If you think I'm talking nonsense then try this experiment. I assume you are a guy with a comment like that. So, go to the department store. Find and buy a pink jacket/shirt and wear it for a month. When someone comments, or asks why you are wearing pink, reply that you like the colour. Then after a month, come back to me and tell me how comfortable you felt about doing it.
Where do you live? Here in the Seattle area, I see men wearing pink shirts all the time, I've never really thought twice about it. Heck, a few years ago (2-3 years ago), pink shirts seemed to be a short-lived trend, at least in this area.
The newest thing seems to be the hipster-types in their 20s carrying canes over their shoulders. Seeing someone in tennis shoes with a $150 cane is pretty damned weird. (Now if you added a cape to that...)
The day after 9/11 I was in an elevator, and caught a snippet of conversation between 2 people that had business interests with a firm that was in the WTC. The comment I heard was 'their backups were in the other building'. Another company lost.
To be fair, that was a capital-D Disaster. Their backup strategy probably made the assumption that if both towers collapsed at the same time, it was a nuclear conflict and they'd have much bigger problems to worry about than the archived 1987 check register. (And, depending on how much of the company was in the tower, it's likely they were right-- a lot of companies lost enough that the servers would be the least of their worries.)
Wouldn't have helped with this situation, since the server admin obviously doesn't know the difference between "replication" and "backup." He would have just copied the data back across the two publicly-accessible servers, and, hey look! It works. Since he didn't anticipate a hacker wiping *both* servers at the same time, he wouldn't have tested that situation.
That said, you're completely correct: if you do real backups, test them on a schedule. And don't skip a test, no matter how busy you are.
Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers.
If both copies of data were both on publically-accessible servers, they weren't backed-up. This is called "replication" (not "backup") and it can't pass for a viable backup strategy. (For reasons that I'm sure Tom Allensworth realizes now.)
The number of irresponsibly-run servers just boggles my mind.
I actually agree with everything you wrote, but what really pisses me off isn't that Netscape couldn't compete-- that's honorable at least-- but that they didn't even try! Instead they broke out the lawyers, and decided their best tactic was to sue to buy time while they tried to re-write their application from scratch. Like you said, they couldn't compete with Microsoft's developers when they were going full-tilt, what made them think they could compete when they had to write *everything* from scratch?
It was just terrible strategy, and they frankly deserved to fail, IMO. The really sad part is that nobody bothered to compete with Microsoft at all in that space for so long-- of course IE6 was stagnant, why would Microsoft bother committing resources to a project with no competition?
IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business, proceeded then to basically cease development and ignore its many faults until Mozilla and other projects finally caught up.
IE was a better browser than Netscape in the 4.0 era*. Then to make things worse, Netscape basically gave up and didn't even release a product for three years. And it's Microsoft's fault they lost marketshare? Hah.
* If you take issue with that statement, consider this: IE was also more popular than Netscape 4 on the Macintosh. Apple shipped *both* browsers on the system CD and let the consumer choose their favorite to install.
Not to mention the popular browser are the older ones. That means cruft build-up of the type that Chrome simply doesn't have. (The exception to this rule is Opera, of course nobody uses that.;)
If Chrome supported all the weird edge-cases that IE supported, and had the code support to handle the rats nest of HTML supported by 4.0-esque browsers, and had tons of marketing-inspired and now-obsolete features that some intranet somewhere still needs support for (like ActiveX), it probably wouldn't look nearly as good in the benchmarks.
I think in the long run, we're much better off because we said "no thanks" to supersonic transport. The Concorde was nothing but a huge a waste of money and time to make a toy for the already-wealthy. Give me American Airlines' hundreds of Super-80s that everybody in the country can afford to ride in any day.
(Well, ok, maybe not Super-80s specifically-- those things suck-- but you get the point.)
No, you should not have to be deafened, or bug your passengers, but given that a single line to a single file would've solved this problem, I'm going to say that it's a lame reason to stop using an OS.
