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Jesus wept! Is this "Dona Sarkar / Software Engineer, Windows and Devices Group" nine years old, or what?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It is probably the brain damage of those 11 years at Microsoft...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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 MS-DOS actually had a public BETA program?! Was it distributed via RFC 1149[^]?
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Oh yes, it had public beta: distributed via floppies if IIRC. Mind you, it was a loooong time ago, and my memory isn't what it was!
And just like today, problem reports got ignored... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Oh...Those good old days, when you were sitting tight to see if the postman will or will not fold those precious floppies you bought with hard cash...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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We would have killed to be ignored.
When I was a wee beta tester we had to get up at 3 in the morning, walk 5 miles to the local computer store to get the beta disks, pay to get the disks and then they'd give us a right good thrashing.
Ignored, eh? Luxury.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the keyboard box at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the hard disk clean with our tongues. We 'ad half a handful of freezing cold ASCII, worked twenty-four hours a day at edlin for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, microsoft would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Don't forget to get the hammer and the nails and do your own wholes in the disc, so that the relais get triggered 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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You had a keyboard box to live in, a hard disk, and you worked on edlin?! You lucky so-and-so!
We had to find out own lodgings, had nothing but mouldy EBCDIC to eat, and had to provide our programs on punched cards (which we had to pay for). We would have been delighted to get a whole fourpence every six years!
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Right.
We had to get up in the morning at 10 o'clock at night, half an hour before we went to bed, eat a lump of cold stackfaults, beta test twenty-nine hours a day, and pay for permission to do the testing, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah".
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Aye. And you try to tell that to the young people of today. Will they believe yer? Nooooo....
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Love the comment from "Filipe":
"Windows10 is the best Windows ever! What other OS is developed with the help of millions of people around the world"
Um, someone should tell him that his box is dual-boot with Ubuntu, and he keeps clicking the wrong one.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The Apple fanboi thing always rubbed me the wrong way, but I do love their hardware*. Their software is a mess: buggy, complicated Frankensteins, with UIs that lock up, and a "find me if you can" approach to feature discovery. However, their hardware is slick.
Except when it stops working.
My iPhone 6 started getting hot. Really hot. So hot that I couldn't leave it in my pocket. Naturally the battery life went from a couple of days to a few hours, and for the life of me I couldn't work out what happened. I removed apps, I factory reset, I turned off every single thing that could possibly be using power. It still ran hot and died.
I took it to an Apple Genius (I'm sure they appreciate irony) and the guy held my hot phone and says "it's normal", runs some diagnostics and says "no, there's nothing causing the battery to die. The battery is in perfect condition and there's no history of apps running that could drain it". That's because I closed and deleted all the apps, genius. He suggested all the standard stuff (turn off background stuff, turn off notifications, keep it in a dry dark place and try not to actually use it) but I'd done all that. So instead of saying "your phone's dead" he said "this is normal". Which clearly it isn't.
So my backup phone is a backup phone because the battery goes from 40% to 0% instantly. Given that my main phone is unusable I figured $99 for a new battery for the old phone while I wait until the new phones come out in September is my best bet. So they take my old phone, slap a new battery in it, give it back and say "plug it in to iTunes and do a restore and it'll be good as news". Except it isn't. It's a brick locked in restore mode and nothing - not even those "get out of restore mode for free" apps can fix it. It's completely cactus.
So. I book another genius bar visit. Except I clicked the wrong time and you can't go backwards (you get an error if you try). So I wait for the email confirmation to arrive and figure I'll just change the time. Except the link to "Manage your reservation" doesn't work: it says my case ID (which they sent me) and me email (which they sent it to) don't match.
So stuff them. I'll book again, ignore my first booking, and then try and explain how they bricked my phone, misdiagnosed my other phone, and can't manage a simple appointment booking app to a young energetic kid who will assume it's this poor, sad, confused user's fault, and not the fault of a company that has completely lost it's focus, it's passion, and it's unbending commitment to having things Just Work.
An Update
I took my phone 6 and phone 5 back today to get them to look at it. Phone 6 is the one with the power issue. Again the genius said that because I'd wiped it it had no history. "Except the 2 days I've been charging it and watching it go flat every 6 hrs"? Yes, he said, but that's not app history, "Maybe if you install some apps and use them then we'd have some app history".
I'd actually installed an app: a battery meter that showed a neat and steeply jagged graph of battery charge over the last 2 days.
Me: "So we have graph of battery charge clearly showing it's dying quickly. You can feel in your hand how hot it is. And you want me to install some apps to help burn up the battery faster? Sure: but what will that tell you?"
He finally admitted the phone was busted. Deeply, irreparably busted. For a mere $380 + tax I could pick up a brand new 2 year old iPhone 6.
I stared at him for some time so he could replay in his head what he'd just said.
iPhone 5, on the other hand, is also properly busted. The other hand being that they understand this one shouldn't be busted (as opposed to iPhone 6, I assume) and so will replace it. With a brand new 4 year old iPhone 5. I was graceful and puzzled over that one using my inside voice.
* I loved their hardware better when they had focus. See this video of Steve Jobs[^] 8 weeks after returning to Apple. "Apple has pockets of greatness but has drifted away from doing the basics really well. [...] There's way too much stuff and not enough focus [...] I couldn't figure out the damn product line".
cheers
Chris Maunder
modified 31-Jul-16 21:04pm.
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And here I was thinking of getting an iPad Pro. Maybe not.
Sometimes the true reward for completing a task is not the money, but instead the satisfaction of a job well done. But it's usually the money.
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Being thoroughly stuck in the MS space I have never considered any of apples gear for no other reason than bigotry.
The wife, who is pretty close to being a luddite, took the advice of a girlfriend and bought an ipad mini, much to my disgust. When I got my samsung pad I found the screen to be dramatically brighter and sharper and cost less. I feel my bigotry is justified!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I've been lucky to have the used the gamut of devices out there. My experience with Samsung has been suboptimal to say the least - especially in regards to their policy of OS updates (or no updates, as is often the case). I've also found the android tablets a little too plastic-y for my liking.
I wish the Surface would thin out, lighten up and get better battery life (yeah, I know, I know...). However, even dumb things like the ridiculous rotation animation (pause...screen shrinks...screen rotates...screen expands...pause) bugs me in ways that are irrational.
Apple gets the hardware right (except when they get it wrong, cf. single USB-C plug on Macbook). Their software needs some to just bite the bullet and fix it.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: bugs me in ways that are irrational
I begin to see our problem
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Prejudice does serve a very useful purpose at times!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Chris Maunder wrote: It's completely cactus.
My guess - you have been hacked. Probably by the Russians and we will soon see your personal emails on the wicked leaky site. 
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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But not the photos!
PLEASE not the photos!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It's okay. Chris got a third party to take Sean's publicity photos. They aren't on his phone.
This space for rent
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That was my thought too. I mean, I am kinda a big deal...
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Well, yes you kinda are.
While I was reading your post, I imagined you standing in front of the A-Genius as he told you there was nothing wrong with your phone. You must have frozen for a second or two as images of the dozens of phones, tablets, laptops and desktops you have used over the years ran trough your mind - not to mention the server farms at CP.
Don't these guys ask the customers a couple of questions to get a feel of their technical experience?
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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Yeah - I'm a legend in my own lunchtime
I've learned that I need to approach these guys carefully. I list everything I've tried, referencing their online docs, and use precise terms. I didn't "reset the phone" I "put the phone into DFU mode and did a full firmware restore via iTunes". That seems to switch their mode of thinking into a more sensible and efficient discussion.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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