Because I was a stupid kid and I didn't know any better? Imagine if the future employer had, say, phone conversations recorded with your personality and opinions from when you were 16. When you're young, you don't think about things like "wow, will I still think like this when I'm 27?", you just write the post and hit send.
The bigger question, for us people who grew up with the internet from early high school, is will the stupid crap I wrote back in 1997 when I was 16 ever go away?
Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is no, and that there's no way to make it go away. If you Google my name, one of the links that comes up is a comment I posted to some website back in 1997 about how Apple is awesome and Microsoft (I probably spelled is M$) is terrible and all Windows users stink. Do I still believe that? Of course not! But is the employer going to check the date of the post? What about if the posted comments don't have a date attached? (Or if, like some crappy software, it has a date that doesn't mention the year?)
What makes this even worse is that older sites (generally) have a higher pagerank than newer sites, so those old stupid posts are more likely to come up when you Google my name.
That's my real concern. I don't care about anything that I post *now*, because my personality has "gelled" and anybody who Googles me and reads only recent material is likely to get a pretty complete picture of me. But I have no way of getting rid of all that old crap indexed under my name. Other than changing my name, I suppose.
Uh, I'm running version 6.5.1, and it still sucks donkey wang. It sucks MAJOR donkey wang. In what *possible* way is the email component of Notes better than Outlook? The email isn't better, the calendar isn't better, the address book isn't better (and is in fact the exact same as R5, as far as I can tell.) For groupware, Lotus Notes stinks and has always stunk. In fact, while the UI for 6.5.1 has some improvements over R5, it still is at least 5 years behind Outlook (and 10 years behind Entourage for OS X... I'd rather shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails than use Notes on OS X.)
Here's a very basic task you can do on any email application on earth except Notes: Sort by subjectline!
Now here's the part where you tell me, "but Notes isn't just for email! It does DB apps also!" Which would be a valid argument except for two points:
1) IBM *sells* Notes as an email solution, so whether or not it just does email, it's inexcusable for it to do email this poorly.
2) Notes sucks for DB applications, too, compared to competing products. It's probably a wash with Access, but give me Filemaker over Notes any day of the week! The *only* unique feature Notes has, which works maybe half the time, is that it can automatically convert a Notes DB to run over the web using Java. Of course, this crashes/freezes constantly using Sun's Java, and Microsoft's Java is no longer available for XP, so for practical purposes that feature is useless. In addition, Notes DBs are a complete pain to develop... here's a typically error message from Notes for "debugging" purposes: "Object Attribute not found." What object? Which attribute? What operation produced the error? Why the hell are you showing this to my end users when they know even less about it than I do? (These errors come up in Lotus-developed DBs, BTW, not just custom ones.)
IBM wouldn't know usability if it smacked them on the head. When I brought up a usability issue (the "Edit.." option for attached files in email easily can cause data loss and there's no way for an admin to disable it [1]), the developer on the board actually *insulted my users* for not being able to figure out the mysterious undocumented process you need to do to get the Edit... option to work.
I pull my full support behind ANY company that can help the world be rid of the Notes scourge.
1) The bug is as follows: open up a email in Notes with an attached Word file, hit Edit. The Word file opens. Now delete the email from Notes, then save your changes in Word... Notes immediately deletes the temp file it opened in Word, losing any changes your user makes without warning and without any chance of recovering the changes. Lotus claimed it worked this way because the client didn't know whether the file in Word was still open or not, which *might* be excusable if Notes at least kept the temp file around so I could recover the changes and/or allowed the admin to disable the Edit button, but it does neither. Our small organization has lost probbaly 100 man-hours to this bug, imagine how much time a large organization is losing!
If you have a PS2 or a Xbox, try the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games. They're a little bit dated, but they have excellent co-op play, and the learning curve is so shallow that you'll both be masters at it near the end.
PS2 also has an Everquest game (Heros of Norrath? Something like that) based on the same engine which should give you the same experience. Xbox also has "Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel" and "Dungeon and Dragons Legends" which also give a similar gameplay experience.
What about Galaxy Quest which was made to look like a cheesy kid's movie and turned out to be one of the most intelligent sci-fi spoofs ever made? How many people never gave the movie the chance because the advertising for it was so terrible?
If Cocoa is so great, why is the Finder so shitty? I can't go an entire day without it crashing, and I know several things to trigger crashes. Dragging a file from Cyberduck, my FTP program, to the desktop will freeze Finder about 80% of the time. Unplugging my USB2 external HD will do it about 33% of the time. Then there are the multitudes of bugs... folder contents don't update in real-time, nor does any other metadata (like filesize.) I love running a rsync backup script and, when it's done, having Finder tell me the folder it was backing up to still has zero items... double-click it, and suddenly there's 100 items. Its handling of text clippings is FAR inferior to OS 9's Finder, and it still lacks features that OS 9 Finder had. (No spatial option, for example. No pop-up folders-- Apple says the Dock can replace pop-up folders, but it can't.) I usually organize my photos using a Windows fileshare because Windows XP's filmstrip view is about 10,000 times better for graphics than anything in Finder, and it won't crash if you have more than 500 images in a single folder.
