That's almost as bad as the last time I was on a Windows box that didn't have gvim installed, and I had to use this weird editor called "Notepad."
I kept typing ":wq" and ":w!" but no matter how many times I hit ESC, the stupid thing resolutely stayed in Insert mode. Never did work out how to save my document.
...Zork was an early Infocom text-only adventure game, and was incredibly fun.
Well... it was fun once I figured out how to get past the ^%@*!$ rug.
push rug shove rug lift rug roll rug kick rug burn rug take rug [...GAAAAA!!!!] move rug [...oh.]
Ah, my beloved Kaypro II. I still miss her.
Anyway, back to pretending I'm NOT really old. (Let's just say the crystal in the palm of my hand started blinking last year. Nothing to see here, move along...)
NES? Pah. I pity the person tasked with designing the box for Zork. The Infocom box is goofy enough, but scroll down and check out the package for the Personal Software release. I can almost hear the art manager saying "Well, let's just wing it and hope for the best."
(To their credit, peering closely at the picture, I notice a few things which could be interpreted as props from the actual game. That bell isn't going to do him much good without the book and candles, though.)
Reminds me of a website I ran across one day. It had lots of little cartoon hamsters, animated so that it looked as if they were dancing. Plus there was music.
I don't know if anyone's heard of it or not, but it was really something.
...most bios's (biosi?) wouldn't let you boot from a cd back then
Oddly enough, that very situation is very much a "present tense" problem I'm tackling. I cleaned out my storage area last week and found, buried way in the back, my old PC circa 1995 (it was out of date even then).
The bios refuses to believe in that newfangled CDROM drive, and is only prepared to accept the existence of a 3.5 or 5.25 floppy drive. I'm convinced I can do something useful with it, even though it only has a 200mhz processor, and the case smells like cat urine. Perhaps an ancient Slackware distro is the answer.
I feel a bit sorry for the poor thing, waking it from its dusty snooze of obsolescence and yanking it into the light of day. I did finally decide to have pity on the Mac SE I found back there, though. With its 9-inch greyscale monitor and its whopping 1MB hard drive, it makes a kick-ass Tetris machine.
I have spent more years of my life working with Microsoft Word than I care to contemplate at this juncture. I assure you that the problems you're describing are not inherent to porting documents from Word to OO. They're problems which you will see whenever you open a document with a word processing program which is not configured the same as the word processing program which originated the document.
Most people don't notice this problem because most people never bother to change the default Word configurations. If Mary makes a Word document and sends it to Steve, and they're both using Word's defaults, it will look exactly the same when Steve opens it. However, if Mary then sends her Word document to Bob (who has spent many hours configuring Word to his liking) Bob's instance of Word will "translate" Mary's document into Bob's preferred formatting. Or rather, it will attempt to do so, with varying degrees of success.
I have personally had to tackle the problem of importing Word documents into Word more times than you can possibly imagine. I've also had to import Open Office documents into Open Office. The problem isn't that "Word sucks" or "Open Office sucks." The problem is that both programs need to find a way to properly import formatting rules on a per-document basis.
(Of course, that's easy for me to say, isn't it? I'm not the one trying to program it, am I?)
When I'm importing MS Word docs, I'm able to read the documents but the fonts are sometime mess up.
Tell the people who are sending you the Word docs to QUIT USING COMIC SANS.
(Arguably, you could also resolve this issue by installing Comic Sans on your machine. I wouldn't recommend this, personally, because I loathe Comic Sans more than you can possibly imagine. But that's just me.)
Truer words were never spoken. I once spent two weeks working for a telemarketing company. Most of my calls went like this:
Me: "Hi! I was wondering if you might be interested in donating money to the firefighter's fund in exchange for two tickets to a Crystal Gale concert!"
Them: "Not really."
Me: "Okay, thanks." [hangs up, dials again]
At the end of my second week, the manager called me into his office. He held up the sheet with my sales (which, if memory serves, totalled exactly: three). "Look," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"We'll mail your paycheck to your house."
