as for links - maybe. but on the other hand that also makes documents much smaller if a user does not want to send them anywhere. it's not a sure choice...
This is precisely the point I am trying to make about usability. It is only "not a sure choice" because a developer understands the ramification of storing something as a small size. An end user wants to write the document to a floppy disk/thumb drive or attach it to an email. They don't want to think about breaking links; in fact, they are probably fairly clueless how the picture actually gets in the document in the first place.
i think main reason is the choice of the old format
Again, this is an example of OSS community hubris. Instead of making it work like it should, blame the user.
If I save a document from Word 2003 into Word 95 format, I bet I won't have this problem. So who is doing it better? =)
If you want your software to be kick-ass awesome, think like the user that uses it.
Whoever modded him as a troll, I don't think he's trolling. This is the type of conversation OSS developers need to participate in to learn how to deliver usable software to the masses.
I usually insert a picture from a file (screenshots). But, really, this is an example of a usability problem. To an average user, they save a word document and it serializes the pictures in the document. If I'm saving the OpenOffice document as a Word version X document, it should work the same way.
To a developer, breaking links makes sense. To an average user, their reaction will be, "What is a link?"
As for a test case....well, working from memory here. I create a document, write some text, insert a screenshot from a png file, save it. When it comes time to send it to others, I try to save it in various Word export formats until I find one that decides to serialize the images in the document file itself. (If I recall correctly, the Word 95 export seems to serialize the images.)
I then load it on my Windows box with Word 2003 and the pictures are usually thumbnail size. Not always, just very often.
And you can't say "Upgrade to Word 2008" (or whatever the current version is) because reality is that most corporate users don't have control over the version they use.
* Learn to manually set the MTU of the ppp0 interface when connecting to a pptp VPN at the office since the VPN setup effectively ignores the MTU setting. Although this makes certain things just not work properly when the remote end ignores requests to fragment, it is not a priority to fix apparently.
* Figure out how to make ndiswrapper load the wireless interface drivers on his laptop. Even though there are wireless drivers for the wireless nic, they don't work. You have to download the Windows package, extract the ndis driver from it, and then follow some cryptic commands to get the ndiswrapper kernel module to load it.
* Teach his 4 year old kid how to enter the keyring password so that the wireless WPA key can be retrieved when the kid's gaming computer starts up that is down in the kitchen with a wireless card. Though ubuntu has a nice option of auto login (since kids that young might not know how to type a username and password in) so that he can put links on the desktop that the kid can click to go to Barney's website and such, auto login doesn't count as entering the password. So he can figure out a way to put a script hack in where he has to put in his password IN PLAIN TEXT to get around the prompt for the keyring password.
* Try using open office and embedding pictures in a word processing document, only to find that Microsoft Word (which everyone else at the office uses) either can't load the pictures or the pictures come out scaled to thumbnail size. But, you have to export it in like Word 95 format to at least get the thumbnails.
* He can continually wonder WHY THE HELL DOES FLASH KEEP LOCKING UP FIREFOX? Seriously, after a few LiveLeak or YouTube videos, you have to force-quite the browser and reload it. WTF?
I use Ubuntu 90% of the time now, but I'm no Joe Sixpack. The open source community has its own hubris that is, quite frankly, annoying.
I mean, seriously, all the open source people are rabidly anti-microsoft and insistent that anything they can do OSS can do as well or better. All this forcefully exerting how idiotic it is to use MS products culminates in end users finally moving over to OSS. Then....
They inevitably have problems or encounter bugs. They ask, sometimes not nicely, the project community to fix the bugs, only to be met with: "This type of attitude really irks me. You get all this stuff for free, you can fix it yourself or pay someone to fix it."
It was YOUR agenda that brought the users here, make them WANT to stay here rather than giving up and going back to Microsoft. Ubuntu is nice and useful as long as you know how to deal with these little usability quirks and annoying bugs. Supporting non-developers on OSS still SUCKS.
A friend was cleaning out his garage once and had one of these in a box. He gave it to me. I like tinkering with antique computers on occasion. (I still have my C64 programmers handbook that has the fold-out motherboard schematic in the back.)
