19 karma · joined January 18, 2012
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20070219/0441...
(Edit: After further research if you were on Hacker news mid january last year this would in fact be old news, sorry for the unwitting repost)
I'm not saying that XP was flawless by any means (and I was using the much reviled 64 bit version), but it accomplished an excellent balance between simple ease of use and access to more complex features, which no Microsoft product has managed since.
There has been a gradual shift toward automation which in a few cases is welcome but in others has become an impediment to actual use. The automated functions just aren't up to task at this point, either technologically, or because of the assumptions the designers have jumped to about what you want to do are just wrong.
In addition some people don't cope well with context sensitive menus (and I am one of them I freely admit), they are messy and unintuitive after a certain point. Sure once you learn them they can be helpful but if you have to learn something it's not intuitive.
Nowadays there should be no reason to learn technology, it should just work.
Check out the analytics for 26th of May 2011:
Which if they refuse has to create a cookie so that their selection is remembered.
(Edited for clarity)
It's a pain I admit, but such is the burden of maintaining your privacy online. Whenever I set up a computer for friends or family I always do this (as well as blocking flash and javascript as standard) and explain what it entails, because without that they cannot know what they are giving away.
Sure we can follow the ICO and put a pop-up on the site asking to accept cookies or not (which if you select 'not' ironically creates a cookie), but as other people have pointed out that's laughable (for a huge number of reasons) and would push online trade away from uk sites. Easiest option for me would be to shift hosting outside the EU, take the SEO location hit and get back to work as usual (EDIT: it appears I am a little behind on the legislation as last time I read it hosting overseas was a loophole, looks like I need to refresh things).
Alternatively if I could dispense with cookies and shift tracking upstream to a CDN that would also save me the problem and at that point I should be getting even more data such as IP addresses.
Users need to take control of their browsing and privacy, they need to be aware of what they are giving away when they join a site or go online in general. Currently they are clueless and that is what needs to stop, force a prompt for all cookies regardless of country, evens the playing field and make people think for a change (if you're a chrome user "Edit this cookie" is an invaluable plugin for monitoring and removing what each site is placing on your machine).
It's also a bit rich saying that tracking cookies are bad whilst trying to pass a law attempting to track almost all communication:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/uk-government-proposes...