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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
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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
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> 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.
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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."
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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."
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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
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Invisible wrote:
> 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.)
I don't know what version of Word you're running, but... I dunno, maybe the
"Tools->Auto Correct" options is what you're looking for?
It looks pretty straightforward to me.
> 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.
So far you haven't complained about anything that's not trivial to turn off.
> Computers are hopeless at figuring out what humans want!
I was surprised how good a job Word did with guessing what I wanted.
>> 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?
Sure. But if you want to make a nightly build after checking out the code
and then run that build against the regression tests, mailing failures to
people who checked in the code that failed, you don't really want to use the
IDE for that.
>> Not necessarily. It gets everybody working the same way, which is good.
> I can see some value in that I guess.
It really is quite flexible. You just have to configure it how you want it.
Now I'm talking about Visual Studio for something other than Java. Maybe
Java has particular rules about where things go. (Indeed, I know Java itself
has such rules.) That might be what you're seeing - Java is designed that
you don't need to #include every header your program references, so they
chose the path of putting files in specific places so the compiler can find
them.
>> 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.
Um, no it doesn't. I mean, if you're going to put signed code in the global
store, then yeah. Do you mean certain files have to be in certain
directories? It puts all the code that compiles into the same assembly under
the project subdirectory, so you can find it, yeah. But if you don't want it
writing the makefiles for you, you don't need to put everything in the same
place. You can edit any file anywhere.
> It insists that your code must have a specific layout.
No it doesn't.
> It insists on autogenerating buckets of code that you then have to manually delete.
Only when you ask it to.
> It insists on inserting dummy comments here and there. And so on.
Only in code you ask it to generate.
> It must be really hard if you decide you want to use some sort of
> revision control,
Actually, it's trivially easy and you almost never notice, because it's
built into the IDE. When you start typing into a file, it automatically
checks it out for you.
> since the fixed file layout has human-written source
> code muddled up with VS configuration files, autogenerated cache files,
> object files, and so on.
They're all in different subdirectories. Honestly, I've done some fairly
large projects without ever looking at the layout of the files in the
directories, other than tracking down where the actual executables went.
> 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?
Java has weirdnesses of its own. C# is smart enough to (for example) put any
boilerplate into a separate file. I never see that crap.
> 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.
I agree. POV-Ray's documentation is a shining star.
> As far as I can tell, no such documentation exists for any M$ product.
Of course it does. Heck, look at C#. There's sufficient documentation that
someone else could write a version of the compiler based on the
documentation that outputs the same bytecodes for the same programs.
> 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?
Because if it came with an 800-page manual, fewer people would buy it.
You don't even want to use the automation that's turned on by default in
Word, yet you're complaining it doesn't come with a textbook telling you how
to automate it?
> (I wonder how many courses you have to take before you really know what
> you're talking about?)
Lots of courses are like that, yes. Sometimes you just have to sit down and
plow thru MSDN online. Welcome to computers.
When they put the new voicemail system in at Bellcore (formerly Bell Labs,
you know, the guys who invented the telephones et al), the training started
out with "if the phone makes a noise like this, pick up this handle and
talk. Set the handle down when you're done. To make a phone call, pick up
the handle, then push on these buttons..." I politely excused myself after
about 90 seconds, just asking for the cheat sheet that comes with the system.
> I'll bet the GCC manpage tells you what all the
> GCC-specific options and switches do though.
Only if you already know what all the words mean. (Actually, IIRC, the
manpage says "go look at our interactive documentation and try to figure out
wtf you want to know." The interactive documentation tells you what the
flags are. FSF doesn't like man pages for some reason I never figured out.)
> The actual code is not remotely complex, but it took *days* to track
> down the magic command names. It really was ridiculously hard.
I don't know. As I said, I googled the obvious term, and number 12 on the
list of the first 20 hits was a tutorial on how to do it using VBA.
> can mostly guess how it works - again, I don't see a syntax description
> anywhere.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Search/en-US/?query=visual%20basic%20syntax%20description&ac=3
Dude. MSDN is your friend. I don't know how much easier it can be than to
type "visual basic syntax description" into MSDN and have the first hit
being "Visual Basic .NET Language Specification." What are you looking for?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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Invisible wrote:
> Doesn't that just mean that VS matches the way the development teams at
> M$ happen to structure their work?
I wouldn't think every team at Microsoft works the same way, no.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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>> 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?
When you first run XP (i.e., after all of the installation process has
finished), it displays a big screen with a cute little animation saying
"Welcome to Windows XP". It then asks you a couple of things... Off the
top of my head, it wants to know whether to enable automatic updates, it
tries to connect to the Internet so you can "register with Microsoft",
and at the end, it asks you for a username. It then creates an account
with that username, sets it as administrator, and makes it auto-login at
system boot.
If you're setting up a home PC, this is precisely what you want, of
course. But if you're trying to set up a corporate PC that's supposed to
be part of a business network, you now have to go in, delete the local
account just created (but note that it still appears in the Windows
registration information), delete the corresponding profile, turn off
auto-login, turn on the login prompt, and basically mess around with a
whole crapload of stuff.
Unless, that is, you join the PC to a domain during setup. Then it
doesn't ask you for an account and puts in the correct settings. But if
you want to, say, install Windows, load SP3, and *then* join the
domain... sorry, can't easily do that.
>> - "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.
All I know is that several KB articles mention tools that are only
available in the resource kit, and I have tried multiple times to obtain
this kit, yet never actually succeeded.
>> - 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. :-)
It's always nice when an Internet argument manages to produce
*something* of use... ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Unless, that is, you join the PC to a domain during setup. Then it
> doesn't ask you for an account and puts in the correct settings. But if
> you want to, say, install Windows, load SP3, and *then* join the
> domain... sorry, can't easily do that.
So put SP3 on the CD before you install it? It's called "slipstreaming" the
disk. It's pretty straightforward if you have something that can burn a CD.
Otherwise, how would you expect to install SP3 if it doesn't make an account
for you to run the install from? When you're done, delete or disable the
account, and you're good. (You can't auto-login to an account by default
unless there's only one account and it has no password, so even adding a
password would take care of it.)
> All I know is that several KB articles mention tools that are only
> available in the resource kit, and I have tried multiple times to obtain
> this kit, yet never actually succeeded.
Go to msdn.microsoft.com
type "resource kit" into the search bar.
You'll get back a page of entries for downloading all the resource kits for
different software packages.
Again, what's hard? Where did you look for the resource kit before?
> It's always nice when an Internet argument manages to produce
> *something* of use... ;-)
I always try to produce something of use! :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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