So... about that Heartbleed
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@blakeyrat said:
I'm pretty sure no version of IE ever said "I'm slow BTW" when starting up, that has to be a lie.
It's not a lie; it's a feature. It's been there since IE9. It comes in the form of that almost invisible orange attention bar at the bottom.
The system needs to be underperforming for that to happen, though. Fire2k is probably due for a reformat&reinstall, or some new hardware.
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@blakeyrat said:
Then upgrade. IE11 does not do that. (And I'm pretty sure no version of IE ever said "I'm slow BTW" when starting up, that has to be a lie.)
My IE11 has 12 add-ons, only one of which IE asked for permission to activate (Citavi Picker). Java, Skype, Lync and others did not ask. The add-on performance advisor is also still a thing in IE11 btw:
@blakeyrat said:
Ok but see the problem with that reasoning is that all of those markets are dominated/were brought by different non-Microsoft third-parties.
So your complaint about Microsoft is that Microsoft can't compete against: AOL, Amazon/Paypal/Google Wallet, Mozilla and Chrome, Dropbox and Valve simultaneously? Well fucking duh. Who could? "Hey guyz, Microsoft is bad because they're not super-mega-ultraman capable of doing everything ever!" What a great argument.
No, that isn't the problem with the argument - that is the argument. The argument is that all those markets were dominated/were brough by different non-Microsoft third-parties. That is the point of the argument.
And guess what - if Microsoft had been first to market and/or had consequently used their advantages, they would have domineered or made those markets.
- If Microsoft had cemented MSN Messaging Services by investing into it's usability while integrating it into the core services of their OS, they would have crushed the alternatives
- Amazon/Paypal/Google Wallet didn't even exist until years after Microsoft had already botched their own attempts at creating online payments services, and the prevalence of VISA/EC/Eurocash in the Internet could have been stopped as well if Microsoft had commited to it at that point
- Microsoft disbanded their browser team at the same time a completely unfunded Mozilla (at that time not even stable) got traction, all while serious security concerns should have made it clear that IE 6 was completely unsustainble. Microsoft flinched in the Browser market, and that is the only reason Google ever got a foot in. This was not about not having the funding to compete or was incabable of competing. They decided not to, and it cost them.
- Valve, despite the Half-Life cash, was nothing around the time Steam hit the market. The number of games using Games for Windows Live as their backend dwarfed Steam exclusive titles for years, until everybody got fed up with how much of an underfunded piece of crap GfWL was (Also Steam started to get actually good at some point). Steam continued to add features, while the Microsoft infrastructure actually eroded.
- Online-Based Scripting (aka killing Javascript before it became popular/ stop investing into ActiveX)
@blakeyrat said:
Wha-huh? When did Microsoft kill JavaScript? They only stopped investing in ActiveX about 5 years after it was obvious it was a technological dead-end. Remember, even Microsoft products couldn't run ActiveX because of its reliance on Windows-specific technologies, and when Microsoft has a "cross browser" scripting technology their best browser at the time literally can't run because it lacks OS support, well, that's a pretty obvious, "hey guys, let's rethink this..." kind of situation. The only reason ActiveX was even still around in Windows XP was because so many third parties were more enthusiastic about adopting it than MS themselves.
I think I should have written more clearly here: Full agreement. Microsoft invested into ActiveX too long, enabling the "success story" that is Web 2.0/3.0. That was what I meant to get across.
@blakeyrat said:
@fire2k said:
- Online-Based Office/Google Docs (see the first link)
Uh... wha? Are you seriously suggesting Google Docs is competition for Office? You are a crazyman.
Uhh... how did you get to that conclusion? I'm saying Online-Based Office Solutions like Google Docs are a market, and Microsoft wasn't the first to enter it, and are now struggling to have an impact on it.
@blakeyrat said:
And what do ANY of these bulletpoints have to do with Microsoft missing out on "the Internet"? Let me present an alternative suggestion: you repeated the "Microsoft missed the Internet" piece of Slashdot bullshit, got called on it being bullshit, and then pulled that list out of your ass to somehow retroactively attempt to make some sense of the saying.
Jesus, you are obsessed with the slashdot crowd. What did they do, drive over your tricycle when you were ten? I wrote "Microsoft missed the Internet" intead of "parts of the Internet", and then clarified in an apologetic way. What more do you want?
@blakeyrat said:
You've literally never heard of Windows CE PDAs, or Windows XP tablets? You somehow didn't know that they even released an OS specifically named Windows XP Tablet PC Edition designed to run on tablets and only tablets? You are either a liar or an idiot.
I actually mentioned CE in my post. It was a successful venture that ended up in no way helping when Apple hit the market with an actual solution. The truth is - and I'm sure you will chalk it up to Intel's failure to get energy-saving X86-Infrastructure out there, while I have actually programmed for later-day CE-Devices, which compared to iPhones sucked - Apple did it better. They did it so much better that I would actually argue that in their quality class they were first to market. The iPad/iPhone was the innovator of the field, and that is why Steve Jobs got played by Aston Kutcher instead of somebody actually resembling him. Windows XP Tablet Edition was, btw. a piece of shit. A coworker at the time had one of those devices, and they were broken on a conceptual level.
