Especially when it comes to Office, whose help system is worse than useless because it makes you waste time expecting to find useful information that is never there. Nor is anything from a Microsoft site usually ever in the first few pages of a search for the info.
We already have a brainless government. Replacing it would be a good thing. Of course, not through suitcase nukes, but to be fair, the elections aren't doing an effective enough job. It would help if TV attack ads weren't the most influential political communication in the country.
And when I say "using Excel", I mean "using Excel and mailing equivocally named.xls[m] files all over creation" or if they are a step up from the IQ of a cabbage (say that of a radish), working off of a shared network drive.
I wouldn't touch.NET with a ten-foot pole, so you're not talking about me. I did serious Windows development in the pre-.NET days, and it was actually a pretty good time and platform to work in. Visual Studio 6 was a decent IDE even if the editor was archaic. Of course, MFC was a half-hearted and half-assed first draft of a library that was obviously written by a high school intern on a Friday afternoon in between foozball games, but I was able to turn it into something pretty useful because it was C++ and I could derive useful stuff from its bare-bones, do-nothing classes. I was very productive with it and wrote some really cool apps.
None of my employers or clients ever wanted to move past VS6 when the.NET stuff started coming out, which was fine by me, and the more I hear about.NET these days the less I want to use it.
Of course, I've been doing Linux work for the last 7 years, so I've lost what little interest I had in Windows development.
This is the truth. VB is just an archaic, crippled language. It really isn't that bad as long as you don't mind re-writing every library that comes with real programming languages. VBA, however, is the worst development platform I've ever used. Nothing else even comes close, although I can say I've never done Lotus Notes development. Microsoft even acknowledges this. They do NOT support VBA.
Any manager that allows VBA applications to be used should be summarily executed. Office itself is a nightmare, but it is possible to do some useful things with Excel, as long as you don't try to program it. Word on the other hand is so bad, it's not only unusable, it's literally ruined the concept of word processing. Everyone tries to copy it since Microsoft has a monopoly with Office, but it's a horrible, disorganized, unpredictable mess that violates practically every usability standard and convention as well as common sense itself.
It's the second worst piece of software I've ever used that wasn't designed for the "enterprise". The worst is Access. Enterprise software" is of course a euphemism for software that looks like it was designed in the 1970s, by angry, confused people who have never seen or used computers before, and runs almost as well as it looks. I have yet to use an "enterprise" application that wasn't like being kicked in the nuts with a jackhammer.
Actually, I don't think I've upgraded Windows since I put XP on my kids' Windows 98 computer about 8 years ago. The only reason I have Windows 7 is because I bought a computer with it. Windows 7 works fine for the most part... no reason to go back to XP, but if I were running XP I can't imagine having a reason to go to 7.
Actually I have one laptop with Windows 7 on which I run games, my netbook and desktop run Linux.
Well, in some cases, that can be good. In some cases, it's the best thing to do. For instance, web-based e-mail isn't such a bad thing (although I prefer using a native e-mail client).
In other cases, it's just sad. How many companies are still using Excel to handle order forms or customer data when they should be doing something web-based? You'd be surprised.
I can attest to that, and I consider anything that involves VB as a crime against humanity for that reason.
There's a reason you hire programmers to write programs and when half-assed tools are sold to allow non-programmers to attempt to do the same thing, the result is never good.
Well, the suckage started when the web got big. Everyone rushed to make their desktop apps look and work like web pages and real UI improvement ceased. 15 years later everyone is rushing to make UIs look like another much more limited environment: mobile devices.
I strongly suspect that we'll be hearing a lot more of it when Windows 8 comes out. Microsoft has nothing new to offer and hasn't for many years. OK, Kinect. But that's not relevant to desktop users.
The only reason I've ever had to upgrade a Microsoft OS is to support newer hardware. Now supporting new hardware is a really good thing. So are bug fixes and security fixes. The problem is that you get all this useless change and bloat that goes along with it.
This ALL-CAPS menu thing jumps the shark, even for Microsoft.
I prefer to make fun of Microsoft for making a big deal about features that Linux has had for years (or Unix has had for decades). It's no less work, but it's still fun.
It's funny, for me every single time WMP said it couldn't recognize the codec and asked if it should look online to download one, it never worked. Ever. Of course, I finally stopped even trying WMP years ago when it became obvious Microsoft's highest priority was seeing how ugly they could make it. Maybe it's better now, but I avoid using anything Microsoft, even when on Windows, whenever possible. And I only run Windows for easy access to games and few other apps.
