Carrot on a stick by IT



  • Just in my mailbox (translated from Dutch):



    Sale of old computers

    If you want you can buy our old DELL computers for 15 euro. Computers are delivered without keyboard, mouse, screen and software. Just send an email to *. Note: sale is only for people that have upgraded from XP to Vista.



    We as engineering are not upgrading to vista. But for the rest of the company they use this kind of stuff as a carrot on a stick. They shoved Office2007 into the organization with a Lotus Notus upgrade (they forced you to upgrade office before you could upgrade Lotus Notus) and everyone wants the lotus upgrade as that makes it a bit less frustrating to work with (but it remains a POS)



  • @Daid said:

    Just in my mailbox (translated from Dutch):

    Sale of old computers
    If you want you can buy our old DELL computers for 15 euro. Computers are delivered without keyboard, mouse, screen and software. Just send an email to *. Note: sale is only for people that have upgraded from XP to Vista.

    We as engineering are not upgrading to vista. But for the rest of the company they use this kind of stuff as a carrot on a stick. They shoved Office2007 into the organization with a Lotus Notus upgrade (they forced you to upgrade office before you could upgrade Lotus Notus) and everyone wants the lotus upgrade as that makes it a bit less frustrating to work with (but it remains a POS)
     

    God I wish my company was trying to upgrade everyone to Office 2007 and Vista.



  • @tster said:

    God I wish my company was trying to upgrade everyone to Office 2007 and Vista.

     This.



  • @Daid said:

    ...everyone wants the lotus upgrade as that makes it a bit less frustrating to work with (but it remains a POS)

     

    Upgrading from 7 to 8? I was amazed by the fact that Notes 8 actually did something to address the massive usability and accessibility problems that IBM usually refers to as "features".  But you're right, it's still a POS. I don't think the developers have quite figured out that it might be a good idea to run the networking code and the GUI in separate threads, or that it might be a good idea if the Notes client and Domino Designer ran in seprate processes. Baby steps...



  • @Someone You Know said:

    Upgrading from 7 to 8? I was amazed by the fact that Notes 8 actually did something to address the massive usability and accessibility problems that IBM usually refers to as "features".

    8 is actually considered a beta version. Since we're open to bashing this horrible database client that likes to pretend it can do email: why does it take lotus notes 3 hours to recieve an email with an 18mb word doc and another 7 to send it back out?



  • @Lingerance said:

    Since we're open to bashing this horrible database client that likes to pretend it can do email: why does it take lotus notes 3 hours to recieve an email with an 18mb word doc and another 7 to send it back out?
     

    You can set up a Domino mail server to hold messages over a certain size until a designated "low-volume" time period (e.g., after business hours). Having never managed or configured any kind of mail server myself, I don't know if this sort of thing is common in other environments.

    Most of the things people complain about with Notes/Domino can be traced back to the fact that the people responsible for this horrific piece of software have essentially ignored twenty years of evolution of interface design and established standards. If you've ever tried to select multiple emails in your Inbox, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. 



  • @Lingerance said:

    @Someone You Know said:
    Upgrading from 7 to 8? I was amazed by the fact that Notes 8 actually did something to address the massive usability and accessibility problems that IBM usually refers to as "features".

    8 is actually considered a beta version. Since we're open to bashing this horrible database client that likes to pretend it can do email: why does it take lotus notes 3 hours to recieve an email with an 18mb word doc and another 7 to send it back out?

    Here is the joke: We only use it for email (or at least, we try to use it) we got it a year ago when we where 'absorbed' into a larger organization. We where using outlook before that. And outlook is quite good actually. Now, the next joke, we'll be getting outlook again in less then a year.



    Also, I am still using lotus 7, as the only improved feature we could find in 8 was that you can send custom emoticons with the chat function. It still crashes, it still loses email, it still marks new email as read from time to time and it still looks like something developed in Win3.11



  • @Daid said:

    it still looks like something developed in Win3.11

    I wish it had the memory requirements of something developed for 3.11.



