Yeah I guess I read it wrong. I do something like that myself in addition to tape backups, but I don't take the disk offsite, it's more for convenience so that we can just setup the disk as a temporary network share if the RAID array needs rebuilt or whatever..
Well, I don't buy the Sims either, so it probably doesn't say anything to be honest.
If you could point out any point and click adventure games made in the last few years I'd be happy to go and have a look. I completed the Monkey Island series and Full Throttle, and got The Dig in the same box set, but it was rather boring - just because a game is point and click won't make it good! Wikipedia says The Dig was the most serious point and click adventure LucasArts made, so I don't feel so bad about finding it boring now:) I suppose the format works best with slightly comedic games.
I admit that I don't often search for indie games or even look at modern games coming out. Yes, a game will have to be brought to my attention by slashdot (I pre-ordered Fallout 3 after seeing an article on it - it looks very good, I haven't been interested in an 3D RPG type game since Deus Ex), friends or TV (I'd never heard of Saints Row but I saw an advert for the sequel on TV and I'm tempted, because I like the GTA series a lot). A lot of the best selling games these days don't really interest me.
I am definitely not all about the graphics. I do appreciate beautiful shiny graphics, but when I discovered MUDs a few years ago my Counter-Strike addiction turned into a mudding addiction, even though I'd just bought a nice shiny new graphics card! I also bought Escape Velocity Nova last year when I got my new Mac, as I remembered the original Escape Velocity fondly from earlier Macs. BTW you don't really need 15 million dollars for good graphics, you just need to read up on things, get decent quality textures, models and animations (which is where a lot of the cost will come in, but you get people in games communities who like doing that kind of thing just for fun anyway).. if you are dedicated you can make a great looking game that costs nothing but your own time.
I have downloaded games illegally to try them. There was Halo, tried it for 10 minutes and deleted it (would have bought it if it was any good). Lots of ROMs too over the years, but considering there is no other way to play those old games these days I don't feel bad about that. I should probably get all those old point and click games that I'd played the demos of but wasn't able to afford since I was just a kid.
Yes, the game industry is doing a terrible job of promoting indie games, because I thought the whole definition of an independent games maker is that they don't have a publisher so it is hard to get publicity. If someone mentions a great game here on slashdot then I sometimes give it a go. The thing is that I have a PS3 now anyway and prefer to play games on it. There are a few indie type games on the PS3 store which I've downloaded and played, but obviously that again is just games that have been chosen by Sony rather than truly independent ones..
Yeah, I think when he talks about budget he means they don't have the budget for a multiloading tape system that would be necessary to run that kind of script.. scripting is the easy part, convincing management to give him funds sounds like the awkward one. If the company can't afford to backup their data, it's like someone buying a Ferrari but not leaving enough budget for the insurance.. so in reality they can't really afford a Ferrari.
We've had 2 different Dell fileservers and both ended up failing when trying to recover after a disk failure. Both times we had stuff that wasn't on the tape backup list for some reason or another, and had to pay to get the disks recovered -_- It's far cheaper and simpler to recover a single disk than an entire raid array. So to my mind unless you're looking for the performance, using a large single disk and tape backups is the safest, most cost effective backup option for a small business.
I started MUDding in my honours year and ended up staying up til 6am each day playing (I live in the UK but most of the other players were from the US). That combined with a couple of other factors resulted in me not even doing my final year project.. I did all the other work and the exams for some reason, but only about 1/3 of the project!
I got a decent job working at the place where I used to work summers while I was a student, doing all sorts of IT from support to coding to sysadmin stuff. Hopefully experience will count for more than my honours year for any future jobs. Either that or I'll get a Masters/PhD if better qualifications are really necessary for a job I want. I actually got offered to be sponsored for a Masters if I want by my employer (probably would be based on one of the engineering apps I'm doing for them). They've already done that sort of thing for other employees.. almost took them up on the offer at one point, but life got in the way again and I forgot about it.
