As for the exit interview, it was your chance to tell them why you were fed up and have it entered in permanent documents
They had permanent documents. They had six months worth of permanent documents about it and two requests, in years before the incident blew up, to be transferred away from the manager in question. There was even a written request to HR, within the first year of my employment of,"How to handle a situation where goals and expectations are set at an unreasonable level to include demands which are beyond the control of an entry-level employee?" That request was ignored for the most part. I was told that such a thing must be handled on a case by case basis should it ever arise. When it did arise, the department head looked me blank in the face and said he saw nothing unreasonable about the goals and expectations. Requiring an entry level employee to personally deliver a clinical target molecule. Nice.
you could have even typed up your comments and submitted them as part of your response
They were in my letter of resignation which I left with HR on my way out the door. It was a professionally written letter which said only that which needed to be said. All parties, including the HR rep who called me a week later, were personally involved with the entire history of the situation. She knew darned well what had gone on. The HR rep who had handled the situation before her had told her what was going on--but he was across the nation and she was doing exactly what management told her to do.
And why didn't you call the labor board (whatever name it goes by in your state) and ask them for help?
"We're sorry sir. The company has denied your request. Since you voluntarily left your job there's nothing we can do. The matter of your vacation time has always been a case by case subject. You may need a private attorney to look at your employee agreement."
There was nothing in the employee agreement about a mandatory exit interview, only that the company may ask for one. I agree it was standard procedure, but the treatment which I received there was most definitely in violation of every concept of standard procedure when working with another human being. On numerous occasions I had told my manager that I'd had enough, that he was going too far, that, as a manager who was 3 promotions above me (which was atypical. most managers are only one level above their direct reports or associates), he needed to meet me halfway on at least some of the issues. He folded his arms, looked at me blankly, and said,"I don't need to meet you anywhere."
I'm happily employed again and I like my current employer. I'm still paying to clean up the financial mess that was created at the last job. You don't just walk away from a professional job and expect the bills to pay themselves. I had tried for a year before leaving to interview with other companies, but I was out of sorts, harassed, and antagonized and wasn't in any frame of mind to interview well.
As I said... it was like leaving a bad marriage in the middle of the night with no clothes, no money, no place to live, and nothing but a tiny suitcase under the arm. I'm doing better now that I've left but that's not to say what happened then isn't still causing problems for me now.
Well, there you go. You've made the important distinction which the article and most posters arguing against printed manuals leave out.
If I'm printing out an 800-page manual, or a 50 page HOWTO, or a 200 page Documentation manual, chances are I'm not using it for reference. Reference is looking for a very specific small bit of information in an enormous pile of available material. For this task, electronic editions are preferable.
For anything which requires reading more than a single page of text at a time, absorbing it, and using it to build the next page of text on, the printed text is far superior.
To take a vacation, you have to come back at the end. I.e. you were required to come in for the exit interview.
Ah, no. I've watched plenty of people use their vacation to fill out their time when they were switching jobs. It's not a requirement. It was company enforced and government backed strongarm tactics to have a last chance to harass me after I walked out. I was on a first name basis with the HR rep who called me that day, mostly because I'd already talked with her on numerous occasions about my problems with my manager. The problem was that this HR rep was in my manager's pocket.
The first HR rep who handled my case against the manager found in favor of me and told management to back off. He had actually been recruited by management to send me out the door but, with a few important details provided by me which management had carefully omitted, he recognized the kind of harassment that I was receiving. The company offered him a cozy position at a facility in another state, closer to his family. The management then waited three months, rehashed the same old story, and fed it to the new HR rep who was a young girl, easily pushed around and misled, with no sense of what goes on in big company politics.
However, an exit interview is not an unreasonable request. Heck, I'd think of it as standard procedure.
Say again how standard procedure justifies something which is illegal? Standard procedure does not require a victim to go through an exit interview with their assailant.