  • @Daid said:


    Also, I am still using lotus 7, as the only improved feature we could find in 8 was that you can send custom emoticons with the chat function. It still crashes, it still loses email, it still marks new email as read from time to time and it still looks like something developed in Win3.11
     

    The Eclipse-based version of 8 (which may actually be 8.5; I can't keep the numbers straight) has some significant interface improvements; it now looks like something developed in Win95.



  • @Daid said:

    with a Lotus Notus upgrade
     

    Lotus Notus?  Is that like Lexis Nexis?



  •  It's "carrot and stick", not "carrot on a stick."  I hate it when people get that wrong.  I can forgive you partly for presumably being a non-native speaker, but the way it's used here doesn't even mean anything.  Carrot and stick are metaphors for reward and punishment.  What is the phrase supposed to mean in this post?  Is it just supposed to be fancy-talk for "incentive?"  And if so, where is the WTF?



  •  I've never heard of "carrot and stick" but I have heard of carrot on a stick, as a reference to a reward being held at a distance or not necessarily accessible.



  • @Aaron said:

    What is the phrase supposed to mean in this post?
    I believe the phrase he was attempting to go for was "dangling an apple from a string."  Or maybe he just misspoke the carrot-stick thing.

    @Aaron said:

    Carrot and stick are metaphors for reward and punishment.
    The carrot is a cheap computer and the stick/box is Windows Vista.



  • Wait wait wait, there are still businesses that let you decide what version of Windows to run?

    We had a bunch of old Win98 boxes...then we ran some pilots, decided Vista would run all the software we used, and threw out every last win98 box for Vista. Yes, some of the users were a bit "WTF O_O" at Vista at first, but honestly it isn't the monster everyone makes it out to be.

    Also, yes, he means carrot [b]on[/b] a stick. Not carrot and stick.

    My 2¢.



  • @Aaron said:

     It's "carrot and stick", not "carrot on a stick."  I hate it when people get that wrong.  I can forgive you partly for presumably being a non-native speaker, but the way it's used here doesn't even mean anything.  Carrot and stick are metaphors for reward and punishment.  What is the phrase supposed to mean in this post?  Is it just supposed to be fancy-talk for "incentive?"  And if so, where is the WTF?

     

    I've always heard "carrot on a stick" (or "dangling carrot") to mean an incentive, or more specifically as another poster mentioned, a false incentive that can never be reached. Clearly the OP meant the more general sense.  "Carrot and/or stick" is new to me, though apparently the original formation.  See http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/carrot.html



  • I wish Lotus Notes was was JUST a POS. I swear it must have the biggest MPSF on the planet. (MPSF is my own creation: Market Penetration * Suck Factor). If you could quantify the "suckiness" of software and its "Market Penetration" -- loosely how much it sells or is used or whatever -- you could multiply the 2 together to get MPSF. Yes, there are apps with a bigger SF than Notes, but they tend not to have nearly the MP. In other words, if MP is the x-axis and SF is they y-axis, Notes is near the upper right corner of the graph. Sorry, don't mean to derail the thread, but some days I just want to find whoever is responsible for me having to use Notes at work and slap them until Notes stops sucking.



  • @Aaron said:

     It's "carrot and stick", not "carrot on a stick."  I hate it when people get that wrong.  I can forgive you partly for presumably being a non-native speaker, but the way it's used here doesn't even mean anything.  Carrot and stick are metaphors for reward and punishment.  What is the phrase supposed to mean in this post?  Is it just supposed to be fancy-talk for "incentive?"  And if so, where is the WTF?

    And SQLDave, have you ever seen a none-derailed thread on TDWTF?






  • :belt_onion:

    @jpaull said:

    @tster said:
    God I wish my company was trying to upgrade everyone to Office 2007 and Vista.
    This.
    You're all nuts. The upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the worst thing that has ever happened to my company laptop. Luckely we are switching the Windows 7. Some colleagues of mine already have it installed and they are very happy with it.