Actually both the MUDs addictions I've had (Animud.net and Dragonball Evolution) have unfortunately been broken by girls. I wish I'd stuck with the MUDs to be honest, they were a far more rewarding use of my time.
I've never been a big fan of modern MMORPGs, but I love MUDs for some reason:)
Right on! Why bother to take all that lead out of the trunk when you can just put in a bigger engine and firmer suspension? What kind of a moron does it take to want to be driving an efficient vehicle? Haha, look at those losers who don't want to make the most of what they currently have instead of being wasteful!
It's so much easier to just buy a computer with extra cores and 16GB of RAM, why bother to check for memory leaks in your code? Heck, why even free up memory at all, ever? It's not like you're going to run out at any point! I actually buy replacement RAM for my computer every day, just because it's so damn cheap!
to increase process isolation they had to increase memory usage
Can you explain or cite a source as to how Vista process isolation is any better than Linux isolation? I just read up on it briefly and it doesn't seem to do anything that Linux doesn't.
You get plenty of Linux distros that don't require 512MB to run. I don't know the minimum requirements for SELinux, but I don't see any mention on the NSA website of a sudden 10x requirements jump if you want to enable it in your current distro, so IMO using "security" as an excuse for using that much RAM is.. dubious.
Well, I do have to concur that you seem a little crazy - you're even more obsessed with being right than I am! Not to mention regular use of all caps, bold and extraneous punctuation;) But who am I to hold that against you, perhaps you're just a very enthusiastic person, lol.
Exactly - I think high end machines are worth the money to those that have the money. For example, when I was a student new Macs looked insanely priced to me, but now that I have a job the prices seem sensible, apart from the Air - but that's just because I don't have any real need for an ultra-portable. It's hard for me to understand why anyone would pay that much for so little power.
It has an offline mode for single player games, and how were you going to play online games without a net connection anyway? It also lets you download and install to any machine you want without having to delete the original install, which makes it even more "portable", as well as a very convenient way to manage your games without having to manually install them yourself and type in registration keys, which you've had to store away safely with their disks.
Installing from disks is still quicker than downloading, but it definitely isn't as convenient when you have a large collection of games and have just bought a new machine or reinstalled Windows. You can either download all your games again, or restore from a Steam backup or whatever.
Considering Portal is based on Narbacular Drop which was actually University project, we already got the creativity without going through the standard games industry business model. Narbacular Drop was free and apparently had a decent community creating maps for it (I never tried it myself). Admittedly Portal has shinier graphics and a story, but IMO the current business models pushed by publishers are more likely to stifle innovation than encourage it - which is why Bungie left Microsoft for example. They were fed up churning out sequels to Halo, because they know they are capable of much more.
I don't mind publishers and developers releasing sequels - as long as the original game was good and the sequel is just as good or better, of course - but using recent business models it is difficult for developers with original ideas to get their foot in the door. We still get original games occasionally, but there is pressure from the publishers to produce more of the same recipes rather than try out new concepts - see DeathSpank for another example. Ron Gilbert tried pushing the ideas to publishers for years before he found one that was willing to take the risk on it, even though he's got some great games under his belt. We will always have developers/designers with interesting ideas, it's currently up to the publishers who gets through though.
I have no idea why nobody is still making good ol' point and click adventures. We have plenty of point and click cruft like the Sims and WoW, but for some reason point and click adventures are 'outdated'. I'd choose playing a Ron Gilbert Monkey Island sequel over the Sims any day (though if you said Half-Life 3 I'd have to think about it)! I'm definitely getting DeathSpank when it comes out anyway.
The current generation of consoles are starting to have channels for homebrew type games, and things like Steam on the PC are good ways for developers to be able to release their games without going via the traditional publisher route. I'd never heard of Ico - apparently it was a bit of a flop - but if it was released as a cheap WiiWare game or PS3 store download right now it would do very well. I'd buy it now that I've heard about it. Of course if you threw in every other PS2 game ever, I probably wouldn't notice it at all. It all comes down to marketing and a bit of luck in the end as to which games get noticed - but then that's just life (and damn statistics).