"Right on. See ya."
Least painful firing in all of human history, that.
Please, won't someone please think of the trolls? For only two cents a day - less than the cost of a bottle of Mountain Dew a month - you can bring a glimmer of hope to a dying troll.
Don't let the trolls die. Keep them alive. Nurture their spirit, cherish their well-worn familiarity, and value their contribution to the Slashdot ecosystem.
For more information on how you can help, please send away for one of our colorful brochures.
90% of the people in the world that use a web browser only use it because that's what browser was there for them to use.
An excellent point, and one that tends to get overlooked. Not only do most people use IE because it's already there; believe it or not, most people use IE because they don't even realize that they have other options. Don't get me wrong - I've done more than my fair share of Mozilla advocacy. Or rather, "attempted to do." This is how it usually goes down:
Them: "Hey, what's that? That's not Internet Explorer."
Me: "Nope, it's a different browser, called Mozilla. It blocks popup ads, and see how clever the tabs are? I can have several different websites open at once, but my taskbar isn't all cluttered."
(Long silence.)
Them: "More than one website open at once?"
Me: "Right. Like say I opened one website, and I read half of it, and I wanted to come back later, but in the meantime I decided to go to another website. See?" [clicks tabs to demonstrate]
Them: "I never do that."
Me: "You've never opened more than one website at a time?"
Them: "No."
Me: "Oh. Well... then... err... but surely you'd rather use a browser that blocks pop-up ads, right?"
Them: "Pop-ups are kind of annoying, but I don't like to download software and install it and stuff. I'd rather just live with the pop-ups."
Me: "Okay. Um. Well. As long as you're happy, I guess that's the important thing." [weeps quietly]
(I'm not kidding. I've had this exact same conversation with three different people in the last two weeks alone. Except for the weeping. I was kidding about the weeping.)
Works both ways, of course. Think of a handheld detector from the Alien movies, displaying approaching coworkers instead of goo-spewing double-jawed monsters.
Ideally, you'd want to implant each coworker with their own RFID tag so that you could get identity as well as proximity information. How best to accomplish this is an exercise I leave to your own imagination.
That has to be one of the worst cases of trolling I've ever seen.
Oh, I don't know about the worst, really. I've seen some pretty clumsy trolling in my day, although I agree that this one is pretty inept.
I have to admit, though, that I'm almost hypnotized by his use of the word "fractious." I assume the poor word just got caught in the crossfire between a freak-ass typo and his spellchecking program, but it's hard to say. Nevertheless, "fractious" is a delightful word that simply doesn't get used as often as it deserves.
As a troll, both he and his "Word A Day" calendar deserve to die horribly, of course. But I have to give him credit for vocabulary, at least.
They'll spend 8 days between putting you on hold and telling you they'll call back in 30 minutes...
Ha ha! Yeah. Good times. *happy sigh*
The thing is, no tech support rep ever got a raise for being smart. Believe me, I've worked alongside some pretty damned smart people, and they got paid just the same as the boxes of rocks. Your only shot at getting a raise (and a meager shot it is) is to take more calls faster.
No tech support manager has ever climbed atop their desk and shouted to the floor at large, "People! I need you to quit being such retards and LEARN SOMETHING!" What they shout is "We've got calls in the queue! CALLS! For the love of god, answer the phone faster! FASTER!!!11" (Yes, they actually DO shout the 1s at the end. You can hear it. I'm not kidding.)
If you ever (God help you) find yourself in a position where you have to contact technical support, do it by email (website form, whatever). The longer a person works in support, the more likely it is that they'll graduate off the phones and work email. You are, therefore, approximately.05% more likely to get an intelligent response.
It's not much, but it's better than calling. Trust me.
Traumatic amnesia prevents me from fully describing the extent of its wretchedness, but just to give you a taste: it's an amateur remake of Blade. Only with midget vampires. And the soundtrack prominently features an out-of-tune guitar played badly.
(Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself! I rented my copy from the neighborhood Hollywood Video.)
