@dkf said:
The last few times have been OK for me (probably due to me taking great care) but I remember the bad old days when opening a computer tended to involve a small blood sacrifice and much swearingof oaths.
FTFY.
@dkf said:
The last few times have been OK for me (probably due to me taking great care) but I remember the bad old days when opening a computer tended to involve a small blood sacrifice and much swearingof oaths.
FTFY.
@dhromed said:
@Algorythmics said:
Possibly a sexist thing for me to imagine, but I think it probably has more to do with what the word iron conjures up first in my head than anything else.It's called stereotyping. It's not inherently evil, but it's really good to be aware that you're doing it.
Reminds me of my boss who said to the black guy in our office who plays in a band: "I bet you play funk!"
@oheso said:
@Master Chief said:
I could tell stories all day of my time at a local technical college (Don't know how that ranks against community college, don't honestly care). Frankly I knew almost everything I needed to know to graduate walking in, save for an excellent Photoshop class and an amazing web development instructor (PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, the usual fare. Guy was damn good though.)
I knew one girl that I always unfortunately seemed to end up in classes with, called her Database Action Barbie since my first encounter with her happened to be the SQL class. Not that she was pretty mind you, I called her Barbie because she was an incredible dunce. Seriously, every single concept needed to be explained in triplicate, and I don't honestly think she got it after that.
I have no idea if she graduated. I fucking hope not. I know that she wasn't alone, though, we had tons of middle aged folks in the same classes. It was a riot and a half watching these people, who could barely aim a mouse, try to learn ASP.net. Thanks to an earlier class in VB.net, I picked up ASP pretty damn easily (similar syntax, etc.) so I immediately became the person everybody wanted to ask questions during the work periods. Led me to take up the habit of doing the homework during the lecture so I could leave.
Our school claims to have good graduation rates, if that's so I'd say they're graduating a lot of under qualified people. I think the peak was when I had to take a class in Visio (already 2 years discontinued mind you when I took it) to make a credit requirement one semester, and sweet baby Jesus. I think we had some people in their 70's in that class, and I'm sorry, if you can't even find a pre-mounted network drive in Explorer, you have no damn business building anything for the Internet.
Ageism. My mother develops databases on big iron, while kids with iToys think that "hacked" means "I left my toy where my gf could get it and she posted a status update on fb."
I was going to respond to this by pointing out you were calling me an ageist after a story about a fellow college aged student, but you then decided to judge me based on my age in the same comment, so...yeah, that's a thing, I suppose. Good work.
@El_Heffe said:
@boomzilla said:
@El_Heffe said:I never said they can't sue. Anyone can sue anyone else for any reason, no matter how wrong or stupid. But that's not the point. Laws, courts and lawsuits are a form of regulation. If you want something that's completely unregulated, it's hypocritical to atttempt to use regulations to complain when things don't work out so well.To me the funniest part is all the people who said that bitcoin is wonderful because it is completely unregulated and free from control by TEH EVIL GOVERMENT and now that alll their bitcoins have been stolen they want to sue. Sorry, you can't have it both ways. You wanted unregulated, you got it.How does "unregulated" equate to "can't sue?"
It reminds me of a joke a comedian once told while talking about his past drug use: "Here's a word of advice. If you give a hooker money to go buy coke, she will never come back with the coke."
As far as I'm concerned, all lawsuits pertaining to this matter should be immediately thrown out of court and stamped with the following:
@ochrist said:
I wouldn't have helped her the one time he did. It's obvious she was either in way over her head (in which case she shouldn't pass) or had put zero effort into learning a damn thing (in which case she especially shouldn't pass).@bighusker said:
It turns out that Sarah doesn't know anything about programmingI've met people like this (mostly girls, I'm afraid).
Most of them don't work in IT (anymore). And certainly not as programmers/developers. But this industry cannot work with 'hard' geek types only. There is actually a need for persons who can participate in projects with more 'soft' values (administrators, analysts, testers etc.), so TRWTF is probably the college, who inists on programming knowledge.
However, when that is said and done, I think more people should know what programming is about. I have met a few managers / project leads who knew next to nothing about the core problems in the project.
I believe you took the right decision (as I would have done exactly the same).
I've never understood the idea that just because someone is good at what you call soft skills that they can't program too. It should be a requirement, they would do much better at their jobs.