PS - I actually thought Portal would be rather spectacular with online multiplayer. It would be pretty cool playing in a deathmatch arena with traps everywhere, trying to drop objects on people's heads, send them into a spiky pit/whatever. Or perhaps they could have some kind of capture the flag variant. It would be a bit messy and hectic, but could be good fun. As it is, it's "just" a puzzle game to me and I probably will never play it again. I hope they include portals and multiplayer in Episode 3 anyway:)
I'd actually consider the VAIOs much more of a waste than any Alienware hardware since I don't care too much about portability. VAIOs also come with all sorts of crapware pre-loaded as well - much more than I've seen on a Dell or Alienware machine anyway.
Just had a look at the Alienware website and the prices actually look pretty reasonable to me, considering what you're getting. When it comes to desktops I prefer to build my own, but for laptops I'm happy to pay someone else to design proper ventilation etc, assemble it and give me a warranty.
Agreed. I was going to post another rant about this woman, she similarly just went through everything by rote instead of really trying to think what was going on and using common sense. I showed her how to insert new rows into a spreadsheet a couple of times (just right click on the rows and choose insert->new row, I mean how hard is that to remember) and she still asked me to do it for her, which was the start of me just getting really frustrated with her attitude. You can tell when someone really just is struggling to grasp a concept, or whether they're just being lazy*. The non-lazy ones will at least take the initiative to look through the menus to try to find what they need. My job covers a lot of areas, and if I had a job description it probably would include helping people out with simple issues like that, but as a result of this situation we ended up having a policy in the sales offices of employees helping each other out with simple stuff like that before I need to get involved. Funnily enough, all the workers in the engineering and finance departments never need to ask that kind of question. The country bumpkin types in our fabrication department.. well, we won't talk about that 8|
Thankfully, any new employees we've had recently have been under 30, so they already just 'get' how to use computers, having been brought up with them. Older people can of course learn too - one of our managers has done a great job picking things up - but some people just don't want to know.
*okay, some people may have real insecurities within themselves of looking inadequate when trying to learn something, or just feeling they wouldn't be able to learn, but a lot of the time it's just laziness. I don't mind if someone asks 'stupid' questions as long as they are making a genuine attempt to learn, and I have a lot of time for those people - just not ones who are basically using me as their Human-Computer Interface.
That's a quote from Apple's website, not TFA (I ran a search on all 3 pages of the article before googling for the phrase). So why are you quoting that as if the article is biased? There are a couple of sections where he just says "I like this" rather than being objective - and I have no idea how he could like the crappy toy keyboards on the Macbook - but he does give the other machines their due when they deserve it, and admit what the Macbooks don't have.
Oh, and I didn't laugh. Do I win a prize?
Disclaimer: Yes I have a Macbook Pro, and it was of comparable price and specs to the Dell Precision that I would have bought otherwise - which surprised me after hearing people bang on about Apple's always being overpriced. I wonder if those same people complain about Sony VAIOs, Dell's XPS range or Alienware being overpriced. Probably do..
Of course I agree, there are loads of libraries today to do anything. I used to imagine I'd have to code everything from the ground up, almost bashing directly on the hardware with no drivers etc (this was when I had an Amiga, tho I only knew BASIC and a little C in those days).
The reason I was being sarcastic is because I thought you were labouring the point about libraries a bit. I think everyone gets that ActiveX can save time, but that is not always the most important consideration.
ActiveX has a bit of a stigma attached to it (in my mind at least) because it has had so many security issues surrounding it for a long time. I don't have so much problem with people implementing APIs to do more advanced stuff in a browser* - but it would be much better to use a well documented and/or open source API for security and cross platform compatibility. ActiveX is useless for a significant chunk of web users. I don't run IE on any machine unless I have to, which often means only for setting up Windows updates.