My cynicism about employers and their contracts comes from situations like this one where the abusive manager had HR in his pocket, was a long-time favorite of the established upper management above him, was a 15-year industry veteran and a regular attendee at some very prestigious world conferences in the industry and who was taking out his personal and professional frustrations on a hardworking employee with the work ethic of a Catholic and the patience of an elephant who was only a single year out of undergraduate school.
As for my cynicism about governments: Our own government here in the US is not even close to being the Constitutional Republic that it purports to be. The federal government has long overstepped the boundaries of legitimate power as defined specifically in the 9th and 10th Amendments to our Constitution and, in doing so, has dictated much of the policy that strongly influences if not outright controls not only our interior state governments, but the policies and procedures of the governments in much of the world, including the UK. The UK government has never truly impressed me either in the obvious contradictions between its public policy and the way it's handled things like, oh, the Irish, the Church, the Jewish world migrants after WW-II (not to mention creating the Israeli problem, without bothering to ask the natives of that area, prior to WW-II in their own efforts to move the Jews out of the UK), and South Africa. Second only to the Portuguese in brutality, from what I understand.
How're those police installed microphones doing over there? All safety and do-good propaganda aside, aren't they indicative of an overwhelming and self-absorbed government as well?
I'm fed up with the authority pyramid scheme that pervades the entire world, I'm fed up with the taxation pyramid scheme which creates more social problems than it solves, I'm fed up with the financial pyrmamid scheme so elaborately set up by the banking, insurance, and investment industry...
And mostly, I'm fed up with the policy of lip-service which is used to pacify the population. And I'm fed up with a population that tolerates this kind of treatment from the very people they elected, from the very people whose paychecks they pay with their own blood, sweat, and tears 60-80 hours/week. I, and most of my fellow Americans, work more days/year to pay taxes than to pay myself... and what do we get for it? We get an overbearing government wasting our money to pass legislation allowing them to fiat more money just so they can funnel it back into their own private coffers by means of government contract, government regulation, and other back-alley poker type tactics: "If you can't win, change the rules so you can."
There are 100 people in the world. There are 5 intelligent people, 5 greedy people, and 90 not-so-bright people. 2 greedy people convince 20 not-so-bright people to harass and otherwise detain 5 intelligent people. 2 greedy people convince 55 not-so-bright people to vote. 5 intelligent people get harassed to death while 5 greedy people use the votes of 55 not-so-bright people to justify turning the world into a planet of indentured servants.
If authority were even close to solving more problems than it fixes, I'd be all for supporting authority. The way the world runs today, however, it's all a big pile of steaming poop.
You could be missing the other possibility: Governments and the implementation of their various powers have proven to me, at least in today's world, to be not worth the paper they're printed on.
You say that such a thing might lead to an industrial tribunal. In practice, however, how impartial are such tribunals? What is the cost barrier for representation? What are the various social stigmas which may follow an employee before, during, and after the proceedings of such a tribunal? For example, here in the States, if you want to take the legal route against an employer one had better pray the settlement is enough to hold you for a lifetime because very few companies will chance hiring an employee who has filed legal action against a former employer.
Pretty words and useless legal promises aside... Let's talk about reality.
The Bible is mostly storytelling which is supposed to pass time.
Summarizing the Bible's easy: Nothing really matters but be polite and considerate anyway.
It's really too bad that the people with the biggest mouths about doing the "right thing" have absolutely no concept of being considerate. Bankers, politicians, CEOs... most of them feel all good about themselves because they go to church but yet they feel absolutely no problem rewarding themselves with multimillion dollar bonuses while laying off thousands of workers at a shot. That's not real considerate.
Now... back to summarizing that 800 page tech manual.
The veal's great. Is that cracked black pepper in the seasoning? Yum.
When I left my last employer I gave no notice and informed my manager that I was taking my two weeks of vacation as I walked out the door.