@blakeyrat said:
I concede that Apple had Sherlock before XP had fast full-content indexing. (Edit: I'm not even 100% sure that's true.) But there's a detail you're missing here: Sherlock SUCKED ASS. MUCH more than XP's search sucked ass. Nobody used Sherlock, and anybody saying otherwise is a fucking liar.
You don't have to concede anything. We aren't in a property war. This is a discussion forum, not debate club.Apple's search didn't become actually good until they released Spotlight in 2005. And the only reason they were able to make that in a non-fucked-up way is that they just bought a third-party solution.
But guess what: by 2005, Windows XP had good search indexers. They weren't shipped with the OS by default, but they worked as well as Spotlight and a damn sight better than Sherlock ever did. And Windows Vista (2007), included that as core functionality in the OS. Not Windows 7, which as your lie-filled lie-paragraph suggests-- Windows 7 search is identical to Windows Vista search.
So this idiotic little complaint sums to: if you wee an XP user who didn't download a search indexer, even though the OS maker had a great one, there was a period of about 18 months where Apple's search was better than Windows search. Ooo. What a devastating point. I'm shaking.
As for Spotlight: I only had spotty access to Apple systems at the time, so I don't have any anecdotal or first-person evidence to go along with it, but benchmarks taken by German computer science magazine C't at the time were clearly in favor of Apple.
I was wrong about Vista not containing a good search engine (it seemingly did), but Vista generally sucked ass performance-wise on all hardware I ever saw it on, so I hope it'll be excused.
@blakeyrat said:
@fire2k said:
So? They are still losing money in this venture.
So? I didn't say it was profitable, I said they were competing better against Google's core product than anybody else. All that means is nobody can compete against Google's monopoly without money infusion.
Full agreement.
@fire2k said:
and certain parts of Bing, like their API-Services are miles ahead of Google
@blakeyrat said:
Almost everything Bing does is miles ahead of Google. And Google's been doing nothing but ripping-off Bing's ideas for 5 years. Bing isn't losing money because it's a bad product, it's losing money because Google is a monopoly.
If Bing would give me superior search results I would be using it. It's that simple. I agree that it's a good product though.
Anyway, Bing is also constant in ripping off Google, that's a two-way street. Bing Maps, Bing Street-Maps (whatever that was called) and so on are testament to that.
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@dhromed said:
@blakeyrat said:
I'm pretty sure no version of IE ever said "I'm slow BTW" when starting up, that has to be a lie.
It's not a lie; it's a feature. It's been there since IE9. It comes in the form of that almost invisible orange attention bar at the bottom.
The system needs to be underperforming for that to happen, though. Fire2k is probably due for a reformat&reinstall, or some new hardware.
I've never had it not happen, actually, on all my machines since IE9 came out. I'm guessed the sheer insane amout of software with IE-Integration I use is more to blame.
There is also quite a few dead add-on entries in there, from one-time software I had to use for the university, and that didn't unistall properly.
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@Ragnax said:
The rd (remove dir) command accepts UNC paths as well, so more \?\ wizardy is the answer you are looking for. :)
Awesome, thank you! I was trying the UNC path with del, but I guess it doesn't support directories or UNC or trailing spaces or summin'.
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@fire2k said:
Microsoft disbanded their browser team at the same time a completely unfunded Mozilla (at that time not even stable) got traction, all while serious security concerns should have made it clear that IE 6 was completely unsustainble. Microsoft flinched in the Browser market, and that is the only reason Google ever got a foot in. This was not about not having the funding to compete or was incabable of competing. They decided not to, and it cost them.
Honestly, I don't blame them for this. Who would have known that people would actually try to supplant real graphical environments with hacked-together HTML, CSS and Javascript? I think we would have been better off if the entire concept of web apps had died on the vine. Of course, Microsoft deserves a bit of blame for the current mess, since they invented AJAX. Bastards.
@fire2k said:
I'm saying Online-Based Office Solutions like Google Docs are a market, and Microsoft wasn't the first to enter it, and are now struggling to have an impact on it.
Huh, that's an odd take. It seems to me like Google is quietly trying to kill off Docs. Half the reason I bought Office 365 is because Google has successfully hidden Docs from all of their top-level navigation. I got sick of spending 10 minutes rooting around trying to find how to create a new spreadsheet in Docs when I just needed to record a few columns, and it was a lot quicker to just boot a Windows VM and use Office.
@fire2k said:
The iPad/iPhone was the innovator of the field
How do you figure? Other than a touchscreen (and I'm not even sure they were the first smartphone with that) nothing they did seemed all that new or interesting. They were just really, really good at convincing stupid people to jump onto a fad and part with their cash.