*I do have a bit of a problem with it because it opens up a lot of avenues for attack - but if it is designed securely to work with restricted or custom privileges it could be useful.. unfortunately ActiveX seems to have been designed to be big on flashy features but not so big on security.. and since then it has just been patched and patched to try and erase the bugs, when IMO they'd be better starting from scratch with a new idea like they tried to do with Vista - but hopefully with better results!
Wow, so using a proprietary library can save you time? Who knew!
The benefit of not using ActiveX, even if it means you have to write some of your own code, is that your application is a lot more likely to work in more than one browser. When an application (web related or otherwise) requires IE components I tend to assume it has been designed by idiots. It's annoying when IE specific issues get in the way of an application running properly for example. That happened recently with one of our FEA tools - installing IE7 caused annoying errors to pop up all the time (and changing its security settings didn't do jack, ended up reverting the machine back to IE6).
The main reason I have started to appreciate web apps (I used to much prefer standalone apps) is for simple, reliable cross-platform compatibility. The computing world is a much better place to be when people use open standards and leave out the proprietary junk.
I'm pretty sure the only plug-in I use apart from ad-block and no-script - which don't really count as they're about removing content rather than adding it - are flashplayers for streaming videos. IMO we'd be better off with a streaming media standard for browsers, if one doesn't already exist. Flash does other stuff too obviously, but I don't need annoying flashing ads or fancy menus which only work on browsers that support flash. Flash and Java are great for cross-platform applications and games, but I don't want them in my browser - I'd be happy to download and run them in a standalone VM.
Well, it's a pretty small company, so often I'm dealing with the top level of management directly as I'm one of two IT staffers. Most of our management aren't actually trained as managers - they're trained as engineers or accountants, and on top of that are actually nice people!
Reminds me of our old Office Manager. When she wanted to archive an important email, she copied the main text into Word, then printed it off before storing it in files in her desk. Rather than, you know, at least printing it out from Outlook, or freakin storing it in her personal folders like everyone else.
I wasn't aware of her weird filing system, so when she scanned in one of these emails and sent it to me as a type of 'forward' I thought she was trying to bullshit me. It clearly said at the top of the scan that it was a Word document.
The text of the message actually included something like "I have sent this email to you on 20th of Whatever" which made the whole thing look incredibly fake.
The sad thing is that it turned out it was actually a real email from her to me months before, but I had deleted and forgotten the original because it was so incredibly dumb as to be offensive to both my Inbox and my mind. The headers are there for a reason, technophobes! I don't need you to tell me the date in an email, thankyou very much.
I was relieved when she got made redundant last year. There's something about having half-wit control freaks in positions of authority that disturbs me.
I'm just wondering if I can count myself as family, as I created a subaccount for myself because I wanted a better account name. I didn't realise that the account name would be my online name in all of my games, I was used to just being able to call myself anything I want in PC games. Often people have their full name in their account name anyway.
The thing I have the biggest problem with in all of this is messages just disappearing without notification. That's something that's happened occasionally on MSN messenger, and I've only found out months later by comparing history messages with the other person:/ I can understand censorship 'for the children', or really moany bastards who don't like swearing, or whatever their excuse is, but it really would only work if you're told that a message has not been sent because it contains inappropriate material. I don't see how they're going to stop everyone from giving out their name or location though - they could easily just say it on VoIP channels or slightly mispell it in a message.
Don't forget that Jesus is meant to be 'human' now as well, with a body, and Jesus is also God, so that means that he exists in time.. meh. I was thining about this kind of thing yesterday - is it even possible for space-time to exist somewhere where there is no time, or for a timeless area to exist in our own universe? I doubt it. As a Christian I would have said "with God, anything is possible", but it ends up just being an excuse not to use your critical faculties anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I guess I read it wrong. I do something like that myself in addition to tape backups, but I don't take the disk offsite, it's more for convenience so that we can just setup the disk as a temporary network share if the RAID array needs rebuilt or whatever..
Well, I don't buy the Sims either, so it probably doesn't say anything to be honest.