A few years later, I velcroed it to a pull-out rack shelf and hooked a null modem cable to it to monitor the console output of a SSL Screen Sound setup (proprietary pro-audio digital mixer/editor in the days before Pro-tools). It couldn't quite keep up with the 9600 baud stream if there was a lot of data streaming fast like during bootup. It did the trick, however, when you just needed to go in and check some of the statuses while the system was running. I think I mostly used it to go in and low-level format the hard drives on occasion.
It was useful for a while, and that must have been somewhere in the mid-90s that I used it.
They swipe and get a recipt they keep. All the other information is stored by some 3rd party on servers far far away.
This is not always the case. That terminal may actually be storing your card data. It may even give someone the ability to access data stored in those far far away servers.
And if they are 100+ employees, they are big enough to be able to figure out how to do a little encryption.
I was at a global company recently that probably has tens of thousands of employees. They did a "little" encryption project and it took them a year to do it. Then they figured out that it didn't meet PCI DSS's requirements to be able to rotate your keys, so they had to scrap the whole thing and try to figure out how to do it again.
Data protection is a difficult issue to deal with for a business of any size. Despite the fact that there are a lot of free crypto resources out there, it takes someone able to decipher how it all works to be able to use crypto effectively. Usually, corporate IT people stop reading about encryption at the first sign of any sort of proof or formula beyond their basic math skills. Reading Applied Cryptography will only get you so far, then you actually have to understand how the stuff works to integrate it into your system effectively.
Um...you can buy a transistor, but you can't make and sell your own identical transistor without licensing the patent on the transistor.
How is this different from: You can buy software, but you can't make and sell your own identical software without licensing the patent on the software.
Software isn't physical? Well, you either have it or you don't....it's not like I can load up a text editor and type the word "Blitz!" on the top line and suddenly have a copy of Windows Vista.
(Of course, only people that ever owned C64s will get the Blitz! reference.)
Ya, the purpose for doing it in dev was to figure out how to do it right. Doing it in QA should have referenced the Dev settings, so that we didn't have to re-figure out how to do it right. Then use UAT testing to make sure it was not only done right but that it worked, then you promote the changes to production.
What you most certainly DO NOT do is figure it out new each time. This invalidates all your QA testing and defeats the whole purpose of staging it in the first place.
I most certainly would not shit my pants if I saw HA requirements. I live and breathe these types of requirements. I just don't need redundant and unreliable people to manage a redundant and reliable hardware/software system.
Too bad no one will read this since the thread is now too old.
I've worked with enterprise customers that have IBM handle all their data center stuff. Every time a change needs to be made to do something like redirect a URL from websphere, it takes 6 people to be on the phone:
1. Person from our company telling people what to do.
2. Person from our customer that organized the call.
3. Person from IBM that can run a test through web sphere
4. Person from IBM to change the URL in webshpere
5. Person from IBM to change the firewall
6. Person from IBM to change the VPN
IBM has a bunch of people that know how to do one thing, and that is their job. The funny thing is, the people that know how to do their one thing aren't all that good at it. We went through this exercise 3 times. Once for dev, once for staging, and once for production. It took hours to do each time regardless of the fact that we did the exact same thing a week prior in one of the other environments.
I'm sure IBM has some good people, but I'd have to say I'd be swinging the axe too if my company got to this point.
The problem is that proving something does not necessarily mean it is the truth. Convicting someone for murder without a body, for example. If you recall the OJ Simpson murder trial, you will recall that he was found not-guilty in the criminal trial. However, in the subsequent civil trial brought on by the murder victim's relatives, he was found liable.
Two different proven facts, each pointing to two different truths. In which truth was justice served? Everyone knows the answer, but the fallacy that a proven truth served to dispense justice prevents anyone from actually dispensing any justice at all.
Perhaps the applicant's were testing you by submitting their resumes in Word format. You know, just to see if it was a company of people that had the skills to react when the unexpect and unplanned happens.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
truly wonderful cross-platform
Ahem...
It should be truly wonderful, as-long-as-all-your-customers-use-the-same-version -of-the-VM-on-the-same-OS-unless-you-are-insane-en ough-to-figure-out-how-a-lot-of-different-virtual- machines-crap-out-on-your-code cross-platform
I like Java, but it's only cross platform in theory. You have to have good architecture to make it behave properly cross platform. Sure, it's easier than doing cross-platform in C/C++, but the customer doesn't care that its the VM's fault.
