Posts by -maniax- 66 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2014
I was in a not dissimilar situation a couple of decades back where a number of customers would only talk to me as they knew they'd get sensible answers from me rather than the sales answers they'd get from any of the sales team
Needless to say the sales people weren't entirely happy but couldn't really do much as they couldn't block the customers from contacting me when I was the point of contact for any support issues
> so we'd better ban arts and crafts supplies too, right down to crayons!
Don't forget hammers and chisels!
Have you seen some of the hard-core stuff the Ancient Greeks & Romans produced?
It's filth I say, utter filth
icon = all the dirty old men in their macs who go the museums to ogle stone dangly bits
Don't forget that the first probes to visit the outer planets* did "high" speed fly-bys lasting only a few minutes effectively but were still able to provide enough data to keep the boffins busy ever since.
And it's not just the data gathered during the fly-by that matters, the approach also provides oodles of data as does the ongoing journey afterwards , NASA?\JPL? are still receiving transmissions from at least one of the Voyagers if not both all be it very limited in nature now due to power constraints
There's no reason the first interstellar probes can't do the same for whichever systems they get aimed at although I'll admit that given the timescales involved it would be nice to get more than a few blurry snapshots & fuzzy data readings from any such probes rather than have to wait for further probes to be sent after we've proved we can do it
*Voyagers 1 & 2 for those who have been hiding under a big rock at the bottom of a very deep cave for the last half century
> ...was that they were using the credit customers had built up to fund the company itself
Not disagreeing with that in relation to most of the supply companies but one of the companies I was with for a while actually paid interest on the amount a customer was in credit by
Ok, I'm sure they were earning more than they were paying out but it did weaken the customer argument that "the money should be in my account earning me interest rather than in your account earning you interest"
> The GIMP UI being Photoshop-alike is what made me switch to Affinity. But that's on the Mac, on Linux there's no other option
Have you tried Pinta (https://www.pinta-project.com/)?
It may not have all the Photoshop type bells and whistles but for simple image editing it works fine
> On Linux, CTRL+F doesn't actually open a search dialog
Works fine for me on Linux Mint across every version of Firefox on 2 machines I've used for the past few years
I have NoScript installed as well as few other privacy and utility add-ons installed but I've just tested a clean profile default profile and CTRL-F works on that as well so it doesn't seem like I've tweaked anything to cause CTRL-F to work
I had similar fun using the remote connection feature of SMS back when SMS was a brand new product
At the time I was working for a very small reseller, far too small to actually need any of the features of SMS but as we were selling it and I might be called on to support it* I'd installed it on a couple of test machines to play with before rolling it out to a select few live in house machines
*Yes, I'd been on the official Microsoft SMS training course at their original Reading, UK offices but that course was a complete shambles to the extent that we, and I assume the other trainees, got a full refund for the course
Almost everyone in the company shared one open plan office (as I said, we were a small company) with my desk being tucked away in one corner looking out at the rest of the office from where I could see the desks\screens of a number of people including one of the sales girls
Seeing the opportunity for some mischief I remote connected to her PC and I'd periodically move her mouse just as she was going to click on a button, said mouse movement wasn't great but it was enough to cause her to miss the button she was trying to click on, sometimes I'd only cause her to miss once other times she'd "miss" maybe 2 or 3 times on the trot before I'd let her actually click the button
I was able to see from her body language that she was getting a confused but anytime I could see she was really focussing on where she was clicking I wouldn't do anything only for the mouse to then "miss" again a little while later after she'd relaxed
She even called me over at one point saying her mouse was doing strange things and I dutifully checked the mouse out including taking the ball out and checking if the rollers were gummed up but for some reason I was unable to find anything wrong with the mouse and me clicking around various windows worked fine as it did when I stood and watched her to "see if I can spot if she's doing anything strange to cause the problem"
This went on for maybe 30 minutes all told until one of the sales guys came over to talk about something and seeing that I was struggling to keep a straight face asked me what was going on to which I showed him what I was up to
It only took another minute or so of the pair of us "giggling" in the corner for the sales girl to turn to us and say "it's bloody you messing with the mouse isn't it?" at which point we both burst out laughing
Thankfully the sales girl took it all in good grace but she did call me a few names afterwards
> I had bookmarks dating back to the mid 90s that I would always restore whenever installing Firefox
You could've just copied the entire Firefox profile from your old machine to the new one and had your new Firefox install configured EXACTLY the same as your old one
In fact, knowing Firefox there's probably a single file\folder you could've copied to migrate just the bookmarks if you wanted a clean install of Firefox on the new PC
> I use that [Chrome] only to access my professional GMail, Google Maps or Google Translate
Why?
I'm exclusively a Firefox user on desktop and never have any problems with any of those or are there some extra toys in the professional versions that don't place nice if you're not using Chrome?
