God, I just realized -- Microsoft marketing behaves exactly like my 19 year old daughter. If the solution is obvious, she'll do something different rather than admit she's wrong.
Personally, I'm sticking with 7 until the start menu comes back or hell freezes over
I kind of liked 7 when I got this notebook 2 years ago, even though it was missing some features I'd gotten used to with kubuntu. But it's gotten slower with every OS patch to the point where it's annoying enough it's going to be Linux. Probably coincidence, but the biggest slowdowns were the three Patch Tuesdays after W8 came out.
If you're a Windows user because you're a gamer or need some expensive business software, you're going to have to "upgrade" sooner or later anyway.
It's because I use fairly expensive Adobe applications on a regular basis. But if the choices are going to be win8 or finding a different set of applications, I'm thinking the latter. If Adobe ever ports to Ubuntu or Android, I'd leave Windows and never look back. (Except a brief glance to make sure Ballmer wasn't chasing me with a chair.)
So.... besides the ".1" in 8.1, we are anticipating this release... why? I mean, I wasn't aware that the 8.1 release was a thing. You get a start button, which takes you directly to the already existing start screen. Shrug. Personally, I'm sticking with 7 until the start menu comes back or hell freezes over, whichever occurs first.
So, the RT didn't sell well, the Pro sold only slightly better... so the answer is to release more models, and the mistake they made was not timing it with the holidays?
um, yeah, you should have sent it back. I've had a Bold and a Tour, (two different carriers) and haven't had any of the experiences you describe. The desk holder is head and shoulders the best ever created. There's no connector to press in, as with both of my Droids -- you just drop the phone in the general direction of the slot and it switches to desktop mode and starts charging. No problems with reception or battery life, although I did invest in the extra capacity battery as a job requirement.
As you well know, when the PC goes to sleep it cuts power to the USB cable. Many USB devices handle this badly. None of my grid-powered devices go to sleep, for a variety of reasons, including this one. If you insist on using this feature, use a wall charger for your phone. It's not rocket science.
Mind you, the first Bold had build issues, and I sent the first two back as unusable. But I eventually got one that worked correctly.
I had an ongoing problem with the trackball, but that was my issue -- I have eczema in my hands, and bits of dead skin would get jammed under the ball. When they switched to the trackpad the problem went away. (The man reason I switched from the original Bold to the Tour when it came out.)
I've not found options and preferences any better or worse on BB vs Android. If you've been stuck with the wrong spell check library you just haven't been trying hard enough. I googled "blackberry bold spell check" just now and the fourth link was a tutorial on spellcheck options. That might be a good place to start.
I'm on call, and I've returned phones (cough-Windows6-cough) that would not take or make calls reliably. (The Windows phone would pop up "the audio driver has encountered an error and must now close" and the phone would no longer ring until rebooted.) When the "you're holding it wrong" version of the iphone came out, it was clearly not a good choice (although the execs loved them), and when it was established that offshore IT could not keep BES up, Android was the only other choice.
But the Blackberry is not... shiny. It doesn't have the coolness factor of an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy Note, and this grates on people. I can understand. It depends on what you want a phone for. As issued by work, the primary purpose is communication, and I submit that BB does that really well (when BES is up). It falls short of Android and IOS in number of apps, lacking the fart button, and having a poor showing in games and media. And it's not cool.
There's a factor in getting to know a phone which I call the "hate factor". If you hate your phone, if it's not what you wanted, you're not going to learn how to use it adequately. It's just human nature. If you love your phone (cough-iphone-cough) even the most egregious flaws and omissions will be overlooked.
Feel free to disagree, but I think what killed BB in the end was losing their reputation for reliability. They may not have been the newest shiny object, but dammit, when you made a call, it went through, no matter how you held the phone. Being tightly integrated with the company intranet was a huge plus, something that android and ios still don't have completely. I miss being able to tap on a meeting organizer name in calendar to message him I'll be a little late.