Anyway, I was excited about the re-write of Finder when it was announced (for 10.3, I believe)... but they actually ended up with a Finder that was just as poor as the one before and less stable to boot.
Note to Apple: Finder is the FIRST THING people see when they walk up to a Mac. Make it work, or you'll give people a bad impression.
Even months later, the same misinformation keeps popping up.
The Xbox 360 costs $400. Period.
Any bundles you may have seen were created by the *retailer*, not by Microsoft. And you're crazy if you don't think the retailers will do the same thing with the PS3 when it comes out.
Remember the last presidential election here in the US where some citizens of the UK said that *they* should have the right to vote in *our* election because, as a superpower, what the US does influences the rest of the world?
To make the trifecta complete (to steal a Fark.com term), OS X has *added* many focus-stealing bugs that were never there in MacOS Classic. The one that drives me batty every time is Apple's DVD Player which, when inserting a DVD, steals focus not once, but TWICE! About 2 seconds apart, so just when you realized what happened, and click back to your original window, BAM, focus gone again. Grrr...
Focus bugs never happened in Classic because each application had its own 'layer' it was required to stay in.
Remember in the Matrix, the last two movies everyone hated, the humans didn't DEFEAT the machines, nor the machines defeat the humans. Instead, they created a compromise which allowed both parties to live in peace while working together to destroy a common enemy (Agent Smith.)
So the Matrix kind of proves your point if you watch it to the end.
What's interesting is that the US is attempting, at this very moment, to speed up that process by introducing democratically-elected governments to the region, and we get nothing but crap for it from the majority of the Western World. It seems like a pretty noble goal, to me... and even if we end up failing, well, at least we tried.
I was scammed, but it was more from seller ignorance than from anything else.
A seller claimed to have a Magnavox Odyssey game console for sale. This early console is actually a pretty good collector's item and they go for a decent amount. I had the top bid, got shipped the item... and it was an Odyssey 2! (Which isn't nearly the same thing.)
It wasn't a *huge* deal, since I wanted an Odyssey 2 in my collection also. I emailed the seller and told her to be a lot more careful when listing items... I *could* have reported that as a fraud and gotten her eBay account cancelled.
I've also been burned from a newsgroup ages ago, when I was looking for a eternal SCSI CD-R (recorder) and some guy tried to sell me a regular CD drive that wasn't a recorder. Again, this was only seller ignorance, and since it was arranged with a face-to-face meeting I could inspect the goods and refuse the sale.
Are you acting stupid just so you can brag that you've never worked in a cubicle before? Or are you actually clueless? (I'm going with option A, since you could have Googled the answer if you were clueless.)
That's great, but how the hell do you get the text off of it? My G5 doesn't have a Serial port, or anything that's likely to plug into this. It seems like you'd have the same problem you get from trying to use a Newton in this day and age... the device is great, but it can't talk to anything anymore.
You're way ahead of me. I tried setting up MythTV on Ubuntu, and I couldn't even get the IVTV drivers for my Hauppauge card installed... and that's after consulting two Linux experts and about a week of tinkering.
My DishNetwork PVR might not have all the features of MythTV, but it has one feature that's pretty damned important to me: It WORKS!
I'd be more scared if the OS community DID try to follow Dell's advice.
Then you'd have the Open Source Follow Dell's Advice Alliance (OSFDAA), and they'd get SUSE and RedHat to sign up. Then the next week you'd hear about the Linux Consolidation For Dell (LCFD) project, which would sign up Gentoo and Debian. Then they'd each create their own standards, all completely mutually exclusive with each other. Then you'd get somebody at the OSFDAA getting angry about the wrong direction they were taking, and you'd see the OSFDAA Linux distro... ditto that with the LCFD and, well, I think you get the point.
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What's better?
1) Microsoft leveraging their cash supply to create a video game industry in a fraction of the time it would take another company to, or
2) The Japanese controlling console gaming for the rest of time?
Personally, I prefer option 1.
Say I wanted to make a MNG file, what program would I use to do it?
Because I was a stupid kid and I didn't know any better? Imagine if the future employer had, say, phone conversations recorded with your personality and opinions from when you were 16. When you're young, you don't think about things like "wow, will I still think like this when I'm 27?", you just write the post and hit send.
Not everybody posting to Usenet is an adult.