@TheCPUWizard said:
@Master Chief said:
...when I had to take a class in Visio (already 2 years discontinued mind you when I took it)...Wondering how you took a class in 2018 (or beyond) already?????
I could tell stories all day of my time at a local technical college (Don't know how that ranks against community college, don't honestly care). Frankly I knew almost everything I needed to know to graduate walking in, save for an excellent Photoshop class and an amazing web development instructor (PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, the usual fare. Guy was damn good though.)
I knew one girl that I always unfortunately seemed to end up in classes with, called her Database Action Barbie since my first encounter with her happened to be the SQL class. Not that she was pretty mind you, I called her Barbie because she was an incredible dunce. Seriously, every single concept needed to be explained in triplicate, and I don't honestly think she got it after that.
I have no idea if she graduated. I fucking hope not. I know that she wasn't alone, though, we had tons of middle aged folks in the same classes. It was a riot and a half watching these people, who could barely aim a mouse, try to learn ASP.net. Thanks to an earlier class in VB.net, I picked up ASP pretty damn easily (similar syntax, etc.) so I immediately became the person everybody wanted to ask questions during the work periods. Led me to take up the habit of doing the homework during the lecture so I could leave.
Our school claims to have good graduation rates, if that's so I'd say they're graduating a lot of under qualified people. I think the peak was when I had to take a class in Visio (already 2 years discontinued mind you when I took it) to make a credit requirement one semester, and sweet baby Jesus. I think we had some people in their 70's in that class, and I'm sorry, if you can't even find a pre-mounted network drive in Explorer, you have no damn business building anything for the Internet.
@anotherusername said:
@Master Chief said:@anotherusername said:The only good DRM is dead DRM. What you describe -- 100% accurate DRM (zero false positives, zero false negatives) -- simply can't be done.@El_Heffe said:Weirder still that people tolerate the DRM in the first place.@anotherusername said:
Ya know, I've never had any of these strange DRM problems when I've downloaded hi-def movies in MP4 or MKV format.Yes, I've noticed that movies which have had the DRM removed no longer have any DRM in them. Weird, huh?
When it's done properly, you never know it's there. It just keeps being done poorly.
Err on the side of the User - If you assume your customers are criminals and force them to prove otherwise to use the product, you have failed. You will gain nothing but poor PR and a bad reputation as a content distributor. Secondly; if you can't verify authenticity because of outside problems (no internet, server offline, etc.) you can't just lock up whatever you've sold until conditions improve. People have paid for a product; SNES games I pull out of my closet still work in 2014, there's no reason my digital movies shouldn't work in 2024.
No Codes, no restrictions, no nonsense - If I bought a movie, I should be able to watch it on my PC, on my blu ray player, on my XBox, on my iPad, or on my Android Phone, or all at the same time if I really want to. As long as all the backend accounts are mine, there is no reason I shouldn't be able to. I've purchased the product; I should be entitled to use it as I see fit, excluding outright copying and distribution.
@anotherusername said:
@El_Heffe said:Weirder still that people tolerate the DRM in the first place.@anotherusername said:
Ya know, I've never had any of these strange DRM problems when I've downloaded hi-def movies in MP4 or MKV format.Yes, I've noticed that movies which have had the DRM removed no longer have any DRM in them. Weird, huh?
You know your spambot sucks when you need to create additional spambots to talk to it.
The fuck kind of spam is this? What is he/she/it trying to sell? I'm completely fucking lost on this one.
I found it amusing that when I was browsing one of the recap articles about whichever electronics show (sorry, I just don't keep up with this stuff very often) and noted that a Bethesda rep was quoted as saying they'll be implementing QA procedures in the future. I hope to God he meant to say "implementing MORE QA procedures" but I couldn't help but think how much that explained about Bethesda games...
@El_Heffe said:
Oh wait, you're installing the 64 bit version of Photoshop CS4 on Windows x64 and the installer informs you that it is going to install both the 32 and 64 bit versions, with no apparent way to prevent it from doing that.
Because fuck your hard drive, that's why.
@joe.edwards said:
Would they have had a chance to become your favorite sites if they'd presented you a paywall on your first visit? Free trials are even worse, since I got a "free credit score" years back and discovered I needed to wait on hold for over two hours on the phone to cancel, I won't repeat that experience.