  • @bjolling said:

    You're all nuts. The upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the worst thing that has ever happened to my company laptop.

    why ?



  • @Nelle said:

    why ?
    He probably has a vista capable laptop.



  • @bjolling said:

    @jpaull said:

    @tster said:
    God I wish my company was trying to upgrade everyone to Office 2007 and Vista.
    This.
    You're all nuts. The upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the worst thing that has ever happened to my company laptop. Luckely we are switching the Windows 7. Some colleagues of mine already have it installed and they are very happy with it.

     

    Windows Vista (with SP1 or SP2, of course) is essentially the same thing as Windows 7 minus the new taskbar. It's all about perception.Take a look at this: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mojave-experiment/



  • @blkballoon925 said:

    Windows Vista (with SP1 or SP2, of course) is essentially the same thing as Windows 7 minus the new taskbar. It's all about perception.Take a look at this: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mojave-experiment/

    No it's not, that article is for XP users, Windows 7 is a lot more then just a new taskbar (improved UAC, homegroup, libraries, much better DWM,...)



  • @XIU said:

    @blkballoon925 said:
    Windows Vista (with SP1 or SP2, of course) is essentially the same thing as Windows 7 minus the new taskbar. It's all about perception.Take a look at this: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mojave-experiment/

    No it's not, that article is for XP users, Windows 7 is a lot more then just a new taskbar (improved UAC, homegroup, libraries, much better DWM,...)

    No, you don't get it.  Windows is just a new skin for XP, except that it's less secure, more annoying (thanks to UAC), more bloated, and a bunch of your old apps won't work.  Gosh, don't you know anything?

    Oh wait, this isn't /.?  



  • @bjolling said:

    @jpaull said:

    @tster said:
    God I wish my company was trying to upgrade everyone to Office 2007 and Vista.
    This.
    You're all nuts. The upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the worst thing that has ever happened to my company laptop. Luckely we are switching the Windows 7. Some colleagues of mine already have it installed and they are very happy with it.

    Windows Vista I can kind of tolerate by now, except for the fact that some stuff won't run (Sun Directory Server just crashes, something to do with UAC I think) and that some Java file operations seem to clash with the Vista security model.

    But Office 2007? No way in hell I'll upgrade to that POS. Or at least I won't 'till they give me back my menus. Fortunately my current employer is actually delaying Vista deployments and sticking with Office 2003; everyone hates the new thingy and cost-cutting measures serve as a pretext not to force those "upgrades" on us.

    Hell, one of my previous employers is ditching Windows altogether and switching to some Linux solution for most of its employees. Vista deployment there was somewhere around 10... people.



  • @XIU said:

    @Lingerance said:
    @cconroy said:
    See http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/carrot.html
    404

    FTFY

    My fault for bothering to linkify.  Thanks for the fix, anyway.



  • @Daid said:

    [Stupid and mostly irrelevant xkcd reference used in place of intelligent reply]

     

    Maybe if you wrote your own material instead of using clichés and cartoons to communicate, you wouldn't have ended up in this situation in the first place.



  • @Aaron said:

     It's "carrot and stick", not "carrot on a stick."  I hate it when people get that wrong.  I can forgive you partly for presumably being a non-native speaker, but the way it's used here doesn't even mean anything.  Carrot and stick are metaphors for reward and punishment.  What is the phrase supposed to mean in this post?  Is it just supposed to be fancy-talk for "incentive?"  And if so, where is the WTF?

    It bothers me too... But "carrot on a stick" is a well-known phrase:

    I remember seeing this in many Looney Tunes episodes.

    In fact, I don't know what "carrot and stick" means.

    Wikipedia thinks you're wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot_and_stick

    EDIT: JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THE EDITOR STILL DOESNT INSERT NEW LINES OR EVEN MAKE LINKS, WHAT THE FUCK



  • @savar said:

    EDIT: JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THE EDITOR STILL DOESNT INSERT NEW LINES OR EVEN MAKE LINKS, WHAT THE FUCK

    It does actually, just doesn't convert them to <br>'s or <a>'s. Try turning off NoScript and enabling the WYSIWYG editor (if disabled).