The bigger question, for us people who grew up with the internet from early high school, is will the stupid crap I wrote back in 1997 when I was 16 ever go away?
Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is no, and that there's no way to make it go away. If you Google my name, one of the links that comes up is a comment I posted to some website back in 1997 about how Apple is awesome and Microsoft (I probably spelled is M$) is terrible and all Windows users stink. Do I still believe that? Of course not! But is the employer going to check the date of the post? What about if the posted comments don't have a date attached? (Or if, like some crappy software, it has a date that doesn't mention the year?)
What makes this even worse is that older sites (generally) have a higher pagerank than newer sites, so those old stupid posts are more likely to come up when you Google my name.
That's my real concern. I don't care about anything that I post *now*, because my personality has "gelled" and anybody who Googles me and reads only recent material is likely to get a pretty complete picture of me. But I have no way of getting rid of all that old crap indexed under my name. Other than changing my name, I suppose.
Uh, I'm running version 6.5.1, and it still sucks donkey wang. It sucks MAJOR donkey wang. In what *possible* way is the email component of Notes better than Outlook? The email isn't better, the calendar isn't better, the address book isn't better (and is in fact the exact same as R5, as far as I can tell.) For groupware, Lotus Notes stinks and has always stunk. In fact, while the UI for 6.5.1 has some improvements over R5, it still is at least 5 years behind Outlook (and 10 years behind Entourage for OS X... I'd rather shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails than use Notes on OS X.)
Here's a very basic task you can do on any email application on earth except Notes: Sort by subjectline!
Now here's the part where you tell me, "but Notes isn't just for email! It does DB apps also!" Which would be a valid argument except for two points:
1) IBM *sells* Notes as an email solution, so whether or not it just does email, it's inexcusable for it to do email this poorly.
2) Notes sucks for DB applications, too, compared to competing products. It's probably a wash with Access, but give me Filemaker over Notes any day of the week! The *only* unique feature Notes has, which works maybe half the time, is that it can automatically convert a Notes DB to run over the web using Java. Of course, this crashes/freezes constantly using Sun's Java, and Microsoft's Java is no longer available for XP, so for practical purposes that feature is useless. In addition, Notes DBs are a complete pain to develop... here's a typically error message from Notes for "debugging" purposes: "Object Attribute not found." What object? Which attribute? What operation produced the error? Why the hell are you showing this to my end users when they know even less about it than I do? (These errors come up in Lotus-developed DBs, BTW, not just custom ones.)
IBM wouldn't know usability if it smacked them on the head. When I brought up a usability issue (the "Edit.." option for attached files in email easily can cause data loss and there's no way for an admin to disable it [1]), the developer on the board actually *insulted my users* for not being able to figure out the mysterious undocumented process you need to do to get the Edit... option to work.
I pull my full support behind ANY company that can help the world be rid of the Notes scourge.
1) The bug is as follows: open up a email in Notes with an attached Word file, hit Edit. The Word file opens. Now delete the email from Notes, then save your changes in Word... Notes immediately deletes the temp file it opened in Word, losing any changes your user makes without warning and without any chance of recovering the changes. Lotus claimed it worked this way because the client didn't know whether the file in Word was still open or not, which *might* be excusable if Notes at least kept the temp file around so I could recover the changes and/or allowed the admin to disable the Edit button, but it does neither. Our small organization has lost probbaly 100 man-hours to this bug, imagine how much time a large organization is losing!
I desire... I desire... paper plate bean shakers!
If you have a PS2 or a Xbox, try the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games. They're a little bit dated, but they have excellent co-op play, and the learning curve is so shallow that you'll both be masters at it near the end.
PS2 also has an Everquest game (Heros of Norrath? Something like that) based on the same engine which should give you the same experience. Xbox also has "Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel" and "Dungeon and Dragons Legends" which also give a similar gameplay experience.
What about Galaxy Quest which was made to look like a cheesy kid's movie and turned out to be one of the most intelligent sci-fi spoofs ever made? How many people never gave the movie the chance because the advertising for it was so terrible?
What bothers me is this:
If Cocoa is so great, why is the Finder so shitty? I can't go an entire day without it crashing, and I know several things to trigger crashes. Dragging a file from Cyberduck, my FTP program, to the desktop will freeze Finder about 80% of the time. Unplugging my USB2 external HD will do it about 33% of the time. Then there are the multitudes of bugs... folder contents don't update in real-time, nor does any other metadata (like filesize.) I love running a rsync backup script and, when it's done, having Finder tell me the folder it was backing up to still has zero items... double-click it, and suddenly there's 100 items. Its handling of text clippings is FAR inferior to OS 9's Finder, and it still lacks features that OS 9 Finder had. (No spatial option, for example. No pop-up folders-- Apple says the Dock can replace pop-up folders, but it can't.) I usually organize my photos using a Windows fileshare because Windows XP's filmstrip view is about 10,000 times better for graphics than anything in Finder, and it won't crash if you have more than 500 images in a single folder.