Rack mount hardware is hell. There are probably many different rack mounting standards, and it is almost never the case that the people you are buying from happen to sell rack kits that fit your rack. I used to see this problem all the time with pro audio/video rack mounting. Normally, all the rack mount hardware was bought separately. This allowed us to know what racks and rack hardware to buy, and rack mounting was not a problem. On the odd occasion we got some equipment in a rack made in the UK, we would need a whole different set of rack mount hardware.
Of course, you not knowing about racks is not the company's fault. I also wouldn't have bothered to plug them in if I'd seen the shock sensors, they'd be heading right back to the manufacturer.
This is no excuse for bad customer service though. I'd call my card company and just dispute the whole amount. Tell them to take their 15% restocking fee and stuff it.
The article didn't make much sense, but I *think* someone figured out that some downloaded POS program uses the CBT windows hooks. CBT is for [C]omputer [B]ased [T]raining. If I had to guess why they would do this, it is so their program can react to content that trigger's their CBT hooks. If I recall correctly, you can imbed this type of CBT stuff in Windows media files. So their memory resident POS program sits their and reacts to video streamed off their affiliates sites?
Of course, the problem here is that other parites will be able to figure this out too. I bet someone finds out that Zango can launch external programs based on content in WMV streaming media. If so, this will be the next Sony-DRM-type scandal.
I believe BTK submitted a document on disc, not in print. I'm betting it had to do with GUIDs embedded within the Word document and/or the disk FAT that got him. The GUID is generated from several things, one being your MAC address. So if you're going to be a serial killer and send someone a word document, make sure you type it on a 286 with Windows 3.1.
The fact is that the supply of competent people in the world is vanishingly small
I think this seems to be the case, but I would guess that there are a lot of competent people out there still. I think the problem is that they are lost in the massive sea of incompetent people.
There seems to be a global westernish cultural thing where it is "improper" or "unprofessional" to out incompetent people. You see the incompetent people all over the place in the news - the cops that handcuff a 5-year-old that was throwing a temper tantrum, the head of FEMA that "resigned" after being complemented for doing a "helluva job, Brownie," and so on. Yet, no one suggests that they are incompetent.
I know a lot of comepetent people. If they screw up, they step up and say so - then they make it right. Incompetent people hide their screw ups, deny that they screwed up, leave it for someone to clean up, and then sue when they get fired by someone with the balls to accept no less than competence in job performance.
If our culture would stop thinkng morons have a right to a job, a right to an education, and a right to not be called incompetent for fear of appearing in-equal to everyone else, we'd be doing ourselves a favor. Let the individual's abilities speak for themselves, and the incompetents will quickly be discovered.
....every software developer is supposed to know that a customer doesn't have people smart enough on staff to install software using anything other than the default install? There would be nothing but a blame game because much of commercial software depends on other software libraries, including those provided by the OS. If our courts can't figure out that P2P lawsuits are basically meritless, I'd hate to see them figure out who is to blame because someone installed a default option on IIS that had an exploit, yet wasn't required to run IIS with a vendor's software.
Don't get me wrong...bugs suck, but suing someone over it is as equally bad as releasing buggy software.
Slashdot Mirror
as for links - maybe. but on the other hand that also makes documents much smaller if a user does not want to send them anywhere. it's not a sure choice...
This is precisely the point I am trying to make about usability. It is only "not a sure choice" because a developer understands the ramification of storing something as a small size. An end user wants to write the document to a floppy disk/thumb drive or attach it to an email. They don't want to think about breaking links; in fact, they are probably fairly clueless how the picture actually gets in the document in the first place.
i think main reason is the choice of the old format
Again, this is an example of OSS community hubris. Instead of making it work like it should, blame the user.
If I save a document from Word 2003 into Word 95 format, I bet I won't have this problem. So who is doing it better? =)
If you want your software to be kick-ass awesome, think like the user that uses it.
Whoever modded him as a troll, I don't think he's trolling. This is the type of conversation OSS developers need to participate in to learn how to deliver usable software to the masses.
I usually insert a picture from a file (screenshots). But, really, this is an example of a usability problem. To an average user, they save a word document and it serializes the pictures in the document. If I'm saving the OpenOffice document as a Word version X document, it should work the same way.
To a developer, breaking links makes sense. To an average user, their reaction will be, "What is a link?"