If you could point out any point and click adventure games made in the last few years I'd be happy to go and have a look. I completed the Monkey Island series and Full Throttle, and got The Dig in the same box set, but it was rather boring - just because a game is point and click won't make it good! Wikipedia says The Dig was the most serious point and click adventure LucasArts made, so I don't feel so bad about finding it boring now :) I suppose the format works best with slightly comedic games.
I admit that I don't often search for indie games or even look at modern games coming out. Yes, a game will have to be brought to my attention by slashdot (I pre-ordered Fallout 3 after seeing an article on it - it looks very good, I haven't been interested in an 3D RPG type game since Deus Ex), friends or TV (I'd never heard of Saints Row but I saw an advert for the sequel on TV and I'm tempted, because I like the GTA series a lot). A lot of the best selling games these days don't really interest me.
I am definitely not all about the graphics. I do appreciate beautiful shiny graphics, but when I discovered MUDs a few years ago my Counter-Strike addiction turned into a mudding addiction, even though I'd just bought a nice shiny new graphics card! I also bought Escape Velocity Nova last year when I got my new Mac, as I remembered the original Escape Velocity fondly from earlier Macs. BTW you don't really need 15 million dollars for good graphics, you just need to read up on things, get decent quality textures, models and animations (which is where a lot of the cost will come in, but you get people in games communities who like doing that kind of thing just for fun anyway).. if you are dedicated you can make a great looking game that costs nothing but your own time.
I have downloaded games illegally to try them. There was Halo, tried it for 10 minutes and deleted it (would have bought it if it was any good). Lots of ROMs too over the years, but considering there is no other way to play those old games these days I don't feel bad about that. I should probably get all those old point and click games that I'd played the demos of but wasn't able to afford since I was just a kid.
Yes, the game industry is doing a terrible job of promoting indie games, because I thought the whole definition of an independent games maker is that they don't have a publisher so it is hard to get publicity. If someone mentions a great game here on slashdot then I sometimes give it a go. The thing is that I have a PS3 now anyway and prefer to play games on it. There are a few indie type games on the PS3 store which I've downloaded and played, but obviously that again is just games that have been chosen by Sony rather than truly independent ones..
Yeah, I think when he talks about budget he means they don't have the budget for a multiloading tape system that would be necessary to run that kind of script.. scripting is the easy part, convincing management to give him funds sounds like the awkward one. If the company can't afford to backup their data, it's like someone buying a Ferrari but not leaving enough budget for the insurance.. so in reality they can't really afford a Ferrari.
We've had 2 different Dell fileservers and both ended up failing when trying to recover after a disk failure. Both times we had stuff that wasn't on the tape backup list for some reason or another, and had to pay to get the disks recovered -_- It's far cheaper and simpler to recover a single disk than an entire raid array. So to my mind unless you're looking for the performance, using a large single disk and tape backups is the safest, most cost effective backup option for a small business.
'93 - the year my degree died..
I started MUDding in my honours year and ended up staying up til 6am each day playing (I live in the UK but most of the other players were from the US). That combined with a couple of other factors resulted in me not even doing my final year project.. I did all the other work and the exams for some reason, but only about 1/3 of the project!
I got a decent job working at the place where I used to work summers while I was a student, doing all sorts of IT from support to coding to sysadmin stuff. Hopefully experience will count for more than my honours year for any future jobs. Either that or I'll get a Masters/PhD if better qualifications are really necessary for a job I want. I actually got offered to be sponsored for a Masters if I want by my employer (probably would be based on one of the engineering apps I'm doing for them). They've already done that sort of thing for other employees.. almost took them up on the offer at one point, but life got in the way again and I forgot about it.
he wrote in sexually transmitted diseases. Seemed like within a week, half the mud was scratching and oozing everytime they entered a room.
ROFL that's excellent :)
On the last MUD I was into they had drugs as well as alcohol, and players could grow their own strain of bud if they bought a house..
