That's because--let's face it--the mine of the office productivity application has been emptied of its gold. It's gotten to the point where it's pretty damned difficult to screw up something like word processors and spreadsheets. The things have been around since nearly the beginning of the office PC and the wrinkles have been ironed out. What the hell more can a company add? Talking paperclips? Christ, if I were to put down a features table of the major office apps--MS Office, Star/Open Office, Wordperfect's bundle, and Lotus Smartsuite(does IBM even still sell it?)--you'd be hard pressed to find features in one that you can't find in another. Microsoft is milking the franchise; you know it, I know it, Microsoft knows it, and now their customers are starting to catch on to the fact that there are plenty of "just as good" applications out there for cheap, liscensed in such a way that you don't have to be a contract lawyer with 30 years experience to understand the terms. (How difficult is it to understand, "Oh, uhhh, yeah, it's free"?)
...but it involves Guido and Nunzio tracking down the extortionists and hitting them with baseball bats.
"Coming from Eastern Europe you say?" says Special Agent Buttbreath. "Too bad, so sad." You then make a call to your anti-extortion squad and they go to work for you.
Of course, this will take reaseach for the going rates in the country that the threats are coming from; if they want you to pay $10,000, you do $10,001 of bodily damage to them--it doesn't have to be on one person, spread it around to their families--kick their cats. Let them know that they're playing in the big leagues. If the authorities are unwilling, or unable, to do something about this, then the time for vigilantes to step up. Sure, you'll occationally start a war with the real Russian Mafia, but those are the chances you take when you get that MBA, my friends.
This post was only halfway flippant. Thugs need to find out that there are consequences to their actions, even if that action is hitting enter on a keyboard.
I don't use AOL, and I got (probably) the exact same e-mail. Curious, I followed the link and checked out what they wanted. If a person was naive (yes, there are plenty of naive people out there), then they'd fill out the secure form and the scammer would have their number; so my bet is we have an idiot scammer on our hands sending out their spam to non user@aol.com addresses rather than an idiot FBI special agent who's checking his personal e-mail while "on the clock."
Besides, L337 internet users bitching about the stupid aolers is passe.
Good thinking. Personally, I don't run anything unless the programmer has submitted a DNA sample. And that Java is nasty stuff, it sends thought rays from your hard disk and is the cause of all kinds of nefarious stuff, such as spam. What were those bastards at Sun thinking?!
Just because many of these problems are socialogical not technological doesn't mean they're not problems. People are not robots. People fuck up -- quite a bit actually. To you perfect people writing a reply to this boldly telling me that people shouldn't "fuck up", how many times did you have to use backspace in writing that response?
None T^Hthis tu^Hime. Backspav^Hce keys are fore^H sissys.
Tearoff menus have alwasy been in gnome2 (I think) but you have to use gconf-editor set enable.
The key is:/desktop/gnome/inferface/menus_have_tearoffs
Note that this will only effect gnome2 apps (I think). If your gnome1 apps have tearoff turned off you have to use the old gnome-cc to enable. Also, don't be afraid of gconf-editor, a good number of the so called "missing features" are still there!
But how inthe hell are people to know that these "missing features" are there?
This is one reason that you'll never see GNOME on the desktop other than on Unix geeks' boxes. Come on, people, you don't hear Microsoft advising you to fire up the registry editor to get useful features of *their* software to work. I can see it now: "Sure, if you want Word to support styles, just open up registry editor and find the/desktop/microsoftgarbage/office/word/features/eso teric_fuction/styles to PI."
Bullshit.
I know that programmers are proud of their lazyness, but this is ridiculous. (And when I say ridiculous, I mean deserving of ridicule.) If you don't want to code a dialog for options, then take the damned option out all together and get rid of some bloat instead of trying to blow smoke up my ass by telling me that it's there, but it's not there. If they wanted to hide features from novices they could have implemented something similar to the way Sawfish does it with Novice, Intermediate and Advanced features which are exposed with a drop down menu. (Of course I'm not sure Sawfish *still* does this because fuck if I can tell how to change my window manager away from Metacity--whose development philosophy seems to be "If I don't need this feature, then *you* don't need it.")
Had I known that GNOME 2.0 was going to be this much of a UI mess, I'd have just upgraded my kernel, rather than going with a virgin install. (Yes, UI mess. Consider that they rearranged the order of the buttons on some, but not all, of the dialogs, which in itself, is deserving of a FLOGGING.*) Maybe someone needs to tell them the obvious: When version numbers go up, the software is supposed to get BETTER and EASIER to use.
What really cheeses me is that GNOME 1.2 worked. Nautilus was slow as hell, but there were ways to get around that. My mime-types which I'd customized worked. No longer. The only thing which keeps me from logging in to a KDE desktop is that I like the look of GTK and that most of the software I use is GTK/GNOME based. What
And don't even get me going on how they fucked up the Panel...