I suspect that national outage awhile back started people thinking about single points of failure. I know that when BES went down for a week (not Blackberry's fault -- we outsourced our BB admins and that did not go well) most of us BB users had Android or IOS phones on order by the time it came back up. Blackberry ("Crackberry") got us hooked on instant gratification -- immediate access to office communication -- and when it went away, we were not prepared to take that cold turkey.
> You are nitpicking because you don't like Al Gore.
Stop right there. Were my only goal to not like Algore (as the media called him in 2000, slurring the two syllables into a single word, accent on the first syllable) I would merely be repeating the tired old meme that he claimed to have invented or built it or some such. I have researched it, I was *there* for part of it, and I know whereof I speak. The bill he co-wrote was *not* the single action that suddenly flicked the switch from "ARPA" to "AOL". Commercializing the (already existing) internet was a long process which included several factors, of which this was undeniably one.
Again, had he said something reasonable, like "I took the initiative to co-author legislation that helped develop the internet into the commercial presence it is today", there would never have been an issue. Instead, he went for something bombastic, (or, as some have suggested, had a line and blew it in the heat of the moment) and an Internet meme was born. This however, doesn't stop people from continuing to try to prove that what he actually said was in some way literally true. To which I say, if you just stick with the facts, instead of trying to go too far the other way in compensation for people sniggering at "Algore thinks he invented the internet", then the meme might fade. Oddly, it's showing no sign of doing so. And between you and me, I'm getting tired of it also. If someone needed evidence that Algore is a blowhard, there are many truthful ways to prove it; there is no necessity of inventing same.
> "How can I automatically have my wi-fi turn off when I leave the house unless I specifically turn it back on?"
At first I couldn't think of a solution. It's really a matter of remembering to do it yourself....and then I remembered, cells with wifi also have gps... Why couldn't there be an app that will only turn on wifi when gps coordinates closely match a list? Possible GUI -- bring up app, touch "allow wifi from here". Coordinates are memorized, and wifi is turned on only X number of feet from that location. (Also "disallow wifi from here", "edit list" and "delete all entries" would be good features. Oooh, also add "test wifi" with "remember this location?")
My former boss and many of my co-workers are in my friends list. It's an extension of "if you don't want someone to see it, don't put it online". It's difficult to post in a public forum and then try to control who sees it. That's what "public" means.
I've caught a company rep in a lie based on information from the public linkedin profies of two of their employees, and called them on it. See "public"...
(Note that private communication to individuals is an entirely different thing.)
That said, if a company demanded to see my facebook profile, I'd decline on general principles.
Slightly off-topic but I wonder how realistic reinstatement is as a remedy in cases like this. Presumably by now the company has hired someone else to do her job, given them her desk and all her files/work. Do they get fired if she comes back? Do they just have to make more work for her?
Of course it's the company's fault, so she should not lose out, I'm just interested in how it works in practice.
Hm. I suspect reinstatement works fine for most (non-elected) government positions and into any role that is heavily union-regulated. In a free market, not so much.
>Having been present when a company fired 88% of their IT staff, (and came to *really* regret it later)
Would you mind telling this story?
The company announced a massive outsourcing that was to commence in six months. Told all of us to document our jobs so that the offshore admins could take over. We're talking releasing all but a couple dozen of a 200 person workforce. Only the people who were retained had any interest whatsoever in documenting the work that offshore had to do -- the rest were using that time to look for jobs in a down economy.
Nevertheless, reports were that the process was going well. We were told that we would no longer have root to do our work, the offshore experts would share their session in some kind of proprietary virtual room, temporarily grant us root and watch us work.
Transition occurred on a Friday. Services started crashing on Saturday. Blackberry was a popular company phone at the time, and BES went down hard within 24 hours of cutover and stayed down for a week. Email stopped working. We provide web services to outside customers, and they ran on inertia for a few days and then started having problems.
My group was scrambling to keep our services up, and needed root to recover from a crash. We attempted to invoke the "virtual room" clause, and after an excruciating 40 minutes trying to get a session going with an offshore admin, (the line kept failing, and he had to log in again and again and restart the session) we finally got him patched into a webmeeting using our resources.
