...but wouldn't it have been more accurate to suggest they're asking sci-fi writers to sell their soul to the devil? I mean I don't know what to do when the headline isn't sensationalist on/. - something's wrong...it's started.....common sense....it's taken over the Internet! Red alert!
...and what happened to Google's "Do no evil" slogan?
Then again these days Firefox itself pretty much forces you to update if you want to easily install extensions. What is with forcing people to download the plugins at install time? Last time I checked there was a plugin that allowed you to download to install later. That makes no sense. Why do I need a plugin to do this???
I use to have a stable browser with 1.0. With 1.5 and 2.0 I often have to restart the thing if I open lots of tabs and some of the pages don't respond, otherwise anything new I try to open doesn't respond. Firefox is still the best browser around at the moment, but it started off with so much more promise. It's become a bit of a pain to use as I've gotten use to the features (and other browsers have caught up), yet Firefox has gotten buggier.
The users don't care about new features, nor is organizing the logistics of your support work their problem. Nor should they care about these things. That's what YOU are paid for. If you're getting in the way of them doing their job they are right to complain. Instead of seeing them as the enemy if you really couldn't do it you need to explain clearly and in very simply terms why you couldn't. It'd have to be one heck of an explanation if they had the old version of office before and can't have it now.
I cannot stand system administrators who fall back on the short sighted argument that they're not there for the benefit of the users, but rather for the organisation. If your users are inconvenienced or upset it will affect their performance and therefore the organization. In other words if you hurt the user your hurt the organization. The fact that you don't understand this speaks volumes for your level of professionalism and maturity.
Furthermore falling back on the "do you do my job" is further evidence of a lack of maturity. I'm also not a brain surgeon but if a brain surgeon bolloxed up an operation on me or mine I'd still have something to say about it.
Your analogy is also weak. Simple tools like welders are generally very similar to operate, and don't take much time to get use to. A change in a teacher's version of Office - particularly to 2007 with it's new interface - may actually break functionality or workflow they built or learnt years ago.
The solution is that you have to get them to grow up more quickly to deal with that flood of info that you can't stem. Yes that does mean they lose their "innocence" sooner. You can't have innocence without ignorance.
Unfortunately the trend is for the opposite. We shelter and shield "children" into their late 20s, then wonder why they can't make adult decisions.
All monitoring should be open and honest. The child needs to be taught why they need to do something a certain way, and that why needs to be something other than you yelling or punishing.
I think you can definitely be friends with a child while still maintaining the authority of parenthood. The key is to do what you believe is the right thing for them rather than what you want or what the child wants.
So that means when I have a problem with an aircraft requiring a service, I should go find an auto mechanic?
The guy's job was obviously to look at the performance of the system and help users out when they had problems. They might be IT users, but system performance isn't their area. In this context they are end users even if they are also programmers. They just aren't specialists in what this guy does, and it's not their job to do his specialised job on top of theirs.
Trust/. to mod me as troll for saying this. Right here, THIS is the reason why Linux isn't on every fucking destkop. Idiotic.
What these teachers were trying to tell you was that they wanted what they were use to, and what they'd already spent their own time and effort learning. First you gave them a version that was different, had no technical advantages and isn't the equal of what they had in the first place. Then you let Microsoft talk you into giving then a totally different version of Office that they'd have to re-learn, and that is less mature and stable. Clearly what they wanted was what they had in the first place. These teachers weren't the problem at all, you didn't listen. You could "win" with them just by buying them licenses for what they were already using, and not trying to force your choices or Microsoft's upon them. You demonstrate an unfortunate and classic problem with Linux evangelists: A complete inability to understand or care about an end user's point of view.
Auto update is an evil stupid and dangerous idea for everything but critical security patches. You never know when the latest and greatest bleeding edge version is going to break something else, or break your workflow (sometimes even by design!). Yes I know about minor revisions and stable vs unstable, but that doesn't mean you don't get bugs. The typical end user (and many time-poor IT professionals) don't have the time to understand what the changes are in an update. Most people just want their computer to work today like it did yesterday, and if they want an improvement they're willing to go out and download it.