You misunderstand, I'm saying if a site had to enable a paywall after they had been free for a long time, I'd be alright with that. Yes, it's unfortunate that what once was free isn't going to be anymore, but it's damn well better than having a site burdened with a complex pay system like this one now is.
@TortoiseWrath said:
Browsershots used to be awesome, but it started falling apart when they introduced their paid online VM service about six or seven years ago. It's sad to see that it's gotten to this point.
The problem is people get used to these free services being free. Then they get popular and are widely used, and need to have more dedicated resources. This means either the person running it has to eat the loss to continue providing it, start charging for the formerly free service at which point everyone will get pissed off, or start offering a more premium paid service for users who want to use it, which means introducing additonal complexity into what is already a complex web app.
Frankly, I wish people in general would just grow up and understand that we can't have everything free forever. I'd be happy to kick a few bucks to my favorite websites every once in awhile.
Going to steal that phrasing, really like it. "Disaster is patient."
@Buttembly Coder said:
Pick whatever kernel you want, whatever utility set you want, and whatever DE/WM you want. Then stop telling the rest of us why you think you're better.
@serguey123 said:
I never had a cellphone until recently, never read tutorials or instruction and I used it just fine, of course there is a basic knowl how that is present in other devices like PCs so that helps. I'm not saying documentations isn't a good idea, I'm saying that for basic operation in a cellphone there is little that needs to be learn if any.
@dhromed said:
Also talent is a myth. Stop using that word.
I think that's about the most profoundly stupid thing I've ever read. Sure, there are many skill sets that can be acquired through simple study, like mathematics, which are strict "this is right, this is wrong" type academics, but most studies I'd argue play far more into the gray. Artistic ones especially.
Hang on, Blakey, I thought you were arguing that software should be accessible, not software development. That's two different animals. If it's the former, I'd agree though I think your ultimate goal is a little unrealistic as I said earlier. If it's the latter, I don't know how on Earth you'd do that. Sure, power steering and automatic gearboxes made cars accessible and easier to use, but that doesn't mean anyone driving one could engineer one.
@flabdablet said:
@PedanticCurmudgeon said:I think what it really boils down to is if you want to run your hardware, or you want your hardware to run you. Personally, I'm the former (though printers could become a little more adaptive and intelligent, and I would not complain.)@Master Chief said:Because a very large number don't. Speaking purely of my own experiences, and in agreement with every single IT person I know, the vast majority of users do not want to learn. They want the magic box to work, and they don't care how.I found it mildly interesting that the very next post was a blakeyrant proving your point.Seems to me that there are two fundamentally different attitudes about how IT should be.
On the one hand you have people like Blakey and Steve Jobs, who want computing devices that pretty much do work by magic; they're so good at figuring out what you want to do with them that you really don't need any training or expertise to use them effectively.
On the other you have people like me and Albert Einstein, who think that everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. I have a lot more confidence in the ability of the average human being to learn and adapt appropriately than I do in that of the little machine in their pocket or on their desk.
@blakeyrat said:
When software is as simple as possible, it'll also be usable with no training or expertise.
@flabdablet said:
@dhromed said:I'm a technician.@flabdablet said:
My dishwasher, washing machine and other home appliances I fix myself.That's super-exceptional.
@blakeyrat said:
Wow that guy gets so close to making a point, then goes completely off-his-rocker about surveillance paranoia, then goes into "what a fucking dick" territory:
I agree with you there. The network key thing is a little over the top, especially when he's expecting the kid to learn python or bash without the resources of the Internet. Just from the man pages, I suppose, which is fucking HELL.
Plus, using Linux is no guarantee of being able to use anything else. Assuming using Linux without some technical competence wouldn't make you swear off computers forever.
@flabdablet said:
The fact that 99% of IT training courses amount to no more than How To Start Word And Choose A Fancy Font doesn't help much either. It's unfair to call somebody an idiot who has never actually been given a chance to learn a given skill.
Because a very large number don't. Speaking purely of my own experiences, and in agreement with every single IT person I know, the vast majority of users do not want to learn. They want the magic box to work, and they don't care how.
