I think we should give Jackson a chance to actually _be_ George Lucas before we paint him with that dishonor. So far, we don't really know what he will be doing with 3 movies. I think it's grossly unfair to prejudge it based on nothing much more than a description of the length of the final product.
There were a few things about LoTR I really didn't like (especially how it treated Gimli primarily as comic relief), but that didn't stop me from thinking they were 3 superb movies. I'm willing to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt until I at least see the movies.
I'm with you Frank. I don't see where Jackson has earned a reputation as diluting something merely to make more money, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Rankin-Bass already made a children's movie out of "The Hobbit" and they did a fine job. I didn't even find out until many years later that they also did "Return of the King" to sort of being Bakshi's movie to a conclusion. That was a fine version as well.
I would say that if Peter Jackson had exhibited a history of trying to wring cash out of a franchise with new, but inferior material and unnecessary revisions (*cough*Lucas*cough*), and to my knowledge, that hasn't happened, has it?
You could only downgrade from Vista to XP if you had the Business version, and if you had the Business version, it was probably because it was provided to you by your employer, in which case you'd only be able to downgrade if the employer chose to do so.
I consider this one of Microsoft's finest moments in terms of appearing to cave in to customer demand but actually doing so in a way that did nothing for the vast majority of users who wanted it.
I have no doubts they will try to force Windows 8 on users as well, but they will have to be much more careful because they are in a less powerful position now. The fact that the Windows 8 upgrade price is going to be $40 means they are absolutely certain it will not be popular. If they didn't chose to drop the upgrade price on Vista, which was a steaming turd by anyone's standard, but they are for Windows 8, you know that 1.) They have no faith in their own product, and 2.) They have taken a huge blow and realize they can no longer afford to treat their customers with complete arrogance any more.
Slowly, but surely Microsoft is being humbled. It's been a long time coming and has a long way to go, but it's a good thing for the industry.
Didn't Bill Gates say you couldn't multitask in less than a meg of RAM, therefore the Amiga never existed. My Amiga 500 came with a half meg of RAM and it multitasked very nicely. But of course it didn't exist.
I also remember the first time I saw "It is now safe to shut down your computer." For some reason I thought that was the funniest computer message I'd ever seen.
Because autohide has been horribly broken since it was first introduced and has never gotten better. As with almost everything in Explorer, it just doesn't work.
In short, it inevitably stops autohiding. The only solution I've ever found, short of constantly turning it off and on again to reset it, is to use a third-party tool.
To me, the controversy about this particular constant is not so much that it would be offensive to women, although that's certainly the case, but that it's crude and unprofessional. There are plenty of ways to be crude and unprofessional that aren't offensive specifically to women. People shouldn't do those those kinds of things. Things don't have to offend you personally to still be offensive, and you don't have to be a member of the political correctness gestapo to want folks to hold a certain level of decorum in how they comport themselves.
As a woman in a field that skews very heavily male, this particular instance situation is made that much worse for you, and I sympathize with you, and agree with your complaints. You are 100% correct. But if, for some really contrived reason, this constant had been used in a situation such that it was completely impossible that a woman would never see it, that wouldn't make it any less unacceptable.
But the issue is a little more broad than just offending women (or a minority of some type), it goes more to the idea of just acting professionally.
Now, I feel slightly hypocritical making these comments because I am a big joker, and despite the fact that I would never intentionally try to offend someone while trying to be funny, I'm sure it's happened. Humor is almost always at least slightly risky, and while I cut people (or TV or movies) slack when they are trying to be funny, and much more so if they really are, I also don't see that as an excuse or a get-out-of-jail-free card when you do cross the line.
On the flip side, there will always be people that go out of their way to be offended at anything, and the only remedy for people like that is to continue to offend them until they go away. We live in a pluralistic society in the U.S.. It's literally built into our Constitution. To me, the person who has excessively thin skin is just as much a problem as, if not more than, the person who makes offensive jokes.
It's never a cut-and-dried situation, but it's also usually not so hard to comport yourself in a way that avoids unnecessarily offending people and in a way that generally allows you to get along with folks. That this constant was a bad idea is a no-brainer.
Well, see that's the problem. 90% of so-called "feminists" give the other 10% a bad name. Just because "feminism" has been subverted into some kind of liberal pseudo-religion that ties into just about every bad idea and philosophy that's been invented in the past two centuries doesn't mean that there isn't still real sexism in the workplace and in society in general.
It's kind of like the anti-abortion extremists who advocate (or worse, engage in) violence in support of their cause. They do more harm to their cause than they could ever understand.