Come on now, you don't really think that many Windows users have the knowledge or patience to select which updates they want to use do you? They either update the lot or they don't do updates (usually because they got bitten updating the lot at one time or other). If they use a particular app and it nags them to update they may do so. Likewise if someone they know got a cool new feature out of updating a particular app, they may be inclinded to hit update now or go to the trouble of downloading a patch.
Present them with a list of 30 apps to update and they'll either hit treat it as one update. The more choices you present to the user just to admin the box (rather than get what they want done). They aren't interested in the finer points of computing or security. They want to get a job done or have some fun and the computer is a tool they want to use. Even IT professionals often don't have the time to work out if the latest version of something is going to break their workflow or if they're going to hit a bug. I know I learnt the hard way never to attempt to upgrade a Linux installation between major versions. Auto-update is a stupid stupid idea for all but the most critical security updates.
YOU are the IT expert, not the end user. If they're not following instructions you're suppose to help them, not hang them out to dry or make them an object of ridicule. You have the professionalism and people skills of a grizzly bear.
'[G]enerosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.
Save time, be more efficient. Eat and have sex instead of giving to charity. Then when someone tells you "you don't give a fuck" you reply with "well actually..."
You're a dangerous twit. Things other than your precious parameter may have affected performance, and the differences your users were seeing may have been due to other factors. Instead you focused their attention on a non-variable and dismissed any actual differences they saw. This was an opportunity to work out what else they were doing differently which may have lead to other performance insights....but I guess that would have cut into your beer time. YOU were the problem, just as much as any foolish user, but I don't suppose you'll see that because you're actually fool enough to be bragging about this years later.
I'd argue that apt-get is less intuitive and harder to admin. Few Windows users are going to want it. Good luck finding that out the hard way.
They used a student's experiment
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Since when was some poor student's experiment on people's weekly grocery list. Yes they used everyday items to modify the experiment which they took apart (causing the student to cry but apparently they weren't interested in "niceties").
Just like MacGyver. Look how MacGvyer creates a nuclear reaction with just this hammer, chisel, coke bottle, string, 300mL of acetone....oh and a nuclear reactor.
MacGyver and physics don't mesh
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Hey I love MacGyver. I watched it as a kid and now I watch the DVDs with my fiancee who has fond memories of watching the show with her grandmother as a kid. However that doesn't stop me wincing at how bad the physics (and all the science is) in that show. Anyway it's not MacGyver physics unless there's a baddie waiting in the wings to kill MacGyver and the "experiment" foils their plan to do so, preferably causing the bad guy to fall flat on his ass or be blown up.
Seriously though. Why associate ingenuity with a tv show (even if it's a good one)? It's like describing math breakthroughs as "reminiscent of the TV show 'Numbers'". These shows are inspired by the real science more than they inspire it.
The any publicity is good publicity theory is pretty dumb. Your stock price and sales can go up or down based on the publicity. I'm thinking even less of the advertising agencies and I'm more likely to avoid greedy companies that employ greedy advertisers.
Well, think of it this way. If you are a budding filmmaker and want to have something on your resume, isn't this a good way of trying for it?
Pick your favourite films or commericials (if you have favourite commercials. I find them all obnoxious). Do you think they were done on a zero dollar budget? These ad agencies are looking for quality of this calibre. Put the same writers/creative staff, directors etc. on a project with no budget and you'd end up with shite too. Might as well whine that someone whose got a 4ft row boat (analogy to a camera) tried to travel around the world in it but didn't make it.
The companies (well, Heinz, in this case) aren't complaining. You didn't read the blurb or TFA, but that's OK. It's the advertising agencies who aren't involved who are complaining that the quality is crap. Pot, meet fucking kettle.
Sorry I wasn't crystal clear but I said "these companies" and titled it "Greedy advertisers". I was talking about the companies doing the complaining - the ad agencies. No pot or kettle involved, just you misreading.
Let me get this straight. These companies want you to make an ad for them, for free on a zero dollar budget and they're complaining that the quality is crap?