@fire2k said:
If Bing would give me superior search results I would be using it.
Anymore, it seems I get better results from Bing. A lot of this seems to be due to the fact that Google has gone way overboard with their natural language processing. Try to search for "mother boards" (without the quotes) and you'll get NPR stories about all-female sawmill communes (that's not an actual example, it's merely a hypothetical, so don't bitch at me that you don't get NPR stories in your results..)
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@morbiuswilters said:
Try to search for "mother boards" (without the quotes) and you'll get NPR stories about all-female sawmill communes (that's not an actual example, it's merely a hypothetical, so don't bitch at me that you don't get NPR stories in your results..)
Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">mother boards</font> gives me results that are essentially the same on both Bing and Google.Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">female sawmill communes</font> this thread is the 4th result on Google but doesn't show up at all on Bing (at least not on the first 4 pages of results).
This obviously proves that Google is superior.
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@El_Heffe said:
Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">female sawmill communes</font> this thread is the 4th result on Google but doesn't show up at all on Bing (at least not on the first 4 pages of results).
Yeah, Googlebot has, like, an uber boner for TDWTF. I've worked on sites that spend tens of thousands a month trying to get better SEO and marketing, and yet Google only crawls the home page every other day. I swear to God, you can post something here and within an hour it will show in Google's index, which is quite impressive. I don't know of any other site that gets crawled that quickly. I wonder if some engineer in the bowels of Google likes the site and decided to set Googlebot to obsess over it as a joke..
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@morbiuswilters said:
@El_Heffe said:
Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">female sawmill communes</font> this thread is the 4th result on Google but doesn't show up at all on Bing (at least not on the first 4 pages of results).
Yeah, Googlebot has, like, an uber boner for TDWTF. I've worked on sites that spend tens of thousands a month trying to get better SEO and marketing, and yet Google only crawls the home page every other day. I swear to God, you can post something here and within an hour it will show in Google's index, which is quite impressive. I don't know of any other site that gets crawled that quickly. I wonder if some engineer in the bowels of Google likes the site and decided to set Googlebot to obsess over it as a joke..
Maybe it's something to do with how CS has fifty billion copies of each page that all link to each other, so Googlebot thinks there are a lot of incoming links to the site and therefore it's important.
It could also have something to do with how frequently the content of those (post count) × (fifty billion) pages changes, also due to Community Server.
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@El_Heffe said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Try to search for "mother boards" (without the quotes) and you'll get NPR stories about all-female sawmill communes (that's not an actual example, it's merely a hypothetical, so don't bitch at me that you don't get NPR stories in your results..)
Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">mother boards</font> gives me results that are essentially the same on both Bing and Google.Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">female sawmill communes</font> this thread is the 4th result on Google but doesn't show up at all on Bing (at least not on the first 4 pages of results).
This obviously proves that Google is superior.
Look at how many more results Google got! And look how the top result includes exactly what I was looking for!
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@morbiuswilters said:
@El_Heffe said:
Most search engines have some web service API for you to annouce fresh content to be indexed. I've integrated a few CMSes with that functionality.Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">female sawmill communes</font> this thread is the 4th result on Google but doesn't show up at all on Bing (at least not on the first 4 pages of results).
Yeah, Googlebot has, like, an uber boner for TDWTF. I've worked on sites that spend tens of thousands a month trying to get better SEO and marketing, and yet Google only crawls the home page every other day. I swear to God, you can post something here and within an hour it will show in Google's index, which is quite impressive. I don't know of any other site that gets crawled that quickly. I wonder if some engineer in the bowels of Google likes the site and decided to set Googlebot to obsess over it as a joke..
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@fire2k said:
The number of games using Games for Windows Live as their backend dwarfed Steam exclusive titles for years, until everybody got fed up with how much of an underfunded piece of crap GfWL was (Also Steam started to get actually good at some point).
GfWL really was shit (and might still be; I've not looked for years). It was the only piece of software where I've had to manually tune my local network MTU to make it work. Seriously WTF? Absolutely nothing else needs that sort of thing, not even something demanding like a video conference call (yes, with everyone using video). That's the kind of uber-awful shit which would get any customer chewing the furniture in frustration (and it seemed to require using the command line on Windows to adjust that parameter: No Usable GUI For You, Sunshine!).Now, to be fair this may have been fixed, but that doesn't help when you've got to go through the horrid disaster to get it to patch itself to not need that sort of thing. Gaaaah! Did I mention that GfWL is the absolute antithesis of Good Software yet?
Don't do the video thing. It sucks, but not because of software and only somewhat because of hardware. It's the human-factors that really make it awful. Someone's audio is always wrong and there's way too high a chance of something embarrassing happening in the video feed.
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@dkf said:
Don't do the video thing. It sucks, but not because of software and only somewhat because of hardware. It's the human-factors that really make it awful. Someone's audio is always wrong and there's way too high a chance of something embarrassing happening in the video feed.