The HR department called me to say they would only honor my vacation request if I came in for an exit interview. I told them there was no way I was setting foot in their building again after the way I'd been treated. I put up with it for three years and, one day, made the decision that I'd had enough. It was like leaving a bad marriage with no money, no clothes, no where to live, and barely a suitcase under the arm.
They wrote me off, denied my unemployment claim, and withheld the paycheck for the two weeks' vacation.
Call a lawyer? I'd been so harassed and was so out of sorts at the time that no lawyer even wanted to talk to me. Truthfully, I wouldn't have wanted to talk to me at that time either.
So where's all this hoidy-toidy legal rights junk now? I'm still paying for the mess that was created by a manager harassing an employee near to death.
So that as long as the manager who's harassing you can wheedle in good with HR, he's free to harass you for as long as he likes and you still have to put up with a notice period should you decide to leave?
No thanks. If someone's riding my backside with the blessing of the supposedly objective and impartial corporate overseers then I'm going to walk out the door on a dime notice.
I have boots, camping gear, and a tent. I just don't care to put up with the BS anymore and I will walk if I'm pushed.
I think that falls under "We're going to try and pull as much illegal crap as possible to turn you into a human slave because we know you can't afford to be without a paycheck or the lawyer to call our bluff."
Either way, it's dishonest and unethical. If I find someone's not playing by the rules then I summarily dismiss any respect I may have ever had for them.
That's the way I feel about my employers, past and present, and my government.
I'd thought about it but something about syringe kits just don't look right to me. I had no problem with reinking my own ribbons but there's something that just doesn't "smell" right about syringe kits.
If I think about it I suspect it's the ink. If I bought a syringe kit I'd fully expect to print pages of paper with ink blots all over them and end up with a printer with ink splattered everywhere inside.
That's a beautiful idea. Here are my thoughts on "why not":
A frozen patch CD removes the necessity for network traffic to MS.com and eliminates their chances to have their automated update tool poke, prod, and probe your system for whatever data mining they like to do.
In Win98SE (which was a good OS for a single-user install.) it was an offered option at one time to save the incoming updates to the HD first. This option has since been quietly removed. For certain it is still possible to retain copies of the updates but it requires the user to do/know things which aren't considered normal update procedure. I imagine that MS PR likes to delude themselves (and the public) into thinking they're securing their patch code so that people don't reverse engineer the patches to find out what's really being fixed/added/modified/surreptitiously installed.
<tinfoil mode="extreme">Mostly I think it's because MS has business dealings with the types of corporations who profit from poking, prodding, probing, and snooping on the general consumer populance</tinfoil>
My employer tried this as well, except that they had absolutely no method to block the Windows autoupdate (which they used their IT superpowers to fixate at "Automatically Download Updates").
So I'm supposed to endure this pop-up which keeps telling me that new updates are ready to install or, worse, tell it not to install the updates and wait five minutes for it to download them all again?
I read between the lines, let it autoupdate, and waited for someone to tell me I wasn't supposed to do that. No one ever did.
I've seen Opera crash in some pretty extraordinary fashions. I'm not certain that I entirely trust the security of a product which has dedicated window areas for spamvertising.
This is purely conjecture but, from experience, anything even remotely related to advertising typically has lower ethical standards in the interest of achieving the advertising goals.
Now, if CSUSA doesn't have any evidence that the postings were libelous, then Reigelman will win the suit (and will also win her countersuit for legal fees, if her lawyers are worth a damn).
You will admit, of course, that this is an idealistic presentation which ignores the intricate working of social and political connections, personal egos, and any interpersonal relationships between any and all people involved in the situation.
Something like... <conjecture type="fast and simple">the judge presiding over the case may have a daughter who's married to a fellow whose business is in managing the contracts for the janitors at these schools.</conjecture>
You're comparing literary writing, which is an exercise in storytelling, which is supposed to pass time, with technical writing.
