$36 XP Easy On The Wallet, Hard On The Eyes?
from the artificial-barriers dept
theodp writes “Reading on-screen is hard on the eyes, wrote Bill Gates, stressing the need for higher screen resolution to prevent irritating and distracting computer users. But Gates’ concerns apparently don’t extend to those who are only able to cough up $36 for the Hindi version of Windows XP Starter Edition, which features crippled display resolution, limits the number of open windows or running programs to three, and provides a Taj Mahal screensaver in lieu of home networking and multi-account capabilities.” Not sure that’s really true… At a lower resolution, everything should appear larger, meaning it may be easier on the eyes. Of course, this might, in part, be a response to some of the geographical goofs Microsoft has made in the past, including angering many in India over its world map, to the point that some versions of Microsoft software were banned.
Comments on “$36 XP Easy On The Wallet, Hard On The Eyes?”
800x600 Resolution problems
As this Gates speech notes, Microsoft has been targeting at least 1024×768 resolution for YEARS, and Microsoft warns that their own web pages will look bad (e.g., clipping of content) when displayed with the maximum 800×600 resolution of ‘XP-Lite.’
Re: 800x600 Resolution problems
Compromise World
In poor countries, people tend to spend a pound to save a penny. Offering a degraded windows is a compromise for the millions of fake windows machines with no security patches, which allows computer viruses to wreak havoc throughout Asia and waste so much productivity. For every Indian that is doing “well” with an outsourced US job, there are 10 more Indians still living in abject poverty. In the IT world we may only hear about the prowess of elite Indians, but if you go into the public health professions, India/Asia is still an epic tragedy.
No Subject Given
Arabic script fonts look terrible at low spatial resolutions. They look like doctor’s prescriptions: a line of scribble with the occasional vertical or diacritical.
Chinese/Japanese/Korean ideograms look terrible at low spatial resolutions. They look like an endless row of # signs.
It’s not the size of the letters, it’s the size of the pixels. The same amount of script on a higher resolution display is MUCH more readable for non-Latin characters.
submission text
Reading this submission made me realize how hard it is to read the italicized text. 😉