Need Help with Office politics
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I think what people are knee-jerking about when they say "I hate the Office Ribbon" or "I hate Windows 8" isn't about the product at all. I think they're objecting to having to learn new things.
Yeah, it's like when someone learns to use...I'm picking something totally at random here...git.
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I'm a huge fan of Dynasty Warriors, and it's consistently had a good co-op experience (a few titles didn't let you co-op in story mode, but it always has alternate modes where you can, and they're long enough and hard enough that you don't get that "I'm just here to watch the other guy hit all the checkpoints" feeling you sometimes get when co-op is shoehorned in at the last minute). Hyrule Warriors takes the DW experience and injects a crapton of Zelda nostalgia. It's a nice game to unwind with, and I'm starting to get that 100% completion fever :)
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must have.... and since it's zenda i know i have the came console for it (that series has always been nintendo exclusive and that's the only console i have)
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Putting the most-frequently-used/best-for-common-tasks functions 'up front' was the point of toolbars to begin with, yet the old Office toolbar system subverted this.
Subverted it how?
Do you know why they created the Ribbon? After every Office release, Microsoft sends a survey to big Office users asking them what features they wanted in the next release. Every year they got a bunch of requests for features that already existed in Office, and every year they got more and more requests for features that already existed.
The obvious conclusion was that the problem wasn't the number of features, but the fact that customers couldn't find them in the mess of menus and dialogs. Now if you had some proposal to solve this problem back in 2003, I'm sure Microsoft would have been happy to consider it, but the solution they picked was the Ribbon interface.
And it worked.
Microsoft, sadly, expected the Ribbon to just catch on by itself without supporting its userbase through the shock that they should have expected it to be.
What "shock"? What are you talking about?
If people are "shocked" by a piece of software, the problem isn't in the software, ok? When you build software, you have to make certain assumptions about the user. One of those assumptions is: "the user isn't fucking insane."
duplicative -- ODF was already an ISO standard when OOXML was shoved through the committee
And this is bad... why?
Is there some ISO rule that there can only be one standard for a given document type? Because I've never heard of that.
You're also ignoring the minor detail that OOXML supports a ton of shit that ODF does not and probably never well. For example, specifying formulas in spreadsheet cells. So obviously there was a need for a more-complete format than ODF.
('This feature should be implemented as in Excel 97' has no place in a standard; it'd be like the C++ standard saying 'do as GCC does in such-and-such a case'.)
Well I agree with that in principle, it seems to work for browser-makers. ;) The only difference is that when a question comes up about vague W3C standards, the W3C actually boots up a copy of Firefox and sees what it does so they can write an actual behavior instead of just "do it like Firefox".
The fact that Firefox always does is in a dumber way than IE is never addressed. (innerText vs. textContent, the way mouse buttons are enumerated, IE's brilliant ReadyState property, etc.)
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Just like that. So if you were playing Clue, the game board would be on the screen, and your cards would be on your pad.
Right; but if I don't like that type of game, why do I have to pay $100-or-so more than I should for the damned thing? At least the Kinect is useful to me. Still not $100 useful, but useful.
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You can fork without starting up a new interpreter, even in Python. The child basically gets a 'clone' of the parent's interpreter through the forking process; the Python implementation doesn't have to do anything magical to make this happen, either.
Then wouldn't you be on the same CPU and the same Python virtual-bullshit-made-up-threadpool?
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Hyrule Warriors takes the DW experience and injects a crapton of Zelda nostalgia.
Since nostalgia (or being 8 years old) is the only reason to own a Nintendo anything, that makes sense.
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How do i get this point across ?
Close the bug. CANTFIX NOREPRO NEEDMOREINFO.
How do i tell them to pick their shit up and act more responsible.
Generally you can't--you can only hope to tell their bosses "if they don't put in meaningful data, then the application won't work and we'll ship the wrong stuff" or whatever. Tie it to the bottom line: "we're wasting crores of rupees on return shipping."
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The problem here being the manager glances over the issues on the Bug tracker and basically goes like dude you are inefficient.It takes so much back and forth for you to find and fix a bug.Not goooood!!!!!!
Me: Hey need more info
Tester: oh what do you need (after around 8 hrs)
Me:Hey frobinator was frobinating fine until yesterday evening .what did you give the frobinator today?
Tester: Oh I dont remember,let me get back on that to you(after another 8 hrs maybe)
Me:waiting
Me:Still waiting
Me:Hellooooo?
