They thought they were giving us the greatest thing since sliced bread when they came out with the first version of VS 2012, featuring such innovations as monochrome grey icons on a grey background that turn grey when disabled.
When users revolted, they only had two options. They could either admit that their ideas suck, or they could simply dismiss the users as irrational people who don't understand all the great things that Microsoft is doing.
Guess which one they picked? It's a disease that infects Redmond and also explains why they think Metro on the desktop is anything other then a total disaster.
That's one theory. But when someone decides to keep using the program on a new version of Windows and stuff changes, who gets to support that? Hell, I've seen Windows patches break stuff.
Software does in fact tend to require ongoing maintenance from time to time, just like anything else.
Headphones became more popular in response to the "open" office BS that sprang up. Put a bunch of people together and it gets noisy. That noise is both distracting and annoying. Headphones are distracting but not annoying, so they're getting used.
I don't need them, because I'm in an old building and still have an office door. Close the door and noise goes away.
If all you're going to make is generic one-off easy to create stuff, then sure. But once the product gets complicated, it doesn't work very well. Anything that requires domain specific knowledge turns awful real fast when consultants are involved, because if you can't get the same consultants all the time they're starting over in that area and won't know the business at all.
You see this all the time in government. They think its cheaper to have consultants build something from some consulting company that lowballs the estimate. Assuming that what they get actually works at the end of the contract (which itself is a crapshoot), there's nobody in the government with the slightest idea how to support it because all that knowledge is at the consulting company. There's probably flaws due to mistakes in the requirements and specifications that nobody at the consulting company could catch, because they don't know how the inner workings of the government function and just built what you asked for (which is probably not what you needed).
Now when it comes time to fix it, that consulting company has you in a very bad place. Going anywhere else will be prohibitively expensive because the new people won't know anything about either of those things. So now they can charge through the nose for maintenance.
A good in-house team can actually learn the business AND the code, and will be a lot more capable at everything then consultants are, assuming you hire decently skilled people. They'll be able to learn enough to know what you need when you don't know how to ask for it, and will be able to say "no" when you ask for something that's totally unrealistic. Best of all, they might actually care about the success of the company rather then just seeing you as a place to extract more contracts out of.
You can suppliment that team with an occasional consultant when it makes sense (and it does sometimes) or students for more routine coding jobs, but you can't replace having internal expertise. That's been my experience in years of building things with less people and money for one government department, while others try to use consultants to "save" money and wind up massively overbudget with tools that don't actually work very well.
This is pretty standard in the Microsoft volume licensing agreement. There's lots of corporations doing the exact same thing. How do you think XP hung around so long after it wasn't for sale anymore?
And we can do all that now without paying ICANN extra fees or creating the illusion that it's "secure" because the address says so. Which is exactly what end users and the media are going to believe.
What we really need to do is rein ICANN in and stop this kind of nonsense.
My old copy of Demolition Man on DVD has this stuff right. You put it in, the movie starts. There's minimal nonsense. No previews, no menus, just movie. The movie is the only thing I care about anyway, so this is great.
These days they're just annoying. As usual Hollywood is working hard to make the pirate version superior to the purchased one. They must be taking lessons from Ubisoft in how to chase off paying customers.
These types of systems are usually enforced on a complaint basis. Someone lodges a complaint, then some agency gets involved and the advertiser has to prove they didn't break the law or face a fine.
CEOs are judged by a different set of standards then the grunts are. In that we expect the average preson to be responsible, truthful, and generally a decent guy.
On the other hand CEOs have carte blanche to be lying cheating backstabbing assholes, up to and including destroying the company (or the economy) and getting a golden handshake for their trouble.
It's better then a really, really bad credit card, but only if you'd leave it on the card for a long time.
If you can pay off the cost in 9 months, even if it's on a 20% card, doing that still comes out easily ahead of this deal.
Bottom line is that this thing is basically like payday loan services - it exists for suckers who don't have the financial literacy to understand that it's actually a pretty horrible deal.
Because there's lots of people still willing to pay it. Having that fee doesn't seem to hinder them a whole lot, and if you've got a customer base happy to give you money for something that nobody else charges for, why not?
So if I read this correctly, we're now at the point where our collective opinion of CEOs is so low that any standard of behavior above "didn't go on a shooting spree" is considered acceptable?
Sorry, but no. We should expect at least out of our so-called "leaders" what we expect out of entry level staff or unpaid interns. That many CEOs are too morally bankrupt to meet that standard doesn't mean we lower it.
That and you couldn't trademark "486" as it turned out, so Cyrix started putting out stuff like the "6x86" which sounded better due to bigger numbers. Pentium is a trademark-capable name.
