But that's my point - basic computer common sense training should be mandatory, so that we can have a bit more freedom with our machines, and tech support can have a quieter life. I'm sure they'd rather not have to do mundane crap like authorising me to use certain printers when I've got the wit to do it myself, and I understand why they won't let me, but if time was taken to show everybody the ropes, it'd be one less thing they'd have to worry about, because they could assume a certain level of knowledge for all users. Right?
It really bothers me that people can spend all day every day working on a computer and not only not know much about how to work it, but think that this ignorance is something to brag about. If it's the main tool of your trade, you should know how to operate it, and by that I mean something beyond finding your way around the common applications you come into contact with day-to-day. I hate to use a car analogy, but it's like driving without knowing how to change a tyre.
(I'm not a code-monkey, by the way, just someone who knows one end of a computer from the other)
I also worked at a very big company which let us do this. Not company-wide, just the couple of thousand people that worked where I did, which was probably very similar to Google in terms of the sort of people who would work there. We were considered to be bright enough to stand on our own two feet. We weren't the sort to bother tech support unless it was a problem with, say, networking - applications we'd installed were our problem, and besides that we'd be more likely to know what we were doing with those applications than the average techie. It meant that if we needed a particular piece of software or equipment, we didn't have to wait weeks to get sign-off from God Himself - we went and downloaded it and our manager found the money for it if it had to be paid for. We were trusted not to buy stuff we didn't need, and by and large it worked. Treat people like adults and they'll behave like adults, mostly.
More than once I got hold of an oldish spare computer and installed Gentoo Linux on it, and the only justification I had for doing so was that Windows got on my nerves. Not much of a business case, but as far as they were concerned I was a big boy and could look after myself, and it was no skin off their nose as long as it didn't take up tech support's time.
The only thing that made us different from the tied-down masses elsewhere in the company was our level of knowledge about what we were working with. I maintain that the best security system is user education. Obviously that's not to suggest that you should throw caution to the wind, but clued-up people generally won't get you in trouble. So clue them up.
Right now I'm in a much more locked-down environment and it's incredibly frustrating. Something as simple as connecting to a printer is a nightmare because I have to go through some tech support clown who invariably knows a lot less than I do and bumbles around randomly prodding things till it works. I don't have admin rights to my own machine, and useful things like the command line are blocked. It drives me mad, and it holds me back in my work, but hey, some IT goon has an easier life because of it, so it's all fair enough, right?
Google is full of smart people, and the people in charge are clearly smart enough to treat them as such. I wish more companies would follow this example.
Only problem with that is that real bats sleep in nooks and crannies, rather than sprawled out in the sun, so if you see one sunning itself, it might strike you as a bit unusual, which would kinda defeat the purpose of making your spy drone inconspicuous.
Yeah, and it's quite obvious where it is: Population growth is not uniform. Look at the title of this article - global population numbers. Not "Population numbers in the industrialised West", which are stable at best.
Basically the sooner the Baby Boomers die off, the better for everybody they'll be leaving behind, as they're making one hell of a mess of the environment as well as the economy.
I find O-Matic is just the job, usually. We debated for some time whether to call a project I was working on Choose-O-Matic or Choose-A-Tron, but went with the former 'cos it just sounded better.
And then the suits got involved and it became boring old Help Me Choose. Bah.
I don't believe that, considering I saw a poster in the McDonald's at Gatwick Airport inviting people to work for them, which described the "benefits" on offer, finishing with the payoff line "Not bad for a McJob."
And even that's pussyfooting around the real problem - there are too many people. Unfortunately, there's only one way that's going to resolve itself. I just hope I'm dead and gone before it happens.
And also, lest we forget, because for a fair while IE was a better browser. Hell, I remember using IE4 in preference to Netscape 4.whatever on a Sun workstation in 1998. Microsoft sure didn't force me into that, and believe me, I hate them at least as much as the next guy.
Did this actually come out on the Apple ][? This was a mid-90s game, and if the ][ wasn't dead by then, I can't imagine it made much of a job of this game, as its main USP was the fluid, motion-captured animation of the characters.
I write as an ignorant Brit who couldn't have afforded an Apple ][ in a million years.
Well, I dunno. There's a school of thought that the ancient Egyptians used 'em to raise obelisks. This guy tried it out and got a three-ton obelisk vertical in a few seconds.
Ah, but they didn't hate it - people liked the taste. What people didn't like was that Coke took their old favourite away from them and left them without any choice. It wasn't the product that was bad, it was the marketing of it.