My main frustration was that that single line in that single file wasn't added *before* the OS was released to the general public. What were they thinking!? It's like they don't even slightly care about quality, the calendar says it goes out today so it goes out today-- easily-fixed, super-annoying bug or not!
My computer making extremely embarrassing beeping sounds in public is not a lame reason to stop using an OS. In fact, rules of politeness basically dictate I should stop using the OS in this circumstance, since there's no way to predict what action will cause the beep.
Clearly, if there had been other compelling reasons for you to use Ubuntu, and if you hadn't had other problems, you'd have dealt with this one.
Except that (the PC Speaker issue) was the reason I stopped using Ubuntu. If I could have used my computer without being deafened by a horrible sound, I would have continued struggling through the other issues. I actually did struggle through a couple, before I discovered that, figure out how to get the wifi card working.
But, you're right, eventually, I would have given up:
1) Since Ubuntu removed all tablet features from my tablet, and turned it into an unnecessarily-expensive laptop. (BTW, I installed Windows 7 after removing Ubuntu-- the tablet features work great! Better than Vista, even, and Vista has really good tablet support.)
2) Because I can't use a laptop without sleep mode. My usual mode is: plugged in at home overnight, use an hour on the train in the morning, sleeped at work, use an hour on the train in the afternoon. The battery is *just enough* to make this all work without plugging it in at the office. Ubuntu would make it so I have to carry the adapter around, too.
3) The DPI change didn't work in Firefox. It's not really a super big deal, except I can't figure out why Firefox would respect the DPI setting in Windows and not Linux, and because it means I have to set the minimum font size in Firefox to, like, 16 for text to be readable. Setting the minimum font size isn't the same thing as the DPI; I'd rather have correct DPI than have to do work-arounds on the application I use most often.
Things that are popular on the Internet are (generally) not popular in real life-- Firefly/Serenity, Snakes on a Plane, Howard Dean, Ron Paul, there are a million examples.
The saddest thing is that so many Internet users haven't learned this yet. And some of them are in the position to, for example, heavily promote Snakes on a Plane.
Seriously, though, why the heck do people even *start* on these projects without permission from the IP holder? I mean, duh you're going to get shut down, it's not a matter of "if" but "when."
Yeah, it's unfortunate that all that work was lost, but what the hell did you expect would happen? This was inevitable from day 1. If you want to write a video game, use your own IP, don't just jack someone else's and expect it to be "all ok."
What percentage of BitTorrent traffic would be non-infringing if the RIAA and MPAA didn't continuously give a negative connotation to the technology?
Wait, what? The majority of BitTorrent traffic is illegal only because the RIAA and MPAA mention that BitTorrent is used for exchanging illegal files? Is this some weird use of the "mind over matter" principle? Instead of, for example, the RIAA and MPAA calling the spade a spade.
MP3 became a considerably more popular audio format because of the widespread use of Napster,
So Napster was Ok because it allowed one audio format (which existed before Napster) become more popular?
It could even be argued that Apple wouldn't even have as strong of a user-base without Napster's influence.
It could also be argued that Apple's iTMS would have done three times the business if most users hadn't already amassed a large Napster-obtained MP3 collection. Of course, Apple doesn't even use your miraculous MP3 file format.
1) AdBlock already has the feature you're proposing it should. 2) It specifically says in the article that it would be an in-line dialog, like the "pop-up blocked" warning, not a full dialog box. Not that you read the article.
Uh, yah, but if they simply don't accept the payments (and surely they wouldn't accept payments from random people on the web) then they pay nothing, right? All they have to do is call up their bank and get a hold put on the account, they're out nothing. This "plan" is idiotic.
yet nobody batted an eye when Microsoft decided to redesign Office and give it those stupid ribbons.
Depends which forums you read, I guess. This place was crazy with hundreds of people ranting at every opportunity what a horrible cancer upon society Office 2007 was, when it was released. You still see those rants in threads related to Office.