Actually both the MUDs addictions I've had (Animud.net and Dragonball Evolution) have unfortunately been broken by girls. I wish I'd stuck with the MUDs to be honest, they were a far more rewarding use of my time.
I've never been a big fan of modern MMORPGs, but I love MUDs for some reason :)
Right on! Why bother to take all that lead out of the trunk when you can just put in a bigger engine and firmer suspension? What kind of a moron does it take to want to be driving an efficient vehicle? Haha, look at those losers who don't want to make the most of what they currently have instead of being wasteful!
It's so much easier to just buy a computer with extra cores and 16GB of RAM, why bother to check for memory leaks in your code? Heck, why even free up memory at all, ever? It's not like you're going to run out at any point! I actually buy replacement RAM for my computer every day, just because it's so damn cheap!
to increase process isolation they had to increase memory usage
Can you explain or cite a source as to how Vista process isolation is any better than Linux isolation? I just read up on it briefly and it doesn't seem to do anything that Linux doesn't.
You get plenty of Linux distros that don't require 512MB to run. I don't know the minimum requirements for SELinux, but I don't see any mention on the NSA website of a sudden 10x requirements jump if you want to enable it in your current distro, so IMO using "security" as an excuse for using that much RAM is.. dubious.
Crayland has higher speed limits than OtherSupercomputerVendorland?
He could use it to crack passwords or something.. lots of processors and memory is pretty handy for that
You say that like anyone stuck with it long enough to find out..
Well, I do have to concur that you seem a little crazy - you're even more obsessed with being right than I am! Not to mention regular use of all caps, bold and extraneous punctuation ;) But who am I to hold that against you, perhaps you're just a very enthusiastic person, lol.
Exactly - I think high end machines are worth the money to those that have the money. For example, when I was a student new Macs looked insanely priced to me, but now that I have a job the prices seem sensible, apart from the Air - but that's just because I don't have any real need for an ultra-portable. It's hard for me to understand why anyone would pay that much for so little power.
What do you mean "it isn't portable"?
It has an offline mode for single player games, and how were you going to play online games without a net connection anyway? It also lets you download and install to any machine you want without having to delete the original install, which makes it even more "portable", as well as a very convenient way to manage your games without having to manually install them yourself and type in registration keys, which you've had to store away safely with their disks.
Installing from disks is still quicker than downloading, but it definitely isn't as convenient when you have a large collection of games and have just bought a new machine or reinstalled Windows. You can either download all your games again, or restore from a Steam backup or whatever.
Considering Portal is based on Narbacular Drop which was actually University project, we already got the creativity without going through the standard games industry business model. Narbacular Drop was free and apparently had a decent community creating maps for it (I never tried it myself). Admittedly Portal has shinier graphics and a story, but IMO the current business models pushed by publishers are more likely to stifle innovation than encourage it - which is why Bungie left Microsoft for example. They were fed up churning out sequels to Halo, because they know they are capable of much more.
I don't mind publishers and developers releasing sequels - as long as the original game was good and the sequel is just as good or better, of course - but using recent business models it is difficult for developers with original ideas to get their foot in the door. We still get original games occasionally, but there is pressure from the publishers to produce more of the same recipes rather than try out new concepts - see DeathSpank for another example. Ron Gilbert tried pushing the ideas to publishers for years before he found one that was willing to take the risk on it, even though he's got some great games under his belt. We will always have developers/designers with interesting ideas, it's currently up to the publishers who gets through though.
I have no idea why nobody is still making good ol' point and click adventures. We have plenty of point and click cruft like the Sims and WoW, but for some reason point and click adventures are 'outdated'. I'd choose playing a Ron Gilbert Monkey Island sequel over the Sims any day (though if you said Half-Life 3 I'd have to think about it)! I'm definitely getting DeathSpank when it comes out anyway.