We then found that, just like the "Peggy" commercial, he answered "yes" to every question whether he knew the answer or not. In the background I could hear him ruffling through papers in a panic, no doubt trying to find a procedure for what we were trying to do. (Gain temporary root access, something the outsourcing company said we would be able to do.)
"Madhusudan, can you see my screen?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Ok I'm going to give you control of the session. Do you have control now?"
"Yes"
"Can you move the cursor?"
"Yes"
(Nothing happens)
"We want you to move the cursor now."
"Yes"
(Still nothing)
And so forth. After a lot of coaxing, (about an hour and a half into the call) we finally got him to the point where he was to type in the root password. He then -- I swear I am not making this up -- asked us what the root password was.
Getting anything done that we can't directly do ourselves is excruciatingly difficult. Among the challenges: Adding a user to an A/D group takes three weeks. The offshore admins don't know or don't care who is responsible to what, and blast out all notices to the entire company, including people who never touch computers. They ignore distribution lists, apparently keeping their own scorecard as to who does what, and if you are identified as being able to fix something, (even if it's no longer your job) you'll get all the requests.
My customers beg me not to make them call the helpdesk.
They don't understand that when it's daytime over there, it's night time over here. I routinely get calls at my desk between midnight and 4:00 AM. Often asking for final permission for some maintenance they had scheduled. They can get really irate that repeated calls at 3 in the morning don't get hold of me.
These are obviously people with no experience whatsoever, who are put in front of phones with a stack of papers. They're *not* stupid -- we have trained up some fairly decent junior admins over time. The problem is, the pay is so low that as soon as they get some training, they move on to higher paying jobs and we never hear from them again. I've had admins *brag* that they finally have enough training to get off night shift (our day shift) and then we have to start over with someone who's just learning to type.
And it's not ever going to get better, because this is the way the business model is
He did not do the engineering bit, nobody would think so. But... the internet was a government research project, FFS. If a politician said he took initiative to the creating a road, would he ever be confronted with people insisting on interpreting his statement to mean that he claimed to have built the road?
Giving the line that significance is frankly stupid. This trend of purposefully misunderstanding people is doing some serious damage to the intelligence of politics.
Don't try erecting straw men; I did not and would not say he claims to have built the internet.
He didn't say "create a road", which in this context might mean "create an internet". He said "I took the initiative in creating the internet", and the internet demonstrably already existed before he started co-writing the bill that increased funding for the backbone.
And "the first political leader" means the first political leader, not the first architect, engineer, futurist. Lots of things, even government things, happen without direct involvement by a politician. Being the first political leader signifies the first involvement by a political leader, not the first existence of the thing the politician chooses to support.
Princess Leia: No! Alderaan is peaceful! We have no weapons, you can't possibly... Wait, nothing's happening. Isn't that supposed to be doing something? Governor Balmer: Give me a minute. Try the hot corner. No, the other one! Get out of the way. Desktop Mode.... WHERE THE %#@$ IS THE START MENU?
The business model is: Lead clients to BELIEVE that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week.
Sorry, I think IBM Global Services has already patented that idea.
You may be right. If so, at least one other well known outsourcer is in violation of their patent.
Personally, I thought IBM's best known contribution to the outsourcing process was the clause: "You can keep your job if you agree to move to a third world country of our choice and work for prevailing wage there." That's a classic.
Slashdot Mirror
God, I just realized -- Microsoft marketing behaves exactly like my 19 year old daughter. If the solution is obvious, she'll do something different rather than admit she's wrong.
> People are waiting for it for the same reasons they waited with anticipation for the first Vista service pack: they hoped that it would fix things.
We both know that's not gonna happen.
> The best solution might be to ship ClassicShell as an option, but pride would prevent that.
Agreed. They wouldn't do that even if their business depended on it.
Personally, I'm sticking with 7 until the start menu comes back or hell freezes over
I kind of liked 7 when I got this notebook 2 years ago, even though it was missing some features I'd gotten used to with kubuntu. But it's gotten slower with every OS patch to the point where it's annoying enough it's going to be Linux. Probably coincidence, but the biggest slowdowns were the three Patch Tuesdays after W8 came out.