What was it about the original movie version that was so good and what was it about the miniseries that was so bad?
Speaking for myself (as usual), I found the miniseries to be excruciatingly dull. The dialogue and acting was every bit as flat as previous Sci Fi channel offerings have led me to expect.
It's true that it was very faithful to the original. However, "faithful to the original" is not - to me - the total sum of quality. I could put socks on my hands and stage a puppet show that would re-enact "Dune" in its entirety, but so the hell what?
The Lynch version, though... THAT is some high-class cheese! I wouldn't call it GOOD, exactly, but I love it more than you can possibly imagine. (How could I NOT love a movie whose key turning point involves Kyle MacLachlan solemnly intoning "My name is a killing word"?)
AOL is already the biggest CD distributor already, with the most CD's in the most homes (and trash cans.)
Trash cans? Are you kidding? I bought a batch of CD coaster-ification kits from Jinx Hackwear (it's under "Misc Swag"). Now I have the coolest coasters in town! AND my desktop isn't all sticky from the coffee that pixies slop all over the place when I'm not looking. (I would never be so uncoordinated as to slop coffee. Therefore, it must be pixies.)
I was particularly thrilled at the most recent run of AOL CDs to hit my town. They're printed with a faux-oriental rug pattern. Oo, classy!
I on the other hand would never make your choice. In fact, I would love to turn off my social/sex needs entirely since they are a gross waste of my time and resources.
Okay look, here's the thing. There is a class of human activity which is both unpleasant and mandatory (i.e. work). And then there's everything else. You can do anything you want with the "everything else" time. There's no point wasting the "everything else" time by doing something you don't enjoy.
If you don't enjoy socializing, then don't do it. Voila, problem solved. If you DO enjoy socializing, then your time is, by definition, well-spent. It's not as if aliens are beaming these "Gosh I like sex" thoughts into your head, you know. Your brain is telling you what you like to do. Get over it.
If you're in a relationship where your time is being managed for you in such a fashion that you feel your soul is being stifled and your time is being wasted, then it's time to renegotiate the terms. Everyone needs free time (some more than others). If your partner can't understand this, if they're trying to turn you into someone you're not, then maybe they're just not the right person for you, hmm?
I say this as a veteran of many such negotiations. Believe me, fellow geeks, it IS possible to carve out your own little niche in a relationship with a non-geek. It requires a certain amount of flexibility, respect, creative thinking, and diplomacy on both sides, and may entail solutions which sound silly at first ("Never ever speak to me when I am at the computer and I have placed this bright pink Post-It on the side of my monitor"). But the important thing is that it can - I promise - work.
[...] everyday, I get phone calls about pr0n email that she has received. She takes great delight in explicitlly describing the contents of the message, and then pretending to be offended. Then I get the "Why don't you do something about this" statement.
Tell her "Look, lady, I'm sorry if you feel neglected, but I'm sending out as much of it as I can. I'll send you a couple extra tonight when I get home, but after that, I can't make any promises." Then apologize for having misspelled "barnyard" in the subject line.
everything else is a rehash of old trolls, old comments, one guy searching caldera stories and cutting and pasting +5 comments, sprinkle with insight, set at 350 degrees, and bake until done. Serves 10,000.
Welcome to Slashdot. Enjoy your stay.
I once complained to a buddy of mine that Slashdot was nothing but interesting articles trailing thousands of gibberish comments behind them like comet tails. "It's... chaos!" I said, waving my hand at the monitor in frustration.
He grinned and said, "The chaos is the best part!"
Slashdot Mirror
The only people who use it are elitists who don't want to run the same OS as everyone else.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Try the adventure lost in ed ... :-)
That's almost as bad as the last time I was on a Windows box that didn't have gvim installed, and I had to use this weird editor called "Notepad."
I kept typing ":wq" and ":w!" but no matter how many times I hit ESC, the stupid thing resolutely stayed in Insert mode. Never did work out how to save my document.
...Zork was an early Infocom text-only adventure game, and was incredibly fun.
