 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
>> large project featuring a vast codebase and dozens if not hundreds of
>> programmers, I would think such cast-iron inflexibility would be a
>> massive, potentially show-stopping issue.
>
> BTW, given that Microsoft uses their own compilers and tools, and they
> do manage to put out some pretty sophisticated software that takes lots
> of people to build, it would seem that the tools are sufficiently
> flexible to avoid show-stopping hundreds of programmers working on a
> massive system.
Doesn't that just mean that VS matches the way the development teams at
M$ happen to structure their work?
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
>> Have you any idea how many people in the workforce cannot write a well
>> formatted letter?
>
> Or how many marketing people struggle with basic grammar, for that
> matter? :-)
That's kinda worrying. I thought that only happens in Dilbert world?
> Yes. If you never look for the information, of course, you don't find
> it. But HP doesn't sit there installing the OS one at a time when they
> make machines. :-)
Well, since HP sells millions of identical machines, I would suspect
they do what I do - create a disk image and clone it onto each machine.
That still doesn't help you if you just want to set up one machine, but
you want to configure it in a specific way. There is basically no way
round it; you *must* run the irritating wizard, and then spend half an
hour undoing all the incorrect configuration it did. There's no way to
abort or circumvent the wizard and configure manually.
> http://labmice.techtarget.com/windowsxp/Install/unattend.htm
>
> You know, that wasn't really hard at all. A pretty obvious google query
> answers that for you, with links to all the official MS pages.
Uhuh, and let's see what this page actually says...
- "How to deploy using RIS". Cool. I don't have RIS, but anyway...
- "How to perform unattended install from CD-ROM". Which basically says
you need the Resource Kit that I can't obtain. Nice.
- "How to use Group Policy to remotely upgrade from Windows 2000 to
Windows XP". Interesting that you can do that, but I would never, ever,
attempt to do something so hazardous.
- "How to use SysPrep: An Introduction". Now this sounds actually
useful... oh, wait, it redirects to the Windows XP Homepage. So no help
there then. (Having spent time wrestling with SysPrep and trying to
guess how to work it, this might have been quite useful.)
- The second SysPrep link also redirects to the XP homepage.
- "How to use the SysPrep tool to automate the installation of Windows
XP". Ah, *this* link actually works! And contains some moderately useful
information...
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
>> Uhuh. And now open Word, type a few sentences, apply some minimal
>> formatting to it, and behold as an animated paperclip pops up and says
>> "Hey! That looks like you're trying to type a letter! Are you so
>> retarded that you can't figure out how to do that properly all by
>> yourself, or should I just **** off and let you get on with what you
>> were trying to do in the first place?"
>
> Because unlike some systems, MS designs things to be usable both by
> casual customers and expert customers. For the most part, at least. That
> the paperclip offers to help out doesn't mean the system is useless to
> experts, which is what you were contending.
The paperclip at least can be disabled. The other unecessary
helpy-helper features seem to be unavoidable. (E.g., Word tries to
automatically format your text based on text you've recently typed. Even
if you expressedly don't want it to. It insists on correcting
capitalisation, even if you don't want it to. And so on.)
It's just so frustrating that there is no way to make M$ software do
what you tell it to do, rather than what it thinks you want it to do.
Computers are hopeless at figuring out what humans want!
>> Is this somehow not the case? Or have they made VS more flexible now?
>
> You can certainly still use the command line if you want.
Sure, but... you can do that for free. Presumably if you paid hundreds
of dollars for an IDE, you actually want to... I don't know... use the IDE?
>> for a large project featuring a vast codebase and dozens if not
>> hundreds of programmers, I would think such cast-iron inflexibility
>> would be a massive, potentially show-stopping issue.
>
> Not necessarily. It gets everybody working the same way, which is good.
I can see some value in that I guess.
> Since I can't guess what problems your hyperbole refers to, I couldn't
> guess whether they fixed it or not.
It insists that your files must be arranged in a certain way. It insists
that your code must have a specific layout. It insists on autogenerating
buckets of code that you then have to manually delete. It insists on
inserting dummy comments here and there. And so on.
