Indeed. I've been depressed lately, mainly due to unsatisfactory job, sleep deprivation (family = family + 1) and financial drowning (expenses rose, debt rose, income didn't, and that for years). And at work, when "new" projects come in, everyone feels excited, and I see no reason why they shouldn't. I immediately jump to analyzing the usefulness of whatever comes our way and well, frankly, most times I can't find any. I am doing my job, and I am doing it well, I just don't feel happy about it. As a matter of fact, I haven't felt happy in a long, long time. I don't know what sort of magical substance I lack and I don't really care. I do, however, know what can get me back on track, and that's financial stability. Sadly, my employer treats me like shit and I'm spiraling down because I ceased trying to look happy and shit when going to job interviews. So yeah, I feel like I'm pretty much done for. I browse a few sites, circling around all day long, I play the same game when I get back from work and that's pretty much it. One difference, though: I'm not alone. At home I'm with family and at work I'm surrounded by work mates. But I wish I would be alone, and not temporary, but in an "I am Legend" kind of way. Me in an empty world would be fucking awesome.
I think it's way more people than you assume. Furthermore, those people see both the advert AND the car at the same time, not just a picture on a website they don't visit for the car. If you count Adblock in and the fact that most people are so accustomed to Internet adverts that they subconsciously ignore them... un-targeted online advertising is very, VERY ineffective. Also, there's a difference between who you DO affect and who you COULD affect. Who sees car stickers? Other motorists and pedestrians who actually look at cars. I think those kind of ads are more targeted than Facebook stuff. Maybe I'm biased, bit I, for one, usually read car stickers, but blissfully ignore Internet ads unless they're really obnoxious (and if so, I hate them AND the product they're advertising). When I need a product, I know where to look.
Yes, because high school dudes with shitty lives can *totally* spend 12K bucks on a brand new car. NOT. And 40M USD? Damn! Here's an instant idea on what to do with that money: give every buyer a discount of 400 USD when buying a car and tell them you're going to install a sticker on their car advertising GM in a funny or witty or aggressive or stupid way (they can choose from a selection of stickers), and that sticker should stay there for a year. That's 100K cars being driven around and boosting your visibility as a company. You "spend" the same amount of money but man, it's going to be way more effective.
Wait a minute... I'm not saying updates were flawless, but at least with Ubuntu I never got something updated without my consent. I mean, no automatic updates. The OS checks, tells you "here be updates" and you check the ones you want. I have configured Windows the same way as well, it never adds updates by itself.
I've been modded "Flamebait" quite a few times. In all honesty, my intention was to make a funny remark, because of an old joke where Jesus and the Underlord entered a programming ocompetition where power went out in the end and Jesus won because "Jesus Saves". Sorry if i offended anyone. A joke is a joke, nothing more, and whoever sees something else might lack sense of humor.
The "Save" icon can be replaced with a tiny pic of Jesus with his hands high in the air. For any unsaved file, replace it with a tiny pic of the Underlord.
I'll add to my previous statement... Getting an one-off "freebie" achievement is fine. I mean, yeah, you get recognition but nothing else, it's all cool, happens. maybe the department has no budget, maybe your achievement is not really worth some financial incentive. I can live with that. But when you get not one, not two, but five, ten such "badges" over time, the whole thing starts to suffer from the diminishing returns syndrome. The more you get, the less valuable they seem, and while the first one definitely has some WOW! factor attached, the next one is "cool", the one after it is "meh" and subsequent "badges" throw your mood on the other side of the fence. You start loathing them. The employer basically says "here's another candy wrap for you, look, it's shiny, but no candy in it". So where's the fucking candy? Give it to me or fuck off. But wait, it gets worse. In some companies (no specific names presented for personal reasons) the badge system got corrupted. How, you ask? Well, here's the thing: management starts to actively lobby so that each employee ultimately gets a badge, regardless whether they deserve it or not. How that works: say you're in a team of ten people, and 3-4 of them are mediocre at best. it happens. Some people are brighter, some not so much. Some people work more, some people slack more. Some people get stuff done, some others are paper pushers or e-mail relays, it's what they do all day long. It's cool, I have no quarrels with that, to each his own. But then shit hits the fan, because you submit a recognition proposal for someone who deserves it fully and your manager (or his manager) rejects the proposal because that guy already has past badges. "Not nice for one guy to grab all badges", they said. So they propose someone who has no badges, although that guy has done nothing to deserve it. That guy pushed e-mails around and added no values in meetings; all he does, all day long, is get raw data from an environment and pass it, unmodified, to business analysts. It's a shit activity, true, but he's basically a "human patch", doing what a machine should do. And eventually that dude gets a "recognition badge" for "hard work" and "excellence" and all that corporate bullshit wording that I loathe. In the end, he gets the same "badge" that you got, and you worked your ass off whereas he pushed e-mails around once a day. This further dwarfs the badge value and importance. Even worse, it makes you feel ashamed of it, because it must mean the achievement requirements are so low, everyone would get one eventually. Suddenly, the badge is something you no longer want.