- People who laugh loudly at non-jokes
- People who play loud music during a conference call
- Pedantic dickweeds
- People who have lights that somehow make more noise than they do when they talk
- People with microphones that only pick up their speakers
- Pedantic dickweeds
- People who comment on everything everyone else says
- People who prepare sushi during conference calls using their microphone as a knife
- People with no microphone that somehow convince their computer they have a microphone so it just reads static
- Extremist pedantic dickweeds
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@morbiuswilters said:
Awesome, thank you! I was trying the UNC path with del, but I guess it doesn't support directories or UNC or trailing spaces or summin'.
Works for me:X:>echo foo > "\?\x:\space at end "
X:>del "space at end "
Could Not Find X:\space at endX:>del "\?\x:\space at end "
X:>
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@ender said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Awesome, thank you! I was trying the UNC path with del, but I guess it doesn't support directories or UNC or trailing spaces or summin'.
Works for me:X:>echo foo > "\?\x:\space at end "
X:>del "space at end "
Could Not Find X:\space at endX:>del "\?\x:\space at end "
X:>
Windows 8?
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@joe.edwards said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@El_Heffe said:
Most search engines have some web service API for you to annouce fresh content to be indexed. I've integrated a few CMSes with that functionality.Searching for <font face="courier new,courier">female sawmill communes</font> this thread is the 4th result on Google but doesn't show up at all on Bing (at least not on the first 4 pages of results).
Yeah, Googlebot has, like, an uber boner for TDWTF. I've worked on sites that spend tens of thousands a month trying to get better SEO and marketing, and yet Google only crawls the home page every other day. I swear to God, you can post something here and within an hour it will show in Google's index, which is quite impressive. I don't know of any other site that gets crawled that quickly. I wonder if some engineer in the bowels of Google likes the site and decided to set Googlebot to obsess over it as a joke..
Yeah, but you usually won't be crawled within a few minutes, at least in my experience. In fact, with Google, I'm not even sure they pay attention to that, beyond making sure you're in their index in the first place. They seem to just use their own algorithm for determining how frequent they should crawl.
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@ender said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Windows 8?
8.1, but it works the same in XP and 7.Actually, I see you're creating a file and not a directory, so that's probably the difference.
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@dkf said:
@fire2k said:
The number of games using Games for Windows Live as their backend dwarfed Steam exclusive titles for years, until everybody got fed up with how much of an underfunded piece of crap GfWL was (Also Steam started to get actually good at some point).
GfWL really was shit (and might still be; I've not looked for years). It was the only piece of software where I've had to manually tune my local network MTU to make it work. Seriously WTF? Absolutely nothing else needs that sort of thing, not even something demanding like a video conference call (yes, with everyone using video). That's the kind of uber-awful shit which would get any customer chewing the furniture in frustration (and it seemed to require using the command line on Windows to adjust that parameter: No Usable GUI For You, Sunshine!).Now, to be fair this may have been fixed, but that doesn't help when you've got to go through the horrid disaster to get it to patch itself to not need that sort of thing. Gaaaah! Did I mention that GfWL is the absolute antithesis of Good Software yet?
Don't do the video thing. It sucks, but not because of software and only somewhat because of hardware. It's the human-factors that really make it awful. Someone's audio is always wrong and there's way too high a chance of something embarrassing happening in the video feed.
There's a rumour, which I'm REALLY hoping is truth, that GfWL is being killed off on 01 July 2014. Microsoft has made many missteps in the past, but GfWL is the one I can never forgive them for.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Actually, I see you're creating a file and not a directory, so that's probably the difference.
Yeah, but del won't remove even regular directories.
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@Ben L. said:
Pedantic dickweedery is par for the course, but it's a fact that someone's always got interference and doesn't think they have and so screws things up for everyone else. Or they're having alterations done to the office. (Or the dreaded feedback, though that's usually caught these days; echoing is more common.) I'm impressed with how good the Cisco and Citrix audio conferencing systems are; they do a really good job at getting the volume levels about matched across a whole bunch of callers. That's pretty hard. OTOH, even Skype does a reasonable job here. (You don't notice the problem with one-on-one calling, but the more people call in, the more likely someone will have their microphone gain set far too high and someone else will have it far too low.)- People who laugh loudly at non-jokes
- People who play loud music during a conference call
- Pedantic dickweeds
- People who have lights that somehow make more noise than they do when they talk
- People with microphones that only pick up their speakers
- Pedantic dickweeds
- People who comment on everything everyone else says
- People who prepare sushi during conference calls using their microphone as a knife
- People with no microphone that somehow convince their computer they have a microphone so it just reads static
- Extremist pedantic dickweeds
Video is worse, because looking at people is usually unedifying. Or, rather, looking at their foreheads or up their noses, depending on how their webcam is positioned. “Lovely.”