In a way, Vista's similar. In many respects, it's not a bad product - the unfortunate thing is that the improvements are in areas that end users don't appreciate, and the failings are prominent and obvious, so people decide it's shit and that's that. They want their old XP back because they were happy with it, and if other people want the new thing that's fine by them, but they don't want the Great New Taste of Vista poured down their throats.
Man, Microsoft have been doing this for as long as I can remember. "Yeah, OK, you got us, this version stinks to high heaven, but we'll nail it next time, just you wait and see. Don't go running off to the competition, 'cos you'll only be sorry when you see what we've got in store just round the corner." This time they're starting the rumour mill extra-early, well before any sign of an announcement, presumably because Vista's gone down like a turd in a hot tub.
And then one by one the whiz-bang features they promised at the time of announcing the product disappear, and it turns up late and full of bugs.
Every time.
Sad thing about it is that people still fall for it.
Every time.
Why? How many times do you need to be disappointed by them before you decide that enough's enough? I swear, it's like an abusive marriage. They're the drunken husband in the string vest - they beat you up, then they promise you they love you and they'll change, only for it to happen again. And again. And again. And you, the battered wife, are convinced you're lost without them.
Seriously, folks, pack your bags and get out of there. He's a brute and he'll beat you again. Because you let him.
That's pathetic. There's cars several times more bigger and more powerful than that which can do better. For example, the Fiat Punto 1.3 Multijet diesel gets a combined figure of 63 miles per (British) gallon. It produces about 70BHP.
OR - and call me crazy - you could carry the power from the desert to the coast along, I dunno, some sort of metal cable or something. Radical, I know.
Not with dialogue, there isn't. That's plenty of bandwidth to reproduce a conversation with complete fidelity. And that's what movie soundtracks primarily consist of. The other stuff isn't that challenging either.
Lossless audio reproduction is very important for music, but it really isn't for movies.
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Dude, he's Arthur C Clarke, not Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Why are they letting Twitter back on his soapbox?
But that's my point - basic computer common sense training should be mandatory, so that we can have a bit more freedom with our machines, and tech support can have a quieter life. I'm sure they'd rather not have to do mundane crap like authorising me to use certain printers when I've got the wit to do it myself, and I understand why they won't let me, but if time was taken to show everybody the ropes, it'd be one less thing they'd have to worry about, because they could assume a certain level of knowledge for all users. Right?
It really bothers me that people can spend all day every day working on a computer and not only not know much about how to work it, but think that this ignorance is something to brag about. If it's the main tool of your trade, you should know how to operate it, and by that I mean something beyond finding your way around the common applications you come into contact with day-to-day. I hate to use a car analogy, but it's like driving without knowing how to change a tyre.
(I'm not a code-monkey, by the way, just someone who knows one end of a computer from the other)
I also worked at a very big company which let us do this. Not company-wide, just the couple of thousand people that worked where I did, which was probably very similar to Google in terms of the sort of people who would work there. We were considered to be bright enough to stand on our own two feet. We weren't the sort to bother tech support unless it was a problem with, say, networking - applications we'd installed were our problem, and besides that we'd be more likely to know what we were doing with those applications than the average techie. It meant that if we needed a particular piece of software or equipment, we didn't have to wait weeks to get sign-off from God Himself - we went and downloaded it and our manager found the money for it if it had to be paid for. We were trusted not to buy stuff we didn't need, and by and large it worked. Treat people like adults and they'll behave like adults, mostly.
More than once I got hold of an oldish spare computer and installed Gentoo Linux on it, and the only justification I had for doing so was that Windows got on my nerves. Not much of a business case, but as far as they were concerned I was a big boy and could look after myself, and it was no skin off their nose as long as it didn't take up tech support's time.
The only thing that made us different from the tied-down masses elsewhere in the company was our level of knowledge about what we were working with. I maintain that the best security system is user education. Obviously that's not to suggest that you should throw caution to the wind, but clued-up people generally won't get you in trouble. So clue them up.
Right now I'm in a much more locked-down environment and it's incredibly frustrating. Something as simple as connecting to a printer is a nightmare because I have to go through some tech support clown who invariably knows a lot less than I do and bumbles around randomly prodding things till it works. I don't have admin rights to my own machine, and useful things like the command line are blocked. It drives me mad, and it holds me back in my work, but hey, some IT goon has an easier life because of it, so it's all fair enough, right?
Google is full of smart people, and the people in charge are clearly smart enough to treat them as such. I wish more companies would follow this example.