You say that in a world where 99% of business users have Office installed, and Microsoft uses everything in their huge portfolio of evil to keep it that way?
I agree that the OSS community needs to make better software, and in many cases they already do. But you can't just compete with Microsoft on quality. They will crush you almost every time. Sure, Mozilla has driven IE from its once overwhelming market share, but that isn't slowing down the sales of Windows, or that thorn in the side of all that is good, Office.
I never used the mythical Zed-X. Are you telling me it had less than 16x16 resolution? That doesn't seem right.
The TRS-80 could do 128x48.
I first used Apple ][s and wrote a simple game... I think I have the source code printed out somewhere. Later at Virginia Tech in the fall of 1982, I discovered the computer lab in the library that had IBM PCs that only had monochrome cards and for a short while were still running DOS 1. A couple years later the PCs in the labs all had CGA capabilities. At the time I wrote a graphics editor using a hacked text mode with the block characters in the >128 range that you could use to draw in 16 colors (woo!) with a resolution of 160x100. Fun times.
It always amuses me when (U.S.) Americans are completely ignorant of British (and Canadian) spelling of words.
I once worked in a team of 4 developers and one day one of them was reading an article and commented "Hey, they spelled "organization" wrong. They used an 's'." I replied, "No, that just the British spelling." All three of my teammates were utterly amazed that I could know something like that, which itself was even more amazing to me.
I would comment that people should try reading books, but in fact, it occurs to me now that I probably read more non-American English on the web simply because it's so easy to access international content. e.g., A friend of mine here in Virginia blogs about U.S. politics for the Daily Mail.
Anyhow, it just amazes me that these kinds of things get complained about.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially when it comes to Office, whose help system is worse than useless because it makes you waste time expecting to find useful information that is never there. Nor is anything from a Microsoft site usually ever in the first few pages of a search for the info.
Yes, but breaking Lotus Notes is a good thing, on balance.
We already have a brainless government. Replacing it would be a good thing. Of course, not through suitcase nukes, but to be fair, the elections aren't doing an effective enough job. It would help if TV attack ads weren't the most influential political communication in the country.
The Constitution doesn't give you any rights. They are already yours. Its purpose is to prevent the government from taking those rights away.
If it weren't for unintended consequences, Congress would be of no consequence at all. Crippling them is the best thing that can happen.
And when I say "using Excel", I mean "using Excel and mailing equivocally named .xls[m] files all over creation" or if they are a step up from the IQ of a cabbage (say that of a radish), working off of a shared network drive.
I wouldn't touch .NET with a ten-foot pole, so you're not talking about me. I did serious Windows development in the pre-.NET days, and it was actually a pretty good time and platform to work in. Visual Studio 6 was a decent IDE even if the editor was archaic. Of course, MFC was a half-hearted and half-assed first draft of a library that was obviously written by a high school intern on a Friday afternoon in between foozball games, but I was able to turn it into something pretty useful because it was C++ and I could derive useful stuff from its bare-bones, do-nothing classes. I was very productive with it and wrote some really cool apps.
None of my employers or clients ever wanted to move past VS6 when the .NET stuff started coming out, which was fine by me, and the more I hear about .NET these days the less I want to use it.
Of course, I've been doing Linux work for the last 7 years, so I've lost what little interest I had in Windows development.
This is the truth. VB is just an archaic, crippled language. It really isn't that bad as long as you don't mind re-writing every library that comes with real programming languages. VBA, however, is the worst development platform I've ever used. Nothing else even comes close, although I can say I've never done Lotus Notes development. Microsoft even acknowledges this. They do NOT support VBA.
Any manager that allows VBA applications to be used should be summarily executed. Office itself is a nightmare, but it is possible to do some useful things with Excel, as long as you don't try to program it. Word on the other hand is so bad, it's not only unusable, it's literally ruined the concept of word processing. Everyone tries to copy it since Microsoft has a monopoly with Office, but it's a horrible, disorganized, unpredictable mess that violates practically every usability standard and convention as well as common sense itself.
It's the second worst piece of software I've ever used that wasn't designed for the "enterprise". The worst is Access. Enterprise software" is of course a euphemism for software that looks like it was designed in the 1970s, by angry, confused people who have never seen or used computers before, and runs almost as well as it looks. I have yet to use an "enterprise" application that wasn't like being kicked in the nuts with a jackhammer.