*Don't believe me? Go to the Open File from Galeon and at the bottom you see two buttons: [OK][Cancel] now go to Nautilus and try the delete file function (you'll have to turn it on) and the confirm dialog has two buttons at the bottom: [Cancel][Delete] THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE.
I can't understand why you would complain about installing dependencies for a product that is still in development. How is software supposed to advance if we're always using v1 of libraries instead of v2?
Well considering how Gnome2 is a complete UI mess and isn't an improvement on version 1, I could see that part of his argument.
Of course my idea of "make them pay" is perhaps a bit different than the norm. I'm not talking about finding out who they are so they can face the swift hand justice, I'm more of the though of finding out who they so they can face teh swift baseball bats of Guido and Nunzio who, when they're done, break the spammers' fingers so they can no longer type out those emails telling me how easy it is to buy my Viagra.
Hell, I'd be willing to contribute to a fund which promised such results. I want my mailbox back and I'm tired of coming up with new regular expressions to make the spam go away.
I too faced with the same monster. I decided that in this day and age that life is too short to spend in a darkened cubicle. I've since turned to writing, and though success in that is just about the same as hitting the lottery, I find myself much more relaxed and... almost happy.
So my advice to you is to sit back, think "What sounds fun?" and make a go at that. What have you got to lose? It isn't like you can't go back when CS becomes interesting again. Just don't forget what you've learned, because that quest for knowledge wasn't in vain.
Of course I'm being facetious. In fact, I can't think of a stupider time to start laying off people. I swung by their website and dl'd the super-duper install program in the hopes of installing Nautilus, but the install program would get only so far into downloading packages and then segfault. Repeatedly. It's not like I'd be able to fix the install program, I couldn't find the sources to it in that maze they call a website.
`No problem,' I thought. `I can just download the rpm's and install them by hand!' Yeah. Right. I downloaded the rpm's they had listed on the Redhat 7.0 page; the links for some of which were just plain broken and I had to cut and paste from Mozilla and use wget and some editing of the URL's to get the packages.
This does NOT make for good first impressions.
That pages also informs me that I should make sure my GNOME is up to date, but I'll be damned if I can get ximian's damned install program to download. (http://go-gnome.com piped through/bin/sh *would* work, i'm sure, if the site weren't seemingly down. I don't blame the Ximian guys, hell who knows why their web server is unavailable.)
I'm just hoping these guys haven't laid off any of the web developers because they must realize that for a company which writes software mainly available on the WWW, the first thing a user is going to interact with is the web site. It doesn't matter if this application they're writing is going to change computing forever, bring about world peace and exile Bill Gates to the math departpment at Wassamatta U; if the UI of the website is braindead, that's doesn't say much for the applications the website's gatekeeping or or the support they're going to want to sell to the public.
I thought these people were supposed to be user interface wizards, or something. Quite frankly, I'm not impressed.
So they have a website which has broken links and an install program which chokes for no apparent reason. (Don't even let me go into the registration system which didn't work.)
Let me tell you, nothing pisses me off than wasting an afternoon running around in circles.
They're still made. You can get em new or do a search on ebay or some other auction site and get them on the cheap.
It's IBM part no: 1391401, but if you do your search for "clicky keyboard" you'll pull up all sorts of hits. I picked up two of them (one for me and one for my my dad) for ~$15 each.
The best part is they last forever and if you get them used, they don't have FULL SIZED space bar and none of those 'effin windows keys.
This is the only keyboard which has been able to withstand my fury (i.e. slamming my fist into it when things go wrong at my workstation), so you know they'll be able to withstand misuse, and if you get one of those rubber skins, you should be able to keep debris out, though I really doubt that would be a problem with this particular model!
I've been pondering this for a while. It's painfully obvious that law enforcement can't/won't do anything about this. As far as I'm concerned the way to take care of this is to do everything humanly possible to find out who has cracked/DoS'ed you and NOT report it. Instead, when you find out who it is go to their home and lay a beating on 'em.
If I were some pimply 15 year old, I'd be damned awful careful whom I'm pissing off if it were possible to actually get the crap beat out of me. Illegal? Very, but enough is enough. People need to know that there are consequences for their actions and that if you overstep certain bounds, you will actually pay a severe penalty.
It may sound rather Draconian, but once word got out that there are certain servers/networks out there whom you don't want to mess with if you want to keep all your teeth, things will get a bit quieter if they're not sure who'll get revenge on them.
