I have spent my entire adult career since leaving university going into schools and removing / repurposing their RM junk to actually be a functional school network.
99.9% of the time that means wiping back the disks and starting from scratch without all their junky "network management" software (which I once used to crash an ENTIRE school network beyond recovery - as in we had to back out all the servers to a previous data and rebuild all the clients - by deploying an MSI package with a space in the filename).
I spent ten years doing that self-employed and made more money doing it than anything else. Then I got bored and frustrated at the situation and took an offer from a private school who - in the job interview - called RM "shit" and that they'd never touch them. Still there, and still have a lot less frustration, until I get reminders like the above posters who don't get what education *REALLY* needs (besides giving monopolies a kick up the bum) in terms of IT.
By supporting this bundle, I'm supporting people who apparently don't work in education to replicate well-catered-for sections of "educational software" (stretched to the largest definition), and encouraging them to produce more of the same.
Or I can just not, and do what I'm already doing, which is working for schools and writing not only similar educational software, but better stuff too (and hearing left, right and centre that the "educational software" on the mass market - e.g. app stores, etc. is a complete waste of time and money and the staff would rather keep their 20+ year old software running because it does the job better than any of the modern rubbish).
The problem is not the idea - it's the execution, and falls into the same trap that EVERYONE falls into: Education is simple and we can just knock something up that looks good and schools / parents will use it and do something positive for their kids with it.
I deal with it every day for everything from business computer equipment suppliers (who don't understand that we need things locked down and durable, not bog-standard office supplies) to pushy parents ("Why can't we just use iTunes on all the PC's?") to software companies trying to "break into" the market (e.g. "We've made a wonderful piece of whiteboard software that does X, Y and Z, none of which you'd ever use in a classroom environment but we think they look cool when giving an exhibition at BETT so they must be helping the kids get better" - the fact you can't network it, can't run without admin permissions, can't save to network shares, can't stop it trying to go on the Internet (sometimes using Internet Explorer no matter what settings you have), we don't have a site licence, and you have to upgrade Flash twice a day or it just bums out, etc. are overlooked and are apparently "coming soon").
And like all "educational" bundles, the actual educational value is near zero.
Colouring books, "mouse training" (because my 4-year-old has such trouble using a mouse, and it's not like she picked it up in seconds after being told to keep it on the desk), and then jump to mental arithmetic and sudoku-like games.
There are a million colouring book apps. There aren't a million mouse training apps because they will pick it up faster than you'll ever know and be more accurate and fast that you ever will (hell, even grannies get the hang of the mouse in the first ten minutes). There are a million sudoku-like games and, ignoring the jump in mental age required, their value in mathematically or even logical skills is virtually zero (either that, or they become impossible for younger kids to solve).
The only thing of use is the "make a presentation" thing but that's hardly educational or pedagogical.
I hate to advertise their products but have you SEEN proper educational software? 2Simple, RM Maths (Yeurch for the company, yay for THAT ONE PIECE of software), Sherston, etc. It's miles ahead of anything that you'll find even in GCompris or the Tux bundles of software.
Literally, the best open-source piece of educational software is TuxPaint, and that's a dire warning for the state of open-source or even free educational software. I, and the schools I work in, would give their right arms for a decent, rounded, consistent, graded piece of educational software with a decent learning curve, data recording, coverage of multiple subjects (not just basic arithmetic and colouring in).
Not being funny, but I've *written* better pieces of software for schools (within the past year even) - it's only the fact that they own the code, and that they are all similar things (e.g. times tables, etc.) that stops me sharing them. Their educational value is minimal. But we still pay thousands for site licenses for software made by BBC educational subsidiaries nearly 25 years ago.
All of which will happen in a fraction of a second if you don't have boot prompts enabled.
And all of which is nothing compared to the hoops that most system go through to get from switch-on to full operation on the CPU (real-> protected mode, etc.).
Yeah. Nice way to work around this horrendous locking-down technology and promoting openness of hardware and all software (from BIOS up). "Let's buy a key to their proprietary lock-in systems that they can revoke at any time."
