Gosh, I must have forgotten to check with whoever decides which typos
are funny and which aren't. Either that, or TRWTF is that some people
lack sarcasm detectors.
Posts made by tmountjr
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RE: Apple Decreases Price by Negative $70
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Apple Decreases Price by Negative $70
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-01-15-macworld_N.htm
Key phrase: "Apple also announced a new version of Apple TV, its device for watching digital entertainment on a television, and lowered the price from $229 to $299."
What a steal! Glad I waited - now I can save $-70!
A little later: "The news didn't impress Wall Street. Apple shares fell more than 6% in mid-day trading." No kidding, Sherlock...
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RE: Project must run at warp speed
@asuffield said:
Bonus points for spotting the grammatical error.
Besides the one already mentioned ("users' flow of thought" which should be the more awkward but correct "users' flows of thought") there's the stylistic kludge of "should (as far as possible) be" - splitting up a verbal phrase with a prepositional phrase. Dunno if that's an error, but hey, never hurts to err on the side of caution.
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RE: Need a Hitman? Ask Wikipedia!
Sounds like a good plot for "World's Dumbest Criminals" - hitman adds his name, hoping for business, and gets arrested. He then sues Wikipedia because it's their fault for letting him do something so stupid. Then he wins.
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Registry by Committee
I've been assigned with the task of automating some changes in our network drive mapping for a few hundred of our users - we're basically changing the mapping of one volume from I:\ to H:\. My job is to make sure that Office doesn't break, since I:\ is now going to end up read-only and they can't go saving documents there anymore, nor will their documents show up anymore, since they're now on H:\. So I dig around in the registry to see if I can find where Office XP stores all that information. Here's what I found:
Three programs, three registry key naming conventions, and two key names. There is no possible good reason for doing it like this.
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Broderbund WTF
So I'm working on repackaging the Broderbund Printshop installer into an MSI. I'm not a programmer by trade (I picked up a few things here and there but nothing in-depth), but I can't find any good reason for this behavior:
The program requires Macromedia Shockwave Player 8 and Acrobat Reader 5.1. Now, up until now it's been my understanding that when a package says that it requires version x.y.z of a program, that means it requires *at least* that version, right? Not Printshop. No, it requires *precisely* version 8 of Shockwave and *precisely* version 5.1 of Acrobat. The first time through the installer (on a machine with Shockwave 10 and Acrobat 8.1) it tried installing the old versions of those programs. I'm thinking that maybe it's just hardcoded to look in certain paths (because Adobe, for better or worse, hardcodes all their major release version numbers into their paths). So I hunt around, download Reader 5.1 and Shockwave 8, install them on the clean system, then start up the installer again to capture all the files. And still it wants to install its version! The only thing I can think is that the geniuses at Broderbund decided to run their 3rd-party redistributables, regardless of whatever version happens to be installed at the time.
Maybe a programmer can tell me better - certainly this isn't a good idea? And what's the deal with Broderbund in general? Every product of theirs I've tried has been junk. They seem not to understand the concept of minor revisions, because every time their software is released it's up a new version - I think they're at version 22 of Printshop. So what in the world is up with them?
</rant>
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Screenshots 0.1
I work at a help desk, so when users call in with problems I usually like them to send along a screenshot. The popular method (stemming from the 800x600 days, maybe?) is print-screening their entire 1280x1024 desktop and pasting it into a Word document, all so I can read two lines of arcane Microsoft error code. I try to show my users the virtues of Alt+PrintScreen and pasting into Paint (or better yet the actual email they're composing). I think I got through to one of them, though I don't think this person quite has the concept nailed down.
Behold the screenshot of an email containing an attached screenshot of a Word document which contains the actual screenshot!
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RE: Being the oldest registered TLD isn't it's only notable feature...
Actually there's an emulator available for Linux...
http://www.unlambda.com/download/genera/
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RE: Being the oldest registered TLD isn't it's only notable feature...
Number 9: "An application program bug in Genera will never hang or lock the system, no matter when it happens. The debugger is the exception handler of last resort (or first resort if that's what you want)."
Oy. That's a pretty risky statement. I'm sure someone somewhere can crash Genera.
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RE: Dreamweaver Update Pains
[quote user="nuclear_eclipse"]Why is the ordinary cow-orker/user installing the updates to Dreamweaver? Isn't that the job of IT? ( and/or the helpdesk? ) I would think that in most jobs, it shouldn't even be possible for normal users to have access to installation media due to piracy issues (copying, installing elsewhere, etc).[/quote]
He is IT, sort of. He's in the web programming division. We don't loan out media to other divisions, but for other in-house IT departments we let them run their own show. The rule of thumb is, if they have admin rights on their machine, we typically don't stand over their shoulders when they want to update things.
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Dreamweaver Update Pains
A coworker of mine emailed me, the helpdesk tech, to request the Dreamweaver 8 cd again. I say again because he had tried updating 8.0 to 8.0.2, which required the CD, which he didn't have, so he cancelled the update. He emailed back today because of a note on Adobe's support forums:
Note: If you press Cancel during the installation process in Windows, you will no longer be able to update Dreamweaver. To update to 8.0.2, you will need to uninstall and re-install Dreamweaver. For more information, please see Tech Note 785362aa at www.adobe.com/go/785362aa.
What on earth is up with that? If you cancel the first try you lose the ability to try again? Adobe says this is an InstallShield problem, and InstallShield says it's a Windows installer problem. Supposedly this problem exists in a wide variety of programs, but I've never run across it. Anyone else?