Well... it was fun once I figured out how to get past the ^%@*!$ rug.
push rug
shove rug
lift rug
roll rug
kick rug
burn rug
take rug [...GAAAAA!!!!]
move rug [...oh.]
Ah, my beloved Kaypro II. I still miss her.
Anyway, back to pretending I'm NOT really old. (Let's just say the crystal in the palm of my hand started blinking last year. Nothing to see here, move along...)
NES? Pah. I pity the person tasked with designing the box for Zork. The Infocom box is goofy enough, but scroll down and check out the package for the Personal Software release. I can almost hear the art manager saying "Well, let's just wing it and hope for the best."
(To their credit, peering closely at the picture, I notice a few things which could be interpreted as props from the actual game. That bell isn't going to do him much good without the book and candles, though.)
Reminds me of a website I ran across one day. It had lots of little cartoon hamsters, animated so that it looked as if they were dancing. Plus there was music.
I don't know if anyone's heard of it or not, but it was really something.
...most bios's (biosi?) wouldn't let you boot from a cd back then
Oddly enough, that very situation is very much a "present tense" problem I'm tackling. I cleaned out my storage area last week and found, buried way in the back, my old PC circa 1995 (it was out of date even then).
The bios refuses to believe in that newfangled CDROM drive, and is only prepared to accept the existence of a 3.5 or 5.25 floppy drive. I'm convinced I can do something useful with it, even though it only has a 200mhz processor, and the case smells like cat urine. Perhaps an ancient Slackware distro is the answer.
I feel a bit sorry for the poor thing, waking it from its dusty snooze of obsolescence and yanking it into the light of day. I did finally decide to have pity on the Mac SE I found back there, though. With its 9-inch greyscale monitor and its whopping 1MB hard drive, it makes a kick-ass Tetris machine.
I have spent more years of my life working with Microsoft Word than I care to contemplate at this juncture. I assure you that the problems you're describing are not inherent to porting documents from Word to OO. They're problems which you will see whenever you open a document with a word processing program which is not configured the same as the word processing program which originated the document.
Most people don't notice this problem because most people never bother to change the default Word configurations. If Mary makes a Word document and sends it to Steve, and they're both using Word's defaults, it will look exactly the same when Steve opens it. However, if Mary then sends her Word document to Bob (who has spent many hours configuring Word to his liking) Bob's instance of Word will "translate" Mary's document into Bob's preferred formatting. Or rather, it will attempt to do so, with varying degrees of success.
I have personally had to tackle the problem of importing Word documents into Word more times than you can possibly imagine. I've also had to import Open Office documents into Open Office. The problem isn't that "Word sucks" or "Open Office sucks." The problem is that both programs need to find a way to properly import formatting rules on a per-document basis.
(Of course, that's easy for me to say, isn't it? I'm not the one trying to program it, am I?)
When I'm importing MS Word docs, I'm able to read the documents but the fonts are sometime mess up.
Tell the people who are sending you the Word docs to QUIT USING COMIC SANS.
(Arguably, you could also resolve this issue by installing Comic Sans on your machine. I wouldn't recommend this, personally, because I loathe Comic Sans more than you can possibly imagine. But that's just me.)
THAT'S the problem! I had been waving a Finnish flag while crapping on the Windows disk.
Dammit! I am so not l337!
Well, clearly you aren't a very good salesman
Truer words were never spoken. I once spent two weeks working for a telemarketing company. Most of my calls went like this:
Me: "Hi! I was wondering if you might be interested in donating money to the firefighter's fund in exchange for two tickets to a Crystal Gale concert!"
Them: "Not really."
Me: "Okay, thanks." [hangs up, dials again]
At the end of my second week, the manager called me into his office. He held up the sheet with my sales (which, if memory serves, totalled exactly: three). "Look," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"We'll mail your paycheck to your house."
"Right on. See ya."
Least painful firing in all of human history, that.
Please, won't someone please think of the trolls? For only two cents a day - less than the cost of a bottle of Mountain Dew a month - you can bring a glimmer of hope to a dying troll.