    Or type your HTML yourself and then complain when CS randomly deletes attributes from your tags or even some tags completely.


  • Garbage Person

    @XIU said:

    libraries
    SUCKSUCKSUCKSUCKSUCK. I haven't had a chance to get RTM installed, but in RC1 it arbitrarily excludes random files from the default "Documents" library - usually important stuff I copied over from my old Vista drive and dumped in My Documents.



  • @savar said:

    It bothers me too... But "carrot on a stick" is a well-known phrase:

    I remember seeing this in many Looney Tunes episodes.

    In fact, I don't know what "carrot and stick" means.

    Wikipedia thinks you're wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot_and_stick

    Hmm.  I thought "carrot and stick" was when you put a carrot under a box that's been propped up by a stick, then tie a string to the stick such that you can pull the stick out and have the box enclose your prey when they begin eating the carrot.  This is also of Looney Toons fame.

    Of note, the first thing that came to mind when we started discussing this was from Honey I Shrunk the Kids when they dangle a piece of oatmeal creme pie out in front of the ant to get it to drag them along.  I'm sure I wasn't the only one.


  • :belt_onion:

    @Lingerance said:

    @Nelle said:
    @bjolling said:
    You're all nuts. The upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the worst thing that has ever happened to my company laptop.
    why ?
    He probably has a vista capable laptop.
     

    The laptop is a Dell Latitude D630 with 4GB of RAM. Works like a charm under Windows XP and Windows 7 but is very sluggish on Windows Vista even with all the eye-candy disabled. And it takes forever to boot.



  • @Aaron said:

    It's "carrot and stick", not "carrot on a stick."

    I think he was talking about lettuce on a fishing rod (starting at 1:07).



  • @bjolling said:

    but is very sluggish on Windows Vista even with all the eye-candy disabled.



    have you tried disabling the indexer ? it helped on my laptop (5400 rpm drive)




  •  That so-called "eye-candy" actually helps your computer run faster. By using Windows Aero you offload the processing of window chrome to the GPU.


  • :belt_onion:

    @Nelle said:

    have you tried disabling the indexer ? it helped on my laptop (5400 rpm drive)

    @blkballoon925 said:

    That so-called "eye-candy" actually helps your computer run faster. By using Windows Aero you offload the processing of window chrome to the GPU.
    Thanks for the tips but alas it's too late to try them out on Vista. My laptop will be running Windows 7 shortly. But I'll definitely try them out on Windows 7 to see what is the impact here.



  • @blkballoon925 said:

    That so-called "eye-candy" actually helps your computer run faster. By using Windows Aero you offload the processing of window chrome to the GPU.
    ...assuming you have a decent card. While some Intel's GMA cards can run Aero, they're awfully slow at it, and computer actually runs faster with Aero disabled.



  • Personal experience: after a few weeks, all the eyecandy drove me nuts. My visual cortex found it highly nervous, all the bold fading and bold mouseovers, so I switched back to classic shell.



  • @dhromed said:

    Personal experience: after a few weeks, all the eyecandy drove me nuts. My visual cortex found it highly nervous, all the bold fading and bold mouseovers, so I switched back to classic shell.

    Ditto that.  I don't want the chrome on my windows to be extra-wide just so it can distract me.  Transparent shells (in Linux) are a bitch to read.  And I hate having to wait an extra second every time I minimize or what-have-you just so some fancy "effect" can be shown; just update the GUI as fast as possible, please.  Of course, I'm pretty "conservative" when it comes to UIs: I keep a very light window manager, use keyboard shortcuts frequently and use a terminal for pretty much anything except IMs and web browsing.  I tried using primitive windowing environments like Ratpoison or Ion for awhile but those were just too minimalist, even for me.


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