If any of these networks don't want to be trespassed upon, they'll start to be a little less like nerdy Bill Gates and a little more like Charles Broson
Slashdot Mirror
That's because--let's face it--the mine of the office productivity application has been emptied of its gold. It's gotten to the point where it's pretty damned difficult to screw up something like word processors and spreadsheets. The things have been around since nearly the beginning of the office PC and the wrinkles have been ironed out. What the hell more can a company add? Talking paperclips? Christ, if I were to put down a features table of the major office apps--MS Office, Star/Open Office, Wordperfect's bundle, and Lotus Smartsuite(does IBM even still sell it?)--you'd be hard pressed to find features in one that you can't find in another. Microsoft is milking the franchise; you know it, I know it, Microsoft knows it, and now their customers are starting to catch on to the fact that there are plenty of "just as good" applications out there for cheap, liscensed in such a way that you don't have to be a contract lawyer with 30 years experience to understand the terms. (How difficult is it to understand, "Oh, uhhh, yeah, it's free"?)
Love,
Dave
Why bother? I pay $42/month for my broadband internet, and I expect to get *some* sort of cheap entertainment out of it--porn is expensive.
...but it involves Guido and Nunzio tracking down the extortionists and hitting them with baseball bats.
"Coming from Eastern Europe you say?" says Special Agent Buttbreath. "Too bad, so sad." You then make a call to your anti-extortion squad and they go to work for you.
Of course, this will take reaseach for the going rates in the country that the threats are coming from; if they want you to pay $10,000, you do $10,001 of bodily damage to them--it doesn't have to be on one person, spread it around to their families--kick their cats. Let them know that they're playing in the big leagues. If the authorities are unwilling, or unable, to do something about this, then the time for vigilantes to step up. Sure, you'll occationally start a war with the real Russian Mafia, but those are the chances you take when you get that MBA, my friends.
This post was only halfway flippant. Thugs need to find out that there are consequences to their actions, even if that action is hitting enter on a keyboard.
I don't use AOL, and I got (probably) the exact same e-mail. Curious, I followed the link and checked out what they wanted. If a person was naive (yes, there are plenty of naive people out there), then they'd fill out the secure form and the scammer would have their number; so my bet is we have an idiot scammer on our hands sending out their spam to non user@aol.com addresses rather than an idiot FBI special agent who's checking his personal e-mail while "on the clock."
Besides, L337 internet users bitching about the stupid aolers is passe.
If you're going to be poking about in Pandora's Box, you really shouldn't let the entire world know about it.
They're working on a way to shut that annoying "can you hear me now" guy up.
That's probably a good thing, considering it keeps weirdos like me from peeking in her bathroom window.
Good thinking. Personally, I don't run anything unless the programmer has submitted a DNA sample. And that Java is nasty stuff, it sends thought rays from your hard disk and is the cause of all kinds of nefarious stuff, such as spam. What were those bastards at Sun thinking?!
Just because many of these problems are socialogical not technological doesn't mean they're not problems. People are not robots. People fuck up -- quite a bit actually. To you perfect people writing a reply to this boldly telling me that people shouldn't "fuck up", how many times did you have to use backspace in writing that response?
None T^Hthis tu^Hime. Backspav^Hce keys are fore^H sissys.
When the robot tells you to bite its shiny, metal, ass, then it's safe to say that it'd be a bad idea to disassemble him...
"We do anything for a credit."
Why would your dog be associated with SCO in the first place? Is he a stockholder? Taht son of a bitch!
I don't see what's so funny about it, after I read the article (thank-you babelfish), I decided that I want one too.
No, wait.
I NEED one.
Mmmmmmmm beeeeeeeer.
The key is:
Note that this will only effect gnome2 apps (I think). If your gnome1 apps have tearoff turned off you have to use the old gnome-cc to enable. Also, don't be afraid of gconf-editor, a good number of the so called "missing features" are still there!
But how inthe hell are people to know that these "missing features" are there?
This is one reason that you'll never see GNOME on the desktop other than on Unix geeks' boxes. Come on, people, you don't hear Microsoft advising you to fire up the registry editor to get useful features of *their* software to work. I can see it now: "Sure, if you want Word to support styles, just open up registry editor and find the
Bullshit.
I know that programmers are proud of their lazyness, but this is ridiculous. (And when I say ridiculous, I mean deserving of ridicule.) If you don't want to code a dialog for options, then take the damned option out all together and get rid of some bloat instead of trying to blow smoke up my ass by telling me that it's there, but it's not there. If they wanted to hide features from novices they could have implemented something similar to the way Sawfish does it with Novice, Intermediate and Advanced features which are exposed with a drop down menu. (Of course I'm not sure Sawfish *still* does this because fuck if I can tell how to change my window manager away from Metacity--whose development philosophy seems to be "If I don't need this feature, then *you* don't need it.")