Ah, yes, the Waitress/Teacher/Street Cleaner Imbalance.
If you're doing a good job, people generally won't bother to tell you. If you're doing a bad one, people will let you know.
That said, not receiving a SINGLE email for is sign of something - either you didn't do a proper consultation (and those people in favour didn't get the opportunity to reply) or people are vehemently against it. Either way, it means going back to the drawing board rather than pushing through with it.
That doesn't mean that's what will happen, though.
I predict that would work about as well as denying Linux use of BitKeeper.
All it would do is actually provide the incentive for someone to pump more work into nouveau rather than use something that "just works" but which has been taken away from them.
Yep. If you have to state it, it means that the people within the group don't know it, that it's reached a state where management of it is required, and where people outside the group would be expected not to know the motivation for the project. Otherwise you wouldn't need to state it.
It's nothing more than a company mission statement. Who cares about a company mission statement from, say, Google, or Microsoft, or your local bakery, or any company of any scale whatsoever apart from the people who write it? No-one.
When you've crossed from "we're writing some desktop environment software" to needing a manifesto, bureaucracy has taken over to the point where you've already lost sight of the goal.
Yeah. I'll bet they're not even using oxygen-free SATA cables either.
Who cares what they store it on? What's important is it adequately checked for consistency, and what are the backups like. Everything else is detail.
Guess what. Google bought off-the-shelf computer gear for years and some datacentres run things without "datacentre grade" cooling. They don't suffer because a) they do it properly (i.e. not RELY on those drives to never fail) and b) nobody notices because the service is still more than good enough.
"Enterprise"-grade drives are just warrantied for longer. It doesn't mean they won't die just as quickly. Like "RAID"-grade drives - same drive as every other one on the production lines.
It's like saying you can't use Intel Mobile chips in a datacenter. It might not be your first choice, but provided they fulfil all their service obligations (which includes response times, failover, etc.) then who notices and who cares?
Every single server I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Every single desktop I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Failures are actually FAR BELOW any stated MTBF and, who cares, because it takes seconds to replace and DOES NOT AFFECT THE OVERALL SERVICE for the user. And no-one I've worked for has ever lost data because of a drive failure. Ever. Even when servers have all but caught fire.
I'm gonna sue any anti-spam filter - because they ALL read the emails I've sent to other people who use them, without my permission, and may be targeting ads based on that.
And every antivirus software that integrates into Outlook.
And everything that might conceivably view the content of an email en-route (e.g. intermediate mail servers).
If the recipient chooses to use such software - that's up to them. If you send an email to them and they have agreed for Google to receive it on their behalf with their permission to read it, then that's not Google's problem.
It's like suing a courier firm that someone sent to your door to pick up a parcel, because they looked inside the package and the recipient that nominated the courier firm allowed them to.
"We all know people who are suffering terribly due to the economic crises."
I can't actually name a person who I personally know who has been affected by the economic crisis, on average, more than would have happened by chance anyway. I can name someone who lost their job and was offered a replacement - but they worked in libraries that have been scheduled to close for decades, and they moved 400 miles in between jobs to a very rural area, so their present situation is more related to that.
I have Italian friends (supposedly "the next big country to go") - don't know any of them where the economic situation has changed their life for the worse. Actually, the opposite (promotions, more work etc.) and they gave my Italian girlfriend a lot of money to help buy a house. Incidentally, she's been taken on by a hospital as permanent staff to supplement those already there (she's been doing the job for years on a contract basis, and now she's staff).
In fact, even in my work, we now hire more staff than we did before the "crisis", on longer basis, more hours, more pay (and now they get a new pension on top, by law!). We had a few people retire, one left due to work circumstances that they didn't agree with (nothing to do with pay, hours, or anything like that) and the replacements outnumber them by quite a few. I've had a raise every year (at least) for the last four years.