Free trade and crapitalism aren't the end all be all ultimate answer. Just as other political ideologies break down so does unfettered capitalism in a global market.
All civilized countries should make the import of goods produced under conditions where a living wage was not paid illegal, and actually enforce it. This is in everyone's best interests and should be what the world trade organisation and world bank are about, not driving everyone to compete in a market where the employer has all the power. Jobs that can be replaced by robotic machines will disappear but the jobs that are left will be ones that allow people to feed their children. Yes, gadgets and luxury items will indeed be more expensive. I can live with one gadget and one computer instead of 7. So can you. Neither of us are going to do well without a living wage.
Learning languages quickly isn't hard. It's the libraries and the patterns that you must follow that require months of experience. The standard C libraries are very small compared to what you're expected to know say on a J2EE project today.
They look at us poor techy schlups and think sod that. Then they look at management with their own office who get to boss us around and they think hey that's just like home!
I use to triple boot. Win98, WinXP and Linux. I remember dealing with all that sort of BS. I eventually decided not to bother with Linux. The end came when I upgraded my version of Redhat (before the Fedora days), only to find my login password was no longer secure enough to log into my own box and I was locked out. They'd just added PAM and the default password rules were pretty strict. Can't remember how I got around it but I believe it involved booting with a rescue disk and changing my password and/or the rules.
For a while there was Astronomy software I needed to run on Linux, and when I was doing my Masters we were threatened with having to submit our papers in LaTex but that never came to pass. I'm glad I know the Linux and Unix I know. It's been great for my employability I even taught a Unix Systems Programming elective for 2 semesters at uni after graduating my comp sci. undergrad However I'm not rushing out to try to replace XP with Linux any time soon. Mind you I'm not rushing out to replace it with Vista either - especially at almost $800 Aussie for Ultimate. Vista's bugs, "security" features, and DRM are the last straw. So I'm kinda stuck at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
...but wouldn't it have been more accurate to suggest they're asking sci-fi writers to sell their soul to the devil? I mean I don't know what to do when the headline isn't sensationalist on /. - something's wrong...it's started.....common sense....it's taken over the Internet! Red alert!
...and what happened to Google's "Do no evil" slogan?
Then again these days Firefox itself pretty much forces you to update if you want to easily install extensions. What is with forcing people to download the plugins at install time? Last time I checked there was a plugin that allowed you to download to install later. That makes no sense. Why do I need a plugin to do this???
I use to have a stable browser with 1.0. With 1.5 and 2.0 I often have to restart the thing if I open lots of tabs and some of the pages don't respond, otherwise anything new I try to open doesn't respond. Firefox is still the best browser around at the moment, but it started off with so much more promise. It's become a bit of a pain to use as I've gotten use to the features (and other browsers have caught up), yet Firefox has gotten buggier.
Fucking great. Now my coffee table can disallow high def content and continually ask for activation too.
They're welcome to put up shielding to stop the rays passing through their airspace.
The users don't care about new features, nor is organizing the logistics of your support work their problem. Nor should they care about these things. That's what YOU are paid for. If you're getting in the way of them doing their job they are right to complain. Instead of seeing them as the enemy if you really couldn't do it you need to explain clearly and in very simply terms why you couldn't. It'd have to be one heck of an explanation if they had the old version of office before and can't have it now.
I cannot stand system administrators who fall back on the short sighted argument that they're not there for the benefit of the users, but rather for the organisation. If your users are inconvenienced or upset it will affect their performance and therefore the organization. In other words if you hurt the user your hurt the organization. The fact that you don't understand this speaks volumes for your level of professionalism and maturity.
Furthermore falling back on the "do you do my job" is further evidence of a lack of maturity. I'm also not a brain surgeon but if a brain surgeon bolloxed up an operation on me or mine I'd still have something to say about it.
Your analogy is also weak. Simple tools like welders are generally very similar to operate, and don't take much time to get use to. A change in a teacher's version of Office - particularly to 2007 with it's new interface - may actually break functionality or workflow they built or learnt years ago.