It's why I stopped recommending people for those achievements, removed all achievements which were displayed on my employee webpage and generally consider such a system insulting. As someone above said, I'm not a fucking child anymore. I have a family to feed and bills to pay, and badges don't get any of that accomplished. I can't go to the doctor with my sick child and tell him "look, dude, I can't pay for these medical services, but I'll give you a few of my badges". Doesn't work that way, sorry.
Gamification is theoretically good. If applied properly, it adds value to the company, I strongly believe it does. Sadly, management doesn't understand how it should work and they just mess it up really bad, with negative results. My manager was very surprised by my lack of reaction when he joyfully brought me the "news". I explained to him how I felt and why and he was even more surprised. OK, there are some cultural differences (he's from US, I'm from Romania) but nevertheless the reasons are the same, wherever you are from. Give the employees the candy together with the candy wrapper, and by candy I don't necessarily mean money. Give them a gadget, give them some promotional items, such as T-shirts, jackets, field trips, team buildings, vouchers, NCAs, anything really. But give them something other than just an e-mail and maybe a piece of paper with colored text on it.
Good challenges and good toys to play with seem to me the best way to motivate engineers (by which I mean they're the best way to motivate me).
...If you already have the money, or enough to live comfortably. I personally hate those fucking badges. Just got two of them this quarter (they were handed less than a week ago) so the rage is still fresh. One was a team-based award (some project I was part of) and the other was a recognition award (some people considered me being awesome and shit). Strings attached: no cash reward. No cash reward, these "database entries" are worthless to me. Those "badges" mean "We, the Company, think you are worthy, but not worthy enough to throw some money your way". You can commend everyone for free. That doesn't mean shit. if you're underpaid but surrounded by beautiful toys, it's not gonna work. It's my current situation; if I need this IT component or that monitor or whatever, I can go ahead and get it and if there's a business justification, the company will approve and pay for it. But when I see there's budget for fancy mobile devices and expensive monthly subscriptions, but no budget for salary adjustments (nota bene: NOT raises, just adjustments to inflation), that makes me pretty mad and demotivates me.
And then badges come, and I'm supposed to be happy about them? Piss off.
Doh, make them write their verdict on a piece of paper before fighting. And if they both die, just rinse and repeat, bring 12 more and have them fight too. Pane et circem with actual results. Everybody wins.
Better yet, have 6 people from one company fight 6 people from the other company fight to the death. Likely, you'll see a severe reduction of trials fairly soon.
Not when you're in my position where calls can come at 3 AM in the morning even if you're off duty. In case of major outages, automated calls are being sent out worldwide to all personnel. It's simpler to just urn it off altogether. Also it's a cultural difference; most people around here hate both leaving and receiving voice mails. I have voice mail disabled, BTW.
The ISP offer says "Up to 20 Mbps external and up to 100 Mbps metropolitan speeds". I am reaching 20 Mbps pretty often, but not consistently. If I get something from Australia, clearly it's going to come slowly, for example. So the ISP does what promises most of the time and I'm not anal about drops in speed. I'm using metropolitan mostly for heavy traffic (e.g. torrents) anyway. Another thing I think is relevant: lag/latency. Especially while playing MMOs. My usual latency (unless the server is located in a weird area) is 50-100 ms, which is pretty good.
Depends. He's basically saying he only can tell their dead in the water (presumably able to tell their dead apart from other dead) up to some extent:) - the phrase still makes sense, but it's constructed in a weird way, not to mention that it makes no sense in the given context. But strictly from a literary standpoint... it's correct.
but what kind of idiot wants to carry around two phones?
Me, for example. I don't mix business life with personal life, and when I'm off duty, I shut down my business phone but am still available to family through my personal phone. It helps.