The situation is pretty much the same throughout my family (one of whom is an electrician and I've never seen anyone go on quite so many holidays abroad as they have recently), my friends, etc. from delivery drivers to electricians to builders to teachers to management to trained professionals to medical staff.
Personally, I think the "economic crisis" was much shorter-lived than people would have you think. Sure they'll be some people who lost their jobs, even companies that shed thousands of workers, but nothing out of the ordinary when taken as a whole. Unemployment in my country is "the highest since 2004" or something ridiculous (so, in fact, not as high as it's been historically, not as high was it was before the crisis, etc.).
(Meanwhile banks still aren't offering loans, mortgages etc. even though they're being given billions to do so. It all seems strangely fishy to me. Which actually stops people going into debt, though, and is better for the country actually even if I keep being told that the economy is faltering because nobody is spending, buying houses, etc.)
The "economic crisis" was nothing more than a short-lived blip. It started in 2008. That's far enough ago that there's still traces of its effects in some ledgers somewhere but not far enough away that people can't have carried on with their lives by now and not blame everything on 2008.
Perhaps that's what people did, even if it's a convenient excuse why they can't pay a bill or why they lost their job (which, on average, they probably would have by now anyway). Perhaps people just carried on regardless and didn't get into scrimping and saving as much as we're led to believe.
Or: The one thing we don't sacrifice in an economic downturn are simple home comforts like warmth / cooling, but instead install poxy energy-saving lightbulbs that contribute next to NOTHING towards energy savings as a whole.
Nobody realises how to save energy properly and/or doesn't understand that their kettle pulls more power in the 2 minutes it's on than the lightbulb does all day long.
Or maybe we did cut back on energy use and those emissions came from somewhere else (e.g. people burning wood instead of paying for electricity to heat their homes).
Or maybe people know that they spent X amount on energy last year and intend to only spend X on it this year too so they know what they are paying by the end of the year.
Or maybe the "economic crisis" wasn't that much of a crisis at all, averaged over the entire populace.
Or maybe human home emissions have little relevance to global greenhouse gas emissions.
Or maybe there's a billion reasons.
Personally, the options for me get more likely towards the end of my list.
Why would you want a fast plane nowadays? All it will do is burn fuel and cost so much you'll be afraid to deploy it. There were 32 SR-71's, for example, and 12 were lost in accidents. That's a pretty expensive cost for... what? To get to the Middle East slightly quicker?
Blackbird is likely to remain the fastest plane for a long time, like the fastest horse-drawn carriage that ever existed. Nobody's going to splash that amount of cash to go in a circle at great expense when that same money would buy satellite constellations, ICBM's, sacrificial drone aircraft, or any number of other more useful things.
Speed isn't the only statistic when it comes to military aircraft.
Actually, as a tech guy, I rarely have to use the desktop installs I roll out except for internal testing. That's the user's job.
And although we can all USE the new interfaces, they are diabolical to some of us to use every day for every program you run. Most users barely run a program or two each session. I have twenty open now and I'm winding down for the end of the day (I work in schools).
I've lost count of how many times I've had to say to someone "I don't know, I never use that program, I'll find out". I might install it, support it, maintain it, debug it, deploy it, patch it and get it running on machines it's never supposed to. But I probably don't USE that program in my daily life very much at all (e.g. the finance programs, school reporting programs, etc.). That's for the users, for whom I can answer any problem if absolutely necessary (even if it means struggling against UI's and even personal user options that I hate) and can source external training for if need be.
But the fact is that in my daily life, the new UI costs me time compared to the 20+ critical systems set up to use a much more basic and consistent UI than that Metro junk that DOESN'T try to tell me how I should work.
God, I can't even use some people's desktop layouts or wallpapers they are so horrendous. It doesn't mean I don't support them and/or that I must use them myself on the servers and my own machines.