Of course, you have to realize that they all come from people who: 1) Haven't even tried Office 2007 and, 2) Are generally programmers who don't use Office apps in the first place.
The only thing worse than computers is phones with computers in them.
My IP phone here at work helpfully keeps a log of missed calls, and their numbers. It helpfully displays these as a list on the screen, and helpfully lets you highlight one and press the "dial" button to instantly re-dial the call. But, uh... it's too fucking stupid dial the "9" for an outside line, meaning the call either fails or goes to some random extension in the company.
As an added bonus, there's no way to have the missed call list and dialing interface both on-screen at the same time. So my phone is surrounded by a pile of Post-It notes containing numbers I had to write down, only to dial mere seconds later.
In short: computer interfaces suck, ignore anybody who says "leave it the way it is" because the way it is sucks.
Windows 7 hasn't even been released yet, but is more successful in its pre-release state than Vista is post-release. (Weird.) Office 2009 doesn't (and never will) exist-- the next Office version will be 2010.
These things are all failures for more-or-less one reason: the UI has advanced as far as it needs to. Interface revisions are okay, overhauls are NOT.
Except Office 2007 has been a huge success due to the (badly needed, IMO) overhauling of the UI.
Anyway, I'm all for reorganizing the interface, but there should be some way to hide all the ribbony stuff when you are on a machine with a small screen where menus still make the most sense. I've never tried to use Office 2007 on a netbook, but I'd wager it is a sick joke.
1) The ribbon takes up fewer pixels than Office 2003's default toolbars, so it's definitely no worse than before, and 2) it can be set to "minimize", which basically makes it the same height as a normal menu bar.
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I think Mel Gibson figured it out in that one movie where he was telepathic.
If you think I'm talking nonsense then try this experiment. I assume you are a guy with a comment like that. So, go to the department store. Find and buy a pink jacket/shirt and wear it for a month. When someone comments, or asks why you are wearing pink, reply that you like the colour. Then after a month, come back to me and tell me how comfortable you felt about doing it.
Where do you live? Here in the Seattle area, I see men wearing pink shirts all the time, I've never really thought twice about it. Heck, a few years ago (2-3 years ago), pink shirts seemed to be a short-lived trend, at least in this area.
The newest thing seems to be the hipster-types in their 20s carrying canes over their shoulders. Seeing someone in tennis shoes with a $150 cane is pretty damned weird. (Now if you added a cape to that...)
The day after 9/11 I was in an elevator, and caught a snippet of conversation between 2 people that had business interests with a firm that was in the WTC. The comment I heard was 'their backups were in the other building'. Another company lost.
To be fair, that was a capital-D Disaster. Their backup strategy probably made the assumption that if both towers collapsed at the same time, it was a nuclear conflict and they'd have much bigger problems to worry about than the archived 1987 check register. (And, depending on how much of the company was in the tower, it's likely they were right-- a lot of companies lost enough that the servers would be the least of their worries.)
Wouldn't have helped with this situation, since the server admin obviously doesn't know the difference between "replication" and "backup." He would have just copied the data back across the two publicly-accessible servers, and, hey look! It works. Since he didn't anticipate a hacker wiping *both* servers at the same time, he wouldn't have tested that situation.
That said, you're completely correct: if you do real backups, test them on a schedule. And don't skip a test, no matter how busy you are.
No kidding, this is an oxymoron:
Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers.
If both copies of data were both on publically-accessible servers, they weren't backed-up. This is called "replication" (not "backup") and it can't pass for a viable backup strategy. (For reasons that I'm sure Tom Allensworth realizes now.)
The number of irresponsibly-run servers just boggles my mind.
Nostalgia rots your brain. Where I live there are as many kids playing outside as there ever were, and I would wager that's true where you are, also.
I actually agree with everything you wrote, but what really pisses me off isn't that Netscape couldn't compete-- that's honorable at least-- but that they didn't even try! Instead they broke out the lawyers, and decided their best tactic was to sue to buy time while they tried to re-write their application from scratch. Like you said, they couldn't compete with Microsoft's developers when they were going full-tilt, what made them think they could compete when they had to write *everything* from scratch?