The solution is that you have to get them to grow up more quickly to deal with that flood of info that you can't stem. Yes that does mean they lose their "innocence" sooner. You can't have innocence without ignorance.
Unfortunately the trend is for the opposite. We shelter and shield "children" into their late 20s, then wonder why they can't make adult decisions.
All monitoring should be open and honest. The child needs to be taught why they need to do something a certain way, and that why needs to be something other than you yelling or punishing.
I think you can definitely be friends with a child while still maintaining the authority of parenthood. The key is to do what you believe is the right thing for them rather than what you want or what the child wants.
So that means when I have a problem with an aircraft requiring a service, I should go find an auto mechanic?
/. to mod me as troll for saying this. Right here, THIS is the reason why Linux isn't on every fucking destkop. Idiotic.
The guy's job was obviously to look at the performance of the system and help users out when they had problems. They might be IT users, but system performance isn't their area. In this context they are end users even if they are also programmers. They just aren't specialists in what this guy does, and it's not their job to do his specialised job on top of theirs.
Trust
What these teachers were trying to tell you was that they wanted what they were use to, and what they'd already spent their own time and effort learning. First you gave them a version that was different, had no technical advantages and isn't the equal of what they had in the first place. Then you let Microsoft talk you into giving then a totally different version of Office that they'd have to re-learn, and that is less mature and stable. Clearly what they wanted was what they had in the first place. These teachers weren't the problem at all, you didn't listen. You could "win" with them just by buying them licenses for what they were already using, and not trying to force your choices or Microsoft's upon them. You demonstrate an unfortunate and classic problem with Linux evangelists: A complete inability to understand or care about an end user's point of view.
Auto update is an evil stupid and dangerous idea for everything but critical security patches. You never know when the latest and greatest bleeding edge version is going to break something else, or break your workflow (sometimes even by design!). Yes I know about minor revisions and stable vs unstable, but that doesn't mean you don't get bugs. The typical end user (and many time-poor IT professionals) don't have the time to understand what the changes are in an update. Most people just want their computer to work today like it did yesterday, and if they want an improvement they're willing to go out and download it.
Come on now, you don't really think that many Windows users have the knowledge or patience to select which updates they want to use do you? They either update the lot or they don't do updates (usually because they got bitten updating the lot at one time or other). If they use a particular app and it nags them to update they may do so. Likewise if someone they know got a cool new feature out of updating a particular app, they may be inclinded to hit update now or go to the trouble of downloading a patch.
Present them with a list of 30 apps to update and they'll either hit treat it as one update. The more choices you present to the user just to admin the box (rather than get what they want done). They aren't interested in the finer points of computing or security. They want to get a job done or have some fun and the computer is a tool they want to use. Even IT professionals often don't have the time to work out if the latest version of something is going to break their workflow or if they're going to hit a bug. I know I learnt the hard way never to attempt to upgrade a Linux installation between major versions. Auto-update is a stupid stupid idea for all but the most critical security updates.
YOU are the IT expert, not the end user. If they're not following instructions you're suppose to help them, not hang them out to dry or make them an object of ridicule. You have the professionalism and people skills of a grizzly bear.
The article says
'[G]enerosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.
Save time, be more efficient. Eat and have sex instead of giving to charity. Then when someone tells you "you don't give a fuck" you reply with "well actually..."
You're a dangerous twit. Things other than your precious parameter may have affected performance, and the differences your users were seeing may have been due to other factors. Instead you focused their attention on a non-variable and dismissed any actual differences they saw. This was an opportunity to work out what else they were doing differently which may have lead to other performance insights....but I guess that would have cut into your beer time. YOU were the problem, just as much as any foolish user, but I don't suppose you'll see that because you're actually fool enough to be bragging about this years later.
I'd argue that apt-get is less intuitive and harder to admin. Few Windows users are going to want it. Good luck finding that out the hard way.
Since when was some poor student's experiment on people's weekly grocery list. Yes they used everyday items to modify the experiment which they took apart (causing the student to cry but apparently they weren't interested in "niceties").