Romania. We only started to have a broadband boom in late 90s, so it's why all networks around have been built with CAT5 cabling and later, optic fiber. As a result, the infrastructure is excellent, compared to more developed countries which are having a hard time replacing old infrastructure and mostly rely on improvisations to increase broadband speed. Oh and I pay 10 bucks a month, flat rate, for unlimited traffic at max speed.
There's something missing from the report, and that's Metropolitan speeds. The report calculates connections to Akamai, which is a good metric data set, but what about Metropolitan broadband? It's just as relevant. In-country broadband or city-wide broadband speeds are relevant; it's about how fast local connections are and how infrastructure is handling traffic. When you download stuff (e.g. distros) you usually pick the closest repository and get data from there. Also lots of other files and data are mirrored across the globe and it's very likely there are a couple mirrors in your state or even city (if it's large enough). My broadband has about 5-10 mbps bandwidth if I transfer something from "general" Internet, but metropolitan speed is 100 mbps. My country-wide connection speed is about 50 mbps, tested with friends; http, p2p and ftp transfers are all equally fast.
Not just what some management people said, but everything in this affair is a classic case of corporate snafu. I'm seeing these things every day. About 18 months ago I was requested to build some Excel macro which would parse a pile of structured data from a table and generate a snapshot report based off that. Multiple people in various locations had to run that file every hour, interpret the results and take action if certain thresholds were met. Now thresholds started to be met but action was not taken, so their management asked them "so, what's up, why are you not taking action?". They said "it must be the macro because we run it every hour and it doesn't tell us that thresholds have been met". management came to me and asked me what's up, and I could tell them, because the macro contained a very simple (primitive even) log. Each time the report was run, an entry was stored in the file in a hidden spreadsheet which could be shown by pressing a button on the form and entering a very simple password (which was stored in the VBA code as a plain text string). As I was saying, primitive. So I asked for all the files which had been distributed to those people and checked the logs. Some of them had never opened the file. Some others had run the script a few times then abandoned it. All others ran it pretty irregularly, the most often run pace being once a day. Nobody ran it every hour. So I centralized the logs, went back to management and told them "here's what happens: your guys don't run the reports. That's how I know: I've been logging their activities.". They said "thank you" and nothing changed ever since.
The above is an example of someone writing extra code which might prove to be illegal and nobody giving a shit, although they have been informed. As I was saying, typical corporate snafu...
Have a password root which is generally the same, let's say "Zaytsev" (see "Enemy At The Gates" for more information). Split it like that: Zay t sev (I call this "winging" because it creates two "wing" words and a "body"). Set a general rule based on website name (the website you need a password for). First letter of the website+"Zay"+last letter of the website+"t"+".org"+"sev"+the letter number of the first website letter. For slashdot.org the generated password would be: "sZaytt.orgsev18". For gmail.com it would be "gZaylt.comsev07".
If the website doesn't allow special characters, simply remove the dot or replace it with a 0 or whatever.
You can make the rules as complex as you want, e.g. reverse ".com" (resulting in "gZayltmocsev07") or insert it in between: "g.Zaylctosevm07". Want it more complex? Change "o" to 0 (zero), "a" with "4" and so on.
All you need to remember is the algorithm and a single password root. Everything else is in front of you when you log in.
There's a work account that I have which requires my password to be between 8 and 12 characters and doesn't allow special characters (only lowercase, uppercase and numbers). WTF.
Also one of our customer-facing generic mailboxes has a password consisting of... 2 (TWO) identical lowercase characters; and it's known by probably 20 people who need to access it.
1. If you have a small screen, pretty much every text editor will take sizable chunks of your screen. Just right-click the Ribbon and hide it if that's your thing. 2. Shortcut keys appear if you hover your mouse over a button, if you've set that in Word options. There's really no excuse for being lazy and not configure your editor but instead choose to complain about its lack of features. 3. You can also customize the ribbon to put unrelated things in a toolbar (hint: quick access toolbar).
Bottom line is that if you're supposed to squeeze the most out of a text editor, any professional one would do, as long as you care to learn it. Sure, each has some advantages and disadvantages, but really, in the end it's a matter of what you're more comfortable with using.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed.
I've been depressed lately, mainly due to unsatisfactory job, sleep deprivation (family = family + 1) and financial drowning (expenses rose, debt rose, income didn't, and that for years). And at work, when "new" projects come in, everyone feels excited, and I see no reason why they shouldn't. I immediately jump to analyzing the usefulness of whatever comes our way and well, frankly, most times I can't find any. I am doing my job, and I am doing it well, I just don't feel happy about it. As a matter of fact, I haven't felt happy in a long, long time.
