The problem people have with Windows is because Windows is a trick trap
if you do not have a lot of knowledge your system will be slow and maybe
not stable and unsafe...

BTW, linux is not for newbies...
Your best bet is OSX...
BTW, I use Windows XP...

I've been frustrated because I played with tons of different operating systems and environments within. I was just thinking about how many times I've had to re-login to NR and other sites recently. I got my new iMac in late December, then tried Safari, Camino, Firefox. Then tried Windows XP w/ Firefox inside of a virtual machine. Now I just got Apple BootCamp running so i can dual boot my Mac between Mac OSX and Windows XP, and I have to import my bookmarks again and set up logins to sites. I'm probably one of those people guilty of over complicating things LOL. I have some private stuff inside of linux since I trust it. OSX since it's a Mac. But I may end up spending more time inside of XP because I really hate Finder and iTunes. I tried to rip some CDs with Max to get them as FLAC files and it didn't go too well and I was really missing EAC, WinAmp, and Foobar2000 on XP. I could go on a rant about it but there isn't much alternative on the Mac unless you love iTunes. But then again there is a port of linux stuff to OSX via a project called fink which uses the debian linux apt system for package management and maybe I could get XMMS running but I'm not sure if it hooks into core audio or if there will be degradation or problems with latency or just inefficient CPU overhead from making it more complicated like that.

This is a practical example of how computers along with a little experimentation can make your life much easier. Then you can also bear the venom and ire of everyone as you've pissed off every computing zealot alive. The XP people will defend its flaws because they don't know anything else. The linux people will say MS and Apple are the devil. The Apple users hate MS and it's sacrilege to run XP on a Mac. I'm stuck now, there's things I link about all of them and things I really don't like. I have a love-hate thing with technology.

So many people demand different things from their systems, and there's quite a few vendors trying to meet all those demands and then operating systems that try to be everything to everyone. I'm amazed anything works at all. Especially with some of the CompSci classes I took it seemed like we were being trained to over complicate everything. It has to be object oriented and functionalized. A black box which takes an input and processes and can handle errors and then you have to create a class library for your black box functions so that you can modularized your code so you aren't reinventing the wheel, and then need to document that code. So you end up doing a ton of work for something you could have done in 10 lines if you'd just hard coded the values to the specific task you wanted rather than having it open ended. And I saw this in staff people too. Dramatically over planning and over-engineering things rather than keeping it simple. The old KISS philosophy is better (Keep It Simple Stupid).

Anyways, I've probably bored everyone to death by now. Sorry. heheheh. Things could be simpler with tech if the best solutions won (typo: one {really, one best solution, if such a thing is possible [but then again people will argue that tech is more robust if there is a diverse landscape, borrowing from the concept of nature]}) and there wasn't this mad frenzy to protect markets, ideas, profits, egos, etc. And this concept of IP, Intellectual Property. I own this idea, and if you want to use it, you have to pay me, and if I decide you can't use it, then you can't. It's stupid IMO. But that's part of why there will be 15 versions of the same basic thing. Have to do it differently because of legal reasons. I like the idea of organic spiritual technology, like mental telepathy instead of cellphones. Sounds easier in theory.

Among the numerous cultural mechanisms for allaying death's sting are envisionments for personal transcendence, such as resurrection, reincarnation, metempsychoses, or some disembodied spiritual existence. In addition to these relatively direct means for personal survival, there are more symbolic forms of immortality that exist. Collectively, there is the immortality obtained through assisting in the transmission of knowledge and precedent to succeeding generations; personally, the preservation of one's memory through eponym, legacy, photograph, or artistic creation.
http://www.deathreference.com/Ho-Ka/Imm … bolic.html

no source given

As it is, each improvement is turned like a weapon back upon humanity to try to make us mere cogs, or perhaps sub-electronic
quarks of nothing, all in service to their plans. This isn't how it could have been, because humanity has the ability to make
responsible choices with technology.

