Even Bill Gates (H/T) has trouble with windows. A sample from his e-mail:
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame
I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.
Let me give you my experience from yesterday.
I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.
The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.
This site is so slow it is unusable.
Read and enjoy.
Hubbard posted this at 12:23 PM EDT on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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I try to restrict myself from making food posts . . . but . . . a $17 croque monsieur? I take a backseat to no one in my love of a good croque, but jambon de Paris and gruyere? Does this guy make hamburgers out of Kobe filet? Fish and chips with sushi grade tuna? This is the sort of stupid conspicuous consumption that gives urban elites a bad name.
Apollo posted this at 10:57 PM EDT on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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Generally I think I’m undeserving of my wonderful wife, but when I read stories of what louts some guys can be I consider entering the World’s Greatest Husband competition.
Consider the second letter in today’s Prudence:
I am a mother of three young children and have been married for 12 years. We have finally begun to enjoy some financial comfort after years of struggling and juggling bills. By reducing expenses and relocating for better job prospects, things are beginning to look up. However, these expense reductions have meant that I have “done without” many things for years. I haven’t had a salon haircut in two years. Buying clothes for myself is a rare treat. Meanwhile, my husband had been wanting a dog “for the kids” for the past several years. I finally relented, and she is indeed a sweet dog, and the kids love her. My problem is that my husband takes the dog to a groomer. I was shocked to learn that it cost $60 for one session. I am feeling resentful that I have scrimped to get us back to a good credit rating only to have him drop $60 on this dog’s appearance. When I expressed my shock, he seemed to think I was being unreasonable. Am I just being petty here?
Apollo posted this at 2:12 PM EDT on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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An apocryphal story once had Hemingway and Fitzgerald arguing about class. Fitzgerald said, “The rich are different from you and me.”
Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” I’m not sure about the rich, but I am sure that the poor are different from the middle class.
TJIC notes this story about drug use and the poor.
Until the past decade, when the price of cocaine dropped sharply, consumers were largely affluent and educated. That fed into the misperception that most powder cocaine offenders were white, specialists say.
TJIC comments:
Uhhh…what?
Consumers of cocaine were largely affluent and educated.
The majority of all Americans are white.
An even larger majority of all affluent and educated Americans are white.
…and yet, the perception “that most powder cocaine offenders were white” is *wrong* ?
Was most of the cocaine in the country being done by Cornell West, Denzel Washington, and Oprah?
I find the sentence, as quoted above, impossible to believe.
I actually find it believable. Simply because something is expensive doesn’t mean that poor people won’t waste their money on it. I’m a paralegal who helps out on many pro bono matters, and I’ve become somewhat numb to the cognitive dissonance that characterizes the lives of the poor people I deal with.
In one matter, I went with an attorney to visit a client in a landlord-tenant dispute. The client’s mother picked us up in a fairly new Lexus; both the client and her mother lived in Anacostia, a high crime region of DC.
In another matter, we visited a woman seeking custody of her grandchildren. Although she was dressed in clothing too ratty for the Salvation Army, she offered us Hennessey and Coke to drink.
Another client was filing a claim because her ceiling collapsed and wrecked two of her six TV sets. An issue in the case was that when roofers had previously worked on that roof, she’d known them and given them booze as they worked.
Certainly there are poor people out there who have done everything right and have been hit with misfortune, but many if not most of them have terribly misplaced priorities, and disaster happens to them as normally as car accidents happen to drunks. Given the sheer waste one sees, it’s no surprise that people with those priorities who aren’t seeking free legal aid are wasting money on expensive drugs. For the shrewd, as a bishop once noted, the poor are a gold mine.
Hubbard posted this at 9:22 PM EDT on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 as Amer-I-Can!, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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This may be a good reason to discriminate against women:
Organizers of the Infosecurity Europe computer security trade show were alarmed to discover this week that 121 of 576 subway riders (21 percent) at London’s Liverpool Street Station were prepared to reveal their computer passwords in return for a chocolate bar.
[snip]
It seems that women were most vulnerable on this score: 45 percent of women compared with 10 percent of the men surveyed gave up their passwords to researchers.
Dorothy posted this at 4:58 PM EDT on Friday, April 18th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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I think I’ve been very cynical and skeptical of Obama. But even I am surprised by the sheer cynicism and opportunism the Holy One is showing here. Since Obama’s supporters are advancing the notion that we should look at how he’s run his campaign to determine how he’d run his administration, I guess we should take this into account. He’d promise one thing, but the moment it become expedient to do it some other way, he’d simply deny that he made the promise and do whatever he felt like.
His argument, though, is audacious in its gall.
We have created a parallel public financing system where the American people decide if they want to support a campaign they can get on the Internet and finance it, and they will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful.
It’s a uniquely jaded individual who can read that and not take a serious step back. He’s now saying that it’s public financing for private individuals to give him money on their own volition. You know, the way a car dealership or Wal-Mart is publicly funded. This is nothing more than misleading wordplay, and it’s part of a developing tendency of his to simply lie. When I started doubting Obama, it was largely because his supporters put him on such a pedestal that to merely suggest he was a normal person was to pull him down some. This and the 100 years lie, however, show that his regard for the truth is in the same ballpark as the Clintons’. This is shameful, and a month ago I would have thought it was beneath him.
What should be striking about his argument, however, is that this is precisely what those of us who oppose campaign finance laws have been saying all along. Coming from the mouth of Barack Obama. I would applaud his conversation if it weren’t the most plainly opportunistic move of this election cycle. Or if I didn’t know that he’s still dedicated to increasing regulation on Americans’ interactions with their government. He just doesn’t want that regulation to effect him.
Apollo posted this at 8:21 PM EDT on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, Audacity of Hype
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