Only problem with that is that real bats sleep in nooks and crannies, rather than sprawled out in the sun, so if you see one sunning itself, it might strike you as a bit unusual, which would kinda defeat the purpose of making your spy drone inconspicuous.
Yeah, and it's quite obvious where it is: Population growth is not uniform. Look at the title of this article - global population numbers. Not "Population numbers in the industrialised West", which are stable at best.
Basically the sooner the Baby Boomers die off, the better for everybody they'll be leaving behind, as they're making one hell of a mess of the environment as well as the economy.
I find O-Matic is just the job, usually. We debated for some time whether to call a project I was working on Choose-O-Matic or Choose-A-Tron, but went with the former 'cos it just sounded better.
And then the suits got involved and it became boring old Help Me Choose. Bah.
Excuse me if I take this post with a pinch of salt, given that you seem to have confused transmission with suspension.
I don't believe that, considering I saw a poster in the McDonald's at Gatwick Airport inviting people to work for them, which described the "benefits" on offer, finishing with the payoff line "Not bad for a McJob."
Put a comma in that, and...
Actually, do you ever wish you'd never hit "submit"?
And even that's pussyfooting around the real problem - there are too many people. Unfortunately, there's only one way that's going to resolve itself. I just hope I'm dead and gone before it happens.
And also, lest we forget, because for a fair while IE was a better browser. Hell, I remember using IE4 in preference to Netscape 4.whatever on a Sun workstation in 1998. Microsoft sure didn't force me into that, and believe me, I hate them at least as much as the next guy.
Did this actually come out on the Apple ][? This was a mid-90s game, and if the ][ wasn't dead by then, I can't imagine it made much of a job of this game, as its main USP was the fluid, motion-captured animation of the characters.
I write as an ignorant Brit who couldn't have afforded an Apple ][ in a million years.
Well, I dunno. There's a school of thought that the ancient Egyptians used 'em to raise obelisks. This guy tried it out and got a three-ton obelisk vertical in a few seconds.
I never mentioned Linux. If you need that stuff, get yourself a Mac.
Ah, but they didn't hate it - people liked the taste. What people didn't like was that Coke took their old favourite away from them and left them without any choice. It wasn't the product that was bad, it was the marketing of it.
In a way, Vista's similar. In many respects, it's not a bad product - the unfortunate thing is that the improvements are in areas that end users don't appreciate, and the failings are prominent and obvious, so people decide it's shit and that's that. They want their old XP back because they were happy with it, and if other people want the new thing that's fine by them, but they don't want the Great New Taste of Vista poured down their throats.
Man, Microsoft have been doing this for as long as I can remember. "Yeah, OK, you got us, this version stinks to high heaven, but we'll nail it next time, just you wait and see. Don't go running off to the competition, 'cos you'll only be sorry when you see what we've got in store just round the corner." This time they're starting the rumour mill extra-early, well before any sign of an announcement, presumably because Vista's gone down like a turd in a hot tub.
And then one by one the whiz-bang features they promised at the time of announcing the product disappear, and it turns up late and full of bugs.
Every time.
Sad thing about it is that people still fall for it.
Every time.
Why? How many times do you need to be disappointed by them before you decide that enough's enough? I swear, it's like an abusive marriage. They're the drunken husband in the string vest - they beat you up, then they promise you they love you and they'll change, only for it to happen again. And again. And again. And you, the battered wife, are convinced you're lost without them.
Seriously, folks, pack your bags and get out of there. He's a brute and he'll beat you again. Because you let him.
I'm on a plane, you insensitive clod!
But how am I going to watch movies?
What's that? I can rent them from Apple, you say? What a coincidence!
Remember, kids, it's not lock-in, it's Steve Jobs holding you nice and safe in his loving arms...
Man, I'm really feelin' the love in this room.
Satan "feels a bit chilly, puts on sweater"
I am, I am. I'm ashamed of myself, frankly.
I'll write it out a hundred times.
That's pathetic. There's cars several times more bigger and more powerful than that which can do better. For example, the Fiat Punto 1.3 Multijet diesel gets a combined figure of 63 miles per (British) gallon. It produces about 70BHP.
OR - and call me crazy - you could carry the power from the desert to the coast along, I dunno, some sort of metal cable or something. Radical, I know.
Not with dialogue, there isn't. That's plenty of bandwidth to reproduce a conversation with complete fidelity. And that's what movie soundtracks primarily consist of. The other stuff isn't that challenging either.
Lossless audio reproduction is very important for music, but it really isn't for movies.