I don't know what sort of magical substance I lack and I don't really care. I do, however, know what can get me back on track, and that's financial stability. Sadly, my employer treats me like shit and I'm spiraling down because I ceased trying to look happy and shit when going to job interviews.
So yeah, I feel like I'm pretty much done for. I browse a few sites, circling around all day long, I play the same game when I get back from work and that's pretty much it. One difference, though: I'm not alone. At home I'm with family and at work I'm surrounded by work mates. But I wish I would be alone, and not temporary, but in an "I am Legend" kind of way. Me in an empty world would be fucking awesome.
Then it's wrong, because it's similar to "crooked politician" :)
"Government" is enough.
What's a "Hypocracy"?
I think it's way more people than you assume. Furthermore, those people see both the advert AND the car at the same time, not just a picture on a website they don't visit for the car. If you count Adblock in and the fact that most people are so accustomed to Internet adverts that they subconsciously ignore them... un-targeted online advertising is very, VERY ineffective.
Also, there's a difference between who you DO affect and who you COULD affect. Who sees car stickers? Other motorists and pedestrians who actually look at cars. I think those kind of ads are more targeted than Facebook stuff.
Maybe I'm biased, bit I, for one, usually read car stickers, but blissfully ignore Internet ads unless they're really obnoxious (and if so, I hate them AND the product they're advertising). When I need a product, I know where to look.
Yes, because high school dudes with shitty lives can *totally* spend 12K bucks on a brand new car. NOT.
And 40M USD? Damn!
Here's an instant idea on what to do with that money: give every buyer a discount of 400 USD when buying a car and tell them you're going to install a sticker on their car advertising GM in a funny or witty or aggressive or stupid way (they can choose from a selection of stickers), and that sticker should stay there for a year. That's 100K cars being driven around and boosting your visibility as a company. You "spend" the same amount of money but man, it's going to be way more effective.
Wait a minute... I'm not saying updates were flawless, but at least with Ubuntu I never got something updated without my consent. I mean, no automatic updates. The OS checks, tells you "here be updates" and you check the ones you want. I have configured Windows the same way as well, it never adds updates by itself.
Ubuntu is the answer, especially if you're a desktop user and don't play games.
I've been modded "Flamebait" quite a few times.
In all honesty, my intention was to make a funny remark, because of an old joke where Jesus and the Underlord entered a programming ocompetition where power went out in the end and Jesus won because "Jesus Saves".
Sorry if i offended anyone. A joke is a joke, nothing more, and whoever sees something else might lack sense of humor.
The "Save" icon can be replaced with a tiny pic of Jesus with his hands high in the air. For any unsaved file, replace it with a tiny pic of the Underlord.
I'll add to my previous statement...
Getting an one-off "freebie" achievement is fine. I mean, yeah, you get recognition but nothing else, it's all cool, happens. maybe the department has no budget, maybe your achievement is not really worth some financial incentive. I can live with that. But when you get not one, not two, but five, ten such "badges" over time, the whole thing starts to suffer from the diminishing returns syndrome. The more you get, the less valuable they seem, and while the first one definitely has some WOW! factor attached, the next one is "cool", the one after it is "meh" and subsequent "badges" throw your mood on the other side of the fence.
You start loathing them. The employer basically says "here's another candy wrap for you, look, it's shiny, but no candy in it". So where's the fucking candy? Give it to me or fuck off.
But wait, it gets worse. In some companies (no specific names presented for personal reasons) the badge system got corrupted. How, you ask? Well, here's the thing: management starts to actively lobby so that each employee ultimately gets a badge, regardless whether they deserve it or not. How that works: say you're in a team of ten people, and 3-4 of them are mediocre at best. it happens. Some people are brighter, some not so much. Some people work more, some people slack more. Some people get stuff done, some others are paper pushers or e-mail relays, it's what they do all day long. It's cool, I have no quarrels with that, to each his own. But then shit hits the fan, because you submit a recognition proposal for someone who deserves it fully and your manager (or his manager) rejects the proposal because that guy already has past badges. "Not nice for one guy to grab all badges", they said. So they propose someone who has no badges, although that guy has done nothing to deserve it. That guy pushed e-mails around and added no values in meetings; all he does, all day long, is get raw data from an environment and pass it, unmodified, to business analysts. It's a shit activity, true, but he's basically a "human patch", doing what a machine should do. And eventually that dude gets a "recognition badge" for "hard work" and "excellence" and all that corporate bullshit wording that I loathe. In the end, he gets the same "badge" that you got, and you worked your ass off whereas he pushed e-mails around once a day. This further dwarfs the badge value and importance. Even worse, it makes you feel ashamed of it, because it must mean the achievement requirements are so low, everyone would get one eventually.
