Chris, you bitch about the internal politics of your own place of employment. Do you expect a 2003 car and a 2007 car to look the same?

I don't, but i expect the steering wheel to be in front of the driver, the pedals to be in the same order, the radio in the middle of the facia, etc.
The rearrangement of menus in the new version of Word is like having to pick the gears from the glovebox which is now under the passenger seat, there being one pedal which i have to choose whether it's the brake, throttle or clutch using a slider on the ceiling, the handbrake being engaged from a pull out drawer with the heater and rev counter also in it, etc.

Oh noooooooooo!... That reminds me of this very old joke that is still painfully applicable today:

If cars were like computers

... "If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics: ...

The airbag example is particularly applicable and painful.

Also for my penance... Is there some duff Windows update floating through or lingering on? We've had an unholy spate of this problem hit a few dozen laptops over the weekend: You receive a "The User Profile Service failed the logon” error message

That old joke for item "3" is especially painfully apt :-( Shame the users don't quite see the funny side :-(

People get used to what order things are in and where to find them, fiddling with that is bound to cause resentment.

Yes...

Depending on the degree of change and for why. Rearrangement for the sake of "rebranding" or for a "brand refresh" is especially irksome. Particularly for those who just simply wish to do their job and have no care for what colour and bells the Marketing people are imposing on their desktop for this year...


All a silly game when the users have no choice...

IT is what we allow it to become,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

... The problem that we have is that MS is a company that has to make a profit to pay it's shareholders... leaving us poor end-users who don't matter gnashing our teeth.

Exactly so. Hence my observation and opinion that Windows has been designed for the benefit of Microsoft and most definitely not for any usefulness for the paying users.

Anyone remember the carnage resulting from the change from office 2003 to 2007? The introduction of ribbon menus? Our College was arbitrarily updated ... I spent god knows how many hours rewriting all our L1, L2 & L3 training notes that had screen dumps of the earlier edition...

I know we have a total difference of opinion on that one...

No course notes should have needed to have been changed. At most, just one or two pages to outline the menus layout would perhaps have needed to be added. Instead of blindly teaching Microsoft screen dumps, teach METHODS.

Teach people 'to fish to feed themselves' rather than be enslaved by one view...


IT is what we make it...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Anyone remember the carnage resulting from the change from office 2003 to 2007? The introduction of ribbon menus? Our College was arbitrarily updated ... I spent god knows how many hours rewriting all our L1, L2 & L3 training notes that had screen dumps of the earlier edition...

I know we have a total difference of opinion on that one...

No course notes should have needed to have been changed. At most, just one or two pages to outline the menus layout would perhaps have needed to be added. Instead of blindly teaching Microsoft screen dumps, teach METHODS.

Teach people 'to fish to feed themselves' rather than be enslaved by one view...

The world may have just stopped rotating, but on this I agree with Martin.

Unfortunately far too much school is actually teaching by flashcard. If they are taught with black ink flashcards but suddenly are presented green ink the pupils can't solve it. However is it the lazy git way to teach and results in high test scores.

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... OH MAN! YOU JUST PINCHED A NERVE WITH ME!

[rant]

Yes, MS Word annoys me to no end also. Just as you figure out all the nuances of the latest version, another fricken version comes out that resets your efforts back...

... importance on format than on content... hours and hours and hours getting the format right, along with the content only to have your boss give it back to you to fix because the format is *still* incorrect when he/she prints it out on *his/her* printer! ... never even tried to port back and forth between .doc(x) and .odt. ... apparent (unknown) file size limitation and had your word document go into repetative "recovered file" mode! ... and then recreate the formatting in a fresh .doc(x) file.

Just to name a few things about MS Word that annoy the "h" "e" double hockey sticks out of me!

I thank GOD I never have to work for an organization like that again!...

Yep, that's a BIG OUCH! And extremely costly.

Hence for the sake of dumb working, the entire organization here has been forced to 'standardize' on one version of MS-Word for the sake of arbirary compatibility and all documents sent further afield MUST be sent out as PDFs... Sadly and painfully, that is the only semi-reliable way available to work with such random variability/inconsistency...

As far as I'm concerned, MS Word has exceeded critical mass and is beyond recoverable. It still works fairly reliably for documents that are only a couple pages long, haven't had too many changes, are printed a couple times on the same printer, and then deleted.