I have yet to ever "learn" to use an OS before it's been out for a year or so. Hell, I've deployed and supported Windows 7 machines for years - and still my first personal machine with it on was this September. What *I* use has absolutely no correlation to what my *users* use, which has absolutely no correlation to what I support (which is much vaster in scope and more in-depth than any of them will ever touch - in comparison, a tricky way to start programs is the least of my problems, but one that's easily solvable when it does crop up by deploying Classic Shell, for instance).
The new Windows 8 install we have planned for next summer? Guess what's loaded on it, and we haven't even seen the full OS out in circulation yet.
Quite funny - it took me only three weeks to BSOD brand-new, recent, fully-patched installs of Windows 7 and Windows 8 RTM's without installing a single unsigned driver, a single dodgy app, doing anything vaguely stupid (i.e. trashing random memory using a C compiler or whatever).
Once, it crashed because I right-clicked on a CD ROM drive. That was it. I performed no other action, nothing else unusual was running.
The fact is that the BSOD should be as rare as a kernel panic in all non-hardware failures. It's not. Even on the new OS, or fully patched ones.
If it's just friends and family watching it, why bother uploading it to YouTube and suffering through that process?
Stick it on your personal website, link to have, finished. Hell, if I were in an indie band, that's what I'd do and let other people suffer the hassle of trying to post it onto YouTube etc.
What you're complaining about is YouTube making sure it's not liable for videos you've posted and the time it takes to verify probably thousands of cases a day where someone says something infringes and actually doesn't.
If it's in your way - go around it. Hell, the size of the free web hosting offerings nowadays, nobody would even notice the impact of a few dozen large videos on them if you wanted to use them in preference to YouTube.
Slashdot Mirror
I have spent my entire adult career since leaving university going into schools and removing / repurposing their RM junk to actually be a functional school network.
99.9% of the time that means wiping back the disks and starting from scratch without all their junky "network management" software (which I once used to crash an ENTIRE school network beyond recovery - as in we had to back out all the servers to a previous data and rebuild all the clients - by deploying an MSI package with a space in the filename).
I spent ten years doing that self-employed and made more money doing it than anything else. Then I got bored and frustrated at the situation and took an offer from a private school who - in the job interview - called RM "shit" and that they'd never touch them. Still there, and still have a lot less frustration, until I get reminders like the above posters who don't get what education *REALLY* needs (besides giving monopolies a kick up the bum) in terms of IT.
By supporting this bundle, I'm supporting people who apparently don't work in education to replicate well-catered-for sections of "educational software" (stretched to the largest definition), and encouraging them to produce more of the same.
Or I can just not, and do what I'm already doing, which is working for schools and writing not only similar educational software, but better stuff too (and hearing left, right and centre that the "educational software" on the mass market - e.g. app stores, etc. is a complete waste of time and money and the staff would rather keep their 20+ year old software running because it does the job better than any of the modern rubbish).
The problem is not the idea - it's the execution, and falls into the same trap that EVERYONE falls into: Education is simple and we can just knock something up that looks good and schools / parents will use it and do something positive for their kids with it.
I deal with it every day for everything from business computer equipment suppliers (who don't understand that we need things locked down and durable, not bog-standard office supplies) to pushy parents ("Why can't we just use iTunes on all the PC's?") to software companies trying to "break into" the market (e.g. "We've made a wonderful piece of whiteboard software that does X, Y and Z, none of which you'd ever use in a classroom environment but we think they look cool when giving an exhibition at BETT so they must be helping the kids get better" - the fact you can't network it, can't run without admin permissions, can't save to network shares, can't stop it trying to go on the Internet (sometimes using Internet Explorer no matter what settings you have), we don't have a site licence, and you have to upgrade Flash twice a day or it just bums out, etc. are overlooked and are apparently "coming soon").
And like all "educational" bundles, the actual educational value is near zero.
Colouring books, "mouse training" (because my 4-year-old has such trouble using a mouse, and it's not like she picked it up in seconds after being told to keep it on the desk), and then jump to mental arithmetic and sudoku-like games.