When Joe Average has a problem with Windows, he can ask his kids, friends, or someone in IT (yes, it happens0 and probably get some help.
The problem with Linux on the desktop and "Joe Average" is that before it's ready for Joe Average, you need a large enough group of geek adopters that it's easy for Joe Average to get help when something goes wrong. And that group simply isn't large enough right now.
Beat me to it. This attitude explains quite a lot. Everything from why the industry wants to keep reinventing the wheel to how the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again.
The people who know better are "too old". They're also too likely to tell management that management was just sold a bill of goods by a vendor, and managers who think they have a fucking clue what they're talking about certainly can't have that.
People are poorly informed fools
on
In Nothing We Trust
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· Score: 4, Insightful
People are always dissatisifed with how things are going lately, because they haven't got a clue how things are going or what to do about it. It's just how they feel at the moment that determines things... and there's always something new to be outraged about.
The truth is that we've got an uninformed and unengaged electorate who picks a bunch of people to run things, then immediately starts complaining about them. And whose fault is it if you don't like the politicians? It's the voters. Nobody wants to tell the people that they're the ones to blame for all of the stuff they bitch and moan about (as people would rather hear pandering lies about Washington insiders and evil big business), but they are.
You replace the current crop of voters with a group that actually bothers to get informed and refuses to tow the party line, and you'll see things change real fast. Without that, there's no particular reason for anything to change. After all, politicians want votes. If you vote for it, you're encouraging more of it.
At some point you have to move the news from where it's created to where it's read.
With the online versions, that goes over the internet.
With the physical version, that happens with fossil-fuel burning trucks. It takes a LOT of fuel to move a large quantities of a heavy product like paper.
If you want Windows, then you want Windows. Not something else that happens to be called Windows... but that's exactly what Metro is.
And that's why it'll fail on the desktop in Windows 8. The people who like Windows are getting something not-Windows, and the people who don't care will just see that it's new and confusing and figure that if they have to learn something new anyway why not just learn an iPad?
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They thought they were giving us the greatest thing since sliced bread when they came out with the first version of VS 2012, featuring such innovations as monochrome grey icons on a grey background that turn grey when disabled.
When users revolted, they only had two options. They could either admit that their ideas suck, or they could simply dismiss the users as irrational people who don't understand all the great things that Microsoft is doing.
Guess which one they picked? It's a disease that infects Redmond and also explains why they think Metro on the desktop is anything other then a total disaster.
That's one theory. But when someone decides to keep using the program on a new version of Windows and stuff changes, who gets to support that? Hell, I've seen Windows patches break stuff.
Software does in fact tend to require ongoing maintenance from time to time, just like anything else.
So you must love the new touchscreen Fords then!
Headphones became more popular in response to the "open" office BS that sprang up. Put a bunch of people together and it gets noisy. That noise is both distracting and annoying. Headphones are distracting but not annoying, so they're getting used.
I don't need them, because I'm in an old building and still have an office door. Close the door and noise goes away.
If all you're going to make is generic one-off easy to create stuff, then sure. But once the product gets complicated, it doesn't work very well. Anything that requires domain specific knowledge turns awful real fast when consultants are involved, because if you can't get the same consultants all the time they're starting over in that area and won't know the business at all.
You see this all the time in government. They think its cheaper to have consultants build something from some consulting company that lowballs the estimate. Assuming that what they get actually works at the end of the contract (which itself is a crapshoot), there's nobody in the government with the slightest idea how to support it because all that knowledge is at the consulting company. There's probably flaws due to mistakes in the requirements and specifications that nobody at the consulting company could catch, because they don't know how the inner workings of the government function and just built what you asked for (which is probably not what you needed).
Now when it comes time to fix it, that consulting company has you in a very bad place. Going anywhere else will be prohibitively expensive because the new people won't know anything about either of those things. So now they can charge through the nose for maintenance.
A good in-house team can actually learn the business AND the code, and will be a lot more capable at everything then consultants are, assuming you hire decently skilled people. They'll be able to learn enough to know what you need when you don't know how to ask for it, and will be able to say "no" when you ask for something that's totally unrealistic. Best of all, they might actually care about the success of the company rather then just seeing you as a place to extract more contracts out of.
You can suppliment that team with an occasional consultant when it makes sense (and it does sometimes) or students for more routine coding jobs, but you can't replace having internal expertise. That's been my experience in years of building things with less people and money for one government department, while others try to use consultants to "save" money and wind up massively overbudget with tools that don't actually work very well.
This is pretty standard in the Microsoft volume licensing agreement. There's lots of corporations doing the exact same thing. How do you think XP hung around so long after it wasn't for sale anymore?