If there is a need to describe "lots of little things" then I reiterate: It's a horribly designed product. I wouldn't be using a computer to play music/send email/print docs if I had to code machine language from the BIOS on up for every task. They make 4-button CD players and 12-button telephones.
800-page documentation manuals are a direct result of featureware. Featureware is the useless implementation of any and all possible capabilities just for the sake of argument. That translates into a product which is the equivalent of grey goo.
Featureware is becoming readily apparent in iPods and cellular phones, too. The world is being overrun by grey goo. I'd really like to see someone put an end to it.
It's a psychology issue. Maybe in another generation or so this won't be as much of a problem but human beings are trained to index things, in their minds, in book form. That book form has a TOC, an index, chapters, and pages which are physically turned.
Let's assume you've read a particular book more than three times (I've read LotR and the first six DragonLance novels better than a dozen times). If I had an electronic copy and the paper copy side by side, I bet dollars to donuts that I can find a particular passage much faster and much more easily in the printed edition than I can the electronic edition.
Sure... if you don't know what you're looking for and you don't really know what you're doing then one long searchable electronic stream is just as good as any paper copy. If you really know what you're doing, though, chances are you'll prefer the paper copy.
As for the 800-page manuals--well, the manufacturer is obviously inept and implementing a ridiculously horrible design. Hopefully they'll go out of business but probably not. Product quality is, in today's world, superseded by business shenanigans and political chicanery. ie. Superior advertising will beat superior design almost every time.
It was a 550 page document, so we're talking close to $400.
Indeed! I have nine 3" 3-ring binders of UNIX documentation that I printed out back around '99. Most of it is vintage tldp.org and a hardcopy of a LFS 3.2 book. At the time I had a Canon BJC-4200 printer and I think I went through about 5 ink cartridges over the course of two or three months. That amounted to about $150 in ink and paper is cheap.
The BJC-4200 still works but, as of about 2 years ago, it is impossible to find a good ink cartridge for it. Ink cartridges are still sold but the consumer is informed, at the counter, that no returns are accepted once the package is open. It's readily apparent that the ink cartridges have been sitting in the back of a warehouse for probably as long as the printer is old. The last 5 (yes, I paid my money and took my chances five times at three different retail chains) cartridges were dry solid from the moment I opened the package.
I now suffer with an Epson Stylus C86. It prints nice and all, but what do I need 5000x5000 dpi ultra-snazzy 128-bit color for? I get about 25 pages per ink cartridge. To reprint all my documentation would cost me probably close to $500 or more in ink and I'm not so confident that the printer mechanism would last as long as my trusty old Canon BJC-4200.
The industry needs to ditch this infatuation with fonts and bitmap and go back to ASCII and cheap dot matrix printers. Remember when you could run off 300 pages of text with a $7 ribbon and then re-ink it until the ribbon shredded?
I haven't thrown out the Canon. It's by the door but I can't bring myself to part with a perfectly functional printer (which has served me faithfully for better than a quarter of my life) just because the industry wants to fleece me for the ink cartridge. I've been trying to think of what I could do with a piece of hardware which can be programmed to mechanically move the head along an axis. Maybe I can tape a pen or pencil to the head and code a program to use it as a chart recorder by sending lines of varying length to it.
Perhaps the real issue isn't whether or not we want hardcopy documentation. The real issue seems to be incompetent writing skills.
For tens of thousands of years one of the most important skills was saying what needs to be said in a concise and direct manner. Apparently the world has been overrun by people who feel better about themselves by doing just the opposite.
Call me radical, but anything that weighs less than a thousand pounds but requires 800 pages of documentation needs to be rewritten/rebuilt/reengineered from the ground up. It's obviously the wrong design.