There are a million colouring book apps. There aren't a million mouse training apps because they will pick it up faster than you'll ever know and be more accurate and fast that you ever will (hell, even grannies get the hang of the mouse in the first ten minutes). There are a million sudoku-like games and, ignoring the jump in mental age required, their value in mathematically or even logical skills is virtually zero (either that, or they become impossible for younger kids to solve).
The only thing of use is the "make a presentation" thing but that's hardly educational or pedagogical.
I hate to advertise their products but have you SEEN proper educational software? 2Simple, RM Maths (Yeurch for the company, yay for THAT ONE PIECE of software), Sherston, etc. It's miles ahead of anything that you'll find even in GCompris or the Tux bundles of software.
Literally, the best open-source piece of educational software is TuxPaint, and that's a dire warning for the state of open-source or even free educational software. I, and the schools I work in, would give their right arms for a decent, rounded, consistent, graded piece of educational software with a decent learning curve, data recording, coverage of multiple subjects (not just basic arithmetic and colouring in).
Not being funny, but I've *written* better pieces of software for schools (within the past year even) - it's only the fact that they own the code, and that they are all similar things (e.g. times tables, etc.) that stops me sharing them. Their educational value is minimal. But we still pay thousands for site licenses for software made by BBC educational subsidiaries nearly 25 years ago.
All of which will happen in a fraction of a second if you don't have boot prompts enabled.
And all of which is nothing compared to the hoops that most system go through to get from switch-on to full operation on the CPU (real-> protected mode, etc.).
Every time it CHANGES. RTFA properly.
By buying a key from Microsoft.
Yeah. Nice way to work around this horrendous locking-down technology and promoting openness of hardware and all software (from BIOS up). "Let's buy a key to their proprietary lock-in systems that they can revoke at any time."
If it doesn't look like the Power Loader out of Aliens, I'm not interested.
Imagine going to the shops in one of those. "Would you like us to help you load your car?" "No, thanks. I think I have this."
Ah, yes, the Waitress/Teacher/Street Cleaner Imbalance.
If you're doing a good job, people generally won't bother to tell you.
If you're doing a bad one, people will let you know.
That said, not receiving a SINGLE email for is sign of something - either you didn't do a proper consultation (and those people in favour didn't get the opportunity to reply) or people are vehemently against it. Either way, it means going back to the drawing board rather than pushing through with it.
That doesn't mean that's what will happen, though.
I predict that would work about as well as denying Linux use of BitKeeper.
All it would do is actually provide the incentive for someone to pump more work into nouveau rather than use something that "just works" but which has been taken away from them.
Actually, it was 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Schweitzer
And it's been pretty discredited since then.
If all else fails, Google these things and look for the magic words: Consensus between independent researchers with respectable backgrounds.
Without that, nothing means anything. Just this woman career path and the subjects of her official qualifications are enough to worry me.
Surprise? There is none.
Microhard.
Microserve. (that one would almost work phonetically too if you went for "Microserved").
Yep. If you have to state it, it means that the people within the group don't know it, that it's reached a state where management of it is required, and where people outside the group would be expected not to know the motivation for the project. Otherwise you wouldn't need to state it.
It's nothing more than a company mission statement. Who cares about a company mission statement from, say, Google, or Microsoft, or your local bakery, or any company of any scale whatsoever apart from the people who write it? No-one.
When you've crossed from "we're writing some desktop environment software" to needing a manifesto, bureaucracy has taken over to the point where you've already lost sight of the goal.
I was just thinking to myself:
How much code could have been written for the same amount of effort as this piece of content-less puffery?
Yeah, the clue is pretty much in the (now apparently forgotten) original meaning of RAID.
"Inexpensive" disks.
Yeah. I'll bet they're not even using oxygen-free SATA cables either.
Who cares what they store it on? What's important is it adequately checked for consistency, and what are the backups like. Everything else is detail.
Guess what. Google bought off-the-shelf computer gear for years and some datacentres run things without "datacentre grade" cooling. They don't suffer because a) they do it properly (i.e. not RELY on those drives to never fail) and b) nobody notices because the service is still more than good enough.