Suddenly, the badge is something you no longer want.
It's why I stopped recommending people for those achievements, removed all achievements which were displayed on my employee webpage and generally consider such a system insulting. As someone above said, I'm not a fucking child anymore. I have a family to feed and bills to pay, and badges don't get any of that accomplished. I can't go to the doctor with my sick child and tell him "look, dude, I can't pay for these medical services, but I'll give you a few of my badges". Doesn't work that way, sorry.
Gamification is theoretically good. If applied properly, it adds value to the company, I strongly believe it does. Sadly, management doesn't understand how it should work and they just mess it up really bad, with negative results. My manager was very surprised by my lack of reaction when he joyfully brought me the "news". I explained to him how I felt and why and he was even more surprised. OK, there are some cultural differences (he's from US, I'm from Romania) but nevertheless the reasons are the same, wherever you are from. Give the employees the candy together with the candy wrapper, and by candy I don't necessarily mean money. Give them a gadget, give them some promotional items, such as T-shirts, jackets, field trips, team buildings, vouchers, NCAs, anything really. But give them something other than just an e-mail and maybe a piece of paper with colored text on it.
Money
Otherwise why are we truly there?
Good challenges and good toys to play with seem to me the best way to motivate engineers (by which I mean they're the best way to motivate me).
...If you already have the money, or enough to live comfortably.
I personally hate those fucking badges. Just got two of them this quarter (they were handed less than a week ago) so the rage is still fresh. One was a team-based award (some project I was part of) and the other was a recognition award (some people considered me being awesome and shit).
Strings attached: no cash reward. No cash reward, these "database entries" are worthless to me. Those "badges" mean "We, the Company, think you are worthy, but not worthy enough to throw some money your way". You can commend everyone for free. That doesn't mean shit. if you're underpaid but surrounded by beautiful toys, it's not gonna work. It's my current situation; if I need this IT component or that monitor or whatever, I can go ahead and get it and if there's a business justification, the company will approve and pay for it. But when I see there's budget for fancy mobile devices and expensive monthly subscriptions, but no budget for salary adjustments (nota bene: NOT raises, just adjustments to inflation), that makes me pretty mad and demotivates me.
And then badges come, and I'm supposed to be happy about them? Piss off.
Doh, make them write their verdict on a piece of paper before fighting. And if they both die, just rinse and repeat, bring 12 more and have them fight too. Pane et circem with actual results. Everybody wins.
Better yet, have 6 people from one company fight 6 people from the other company fight to the death. Likely, you'll see a severe reduction of trials fairly soon.
if you don+'t have sick or very old relatives, turning the ringer off is an option. Not in my case, though.
Not when you're in my position where calls can come at 3 AM in the morning even if you're off duty. In case of major outages, automated calls are being sent out worldwide to all personnel. It's simpler to just urn it off altogether. Also it's a cultural difference; most people around here hate both leaving and receiving voice mails. I have voice mail disabled, BTW.
The ISP offer says "Up to 20 Mbps external and up to 100 Mbps metropolitan speeds". I am reaching 20 Mbps pretty often, but not consistently. If I get something from Australia, clearly it's going to come slowly, for example. So the ISP does what promises most of the time and I'm not anal about drops in speed. I'm using metropolitan mostly for heavy traffic (e.g. torrents) anyway.
Another thing I think is relevant: lag/latency. Especially while playing MMOs. My usual latency (unless the server is located in a weird area) is 50-100 ms, which is pretty good.
Depends. :) - the phrase still makes sense, but it's constructed in a weird way, not to mention that it makes no sense in the given context. But strictly from a literary standpoint... it's correct.
He's basically saying he only can tell their dead in the water (presumably able to tell their dead apart from other dead) up to some extent
but what kind of idiot wants to carry around two phones?
Me, for example.
I don't mix business life with personal life, and when I'm off duty, I shut down my business phone but am still available to family through my personal phone. It helps.