Don't let the trolls die. Keep them alive. Nurture their spirit, cherish their well-worn familiarity, and value their contribution to the Slashdot ecosystem.
For more information on how you can help, please send away for one of our colorful brochures.
90% of the people in the world that use a web browser only use it because that's what browser was there for them to use.
An excellent point, and one that tends to get overlooked. Not only do most people use IE because it's already there; believe it or not, most people use IE because they don't even realize that they have other options. Don't get me wrong - I've done more than my fair share of Mozilla advocacy. Or rather, "attempted to do." This is how it usually goes down:
Them: "Hey, what's that? That's not Internet Explorer."
Me: "Nope, it's a different browser, called Mozilla. It blocks popup ads, and see how clever the tabs are? I can have several different websites open at once, but my taskbar isn't all cluttered."
(Long silence.)
Them: "More than one website open at once?"
Me: "Right. Like say I opened one website, and I read half of it, and I wanted to come back later, but in the meantime I decided to go to another website. See?" [clicks tabs to demonstrate]
Them: "I never do that."
Me: "You've never opened more than one website at a time?"
Them: "No."
Me: "Oh. Well... then... err... but surely you'd rather use a browser that blocks pop-up ads, right?"
Them: "Pop-ups are kind of annoying, but I don't like to download software and install it and stuff. I'd rather just live with the pop-ups."
Me: "Okay. Um. Well. As long as you're happy, I guess that's the important thing." [weeps quietly]
(I'm not kidding. I've had this exact same conversation with three different people in the last two weeks alone. Except for the weeping. I was kidding about the weeping.)
And let's not forget that "reindeer flotilla" is the best password ever.
Works both ways, of course. Think of a handheld detector from the Alien movies, displaying approaching coworkers instead of goo-spewing double-jawed monsters.
Ideally, you'd want to implant each coworker with their own RFID tag so that you could get identity as well as proximity information. How best to accomplish this is an exercise I leave to your own imagination.
Err... sure, be my guest. :)
That has to be one of the worst cases of trolling I've ever seen.
Oh, I don't know about the worst, really. I've seen some pretty clumsy trolling in my day, although I agree that this one is pretty inept.
I have to admit, though, that I'm almost hypnotized by his use of the word "fractious." I assume the poor word just got caught in the crossfire between a freak-ass typo and his spellchecking program, but it's hard to say. Nevertheless, "fractious" is a delightful word that simply doesn't get used as often as it deserves.
As a troll, both he and his "Word A Day" calendar deserve to die horribly, of course. But I have to give him credit for vocabulary, at least.
They'll spend 8 days between putting you on hold and telling you they'll call back in 30 minutes...
.05% more likely to get an intelligent response.
Ha ha! Yeah. Good times. *happy sigh*
The thing is, no tech support rep ever got a raise for being smart. Believe me, I've worked alongside some pretty damned smart people, and they got paid just the same as the boxes of rocks. Your only shot at getting a raise (and a meager shot it is) is to take more calls faster.
No tech support manager has ever climbed atop their desk and shouted to the floor at large, "People! I need you to quit being such retards and LEARN SOMETHING!" What they shout is "We've got calls in the queue! CALLS! For the love of god, answer the phone faster! FASTER!!!11" (Yes, they actually DO shout the 1s at the end. You can hear it. I'm not kidding.)
If you ever (God help you) find yourself in a position where you have to contact technical support, do it by email (website form, whatever). The longer a person works in support, the more likely it is that they'll graduate off the phones and work email. You are, therefore, approximately
It's not much, but it's better than calling. Trust me.
I think I speak for many of us when I say: "Life is good."
Mm, I don't know. I'd feel better about it if I could figure out how to restore from a saved version.
You lie! Nothing is worse, or can be worse than Highlander 2.
Ha! You've obviously never watched Ankle Biters. I have seen many many bad movies (Devil's Rain, anyone? Universal Soldier 3?) but "Ankle Biters" was by far the worst.