"Enterprise"-grade drives are just warrantied for longer. It doesn't mean they won't die just as quickly. Like "RAID"-grade drives - same drive as every other one on the production lines.
It's like saying you can't use Intel Mobile chips in a datacenter. It might not be your first choice, but provided they fulfil all their service obligations (which includes response times, failover, etc.) then who notices and who cares?
Every single server I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Every single desktop I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Failures are actually FAR BELOW any stated MTBF and, who cares, because it takes seconds to replace and DOES NOT AFFECT THE OVERALL SERVICE for the user. And no-one I've worked for has ever lost data because of a drive failure. Ever. Even when servers have all but caught fire.
I'm gonna sue any anti-spam filter - because they ALL read the emails I've sent to other people who use them, without my permission, and may be targeting ads based on that.
And every antivirus software that integrates into Outlook.
And everything that might conceivably view the content of an email en-route (e.g. intermediate mail servers).
If the recipient chooses to use such software - that's up to them. If you send an email to them and they have agreed for Google to receive it on their behalf with their permission to read it, then that's not Google's problem.
It's like suing a courier firm that someone sent to your door to pick up a parcel, because they looked inside the package and the recipient that nominated the courier firm allowed them to.
"Maps will get better with time"
Customer's tempers won't.
"We all know people who are suffering terribly due to the economic crises."
I can't actually name a person who I personally know who has been affected by the economic crisis, on average, more than would have happened by chance anyway. I can name someone who lost their job and was offered a replacement - but they worked in libraries that have been scheduled to close for decades, and they moved 400 miles in between jobs to a very rural area, so their present situation is more related to that.
I have Italian friends (supposedly "the next big country to go") - don't know any of them where the economic situation has changed their life for the worse. Actually, the opposite (promotions, more work etc.) and they gave my Italian girlfriend a lot of money to help buy a house. Incidentally, she's been taken on by a hospital as permanent staff to supplement those already there (she's been doing the job for years on a contract basis, and now she's staff).
In fact, even in my work, we now hire more staff than we did before the "crisis", on longer basis, more hours, more pay (and now they get a new pension on top, by law!). We had a few people retire, one left due to work circumstances that they didn't agree with (nothing to do with pay, hours, or anything like that) and the replacements outnumber them by quite a few. I've had a raise every year (at least) for the last four years.
The situation is pretty much the same throughout my family (one of whom is an electrician and I've never seen anyone go on quite so many holidays abroad as they have recently), my friends, etc. from delivery drivers to electricians to builders to teachers to management to trained professionals to medical staff.
Personally, I think the "economic crisis" was much shorter-lived than people would have you think. Sure they'll be some people who lost their jobs, even companies that shed thousands of workers, but nothing out of the ordinary when taken as a whole. Unemployment in my country is "the highest since 2004" or something ridiculous (so, in fact, not as high as it's been historically, not as high was it was before the crisis, etc.).
(Meanwhile banks still aren't offering loans, mortgages etc. even though they're being given billions to do so. It all seems strangely fishy to me. Which actually stops people going into debt, though, and is better for the country actually even if I keep being told that the economy is faltering because nobody is spending, buying houses, etc.)
The "economic crisis" was nothing more than a short-lived blip. It started in 2008. That's far enough ago that there's still traces of its effects in some ledgers somewhere but not far enough away that people can't have carried on with their lives by now and not blame everything on 2008.
Perhaps that's what people did, even if it's a convenient excuse why they can't pay a bill or why they lost their job (which, on average, they probably would have by now anyway). Perhaps people just carried on regardless and didn't get into scrimping and saving as much as we're led to believe.
Rate presumably = speed of change.
Thus the emissions dropped more quickly than when they had risen originally.
Or: The one thing we don't sacrifice in an economic downturn are simple home comforts like warmth / cooling, but instead install poxy energy-saving lightbulbs that contribute next to NOTHING towards energy savings as a whole.