Tester:Hey we gave the frobinator "A" I think,It's been two days so i dont remember much!
Me:omg you were supposed to give me.How is you forgetting this my problem?
Tester:lolwut.kthx fix itAll the above happens in the Comments section of the Bug tracker.Lync or Skype pings are treated with "I'm busy"(But I ll actually be taking a long tea break in a while and no time for you)
Well, yes - doing it that way is inefficient. My proposed solution closes the bug after your initial investigation. If it later gets re-opened it's because the testers have finally provided (hopefully) more information.
In the meantime, you start on the next bug...
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Is there some ISO rule that there can only be one standard for a given document type? Because I've never heard of that.
Yes, there is a rule that says there's only to be one ISO standard for a given thing -- whether it be a document format, or anything else under the ISO umbrella.
You're also ignoring the minor detail that OOXML supports a ton of shit that ODF does not
...really now?probably never well. For example, specifying formulas in spreadsheet cells.
ODF 1.2 does specify spreadsheet formulas; better yet, they actually spent the time to define their functions properly instead of reusing Excel's, bugs and all -- and yes, there are bugs in some of the Excel spreadsheet functions.The only difference is that when a question comes up about vague W3C standards, the W3C actually boots up a copy of Firefox and sees what it does so they can write an actual behavior instead of just "do it like Firefox".
Exactly! You get the idea. The same would hold true if they wished to model something after IE, or Chrome, or what-have-you, of course.@tarunik said:
You can fork without starting up a new interpreter, even in Python. The
child basically gets a 'clone' of the parent's interpreter through the
forking process; the Python implementation doesn't have to do anything
magical to make this happen, either.
Then wouldn't you be on the same CPU and the same Python virtual-bullshit-made-up-threadpool?
Nope. The OS is free to slap the new child process on whatever CPU it wants, just like any other child process. Remember that on *nix systems to this day,fork()is the canonical way for everything to create a new process, whether it be the shell spinning up something in order toexec()a program, or a daemonfork()ing a child to handle a client.
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Nope. The OS is free to slap the new child process on whatever CPU it wants, just like any other child process.
... then in what way is that considered "not starting up a new interpreter"? You have one. Then you do this thing. And now you have two. So you started up a new one.
But your post said you could fork WITHOUT starting up a new one, and one of these things is impossible but I do not know which.
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Yeah, I have touched W8 (laptops in the lab for a college course), and it's a real, royal pain compared to W7 (which I use at work).
We use W8 at my work and outside the initial growing pains (disabling some trackpad charms bar nonsense, getting a start menu replacement) I've had no problem using it just as I would a W7 machine.
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All I get back is "Holy shit is that even a thing,Do I have to give frobinator A to get frobinater-Type A.fucking fuck.I did not know that "
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
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All the above happens in the Comments section of the Bug tracker.
Show this shit to your boss. "Look, they filed a bug report, but waited an entire day to answer my question, and then they didn't actually answer it. This is why it always takes so long to close the bug reports. I can't fix it if they won't answer me in a timely manner."
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Are these real people you're talking about?:(
Uh, yes. I've worked in two different companies--including, fortunately, my current one--where the QA person provides detailed data about problems, and replies promptly to questions with useful answers.
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Simple explanation:
Instead of
PythonInterpreter child_py = new PythonInterpreter(); child_py = this, I'm sayingPythonInterpreter child_py = make_a_clone<PythonInterpreter>(this)wheremake_a_clone<>()simply creates a Copy on Write clone of its argument.Technical details below (was my old post before I simplified it):
[spoiler]
There is another interpreter being called into being. Your problem is that you insist it is a brand new interpreter instance. In other words, instead of default-constructing a brand new interpreter along the lines of(pid = fork()? wait(pid): exec("/usr/bin/python"))orCreateProcess("python.exe", /* ... */);, thefork()operation is giving you an exact copy of the existing interpreter instance! In other words, you have cloned the existing interpreter a lamemcpyor a copy-constructor instead of creating a new one from scratch.
[/spoiler]
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(Yes yes, FrostCat, come in here and call me an idiot now.)
What? Sometimes you're not an idiot, you idiot.
BTW, since you bailed on that most recent thread, all I was doing originally was making a mild joke that you should've called your library "com.blakeyrat.SteamWhateveritwas". You're the one who started swearing at me. You should seriously consider taking a break from screaming at people when you don't understand them, because it can't be good for your blood pressure.