If you're a Windows user because you're a gamer or need some expensive business software, you're going to have to "upgrade" sooner or later anyway.
It's because I use fairly expensive Adobe applications on a regular basis. But if the choices are going to be win8 or finding a different set of applications, I'm thinking the latter. If Adobe ever ports to Ubuntu or Android, I'd leave Windows and never look back. (Except a brief glance to make sure Ballmer wasn't chasing me with a chair.)
So.... besides the ".1" in 8.1, we are anticipating this release ... why? I mean, I wasn't aware that the 8.1 release was a thing. You get a start button, which takes you directly to the already existing start screen. Shrug. Personally, I'm sticking with 7 until the start menu comes back or hell freezes over, whichever occurs first.
So, the RT didn't sell well, the Pro sold only slightly better... so the answer is to release more models, and the mistake they made was not timing it with the holidays?
Kidding, right?
um, yeah, you should have sent it back. I've had a Bold and a Tour, (two different carriers) and haven't had any of the experiences you describe. The desk holder is head and shoulders the best ever created. There's no connector to press in, as with both of my Droids -- you just drop the phone in the general direction of the slot and it switches to desktop mode and starts charging. No problems with reception or battery life, although I did invest in the extra capacity battery as a job requirement.
As you well know, when the PC goes to sleep it cuts power to the USB cable. Many USB devices handle this badly. None of my grid-powered devices go to sleep, for a variety of reasons, including this one. If you insist on using this feature, use a wall charger for your phone. It's not rocket science.
Mind you, the first Bold had build issues, and I sent the first two back as unusable. But I eventually got one that worked correctly.
I had an ongoing problem with the trackball, but that was my issue -- I have eczema in my hands, and bits of dead skin would get jammed under the ball. When they switched to the trackpad the problem went away. (The man reason I switched from the original Bold to the Tour when it came out.)
I've not found options and preferences any better or worse on BB vs Android. If you've been stuck with the wrong spell check library you just haven't been trying hard enough. I googled "blackberry bold spell check" just now and the fourth link was a tutorial on spellcheck options. That might be a good place to start.
I'm on call, and I've returned phones (cough-Windows6-cough) that would not take or make calls reliably. (The Windows phone would pop up "the audio driver has encountered an error and must now close" and the phone would no longer ring until rebooted.) When the "you're holding it wrong" version of the iphone came out, it was clearly not a good choice (although the execs loved them), and when it was established that offshore IT could not keep BES up, Android was the only other choice.
But the Blackberry is not... shiny. It doesn't have the coolness factor of an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy Note, and this grates on people. I can understand. It depends on what you want a phone for. As issued by work, the primary purpose is communication, and I submit that BB does that really well (when BES is up). It falls short of Android and IOS in number of apps, lacking the fart button, and having a poor showing in games and media. And it's not cool.
There's a factor in getting to know a phone which I call the "hate factor". If you hate your phone, if it's not what you wanted, you're not going to learn how to use it adequately. It's just human nature. If you love your phone (cough-iphone-cough) even the most egregious flaws and omissions will be overlooked.
Feel free to disagree, but I think what killed BB in the end was losing their reputation for reliability. They may not have been the newest shiny object, but dammit, when you made a call, it went through, no matter how you held the phone. Being tightly integrated with the company intranet was a huge plus, something that android and ios still don't have completely. I miss being able to tap on a meeting organizer name in calendar to message him I'll be a little late.
I suspect that national outage awhile back started people thinking about single points of failure. I know that when BES went down for a week (not Blackberry's fault -- we outsourced our BB admins and that did not go well) most of us BB users had Android or IOS phones on order by the time it came back up. Blackberry ("Crackberry") got us hooked on instant gratification -- immediate access to office communication -- and when it went away, we were not prepared to take that cold turkey.
That's an easy decision. The NSA don't need computers and all that information technology anyway.
Mod up!!
> You are nitpicking because you don't like Al Gore.