Actually, I don't think I've upgraded Windows since I put XP on my kids' Windows 98 computer about 8 years ago. The only reason I have Windows 7 is because I bought a computer with it. Windows 7 works fine for the most part... no reason to go back to XP, but if I were running XP I can't imagine having a reason to go to 7.
Actually I have one laptop with Windows 7 on which I run games, my netbook and desktop run Linux.
Well, in some cases, that can be good. In some cases, it's the best thing to do. For instance, web-based e-mail isn't such a bad thing (although I prefer using a native e-mail client).
In other cases, it's just sad. How many companies are still using Excel to handle order forms or customer data when they should be doing something web-based? You'd be surprised.
I can attest to that, and I consider anything that involves VB as a crime against humanity for that reason.
There's a reason you hire programmers to write programs and when half-assed tools are sold to allow non-programmers to attempt to do the same thing, the result is never good.
Well, the suckage started when the web got big. Everyone rushed to make their desktop apps look and work like web pages and real UI improvement ceased. 15 years later everyone is rushing to make UIs look like another much more limited environment: mobile devices.
Games are the only reason I run Windows.
Same here. And I hear that all the time.
I strongly suspect that we'll be hearing a lot more of it when Windows 8 comes out. Microsoft has nothing new to offer and hasn't for many years. OK, Kinect. But that's not relevant to desktop users.
The only reason I've ever had to upgrade a Microsoft OS is to support newer hardware. Now supporting new hardware is a really good thing. So are bug fixes and security fixes. The problem is that you get all this useless change and bloat that goes along with it.
This ALL-CAPS menu thing jumps the shark, even for Microsoft.
I have to say that I never thought I'd be applying the phrase "angry fruit salad" to a Microsoft UI, but Windows Phone/Metro is exactly that.
1997 called. It wants its complaint about Microsoft back.
We can safely assume you don't live in Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, or Italy, right?
I prefer to make fun of Microsoft for making a big deal about features that Linux has had for years (or Unix has had for decades). It's no less work, but it's still fun.
It's funny, for me every single time WMP said it couldn't recognize the codec and asked if it should look online to download one, it never worked. Ever. Of course, I finally stopped even trying WMP years ago when it became obvious Microsoft's highest priority was seeing how ugly they could make it. Maybe it's better now, but I avoid using anything Microsoft, even when on Windows, whenever possible. And I only run Windows for easy access to games and few other apps.
Let software stand on its own merits.
You say that in a world where 99% of business users have Office installed, and Microsoft uses everything in their huge portfolio of evil to keep it that way?
I agree that the OSS community needs to make better software, and in many cases they already do. But you can't just compete with Microsoft on quality. They will crush you almost every time. Sure, Mozilla has driven IE from its once overwhelming market share, but that isn't slowing down the sales of Windows, or that thorn in the side of all that is good, Office.
It was so cool when the original artists performed the parody.
I never used the mythical Zed-X. Are you telling me it had less than 16x16 resolution? That doesn't seem right.
The TRS-80 could do 128x48.
I first used Apple ][s and wrote a simple game... I think I have the source code printed out somewhere. Later at Virginia Tech in the fall of 1982, I discovered the computer lab in the library that had IBM PCs that only had monochrome cards and for a short while were still running DOS 1. A couple years later the PCs in the labs all had CGA capabilities. At the time I wrote a graphics editor using a hacked text mode with the block characters in the >128 range that you could use to draw in 16 colors (woo!) with a resolution of 160x100. Fun times.
It always amuses me when (U.S.) Americans are completely ignorant of British (and Canadian) spelling of words.
I once worked in a team of 4 developers and one day one of them was reading an article and commented "Hey, they spelled "organization" wrong. They used an 's'." I replied, "No, that just the British spelling." All three of my teammates were utterly amazed that I could know something like that, which itself was even more amazing to me.
I would comment that people should try reading books, but in fact, it occurs to me now that I probably read more non-American English on the web simply because it's so easy to access international content. e.g., A friend of mine here in Virginia blogs about U.S. politics for the Daily Mail.
Anyhow, it just amazes me that these kinds of things get complained about.
Don't laugh... in 10 to 20 years we might be doing just that.
Yeah, I'd feel sorry for poor Flick if he had to use an unheated toilet seat. Yikes!
There is tremendous waste, and yes, fraud, by military contractors but there are plenty of legitimate reasons why military hardware is so expensive.
You deserved a mod for following up your mistake with a good funny.