2002-09-19 17:09 UTC Why does Windows make you stupid?
Jim asks why Windows makes people stupid, saying that users should somehow know that to change the focus-follows-mouse behaviour they have to go into the registry, find the Control Panel\Mouse branch of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER key, add a ActiveWindowTracking key with type dword and set it to 1. He points out that on Linux-based systems, these same users quite happily tweak the many files in /etc and in ~/ to similar ends.
Well, Jim, there's a very simple reason why on Linux-based OSes I am able to fix the problems while on Windows I am not. On Linux, when faced with a problem, I can go into the source and fix it. If I find, in the source, that it is already checking an undocumented pref, then I can simply tweak that. But on Windows, I have no way of fixing the code, because Microsoft withhold that code from their users.