It was just terrible strategy, and they frankly deserved to fail, IMO. The really sad part is that nobody bothered to compete with Microsoft at all in that space for so long-- of course IE6 was stagnant, why would Microsoft bother committing resources to a project with no competition?
Notice how he had to leave New Zealand to accomplish that.
IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business, proceeded then to basically cease development and ignore its many faults until Mozilla and other projects finally caught up.
IE was a better browser than Netscape in the 4.0 era*. Then to make things worse, Netscape basically gave up and didn't even release a product for three years. And it's Microsoft's fault they lost marketshare? Hah.
* If you take issue with that statement, consider this: IE was also more popular than Netscape 4 on the Macintosh. Apple shipped *both* browsers on the system CD and let the consumer choose their favorite to install.
Not to mention the popular browser are the older ones. That means cruft build-up of the type that Chrome simply doesn't have. (The exception to this rule is Opera, of course nobody uses that. ;)
If Chrome supported all the weird edge-cases that IE supported, and had the code support to handle the rats nest of HTML supported by 4.0-esque browsers, and had tons of marketing-inspired and now-obsolete features that some intranet somewhere still needs support for (like ActiveX), it probably wouldn't look nearly as good in the benchmarks.
I think in the long run, we're much better off because we said "no thanks" to supersonic transport. The Concorde was nothing but a huge a waste of money and time to make a toy for the already-wealthy. Give me American Airlines' hundreds of Super-80s that everybody in the country can afford to ride in any day.
(Well, ok, maybe not Super-80s specifically-- those things suck-- but you get the point.)
Many of Spirit's discoveries were because of soil turned over due to her stuck wheel.
For the next rover, they should just break one of the drive wheels before it even lands, whack at it with a hammer or something. That would save time.
You could just work for the DMV.
No, you should not have to be deafened, or bug your passengers, but given that a single line to a single file would've solved this problem, I'm going to say that it's a lame reason to stop using an OS.
My main frustration was that that single line in that single file wasn't added *before* the OS was released to the general public. What were they thinking!? It's like they don't even slightly care about quality, the calendar says it goes out today so it goes out today-- easily-fixed, super-annoying bug or not!
My computer making extremely embarrassing beeping sounds in public is not a lame reason to stop using an OS. In fact, rules of politeness basically dictate I should stop using the OS in this circumstance, since there's no way to predict what action will cause the beep.
Clearly, if there had been other compelling reasons for you to use Ubuntu, and if you hadn't had other problems, you'd have dealt with this one.
Except that (the PC Speaker issue) was the reason I stopped using Ubuntu. If I could have used my computer without being deafened by a horrible sound, I would have continued struggling through the other issues. I actually did struggle through a couple, before I discovered that, figure out how to get the wifi card working.
But, you're right, eventually, I would have given up:
1) Since Ubuntu removed all tablet features from my tablet, and turned it into an unnecessarily-expensive laptop. (BTW, I installed Windows 7 after removing Ubuntu-- the tablet features work great! Better than Vista, even, and Vista has really good tablet support.)
2) Because I can't use a laptop without sleep mode. My usual mode is: plugged in at home overnight, use an hour on the train in the morning, sleeped at work, use an hour on the train in the afternoon. The battery is *just enough* to make this all work without plugging it in at the office. Ubuntu would make it so I have to carry the adapter around, too.
3) The DPI change didn't work in Firefox. It's not really a super big deal, except I can't figure out why Firefox would respect the DPI setting in Windows and not Linux, and because it means I have to set the minimum font size in Firefox to, like, 16 for text to be readable. Setting the minimum font size isn't the same thing as the DPI; I'd rather have correct DPI than have to do work-arounds on the application I use most often.
Things that are popular on the Internet are (generally) not popular in real life-- Firefly/Serenity, Snakes on a Plane, Howard Dean, Ron Paul, there are a million examples.
