The Learning Curve.

[smallhagrid]

Some software companies expect that it's users are idiots - and so they make stuff with very little or no user options that is brainless to use - and sometimes causes problems from it's lack of choices...

(Example - any AV that just goes ahead and deletes things without asking the user.)

I think that is what is behind making a touch-screen based OS for phones and PCs - the machine is now considered to be smarter than it's users !!!

At the other end of the spectrum is software soooo complex, multi-layered and sophisticated that to really make it fit well into a competently configured PC - the user needs to get a whole education JUST for that one software alone (IF the software has good documentation...) - Asterisk is a great example of this.

You can use it to make the greatest phone system ever - but to do so requires a ton of studying time & heavy effort as well as having (and/or buying) the right equipment to learn it on.

I know there are spin-offs of Asterisk like PIAF - but even those are not so easy to learn UNLESS you want to make the effort of getting another college education JUST for that.

What got me thinking along these lines was the interesting thread here about SBIE being bought and what is happening to it...

I think SBIE was a great idea, probably great to use too, and mostly without any real competition that I could ever find.

It is also poorly documented for something so complex and the help options for it basically depended upon a single dev who was overworked and sometimes quite grumpy.

Here's what I mean=>

I wanted to use SBIE, and wanted it to keep out of my C: drive completely.

I got the portable of it - and guess what ?!?

It wrote stuff to C: anyhow.

I asked at it's forum and got a totally unhelpful & grumpy reply from the dev.

So, considering the lack of anything else like it - I got VMWare Player & spent a little effort learning how to do P2V on my own system to make my own virtual environment to test stuff in.

In the meantime I had also posted here & elsewhere asking how to keep SBIE out of C: and after a while got some good info about it.

This made me very happy, and I played with it for a short time - but by then I'd gone one step farther:

I had set up a Linux box with VMWare Player and XP in a VM.

All of that was still easier than figuring out how to learn SBIE and/or getting help for it !!!

I like the middle road when it comes to software=>

Not brainless - and not so hard to figure out that it gives me a headache and feels like going back to school all over again.

So I've yet to ever learn Asterisk - and I suspect I'll never learn to properly use SBIE either.

A nice aside concerning sandboxing though:

360 Internet Security has a nice sandboxing built into it which has an exclusion list and looks quite promising.

I may try that on the win 7 box I'll be playing around with soon...