Assholes are like opinions

Frequently, when I’m reading through the comments page of something like, oh, this, I’ll run across someone who thinks that an uninformed opinion is something worth offering. On that page, I stumbled across this little gem of illogic:

I’ve never bothered with virtual desktops, never saw the point or felt the need, but I agree that Apple’s implementation is horribly broken. It sounds like more of a hindrance than a help.

If you have never bothered with them, saw the point or felt the need, then how can you possibly know whether or not Apple’s implementation is broken? How can you agree that it’s horribly broken without ever having used anything even remotely like it before, let alone the actual product being discussed? And most importantly, what incentive do we have to value your opinion if you have no knowledge or experience with the thing being discussed? I’ll bet it does sound like more of a hindrance than a help if you’ve no experience in actually using it and are just piping in to say that you agree with what everyone else is saying because everyone else is saying it. How can anyone possibly think that the above comment is in any way helpful? What’s the point of even offering an opinion if you have absolutely no idea what the hell you’re talking about? That’s not discourse; that’s just being a sheep and going along with the crowd. It’s like dismissing evolution by natural selection because you mistakenly believe that it’s a random process, despite the fact that natural selection is not and has never been claimed to be a random process. Or like voting for Bush because all of your friends are voting for Bush.

As for my personal opinion on the article itself, I think the real problem is the reliance on the keyboard, given the fact that mousing is faster for most operations. I keep the Spaces icon in my Dock, and it takes practically no time at all to hit it and then choose the Space I need, visually. It’s a lot faster than even Control+<Space number>, because bringing up the Spaces view turns each Space into a giant button. This takes advantage of both spatial (no pun intended) memory — the Spaces will always be in the same location — as well as Fitts’ Law, because by making the targets really big, you make them faster to hit.

But at least Henry Story and I have actually used it.