The saddest thing is that so many Internet users haven't learned this yet. And some of them are in the position to, for example, heavily promote Snakes on a Plane.
You forgot Tribes.
Seriously, though, why the heck do people even *start* on these projects without permission from the IP holder? I mean, duh you're going to get shut down, it's not a matter of "if" but "when."
Yeah, it's unfortunate that all that work was lost, but what the hell did you expect would happen? This was inevitable from day 1. If you want to write a video game, use your own IP, don't just jack someone else's and expect it to be "all ok."
I'm dyslexic. The odds of me being able to memorize a 10-digit number, then recall it in the correct order-- even 5 seconds later-- are pretty slim.
What percentage of BitTorrent traffic would be non-infringing if the RIAA and MPAA didn't continuously give a negative connotation to the technology?
Wait, what? The majority of BitTorrent traffic is illegal only because the RIAA and MPAA mention that BitTorrent is used for exchanging illegal files? Is this some weird use of the "mind over matter" principle? Instead of, for example, the RIAA and MPAA calling the spade a spade.
MP3 became a considerably more popular audio format because of the widespread use of Napster,
So Napster was Ok because it allowed one audio format (which existed before Napster) become more popular?
It could even be argued that Apple wouldn't even have as strong of a user-base without Napster's influence.
It could also be argued that Apple's iTMS would have done three times the business if most users hadn't already amassed a large Napster-obtained MP3 collection. Of course, Apple doesn't even use your miraculous MP3 file format.
1) AdBlock already has the feature you're proposing it should.
2) It specifically says in the article that it would be an in-line dialog, like the "pop-up blocked" warning, not a full dialog box. Not that you read the article.
Uh, yah, but if they simply don't accept the payments (and surely they wouldn't accept payments from random people on the web) then they pay nothing, right? All they have to do is call up their bank and get a hold put on the account, they're out nothing. This "plan" is idiotic.
yet nobody batted an eye when Microsoft decided to redesign Office and give it those stupid ribbons.
Depends which forums you read, I guess. This place was crazy with hundreds of people ranting at every opportunity what a horrible cancer upon society Office 2007 was, when it was released. You still see those rants in threads related to Office.
Of course, you have to realize that they all come from people who:
1) Haven't even tried Office 2007 and,
2) Are generally programmers who don't use Office apps in the first place.
The only thing worse than computers is phones with computers in them.
My IP phone here at work helpfully keeps a log of missed calls, and their numbers. It helpfully displays these as a list on the screen, and helpfully lets you highlight one and press the "dial" button to instantly re-dial the call. But, uh... it's too fucking stupid dial the "9" for an outside line, meaning the call either fails or goes to some random extension in the company.
As an added bonus, there's no way to have the missed call list and dialing interface both on-screen at the same time. So my phone is surrounded by a pile of Post-It notes containing numbers I had to write down, only to dial mere seconds later.
In short: computer interfaces suck, ignore anybody who says "leave it the way it is" because the way it is sucks.
Windows 7 hasn't even been released yet, but is more successful in its pre-release state than Vista is post-release. (Weird.) Office 2009 doesn't (and never will) exist-- the next Office version will be 2010.
These things are all failures for more-or-less one reason: the UI has advanced as far as it needs to. Interface revisions are okay, overhauls are NOT.
Except Office 2007 has been a huge success due to the (badly needed, IMO) overhauling of the UI.
I give this troll 1/10.
Anyway, I'm all for reorganizing the interface, but there should be some way to hide all the ribbony stuff when you are on a machine with a small screen where menus still make the most sense. I've never tried to use Office 2007 on a netbook, but I'd wager it is a sick joke.
1) The ribbon takes up fewer pixels than Office 2003's default toolbars, so it's definitely no worse than before, and
2) it can be set to "minimize", which basically makes it the same height as a normal menu bar.
In short, works fine on a netbook. Give it a try.