
And there was me wondering why Musk moved their HQ to Texas. Now it's obvious - he's hoping for some of that big-business-can-do-no-wrong attitude so beloved by the Texan governor.
842 posts • joined 10 Aug 2018
Really, the words "on 2G networks" are redundant in that headline. I use it every day. I don't want it, it's just that my company bought it and forces me to use it, much to my displeasure (especially every time it* goes into its new favourite infinite loop of "Outlook has encountered an error... repair now?")
* to be fair, Excel actually seems to do this way more often.
Trident 8900 cards bring back memories of doing corporate PC support back in the early 90s. I used to like Tridents - for some reason they tended to be easier to set up than the other horrors clients used to waste money upgrading to (because WordPerfect on DOS required the absolute latest graphics hardware, naturally... or perhaps that was the six disks with "flight sim" written on in biro that were sat in the boss's desk...)
Excel macros... why is it always Excel?
I remember installing VB 5 a few years ago to open some legacy project and it said something along the lines of "write code that downloads and executes on the user's machine - without prompting!".
Bless* 'em, how naive they were...
* (that's a euphemism, of course)
I've made a living from Office macros in the past (I was using them as recently as last week) and I do welcome this change.
The number of people who just run things without thinking and then go "oh I thought it was all right to just click yes to all seventeen prompts to open 'ranzomware.pdf.jpg.png.exe.exe.exe' lol" just beggars belief...
The problem with "agile" is that the word is now so tainted by charlatans that it's become pure, unadulterated snake oil*.
Every time I hear a manager say "agile" now, I wince. I personally now have only two words to describe it: "considered harmful".
* Ironically, snakes are quite an oily meat and apparently taste like chicken. Bonus: there's only two out of the however many bazillion species of snakes there are in the world whose meat is poisonous, so as long as you're the one doing the biting, you should be safe.
Middle managers, however...
I once had a conversation where someone tried to persuade me that the new version of IE (7, at the time) was much better than the alternatives and he wasn't sure why anyone would use anything else. I asked why it was better and the answer was "because it's Microsoft." As to why that made it better, he really didn't have a different answer, except that they were the biggest software company in the world so everything they did must be better.
So why on earth did they decide not to block all Office macros by default? I mean, it's not like they're getting a cut of the profits from antivirus firms, is it?
And it's not that big a deal. I mean, even people who use them often (like me) don't really find it much of a hardship to turn them on when we need them.
Active Directory is likely one of the things that the Chinese government wants to get rid of - an authentication system that is possibly open to scrutiny (thanks to the CLOUD act) that states who works where and for what government agency.
Plus the added chaos that could come in case of a declaration of war if the US government ordered Microsoft to just shut off all their Chinese users...
I'd say the Chinese government are probably taking that possibility very seriously, if they're trying to wean the country off Windows.
Ah Uniplex - sadly its licensing system died at the millennium, meaning almost every keypress brought up a licensing dialog. Shame, if it was still going I'd probably still be using it, if only out of sheer stubbornness.
I did once figure out the format of Uniplex spreadsheets so I could convert them into Excel. Took about four days work and I had a quick Excel macro done to read them in and spit out Excel sheets when management took the decision that out of the hundreds of files, surely they can't all be useful and users should rekey them manually if they actually need the data. I understood it, but my disappointment remains.
Now, where's the nostalgia/greybeard icon?
I was in a weird place a couple of years ago where I had to support IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on a site.
The weird thing is that everything I did worked in everything but one. No, not IE - Edge. Go figure.
Anyway, bye bye IE. You weren't quite as bad as all that, but even so, in your honour I am now going to play "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead" at full volume...
The fact that they seem to be continually taking 89 days to fix something, only acknowledge it when someone says they're going public... this isn't the behaviour of the a reputable and trustworthy cloud provider, it's the behaviour of a clown car full of shysters. How did they get to be number 2 cloud service again?*
* That's a rhetorical question - it's marketing, monopoly power, and idiots who say "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"
That's all well and good, but it was sending the email not only as I was typing it but even if I wasn't. Three of the drafts were the same. All I could work out is that it was sending in a regular pattern of once every ten seconds or so. Very bizarre.
I should point out that it sent the draft I was working on, while I was working on it - with no visible indication that it had done so.
Last time I tried Thunderbird, it sent an email while I was writing a draft. Seven times. Fortunately it wasn't anything serious, but I went back to Mac Mail after that. It may not be as feature rich as Thunderbird but at least it hasn't gone completely hatstand on me (yet).
Now if I were writing this as a work of fiction, I'd have lots of big executive bonuses, followed by another round of funding, more huge executive bonuses, and then - oh dear, the costs are way more expensive than we figured, time to go bankrupt, followed by executives disappearing to tropical regimes that have no extradition treaties...
I'm not suggesting for one second that that's what's happening here, of course, but after the whole Theranos thing I just can't help seeing grandiose expensive business plans like this without trying to work out an angle like that. Maybe I've been watching too much Better Call Saul...
The iPod classic was great. The nano was good, if a trifle buggy (especially if you're a last.fm addict, as I am, the fact that it sometimes just forgets what you played today is annoying).
The touch however, I could do without. The terrible Podcasts app I just find excruciating. iOS 6 handled it WAY better than anything afterwards.
If they're going to add it in, it has to be tested first. It's a new addition, just as the read/write NTFS support is new in Linux. It's going through the same system they always use for releasing new features. Why is it so bad that it isn't released yet? I'm having trouble identifying what you would want instead, as if they simply sent it out from dev to full release, I bet you would have several (correct) complaints about adequate testing.
Ah yes, Micros~1's testing system that seems to consist of
(a) release
(b) get bug reports
(c) close bug reports with snarky comments as to how users are using it in a way for which it wasn't intended
(d) sit down and have a cup of coffee with Satan.
I suspect there was a bug in it that they couldn't be bothered fixing, or some manager didn't like it. I mean, why would they change the habits of a lifetime by actually listening to user feedback, instead of either ignoring it or replying with a snidely worded piece that's just a longwinded way of saying "you're wrong"?
They're definitely not communists as Marx envisioned it, but then he had a pretty utopian vision in mind. Weirdly, he derides socialism for being this somehow out-of-touch fantasyland and then proceeds to go a step beyond. And yet, Robert Owen* got on the fiver** and he didn't. Quel surprise.
* a man I'd class as an actual socialist - unlike, for example, anyone who's ever been a head of state.
** or was it the tenner? It's a while back and I can't quite remember.
I find many people who claim to be Marxists, or who throw shade at Marxists, haven't actually read any Marx to begin with. (And nearly all regimes that claim to be "communist" or "Marxist" tend to use the word as window dressing for kleptocratic authoritarianism, much the same way as any country that uses "democratic" in its name does, but I digress)
You may disagree with some of his economic thinking (and I do), but his documenting of the working standards of the time (and especially of slavery) are hard to read.
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