The uninformed computer user has no idea what's happening inside their computer...

... The only reason MS Word is considered a success by many is that most buy it because they think that's the only one to have. ...

Unfortunately, through various reasons including corruption in schooling, "Microsoft" is the only name that non-computerphiles have ever heard of or seen.


I have one particular example that still sticks in my mind from over a decade ago...

I was given Windows95C to get a job done. (The "C" included the first soon-to-be-aborted version of a USB software stack for Windows that was important for work, but that's another story...)

A year away from completing the job and as required for all good developments, documentation was required. So, in amongst finishing off and running simulations and tidy-up catch-up and all the rest, a 400 page tome was produced resplendent with hefty graphics and charts and diagrams and engineering drawings and... All had to be in a very strict format right down to the fonts and line spacing.

To hand was MS-Word and the institution's ".dot" file. Fine, easy! Or rather...

Adding diagrams made it all painfully slow. Splitting the doc into smaller sections made the formatting and page numbering almost impossible. Trying to add the Apple Mac engineering drawings caused it all to crash even though various formats were tried. Inserting TIFFs or GIFs caused it all to crash or caused awful jaggies.

And having been lead down that path, I had no time to spare to try to somehow bolt together 400 pages that crashed and burned on MS-Word.

In my checking the details for the institutions required format, I found that some kind person had put together a ".TeX" format file. There was also a version of LaTeX that ran on DOS, and there was a DVI viewer available... And DVI can be output as Postscript for professional printers... Yae! Saved!!

I added the LaTeX markup with some deft aliases and global "replaces" faster than trying to get the page numbers correct for MS-Word! LaTeX pulling in the diagrams/graphics in various formats beautifully scaled. All with automatic table of contents and numbering. Easy and reliable. Phew.

MS-Word was relegated to being just a glorified text editor. The formatting was useful for highlighting sections for my own convenience. LaTaX just took the marked-up text and gave professional consistent results. All done just in time for a document simply not practical on PCs of that day with that version of MS-Word.

Sadly, what I see first hand today is little better for MS-Word.


There's other horror stories, for example when a colleague needed to use a special font... You get the gist...


Computers are supposed to help and allow people time to be more effective. Not instead to have everyone victim to become slave to "work-arounds"...


IT is what we make it...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

You've been reading too many ML1 posts for your own good. You used to be a sensible chap, what happened?

I had dinner with my friend who is a tenured high school teacher.

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... really do make me cross...

'Tis very good to be impassioned and to communicate that passion in a positive way :-)

No course notes should have needed to have been changed. At most, just one or two pages to outline the menus layout would perhaps have needed to be added. Instead of blindly teaching Microsoft screen dumps, teach METHODS.

When you have a class of 20 people of differing abilities, a teacher simply cannot give 1 to 1 attention to each and every one. A tried and tested method is to provide a course handout showing in detail the steps to be followed to achieve certain tasks i.e "highlight the 3rd paragraph, change the font to 12 pt Arial, embolden the first sentence, change the font colour of the second sentence to red. Apply a 6pt spacing after each line.

At each stage a screen dump in the handout shows how to do that, and how the screen should then look...

So... After following those Microsoft specific screen dumps, are your students then empowered/able/confident to perform those same tasks also on any/all of:

(Whoever)- Lotus Notes; KDE-KWrite; OO-Writer; Libre-Office; and MS-WordPad?

(Just to name a few I use, and all in a very similar way of use...)

... It is a tried and tested method which most FE Colleges use.

I know we have a total difference of opinion on that one...

Yes we do, because ... people ... are convinced that the only way to teach anyone about computers is to teach them programming...

Not at all.

For "office work basics" such as being able to type, safely save, and print a well presented letter, is exactly that: office skills. Just like using a glorified typewriter.


However, as soon as you hope to progress to creating document templates and form templates and ANY spreadsheet work, then some idea about and exposure to what a program is should help greatly for understanding what is happening rather getting lost in some sort of world of version specific voodoo...

The world constantly moves on, ever faster. That has got to be part of schooling so that everyone is not unhinged for every software update...

Martin
____________
Mandriva Linux A user friendly OS!
See new freedom Mageia2
The Future is what We make IT (GPLv3)

Thanks for the reminder, must update that!


The world moves on!!

