Zylon
1881
The corollary to the corollary is people who always come to your desk for an explanation after you send them an email, no matter how incredibly simply the email is written.
Yes. I had a sales rep call me and then read the e-mail I had just sent over to him out loud to me, where I gave the detailed instructions as to what he needed to do. Then proceeded to ask the same questions that I had just answered for him in the e-mail. Painful.
Having a paper trail doesn’t always hurt. CYA.
Nellie
1884
Going back to error messages, Microsoft Access has the most consistently obscure and/or completely unrelated messages to what is actually going wrong.
Snow leopard’s software update. Up it pops when I’m in the middle of something telling me it wants to install updates and I need to restart. No thanks I’m in the middle of something but I’d be quite happy to install those updates when I turn the computer off but no, you’ve got to restart to install the updates. I know I seem to be in a minority, certainly of mac users, in that I generally turn my computer off every night but it’s one area that windows does do much, much better.
Oh dear god, MS Access. Such a finicky product that is still useful in the right situations and the exact right way. And yet, I still want to hurl it into center of a fiery star…when it’s not the right tool for the job.
Ugh. It won’t let me stop using it!
Couldn’t you use SQL Express? I can’t think of a situation where Access is still useful in the right situations.
shift6
1887
“The Cloud”.
It’s the internet, people. Essentially the same thing we’ve had for 15 years now. That webpages now enable any basic user to share socially what I previously had to FTP to a host and send out a link is definitely cool, but it’s the same fucking shit. FUCK the cloud, right in its marketing fucking ear.
The useful part of Access is the customizable and programmable GUI frontend, not the database backend. I think it’s possible to use Access as a frontend for SQL databases, too.
Nellie
1889
This.
And yes, Access is perfectly happy acting as a front end to SQL Server in some circumstances it’s even quite good at it.
SQL server express is all well and good but it’s a layer of complexity and a reduction of flexibility plus I’ll still have to use Access to develop the front end anyway.
I just hate with a passion its bloody error messages. Even now the “invalid argument” error message still gets me. I’ve spent hours pulling apart code and double checking queries and parameters before remembering that it actually means “your database is now 2gb in size, this is the maximum size of an Access database. Please free some space and try again.”
Zylon
1890
Could be worse:
WEB 3.0!
But yes, people who use “the cloud” unironically are ignorant, douchebags, or in marketing.
Man, you sound like me when I was pissed that people started using the term “The Web”. I was all “RRRAWR, it’s just the Internet with a different protocol, WTF PEOPLE?!?!!?”
Except, you know, I was wrong. Because the mechanical underpinnings are very different than the usage implications.
Back to nerdrage:
Coworkers who refuse to put in the tiny amount of effort to understand a simple thing being explained to them. Drag-and-drop image resizing macros on MacOS are seriously the easiest fucking thing in the world, but BY ALL MEANS PLEASE CONTINUE LOADING UP PHOTOSHOP AND DOING HUGE IMAGE BATCHES ONE AT A TIME, MANUALLY, IN A PROGRAM THAT RUNS LIKE A FUCKING DOG.
Rage.
Exactly. In the right circumstances, it is a huge time saver. I also spent a fair amount of time training end users in using, both in a class setting and in a business setups and it’s really good for people that have basic database knowledge, but couln’t program a .Net program.
As I said, it has it’s uses for sure. It just very finicky. Touchy. Special.
Zylon
1894
Top-posters.
The difference here is that, while cloud computing originally had a somewhat defined meaning, it’s since so expanded in scope as to become nothing more than a trendy synonym for web servers.
What is the “defined meaning”? And if someone uses “the cloud” assuming that defined meaning, are they still ignorant marketing douchebags?
Because it reverses the flow of conversation.
Why do we nerdrage about top posting?
Zylon
1898
Note that I specifically didn’t say “well-defined meaning”. It’s always been a bit vague. If memory serves, it gained currency as a form of “software as a service”. Distributed computing, application hosting, that sort of thing.
Then the marketing pukes got ahold of it and now just blindly swap it in anywhere that we would have used the word “server” or “internet” a few years ago. It’s terminology that actually impedes comprehension.
shift6
1899
Maybe it’s Bay Area overexposure that’s making me rage. Example: I saw an ad recently (don’t recall if it was a billboard or bus wraparound or whatever, but it was definitely physical marketing as opposed to a web banner) telling me how my business could have my own internal cloud. Oh wow, you mean a fucking intranet?
“Web” is shorthand for what was a new thing: a graphical interface for hyperlinked markup language delivered using a stateless protocol. Raging on that would be like raging that “email” is short for “electronic mail” ignoring that it was a new thing.
“Cloud” is an existing thing: the internet (or the bundle of existing protocols and infrastructures that we call the internet). When I save my files “in the cloud” I’m actually saving them “on the internet” (note the change in preposition!) Are those files saved across multiple servers? Yes, just like my ISP has always done with replication and redundancy. Are they saved through a web interface? Yes, just like was always possible since HTML 2 with HTTP uploads. Do I get access to “cloud services”? Yes, they’re goddamn world wide web apps.
Make no mistake, for me this is not “nerd irritation”, the well-considered term that Creole Ned coined earlier. This is nerd fucking rage. RAAAAAAAGE! Frankly, “Web 2.0” has more justification in that it was acknowledging an iteration in the way an existing thing, the world wide web [1.0], was primarily being used (consumptive rather than participative).
How do you guys feel about the fact that we’re not moving small, furry rodents around our desks to click on things? Why the lack of mouth foaming over “mouse”?