Nobody realises how to save energy properly and/or doesn't understand that their kettle pulls more power in the 2 minutes it's on than the lightbulb does all day long.
Or maybe we did cut back on energy use and those emissions came from somewhere else (e.g. people burning wood instead of paying for electricity to heat their homes).
Or maybe people know that they spent X amount on energy last year and intend to only spend X on it this year too so they know what they are paying by the end of the year.
Or maybe the "economic crisis" wasn't that much of a crisis at all, averaged over the entire populace.
Or maybe human home emissions have little relevance to global greenhouse gas emissions.
Or maybe there's a billion reasons.
Personally, the options for me get more likely towards the end of my list.
Why would you want a fast plane nowadays? All it will do is burn fuel and cost so much you'll be afraid to deploy it. There were 32 SR-71's, for example, and 12 were lost in accidents. That's a pretty expensive cost for ... what? To get to the Middle East slightly quicker?
Blackbird is likely to remain the fastest plane for a long time, like the fastest horse-drawn carriage that ever existed. Nobody's going to splash that amount of cash to go in a circle at great expense when that same money would buy satellite constellations, ICBM's, sacrificial drone aircraft, or any number of other more useful things.
Speed isn't the only statistic when it comes to military aircraft.
Actually, as a tech guy, I rarely have to use the desktop installs I roll out except for internal testing. That's the user's job.
And although we can all USE the new interfaces, they are diabolical to some of us to use every day for every program you run. Most users barely run a program or two each session. I have twenty open now and I'm winding down for the end of the day (I work in schools).
I've lost count of how many times I've had to say to someone "I don't know, I never use that program, I'll find out". I might install it, support it, maintain it, debug it, deploy it, patch it and get it running on machines it's never supposed to. But I probably don't USE that program in my daily life very much at all (e.g. the finance programs, school reporting programs, etc.). That's for the users, for whom I can answer any problem if absolutely necessary (even if it means struggling against UI's and even personal user options that I hate) and can source external training for if need be.
But the fact is that in my daily life, the new UI costs me time compared to the 20+ critical systems set up to use a much more basic and consistent UI than that Metro junk that DOESN'T try to tell me how I should work.
God, I can't even use some people's desktop layouts or wallpapers they are so horrendous. It doesn't mean I don't support them and/or that I must use them myself on the servers and my own machines.
I have yet to ever "learn" to use an OS before it's been out for a year or so. Hell, I've deployed and supported Windows 7 machines for years - and still my first personal machine with it on was this September. What *I* use has absolutely no correlation to what my *users* use, which has absolutely no correlation to what I support (which is much vaster in scope and more in-depth than any of them will ever touch - in comparison, a tricky way to start programs is the least of my problems, but one that's easily solvable when it does crop up by deploying Classic Shell, for instance).
The new Windows 8 install we have planned for next summer? Guess what's loaded on it, and we haven't even seen the full OS out in circulation yet.
Quite funny - it took me only three weeks to BSOD brand-new, recent, fully-patched installs of Windows 7 and Windows 8 RTM's without installing a single unsigned driver, a single dodgy app, doing anything vaguely stupid (i.e. trashing random memory using a C compiler or whatever).
Once, it crashed because I right-clicked on a CD ROM drive. That was it. I performed no other action, nothing else unusual was running.
The fact is that the BSOD should be as rare as a kernel panic in all non-hardware failures. It's not. Even on the new OS, or fully patched ones.
If it's just friends and family watching it, why bother uploading it to YouTube and suffering through that process?
Stick it on your personal website, link to have, finished. Hell, if I were in an indie band, that's what I'd do and let other people suffer the hassle of trying to post it onto YouTube etc.
What you're complaining about is YouTube making sure it's not liable for videos you've posted and the time it takes to verify probably thousands of cases a day where someone says something infringes and actually doesn't.
If it's in your way - go around it. Hell, the size of the free web hosting offerings nowadays, nobody would even notice the impact of a few dozen large videos on them if you wanted to use them in preference to YouTube.