Traumatic amnesia prevents me from fully describing the extent of its wretchedness, but just to give you a taste: it's an amateur remake of Blade. Only with midget vampires. And the soundtrack prominently features an out-of-tune guitar played badly.
(Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself! I rented my copy from the neighborhood Hollywood Video.)
What was it about the original movie version that was so good and what was it about the miniseries that was so bad?
Speaking for myself (as usual), I found the miniseries to be excruciatingly dull. The dialogue and acting was every bit as flat as previous Sci Fi channel offerings have led me to expect.
It's true that it was very faithful to the original. However, "faithful to the original" is not - to me - the total sum of quality. I could put socks on my hands and stage a puppet show that would re-enact "Dune" in its entirety, but so the hell what?
The Lynch version, though... THAT is some high-class cheese! I wouldn't call it GOOD, exactly, but I love it more than you can possibly imagine. (How could I NOT love a movie whose key turning point involves Kyle MacLachlan solemnly intoning "My name is a killing word"?)
AOL is already the biggest CD distributor already, with the most CD's in the most homes (and trash cans.)
Trash cans? Are you kidding? I bought a batch of CD coaster-ification kits from Jinx Hackwear (it's under "Misc Swag"). Now I have the coolest coasters in town! AND my desktop isn't all sticky from the coffee that pixies slop all over the place when I'm not looking. (I would never be so uncoordinated as to slop coffee. Therefore, it must be pixies.)
I was particularly thrilled at the most recent run of AOL CDs to hit my town. They're printed with a faux-oriental rug pattern. Oo, classy!
I on the other hand would never make your choice. In fact, I would love to turn off my social/sex needs entirely since they are a gross waste of my time and resources.
Okay look, here's the thing. There is a class of human activity which is both unpleasant and mandatory (i.e. work). And then there's everything else. You can do anything you want with the "everything else" time. There's no point wasting the "everything else" time by doing something you don't enjoy.
If you don't enjoy socializing, then don't do it. Voila, problem solved. If you DO enjoy socializing, then your time is, by definition, well-spent. It's not as if aliens are beaming these "Gosh I like sex" thoughts into your head, you know. Your brain is telling you what you like to do. Get over it.
If you're in a relationship where your time is being managed for you in such a fashion that you feel your soul is being stifled and your time is being wasted, then it's time to renegotiate the terms. Everyone needs free time (some more than others). If your partner can't understand this, if they're trying to turn you into someone you're not, then maybe they're just not the right person for you, hmm?
I say this as a veteran of many such negotiations. Believe me, fellow geeks, it IS possible to carve out your own little niche in a relationship with a non-geek. It requires a certain amount of flexibility, respect, creative thinking, and diplomacy on both sides, and may entail solutions which sound silly at first ("Never ever speak to me when I am at the computer and I have placed this bright pink Post-It on the side of my monitor"). But the important thing is that it can - I promise - work.
[...] everyday, I get phone calls about pr0n email that she has received. She takes great delight in explicitlly describing the contents of the message, and then pretending to be offended. Then I get the "Why don't you do something about this" statement.
Tell her "Look, lady, I'm sorry if you feel neglected, but I'm sending out as much of it as I can. I'll send you a couple extra tonight when I get home, but after that, I can't make any promises." Then apologize for having misspelled "barnyard" in the subject line.
everything else is a rehash of old trolls, old comments, one guy searching caldera stories and cutting and pasting +5 comments, sprinkle with insight, set at 350 degrees, and bake until done. Serves 10,000.
Welcome to Slashdot. Enjoy your stay.
I once complained to a buddy of mine that Slashdot was nothing but interesting articles trailing thousands of gibberish comments behind them like comet tails. "It's... chaos!" I said, waving my hand at the monitor in frustration.
He grinned and said, "The chaos is the best part!"
Know what? He was right.
I love you, Slashdot. Don't ever change, baby.
If any, definitely Kazaa.
Naturally when you say "Kazaa" you mean Kazaa Lite. (All the file sharing, with none of the spyware or adware popups.)