We've already been sold out! Even if every one of us here were the most massive social engineering and computer geniuses,
the numbers and the lack of access, the suppression of alternatives and the loosh economy will ensure that, under normal
conditions (i.e business as usual according to plan), the iterations of the false power hungry grab loop will continue.

The subversive jamming of the system by Matrix Warriors relies on the fact, however, that "some of their rules can be bent,
others can be broken."

One possibity for those who are not able to understand what the rules are, and thus how to break them when it comes to
computers (non-hackers, let's face it) are wise to critique the whole kit and caboodle. Turn the whole thing off, shut it down through
death by a thousand cuts of the millions who are "human,dammit, and they're not gonna take it anymore!" Then, with the
our own deviant experts, create something more akin to the original idea: technology is in service to us, and not the other way
around.

This is quite true in my experience and is just another way to drain people of energy and positive pursuits. For instance, a bad, arrogant webmaster of a manufacturing company, utility or whatever can make life hell by setting up a series of cryptic tabs that lead to tabs that lead to pages that don't ever get you to what you went to the website for in the first place, or there can be no way to get back to where you started and then you go around in a labyrinth of unintelligible "information" and so forth. Also, all companies and businesses now tell you over the phone and everywhere to just go to their website to deal with paying bills, disputes, ordering, customer service issues, etc. as if this is the easier way to take care of these things, then when you get to their website they don't have a function that deals with what you need to do, or you spend long amounts of time trying to figure out their menu to get to what you want to do, etc.etc. it is endless and not time saving in any way. Also, you are tied up in an endless catalog of pin numbers, login names and passwords and etc. to deal with each and every account that you need to create with all of your personal info, puh-leeze.

Athenais wrote:

This is a result also of the vicious corporate mentality merging with cold high-tech mentality: What came out of corporate "culture" and thinking from the 80s and 90s (when it was really honed) is the idea that the work that individual and specific people do has no relationship at all to the overall functioning of a company. People and equipment are both equipment, and when the going is good the corporation just throws money around on everyone and everything; then when the economy gets bad and the company would actually have to do something to retain customers and build business, they look at how to slash "expenses" which always means getting rid of people, not seeing how people working in an efficient and productive environment actually saves money and keeps the business going. Because they keep getting more and more high-tech "advanced' machines, they think that this is an efficiency move rather than looking at how people being able to use equipment productively is what creates efficiency. Also people trained in good customer service is more efficient than machines because good customer service will retain customers, keep customer service needs lower because they are dealt with the first time rather than an ongoing problem, and will ultimately build the business up, as well as keeping good employees that understand the business saves them money because they don't have to train people from scratch every five minutes and then limp along with ongoing new people who don't know what they are doing and are too scared to admit that they don't know what they don't know (another corporate culture staple)-lala

I love it for instance that today they can make automobiles that run better and longer without needing as much servicing or part replacement...but it's just ridiculous when a car breaks down or won't start because of a simple computer malfunction.  Why should you have to spend money just to replace a chip or a sensor, when there are no mechanical problems?

At my last job, at Michaels, I had to do all the time clock edits.  When I started there we had a time clock which was very simple to use.  It was computerized, but it was stand-alone, not tied into any central computer system or external program.  Every Monday morning I punched a few keys on it, and it would tell me if there were any missed punches.  I would correct those, and print out a tape of all punches for the previous week.  Then I would go back to the office and enter all the times in the computer so it could upload to corporate. 

It was really easy and rarely had any problems or glitches.  I don't think it ever took more than one hour per week to finalize payroll, and usually it was less than that.

Then they decided to roll out a new timeclock system called "Workbrain".  Everyone kept raving about how it was going to be soooo much easier and take a lot less time to deal with.  I knew it wasn't going to work out like that, but I kept my mouth shut in the beginning, because there's no use arguing with people who believe in this stuff.

The guy who came out to install it had a good laugh at the dated "eighties" time clock we were replacing (like we were all a bunch of losers because we didn't have the latest technology) and went on to say how the new system was just another sign of Big Brother taking over, because the corporate office would be able to see all our punches and edits.  I actually thought that might turn out to be a good thing, since we had certain people who got away with coming and going to work whenever they pleased, but of course my hopes were in vain.

