No matter what you do, someone will call you an idiot, part 2

Raymond Chen

There was quite a bit of reaction to what I thought was a simple “Hey, here’s what’s going on” article from last year, specifically on how the Adaptive Display Timeout means that Windows doesn’t always start the screen saver exactly on time. As you may recall, this feature adjusts the time it takes for the screen saver to activate if the user keeps dismissing it immediately after it starts. One of those small things that makes the computer adapt to you rather than vice versa, and an adaptation that you probably don’t even notice when it happens. I think these two responses below summarize the extremes of the types of reactions this feature generated.

• Vista/W7 has some nice touches too. http://is.gd/2FgKv Such little things is what we love about Macs.

• Ich finde das erstaunlich. In einem Linux-System kann man soetwas relativ leicht selber scripten, und sich z.B. einen Button erzeugen, der den Bildschirmschoner kurzzeitig ganz ausschaltet. Sowas geht unter Windows freilich auch, aber kaum ein User kennt das System hinreichend gut. Deshalb stellen sich dort solche Probleme. Erstaunlich.

  Translation: This is incredible. On Linux, you can script this yourself relatively easily and create, for example, a button which completely disables the screen saver for a short time. Admittedly, you can also do this on Windows, but hardly any users know the system that well. And therefore we have these types of problems. Incredible.

On the one hand, the feature is something so cool, it must have been stolen from a Mac.

On the other hand, this feature shows everything that is wrong with Windows. I mean, on Linux, you can solve this problem by simply writing a script!

Raymond Chen

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