The current generation of consoles are starting to have channels for homebrew type games, and things like Steam on the PC are good ways for developers to be able to release their games without going via the traditional publisher route. I'd never heard of Ico - apparently it was a bit of a flop - but if it was released as a cheap WiiWare game or PS3 store download right now it would do very well. I'd buy it now that I've heard about it. Of course if you threw in every other PS2 game ever, I probably wouldn't notice it at all. It all comes down to marketing and a bit of luck in the end as to which games get noticed - but then that's just life (and damn statistics).
PS - I actually thought Portal would be rather spectacular with online multiplayer. It would be pretty cool playing in a deathmatch arena with traps everywhere, trying to drop objects on people's heads, send them into a spiky pit/whatever. Or perhaps they could have some kind of capture the flag variant. It would be a bit messy and hectic, but could be good fun. As it is, it's "just" a puzzle game to me and I probably will never play it again. I hope they include portals and multiplayer in Episode 3 anyway :)
I'd actually consider the VAIOs much more of a waste than any Alienware hardware since I don't care too much about portability. VAIOs also come with all sorts of crapware pre-loaded as well - much more than I've seen on a Dell or Alienware machine anyway.
Just had a look at the Alienware website and the prices actually look pretty reasonable to me, considering what you're getting. When it comes to desktops I prefer to build my own, but for laptops I'm happy to pay someone else to design proper ventilation etc, assemble it and give me a warranty.
Agreed. I was going to post another rant about this woman, she similarly just went through everything by rote instead of really trying to think what was going on and using common sense. I showed her how to insert new rows into a spreadsheet a couple of times (just right click on the rows and choose insert->new row, I mean how hard is that to remember) and she still asked me to do it for her, which was the start of me just getting really frustrated with her attitude. You can tell when someone really just is struggling to grasp a concept, or whether they're just being lazy*. The non-lazy ones will at least take the initiative to look through the menus to try to find what they need. My job covers a lot of areas, and if I had a job description it probably would include helping people out with simple issues like that, but as a result of this situation we ended up having a policy in the sales offices of employees helping each other out with simple stuff like that before I need to get involved. Funnily enough, all the workers in the engineering and finance departments never need to ask that kind of question. The country bumpkin types in our fabrication department.. well, we won't talk about that 8|
Thankfully, any new employees we've had recently have been under 30, so they already just 'get' how to use computers, having been brought up with them. Older people can of course learn too - one of our managers has done a great job picking things up - but some people just don't want to know.
*okay, some people may have real insecurities within themselves of looking inadequate when trying to learn something, or just feeling they wouldn't be able to learn, but a lot of the time it's just laziness. I don't mind if someone asks 'stupid' questions as long as they are making a genuine attempt to learn, and I have a lot of time for those people - just not ones who are basically using me as their Human-Computer Interface.
That's a quote from Apple's website, not TFA (I ran a search on all 3 pages of the article before googling for the phrase). So why are you quoting that as if the article is biased? There are a couple of sections where he just says "I like this" rather than being objective - and I have no idea how he could like the crappy toy keyboards on the Macbook - but he does give the other machines their due when they deserve it, and admit what the Macbooks don't have.
Oh, and I didn't laugh. Do I win a prize?
Disclaimer: Yes I have a Macbook Pro, and it was of comparable price and specs to the Dell Precision that I would have bought otherwise - which surprised me after hearing people bang on about Apple's always being overpriced. I wonder if those same people complain about Sony VAIOs, Dell's XPS range or Alienware being overpriced. Probably do..
Of course I agree, there are loads of libraries today to do anything. I used to imagine I'd have to code everything from the ground up, almost bashing directly on the hardware with no drivers etc (this was when I had an Amiga, tho I only knew BASIC and a little C in those days).
The reason I was being sarcastic is because I thought you were labouring the point about libraries a bit. I think everyone gets that ActiveX can save time, but that is not always the most important consideration.
ActiveX has a bit of a stigma attached to it (in my mind at least) because it has had so many security issues surrounding it for a long time. I don't have so much problem with people implementing APIs to do more advanced stuff in a browser* - but it would be much better to use a well documented and/or open source API for security and cross platform compatibility. ActiveX is useless for a significant chunk of web users. I don't run IE on any machine unless I have to, which often means only for setting up Windows updates.