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Compliance to the C++ standard is about the lowest priority for a C++ development environment.
Well, no, it's also about getting support for new features. I tried to use a Minecraft save-editing library once, and it used a C++03 or C++11 or whatever language construct that VIsual C++ completely doesn't have yet. You're completely fucked if you wanna use it on Windows as the basis for a GUI app, unless you want to mess around with MinGW or something, assuming IT supports that language construct.
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I'm even more confused about this clause. A catatonic state?
People don't like change. Anytime Microsoft changes the UI, legions of troglodytes get butthurt. This is the source of most complaints about office 2007+--the Ribbon--and Windows 8--the Start Screen.
I know a guy who uses Office all day long. I asked him what he thought about the Ribbon--he LOVED it. That actually surprised me, but--like I already knew--it makes doing the basics a measurable amount easier, at the expense of making some of the more obscure features a little harder to find. So of course nobody went looking for them--they just sat there and started swearing because they weren't being spoon-fed. I bet that doesn't remind you of anyone here.
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Windows 8 I just can't get my head around at all.
What? It's almost entirely the same. The main difference is instead of trying to fit a 50-app menu into a tiny little rectangly, they put it on a new screen and gave you bigger, easier-to-hit icons, that, OMG, can actually be live tiles like your mail icon on your phone. Sure, it could probably stand a bit of improvement--what can't--but it's a better experience if you're open to it.
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t you do not need threading, especially on the server side.
Except that new process creation is low-cost on Unix, but not on Windows. On Windows, creating a new thread is the lost-cost option.
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If it was such an improvement from day one, perhaps you'd like the ribbon to make an appearance in your IDE?
I would be OK with that.
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I'm still not sure how I somehow got into the chrome APP instead of the chrome APPLICATION for desktop
If you use an app(lication) a lot, pin it to the desktop or task bar. That's actually the official recommendation. It works quite well if you don't put 86 Word documents there as well.
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I like the ribbon now I've worked out where everything is on it.
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The main difference is instead of trying to fit a 50-app menu into a tiny little rectangly, they put it on a new screen
My big gripe with this is that it needlessly takes over the entire screen. It may make sense on a tablet or a phone, but not on a desktop. If they had to change it, I would have preferred if they made it more like Launchy, but really there was nothing wrong with the existing (Vista!) start menu.
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Subverted it how?
Too many ways to get to stuff. You had the menu, you had toolbars, and then you also had those side-panel task pane whatever-they-were-calleds. As you say further down, it became a chore to figure out how to get to any given function if you didn't already know. "Do I start with going through every single submenu, or hovering over all the visible toolbar buttons? Oh, but what about the toolbars that are disabled--do I have to turn them on one at a time?" And so on, and so on. The Ribbon's justification was "everything goes on the ribbon, so you only have one place to look."
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I like the ribbon now I've worked out where everything is on it.
Right. So MS could probably have theoretically come up with a way to make it easier to tell people where stuff is, but nobody would, say, sit through a video that enumerated every thing.
But that's easy to say, and not necessarily so easy to implement. I generally try to use the help and say "how do i X?" and usually that works, if I can describe what I want to do. If you don't know the term Mail Merge and you're looking for how to do that (assuming this is a possible scenario), you're kind of screwed.
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My big gripe with this is that it needlessly takes over the entire screen. It may make sense on a tablet or a phone, but not on a desktop. If they had to change it, I would have preferred if they made it more like Launchy, but really there was nothing wrong with the existing (Vista!) start menu.
It's not that bad, really. My problem is that frequently I want to right-click to get the context menu, and I accidentally left-click and have to wait for it to swap, and then click again to swap back. But start menu-pinning obviates some of that.
The Vista/W7 start menu sucked, because they took out the expando feature. I understand WHY they did it, but it crippled it. You have to scroll constantly to find what you want, and it has the same weird misfeature of Explorer (which makes sense, really) of if you're not careful how you click things at the top or bottom of the viewport you wind up scrolling when you didn't mean to. Plus you can't sort any more, whereas with the new screen you can put the most common things at the bottom left so you can click 'em faster. (Again, they could have done a better job explaining that--I bet a lot of people's complaints about the screen could mostly be resolved by showing them how to move tiles around and pin/unpin them so they do or don't show on the partial view.)
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The ribbon is effectively just a menu laid out differently, I don't see why they'd need to go to any extra effort than any app with standard menus would.