This phenomenon isn't unique to computers, by the way. Do you know how your car works? How about your dishwasher? Could you repair and troubleshoot an issue with your furnace? No, you hit the buttons, expect them to work, and call the repair man when they don't. The fact that computers have become so pervasive in our lives so quickly does not negate this aspect of them; there are those who know how to fix and tinker with them, and there are many, many more who don't. Frankly, I think when it comes to computers, that's going to have to change.
There's an excellent article I read on this. It's a bit long, but anyone interested in this topic should check out Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You.
@dhromed said:
@Master Chief said:
Looks so flat and dull.EXACTLY! It's great! The scrollbar visibility is shit, though.
@blakeyrat said:
@too_many_usernames said:As an end user, I should not care if I'm installing or using a 64-bit or 32-bit application! I should not have to do anything special to install a 32-bit versus 64-bit application. The OS should make that transparent to me!You already don't. It's already transparent.
Oh God. Install any old game or program on a 64 bit OS. Most of the time it's fine; other times, the game installer was written poorly on the (admittedly bad, but nevertheless reasonable at the time) assumption of the program directory location. BANG. Application crash of the worst kind, where you get no meaningful errors.
@dhromed said:
@Master Chief said:
I'm also weird in that I actually appreciate an attractive ui. XP was alright, but Vista and 7 had something really nice going with aero, until 8 came along and fucked it right up.I appreciate an attractive UI also. XP Luna wasn't it. Neither is Aero Glass.I used to set XP to classic, and then change the light brown to grey so that the quirk would trigger where the button highlight would disappear and everything looked sleek and flatter.
Windows 8 has the greatest UI visuals of all current OSs, in my super-personal opinion. (not including Metro) (though apparently Ender has trouble with high-contrast inverted schemes? That's pretty bad.). The buttons and tabs in XP Luna were wonderful, though, can't deny that. Shame about those title bars!
I'm also weird in that I actually appreciate an attractive ui. XP was alright, but Vista and 7 had something really nice going with aero, until 8 came along and fucked it right up.
Here's the thing though that I've never understood: almost any version of windows can, with enough tweaking, run the native window decorations from any given version going backwards. Why the hell can't Microsoft just leave in the old options for the guys who like XP or vista or whatever? And I mean aside from the ass ugly legacy.
I didn't understand the confusion at all. It means 120% of the drives they used from Seagate failed. It's weird when you phrase it like that, but in the context of a failure rate it makes perfect sense.
@TheCPUWizard said:
1) "Start" - I have hit the command key and then the first few letters for many years....what I like about the start PAGE is the usage of LIVE ties so I can quickly see what needs attention. Once again, 90% of my usage is non-touch "bigger" machines..
2) Moving the Address bar - When you look at a screen what do you focus on (the vast majority of the people it is the top, when a tendency towards the left). 99% of people dont care about the address bar at all (I rarely do). I have content on the page, I click links to bring me to other pages (somewhere), and more link,s and more links...It is only a few 100mS per page, but my eyes do focus on the content faster, and ovr time it adds up.
@bridget99 said:
I agree with the OP's premise.Incidentally, what's the deal with everyone moving shit (e.g. the address bar) to the bottom of the screen? Is that what's supposed to pass for innovation these days... just relocating things arbitrarily? Pretty damned pathetic IMO.
That's the one thing I don't get at all. Thankfully chrome on metro keeps the bar and tabs where they belong.
I guess I'm the weird one here. I enjoy Metro...on a tablet. I find many metro apps easy and nice to use...on a tablet. My point is, Windows 8 is a fantastic OS...for a tablet. Microsoft seemed to forget, we don't all have tablets just yet.
@El_Heffe said:
@anonymous234 said:
Microsoft seems to starting to acknowledge it.Microsoft might be starting to acknowledge that people don't like Windows 8. However, I serously doubt that they will do what they really need to do, which is announce "Hey we fucked up and we're going back to a Windows 7 style UI for real computers and leave the metro crap to tablets and phones where it's not such a big deal". It's more likely that monkeys will fly out of my ass.I am betting that their "solution" to the problem will simply be trying to sell the same crap with a different name.