Quite to the contrary, big biz doesn't want any class actions at all, hence the Class Action Fairness [sic] Act
I really had hoped that you had thought about it more than that. Clue: It's a game within a game within a game. Sometimes some people want the lawsuits, and sometimes other people want the lawsuits, and sometimes some other people don't want the lawsuits. Usually the people who want them and the people who don't want them maintain their opinions and sides pre, during, and post lawsuit but a significant percentage of the time people flip-flop opinions at any stage of the game. Most of it ties into the financial industry and which players are looking to make how much money.
The world is a big game. For most people the largest part of the game is enduring harassment from the general populance which is blissfully ignorant of the bigger picture. For the general populance life is satisfactory as long as they can run their own little personal snide harassment scheme and go home feeling better about themselves. Me personally, I'll never really understand such petty discourse.
If there's a problem, fix it. If there isn't a problem then don't create one. Nothing really matters but be the best (90% of "best" is polite--that's all it takes) person you can anyways.
No. Sorry, you are wrong. It had nothing to do with "activist judges".
Relax. No one said anything about activist judges, AC. The OP bemoaned product liability for the aviation industry. Doc's comment amounted to "blame it on the feds" by bringing the concept of political corruption and graft to light in the form of taxpayer subsidies. Dun then went off on Doc as if the feds have nothing to do with it. But apparently there's something about the rules of business and aviation which Dun, and you, seem to think puts the smaller civil aviation corps at a disadvantage. The feds write those rules and Doc's mention of "blame it on the veds" is still completely valid.
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They were in my letter of resignation which I left with HR on my way out the door. It was a professionally written letter which said only that which needed to be said. All parties, including the HR rep who called me a week later, were personally involved with the entire history of the situation. She knew darned well what had gone on. The HR rep who had handled the situation before her had told her what was going on--but he was across the nation and she was doing exactly what management told her to do.
"We're sorry sir. The company has denied your request. Since you voluntarily left your job there's nothing we can do. The matter of your vacation time has always been a case by case subject. You may need a private attorney to look at your employee agreement."
There was nothing in the employee agreement about a mandatory exit interview, only that the company may ask for one. I agree it was standard procedure, but the treatment which I received there was most definitely in violation of every concept of standard procedure when working with another human being. On numerous occasions I had told my manager that I'd had enough, that he was going too far, that, as a manager who was 3 promotions above me (which was atypical. most managers are only one level above their direct reports or associates), he needed to meet me halfway on at least some of the issues. He folded his arms, looked at me blankly, and said,"I don't need to meet you anywhere."
I'm happily employed again and I like my current employer. I'm still paying to clean up the financial mess that was created at the last job. You don't just walk away from a professional job and expect the bills to pay themselves. I had tried for a year before leaving to interview with other companies, but I was out of sorts, harassed, and antagonized and wasn't in any frame of mind to interview well.
As I said... it was like leaving a bad marriage in the middle of the night with no clothes, no money, no place to live, and nothing but a tiny suitcase under the arm. I'm doing better now that I've left but that's not to say what happened then isn't still causing problems for me now.
Well, there you go. You've made the important distinction which the article and most posters arguing against printed manuals leave out.
If I'm printing out an 800-page manual, or a 50 page HOWTO, or a 200 page Documentation manual, chances are I'm not using it for reference. Reference is looking for a very specific small bit of information in an enormous pile of available material. For this task, electronic editions are preferable.
For anything which requires reading more than a single page of text at a time, absorbing it, and using it to build the next page of text on, the printed text is far superior.
The first HR rep who handled my case against the manager found in favor of me and told management to back off. He had actually been recruited by management to send me out the door but, with a few important details provided by me which management had carefully omitted, he recognized the kind of harassment that I was receiving. The company offered him a cozy position at a facility in another state, closer to his family. The management then waited three months, rehashed the same old story, and fed it to the new HR rep who was a young girl, easily pushed around and misled, with no sense of what goes on in big company politics.
Say again how standard procedure justifies something which is illegal? Standard procedure does not require a victim to go through an exit interview with their assailant.