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I've been playing games for a longtime, so howcome GfWL apparently entirely passed by me unnoticed?
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@dhromed said:
I've been playing games for a longtime, so howcome GfWL apparently entirely passed by me unnoticed?
Because everybody here is a liar, it was on like 4 titles, and it never even really tried to compete with Steam. I own (no joke) 600+ Steam games, and the only ones that use GfWL are Dirt 2 and Dark Souls. (EDIT: Oh and Shadowrun, but I might own that on Xbox, I genuinely can't remember.) According to this list, the first two Arkham Asylum games have it, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Ditto that with Fallout 3, which I replayed just a few months ago and there was no GfWL.
Also, all Microsoft products with "Live" in the name became shit around 2009-ish, so the fact that GfWL was shit should not have come as a surprise to anybody.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@fire2k said:
I'm saying Online-Based Office Solutions like Google Docs are a market, and Microsoft wasn't the first to enter it, and are now struggling to have an impact on it.
Huh, that's an odd take. It seems to me like Google is quietly trying to kill off Docs. Half the reason I bought Office 365 is because Google has successfully hidden Docs from all of their top-level navigation. I got sick of spending 10 minutes rooting around trying to find how to create a new spreadsheet in Docs when I just needed to record a few columns, and it was a lot quicker to just boot a Windows VM and use Office.
Docs is part of Drive now. Also, Docs can't do spreadsheets. That's part of the reason why they merged them all into Drive - pedantic dickweeds like me.
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@blakeyrat said:
Ditto that with Fallout 3
Oh right, I saw that on the box of my copy, I think.
I thought it meant something like "runs on Windows"; which was fortunate, because I use Windows.
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@blakeyrat said:
@dhromed said:
I've been playing games for a longtime, so howcome GfWL apparently entirely passed by me unnoticed?
Because everybody here is a liar, it was on like 4 titles, and it never even really tried to compete with Steam. I own (no joke) 600+ Steam games, and the only ones that use GfWL are Dirt 2 and Dark Souls. (EDIT: Oh and Shadowrun, but I might own that on Xbox, I genuinely can't remember.) According to this list, the first two Arkham Asylum games have it, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Ditto that with Fallout 3, which I replayed just a few months ago and there was no GfWL.
Also, all Microsoft products with "Live" in the name became shit around 2009-ish, so the fact that GfWL was shit should not have come as a surprise to anybody.
What is this, some kind of wilfull initiative to post more nonsense?
Now, to anybody actually interested:
- Much like Steam started out as the infrastructure to Valve's own exclusive titles, GfWL was initially supposed to provide a supporting framework (with XBox-Crossplay-Capabilities) to titles by Microsoft Studios, like Gears of War, Halo 2 or Viva Pinata. It was adopted by several "big deal"-triple AAA publishers like Rockstar (who used it on GTA IV, before devising their own social media/gaming platform for L.A. Noir), Bethesda (Fallout 3), Capcom (Resident Evil 5, Street Fighter, Dead Rising) and Rocksteady (who used it on the first 2 Arkham Games, until abandoning it half a year ago after widespread outrage over the GfWL-client not working with Windows 8; Both Arkham games now use Steamworks, however some costume dlc was rendered unusable)
- Several big games are still tied to the infrastructure Microsoft abandoned, which will kill Microsoft-developed games like Fable 3 in the process. There are rumors that Dark Souls won't be fixed until after Microsoft turns of the servers, rendering the game unplayable for paying customers
- The Games for Windows Live service launched in 2007, at exactly the same time Valve started to see widespread triple-AAA support. They were indeed a competitor to Steam, and even tried a big free-to-play initiative in 2010, promising a renewed stream of titles to come.
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@blakeyrat said:
Because everybody here is a liar, it was on like 4 titles, and it never even really tried to compete with Steam. I own (no joke) 600+ Steam games, and the only ones that use GfWL are Dirt 2 and Dark Souls. (EDIT: Oh and Shadowrun, but I might own that on Xbox, I genuinely can't remember.) According to this list, the first two Arkham Asylum games have it, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Ditto that with Fallout 3, which I replayed just a few months ago and there was no GfWL.
There were a number of other games that used it, even if purchased over Steam. Memory says Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and at least one of the Fable series, but I could be wrong and I might also be wrong about the channel they were purchased by (both were franchises that sometimes did daft things usability-wise, and this was all years ago).I stand by my assertion that software that requires you to manually change the MTU is astonishingly bad.
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@ender said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Actually, I see you're creating a file and not a directory, so that's probably the difference.
Yeah, but del won't remove even regular directories.Ah, it gave no indication this is the case, it just silently returned and left the directory there.
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@Ben L. said:
Docs is part of Drive now.
Yes, as I said, they hid it fairly deeply; it's no longer a top-level product. It used to be if you got an attachment in Gmail that had an office-suite extension, there was an option right there to "Edit Spreadsheet". Now if you want to do that you need to: click the drive icon to save to Drive, then click "Done", then open Drive in a separate tab, then right-click the file and go to "Open With", and selected "Edit with .."