There's Help, or there's Google.
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The ribbon is effectively just a menu laid out differently
All I mean is that there's extra tabs and what with the various sized icons and dropdown icons, not everything is instantly visible. It kind of seems like MS just said "oh, check out this new thing" and didn't explicitly say "it's sort of a turbo-powered n-dimensional menu."
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Yeah, I started in automation (they were looking for Java programmers to teach automation skills to), branched out into more and more general QA stuff, and now I'm the sole SQA expert at my new company. My salary is comfortable enough, but I don't anticipate it going up too much higher, so if I want a substantial increase in pay I'll either a) rely on my husband's more traditional career path or b) go into consulting. Thankfully, I quite like my job at the pay rate I'm at; I anticipate feeling much different in 5-10 years, but carpe diem.
You're not making enough now that you're writing for this site?
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I'm still proudly a fan of WebForms and WinForms, because you know what? They're simple, they work, and Microsoft is pretty much forced to support them almost-eternally at this point. Stuff like Entity Framework or MVC I usually just don't bother with and roll-my-own. The learning-curve for all this shit takes longer than just writing the damned thing. (Yes yes, FrostCat, come in here and call me an idiot now.)
You're an idiot, but you're our idiot. That's exactly how I feel about WebForms/MVC.
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So you do make a new one, which just happens to have the same memory contents as the old one. You are twisting the word "new" in a way I did not know it was possible to be twisted.
I feel like I should be a children's show host. "You start with one. Then you have two. What happened in between, kids? ... Right! We created a new one!"
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So you do make a new one, which just happens to have the same memory contents as the old one.
Do you really want to argue semantics? Yes, a new process is created, but nobody, as he said, explicitly calls exec("/usr/bin/python") or whatever.
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Sorry; I foolishly assumed "new" to mean "new". Obviously my own error, assuming words have meanings.
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Do you really want to argue semantics?
English sucks, amirite?
Also: I'm trying to draw the distinction between 'brand-spanking-new, freshly-called-into-being-from-thin-air, made-with-raw-materials-and-blueprints' and 'cloned-from-an-existing-thing'...who knew that this particular distinction would whoosh! over the heads of a few readers here? Or is the way
fork()works (cloning the VM space of the parent to create the child in an efficient way using Copy on Write) too obtuse for folks to understand?
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Or is the way fork() works (cloning the VM space of the parent to create the child in an efficient way using Copy on Write) too obtuse for folks to understand?
I get the concept, duh.
It's just if you clone something, you've made a new thing. Right? That's what cloning is. You start with one thing, and you duplicate it, and now you have a new thing.
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Curiosity question for you and @Yamikuronue ... in your W7 days, were you a Win + Search type, a pinner, a desktop hoarder, or a Start Menu browser?
In my experiences with IT consulting & residential
hellhelpdesk, the people who had the most problems with W8 were the Start Menu browser types. Who were generally the people who thought of themselves as power users (some even actually knew how to use their computer)... the mom & pops -- who were kind of the primary target with Metro anyway -- were either desktop hoarders or pinners (not impacted), or they had learned how to Win + Search, which works at least as well on 8 as it does on 7.In my experience, people in IT-related careers are the worst Luddites (including myself >_>)
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I tend to click on the start menu, scan the most-used apps, and if it's not there, search.
I also keep accidentally triggering weird shortcuts and it took me a few days to figure out how to reliably get out of an app into the desktop.
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The Vista/W7 start menu sucked, because they took out the expando feature. I understand WHY they did it, but it crippled it.
The crippling was a feature, not a bug. The whole migration of the Start experience from XP -> Vista/7 -> 8 has been toward pinning the things you REALLY REALLY need and searching for the rest. Why browse through 2/3/4/5 levels of folders when you can press 2-5 keys and then have what you need right there? (Or have a pin if it's a very high use application.)
My big gripe with this is that it needlessly takes over the entire screen. It may make sense on a tablet or a phone, but not on a desktop.
Which is why the W8 Start screen takes over the screen -- more real-estate for pins.
I, for one, love the extra real-estate -- I have something like 3 different groups of 8+ pins, to help keep things organized into my day-to-day apps, my administrative apps, etc. Just simply no way to make that work in the Vista/7 start paradigm, unless your start bar is like 3 rows tall. I'm kind of sad that they seem to be moving "backwards" some in 10, I hope that there's a way to keep a suitably large Start area for pins.