My cynicism about employers and their contracts comes from situations like this one where the abusive manager had HR in his pocket, was a long-time favorite of the established upper management above him, was a 15-year industry veteran and a regular attendee at some very prestigious world conferences in the industry and who was taking out his personal and professional frustrations on a hardworking employee with the work ethic of a Catholic and the patience of an elephant who was only a single year out of undergraduate school.
As for my cynicism about governments: Our own government here in the US is not even close to being the Constitutional Republic that it purports to be. The federal government has long overstepped the boundaries of legitimate power as defined specifically in the 9th and 10th Amendments to our Constitution and, in doing so, has dictated much of the policy that strongly influences if not outright controls not only our interior state governments, but the policies and procedures of the governments in much of the world, including the UK. The UK government has never truly impressed me either in the obvious contradictions between its public policy and the way it's handled things like, oh, the Irish, the Church, the Jewish world migrants after WW-II (not to mention creating the Israeli problem, without bothering to ask the natives of that area, prior to WW-II in their own efforts to move the Jews out of the UK), and South Africa. Second only to the Portuguese in brutality, from what I understand.
How're those police installed microphones doing over there? All safety and do-good propaganda aside, aren't they indicative of an overwhelming and self-absorbed government as well?
I'm fed up with the authority pyramid scheme that pervades the entire world, I'm fed up with the taxation pyramid scheme which creates more social problems than it solves, I'm fed up with the financial pyrmamid scheme so elaborately set up by the banking, insurance, and investment industry...
And mostly, I'm fed up with the policy of lip-service which is used to pacify the population. And I'm fed up with a population that tolerates this kind of treatment from the very people they elected, from the very people whose paychecks they pay with their own blood, sweat, and tears 60-80 hours/week. I, and most of my fellow Americans, work more days/year to pay taxes than to pay myself... and what do we get for it? We get an overbearing government wasting our money to pass legislation allowing them to fiat more money just so they can funnel it back into their own private coffers by means of government contract, government regulation, and other back-alley poker type tactics: "If you can't win, change the rules so you can."
There are 100 people in the world. There are 5 intelligent people, 5 greedy people, and 90 not-so-bright people. 2 greedy people convince 20 not-so-bright people to harass and otherwise detain 5 intelligent people. 2 greedy people convince 55 not-so-bright people to vote. 5 intelligent people get harassed to death while 5 greedy people use the votes of 55 not-so-bright people to justify turning the world into a planet of indentured servants.
If authority were even close to solving more problems than it fixes, I'd be all for supporting authority. The way the world runs today, however, it's all a big pile of steaming poop.
You could be missing the other possibility: Governments and the implementation of their various powers have proven to me, at least in today's world, to be not worth the paper they're printed on.
You say that such a thing might lead to an industrial tribunal. In practice, however, how impartial are such tribunals? What is the cost barrier for representation? What are the various social stigmas which may follow an employee before, during, and after the proceedings of such a tribunal? For example, here in the States, if you want to take the legal route against an employer one had better pray the settlement is enough to hold you for a lifetime because very few companies will chance hiring an employee who has filed legal action against a former employer.
Pretty words and useless legal promises aside... Let's talk about reality.
The Bible is mostly storytelling which is supposed to pass time.
Summarizing the Bible's easy: Nothing really matters but be polite and considerate anyway.
It's really too bad that the people with the biggest mouths about doing the "right thing" have absolutely no concept of being considerate. Bankers, politicians, CEOs... most of them feel all good about themselves because they go to church but yet they feel absolutely no problem rewarding themselves with multimillion dollar bonuses while laying off thousands of workers at a shot. That's not real considerate.
Now... back to summarizing that 800 page tech manual.
The veal's great. Is that cracked black pepper in the seasoning? Yum.
When I left my last employer I gave no notice and informed my manager that I was taking my two weeks of vacation as I walked out the door.
