If the rationale in the parent comment for this behavior is correct, it sounds like a lot of people making the decision to use Windows are doing it _because_ of behavior like this, not in spite of it.
I tried using some online systems to help formulate weighted sum decisions over unrankable choices and it's bloody hard work getting people on board. I think how the logic presents could improve.
This stuff while old, is not routine for decision makers. They don't seem to grok how to formulate the questions and the choices.
Indeed they are, but my point is that _these_ goals are hardly admirable. At the same time, the claimed innovations aren’t real, at least in the sense that anything in any issue of the Bell Labs Technical Journal was. “Apps”, etc? This is like giving the Medellín cartel credit for their hippo culture while ignoring the basis of their real success.
If you generate a billion bytes using a random byte generator, and bin the resultant array into 256 bins, it will not be perfectly flat. You can use that non-flatness to encode your bits more efficiently. I suspect just using codes to do it won't work well because the bin values are so close so you'll struggle to get codes that are efficient enough, but I suspect you can use the second order difference-between-specific byte as the encoded value. That has a much more pronounced distribution heavily weighted to small values.
This reminds me of a data compression scheme I came up with once:
Treat an n bit file as a polynomial over the finite field with characteristic 2. Now, there are some irreducible polynomials in this field, but many polynomials have factors of x and of (x+1). Factor the polynomial into P(x)x^n (x+1)^m. and just collect these terms, storing only P, n, and m.