Stop right there. Were my only goal to not like Algore (as the media called him in 2000, slurring the two syllables into a single word, accent on the first syllable) I would merely be repeating the tired old meme that he claimed to have invented or built it or some such. I have researched it, I was *there* for part of it, and I know whereof I speak. The bill he co-wrote was *not* the single action that suddenly flicked the switch from "ARPA" to "AOL". Commercializing the (already existing) internet was a long process which included several factors, of which this was undeniably one.
Again, had he said something reasonable, like "I took the initiative to co-author legislation that helped develop the internet into the commercial presence it is today", there would never have been an issue. Instead, he went for something bombastic, (or, as some have suggested, had a line and blew it in the heat of the moment) and an Internet meme was born. This however, doesn't stop people from continuing to try to prove that what he actually said was in some way literally true. To which I say, if you just stick with the facts, instead of trying to go too far the other way in compensation for people sniggering at "Algore thinks he invented the internet", then the meme might fade. Oddly, it's showing no sign of doing so. And between you and me, I'm getting tired of it also. If someone needed evidence that Algore is a blowhard, there are many truthful ways to prove it; there is no necessity of inventing same.
> "How can I automatically have my wi-fi turn off when I leave the house unless I specifically turn it back on?"
At first I couldn't think of a solution. It's really a matter of remembering to do it yourself. ...and then I remembered, cells with wifi also have gps... Why couldn't there be an app that will only turn on wifi when gps coordinates closely match a list? Possible GUI -- bring up app, touch "allow wifi from here". Coordinates are memorized, and wifi is turned on only X number of feet from that location. (Also "disallow wifi from here", "edit list" and "delete all entries" would be good features. Oooh, also add "test wifi" with "remember this location?")
"I'd buy that for a dollar".
...You need to be on my friends' list to see most of what I post, and you need a FB account to even see my main profile at all.
People who aren't on my list will know that I have a couple radio shows...that's pretty much it.
Enh. I suspect that security is largely a sham on facebook.
Back to myspace?
I'd rather gouge my eyes out.
My former boss and many of my co-workers are in my friends list. It's an extension of "if you don't want someone to see it, don't put it online". It's difficult to post in a public forum and then try to control who sees it. That's what "public" means.
I've caught a company rep in a lie based on information from the public linkedin profies of two of their employees, and called them on it. See "public"...
(Note that private communication to individuals is an entirely different thing.)
That said, if a company demanded to see my facebook profile, I'd decline on general principles.
Slightly off-topic but I wonder how realistic reinstatement is as a remedy in cases like this. Presumably by now the company has hired someone else to do her job, given them her desk and all her files/work. Do they get fired if she comes back? Do they just have to make more work for her?
Of course it's the company's fault, so she should not lose out, I'm just interested in how it works in practice.
Hm. I suspect reinstatement works fine for most (non-elected) government positions and into any role that is heavily union-regulated. In a free market, not so much.
>Having been present when a company fired 88% of their IT staff, (and came to *really* regret it later)
Would you mind telling this story?
The company announced a massive outsourcing that was to commence in six months. Told all of us to document our jobs so that the offshore admins could take over. We're talking releasing all but a couple dozen of a 200 person workforce. Only the people who were retained had any interest whatsoever in documenting the work that offshore had to do -- the rest were using that time to look for jobs in a down economy.
Nevertheless, reports were that the process was going well. We were told that we would no longer have root to do our work, the offshore experts would share their session in some kind of proprietary virtual room, temporarily grant us root and watch us work.
Transition occurred on a Friday. Services started crashing on Saturday. Blackberry was a popular company phone at the time, and BES went down hard within 24 hours of cutover and stayed down for a week. Email stopped working. We provide web services to outside customers, and they ran on inertia for a few days and then started having problems.
My group was scrambling to keep our services up, and needed root to recover from a crash. We attempted to invoke the "virtual room" clause, and after an excruciating 40 minutes trying to get a session going with an offshore admin, (the line kept failing, and he had to log in again and again and restart the session) we finally got him patched into a webmeeting using our resources.
We then found that, just like the "Peggy" commercial, he answered "yes" to every question whether he knew the answer or not. In the background I could hear him ruffling through papers in a panic, no doubt trying to find a procedure for what we were trying to do. (Gain temporary root access, something the outsourcing company said we would be able to do.)
