That's really, really reaching. Microsoft's current lineup is more than enough reason to hate them with a white hot hate. No nepotism involved. And this is speaking from the standpoint of thinking a few of their previous products are quite usable. Nope, sorry, blaming on culture or prejudice is at best disingenuous.
> You could be mauled by a bear when you press the accelerator.
But only if you've purchased the "mauled by a bear" feature and have forgotten to put the "bear" switch in the "off" position before putting the car in gear.
I have Secret! and KeePass on a company smart phone. Secret stores my personal passwords, and Keepass stores system passwords. Both are synced to/from a company server. The master password for Keepass is known to the other admins, and the Secret password is known only to me. (And no, it's not Correct Horse Battery Staple, sorry.)
If the company has a problem with you keeping company passwords on a personal phone, have them issue you a phone with remote kill.
The advantage of using a repository is that you're never tempted to make passwords easier to remember (IE: guess) or to reuse a password across multiple systems. The repository password is (ok I'll tell you...) a random string of characters arrived at by pounding the keyboard with both hands for several seconds and then choosing a sequence out of the center of the garbage. But you can remember any random string if you only have to do it once.
Although it doesn't happen as often these days, I do remember OTA updates bricking my phone in the past, and PCs under my care are still occasionally screwed up by "drive-by updates" in the middle of the night. For something like a car with the potential for property damage or stranding me and mine far from civilization, I'm pretty sure I don't want automatic OTA updates, even if they could arrange that the car not be moving during the time. I want to know exactly what problem the update is solving, the likelihood I will experience that problem, whether the update and backout procedures have been vetted, and the post-update test procedure. I make a living with my camera, and I don't blindly install firmware updates for it either.
to be fair warcraft iii the frozen throne is discless playback on battle.net all you have to do is run the updater and it runs with no disc. people still play it, and i know i was missing showers, sleeping 4-6 hours a night and playing virtually the rest of the day and night.
This.
I actually didn't know you could play the game without the disc. That's probably what saved me.
...but I already do that, with dyndns. Certain protocols, on certain ports, limited to certain internal IP addresses. (http and ssh to certain machines.) Other services, like logmein, dropbox, printershare, work through an intermediary with which the machines behind the router initiate the connection.
The problem I see with having a "real" IP on your internal net is that ISPs will just connect you to a cable modem and call it good. The ISP that my mother-in-law has to use does just this, and their tech support will insist that this is all she needs. (I told her "please turn off your PC" and drove over there with a router.) There are better ways to allow limited access to the outside world. If the expectation is that your fridge and microwave will be accessible worldwide by default, at least some ISPs will default to no protection at all, because that's the easiest to install.
Out of curiosity, what was the problem with Doom 3? I played Doom and Doom 2 many years ago but didn't have enough horsepower to play Doom 3 when it came out, and by the time my PC caught up it was old news and I had lost interest.
well, you might be right. I bought a roll recently along with a number of other plumbing parts, but can't for the life of me remember what I paid for it. I agree it's cheap.
You're right. It makes for a good story, but I wasted a lot of time on that game where I really should have been doing something productive. It's so easy to fall into the pit. Games are designed so that the easiest thing to do after you finish a level is play the next level, and the next. For awhile now Wife has been hooked on Candy Crush. We don't see much of her. High scores posted on Facebook are proof of life.
I'm sure there are people out there who can play these games sparingly and not be addicted. But clearly for many of us they're a powerful addiction. I can't play them at all.
Thing is, I don't necessarily want my devices connected to the raw internet. Behind a router using NAT, the device has to originate a connection. That's a feature, not a bodge.
At all. Ever. I had a bad experience with Warcraft, forgot to bathe, was missing appointments, people thought I had died. I finally gave the disk to daughter and told her to hide it. I still don't know where it is.
I guess I have to agree with that, but in the case of navigation, I usually have a passenger who can do all the navigation, and it irritates me that the console won't let *her* look up addresses or find the nearest gas station while *I* have my eyes on the road. It would be nice if the product didn't treat me like a moron.
Re:Here's the problem, vehicle designers
on
A New Car UI
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Agreed. This is also why the controls on well designed vehicles are large enough to easily grasp when the vehicle is shifting, and have a distinctive shape to aid in recognizing them.
Even my motorcycle follows this paradigm. It's a touring model with AM/FM/WB radio, CB, cruise control and other features, which makes the handlebars very crowded. Nevertheless, I can (after much practice) set the cruise, change the channel, signal a lane change and talk to that trucker I just passed without looking at my hands. And this is because the controls have a distinctive shape and position and are large enough to easily manipulate, even with gloves.
It's somewhat of an embarrassment that my big expensive touch-screen stereo/navigator in the truck is such a distraction and so difficult to use while driving, when my daughter can easily change channels and modes with the el-cheapo stereo in her car without looking. Touch screens in cars aren't really a good idea.
