The oldwave has another fit of writing... so we also touched upon the shit momentarily coming from m$ (as they change it every year, it's developing). Here's my current list of complaints:
1) help appears _behind_ the application
2) several apps (m$'s, not others') do not comply with the ancient GUI guidelines - that everything should be possible to do with keyboard too, that the buttons should have the alt+ hotkey combination, that all controls should be in tab order, that escape exits and enter closes the dialogs.
3) I needed to copy one file to a stick. It took me more than fifteen minutes to find it, then more to find the stick. It turned out to be on E: drive, which was neatly marked as „inaccessible network drive“ and grayed out. It never refreshed, not even after I finished copying and went through the directories on that disk.
4) virtual directories are fundamental mess of a job - a typically microsoftlian kludge, where they hide one half and don't disclose the other half, so the solutions spread via the exact method of word-of-mouth and nobody there can say in simple and clear terms what to do, how to do and where to do it. I was seeing people more experienced than myself _trying_ out, for weeks, where the user's data should be so that they are common for all the users' machines and so that everyone can write there.
5) why don't they finally say how much we need to pay to stop it from calling home and serving ads
(Škrba asks why did I drag a file from an exploder's window into TotalCmd, did one panel of the latter just croak)
There are apps which won't confess where did they save a file, but rather keep it in some special directories of theirs. For that kind of vermin, as far as I'm concerned, the easiest trick is to open the SaveAs dialog (because that's a WExpld window) and drag and throw the file where it should go.
Adding his story from the times when he was closer to the fireplace and learning things:
...somewhere I stumbled on a datum which is a proven truth, because it was confirmed by several former [guys] from m$ on their blogs. The datum is published by the character on whom Ballmer threw a chair when this [guy] said he's leaving to work at Gugao, unless Balmer can make him an offer he cannot refuse.
So there, the Start > Turn Off Computer in Windows XP. You know already, you click on it, and then the pane with options appears, while the rest of the screen gradually loses color. The team which did that worked as a team for a while, forgot how long, but significantly longer than a year. The team counted eight people. Among them, the programme code was written by ONE. One was in charge of code checking. One was in charge of coordinating the code material within the corpus of Windows XP code (he approved insertion of a module into the material for compilation, which would last some 16 hours on a dedicated and isolated server farm). Two were in charge of testing the functionality. Two were in charge of logistics and legal issues. And one was a program manager. Since after all this lineup you forgot what am I writing about: the button to turn Windows XP off.
A hunting tale, what functioned on nezavisni and how:
Here I got the Ubuntu work right away, but whole... well, not exactly whole - a few components...
Vidoje [is a regular serbian name] card did work right out of the box, but at 1024x768, took some jerking and yanking of x.conf until it confessed to 1440x900. Truth be respected, took me a few minutes to search the web, and the needed changes worked straight copied via stevka, and I didn't have to reboot - just closed the X and waited for it to reopen.
The wireless network had to be pushed to start, because Broadcom (the manufacturer of the internal card) craps. To initialize the card, it requires the software to download from their website a certain sequence of bytes and send them to the card, whereby there's some typically windowsian step in the communication, so the part of the process is done in some sort of simulation of something from Windowses. I tried out three scripts (via stevka straight into terminal window), each one was grumbling about something, and then it worked. Don't know which one did it, one did. Access to network is flawless, on the fair and at the hotel. To differ from previous attempts in the Vista, where it kept forgetting what was set and how, because I was in the hospital at working hours (on wire), and rest of the time in the hotel (wireless). Didn't try the wireless with XP, it spotted the neighbors' networks and that's all.
The inbuilt camera. Worked from the Vista. From XP it slaughtered the machine into stupor (ie the application which touched it can't be moved until reset). The camera appears to the system as some kind of a mix between a TWAIN device and flash disk, so it keeps trying to open it as a directory instead of as a stream (ahem, creek?). The little camera is actually great, but the interface is sheer kludge - so under Ubuntu I managed to make it visible eventually, it shows a few skewed images (as if uncertain of horizontal resolution) and then it freezes the application. Which is then, after a while, possible to kill off easily.
Second tale, about client-server technology...
With file server everyone chugged from it as much as needed. You need the buyer's name for an invoice? Open the buyers' table (what with indexes and the rest of it) and find, take and display. Oops, ouch, that „find, take“ meant, in stupider systems, that your working station is downloading the whole buyers' table every time when Žika opens the invoicing form. Along with it, he opens the whole archive with all the transactions for the year - all invoices, all line items on them, all the items, stock etc. Which was OK when we had few hundred buyers, and invoiced up to hundred thousand items a year (though let's say dairy plant regularly had two hundred thousand line items of yogurt alone!) and that cranked nicely on the 286 workstation, 386 server, coaxial network combination.
But nowadays the very same network, now ten or hundred times faster than then, shoves around lots of graphics, there go photos, vidojas, telephony, pornography and whatnot, and of course the most horrible (and easiest to cut down upon) is Žika bringing the buyers' table a hundred times over the wire. So they make this client server technology, so Žika will never again see the whole buyers' table (and for which [dick] would he [need it]) while invoicing; maybe when he's doing something else. He won't see the whole of tansactions (unless he's analyzing them). He won't, because he won't drag anything whole from the server, there's a smart programme up there on the server, which wades through them datas. And serves whatever you ask for. Give me the buyer so and so - here. Give me a list of buyers on letter Žnmj - here's the list, but only names and addresses, their totals and tax amounts some other time. I want to invoice - here's the line items and you just shove them where they should go. Thanks nicely, now gimme that invoice to print.
The whole difference is in Žika not seeing all the data at once anymore, only the bits that he asks for. And thus so much of it is not burdening the wire, with nobody ever touching the porn. So, no collateral damage :).
In other news, soon after this I finished watching Babylon 5. Mira Furlan, eh...
10-VII-2024 - 10-VII-2024