"Madhusudan, can you see my screen?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Ok I'm going to give you control of the session. Do you have control now?"
"Yes"
"Can you move the cursor?"
"Yes"
(Nothing happens)
"We want you to move the cursor now."
"Yes"
(Still nothing)
And so forth. After a lot of coaxing, (about an hour and a half into the call) we finally got him to the point where he was to type in the root password. He then -- I swear I am not making this up -- asked us what the root password was.
Getting anything done that we can't directly do ourselves is excruciatingly difficult. Among the challenges: Adding a user to an A/D group takes three weeks. The offshore admins don't know or don't care who is responsible to what, and blast out all notices to the entire company, including people who never touch computers. They ignore distribution lists, apparently keeping their own scorecard as to who does what, and if you are identified as being able to fix something, (even if it's no longer your job) you'll get all the requests.
My customers beg me not to make them call the helpdesk.
They don't understand that when it's daytime over there, it's night time over here. I routinely get calls at my desk between midnight and 4:00 AM. Often asking for final permission for some maintenance they had scheduled. They can get really irate that repeated calls at 3 in the morning don't get hold of me.
These are obviously people with no experience whatsoever, who are put in front of phones with a stack of papers. They're *not* stupid -- we have trained up some fairly decent junior admins over time. The problem is, the pay is so low that as soon as they get some training, they move on to higher paying jobs and we never hear from them again. I've had admins *brag* that they finally have enough training to get off night shift (our day shift) and then we have to start over with someone who's just learning to type.
And it's not ever going to get better, because this is the way the business model is
"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
Quoth an open letter by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, both of whom must be considered "founding fathers" of the Internet.
The full file is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
He did not do the engineering bit, nobody would think so. But... the internet was a government research project, FFS. If a politician said he took initiative to the creating a road, would he ever be confronted with people insisting on interpreting his statement to mean that he claimed to have built the road?
Giving the line that significance is frankly stupid. This trend of purposefully misunderstanding people is doing some serious damage to the intelligence of politics.
Don't try erecting straw men; I did not and would not say he claims to have built the internet.
He didn't say "create a road", which in this context might mean "create an internet". He said "I took the initiative in creating the internet", and the internet demonstrably already existed before he started co-writing the bill that increased funding for the backbone.
And "the first political leader" means the first political leader, not the first architect, engineer, futurist. Lots of things, even government things, happen without direct involvement by a politician. Being the first political leader signifies the first involvement by a political leader, not the first existence of the thing the politician chooses to support.
Not even mentioning that he CO-wrote the bill.
All governments monitor their citizens.
I don't think it's a matter of "whether", but a matter of "to what extent".
Not after we demonstrate the capabilities of Windows 8!
The difference being that the Deathstar actually did was it was supposed to do.
The good news is that customers will get 5 Surface RT's thrown in for free.
Plus a couple of chairs.
Sure, it looks expensive, but Microsoft is throwing in a Surface RT I believe.
Woot!
Duck!
Princess Leia: No! Alderaan is peaceful! We have no weapons, you can't possibly... Wait, nothing's happening. Isn't that supposed to be doing something?
Governor Balmer: Give me a minute. Try the hot corner. No, the other one! Get out of the way. Desktop Mode.... WHERE THE %#@$ IS THE START MENU?
"how the FUCK do you think everything is going to get done with 90 people?"
Two Words: Offshore Contractors
"Get done" being the operative words. Offshore admin contractors (in my personal experience) tend to be former busboys following written scripts.
Is the answer that 90% of the job can be automated because most admins never bother to write a script?
There is that, sometimes, but it takes a singularly inept admin to do 90% unnecessary work when he could be cruising Slashdot instead.
As an American, I'm not sure I agree either.
The business model is: Lead clients to BELIEVE that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week.
Sorry, I think IBM Global Services has already patented that idea.
You may be right. If so, at least one other well known outsourcer is in violation of their patent.
Personally, I thought IBM's best known contribution to the outsourcing process was the clause: "You can keep your job if you agree to move to a third world country of our choice and work for prevailing wage there." That's a classic.