Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 11:32:46 04/06/04
Go up one level in this thread
On April 06, 2004 at 13:55:38, Sune Fischer wrote: [snip] >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 Winboard.ini to add an engine will never be successful in a commercial venture. People will not like it. >Editing one line in the winboard ini-file is not rocket science, not even for >techno-phobes I think. My mother and father both have college degrees with excellent GPA (my father was president of his Phi-Beta-Cappa section and got a master's degree in under 4 years). I am pretty sure I would have to install a Winboard engine for them if they wanted to play chess with it. Eventually, they could definitely figure it out for themselves. But on the first small speedbump they would probably just decide is isn't worth it because they are not terribly interested to start with. Both of them can play chess and my father was very good at it. But he does not play much now-days. I have made a typo in a line of winboard.ini at least 100 times (in perhaps 5000 edits). I am a pretty good typist (at one time 60 WPM, but well under that now as I am out of practice). When you do that, Winboard just exits with no clue as to what went wrong. The average user is not going to know to put a /debug line in the extra options to decipher the problem. >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. Arena asks where to scan. This assumes several things. First, that you have successfully installed Winboard engines. After all, why are you scanning if they are not there already. So the cart is before the horse. And secondly, it assumes that you know the area where you should scan. People do not have to memorize that sort of detail. Arena makes lots of mistakes. Perhaps 5% of my engines do not work at all under Arena. Most technical people think like you do. "But it's just so easy!" Of course it is, when you have already learned it and are keenly interested in that sort of thing. To the extreme case, it is like the linux users who imagine that grandma will simply do a recursive grep to find her mincemeat pie recipie (piped to sed and tex for some nice formatting).
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