Hack one. Purpose defeated.
ICANN is a menace that needs to be put out of its misery.
Pretty much everybody else ignores those, so why not?
And we can do all that now without paying ICANN extra fees or creating the illusion that it's "secure" because the address says so. Which is exactly what end users and the media are going to believe.
What we really need to do is rein ICANN in and stop this kind of nonsense.
Yes. It's my money, and as the customer I demand they not put bullshit in just to make me suffer through it.
If they can't manage that, I'll gladly not give them my money. Capitalism is grand.
My old copy of Demolition Man on DVD has this stuff right. You put it in, the movie starts. There's minimal nonsense. No previews, no menus, just movie. The movie is the only thing I care about anyway, so this is great.
These days they're just annoying. As usual Hollywood is working hard to make the pirate version superior to the purchased one. They must be taking lessons from Ubisoft in how to chase off paying customers.
They also don't have a country that came into existence on a founding principal of mistrust of government.
It's not Israel that's odd here, if you look at the world. It's the US that is.
These types of systems are usually enforced on a complaint basis. Someone lodges a complaint, then some agency gets involved and the advertiser has to prove they didn't break the law or face a fine.
CEOs are judged by a different set of standards then the grunts are. In that we expect the average preson to be responsible, truthful, and generally a decent guy.
On the other hand CEOs have carte blanche to be lying cheating backstabbing assholes, up to and including destroying the company (or the economy) and getting a golden handshake for their trouble.
It's an interesting standard.
It's better then a really, really bad credit card, but only if you'd leave it on the card for a long time.
If you can pay off the cost in 9 months, even if it's on a 20% card, doing that still comes out easily ahead of this deal.
Bottom line is that this thing is basically like payday loan services - it exists for suckers who don't have the financial literacy to understand that it's actually a pretty horrible deal.
Bankers willing to lend money to people with no income, jobs, or assets? They can probably afford a normal price 360, particularly since it's cheaper.
Because there's lots of people still willing to pay it. Having that fee doesn't seem to hinder them a whole lot, and if you've got a customer base happy to give you money for something that nobody else charges for, why not?
So if I read this correctly, we're now at the point where our collective opinion of CEOs is so low that any standard of behavior above "didn't go on a shooting spree" is considered acceptable?
Sorry, but no. We should expect at least out of our so-called "leaders" what we expect out of entry level staff or unpaid interns. That many CEOs are too morally bankrupt to meet that standard doesn't mean we lower it.
That and you couldn't trademark "486" as it turned out, so Cyrix started putting out stuff like the "6x86" which sounded better due to bigger numbers. Pentium is a trademark-capable name.
When Joe Average has a problem with Windows, he can ask his kids, friends, or someone in IT (yes, it happens0 and probably get some help.
The problem with Linux on the desktop and "Joe Average" is that before it's ready for Joe Average, you need a large enough group of geek adopters that it's easy for Joe Average to get help when something goes wrong. And that group simply isn't large enough right now.
Oh they'd sink just fine. It was the getting them to come back up part.
Beat me to it. This attitude explains quite a lot. Everything from why the industry wants to keep reinventing the wheel to how the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again.
The people who know better are "too old". They're also too likely to tell management that management was just sold a bill of goods by a vendor, and managers who think they have a fucking clue what they're talking about certainly can't have that.
People are always dissatisifed with how things are going lately, because they haven't got a clue how things are going or what to do about it. It's just how they feel at the moment that determines things... and there's always something new to be outraged about.
The truth is that we've got an uninformed and unengaged electorate who picks a bunch of people to run things, then immediately starts complaining about them. And whose fault is it if you don't like the politicians? It's the voters. Nobody wants to tell the people that they're the ones to blame for all of the stuff they bitch and moan about (as people would rather hear pandering lies about Washington insiders and evil big business), but they are.
You replace the current crop of voters with a group that actually bothers to get informed and refuses to tow the party line, and you'll see things change real fast. Without that, there's no particular reason for anything to change. After all, politicians want votes. If you vote for it, you're encouraging more of it.
At some point you have to move the news from where it's created to where it's read.
With the online versions, that goes over the internet.
With the physical version, that happens with fossil-fuel burning trucks. It takes a LOT of fuel to move a large quantities of a heavy product like paper.
It's not counter-intuititve at all. It's obvious.
If you want Windows, then you want Windows. Not something else that happens to be called Windows... but that's exactly what Metro is.
And that's why it'll fail on the desktop in Windows 8. The people who like Windows are getting something not-Windows, and the people who don't care will just see that it's new and confusing and figure that if they have to learn something new anyway why not just learn an iPad?