Parenthetically, (geek alert) the controls on TOS Enterprise, with their distinctive shapes, seemed a LOT more practical to me for an environment with lots of tipping and juddering in combat, as opposed to the all-touch-screen controls in later generations, which required that you keep your hands in contact with the control surface in a potentially hostile environment and watch your hands manipulate virtual buttons and switches, when you should probably be looking at something else.
> [...] Then, call it Windows Classic, and run ads with a laptop running the Win8 UX sitting next to a can of New Coke, with the headline: "Yep, we found a way to make even Microsoft Bob look good. We screwed up. Take us back." Include a shot of a second laptop running WC.
As I recall, the Coke company tried to deny responsibility up to the end. I remember the tag line (delivered by Bill Cosby?) being something like "We're not that smart, and we're not that stupid". But that said....
Hell yes. If Microsoft had the guts to put their hubris aside and do this, it would turn things completely around. It would be this century's "Have you driven a Ford lately?"
> By splitting Windows into Metro and the desktop, Microsoft has created space for casual users as well as power users."
Yes, and as soon as they actually do that, more power users will embrace it. But as long as they dance around trying to drag power users into metro, the issue will remain.
A general switch to unrouteable IP addresses for intranets is, I think, mostly what happened. We could see the shift starting even a little before the chicken littles started screaming about addresses running out. Some of us could see that either the internet would shift to a usage pattern where they didn't run out at all, or they'd run out much more slowly than projected.
Mind you, infrastructure should probably still switch to IPV6 (and is, slowly) but there are few reasons why addresses used within intranets have to be real routeable IP addresses.
This happened in two different contracting jobs. In one, first indication of possible trouble was when the contractor in question put all of his certificates of course completion (framed) up in his office. Second indication was when he tried to convince our client that he should manage the rest of the contractors. Eventually, we stayed, he didn't. The bad news was that I had to untwist and make coherent all of his "solutions".
In another job, similar experience, one of our team of four complained loudly and often about the state of our administrative solutions, saying over and over again "it's just a mess". He was hired into project development. About six months later he left for unstated reasons, and our client offered all three of us full time positions.
I never did figure out how to tell my client that he had hired a poser, but in both cases, things worked out for themselves. I'd say, wait and see if the client wises up.
Slashdot Mirror
That's really, really reaching. Microsoft's current lineup is more than enough reason to hate them with a white hot hate. No nepotism involved. And this is speaking from the standpoint of thinking a few of their previous products are quite usable. Nope, sorry, blaming on culture or prejudice is at best disingenuous.
> You could be mauled by a bear when you press the accelerator.
But only if you've purchased the "mauled by a bear" feature and have forgotten to put the "bear" switch in the "off" position before putting the car in gear.
I thought everyone knew that.
I have Secret! and KeePass on a company smart phone. Secret stores my personal passwords, and Keepass stores system passwords. Both are synced to/from a company server. The master password for Keepass is known to the other admins, and the Secret password is known only to me. (And no, it's not Correct Horse Battery Staple, sorry.)
If the company has a problem with you keeping company passwords on a personal phone, have them issue you a phone with remote kill.
The advantage of using a repository is that you're never tempted to make passwords easier to remember (IE: guess) or to reuse a password across multiple systems. The repository password is (ok I'll tell you...) a random string of characters arrived at by pounding the keyboard with both hands for several seconds and then choosing a sequence out of the center of the garbage. But you can remember any random string if you only have to do it once.
Deja Vu.
Your mileage, as always, may vary, but in my experience it's been an overnight driver update that has most often caused problems.
Although it doesn't happen as often these days, I do remember OTA updates bricking my phone in the past, and PCs under my care are still occasionally screwed up by "drive-by updates" in the middle of the night. For something like a car with the potential for property damage or stranding me and mine far from civilization, I'm pretty sure I don't want automatic OTA updates, even if they could arrange that the car not be moving during the time. I want to know exactly what problem the update is solving, the likelihood I will experience that problem, whether the update and backout procedures have been vetted, and the post-update test procedure. I make a living with my camera, and I don't blindly install firmware updates for it either.
to be fair warcraft iii the frozen throne is discless playback on battle.net all you have to do is run the updater and it runs with no disc. people still play it, and i know i was missing showers, sleeping 4-6 hours a night and playing virtually the rest of the day and night.
This.
I actually didn't know you could play the game without the disc. That's probably what saved me.
> Practically speaking, though, couldn't Google just make access to the Play Store harder, if Microsoft were to create an Android-alike OS?
Sure, just make it a requirement that the transaction be signed in some fashion, and then make the credentials really difficult to get.
Waaaait, that sounds familiar...
The problem I see with having a "real" IP on your internal net is that ISPs will just connect you to a cable modem and call it good. The ISP that my mother-in-law has to use does just this, and their tech support will insist that this is all she needs. (I told her "please turn off your PC" and drove over there with a router.) There are better ways to allow limited access to the outside world. If the expectation is that your fridge and microwave will be accessible worldwide by default, at least some ISPs will default to no protection at all, because that's the easiest to install.