As for a test case....well, working from memory here. I create a document, write some text, insert a screenshot from a png file, save it. When it comes time to send it to others, I try to save it in various Word export formats until I find one that decides to serialize the images in the document file itself. (If I recall correctly, the Word 95 export seems to serialize the images.)
I then load it on my Windows box with Word 2003 and the pictures are usually thumbnail size. Not always, just very often.
And you can't say "Upgrade to Word 2008" (or whatever the current version is) because reality is that most corporate users don't have control over the version they use.
(Using OO Writer 2.3.0 for this too.)
* Learn to manually set the MTU of the ppp0 interface when connecting to a pptp VPN at the office since the VPN setup effectively ignores the MTU setting. Although this makes certain things just not work properly when the remote end ignores requests to fragment, it is not a priority to fix apparently.
* Figure out how to make ndiswrapper load the wireless interface drivers on his laptop. Even though there are wireless drivers for the wireless nic, they don't work. You have to download the Windows package, extract the ndis driver from it, and then follow some cryptic commands to get the ndiswrapper kernel module to load it.
* Teach his 4 year old kid how to enter the keyring password so that the wireless WPA key can be retrieved when the kid's gaming computer starts up that is down in the kitchen with a wireless card. Though ubuntu has a nice option of auto login (since kids that young might not know how to type a username and password in) so that he can put links on the desktop that the kid can click to go to Barney's website and such, auto login doesn't count as entering the password. So he can figure out a way to put a script hack in where he has to put in his password IN PLAIN TEXT to get around the prompt for the keyring password.
* Try using open office and embedding pictures in a word processing document, only to find that Microsoft Word (which everyone else at the office uses) either can't load the pictures or the pictures come out scaled to thumbnail size. But, you have to export it in like Word 95 format to at least get the thumbnails.
* He can continually wonder WHY THE HELL DOES FLASH KEEP LOCKING UP FIREFOX? Seriously, after a few LiveLeak or YouTube videos, you have to force-quite the browser and reload it. WTF?
I use Ubuntu 90% of the time now, but I'm no Joe Sixpack. The open source community has its own hubris that is, quite frankly, annoying.
I mean, seriously, all the open source people are rabidly anti-microsoft and insistent that anything they can do OSS can do as well or better. All this forcefully exerting how idiotic it is to use MS products culminates in end users finally moving over to OSS. Then....
They inevitably have problems or encounter bugs. They ask, sometimes not nicely, the project community to fix the bugs, only to be met with: "This type of attitude really irks me. You get all this stuff for free, you can fix it yourself or pay someone to fix it."
It was YOUR agenda that brought the users here, make them WANT to stay here rather than giving up and going back to Microsoft. Ubuntu is nice and useful as long as you know how to deal with these little usability quirks and annoying bugs. Supporting non-developers on OSS still SUCKS.
A few years later, I velcroed it to a pull-out rack shelf and hooked a null modem cable to it to monitor the console output of a SSL Screen Sound setup (proprietary pro-audio digital mixer/editor in the days before Pro-tools). It couldn't quite keep up with the 9600 baud stream if there was a lot of data streaming fast like during bootup. It did the trick, however, when you just needed to go in and check some of the statuses while the system was running. I think I mostly used it to go in and low-level format the hard drives on occasion.
It was useful for a while, and that must have been somewhere in the mid-90s that I used it.
This is not always the case. That terminal may actually be storing your card data. It may even give someone the ability to access data stored in those far far away servers.
And if they are 100+ employees, they are big enough to be able to figure out how to do a little encryption.I was at a global company recently that probably has tens of thousands of employees. They did a "little" encryption project and it took them a year to do it. Then they figured out that it didn't meet PCI DSS's requirements to be able to rotate your keys, so they had to scrap the whole thing and try to figure out how to do it again.
Data protection is a difficult issue to deal with for a business of any size. Despite the fact that there are a lot of free crypto resources out there, it takes someone able to decipher how it all works to be able to use crypto effectively. Usually, corporate IT people stop reading about encryption at the first sign of any sort of proof or formula beyond their basic math skills. Reading Applied Cryptography will only get you so far, then you actually have to understand how the stuff works to integrate it into your system effectively.
How is this different from: You can buy software, but you can't make and sell your own identical software without licensing the patent on the software.
Software isn't physical? Well, you either have it or you don't....it's not like I can load up a text editor and type the word "Blitz!" on the top line and suddenly have a copy of Windows Vista.