The default option for clicking a file in Drive is to just use the "Google Drive Viewer". At least it's relatively quick to create a new document in Drive, but you still can't jump in from the top-level navigation. And meanwhile, all of the Google office stuff looks exactly the same as it did 5 years ago. I don't see that they've really added any features.
As I said, it seems they are quietly trying to kill it, or at the very least it's not a serious product anymore but just a feature of Drive for quickly changing a file when you don't have access to a real office suite. So I wouldn't say M$ missed the boat on the online office suite so much as it turned out to be a dud.
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@morbiuswilters said:
meanwhile, all of the Google office stuff looks exactly the same as it did 5 years ago. I don't see that they've really added any features.
I would consider that a good tthing. What new word processing tasks have been invented recently that didn't exist 5 years ago? Of course, I still like Microsoft Office 2003 and find it to still be adequate for anything I want to do.
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@El_Heffe said:
@morbiuswilters said:
meanwhile, all of the Google office stuff looks exactly the same as it did 5 years ago. I don't see that they've really added any features.
I would consider that a good tthing.Yeah, it's great. Why would you even want more than 64k rows in a spreadsheet? Much better to just bomb out with an error message.
@El_Heffe said:
Of course, I still like Microsoft Office 2003 and find it to still be adequate for anything I want to do.
I love posts like this. "I'm not the target market for the product, therefore I don't care if the product is years behind!!!"
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@blakeyrat said:
therefore I don't care if the product is years behind
Behind what?10 years ago i was using Office 2003 to create complex 100+ page documents. And it worked fine, and I never once encountered a situation where I couldn't do something that I needed to do. So what new word processing tasks haveen invented since then? Answer: None. Sure, newer versions might have fixed a few bugs or improved performance a little and that would be great if they hadn't completely fucked up the UI. The same is true of Google Docs. If it worked reasonably well 5 years ago, then it will still work today.
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@El_Heffe said:
@blakeyrat said:
therefore I don't care if the product is years behind
Behind what?You are missing my point utterly.
@El_Heffe said:
Sure, newer versions might have fixed a few bugs or improved performance a little and that would be great if they hadn't completely fucked up the UI
OH NOES GUYZ THE RIBBON IS SO SCARY RUN RUN FROM THE RIBBON OMGOMG OMGOMGOMOG
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@El_Heffe said:
@morbiuswilters said:
meanwhile, all of the Google office stuff looks exactly the same as it did 5 years ago. I don't see that they've really added any features.
I would consider that a good tthing. What new word processing tasks have been invented recently that didn't exist 5 years ago? Of course, I still like Microsoft Office 2003 and find it to still be adequate for anything I want to do.I kind of see your point, but the Google apps are still far behind the Office versions, so I'd say there's room for improvement, even to get it up to the feature set of Office 2003.
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I have used them to adequately do spreadsheety things.
It's behind in the same way that Notepad is behind Visual Studio. I just want to do some texty stuff at a certain level, and I find that something between Notepad and VS suits most of my porpoises: EditPlus.
@morbiuswilters said:
get it up to the feature set of Office 2003.
There's no absolute, objective need for this. Programs don't need to eternally expand feature sets, and Google Docs does not need to have all the features of Excel.
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@dhromed said:
There's no absolute, objective need for this. Programs don't need to eternally expand feature sets, and Google Docs does not need to have all the features of Excel.
I agree, my point was just that The Jefe said that it's fine if Google's office suite hasn't changed in 5 years and at the same time, that he found it annoying that Microsoft changed Office and that the circa 2003 feature set was good enough for him. I was saying that Google's offering doesn't have all of the features that Office 2003 does, so maybe he would want some things added to it. Or to put it another way: not changing for 5 years might not be a good thing, either, if there are things people need.
For me, the Google office stuff was good enough for years. But I have very limited use of an office suite--I probably create 1 word processor document a month and maybe 2 spreadsheets a year. And they're usually super, super simple. That said, sometimes the limitations in Google's software caused me headaches (formulas and macros in Excel spreadsheets, for example.)
What ultimately made me switch to using Office 365 for all my office suite needs were just two simple things: 1) my most recent laptop has enough physical memory to comfortably run a Windows VM without a second thought (although I'd love more memory support.. c'mon 32GB support!); and 2) Google made their stuff just annoying enough to get to that it was usually quicker to just launch my Win7 VM. (That last one might be a good lesson in the unintended consequences of UX decisions, especially when you're not in a dominant market position.) The icing on the cake is knowing I can open any Word, Excel or Powerpoint doc anyone sends my way and it will Just Work. After over a decade of primarily relying on Google Docs, AbiWord and Star/Open/LibreOffice, that's a major relief.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I probably create 1 word processor document a month and maybe 2 spreadsheets a year.