IT is what we make it...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Yes it is, and particularly when it is done without recourse to foul language, bad temper, insults, and sarcasm, which many people around here use when they can't express themselves adequately :-)

Using the catr example again I think your problem is Martin that you are a car driver that is able to open the bonnet and change the spark plugs. Ergo, you think that because you can do it all drivers have to be taught how to!

Oh dear, someone forgot to spellcheck :)

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You know, if you are in business in the USA, you are required to use this website, every payroll.
https://www.eftps.gov/eftps/direct/EftpsHome.page wrote:

This EFTPS® tax payment service Web site supports Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows and Mozilla Firefox for Windows.

Do you think this might have anything to do with why business tends to use Microsoft O/S?

---

Nope! not at all.

We have the Government Gateway, which has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Gateway

How many UK multinationals have a branch in the USA that will have to use EFTPS?

Note Chris, I did specify USA in my post.

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Yes it is, and particularly when it is done without recourse to foul language, bad temper, insults, and sarcasm, which many people around here use when they can't express themselves adequately :-)

Using the catr example again I think your problem is Martin that you are a car driver that is able to open the bonnet and change the spark plugs. Ergo, you think that because you can do it all drivers have to be taught how to!

Oh dear, someone forgot to spellcheck :)

Don't you own a catr? I thought everyone had one.

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Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge.

So... After following those Microsoft specific screen dumps, are your students then empowered/able/confident to perform those same tasks also on any/all of: (Whoever)- Lotus Notes; KDE-KWrite; OO-Writer; Libre-Office; and MS-WordPad? (Just to name a few I use, and all in a very similar way of use...)

They will be able to perform generic everyday Word processing tasks at various abilities depending on the course undertaken... they can apply that knowledge to other proprietary offerings. Look at it this way, you have driving lessons at a school and you pass your test on a particular make & model of car. You then go and buy your own one which likely will be a different make and model. BUT you won't need to re-take your test to be able to drive it. The steering wheel is in the same place, ... a couple of days familiarity soon gets you used to that. ...

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

At the basic "office skills" level, learning from Microsoft screendumps, the attendees have no confidence they can touch anything else other than that one version of Microsoft.

Worse still, various clever bits of "Marketing differentiation" mean that unless you show/demonstrate the different names for what wordprocessor software might be called, you leave people completely lost if they are presented with a machine where the icons are in a different place or the names are even only slightly different.

The car analogy should hold... But unfortunately for many people the wealth of functionality available in computers make them scary bewildering voodoo that seem to do random things... There is also the frightening aspect that PCs appear to be scarily fragile and one miss-click might cause a costly loss... Hence some people really are scared of PCs...

The other offerings you quote 99% of people will never have heard of and would never use. If you came to me for as job insisting on using them, I wouldn't employ you. Why would I want a maverick geek on my team? ... these days MsOffice is the de facto world standard, whether you like it or whether you don't

Except it isn't.

Due to careful tricks of costly proprietary lock-in, certain niches have been expensively ensnared. It has taken government backed legal action to start to break that. Meanwhile, we have one or two generations of students and their teachers that know nothing of anything other than Microsoft.

Getting suckered by exclusivity teasers such as this:

Kids hooked up with free Office subs at Microsoft-addicted schools

... a new program called Student Advantage, whereby students worldwide can sign up for subscriptions to Office 365 ProPlus through their institutions at no cost to themselves.

The only stipulation is that the schools must have [exclusively] already licensed either Office 365 ProPlus or Office Professional Plus for their entire workforces...

"exclusivity/exclusions" corruptly perpetuates that...

Handouts with screen dumps can be likened... get an MS office handbook, voila! screendumps!

Which locks the pupil into that one screen layout. Unless that is you also teach METHODS... A screendump does not do that...

For example, set a "treasure hunt" type task to format a document in three different commonly available wordprocessors from different vendors, and for advanced students, make note of any differences or ease of use...

Not at all.

For "office work basics" such as being able to type, safely save, and print a well presented letter, is exactly that: office skills. Just like using a glorified typewriter.

Exactly, and office skills is what we were teaching, which is what employers say they want. Not for nothing do computer keyboards have QWERTY layouts (except for Dvorak) so that people can seamlessly change from mechanical typewriters.

Indeed so.

So again for your students, would they be confident to operate the formatting used on these forums for example? This isn't MS-Word after all...

[...]

The world constantly moves on, ever faster. That has got to be part of schooling so that everyone is not unhinged for every software update...