It must be really hard if you decide you want to use some sort of
revision control, since the fixed file layout has human-written source
code muddled up with VS configuration files, autogenerated cache files,
object files, and so on.
On the other hand, maybe for a really large project it's not so much of
an issue. Maybe it's just that all this boilerplate is massively
overkill for a project consisting of 6 Java classes totalling about 200
lines?
>>> You can code Excel and Word...all without any programming.
>> Uh... really? Isn't that kinda contradictory? :-D
>
> It depends on what you mean by "code". Can you build a spreadsheet
> without coding? If so, you can load the cells from a SQL server without
> coding.
That makes more sense. ;-)
>> But if you want to find out what function will, say, change cell D7 to
>> today's date... good luck figuring that out from the minimal helpfile.
>
> And if you want to iterate over all the elements in a list in Haskell
> and apply your function to them, good luck figuring out it's called
> "map" without having read a book about functional programming first.
Sure. Haskell has lame documentation. This is not news. OTOH, Haskell
doesn't cost hundreds of dollars either.
> The help file isn't to teach you every feature of the system. Stuff is
> too complex for that these days.
POV-Ray's manual teaches you every feature of the system. And I don't
mean it just gives you a list of all the commands and what they do, it
actually *teaches* you the complete system, in a coherant way.
As far as I can tell, no such documentation exists for any M$ product.
They all come with a help file, but generally these only cover the
blindingly obvious. Again the assumption is that the person operating
the computer is a moron. I find this irritating and insulting.
> You either look it up on MSDN, or you
> buy a book, or you go to a class, or something like that.
It seems that if you want to know anything remotely "technical" about M$
products, the only way to find out is to go on a course. I find this
very objectionable. I've paid money for this product, why can't you just
tell me how to operate it? Why must I now pay even more money?
Also, FWIW, I went on an M$ course once. It was a waste of time. There
was almost no technical content to it. It was all "click this button,
fill in this box, now click that button..." Apparently if you want to
actually get technical detail, you have to go on yet *another* course.
(I wonder how many courses you have to take before you really know what
you're talking about?)
> The man page for GCC doesn't tell you how to program, either.
Because that's not specific to GCC. *Every* C compiler accepts the same
source code as input. I'll bet the GCC manpage tells you what all the
GCC-specific options and switches do though.
> However, entering "set cell to today's date" in help brings back "Inser
> the current date and time in a cell" as the first hit, and "date and
> time functions" as the second hit, so I'm not sure what you're looking
> for there.
Well, last time I tried, I wasted about 4 days wandering through the VBA
help looking for the name of the VB functions and properties for
accessing a cell in a worksheet, and finding out what today's date is.
The actual code is not remotely complex, but it took *days* to track
down the magic command names. It really was ridiculously hard.
Let us not even go into the fact that I only know VBA exists by complete
accident. It's not like there's anything anywhere that explains what
this stuff is. Fortunately, VB's syntax is sufficiently simple that you
can mostly guess how it works - again, I don't see a syntax description
anywhere.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
>> Or how many marketing people struggle with basic grammar, for that
>> matter? :-)
>
> That's kinda worrying. I thought that only happens in Dilbert world?
I just received the following email from one of our business development
people:
Hi guys
I have no idea if it matters or not????!!!
Andrew - ??
So that's BD, not marketing, but still... o_O
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On 2/10/2009 1:45 AM, Invisible wrote:
> That's kinda worrying. I thought that only happens in Dilbert world?
The real joke is that Dilbert is nonfiction.
--
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On 2/10/2009 1:23 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Sure. But why couldn't they have added a button that says "yes, I
> actually know how to operate a computer, please stop screwing up all my
> formatting and just do what I tell you to do, not what you 'think' I
> want you to do".
They did. You CAN turn off autoformatting, you know ;)
--
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
> They did. You CAN turn off autoformatting, you know ;)
And even if you can't be bothered to go through all the menus to turn off
all the autoformatting, if Word ever changes anything for you it always
displays a little arrow that you can click. You then get the option to undo
just that change, or to totally disable the rule that made it do what it
just did.