The HR department called me to say they would only honor my vacation request if I came in for an exit interview. I told them there was no way I was setting foot in their building again after the way I'd been treated. I put up with it for three years and, one day, made the decision that I'd had enough. It was like leaving a bad marriage with no money, no clothes, no where to live, and barely a suitcase under the arm.
They wrote me off, denied my unemployment claim, and withheld the paycheck for the two weeks' vacation.
Call a lawyer? I'd been so harassed and was so out of sorts at the time that no lawyer even wanted to talk to me. Truthfully, I wouldn't have wanted to talk to me at that time either.
So where's all this hoidy-toidy legal rights junk now? I'm still paying for the mess that was created by a manager harassing an employee near to death.
So that as long as the manager who's harassing you can wheedle in good with HR, he's free to harass you for as long as he likes and you still have to put up with a notice period should you decide to leave?
No thanks. If someone's riding my backside with the blessing of the supposedly objective and impartial corporate overseers then I'm going to walk out the door on a dime notice.
I have boots, camping gear, and a tent. I just don't care to put up with the BS anymore and I will walk if I'm pushed.
I think that falls under "We're going to try and pull as much illegal crap as possible to turn you into a human slave because we know you can't afford to be without a paycheck or the lawyer to call our bluff."
Either way, it's dishonest and unethical. If I find someone's not playing by the rules then I summarily dismiss any respect I may have ever had for them.
That's the way I feel about my employers, past and present, and my government.
I'd thought about it but something about syringe kits just don't look right to me. I had no problem with reinking my own ribbons but there's something that just doesn't "smell" right about syringe kits.
If I think about it I suspect it's the ink. If I bought a syringe kit I'd fully expect to print pages of paper with ink blots all over them and end up with a printer with ink splattered everywhere inside.
MSLinux ... that'd be java enabled KDE or GNOME with OpenOffice.
Registry? (fledgling beginnings of one, anways) Check.
Unnecessary integration of system components? Check.
Bloat and featureware? Check.
No requirement for RTFM? Check.
Yes. I am a snobby computer elitist--and I can walk through a >98% pure 25 gram 21 step convergent synthesis in less than 30 days.
That's a beautiful idea. Here are my thoughts on "why not":
A frozen patch CD removes the necessity for network traffic to MS.com and eliminates their chances to have their automated update tool poke, prod, and probe your system for whatever data mining they like to do.
In Win98SE (which was a good OS for a single-user install.) it was an offered option at one time to save the incoming updates to the HD first. This option has since been quietly removed. For certain it is still possible to retain copies of the updates but it requires the user to do/know things which aren't considered normal update procedure. I imagine that MS PR likes to delude themselves (and the public) into thinking they're securing their patch code so that people don't reverse engineer the patches to find out what's really being fixed/added/modified/surreptitiously installed.
<tinfoil mode="extreme">Mostly I think it's because MS has business dealings with the types of corporations who profit from poking, prodding, probing, and snooping on the general consumer populance</tinfoil>
My employer tried this as well, except that they had absolutely no method to block the Windows autoupdate (which they used their IT superpowers to fixate at "Automatically Download Updates").
So I'm supposed to endure this pop-up which keeps telling me that new updates are ready to install or, worse, tell it not to install the updates and wait five minutes for it to download them all again?
I read between the lines, let it autoupdate, and waited for someone to tell me I wasn't supposed to do that. No one ever did.
OpenOffice's light bulb works the same way. "Oh look! The light bulb's on! It's telling me there's something wrong with my system."
I've seen Opera crash in some pretty extraordinary fashions. I'm not certain that I entirely trust the security of a product which has dedicated window areas for spamvertising.
This is purely conjecture but, from experience, anything even remotely related to advertising typically has lower ethical standards in the interest of achieving the advertising goals.
Something like... <conjecture type="fast and simple">the judge presiding over the case may have a daughter who's married to a fellow whose business is in managing the contracts for the janitors at these schools.</conjecture>
Some people are so hopelessly dependent upon the system that they will fight to the death to protect it.
