Re: Giving an application a window icon in a sensible way

Oliver Wong wrote:
If ten thousand links, unfamiliar tools or file types, or whatever get
mentioned in a day, I clearly don't have time to research more than a
fraction of them. The rest I must judge by their covers, so to speak,
in deciding what to do with them (if anything; usually this means doing
nothing with them).

Two rebuttals:

(1) If it were ten thousand links, tools and file types, then yes I'd
probably be overwhelmed too. If it were more like 50, then I can dedicate a
30 seconds google search to each, and it'd take less than half an hour to
get a basic understand of each of them.

That almost is half an hour, and you've made yourself vulnerable to a
denial-of-service attack wherein people post large numbers of links and
your time is substantially consumed.

An hour spent rebutting crud in this group, plus this, and the time I'm
losing here increases by 50%.

And all of this assumes, generously, your 30 second estimate. It takes
maybe 30 seconds to crank up a web browser, put in a search, and
examine the list of hits. Refining the query, if that proves necessary,
adds more time. Actually examining the pages linked to adds even more.

(2) As an alternative to judging them by their cover, you could withhold
judgment until the next day, week, or month...

I was discussing my decision to follow or not follow a link. I have to
make a snap decision using the information available at that time. I
can't defer it; that means investing the time to bookmark the link or
something so that it's still around, which means I've already made the
decision to spend (waste?) time on the link in question.

Why are we even discussing this? It should be obvious that no-one is
going to click on more than a tiny minority of the links they see, here
or anywhere else, and my being exactly typical in that regard should be
a non-issue.

[Seven second estimate]

This is frankly ludicrous. It takes that to reach for the start button,
find the web browser in the clutter, and click it. It takes another
seven (at least) for a browser to actually appear and be ready for
input. It takes more time still to get to Google, and only then is
there a few seconds spent typing the query and hitting enter.

Of course, you may have some kind of shortcut, like parking a browser
window somewhere guzzling RAM open to Google or something, but I don't
think it reasonable to expect everyone who reads this group to do
likewise!

So if your concern is optimal allocation of your time, you'd do a
lot better to investigate the links/tools/file-types presented to you, than
posting on the newsgroup about how you don't know anything about these
links/tools/file-types.

I don't doubt that I could have found some Web page regarding the tool
in under five minutes. But you see, I didn't want to.
1. People were singing its praises implying it might do something
useful for my current project right now. I doubted some Web page would
know anything about my current project at all, so asking people here
for more information made a lot more sense; it would be more specific
to what I was doing, rather than generic.
2. I wasn't so much interested in the download URL to download it as I
was interested in why people had conspicuously avoided mentioning the
download URL despite otherwise strongly endorsing it. Now I see that my
attackers may have intended it as a trap, so at some point I'd mention
the curious lack of any mention of it and then they could pounce on my
"obvious lack of google-fu" or whatever they figured to pounce on. If
so, several of them are subtler than flaming usenet loudmouths usually
are.
3. I'd already determined that at the current juncture I'd gain nothing
from an automated build tool versus whatever amount of time spent
investigating one, whether 7 seconds (your lowest estimate), 25 minutes
(your highest), or something else.

.