Just like MacGyver. Look how MacGvyer creates a nuclear reaction with just this hammer, chisel, coke bottle, string, 300mL of acetone....oh and a nuclear reactor.
Hey I love MacGyver. I watched it as a kid and now I watch the DVDs with my fiancee who has fond memories of watching the show with her grandmother as a kid. However that doesn't stop me wincing at how bad the physics (and all the science is) in that show. Anyway it's not MacGyver physics unless there's a baddie waiting in the wings to kill MacGyver and the "experiment" foils their plan to do so, preferably causing the bad guy to fall flat on his ass or be blown up.
Seriously though. Why associate ingenuity with a tv show (even if it's a good one)? It's like describing math breakthroughs as "reminiscent of the TV show 'Numbers'". These shows are inspired by the real science more than they inspire it.
The any publicity is good publicity theory is pretty dumb. Your stock price and sales can go up or down based on the publicity. I'm thinking even less of the advertising agencies and I'm more likely to avoid greedy companies that employ greedy advertisers.
Well, think of it this way. If you are a budding filmmaker and want to have something on your resume, isn't this a good way of trying for it?
Pick your favourite films or commericials (if you have favourite commercials. I find them all obnoxious). Do you think they were done on a zero dollar budget? These ad agencies are looking for quality of this calibre. Put the same writers/creative staff, directors etc. on a project with no budget and you'd end up with shite too. Might as well whine that someone whose got a 4ft row boat (analogy to a camera) tried to travel around the world in it but didn't make it.
The companies (well, Heinz, in this case) aren't complaining. You didn't read the blurb or TFA, but that's OK. It's the advertising agencies who aren't involved who are complaining that the quality is crap. Pot, meet fucking kettle.
Sorry I wasn't crystal clear but I said "these companies" and titled it "Greedy advertisers". I was talking about the companies doing the complaining - the ad agencies. No pot or kettle involved, just you misreading.
Let me get this straight. These companies want you to make an ad for them, for free on a zero dollar budget and they're complaining that the quality is crap?
Morons.
Sorry but that's defeatist rubbish.
Free trade and crapitalism aren't the end all be all ultimate answer. Just as other political ideologies break down so does unfettered capitalism in a global market.
All civilized countries should make the import of goods produced under conditions where a living wage was not paid illegal, and actually enforce it. This is in everyone's best interests and should be what the world trade organisation and world bank are about, not driving everyone to compete in a market where the employer has all the power. Jobs that can be replaced by robotic machines will disappear but the jobs that are left will be ones that allow people to feed their children. Yes, gadgets and luxury items will indeed be more expensive. I can live with one gadget and one computer instead of 7. So can you. Neither of us are going to do well without a living wage.
Learning languages quickly isn't hard. It's the libraries and the patterns that you must follow that require months of experience. The standard C libraries are very small compared to what you're expected to know say on a J2EE project today.
They look at us poor techy schlups and think sod that. Then they look at management with their own office who get to boss us around and they think hey that's just like home!
Most programmers who know C also know at least one other language.
This has been true for a very long time. For all intents and purposes it's always been true.
I use to triple boot. Win98, WinXP and Linux. I remember dealing with all that sort of BS. I eventually decided not to bother with Linux. The end came when I upgraded my version of Redhat (before the Fedora days), only to find my login password was no longer secure enough to log into my own box and I was locked out. They'd just added PAM and the default password rules were pretty strict. Can't remember how I got around it but I believe it involved booting with a rescue disk and changing my password and/or the rules.
For a while there was Astronomy software I needed to run on Linux, and when I was doing my Masters we were threatened with having to submit our papers in LaTex but that never came to pass. I'm glad I know the Linux and Unix I know. It's been great for my employability I even taught a Unix Systems Programming elective for 2 semesters at uni after graduating my comp sci. undergrad However I'm not rushing out to try to replace XP with Linux any time soon. Mind you I'm not rushing out to replace it with Vista either - especially at almost $800 Aussie for Ultimate. Vista's bugs, "security" features, and DRM are the last straw. So I'm kinda stuck at the moment.