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So you do make a new one, which just happens to have the same memory contents as the old one. You are twisting the word "new" in a way I did not know it was possible to be twisted.
I feel like I should be a children's show host. "You start with one. Then you have two. What happened in between, kids? ... Right! We created a new one!"
Is a class' constructor called when you reference the Clone() method for one of its instances?
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more real-estate for pins.
It would be if they weren't so damn big. I'm not blind1, dammit!
1 Well, not when I'm wearing my glasses anyway.
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You do realize they come in like 3 sizes, right? Glasses-not-required, my-glasses-are-on, and I-never-use-glasses. Most of my pins are in the "medium" variety, which gives you 5 boxes down by like 8 boxes across (squares) on a 1440x900 resolution 19"W monitor.
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in your W7 days, were you a Win + Search type, a pinner, a desktop hoarder, or a Start Menu browser?
Start menu browser; the Desktop's too much of a pain to get at for me 90% of the time -- in fact, at work, I have the Desktop open in an Explorer window just to use it as temporary file space.
Win+Search isn't in my blood b/c I'm newish to W7 -- most of my windows experience is on XP, which predates that shortcut.
It's just if you clone something, you've made a new thing. Right? That's what cloning is. You start with one thing, and you duplicate it, and now you have a new thing.
"New" in the sense 'was not here before'. NOT 'new' in the sense 'this thing was created from raw materials and a blueprint'.Is a class' constructor called when you reference the Clone() method for one of its instances?
C++ answer: the class' copy constructor is called, save for trivial-layout (aka POD) types with a defaulted copy constructor, for which the compiler can safely optimize to a
memcpy()operation. I'm not sure if Java/C# optimize object deep copies further; they may be able to due to tighter ABI standards and JIT compilation.The behavior of an object during a
fork(), though, is effectively amemcpy()asfork(), being an OS API, has no awareness of your objects and their constructors. You can[i]not[/i] equate this to creating a new thing in the object-oriented sense of the term! (i.e. what anoperator newconnotes)Except that new process creation is low-cost on Unix, but not on Windows. On Windows, creating a new thread is the lowest-cost option.
FTFY. Also, I'm assuming the Unix model here because the W32API smashesfork()andexec()into one system call, which is probably why process creation in Windows is so bloody expensive: you are doing all the loader setup work and page cache walking all over again instead of grabbing the pages from the existing process and reusing them, Copy on Write style.
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You do realize they come in like 3 sizes, right? Glasses-not-required, my-glasses-are-on, and I-never-use-glasses. Most of my pins are in the "medium" variety, which gives you 5 boxes down by like 8 boxes across (squares) on a 1440x900 resolution 19"W monitor.
If I used Win 8 much, that would be helpful to know. Wish they didn't default to the large, though.
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I think it's fairly "learning" -- I set most of mine to medium and whacked all the bloatware tiles (that were, of course, large), and then new pins I make are medium.
Start menu browser; the Desktop's too much of a pain to get at for me 90% of the time -- in fact, at work, I have the Desktop open in an Explorer window just to use it as temporary file space.
Win+Search isn't in my blood b/c I'm newish to W7 -- most of my windows experience is on XP, which predates that shortcut.
As a converted Start Menu browser myself, I can testify1 that it is totally worth the time and pain to get used to the search & pin paradigm
1All testimony guaranteed useless or your money back
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Fortunately, we only have one guy like that at my company:
Impact : This is only affecting me Urgency : I cannot work until this is resolved What is the Issue? : Something is not working What system or device is affected? : *(ID of system, not actual system name)* Please describe your issue below : Unresponsive.
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it is totally worth the time and pain to get used to the search & pin paradigm
I love the pin methodology in Win 7. Basically, my organization goes pretty much as follows:
- 5 most common programs get pinned to the taskbar.
- The next most common programs/files get shortcuts on the desktop. This is somewhat organized with folders on the desktop, such as games and "work related". This keeps me down to about 10 shortcuts on my desktop. Office files in this category also get pinned to their respective program's "Recent Files" menu.
- Frequently used programs/utilities get pinned to the start menu. No more than 4.
- If it isn't in any of the above places, but I know where to find it in the start menu, I use the menu. Easier to remember where to look than what to look for.
- Final option: search.
So you see, it's not so much that I'm against the pinning. It's the tiles and the full screening that I don't like.
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I am always surprised when I have to reboot, because I never look at my desktop wallpaper and always forget what I picked.