No-one gets unhinged on every new version of MsOffice or Windows, in the issue that I mentioned, it was an incompetent Manager who foisted an upgrade from 2003 to 2007 without consultation. The students were fine with ribbon menus once we talked them through ...

Except that your teaching style was completely incompatible with such change and you all grumpily lynched the poor unfortunate for the audacity of dragging you into the future.

Also, did you show your students both the old and new style of menus to give them confidence that it all still works just the same?


IT is what we make it for ourselves...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Win 8.1 released

For a slightly more down-to-earth contrasting view:


Microsoft flings out Windows 8.1, the version you may actually like

... Crucially, the upgrade is a move the software giant really didn’t want to make: it's effectively stepped back from the original Windows 8 blueprint...

... Microsoft has been crowing about being sold out, but ... Microsoft had 12 months to design and produce these updated machines and get them into the hands of potential partners. All the while, meanwhile, more Android devices are coming from new and unexpected makers outside the traditional OEM and ODM base...



IT is what we allow it to become...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

The car analogy should hold..

The car analogy has always been incredibly flawed and should never be used. I've seen that posted many times throughout the last decade+, and it's amazing that everyone misses the hypocrisy of the fictitious response from "GM" (or whatever manufacturer they decide to put in there).

The one that makes me laugh the most is "Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car default' warning light." They already did that one years ago! Ever hear of the "check engine" light? WTF does that mean: check engine? Can't be any more specific than that, huh?

NHTSA detected a fault and your car windscreened. Please make sure all travel was saved before proceeding ...

---

The car analogy should hold..

The car analogy has always been incredibly flawed and should never be used. I've seen that posted many times throughout the last decade+, and it's amazing that everyone misses the hypocrisy of the fictitious response from "GM" (or whatever manufacturer they decide to put in there).

The one that makes me laugh the most is "Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car default' warning light." They already did that one years ago! Ever hear of the "check engine" light? WTF does that mean: check engine? Can't be any more specific than that, huh?

My BMW tells me what is specifically wrong and it also tells BMW...and they call me.

Of course, in your scenario you are talking about GM...not BMW, lol

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The car analogy should hold..

The car analogy has always been incredibly flawed and should never be used. I've seen that posted many times throughout the last decade+, and it's amazing that everyone misses the hypocrisy of the fictitious response from "GM" (or whatever manufacturer they decide to put in there).

The one that makes me laugh the most is "Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car default' warning light." They already did that one years ago! Ever hear of the "check engine" light? WTF does that mean: check engine? Can't be any more specific than that, huh?

My BMW tells me what is specifically wrong and it also tells BMW...and they call me.

Of course, in your scenario you are talking about GM...not BMW, lol

Personally, I don't want my car calling anyone else.

Windows 8.1: Everything you need to know BEFORE you install


So... A 3.5GB download, no iso, no cheating, and reinstall anything you might have added or customised... Sounds more like a contrived network based full install rather than an 'upgrade'...

And no surprise the download servers are swamped.

So Windows is easy?!


IT is what we allow it to be...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

My BMW is 15 years old, but is has a system management chip that when it is plugged into a diagnostic machine, will give the technicians details of any problems.

My car the trouble is indicated by whichever component is smoking, warning lights are for the weak.

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Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge.

If Microsoft made toasters...

Every time you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a toaster. You wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd still have to pay for it anyway. Toaster'95 would weigh 15000 pounds (hence requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your kitchen, would claim to be the first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you want your toast to be, and would secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who made them. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but nonetheless would buy them since most of the good bread only works with their toasters.

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Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge.

You're not exactly being fair there Martin, purposefully so?

A 3.5GB download

That is for the full product, not just the free service pack.

no iso

Most Windows service packs don't come in ISO format. There is, however, a full ISO of Windows 8.1 available.

and reinstall anything you might have added or customised...

Only if you installed the 8.1 Preview. This is not applicable for users upgrading from the full release of 8 to 8.1. This has been Microsoft's stance for years! I remember testing out Windows Whistler, which later became Windows XP, and if you installed the Beta/Preview, you could not upgrade to the full release later, and this was made clear to everyone who downloaded the Beta.

So Windows is easy?!

You always complain about FUD from Microsoft's marketing, why do you think it is acceptable to engage in similar practices? Was it purposeful or are you really that unfamiliar with Microsoft's releases?