@dfcowell said:
While we're talking about how shit Chrome is, Google are taking their great UI design of "hide useful buttons below a top-level button to add more clicks to common tasks" that they debuted with YouTube and Gmail and are adding it to their other products. In this case, the Chrome Dev Tools. Now, if you want to do anything with the "Network" pane (for example, filter by request type) you first need to click the button for the thing you want to do (in this case the "filter" button) and then the buttons that used to be visible at the top-level show up and you can actually do what you wanted to do in the first place.
Wait, what's that? You closed the dev tools panel? Oh, sorry, you need to re-open the "filters" pane now. Enjoy doing that literally every time you launch the dev tools from now on.
Fuck, Google. The buttons weren't hurting anyone where they were - a thousand submenus on all of your products aren't helping anything. Sure, choice is bad and I can kinda understand it in the consumer space, but in dev tools? Really? Fuck you.
@Sack said:
I do understand that mistakes happen, and that's what the compatibility settings are for. But not having fixed this stuff 12+ months after it's first been reported? WTF!
Especially when Chrome is updated practically every damn day.
To preface: I really love Chrome. I love the sync abilities, I love the addons, and yes, I totally am willing to trade more information to Google to use it. I really don't care who knows what I buy.
All of that said, the Windows 8 version has been a total dumpster fire since I bought my XPS 18 nearly a year ago. It's my only Win 8 machine currently, so I suppose some of these problems could be it, but somehow, I doubt it. When I first got chrome, it was desktop only; no metro version. Fine, no big deal. I used IE when I really wanted to use the Metro UI for any reason (by the by, IE 10 is actually pretty nice.) After awhile, I decided to try again, and sure enough, they had enabled the Metro version. Every single time you scrolled, it would highlight all the text you passed by as though you were mouse-dragging down. OK, irritating, clearly they're still working out the kinks. Fine. Uninstall again.
Fast forward a few weeks, try again. Now they have Metro enabled, the text selection thing still is broken a bit, but not nearly to the same degree. This is pretty damn good now, so I set it as default, and resume use.
Today, I boot it up and it's been updated. Now...theres a bar across the bottom, like a task bar, with icons for Google's Apps...whatever. It now starts in a small window, which I'm assuming mirrors the look of Chrome OS. Fine. Maximize it, all is well. Until I grab Mail and stick it next to Chrome...now I can't see half the web page. Well that's weird, they must not have it listening for a resize event. Close it, re-open in the same slot in the screen...exact same behavior. Flipped Mail to the other side, now the right side is gone, and all the icons are hidden. Jesus fucking Christ.
So we're on version who-the-hell-knows and Windows 8 has been out for what, a year and a half? And Chrome is still broken in the Metro UI. Get your shit together Google, good God.
@Clueless_Luser said:
I asked for Clueless_Luser's line of thinking.
Ben L. put this about as well as I could have.To add another layer of WTFishness, we have an assignment that needs to draw something, but we're explicitly banned from using any cross-platform libraries to do so.
The best thing I got out of my education was flexibility. When you get hired into a job, in all likelihood anyway, you get a computer with a given OS, a given development environment, etc. You don't get to choose which, at least in the majority of cases. You're expected to be a well rounded and adjustable employee who can use the tools given to accomplish his task, and if you can't do that, you won't be employed long.
@Mason Wheeler said:
If the "kids" in question are programmers, sure. But this guy doesn't seem to understand basic human psychology, nor the history of computing for that matter. There is a reason that GUIs have slowly but inexorably taken over the world ever since the year 1984: they make computing technology accessible to non-technical users.
I wouldn't even say it makes things better only for technical users. The shell is powerful, to be sure, even on Windows you can do a lot of things much easier and faster in CMD than in Explorer, and of course Bash needs no introduction there. But to say that should be all we have is stupid. Would I rather type out a long cp command or just drag files between two filesystem windows? That's obvious, when you're doing garden variety tasks that don't require anything special, using the command line is like driving picture nails with a sledgehammer. It works, but it's stupid.
The one thing I've learned over the years that no one ever teaches is that limiting yourself to anything, be it a specific OS or a specific way of using one (CLI versus GUI) is like taking a brand new toolset and throwing half the tools out because "only noobs use them." It's retarded. Use the tool suited for the job and move on, don't sit there trying to make yourself look impressive.
Slash dot is to Linux fanboys as reddits religion forum is to atheists: nothing but a pseudo intellectual circle jerk so they can all tell each other how smart they are.
