Author: Sune Fischer
Date: 10:55:38 04/06/04
Go up one level in this thread
>Still, I think it absurd to think that someone who walks into a retail store >will bother to learn what parameters like those mean. These things are >interesting to persons of a certain bent who are very rare. > >You did not understand my illustration about the horse. My point was that most >people don't know what those terms meant or how to accomplish the goal. Of the >group that do not know them, only a small fraction will care to learn them. > >There are 5 million people who have bought ChessMaster. I am guessing that >4,990,000 of them have NO IDEA what a hash table is. Probabbly about one >million of them use the product regularly (e.g. once per month or more). Very >very few people will need to know technical things to use and enjoy the product. > Sure, if they want to learn intricacies they might enjoy it even more. In the >same way, most people cannot tell you what a good valve clearance for their >engine is, or why the spark ignites the gasoline before top dead center. But >they can still enjoy and drive the car, even without knowing how to tune it up. > >I am not disagreeing that it is better to learn. I am saying that most people >won't care about all those parameters we spent weeks fussing over and it is not >a defect on their part, any more than not knowing the compression ratio of your >car's engine is a defect in the driver. Sure I agree to all of that, but I'm still unsure of your point. Are you saying that winboard engines require this level of knowledge? If so that isn't true. Editing one line in the winboard ini-file is not rocket science, not even for techno-phobes I think. Even it if were, they could just install Arena instead. Arena can scan your harddrive for available engines, so all you have to do is download them and unzip them. -S.
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