Ha, I create even less than that!
@morbiuswilters said:
That said, sometimes the limitations in Google's software caused me headaches (formulas and macros in Excel spreadsheets, for example.
How do you even remember how all that shit works again if you make only a few per year? I certainly can't.
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@blakeyrat said:
@dhromed said:
I've been playing games for a longtime, so howcome GfWL apparently entirely passed by me unnoticed?
... it was on like 4 titles...
... according to this list...Apparently 4 and 50+ are like the same number to you, which I find distressing.
Anyhow, the 3 GfWL titles I played - Bulletstorm, Gears of War, Halo 2 - which were all good games in their own right, were all made objectively worse by the foisting of GfWL. Oh you want to play half an hour of single-player? FUCK YOU, download this half-a-gig GfWL update first! (500MB is not insignificant on my current 4Mb Internet connection; I was on 384Kb at the time.) There was also an Xbox Live account that had to be created, and Microsoft being Microsoft the signup page wouldn't let me sign up if I chose my country as South Africa. If I tried to choose a different country, the signup did a geolookup and decided I wasn't from the said country, so it wouldn't let me sign up. I eventually had to use an anonymous proxy to create an account.
This is not "you done goofed" territory, this is "did you actually test this shit anywhere except 'MURICA before you released it to the entire planet?" territory. Fuck GfWL and fuck the useless piece of shit programmers who worked on it.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I kind of see your point, but the Google apps are still far behind the Office versions, so I'd say there's room for improvement, even to get it up to the feature set of Office 2003.
Speaking of which.
Office: put a column of numbers in A. In B1, type '=sum(a:a)'. Result? The sum of all numbers in the A column
Google Spreadsheet: put a column of numbers in A. In B1, type '=sum(a:a)'. Result? The sum of all numbers in the A column
OpenOffice: put a column of numbers in A. In B1, type '=sum(a:a)'. Result? An error, because 29 years, they haven't figured out how to do cell ranges. (StarOffice from 1985-1999, Sun from 1999-2009, Oracle from 2010-2011, Apache to date).
I don't know about LibreOffice, but I'll give them the benefit of EXTREME DOUBT, and assume they haven't figured out un-numbered cell ranges either.
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@Lorne Kates said:
It's open source! Just go fix it yourself! Apparently no one else in the world uses that feature or they'd have written it already.@morbiuswilters said:
I kind of see your point, but the Google apps are still far behind the Office versions, so I'd say there's room for improvement, even to get it up to the feature set of Office 2003.
Speaking of which.
Office: put a column of numbers in A. In B1, type '=sum(a:a)'. Result? The sum of all numbers in the A column
Google Spreadsheet: put a column of numbers in A. In B1, type '=sum(a:a)'. Result? The sum of all numbers in the A column
OpenOffice: put a column of numbers in A. In B1, type '=sum(a:a)'. Result? An error, because 29 years, they haven't figured out how to do cell ranges. (StarOffice from 1985-1999, Sun from 1999-2009, Oracle from 2010-2011, Apache to date).
I don't know about LibreOffice, but I'll give them the benefit of EXTREME DOUBT, and assume they haven't figured out un-numbered cell ranges either.
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@El_Heffe said:
Word 2003's style system is really, really bad. Like criminally bad. Word 2007+ has a style system which is just bad. It's a huge improvement.@morbiuswilters said:
meanwhile, all of the Google office stuff looks exactly the same as it did 5 years ago. I don't see that they've really added any features.
I would consider that a good tthing. What new word processing tasks have been invented recently that didn't exist 5 years ago? Of course, I still like Microsoft Office 2003 and find it to still be adequate for anything I want to do.
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@The_Assimilator said:
Gears of War, Halo 2
.. why would you buy these on PC? And let me guess: when you did get them working, you played with the mouse?
@The_Assimilator said:
There was also an Xbox Live account that had to be created, and Microsoft being Microsoft the signup page wouldn't let me sign up if I chose my country as South Africa.
I Googled this a bit, and it looks like South Africa was never on the "supported" list for any of the Live-branded products. Not sure why.
@The_Assimilator said:
This is not "you done goofed" territory, this is "did you actually test this shit anywhere except 'MURICA before you released it to the entire planet?" territory.
They obviously did not test it in South Africa, seeing as it's unsupported.
Xbox Live does support it, so if you had bought those two games on the platform they were actually made for, you'd have been able to do whatever. (I don't know about Bulletstorm.)
@The_Assimilator said:
Fuck GfWL and fuck the useless piece of shit programmers who worked on it.
All the Live-branded products after about 2009ish were complete sewage, I agree. It took MS way too long to shut those idiots down.
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@blakeyrat said:
why would you buy these on PC? And let me guess: when you did get them working, you played with the mouse?
Well, considering that they are FPS, playing with the mouse is kinda the way to play them. Playing an FPS on PC with a gamepad... you might as well just tie your hands behind your back and play it with your tongue.