@HuskerFan90 said:
The installer works only with IE, but there are versions of the client software for multiple OSes. All IE is used for outside the installer is in the login pop up when you try to login. My point? That there is no reason why the VPN server checks the user agent to see if you're using IE. The login page renders just fine on the iOS login page in the iOS version of the client and even the Android version.
Edit: I get it now, IE installs the client for Windows, and the WTF is that IE is required for a login for a cross-platform service. Don't mind me, 14 hour days take a lot out of a guy...
Weird to be sure, but how is this security? Obviously the VPN software only works with Internet Explorer, so they only answer requests from Internet Explorer. As to not telling you why, they told you explicitly how to get the connection running, including needing IE. Why would I occupy a second of my server's time serving up errors to people who obviously aren't reading?
Frankly I love the new Office, including the new pricing model. I have it installed on all my machines, use it pretty regularly, and I'd have to pay the full retail price of $100 a year for 20 years to zero that out.
Not to mention, only suckers pay full price for MS yearly subs. I pick up the cards on Amazon for $50 or $60 from the bulk resellers.
@Ronald said:
Speaking as a web designer, if someone tried to get my wallet or my ass, they'd have a .45 sized hole in them. Who's fragile? :PThat part really annoyed me:
@Cry baby said:
That it wasn’t simply enough to finally, after 10 months have the courage to say Joe O’Brien sexually assaulted me.That's not "courage". That's a mix of petty revenge and self-pity.
One time I was stabbed just above the kidney and my wallet was stolen. This happened in early afternoon on a busy street in Honduras, and the first cop who came by took my watch and left me there in a pool of blood. Did I write a long blog post telling my sob story and expecting public sympathy, under the pretense of raising awareness about an issue that everybody is already aware of? No. I moved on.
Did the mugger and the crooked cop stole more from me than a wallet and watch? Can I say I'm a different person now because of them? Maybe, but one thing is sure, I'm not a victim nor a survivor not a fucking wuss who uses a single incident to justify every problem at home or at work.
Incidents like that happen, tough luck. If I could go back in time and I had the opportunity to choose I would rather have the guy grab my ass than stab me, but of course I'm not a fragile and bitter web designer with no clue about life.
@Ronald said:
@Master Chief said:This, the layoffs, the in-general shoddy products...How exactly is Yahoo still in business? Best advice for their CEO, gut the place, take what you can, retire to the Bahamas. Put the beast out of it's misery already.
Yahoo is making 400 million dollars per quarter in profit, which is almost 100 million dollars more than Facebook. Your definition of "misery" is pretty interesting.
Which is why their user base is fleeing in droves and they're laying off workers. Obviously a growing, prosperous company.
This, the layoffs, the in-general shoddy products...
How exactly is Yahoo still in business? Best advice for their CEO, gut the place, take what you can, retire to the Bahamas. Put the beast out of it's misery already.
@dtech said:
@Master Chief said:In that case they worked a lot better in XP and previously. I didn't know they existed until Vista, and that was because they were causing havoc with my folder icons and whatnot.@dhromed said:@Master Chief said:
Windows XP used to have thumbnails [...] without any thumbs.dbWhat are you saying?
It sounds like you're saying that XP didn't use thumbs.db at all, which is incorrect.
Did it? Huh. Never noticed them before Vista. Noted.Thumbs.db has even been in use since Win95/98 with IE4 1 and the Mac OS X equivalent .DS_Store has been in use since at least 20032
So they are nothing new, and OSX doesn't "now" do the same thing, it has done that for years.
@dhromed said:
@Master Chief said:
Windows XP used to have thumbnails [...] without any thumbs.dbWhat are you saying?
It sounds like you're saying that XP didn't use thumbs.db at all, which is incorrect.
The thing I don't get is Windows XP used to have thumbnails that came up just as quick (if not quicker) than Vista, 7, or 8, and did so without any thumbs.db file. And now OSX does the same thing. Kubuntu doesn't, but the thumbnails are also dogshit slow, so I wouldn't call it a gain.
@mott555 said:
@Master Chief said:
Am I the only one who finds it incredibly weird that the bot waited three freaking years to post something?Are deleted posts included in the post count? Perhaps it's had a bunch of deleted posts in the past but the account wasn't disabled.