> Google's lawyers defended the company by saying that users are attracted to their search engine because they find it useful
- From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k44x6mge3o
Why does Google need to pay to be a default?, If users are so attracted to Google's search engine as claimed by the lawyers surely users will find\select it themselves without having it "forced" on them as a default
Until people have experienced the "clean" web of being behind a decent ad\tracking blocker many people don't realise just how bad the open web experience is.
Having said that there's still more than enough people who would still choose the open web over a "clean" web either because it's what they're used to or because, for some perverse reason, they enjoy looking at ads and it's people like that that keep the advertising slime in business
(in as much as it starts with a boss throwing their weight around and being obnoxious)
Warning : There's an unexpected and very sad ending to the posts
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/nrnf5j/part_1_of_2_an_absolute_epic_entitled_ahole_gets/
They said "a general ban on targeted advertising" not a ban on any advertising
If that means advertising will be less effective then my response is "Oh dear, what a pity, never mind"
I'd argue that targeted advertising can still be allowed but ONLY if the target is the nature of the website\specific page being viewed with absolutely zero knowledge* about the viewer being needed or used
*except perhaps some very approximate geographical stuff as there's no point running ads for, say, an Australian product if the viewer is in Europe but happens to be looking at the Australian based website
> ...we'd contend that most administrators likely already have a preferred tool and will install it regardless of what Microsoft does or doesn't elect to include.
So how long until Microsoft get up to the same sort of tricks they're already doing with desktop applications where they're overriding or outright ignoring user preferences?
e.g. trying to start the user preferred editor and getting a messages along lines of
"We recommend you use <Microsoft Editor>"
Or just outright redirecting the command that should run the user preferred editor to run the Microsoft editor instead
> I've noticed only recently that with the current version of LO, on the latest Mint/Cinnamon, that for some reason a document with six hundred plus A5 pages turns very slow when deleting characters that cross to the next page (e.g. a series of line feeds).
How long are the paragraphs?
Someone on Reddit was moaning about LibreOffice Writer performance a few months back and after a bit of digging it turned out they had one long continuous paragraph (using shift+enter to get new\blank lines) and as soon as they broke the single paragraph into proper separate paragraphs (using just enter for new\blank lines) the problem went away
> "Once the pig iron was firmly sitting on the floor of the lift, a man climbed on top of the machine to 'pilot' it – his task to push the proper button then wait until the doors reopened to the proper floor."
Couldn't someone have just pushed the call button on the desired floor thereby negating the need for someone to be in the lift and also removing their weight from the equation?
Ok, it may not have made the load light enough for the lift to handle but then again maybe it would have
Having said that, the fact that they didn't take the max capacity of the lift into account suggests they may not have been thinking things through sufficiently in the first place
> RiscOS is where I started with computers and man was that UI good and consistent, a level of consistency Windows, OSX and Linux could only dream of
Probably due to the fact that the hefty tome that was the Programmer's Reference Manual (PRM) included a Style Guide that most developers adhered to
https://www.riscosopen.org/zipfiles/platform/common/StyleGuide.3.pdf
> it has to be the worst UI ever.
When visitors first open the Reddit website they get presented with a new, "modern" interface that was launched a few years ago that apparently is more akin to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, etc (I wouldn't know as I don't use either of those)
There are many who consider the new interface to be an unusable mess and stick to the using previous one that can be accesssed by visiting old.reddit.com (and can be set as the default by signed in users if they want to use it)
The old version provides a much simpler cleaner interface and there are many (me among them) who have stated that if Reddit ever gets rid of the old interface then that'll be the day they quit using Reddit (the current debacle may precede that though)
Reddit (desktop) user here
I have no idea about the numbers for the various apps vs the official app but what I can say is hardly a day goes by where I don't see someone commenting about how bad the official Reddit app is in comparison to the third party apps and those comments are from general users as opposed to the various sub mods who, as the article says, make extensive use of third party tools because the official app doesn't support the sort of tools\features they need to make use of
Fail icon for the way Reddit appears to be enthusiastically driving at speed down the same path to irrelevance and abandonment that other social media sites have previously taken such as MySpace, Digg (and Twitter?)
> Americans have a much higher threshold for loads of ads
Americans have been indoctrinated from birth that it's normal for programmes to interrupt their advert streams
I'm reminded of a, what to me, was a ridiculous situation when I was in Florida 20+ years ago
Had the hotel room TV on showing a news channel and there was yet another ad break after which the broadcast returned to the news where the presenter said "and that was tonight's news, good night".
They'd inserted an ad break no more than 5 seconds before the programme was going to end and that was on top of I don't know how many ad breaks that had already been shown during the "30" minute news program
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