Microsoft insider on why Microsoft sucks (and rocks)
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It was about a year apart. I wasn't paying super close attention, but I don't remember any talk about Ballmer being anywhere close to leaving back when Sinofsky did. Even when Ballmer did leave, it was completely unexpected (to me, at least—maybe I'm trwtf).
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Something about Win8 and the future of Windows. Wasn't XP the culprit of UI for MS? The idea that one of the reasons Win8 is despised is the new GUI, so maybe MS already hit the nail with the old XP style, right? Now, with that in mind, how/where can MS evolve Windows so it makes sense for people to upgrade to a new version? You've got Win7 which runs fine, what not-so-shiny new thing could make a regular user upgrade?
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Ok, you typed a lot of words, and I'm feeling like kind of a jerk for not writing a serious response, but your understanding of events is so different than mine I hardly even know where to begin.
You posted an article about the hoops you have to jump through to get the most touted feature of W8 back. I thought you were agreeing with me.
Ok, how about: How does the fact that Sinofsky resigned less than one month after the release of 8, while it was still too soon to tell if it would be success or failure, possibly match what you've written?
W8 preview was available for a year before the official release. Tech crowd was already whining all over the place. More importantly, corporate IT departments had assessed it too and basically said "we're skipping this one". By the time of the general release, only a smash hit could have saved Sinofsky. And it was quickly obvious W8 won't be that.
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But engineers' primary skill is creating complicated features that are kind of cool but not very useful. Or re-engineering everything into shit.
Wow, I'm an engineer?
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Wow, I'm an engineer?
Possibly just a reasonable facsimile. I'd say that was a necessary but not sufficient condition.
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touching screens and wondering why they don't work
sigh
Before touch screens entered the common public, they were used to help facilitate education for special needs children.
I just wonder if this will lead to diminished critical thinking capacity?
Even small skills like motor coordination between moving a mouse and tracking movement on the screen is an exercise for the brain.
I know, I know. Down the slippery slope of "technology makes us dumber". Not to mention that we're just making electronics interact in the same way we interact with the non-digital-real-world.
It's just, first cursive hand writing and multiplication tables, then basic handwriting, now even typing is giving way to voice-to-text.
At this rate, we're liable to lose the written language altogether.
It's already frustrating enough to want to see a description or instructions for some task and be brought to a youtube video without a transcript.
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It's already frustrating enough to want to see a description or instructions for some task and be brought to a youtube video without a transcript.
Preach it!
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cursive hand writing
I can do this. It looks like a long series of incomprehensible squiggles that nobody (including myself) can read.
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I can do this. It looks like a long series of incomprehensible squiggles that nobody (including myself) can read.
Then.... you can't....?
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Then.... you can't....?
well enough to sign one's name.
if it was supposed to be legible they wouldn't ask you to print it as well.
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well enough to sign one's name.
You don't need a signature to be legible. It's supposed to be distinctive, or perhaps unique.
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It's just, first cursive hand writing and multiplication tables, then basic handwriting, now even typing is giving way to voice-to-text.
Yeah, fuck all that stuff. It's a bunch of tedious work that is MUCH better done by machines. Why is it intrinsically a good thing for a human to spend time and energy on calculations a machine can do instantly?I don't know how removing boring work from human's lives is supposed to make us dumber either. Granted it removes barriers so that the idiots can bray louder and in more places (see: most social media) but there's always been idiots, they are never going away no matter how much/little tech we have.
ponders Brave New World, wonders if a caste system is THAT bad really
has assigned himself Alpha+ caste, naturally
would totally be up for constant drugs and orgies in exchange for not questioning anything
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Why isn't my + sign italicised?
MY WHOLE GODDAM POST IS RUINED FOREVER!!!
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You don't need a signature to be legible. It's supposed to be distinctive, or perhaps unique.
I guess that makes it OK then that each of my signatures is unique.
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When I was signing my mortgage refi a few years ago, the notary complained that my signature looked different on page 40 than it did on page 1. And I was like, "of course it does, I've signed like 80 times by now." And she was like, "your signature is supposed to be consistent," and I was like "it is usually, but I don't usually sign 80 times in a row" and then she said, "well didn't you spend all your free time in elementary and middle school practicing your signature?" and then WTF.
... anyway, apparently people with consistent signatures who can sign all day are that way because they got the invisible Martian brain signals that you're supposed to spend your public school career practicing that. And they think it's weird if your signature changes when your hand becomes cramped-up and tired.
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Because children have to work up to difficult problems.
And if all the simple problems are solved, they won't have the practice and the brain development to become problem solvers.
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My signature got a lot more consistent(ly nasty) when I had to sign three years of timesheets (that's
#1), printed out one week per page (that's #2) and with a full signature required on each page (that's #3) because the auditor we had for that project wouldn't believe it all otherwise (that's #4). My boss at the time wasn't any happier; he had to countersign them all (and for another colleague of mine too; that's #6 and maybe #7 too).Bureaucracy. Because you weren't doing any actual work, were you?
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There are worse things...
Like doing it in triplicate.
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"well didn't you spend all your free time in elementary and middle school practicing your signature?"
That's what chicks do, but usually with the last name of the boy their crushing on at the time.
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Hey don't call those broads chicks! It's insulting!
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Play chess :P
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I don't even have a signature, never seem to need one. When I do have to sign something (rarely) it looks like a child's crayon scrawl. I kinda had signature pegged as one of those "grownup" things I'd be issued at some point.
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I don't even have a signature, never seem to need one.
You don't own a house then. That takes several hundred signatures.
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That takes several hundred signatures.
And writing your name as fast as you can several hundred times (because it is several hundred times) is exactly how you end up with a signature. Or, as mine is sometimes known, a squashed spider.
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That takes several hundred signatures.