(Of course, only people that ever owned C64s will get the Blitz! reference.)
What you most certainly DO NOT do is figure it out new each time. This invalidates all your QA testing and defeats the whole purpose of staging it in the first place.
I most certainly would not shit my pants if I saw HA requirements. I live and breathe these types of requirements. I just don't need redundant and unreliable people to manage a redundant and reliable hardware/software system.
Too bad no one will read this since the thread is now too old.
1. Person from our company telling people what to do.
2. Person from our customer that organized the call.
3. Person from IBM that can run a test through web sphere
4. Person from IBM to change the URL in webshpere
5. Person from IBM to change the firewall
6. Person from IBM to change the VPN
IBM has a bunch of people that know how to do one thing, and that is their job. The funny thing is, the people that know how to do their one thing aren't all that good at it. We went through this exercise 3 times. Once for dev, once for staging, and once for production. It took hours to do each time regardless of the fact that we did the exact same thing a week prior in one of the other environments.
I'm sure IBM has some good people, but I'd have to say I'd be swinging the axe too if my company got to this point.
I guess we should outlaw audio editing software now.
I hope you see the irony of this statement, given the parent post's explanation of their screening process.
Two different proven facts, each pointing to two different truths. In which truth was justice served? Everyone knows the answer, but the fallacy that a proven truth served to dispense justice prevents anyone from actually dispensing any justice at all.
It is a pity that the US legal system is no longer about justice; it is now about what can be proven.
I bet you lose out on a lot of good people.
Your geek merit badge is hereby REVOKED!
Ahem...
It should be truly wonderful, as-long-as-all-your-customers-use-the-same-version -of-the-VM-on-the-same-OS-unless-you-are-insane-en ough-to-figure-out-how-a-lot-of-different-virtual- machines-crap-out-on-your-code cross-platform
I like Java, but it's only cross platform in theory. You have to have good architecture to make it behave properly cross platform. Sure, it's easier than doing cross-platform in C/C++, but the customer doesn't care that its the VM's fault.
Of course, you not knowing about racks is not the company's fault. I also wouldn't have bothered to plug them in if I'd seen the shock sensors, they'd be heading right back to the manufacturer.
This is no excuse for bad customer service though. I'd call my card company and just dispute the whole amount. Tell them to take their 15% restocking fee and stuff it.
Can anyone tell me how to find this DRM stuff on my CDs? All I can see is a bunch of .mp3 files....does this mean I've been infected?
I think they are OSS Champions as long as they are still classified as college students. After they graduate, they are unemployed losers.
Of course, the problem here is that other parites will be able to figure this out too. I bet someone finds out that Zango can launch external programs based on content in WMV streaming media. If so, this will be the next Sony-DRM-type scandal.
Me: "Not I."
(Sirens blare in the background)
TSA: "Freeze dirtbag!"
SBD - the new bio-terror weapon.
It's just a rumor, but Sony should have some Engineering and Executive positions open in 3....2....1...
I believe BTK submitted a document on disc, not in print. I'm betting it had to do with GUIDs embedded within the Word document and/or the disk FAT that got him. The GUID is generated from several things, one being your MAC address. So if you're going to be a serial killer and send someone a word document, make sure you type it on a 286 with Windows 3.1.
If you can't sell it....DONATE IT!!!
I think this seems to be the case, but I would guess that there are a lot of competent people out there still. I think the problem is that they are lost in the massive sea of incompetent people.
There seems to be a global westernish cultural thing where it is "improper" or "unprofessional" to out incompetent people. You see the incompetent people all over the place in the news - the cops that handcuff a 5-year-old that was throwing a temper tantrum, the head of FEMA that "resigned" after being complemented for doing a "helluva job, Brownie," and so on. Yet, no one suggests that they are incompetent.
I know a lot of comepetent people. If they screw up, they step up and say so - then they make it right. Incompetent people hide their screw ups, deny that they screwed up, leave it for someone to clean up, and then sue when they get fired by someone with the balls to accept no less than competence in job performance.
If our culture would stop thinkng morons have a right to a job, a right to an education, and a right to not be called incompetent for fear of appearing in-equal to everyone else, we'd be doing ourselves a favor. Let the individual's abilities speak for themselves, and the incompetents will quickly be discovered.
Don't get me wrong...bugs suck, but suing someone over it is as equally bad as releasing buggy software.