Had I known that GNOME 2.0 was going to be this much of a UI mess, I'd have just upgraded my kernel, rather than going with a virgin install. (Yes, UI mess. Consider that they rearranged the order of the buttons on some, but not all, of the dialogs, which in itself, is deserving of a FLOGGING.*) Maybe someone needs to tell them the obvious: When version numbers go up, the software is supposed to get BETTER and EASIER to use.
What really cheeses me is that GNOME 1.2 worked. Nautilus was slow as hell, but there were ways to get around that. My mime-types which I'd customized worked. No longer. The only thing which keeps me from logging in to a KDE desktop is that I like the look of GTK and that most of the software I use is GTK/GNOME based. What
And don't even get me going on how they fucked up the Panel...
*Don't believe me? Go to the Open File from Galeon and at the bottom you see two buttons: [OK][Cancel] now go to Nautilus and try the delete file function (you'll have to turn it on) and the confirm dialog has two buttons at the bottom: [Cancel][Delete] THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE.
Oh, wait, where am I again?
I can't understand why you would complain about installing dependencies for a product that is still in development. How is software supposed to advance if we're always using v1 of libraries instead of v2?
Well considering how Gnome2 is a complete UI mess and isn't an improvement on version 1, I could see that part of his argument.
I guess the real question is: What in the hell are those Germans hiding?
(I've not tried GNOME 2 yet, I confess.)
You're not missing much.
Of course my idea of "make them pay" is perhaps a bit different than the norm. I'm not talking about finding out who they are so they can face the swift hand justice, I'm more of the though of finding out who they so they can face teh swift baseball bats of Guido and Nunzio who, when they're done, break the spammers' fingers so they can no longer type out those emails telling me how easy it is to buy my Viagra.
Hell, I'd be willing to contribute to a fund which promised such results. I want my mailbox back and I'm tired of coming up with new regular expressions to make the spam go away.
So my advice to you is to sit back, think "What sounds fun?" and make a go at that. What have you got to lose? It isn't like you can't go back when CS becomes interesting again. Just don't forget what you've learned, because that quest for knowledge wasn't in vain.
Of course, then they'll probably figure out a way to override my picture in picture...
`No problem,' I thought. `I can just download the rpm's and install them by hand!' Yeah. Right. I downloaded the rpm's they had listed on the Redhat 7.0 page; the links for some of which were just plain broken and I had to cut and paste from Mozilla and use wget and some editing of the URL's to get the packages.
This does NOT make for good first impressions.
That pages also informs me that I should make sure my GNOME is up to date, but I'll be damned if I can get ximian's damned install program to download. (http://go-gnome.com piped through /bin/sh *would* work, i'm sure, if the site weren't seemingly down. I don't blame the Ximian guys, hell who knows why their web server is unavailable.)
I'm just hoping these guys haven't laid off any of the web developers because they must realize that for a company which writes software mainly available on the WWW, the first thing a user is going to interact with is the web site. It doesn't matter if this application they're writing is going to change computing forever, bring about world peace and exile Bill Gates to the math departpment at Wassamatta U; if the UI of the website is braindead, that's doesn't say much for the applications the website's gatekeeping or or the support they're going to want to sell to the public.
I thought these people were supposed to be user interface wizards, or something. Quite frankly, I'm not impressed.
So they have a website which has broken links and an install program which chokes for no apparent reason. (Don't even let me go into the registration system which didn't work.)
Let me tell you, nothing pisses me off than wasting an afternoon running around in circles.
It's IBM part no: 1391401, but if you do your search for "clicky keyboard" you'll pull up all sorts of hits. I picked up two of them (one for me and one for my my dad) for ~$15 each.
The best part is they last forever and if you get them used, they don't have FULL SIZED space bar and none of those 'effin windows keys.
This is the only keyboard which has been able to withstand my fury (i.e. slamming my fist into it when things go wrong at my workstation), so you know they'll be able to withstand misuse, and if you get one of those rubber skins, you should be able to keep debris out, though I really doubt that would be a problem with this particular model!
If I were some pimply 15 year old, I'd be damned awful careful whom I'm pissing off if it were possible to actually get the crap beat out of me. Illegal? Very, but enough is enough. People need to know that there are consequences for their actions and that if you overstep certain bounds, you will actually pay a severe penalty.
It may sound rather Draconian, but once word got out that there are certain servers/networks out there whom you don't want to mess with if you want to keep all your teeth, things will get a bit quieter if they're not sure who'll get revenge on them.
If any of these networks don't want to be trespassed upon, they'll start to be a little less like nerdy Bill Gates and a little more like Charles Broson
David Schmitz
http://www.ecsd.com/~david
Perhaps the Michigan Attorney General should be looking into this.
Dave