The new time clock had basically no functions of its own.  It was tied in to the company's ISP which was always notoriously flaky and slow.  I eventually started counting, since I had nothing else to do while I was sitting staring at the computer screen.  On average it took Workbrain 15 seconds to load a new page of data.  This might not sound like a long time, but when you are having to sift through page after page after page of data it starts adding up.

Not to mention that the program itself was still full of bugs and javascript errors and sometimes would stop functioning at all.  You could pull up data for all employees on a single day, but the editing functions wouldn't work under that search criteria (the help desk helpfully informed me that this was a "known issue" like I must be stupid for reporting it).  If you pulled up data for all employees, for the entire week, it would allow editing, but you could only view one person at a time that way (this is where going through pages for 30+ people times 15 seconds per page load got to be extremely annoying). 

Of course, the fastest way would be to pull up data just for the people you actually needed to edit!  But I wouldn't know which people I needed to edit, unless I looked at everyone's data, because the search function for missed punches didn't catch everything it should have.  And everyone was paranoid about the time clock not working so they would all sign off on the edit sheet even if it had accepted their punches normally.  So editing just became more and more complicated.  I ended up having to check every single punch, every day to make sure they went through okay.

Don't even let me get started on what would happen if someone's shift went past midnight   The program just wasn't designed to handle it.

All in all, it was now taking about an hour each day to edit payroll, where with the old system it only took about an hour each week.

Then the time clock went down a week before Thanksgiving, with payroll and staffing maxed out from peak season hiring, and for a whole week every single time clock entry had to be entered manually.  Okay, I say it went down, but what actually happened was they sent us a new one - or rather a refurbished one, isn't it funny how they were already having to replace "new" time clocks with "refurbished" ones just a few months after the system was rolled out to the stores?  But it needed some sort of update to make the "new" time clock able to communicate with the ISP, and they weren't able to get that to us right away.  So while the time clock was collecting punches, we were also entering all of it manually into the computer, and when they finally got the time clock back online we had double entries so I had to take all of the manual edits back out and start over.

It was during this period that the manager decided to start bitching at me about how long it was taking me to do my job.  The increased workload was obvious, not only the problems with Workbrain, but the extra HR paperwork from all the seasonal hiring, and bigger sales means you have more money to count in the cash office...but nooooo in her mind it was supposed to take exactly the same amount of time to do my job, no matter what time of year it was, because corporate said that my job was only supposed to take x number of hours, and of course the new time clock system was supposed to speed things up so much, if anything I was supposed to be getting my work done faster than ever!! 

So I quit, and I have never had as much satisfaction from quitting a job, as I had walking away from that one.  But I am still feeling traumatized from the stress of dealing with that horrible time clock system, the nasty help desk people, and that hateful, stupid, incompetent store manager. 

Companies install overly complicated computer programs to keep tabs on things when they don't trust the people who work for them to be able to do their jobs with common sense...or when they want to weed out people who actually have common sense.  Because no one in their right mind would want to spend all their time struggling with a computer to do something that they could do faster without one.  Only people who are already numbed out of their skulls can tolerate staring at a screen waiting for pages to load.

We were all promised years ago that technology would make our lives more simple and productive but the opposite seems to have happened. in my job we keep getting new computer systems that leads to more work, hassle, problems, less efficiency and more jobs going to the private sector who dont care about customer service and always offer an inferior service with more complicated technology to use, that is not as good the systems they replace.

The UK Gov keeps putting new computer systems out to a few chosen private companies who are notorious for their poor track records which the public has to pay the price of with poor customer services and not in many cases capable of even doing the job after 4 years such as the child support agencies computer systems and the Inland revenue's tax credits.

I am half convinced that this by design as a sort of glitchy matrix within a matrix where natural justice, efficiency, common sense and simplicity are not to be tolerated in favour of cold corrupted internal systems that only complicate life, cause more stress and worry to those who have to use them and institutionalize the whole practice as "normality"