Proof of concept.
Oh Lord that's evil... but funny.
You're comparing literary writing, which is an exercise in storytelling, which is supposed to pass time, with technical writing.
If there is a need to describe "lots of little things" then I reiterate: It's a horribly designed product. I wouldn't be using a computer to play music/send email/print docs if I had to code machine language from the BIOS on up for every task. They make 4-button CD players and 12-button telephones.
800-page documentation manuals are a direct result of featureware. Featureware is the useless implementation of any and all possible capabilities just for the sake of argument. That translates into a product which is the equivalent of grey goo.
Featureware is becoming readily apparent in iPods and cellular phones, too. The world is being overrun by grey goo. I'd really like to see someone put an end to it.
It's a psychology issue. Maybe in another generation or so this won't be as much of a problem but human beings are trained to index things, in their minds, in book form. That book form has a TOC, an index, chapters, and pages which are physically turned.
Let's assume you've read a particular book more than three times (I've read LotR and the first six DragonLance novels better than a dozen times). If I had an electronic copy and the paper copy side by side, I bet dollars to donuts that I can find a particular passage much faster and much more easily in the printed edition than I can the electronic edition.
Sure... if you don't know what you're looking for and you don't really know what you're doing then one long searchable electronic stream is just as good as any paper copy. If you really know what you're doing, though, chances are you'll prefer the paper copy.
As for the 800-page manuals--well, the manufacturer is obviously inept and implementing a ridiculously horrible design. Hopefully they'll go out of business but probably not. Product quality is, in today's world, superseded by business shenanigans and political chicanery. ie. Superior advertising will beat superior design almost every time.
The BJC-4200 still works but, as of about 2 years ago, it is impossible to find a good ink cartridge for it. Ink cartridges are still sold but the consumer is informed, at the counter, that no returns are accepted once the package is open. It's readily apparent that the ink cartridges have been sitting in the back of a warehouse for probably as long as the printer is old. The last 5 (yes, I paid my money and took my chances five times at three different retail chains) cartridges were dry solid from the moment I opened the package.
I now suffer with an Epson Stylus C86. It prints nice and all, but what do I need 5000x5000 dpi ultra-snazzy 128-bit color for? I get about 25 pages per ink cartridge. To reprint all my documentation would cost me probably close to $500 or more in ink and I'm not so confident that the printer mechanism would last as long as my trusty old Canon BJC-4200.
The industry needs to ditch this infatuation with fonts and bitmap and go back to ASCII and cheap dot matrix printers. Remember when you could run off 300 pages of text with a $7 ribbon and then re-ink it until the ribbon shredded?
I haven't thrown out the Canon. It's by the door but I can't bring myself to part with a perfectly functional printer (which has served me faithfully for better than a quarter of my life) just because the industry wants to fleece me for the ink cartridge. I've been trying to think of what I could do with a piece of hardware which can be programmed to mechanically move the head along an axis. Maybe I can tape a pen or pencil to the head and code a program to use it as a chart recorder by sending lines of varying length to it.
For tens of thousands of years one of the most important skills was saying what needs to be said in a concise and direct manner. Apparently the world has been overrun by people who feel better about themselves by doing just the opposite.
Call me radical, but anything that weighs less than a thousand pounds but requires 800 pages of documentation needs to be rewritten/rebuilt/reengineered from the ground up. It's obviously the wrong design.
The world is a big game. For most people the largest part of the game is enduring harassment from the general populance which is blissfully ignorant of the bigger picture. For the general populance life is satisfactory as long as they can run their own little personal snide harassment scheme and go home feeling better about themselves. Me personally, I'll never really understand such petty discourse.
If there's a problem, fix it. If there isn't a problem then don't create one. Nothing really matters but be the best (90% of "best" is polite--that's all it takes) person you can anyways.
You fail it.