I had to do some Excel development recently for a former employer and I have to say that in general, I think Excel is a decent program (the only part of Office that I think isn't horrible). Well, PowerPoint possibly isn't awful, but it's so often used in awful ways, I have a hard time separating the two ideas.
However... doing VBA development for Excel 2010 was like stepping back in time to Windows programming circa 1990. It is ridiculously primitive, obscenely unstable and truly the worst development environment I've ever used. In fact, if it were 20 years ago, all other things being equal, I'd still feel the same way. I had to bend heaven and earth to do the most basic things, and while I didn't find what it provided in terms of functionality all that bad to work with, the bugginess and lack of features utterly astounded me for a product that is such an integral part of so many businesses. Oh, and while Microsoft supports Excel, naturally, they officially _do not_ support VBA in Excel. Their attitude is officially, "Yeah, it's there. Yeah, you might be able to do something useful with it. But if it doesn't work right, you're on your own, pally."
I used Excel because management required it. I completed the app and it was a fine piece of work that did everything management wanted. I was proud of what I accomplished even though the app itself wasn't anything particularly fancy, but because of many roadblocks I overcame with persistence and drawing on many years of experience. I'm sure I could have done it in Python or something similar in about a fourth of the time. Then the company got acquired and the app, in final testing, was canned. The end.
Every once in a while I get the urge to try out one of the Metro apps, but I usually get too annoyed and go back to the desktop before it finishes launching. I haven't heard this complaint much, but in my experience the Metro apps are hideously slow to launch, even taking 10s of seconds.
My machine is reasonably fast (Intel i7 with 8GB of RAM) and it's very responsive when using "real" applications.
We don't accept this, we just take what we get. All the locked-down devices can be unlocked with some amount of effort. I've been using Android devices heavily for about 2 years, and I haven't felt any need to root them.
I worked with MSSQL about a decade ago and found it to be a fine product... but then again, maybe I didn't know better.
I think there are two main reasons: We are still living in a world where "You won't get fired for choosing Microsoft." is still a thing, although certainly not the way it used to be, and we are still living in a world where open-source isn't always seen as legitimate.
What can I say? The company I work for uses MySQL, and it does what we need.
Yeah, I always figured if he'd never bumped into Bill Gates, right now he'd be a regional sales manager for plumbing parts working in an small office in Scuffboot, NE, who's good at sales but whom everyone who works for him hates.
I always thought that was one of the stupidest decisions in the entire history of software... and I can't believe they are still doing it after almost 20 years.
e.g., There are 5 files named "setup"... which one is the executable? You have to go by the tiny, inscrutable icons.
Of course, hiding the file extensions of Office files didn't do much back in the day when Office should have been known as the Microsoft Virus Development Kit, but at least that has gotten a lot better.
I think the biggest arrogance of Windows 8, aside of foisting Metro on you whether you want it or not (you don't, and even if you did, all the Metro apps take 10-20 seconds to load.. is this 1989?) is that you cannot go back to the "classic" UI theme, which is, in my opinion, the last UI theme Microsoft made that wasn't hideous. XP had that awful "Playskool" theme, Vista was only slightly less ugly, but also had epilepsy-inducing animations. Windows 7 was a bit better. At least you could choose a color theme that didn't look like it was made by a color-blind mental patient. But in all cases, you could go back to the "classic" look, which was always slimmer and more efficient. Now you can't because either Windows is no longer capable of displaying it, or because they simply think that this hideous and ridiculous "flat UI" fad is so good that no one should be allowed to turn it off. "Flat UI" may be OK for a phone, but for a desktop environment, it's a huge step backwards, but it's not just limited to Metro. You have the stupid flat look on the desktop as well.
Windows 8 is the biggest exercise in user-hostility in the entire history of non-enterprise software. In the world of enterprise software, it's not bad at all, but that's because enterprise software is usually about as user-friendly as the Soviet bureaucracy.
It could be that they were not stinkbugs you were killing. It could have been Coreidae, or squash bugs. They are in the same Infraorder and look similar.
They do squash very nicely, so you might have a point. Nevertheless, if there's fewer of them, I'll be happy.