The only thing you can do is try to treat people decently, and ignore the hypocrites and wild-eyed zealots and the people (and there are many of them) who are not fighting for equality, but for payback.
No, it absolutely isn't. Her point of view is to get people to treat each other decently. If you don't understand the difference then you have failed adulthood pretty egregiously.
Because if MS shipped an update that just had a few new features and bug fixes and didn't require a crapton of new training, etc, the PHB's of the world wouldn't recognize the value of the upgrade.
Why not just send an RTF file that opens transparently in Word, but doesn't shackle you with actually having to use it? I used LibreOffice to do this and then I can export it to any format I want. No muss, no fuss.
I've been doing this for years and never heard a complaint. If they ask for Word, I give them an RTF. Of course, the Word format is wholly inadequate for document exchange, but Office is a monopoly, so what are you going to do? On the other hand, if they don't specify, I send a PDF, which actually _is_ a document exchange format that 99.9% of office computers can read just as well.
Yes, I feel the same way, and yet most HR departments work like this.
More often than not they manage to achieve nothing more than being an incredibly effective barrier between good candidates and the hiring managers who actually know what to look for.
Being a software engineer means the OP has the foundation for understanding things a lot deeper than the average trainer, whose knowledge usually isn't much deeper than the content of the lessons themselves.
I'm not trying to say you fit that pattern, but in my experience most training isn't worth a tenth of the time it takes up because it's always geared towards the lowest common denominator, with trivial examples that never replicate the most obvious situations you'll find as soon as you actually try to use the thing (ditto for documentation, especially technical documentation).
I've been a professional developer for over 20 years, and I guarantee I could train users better than most so-called software trainers (again, making no assumptions about you). The fact that non-technical people have often sought me out for help over the years is a testament. And I don't need (or want) to give them technical information they neither want nor would likely understand, but I can definitely give them a big picture and context that most training and documentation never go near.
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I think we should give Jackson a chance to actually _be_ George Lucas before we paint him with that dishonor. So far, we don't really know what he will be doing with 3 movies. I think it's grossly unfair to prejudge it based on nothing much more than a description of the length of the final product.
There were a few things about LoTR I really didn't like (especially how it treated Gimli primarily as comic relief), but that didn't stop me from thinking they were 3 superb movies. I'm willing to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt until I at least see the movies.
Yeah, and Bletchley Park was in New Jersey. Alan Turing? He was from Brooklyn.
I'm with you Frank. I don't see where Jackson has earned a reputation as diluting something merely to make more money, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Actually, "The Lord of the Rings" was 6 distinct books, published in 3 volumes.
Rankin-Bass already made a children's movie out of "The Hobbit" and they did a fine job. I didn't even find out until many years later that they also did "Return of the King" to sort of being Bakshi's movie to a conclusion. That was a fine version as well.
I would say that if Peter Jackson had exhibited a history of trying to wring cash out of a franchise with new, but inferior material and unnecessary revisions (*cough*Lucas*cough*), and to my knowledge, that hasn't happened, has it?
Woodja woodja woo!
You could only downgrade from Vista to XP if you had the Business version, and if you had the Business version, it was probably because it was provided to you by your employer, in which case you'd only be able to downgrade if the employer chose to do so.
I consider this one of Microsoft's finest moments in terms of appearing to cave in to customer demand but actually doing so in a way that did nothing for the vast majority of users who wanted it.
I have no doubts they will try to force Windows 8 on users as well, but they will have to be much more careful because they are in a less powerful position now. The fact that the Windows 8 upgrade price is going to be $40 means they are absolutely certain it will not be popular. If they didn't chose to drop the upgrade price on Vista, which was a steaming turd by anyone's standard, but they are for Windows 8, you know that 1.) They have no faith in their own product, and 2.) They have taken a huge blow and realize they can no longer afford to treat their customers with complete arrogance any more.
Slowly, but surely Microsoft is being humbled. It's been a long time coming and has a long way to go, but it's a good thing for the industry.
And 17 years later, Explorer is still archaic and horrible.
Didn't Bill Gates say you couldn't multitask in less than a meg of RAM, therefore the Amiga never existed. My Amiga 500 came with a half meg of RAM and it multitasked very nicely. But of course it didn't exist.
I also remember the first time I saw "It is now safe to shut down your computer." For some reason I thought that was the funniest computer message I'd ever seen.
Because autohide has been horribly broken since it was first introduced and has never gotten better. As with almost everything in Explorer, it just doesn't work.
In short, it inevitably stops autohiding. The only solution I've ever found, short of constantly turning it off and on again to reset it, is to use a third-party tool.