*I do have a bit of a problem with it because it opens up a lot of avenues for attack - but if it is designed securely to work with restricted or custom privileges it could be useful.. unfortunately ActiveX seems to have been designed to be big on flashy features but not so big on security.. and since then it has just been patched and patched to try and erase the bugs, when IMO they'd be better starting from scratch with a new idea like they tried to do with Vista - but hopefully with better results!
Wow, so using a proprietary library can save you time? Who knew!
The benefit of not using ActiveX, even if it means you have to write some of your own code, is that your application is a lot more likely to work in more than one browser. When an application (web related or otherwise) requires IE components I tend to assume it has been designed by idiots. It's annoying when IE specific issues get in the way of an application running properly for example. That happened recently with one of our FEA tools - installing IE7 caused annoying errors to pop up all the time (and changing its security settings didn't do jack, ended up reverting the machine back to IE6).
The main reason I have started to appreciate web apps (I used to much prefer standalone apps) is for simple, reliable cross-platform compatibility. The computing world is a much better place to be when people use open standards and leave out the proprietary junk.
I'm pretty sure the only plug-in I use apart from ad-block and no-script - which don't really count as they're about removing content rather than adding it - are flashplayers for streaming videos. IMO we'd be better off with a streaming media standard for browsers, if one doesn't already exist. Flash does other stuff too obviously, but I don't need annoying flashing ads or fancy menus which only work on browsers that support flash. Flash and Java are great for cross-platform applications and games, but I don't want them in my browser - I'd be happy to download and run them in a standalone VM.
(actually, modding redundant implies that they had already accepted it)
Well, it's a pretty small company, so often I'm dealing with the top level of management directly as I'm one of two IT staffers. Most of our management aren't actually trained as managers - they're trained as engineers or accountants, and on top of that are actually nice people!
Reminds me of our old Office Manager. When she wanted to archive an important email, she copied the main text into Word, then printed it off before storing it in files in her desk. Rather than, you know, at least printing it out from Outlook, or freakin storing it in her personal folders like everyone else.
I wasn't aware of her weird filing system, so when she scanned in one of these emails and sent it to me as a type of 'forward' I thought she was trying to bullshit me. It clearly said at the top of the scan that it was a Word document.
The text of the message actually included something like "I have sent this email to you on 20th of Whatever" which made the whole thing look incredibly fake.
The sad thing is that it turned out it was actually a real email from her to me months before, but I had deleted and forgotten the original because it was so incredibly dumb as to be offensive to both my Inbox and my mind. The headers are there for a reason, technophobes! I don't need you to tell me the date in an email, thankyou very much.
I was relieved when she got made redundant last year. There's something about having half-wit control freaks in positions of authority that disturbs me.
I'm just wondering if I can count myself as family, as I created a subaccount for myself because I wanted a better account name. I didn't realise that the account name would be my online name in all of my games, I was used to just being able to call myself anything I want in PC games. Often people have their full name in their account name anyway.
The thing I have the biggest problem with in all of this is messages just disappearing without notification. That's something that's happened occasionally on MSN messenger, and I've only found out months later by comparing history messages with the other person :/ I can understand censorship 'for the children', or really moany bastards who don't like swearing, or whatever their excuse is, but it really would only work if you're told that a message has not been sent because it contains inappropriate material. I don't see how they're going to stop everyone from giving out their name or location though - they could easily just say it on VoIP channels or slightly mispell it in a message.
Don't forget that Jesus is meant to be 'human' now as well, with a body, and Jesus is also God, so that means that he exists in time.. meh. I was thining about this kind of thing yesterday - is it even possible for space-time to exist somewhere where there is no time, or for a timeless area to exist in our own universe? I doubt it. As a Christian I would have said "with God, anything is possible", but it ends up just being an excuse not to use your critical faculties anymore.