Polite Computing

December 12, 2005, 10:53 pm

I’m lucky enough to have a new Dell D610. It was lightning fast to boot up when I first got it, but now it is like a tortoise. I sit tapping my fingers waiting for Windows to power-up. Why? One reason is that I’m waiting for impolite software to load up in my task bar. “If software that took over your computer for its own purposes were a person it would be called selfish” writes Brian Whitworth in a paper for the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. The most impolite, selfish software on my machine is currently Real media player. It weasled its way on to my machine when I visited a multi-media site (bbc.co.uk I think, no, nothing smutty). And then started squatting, filling my clean machine with garbage. Weatherbug? Eh? Real does this because it can, not because I have asked it to. When we design software we should bear this in mind. An application should offer utility (does what it says on the tin), be usable, and be polite.