Again I really don't see what this has to do with Catholicism. The claim of "discovery" of things that are already known by many people except Europeans has been done by people of all religions.
Indeed... in 1492, every Christian in Europe was Catholic... at least formally, so it's somewhat disingenuous to make this a "Catholic" thing. "Gold, glory and God" were the reasons for exploring the New World. I doubt evangelization was always a priority for the explorers, but it certainly was for the missionaries who accompanied them. However, the Spanish Crown were really the ones driving all this and their interests were definitely more political and financial than religious.
Furthermore, the Spanish monarchy wasn't particularly representative of the Church's interests. Among other things, they were responsible for the Spanish Inquisition (whom no one expects!), whose excesses were as much a result of politics as anything else, and were actually no worse than civil governments at the time (and in many cases, much less severe). While the Spanish Inquisition a lot of mindshare in the "evil" category, Queen Elizabeth gets a pass despite executing more people per capita over religion.
Anyhow, the actual missionaries on the ground in the New World were struggling to help keep the explorers/conquistadors from mistreating the natives, but their pleas back home to the Monarchy weren't always given much attention. The priests and religious on the ground were definitely not there to exploit the locals but to spread the Gospel. The conversion (not forced!) of millions in the new World through the 16th century is a testament to the fact that the Catholic efforts were a net positive despite what a lot of the Spanish did, which was truly greedy, inhumane and even genocidal.
Forget Fukushima, the greenies managed to turn public opinion against nuclear power when Three Mile Island happened, even though that was almost a textbook example of how the safety systems _prevent_ dangerous things from happening.
WazHack is what Nethack used to be before it became an exercise in reverse-engineering the spoilers. I'm thinking late 80s back when it was still called Hack. I'm not trying to dis what NetHack has become, and clearly I haven't put enough effort into it since it's obviously beatable, but I find it a lot more frustrating than fun at times. I had e-mailed the creator of WazHack about a bug and had mentioned how much I liked the game and he agreed with me about the idea of making it more forgiving than what Nethack has evolved into.
Maybe that makes me a wimp or a loser, but I really enjoy WazHack, and it works really nicely on a touchscreen-only device too (although it can be a little hard on a small screen), which is a big improvement over trying to play something keyboard-oriented with an on-screen keyboard. Although I tried a recent version of UnNetHack on my phone and found they'd made a lot of improvements to usability on a touchscreen-only device.
It is accepted (for certain values of accepted, YMMV) to use "data" as a singular word. I see one of the definitions of "data" as a synonym for "information". I'm as much of a grammar pedant as they come, but even I don't say, "data say".
The heated arguments here are always about data and empirical evidence and formal logic and the like.
As long as the topic isn't politics, or religion, or global warming, or vi vs. emacs, or Microsoft, or Apple, or pretty much everything else, then, yes, you're right.
Congratulations, lgw. You've just identified the biggest reason we have been completely unable to reform practically _anything_ in the past half century, and it's getting worse at an increasing pace. The government is the only institution in which failure to make good use of resources is consistently rewarded with _more_ resources. Until we fix that problem... by establishing the kind of accountability that most people in the private world have (at least if you're not an executive) then we'll never make it better and things will keep getting worse until we all disappear down a bureaucratic black hole, by which I mean the economy will collapse and we will actually have the anarchy that mentally-defective AC accused me of supporting.
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I had to do some Excel development recently for a former employer and I have to say that in general, I think Excel is a decent program (the only part of Office that I think isn't horrible). Well, PowerPoint possibly isn't awful, but it's so often used in awful ways, I have a hard time separating the two ideas.
However... doing VBA development for Excel 2010 was like stepping back in time to Windows programming circa 1990. It is ridiculously primitive, obscenely unstable and truly the worst development environment I've ever used. In fact, if it were 20 years ago, all other things being equal, I'd still feel the same way. I had to bend heaven and earth to do the most basic things, and while I didn't find what it provided in terms of functionality all that bad to work with, the bugginess and lack of features utterly astounded me for a product that is such an integral part of so many businesses. Oh, and while Microsoft supports Excel, naturally, they officially _do not_ support VBA in Excel. Their attitude is officially, "Yeah, it's there. Yeah, you might be able to do something useful with it. But if it doesn't work right, you're on your own, pally."