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@Snooder said:
@blakeyrat said:
why would you buy these on PC? And let me guess: when you did get them working, you played with the mouse?
Well, considering that they are FPS, playing with the mouse is kinda the way to play them. Playing an FPS on PC with a gamepad... you might as well just tie your hands behind your back and play it with your tongue.
I've been playing Titanfall for over 30 hours with a 360 pad and am often first in my team. If not first I'm just about always in the top half of my team. Some folks prefer gamepads :)
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@Snooder said:
Well, considering that they are FPS, playing with the mouse is kinda the way to play them. Playing an FPS on PC with a gamepad... you might as well just tie your hands behind your back and play it with your tongue.
The genre doesn't matter, what matters is what the game was designed to be used with. Gears of War and Halo 2 were both (crappy) ports from Xbox 360 games, designed for Xbox 360 controllers.
This one is machine and nerve and has its mind concluded; this one is but flesh and faith but is the more deluded.
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@dhromed said:
@morbiuswilters said:
That said, sometimes the limitations in
Google's software caused me headaches (formulas and macros in Excel
spreadsheets, for example.How do you even remember how all that shit works again if you make only a few per year? I certainly can't.
It's less about me creating those things than me trying to open a spreadsheet created by someone else. For example, it's not unusual for companies to have their own template they want you to use for things like invoices or time-off requests. Those invariably will use Excel formulas and drop-downs and so-on, which never seem to work right outside of Excel.
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@The_Assimilator said:
(500MB is not insignificant on my current 4Mb Internet connection; I was on 384Kb at the time.)
@The_Assimilator said:
This is not "you done goofed" territory, this is "did you actually test this shit anywhere except 'MURICA before you released it to the entire planet?" territory.
It's not M$'s fault your Internet is delivered via rickshaw.
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@blakeyrat said:
I Googled this a bit, and it looks like South Africa was never on the "supported" list for any of the Live-branded products. Not sure why.
Apartheid.
Yeah, I know it's gone, but M$ can sure hold a grudge.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Snooder said:
Well, considering that they are FPS, playing with the mouse is kinda the way to play them. Playing an FPS on PC with a gamepad... you might as well just tie your hands behind your back and play it with your tongue.
The genre doesn't matter, what matters is what the game was designed to be used with. Gears of War and Halo 2 were both (crappy) ports from Xbox 360 games, designed for Xbox 360 controllers.
The genre matters quite a bit since commonality of control scheme is one of things that defines video game genres. Just because you can make it playable with a controller doesn't mean it's better off with one. I will give you that Gears might be better with a controller, since it's a 3rd person cover based shooter. But Halo? Fuck no.Also, I played Bulletstorm, and all I have to say is, if GfWL is what kept you from paying money to play it, consider yourself lucky. $60 for a 6 hour game is NOT a good bargain, no matter how awesome the cussing is.
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@blakeyrat said:
@The_Assimilator said:
Gears of War, Halo 2
.. why would you buy these on PC? And let me guess: when you did get them working, you played with the mouse?
Because I didn't want to buy a fucking console to play a couple of games that looked half decent. And yes. Now can we please agree to disagree on the mouse vs controller thing, and never mention it again?
Look, I had a PlayStation long before I ever touched a mouse and keyboard, and even back then I could never accustom myself to using thumbsticks on the controller. I dunno, maybe my thumbs are freakishly short or something.
@blakeyrat said:
This one is machine and nerve and has its mind concluded; this one is but flesh and faith but is the more deluded.
Pity that was about the only decent line from that character.
@blakeyrat said:
@The_Assimilator said:
There was also an Xbox Live account that had to be created, and Microsoft being Microsoft the signup page wouldn't let me sign up if I chose my country as South Africa.
I Googled this a bit, and it looks like South Africa was never on the "supported" list for any of the Live-branded products. Not sure why.
If they weren't going to support SA, then why. the. FUCK did they allow boxed copies of their games to be legally bought in the same country? For that matter, why the hell does an ONLINE SERVICE need to know, or care, where you live? Literally everything about region-based gaming in the Internet age is an anachronism.
@morbiuswilters said:
@The_Assimilator said:
(500MB is not insignificant on my current 4Mb Internet connection; I was on 384Kb at the time.)
It's not M$'s fault your Internet is delivered via rickshaw.
I don't dispute this; we can blame 20 years of freedom (aka the ruling party running this country into the ground) for that. I do dispute the necessity, or even utility, of forcing massive updates of software that the game could run perfectly fine without, onto its players. (I blame the devs and publishers of said games for this more. If you're going to implement DRM, go with the option that makes your players hate you the LEAST, not the most.)
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@The_Assimilator said:
Literally everything about region-based gaming in the Internet age is an anachronism.
Well, assuming they aren't using geographically-local servers. Honestly, a user in S.A. connecting directly to a server in the U.S. seems like more of an anachronism to me..