Anyway, I was excited about the re-write of Finder when it was announced (for 10.3, I believe)... but they actually ended up with a Finder that was just as poor as the one before and less stable to boot.
Note to Apple: Finder is the FIRST THING people see when they walk up to a Mac. Make it work, or you'll give people a bad impression.
It can be done on a small-to-medium sized MUD, with enough staff to pay attention to the player's needs. It can't be done in a MMORPG.
Even months later, the same misinformation keeps popping up.
The Xbox 360 costs $400. Period.
Any bundles you may have seen were created by the *retailer*, not by Microsoft. And you're crazy if you don't think the retailers will do the same thing with the PS3 when it comes out.
Remember the last presidential election here in the US where some citizens of the UK said that *they* should have the right to vote in *our* election because, as a superpower, what the US does influences the rest of the world?
You mean like "Simple Finder" in MacOS, or perhaps like "Personalized Menus" in Office XP? Those features are among the most hated ever by users.
I don't know what the solution is, but an "easy" button has been tried, and it don't work.
To make the trifecta complete (to steal a Fark.com term), OS X has *added* many focus-stealing bugs that were never there in MacOS Classic. The one that drives me batty every time is Apple's DVD Player which, when inserting a DVD, steals focus not once, but TWICE! About 2 seconds apart, so just when you realized what happened, and click back to your original window, BAM, focus gone again. Grrr...
Focus bugs never happened in Classic because each application had its own 'layer' it was required to stay in.
Remember in the Matrix, the last two movies everyone hated, the humans didn't DEFEAT the machines, nor the machines defeat the humans. Instead, they created a compromise which allowed both parties to live in peace while working together to destroy a common enemy (Agent Smith.)
So the Matrix kind of proves your point if you watch it to the end.
What's interesting is that the US is attempting, at this very moment, to speed up that process by introducing democratically-elected governments to the region, and we get nothing but crap for it from the majority of the Western World. It seems like a pretty noble goal, to me... and even if we end up failing, well, at least we tried.
I was scammed, but it was more from seller ignorance than from anything else.
A seller claimed to have a Magnavox Odyssey game console for sale. This early console is actually a pretty good collector's item and they go for a decent amount. I had the top bid, got shipped the item... and it was an Odyssey 2! (Which isn't nearly the same thing.)
It wasn't a *huge* deal, since I wanted an Odyssey 2 in my collection also. I emailed the seller and told her to be a lot more careful when listing items... I *could* have reported that as a fraud and gotten her eBay account cancelled.
I've also been burned from a newsgroup ages ago, when I was looking for a eternal SCSI CD-R (recorder) and some guy tried to sell me a regular CD drive that wasn't a recorder. Again, this was only seller ignorance, and since it was arranged with a face-to-face meeting I could inspect the goods and refuse the sale.
And now we have DLP televisions... go freakin' figure.
Ditto here. Not a single issue.
http://live.xbox.com/member/Mecha+Gamera - gamertag, if you care. Notice how 1337 I am.
Are you acting stupid just so you can brag that you've never worked in a cubicle before? Or are you actually clueless? (I'm going with option A, since you could have Googled the answer if you were clueless.)
Well, those work if you have a legacy PC or a modem, I suppose, but I don't have either. Oh well, I have a iBook for note-taking anyway.
That's great, but how the hell do you get the text off of it? My G5 doesn't have a Serial port, or anything that's likely to plug into this. It seems like you'd have the same problem you get from trying to use a Newton in this day and age... the device is great, but it can't talk to anything anymore.
You're way ahead of me. I tried setting up MythTV on Ubuntu, and I couldn't even get the IVTV drivers for my Hauppauge card installed... and that's after consulting two Linux experts and about a week of tinkering.
My DishNetwork PVR might not have all the features of MythTV, but it has one feature that's pretty damned important to me: It WORKS!
I'd be more scared if the OS community DID try to follow Dell's advice.
Then you'd have the Open Source Follow Dell's Advice Alliance (OSFDAA), and they'd get SUSE and RedHat to sign up. Then the next week you'd hear about the Linux Consolidation For Dell (LCFD) project, which would sign up Gentoo and Debian. Then they'd each create their own standards, all completely mutually exclusive with each other. Then you'd get somebody at the OSFDAA getting angry about the wrong direction they were taking, and you'd see the OSFDAA Linux distro... ditto that with the LCFD and, well, I think you get the point.
Monroe, WA? Have any job tips for a poor fool working at Valley General Hospital as a monitor-plug-in-er?