I used Excel because management required it. I completed the app and it was a fine piece of work that did everything management wanted. I was proud of what I accomplished even though the app itself wasn't anything particularly fancy, but because of many roadblocks I overcame with persistence and drawing on many years of experience. I'm sure I could have done it in Python or something similar in about a fourth of the time. Then the company got acquired and the app, in final testing, was canned. The end.
Every once in a while I get the urge to try out one of the Metro apps, but I usually get too annoyed and go back to the desktop before it finishes launching. I haven't heard this complaint much, but in my experience the Metro apps are hideously slow to launch, even taking 10s of seconds.
My machine is reasonably fast (Intel i7 with 8GB of RAM) and it's very responsive when using "real" applications.
Encrypt the phone, and set a numeric PIN of 6 or more.
Cool, I'll just use my /. UID. Oh, wait... /me struts away trying to ride the old-timer credibility he doesn't deserve.
We don't accept this, we just take what we get. All the locked-down devices can be unlocked with some amount of effort. I've been using Android devices heavily for about 2 years, and I haven't felt any need to root them.
I worked with MSSQL about a decade ago and found it to be a fine product... but then again, maybe I didn't know better.
I think there are two main reasons: We are still living in a world where "You won't get fired for choosing Microsoft." is still a thing, although certainly not the way it used to be, and we are still living in a world where open-source isn't always seen as legitimate.
What can I say? The company I work for uses MySQL, and it does what we need.
Yeah, I always figured if he'd never bumped into Bill Gates, right now he'd be a regional sales manager for plumbing parts working in an small office in Scuffboot, NE, who's good at sales but whom everyone who works for him hates.
For about a year the only updates to IE were security updates; they added no new features.
Actually IE6 alone was around for 5 years, and really the browser's functionality was pretty stagnant from 1997 until about 10 years later.
BY DEFAULT HIDE FILE EXTENSIONS!
I always thought that was one of the stupidest decisions in the entire history of software... and I can't believe they are still doing it after almost 20 years.
e.g., There are 5 files named "setup"... which one is the executable? You have to go by the tiny, inscrutable icons.
Of course, hiding the file extensions of Office files didn't do much back in the day when Office should have been known as the Microsoft Virus Development Kit, but at least that has gotten a lot better.
I think the biggest arrogance of Windows 8, aside of foisting Metro on you whether you want it or not (you don't, and even if you did, all the Metro apps take 10-20 seconds to load.. is this 1989?) is that you cannot go back to the "classic" UI theme, which is, in my opinion, the last UI theme Microsoft made that wasn't hideous. XP had that awful "Playskool" theme, Vista was only slightly less ugly, but also had epilepsy-inducing animations. Windows 7 was a bit better. At least you could choose a color theme that didn't look like it was made by a color-blind mental patient. But in all cases, you could go back to the "classic" look, which was always slimmer and more efficient. Now you can't because either Windows is no longer capable of displaying it, or because they simply think that this hideous and ridiculous "flat UI" fad is so good that no one should be allowed to turn it off. "Flat UI" may be OK for a phone, but for a desktop environment, it's a huge step backwards, but it's not just limited to Metro. You have the stupid flat look on the desktop as well.
Windows 8 is the biggest exercise in user-hostility in the entire history of non-enterprise software. In the world of enterprise software, it's not bad at all, but that's because enterprise software is usually about as user-friendly as the Soviet bureaucracy.
It could lead to a new definition of "rolling blackout".
It could be that they were not stinkbugs you were killing. It could have been Coreidae, or squash bugs. They are in the same Infraorder and look similar.
They do squash very nicely, so you might have a point. Nevertheless, if there's fewer of them, I'll be happy.
Again I really don't see what this has to do with Catholicism. The claim of "discovery" of things that are already known by many people except Europeans has been done by people of all religions.