Romania.
We only started to have a broadband boom in late 90s, so it's why all networks around have been built with CAT5 cabling and later, optic fiber. As a result, the infrastructure is excellent, compared to more developed countries which are having a hard time replacing old infrastructure and mostly rely on improvisations to increase broadband speed.
Oh and I pay 10 bucks a month, flat rate, for unlimited traffic at max speed.
There's something missing from the report, and that's Metropolitan speeds. The report calculates connections to Akamai, which is a good metric data set, but what about Metropolitan broadband? It's just as relevant.
In-country broadband or city-wide broadband speeds are relevant; it's about how fast local connections are and how infrastructure is handling traffic. When you download stuff (e.g. distros) you usually pick the closest repository and get data from there. Also lots of other files and data are mirrored across the globe and it's very likely there are a couple mirrors in your state or even city (if it's large enough).
My broadband has about 5-10 mbps bandwidth if I transfer something from "general" Internet, but metropolitan speed is 100 mbps. My country-wide connection speed is about 50 mbps, tested with friends; http, p2p and ftp transfers are all equally fast.
Not just what some management people said, but everything in this affair is a classic case of corporate snafu. I'm seeing these things every day.
About 18 months ago I was requested to build some Excel macro which would parse a pile of structured data from a table and generate a snapshot report based off that. Multiple people in various locations had to run that file every hour, interpret the results and take action if certain thresholds were met. Now thresholds started to be met but action was not taken, so their management asked them "so, what's up, why are you not taking action?". They said "it must be the macro because we run it every hour and it doesn't tell us that thresholds have been met". management came to me and asked me what's up, and I could tell them, because the macro contained a very simple (primitive even) log. Each time the report was run, an entry was stored in the file in a hidden spreadsheet which could be shown by pressing a button on the form and entering a very simple password (which was stored in the VBA code as a plain text string). As I was saying, primitive.
So I asked for all the files which had been distributed to those people and checked the logs.
Some of them had never opened the file. Some others had run the script a few times then abandoned it. All others ran it pretty irregularly, the most often run pace being once a day. Nobody ran it every hour.
So I centralized the logs, went back to management and told them "here's what happens: your guys don't run the reports. That's how I know: I've been logging their activities.". They said "thank you" and nothing changed ever since.
The above is an example of someone writing extra code which might prove to be illegal and nobody giving a shit, although they have been informed. As I was saying, typical corporate snafu...
I can. It's called mnemonics.
Have a password root which is generally the same, let's say "Zaytsev" (see "Enemy At The Gates" for more information).
Split it like that: Zay t sev (I call this "winging" because it creates two "wing" words and a "body").
Set a general rule based on website name (the website you need a password for). First letter of the website+"Zay"+last letter of the website+"t"+".org"+"sev"+the letter number of the first website letter.
For slashdot.org the generated password would be: "sZaytt.orgsev18".
For gmail.com it would be "gZaylt.comsev07".
If the website doesn't allow special characters, simply remove the dot or replace it with a 0 or whatever.
You can make the rules as complex as you want, e.g. reverse ".com" (resulting in "gZayltmocsev07") or insert it in between: "g.Zaylctosevm07".
Want it more complex? Change "o" to 0 (zero), "a" with "4" and so on.
All you need to remember is the algorithm and a single password root. Everything else is in front of you when you log in.
There's a work account that I have which requires my password to be between 8 and 12 characters and doesn't allow special characters (only lowercase, uppercase and numbers). WTF.
Also one of our customer-facing generic mailboxes has a password consisting of... 2 (TWO) identical lowercase characters; and it's known by probably 20 people who need to access it.
Corporate life at its best.
Just one question:
"grammer"?
Seriously?
1. If you have a small screen, pretty much every text editor will take sizable chunks of your screen. Just right-click the Ribbon and hide it if that's your thing.
2. Shortcut keys appear if you hover your mouse over a button, if you've set that in Word options. There's really no excuse for being lazy and not configure your editor but instead choose to complain about its lack of features.
3. You can also customize the ribbon to put unrelated things in a toolbar (hint: quick access toolbar).
Bottom line is that if you're supposed to squeeze the most out of a text editor, any professional one would do, as long as you care to learn it. Sure, each has some advantages and disadvantages, but really, in the end it's a matter of what you're more comfortable with using.
Most importantly though, he did it because he could.
That's the same reason dogs have when licking their balls.
Just sayin'...