My signature on the last page was still recognizably the same signature as the first, but definitely much sloppier. That would happen sometimes happen even when just paying a batch of bills, back in the days when I still wrote paper checks for them; after a half-dozen or so, I stopped caring about writing neatly.
because it is several hundred times
Nobody who buys a house really knows what they're signing. You have to trust that the neutral third-party (escrow or title company employee) who's handing you stuff to sign is giving you an accurate 1- or 2-sentence summary of the 20-page document. The total is a stack of papers 6 to 8 inches high that would take you a week to read and understand the legalese; you have an hour or so to sign all of them. Refinancing isn't quite as bad; only a couple inches high.
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If he has been working at MS for 15 years, how was he working at an AAA game company 6 months ago?
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TRWTF is what happened to
#5
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You don't own a house then. That takes several hundred signatures.
Really?
Buying a house in the UK takes about three signatures, plus witnesses.
Less than a single week of timesheets, and rather a lot more money involved!Kinda scary how little paperwork it was to be honest.
There are massive sheaves of paper, those are supposed to help you decide whether it's actually a sane thing to do.
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Sometimes I consider having a stamp made. But I also have minimized my signature so there's less to draw.
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I don't even have a signature, never seem to need one.
Years ago, I read a story on one of the humor sites that's now long gone (I think it was thespark.com) about someone trying to see what he could get away with in terms of signing on scanners at checkout counters.
It turns out nobody checks those, so when I'm feeling whimsical, sometimes I'll draw a picture, or sign "John Hancock" or whatever.
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signing on scanners at checkout counters.
Hey, I once managed get a signature on one of those that looked vaguely like my signature on paper. OTOH, I had one recently that was missing its stylus; a finger does not make an adequate substitute.
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It turns out nobody checks those, so when I'm feeling whimsical, sometimes I'll draw a picture, or sign "John Hancock" or whatever.
Nobody checks them but I believe they are kept on file in case there's a dispute of some kind.
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Nobody checks them but I believe they are kept on file in case there's a dispute of some kind.
I'd be surprised if that's not the case: otherwise why even record them?
What I meant was that unlike in the days of yore, the cashier never attempts to verify them against the strip on the back of the card. I once had a woman at an indy bookstore in a mall refuse to take my card--she was outraged it wasn't signed--unless I signed it right there in front of her. Lady, what's that going to prove? If you say "you need to verify it against my driver's license", well, you could have just done that without making me sign the card!
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If he has been working at MS for 15 years, how was he working at an AAA game company 6 months ago?
Who is 'he' in this context, exactly?
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You don't own a house then. That takes several hundred signatures.
Gawd no. Renting a place for super cheap. Thank YOU collapsed property market!
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Renting a place for super cheap. Thank YOU collapsed property market!
2009 was actually not a bad time to buy either, as it turned out...
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My dad went through every single one of those papers. my mother says it took something like 4 hours to finish the signing.
And I read a good bit of it the first time I bought a house. It took a good long while and they keep trying to get you to just trust them that youre not getting fucked over.I suppose you could argue that we didnt fully understand it all, but I at least tried to make them explain anything that I didnt find intuitive.
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The reddit user, who claims they've worked at MS for 15 years.
Post history isn't entirely inconsistent with the idea but there is a lot of "well, I worked on this and this, so I know more about this than you" type posts. The mention of working at a company that makes AAA titles was made in a discussion about game design as a reason why he was right.
If we take all his "I did X" type posts together we find he is something of a Da Vinci of our time.
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The reddit user, who claims they've worked at MS for 15 years.
Ah, I see. It's possible he was working in one of the MS internal game studios, on Fable or Halo or something of that nature?
But, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, so it's worth taking everything with a shovel of salt or two..
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My wife has 3 long names for her full name in her drivers license, but she normally only signs her middle and last name because she doesn't go by her first name. When we were signing the house papers, they told her that her signature HAD to match and have all 3 names.... which is the dumbest shit I've ever heard. My sig is barely even recognizable as my name. But they absolutely REFUSED any paper that was signed with anything shorter, and would make her redo it. By page 37465, she was pretty pissed. Then they mentioned that her "signature" was looking a little different across each page... she nearly murdered one of the dumbasses, and that was the last time they complained about it.
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My signature is First ME. Last. If my middle name is written in full, I'm not the person who signed it.
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Mine has too many of one of the letters in the last name. If my name is anywhere near spelled correctly, it wasn't me.
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I also don't think I'm even consistent with how many letters it is, because my last name is almost completely made up of letters that look exactly the same in cursive. So it's like a randomly long series of loops.
hmm.. i suppose i randomly hit the correct number of letters sometimes, so you could probably disregard the statement about spelling it correctly. I may have the most forgeable signature in the history of the world!
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My signature used to be very neat and legible. As I've gotten older and lazier, it's gotten sloppier. More often than not, I tend to fail to make the loop for the next to last letter these days.
And I should probably stop giving would-be forgers any more hints on how to forge mine properly. :)
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And I should probably stop giving would-be forgers any more hints on how to forge my properly. :)
Exactly, me too
As if anyone checks signatures on any of the trivial shit I do anyway. Maybe if I used to be a CEO for a multi-billion $ company like Sinofsky.
And we come full circle.
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Why do I only notice typos after somebody quotes me?
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Why do I only notice typos after somebody quotes me?
because you read the quote more closely than what you typed, in case that asshole edited your words on you.
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, in case that asshole darkmatter edited your words on you.
Why would anyone do that?
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FWIW, my signature is : First letter of first name followed by random scribbled loops, First letter of last name followed by random scribbled loops.
I also remember mortgage paperwork being a real bastard and taking forever. They didn't give me any shit about first vs last signature though. My signature is entirely illegible anyway.