Indeed... in 1492, every Christian in Europe was Catholic... at least formally, so it's somewhat disingenuous to make this a "Catholic" thing. "Gold, glory and God" were the reasons for exploring the New World. I doubt evangelization was always a priority for the explorers, but it certainly was for the missionaries who accompanied them. However, the Spanish Crown were really the ones driving all this and their interests were definitely more political and financial than religious.
Furthermore, the Spanish monarchy wasn't particularly representative of the Church's interests. Among other things, they were responsible for the Spanish Inquisition (whom no one expects!), whose excesses were as much a result of politics as anything else, and were actually no worse than civil governments at the time (and in many cases, much less severe). While the Spanish Inquisition a lot of mindshare in the "evil" category, Queen Elizabeth gets a pass despite executing more people per capita over religion.
Anyhow, the actual missionaries on the ground in the New World were struggling to help keep the explorers/conquistadors from mistreating the natives, but their pleas back home to the Monarchy weren't always given much attention. The priests and religious on the ground were definitely not there to exploit the locals but to spread the Gospel. The conversion (not forced!) of millions in the new World through the 16th century is a testament to the fact that the Catholic efforts were a net positive despite what a lot of the Spanish did, which was truly greedy, inhumane and even genocidal.
Freezing means above 150 degrees.
Some of us use the Delisle scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delisle_scale), you insensitive clod.
I've killed dozens of stinkbugs, and I never smelled anything. But maybe I'm inured to the odor of nearby Washington...
Especially, flammable tap water.
Free Flaming Moe's for everyone!
Forget Fukushima, the greenies managed to turn public opinion against nuclear power when Three Mile Island happened, even though that was almost a textbook example of how the safety systems _prevent_ dangerous things from happening.
No matter what happens, there is _always_ a relevant Simpsons quote.
Man, now I wish I had some tripe...
WazHack is what Nethack used to be before it became an exercise in reverse-engineering the spoilers. I'm thinking late 80s back when it was still called Hack. I'm not trying to dis what NetHack has become, and clearly I haven't put enough effort into it since it's obviously beatable, but I find it a lot more frustrating than fun at times. I had e-mailed the creator of WazHack about a bug and had mentioned how much I liked the game and he agreed with me about the idea of making it more forgiving than what Nethack has evolved into.
Maybe that makes me a wimp or a loser, but I really enjoy WazHack, and it works really nicely on a touchscreen-only device too (although it can be a little hard on a small screen), which is a big improvement over trying to play something keyboard-oriented with an on-screen keyboard. Although I tried a recent version of UnNetHack on my phone and found they'd made a lot of improvements to usability on a touchscreen-only device.
Whoever designed Metro should be forced to clean toilets at a truck stop for a living.
A more appropriate job might be forcing them to be hostage negotiators who can only communicate with large brightly-colored, but blank cards.
Oh, and they are the hostages themselves.
Microsoft putting Metro on Windows Server was the inspiration for /. Beta, dontchaknow?
I guess... if marriage is 'winning'.
It is for me. 21 years and counting. Very happy.
Just like everyone thinks they are the smartest one in the room. ...and it really annoys those of us who really are!
It is accepted (for certain values of accepted, YMMV) to use "data" as a singular word. I see one of the definitions of "data" as a synonym for "information". I'm as much of a grammar pedant as they come, but even I don't say, "data say".
The heated arguments here are always about data and empirical evidence and formal logic and the like.
As long as the topic isn't politics, or religion, or global warming, or vi vs. emacs, or Microsoft, or Apple, or pretty much everything else, then, yes, you're right.
Maybe he was smart enough to mount a scratch monkey the first time around. (Double entendres _not_ intentional!)
Congratulations, lgw. You've just identified the biggest reason we have been completely unable to reform practically _anything_ in the past half century, and it's getting worse at an increasing pace. The government is the only institution in which failure to make good use of resources is consistently rewarded with _more_ resources. Until we fix that problem... by establishing the kind of accountability that most people in the private world have (at least if you're not an executive) then we'll never make it better and things will keep getting worse until we all disappear down a bureaucratic black hole, by which I mean the economy will collapse and we will actually have the anarchy that mentally-defective AC accused me of supporting.