Out of curiosity, what was the problem with Doom 3? I played Doom and Doom 2 many years ago but didn't have enough horsepower to play Doom 3 when it came out, and by the time my PC caught up it was old news and I had lost interest.
well, you might be right. I bought a roll recently along with a number of other plumbing parts, but can't for the life of me remember what I paid for it. I agree it's cheap.
I think he meant, for a whole roll of plumber's tape.
You're right. It makes for a good story, but I wasted a lot of time on that game where I really should have been doing something productive. It's so easy to fall into the pit. Games are designed so that the easiest thing to do after you finish a level is play the next level, and the next. For awhile now Wife has been hooked on Candy Crush. We don't see much of her. High scores posted on Facebook are proof of life.
I'm sure there are people out there who can play these games sparingly and not be addicted. But clearly for many of us they're a powerful addiction. I can't play them at all.
Well, no but... waaaaaait a minute!
Thing is, I don't necessarily want my devices connected to the raw internet. Behind a router using NAT, the device has to originate a connection. That's a feature, not a bodge.
At all. Ever. I had a bad experience with Warcraft, forgot to bathe, was missing appointments, people thought I had died. I finally gave the disk to daughter and told her to hide it. I still don't know where it is.
I guess I have to agree with that, but in the case of navigation, I usually have a passenger who can do all the navigation, and it irritates me that the console won't let *her* look up addresses or find the nearest gas station while *I* have my eyes on the road. It would be nice if the product didn't treat me like a moron.
Agreed. This is also why the controls on well designed vehicles are large enough to easily grasp when the vehicle is shifting, and have a distinctive shape to aid in recognizing them.
Even my motorcycle follows this paradigm. It's a touring model with AM/FM/WB radio, CB, cruise control and other features, which makes the handlebars very crowded. Nevertheless, I can (after much practice) set the cruise, change the channel, signal a lane change and talk to that trucker I just passed without looking at my hands. And this is because the controls have a distinctive shape and position and are large enough to easily manipulate, even with gloves.
It's somewhat of an embarrassment that my big expensive touch-screen stereo/navigator in the truck is such a distraction and so difficult to use while driving, when my daughter can easily change channels and modes with the el-cheapo stereo in her car without looking. Touch screens in cars aren't really a good idea.
Parenthetically, (geek alert) the controls on TOS Enterprise, with their distinctive shapes, seemed a LOT more practical to me for an environment with lots of tipping and juddering in combat, as opposed to the all-touch-screen controls in later generations, which required that you keep your hands in contact with the control surface in a potentially hostile environment and watch your hands manipulate virtual buttons and switches, when you should probably be looking at something else.
Citation?
TFA?
> [...] Then, call it Windows Classic, and run ads with a laptop running the Win8 UX sitting next to a can of New Coke, with the headline: "Yep, we found a way to make even Microsoft Bob look good. We screwed up. Take us back." Include a shot of a second laptop running WC.
As I recall, the Coke company tried to deny responsibility up to the end. I remember the tag line (delivered by Bill Cosby?) being something like "We're not that smart, and we're not that stupid". But that said....
Hell yes. If Microsoft had the guts to put their hubris aside and do this, it would turn things completely around. It would be this century's "Have you driven a Ford lately?"
> You talk like a member of the Chinese Communist Party trying to tell us that "toxic fumes will make us stronger"
This is my new favorite phrase.
> By splitting Windows into Metro and the desktop, Microsoft has created space for casual users as well as power users."
Yes, and as soon as they actually do that, more power users will embrace it. But as long as they dance around trying to drag power users into metro, the issue will remain.
A general switch to unrouteable IP addresses for intranets is, I think, mostly what happened. We could see the shift starting even a little before the chicken littles started screaming about addresses running out. Some of us could see that either the internet would shift to a usage pattern where they didn't run out at all, or they'd run out much more slowly than projected.
Mind you, infrastructure should probably still switch to IPV6 (and is, slowly) but there are few reasons why addresses used within intranets have to be real routeable IP addresses.
This happened in two different contracting jobs. In one, first indication of possible trouble was when the contractor in question put all of his certificates of course completion (framed) up in his office. Second indication was when he tried to convince our client that he should manage the rest of the contractors. Eventually, we stayed, he didn't. The bad news was that I had to untwist and make coherent all of his "solutions".
In another job, similar experience, one of our team of four complained loudly and often about the state of our administrative solutions, saying over and over again "it's just a mess". He was hired into project development. About six months later he left for unstated reasons, and our client offered all three of us full time positions.
I never did figure out how to tell my client that he had hired a poser, but in both cases, things worked out for themselves. I'd say, wait and see if the client wises up.