I suspect that once you have Word setup just the way you like it you can
copy the settings from somewhere (export a registry key?) so that you can
quickly setup any new installs just the way you want.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Invisible wrote:
> Well, since HP sells millions of identical machines, I would suspect
> they do what I do - create a disk image and clone it onto each machine.
And then you run sysprep, which sets up things as if you didn't do that.
> That still doesn't help you if you just want to set up one machine, but
> you want to configure it in a specific way. There is basically no way
> round it; you *must* run the irritating wizard,
I'm not really sure what wizard you're talking about. The only thing I
remember setting up is the timezone, optionally the network configuration,
and the name and passwords of user accounts. I don't know what "incorrect
configurations" you're referring to. Care to enlighten me?
> - "How to deploy using RIS". Cool. I don't have RIS, but anyway...
No, you buy it if you want it. Just like Windows or Office.
> - "How to perform unattended install from CD-ROM". Which basically says
> you need the Resource Kit that I can't obtain. Nice.
This was free for Win2000. I'm not sure if it's still free, but unless
there's some sort of export control stuff going on, I don't know why you
couldn't obtain it.
> - "How to use Group Policy to remotely upgrade from Windows 2000 to
> Windows XP". Interesting that you can do that, but I would never, ever,
> attempt to do something so hazardous.
On the other hand, if you have a few thousand machines spread around (say)
multiple airports, it's not too hard to figure it out and get it right.
I saw instructions on upgrading from Linux to FreeBSD (or maybe it was the
other way around) without ever being in the same city as the other computer.
Pretty funky.
> - "How to use SysPrep: An Introduction". Now this sounds actually
> useful... oh, wait, it redirects to the Windows XP Homepage. So no help
> there then. (Having spent time wrestling with SysPrep and trying to
> guess how to work it, this might have been quite useful.)
It probably got moved to a different link. That was probably for Win2000 or
soemthing.
> - The second SysPrep link also redirects to the XP homepage.
> - "How to use the SysPrep tool to automate the installation of Windows
> XP". Ah, *this* link actually works! And contains some moderately useful
> information...
Glad to be of service. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
scott wrote:
>> They did. You CAN turn off autoformatting, you know ;)
>
> And even if you can't be bothered to go through all the menus to turn
> off all the autoformatting, if Word ever changes anything for you it
> always displays a little arrow that you can click. You then get the
> option to undo just that change, or to totally disable the rule that
> made it do what it just did.
Unlike OpenOffice, which annoying just says "I changed this for you. If you
want me to stop, here's the name of the menu to go fiddle with. No, I didn't
save the pre-change version." :-) Needs some usability there.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Invisible wrote:
> Sure. But why couldn't they have added a button that says "yes, I
> actually know how to operate a computer, please stop screwing up all my
> formatting and just do what I tell you to do, not what you 'think' I
> want you to do".
They did. You're apparently not expert enough to know where the button is. :-)
For years, I wondered why everyone was complaining about a paperclip. Turns
out I'd never done the default install and always turned off "Office
Assistant", knowing I was expert enough not to need anything called that.
> Or maybe released a seperate version of the software
> for experts or something.
They did. It's called LaTeX.
> It's maddening trying to build a document with
> complex formatting and having to constantly revert the automatic,
> non-deterministic changes that Word keeps applying.
Hmm. I find Word's automation in that area quite useful and usually exactly
what I want and expect. When it isn't, the little drop-down menu on each
automatic change makes it easy to fix whatever is wrong.
> Well, I guess it depends who you think Access is actually aimed at.
I think the idea was it would be a back-end database for simple data
collection programs. For example, it's apparently what my scuba computer
uses when I store the details of scuba dives on the computer.
> Presumably products like SQL Server are designed to be used
> by experts - and, correspondingly, don't have the irritating wizards.
SQL Server has the helpful wizards, instead.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
