[gordaco]

It's funny when you think about it. Many of these guidelines are there to prevent the program from being detected; in other words, it's to give the impression that it's not there.

You would think that good software which performs background tasks should be just as discreet, and follow similar guidelines: do your task, don't bother the user too much, definitely try not to block UI when the user is doing another thing. But a lot of software definitely does not. The classical example is AV software, but a lot of mobile applications are very guilty too. There is so much software that fails so hard at being efficient at background tasks...

It used to be even more prevalent about 10-15 years ago, but I suspect that it has a lot more to do with increased computational capabilities than to higher quality software.