Can't mod because I commented but this make me LOL.
To me, the controversy about this particular constant is not so much that it would be offensive to women, although that's certainly the case, but that it's crude and unprofessional. There are plenty of ways to be crude and unprofessional that aren't offensive specifically to women. People shouldn't do those those kinds of things. Things don't have to offend you personally to still be offensive, and you don't have to be a member of the political correctness gestapo to want folks to hold a certain level of decorum in how they comport themselves.
As a woman in a field that skews very heavily male, this particular instance situation is made that much worse for you, and I sympathize with you, and agree with your complaints. You are 100% correct. But if, for some really contrived reason, this constant had been used in a situation such that it was completely impossible that a woman would never see it, that wouldn't make it any less unacceptable.
But the issue is a little more broad than just offending women (or a minority of some type), it goes more to the idea of just acting professionally.
Now, I feel slightly hypocritical making these comments because I am a big joker, and despite the fact that I would never intentionally try to offend someone while trying to be funny, I'm sure it's happened. Humor is almost always at least slightly risky, and while I cut people (or TV or movies) slack when they are trying to be funny, and much more so if they really are, I also don't see that as an excuse or a get-out-of-jail-free card when you do cross the line.
On the flip side, there will always be people that go out of their way to be offended at anything, and the only remedy for people like that is to continue to offend them until they go away. We live in a pluralistic society in the U.S.. It's literally built into our Constitution. To me, the person who has excessively thin skin is just as much a problem as, if not more than, the person who makes offensive jokes.
It's never a cut-and-dried situation, but it's also usually not so hard to comport yourself in a way that avoids unnecessarily offending people and in a way that generally allows you to get along with folks. That this constant was a bad idea is a no-brainer.
Well, see that's the problem. 90% of so-called "feminists" give the other 10% a bad name. Just because "feminism" has been subverted into some kind of liberal pseudo-religion that ties into just about every bad idea and philosophy that's been invented in the past two centuries doesn't mean that there isn't still real sexism in the workplace and in society in general.
It's kind of like the anti-abortion extremists who advocate (or worse, engage in) violence in support of their cause. They do more harm to their cause than they could ever understand.
The only thing you can do is try to treat people decently, and ignore the hypocrites and wild-eyed zealots and the people (and there are many of them) who are not fighting for equality, but for payback.
No, it absolutely isn't. Her point of view is to get people to treat each other decently. If you don't understand the difference then you have failed adulthood pretty egregiously.
Because if MS shipped an update that just had a few new features and bug fixes and didn't require a crapton of new training, etc, the PHB's of the world wouldn't recognize the value of the upgrade.
You have a point, but this is yet another reason why HR is usually the biggest obstacle to effectively hiring the right people.
Why not just send an RTF file that opens transparently in Word, but doesn't shackle you with actually having to use it? I used LibreOffice to do this and then I can export it to any format I want. No muss, no fuss.
I've been doing this for years and never heard a complaint. If they ask for Word, I give them an RTF. Of course, the Word format is wholly inadequate for document exchange, but Office is a monopoly, so what are you going to do? On the other hand, if they don't specify, I send a PDF, which actually _is_ a document exchange format that 99.9% of office computers can read just as well.
Yes, I feel the same way, and yet most HR departments work like this.
More often than not they manage to achieve nothing more than being an incredibly effective barrier between good candidates and the hiring managers who actually know what to look for.
This is just one reason why HR is the biggest obstacle effective hiring. And it's been that way for a long time.
All of that is possible with PDF files, where's the problem?
Microsoft lock-in.
When recruiters ask for Word format, I send them an RTF file. I would never pollute my life by using Word. For everyone else, I send a PDF.
Office 97 was the last version that actually introduced anything most users would care about (minus broken backwards compatibility).
This is not something a sane, knowledgeable person would ever choose to do, so what does it matter?
Being a software engineer means the OP has the foundation for understanding things a lot deeper than the average trainer, whose knowledge usually isn't much deeper than the content of the lessons themselves.
I'm not trying to say you fit that pattern, but in my experience most training isn't worth a tenth of the time it takes up because it's always geared towards the lowest common denominator, with trivial examples that never replicate the most obvious situations you'll find as soon as you actually try to use the thing (ditto for documentation, especially technical documentation).
I've been a professional developer for over 20 years, and I guarantee I could train users better than most so-called software trainers (again, making no assumptions about you). The fact that non-technical people have often sought me out for help over the years is a testament. And I don't need (or want) to give them technical information they neither want nor would likely understand, but I can definitely give them a big picture and context that most training and documentation never go near.