@amischiefr said:
@Vechni said:
What's WoW ...
credited to the guy with the wierd looking avatar
You mean this guy?
That's not the real WoW, that's just a sham WoW....
- Rick
@amischiefr said:
@Vechni said:
What's WoW ...
credited to the guy with the wierd looking avatar
You mean this guy?
That's not the real WoW, that's just a sham WoW....
- Rick
@bstorer said:
I thought it was that Obama was packing for his trip to Europe. You're telling me the President of the United States can't get someone to pack his bags for him?!
That's just because of all of the security questions he gets at the airport before they'll let him on Air Force One:
@pjt33 said:
He has to wear an orange hat. If he wore a red one, people might think he was a squirrel.(And anyone who gets the reference is welcome to come pigeon poisoning with me this weekend).
Is it spring, already?
"Spring is here; spring is here. Life is skittles and life is beer. I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring, don't you? 'Course you do!
But there's one thing that makes spring complete for me, that makes every Sunday a treat for me....
So, if Sunday you're free, why don't you come with me, and we'll...."
With apologies to Tom Lehrer if I've misremembered his wonderful lyrics.
@Zemm said:
I used to run Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 (IIRC) but then then renamed it to DR-DOS 7.03 and it somehow became non-open, which was around when I switched to Slackware Linux on my 486.
Not Yggdrasil?
@cklam said:
Before mobile phones we had cosmic rays ...
Well, it's a darn good thing that the mobile phones managed to eliminate that particular risk.
@versatilia said:
It happens when something has been turned into PostScript (eg. by converting to PDF) and then displayed when the required font isn't available. IIRC a PostScript document positions characters or groups of characters at absolute positions on the page, so a font substitution after that process will give you exactly this result.I say you can't blame users for not realising that fonts don't travel with documents. Of course it's a good thing when the font is Comic Sans, the unwanted offspring of the spritely young Tahoma and the more mature Script, who really should've known better at the time and worn some extra kerning for protection.
I've seen this more times than I care to count, with both PDF and PostScript documents (no surprise, there). It's most annoying when you download a 100+ page documentation package for some piece of software or hardware that needs to be configured, and you discover that the entire document has that "jiggly-text" effect where each letter is offset by a seemingly-random x and y value due to the document creator not embedding their personal favorite font in the document when they converted it.
I have yet to find a better solution than simply hunting down the author, and feeding him or her, toes-first, into a container full of rabid weasels. Failing that, I simply endure the inevitable headaches as I decipher enough of the document to accomplish my intended configuration task.
@DeLos said:
I do believe you can use your auto payments to pay.Your automatic payments do pay your bill. Some are by credit cards others can be funded from a bank account.
The term "auto payments" can be parsed in at least two ways, it seems:
It seems that, for many of us, the second possible meaning was the first (and often, the only) one that came to mind came to mind.
- Rick
@Aaron said:
@morbiuswilters said:
The psuedo-intellectual use of Latin declension for non-Latin words is very common with computer nerds, like one of those mind virii.
None of those are half as irritating as "boxen". I'm glad I've never had somebody say that to me in person, because if I had, I'd probably be in a cell now.
What's funny is that I've never seen it done for index.
What, you mean "indices"?
@dphunct said:
@RocketRick said:
That's the real reason you still see Notes being used (and new deployments and migrations _to_ Notes happening) at large companies: it actually helps them get their real work done, securely and efficiently.
umm, i'm going to have to disagree with you there. especially if you attempt to use Notes for web applications. Its IDE is PATHETIC!!! Argue with me, and I'll send you a link to download eclipse. (Although they are supposedly correcting this with 8.5 when designer is eclipse-based) Anyone who has ever enjoyed the ease of relational databases will likely have an embolism trying to get data out. Notes is notoriously "quirky" and bug-ridden. More than once we have ran across something that IBM suggests "just don't use that function." And did I mention how bad there web development support is?
I'm not going to argue with you that Notes' development environment sucks. The current IDE *is* pathetic. However, I never said it wasn't. Yes, as a Notes/Domino developer, I have to deal with a crappy IDE, and I have to jump through silly hoops to get Domino to output standards-compliant HTML. It's a pain at times, and I acknowledge that.
The Notes data model is non-relational. Yawn. Color me unsurprised to see this pointed out. The Notes data model is a better fit for some types of applications, and relational databases are a better fit for other types of applications. Horses for courses. For a lot of business processes, the Notes model is actually better. For others, I'll gladly put the data into a back-end relational DB (or it will already exist in one), and I'll query it as needed.
What I actually said was that Notes "helps [companies] get their real work done, securely and efficiently." And *that* is a true statement, and one I'll stick by. Once well-written Notes applications are built, they *do* help companies get their real work done, securely and efficiently. The Notes security model is second-to-none, and completely immune to the usual SQL injection and similar attack methods that plague most other web application platforms. Notes applications are a great tool for automating a wide variety of business processes.There's value in well-designed applications, and Notes gives me, as a developer, a useful toolkit for developing certain types of applications.Is it perfect? Hell no. Is it "the best"? Well, that depends on the specifics of what you're trying to accomplish. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. (Just like most other development platforms.)
The real world isn't black & white. No one tool is always best, or even always "good". No one tool is always worst, or even always "bad". Sometimes, Notes is a very good tool for the problems at hand. Sometimes, it's not.
An experienced professional should be able to distinguish those cases, and make appropriate technology recommendations, rather than blanket commendations or condemnations. "Hating" any particular tool is counterproductive.
To address one of your other statements: it's not "apathy" to conciously decide to accept a product's limitations in order to benefit from its advantages.
- Rick
@morbiuswilters said:
Good Lord, what kind of moronic company would migrate away from Exchange for Lotus Notes?
<gratuitous_snide_comment>One that didn't want to have to worry about joining the "Virus of the Week Club" as a result of running Exchange?</gratuitous_snide_comment>
I've been working as consultant doing Notes development and admininstration since 1994. Over that time, I've seen more than my share of WTFs, just like everyone else here.
However, Notes, in and of itself, has been the source of far fewer of those WTFs than you might imagine.
Yes, Notes sucks. All software sucks. If you just think of Notes in terms of it being an email client, I'll be the first to admit that it sucks particularly hard. If you think of it as a tool for building in-house applications within an environment that implements and enforces a robust and ubiquitous security model (that also happens to include email functionality), then it's actually a pretty decent tool for getting real work done. That's the real reason you still see Notes being used (and new deployments and migrations _to_ Notes happening) at large companies: it actually helps them get their real work done, securely and efficiently.
That being said, the fact that it's relatively easy to "knock together" a quick Notes application means that there are an absolute boatload of badly-written and just plain awful Notes applications out there, written by a whole host of fools who bill themselves as "Notes Developers", despite lacking two brain cells to rub together, let alone a single iota of common sense related to user interface and interaction design. (See also: Visual Basic, and "teh intarweb" for other fine examples of this sort of developer.)
You know, just like every other development environment out there, there are idiots using it, and there are professionals. Too often, people base their opinions on having seen just the work of the idiots. Just because one of the infinite monkeys slapped together a crappy application using Notes is no reason to condemn the tool he used.
As a long-time Notes user, developer, and admin, I know that there are lots of better reasons to hate Notes. Like any tool, it has its deficiencies and problems. But, on balance, and despite a number of WTFs, I still find that Notes gives me the tools I need to deliver useful (and usable) applications that help my clients get their jobs done, and it does it in a framework that makes it straightforward for me to ensure security at multiple levels of granularity.
It's a net positive, in my book, and a lot of big companies have found that to be true, as well.
- Rick