veddox

45 ms·

421.
by veddox 8y ago
I know plenty of professionals who work wonders with MS Office and who love working with it. Calling them all "unexperienced users" strikes me as pretty opinionated. Just because I would rather solve the task with R instead of Exc
422.
by veddox 8y ago
> My other observation was that a lot of the "formatting" that I see in office documents is unnecessary and only there because the software makes it easy. The problem with that statement is: if a colleague sends me his Word doc
423.
by veddox 8y ago
I see the article more as pointing out one aspect that is often ignored - not as invalidating all those other aspects.
424.
by veddox 8y ago
Interesting point about publishers producing a cheap and a "classy" version of their books already way back then. I seem to remember reading somewhere else that when paperbacks first came up, they were a huge success, yet were cri
425.
by veddox 8y ago
I've dipped into it, but haven't had the opportunity to do much with it yet. My impression is that it's fantastic for preparing academic presentations (where it's all about the content and you want to be able to create s
426.
by veddox 8y ago
As long as MS Windows still has 89% market share on the desktop/laptop market [1], as long as Google still keeps core parts of Android under lock and key, and as long as all my friends still communicate with Facebook and WhatsApp, I th
427.
by veddox 8y ago
> have no value to experienced users That's precisely his point: Experienced users deal well with open-source software, because much of that was designed with them in mind. But in all too many cases, it doesn't play well with p
428.
by veddox 8y ago
LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power). Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on L
429.
by veddox 8y ago
> The open source business is thriving. Thriving, may be, but not exactly dominating the consumer market. The vast majority of software companies still keep their code well under wraps.
430.
by veddox 8y ago
I agree with you there. I love open-source, I barely use anything else. And yet I have to admit that much of it is absolutely not user-friendly in the sense of "I can explain this to my grandmother in under 10 minutes". Much of it
431.
by veddox 8y ago
Yes, karma is a good indicator of standing in the HN community :-) High karma shows somebody has been around for a while and is known for substantive comments.
432.
by veddox 8y ago
From the FAQ: > In my profile, what does showdead do? > If you turn it on, you'll see all the stories and comments that have been killed by software, moderators, or user flags. This mechanism was designed precisely for the purpo
433.
by veddox 8y ago
Differentiate between a wreck and a bug. Bugs may be big, common, and expensive, but they don't invalidate the system as a whole. Bugs need fixing, a wreck requires a reimplementation. But seductive as reimplementations may be, they ar
434.
by veddox 8y ago
> Isn't government all about asking one yes or no question and collecting a response from every citizen and going forward with the majority answer. No, it's not. In our modern representative democracies, government is about ask
435.
by veddox 8y ago
No, absolutely and emphatically not! Underlying this question is an assumption very common in tech circles, but nonetheless fundamentally flawed: that social problems can be solved by technological advances. Sure, technology can help implem
436.
by veddox 8y ago
I still mourn the passing of Bazaar (Canonical's CVS, developed in tandem with Git but abandoned some years back). It was a lot easier to learn and use than Git and had a beautifully clean Python codebase. Unfortunately, it was also sl
437.
by veddox 8y ago
I think I would really enjoy working with GitLab, but a while ago I tried to set up an instance on my own server and it was a real pain... Then, once I finally got it running, it turned out to hog incredible amounts of resources even when d
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by veddox 8y ago
I have a running GitBucket instance and I must say I can't recommend it, especially not for production. It's good if you just need a private repository somewhere to host your code, but the web interface is not the best and misses
439.
by veddox 8y ago
I suspect it's meant to portray George Washington at Valley Forge (where he spent a winter with his army during the War of Independence). From Wikipedia: "Valley Forge long occupied a prominent place in American storytelling and m
440.
by veddox 8y ago
Yep, using WebDav with Nextcloud too - much nicer to use than the official desktop client, IMO.
441.
by veddox 8y ago
GDPR is a whole other story. While I applaud the spirit, it is one nightmare of a regulation. (This is speaking from the small non-profit / volunteer organization sector - we neither have the know-how nor the manpower to deal with its
442.
by veddox 8y ago
Deutsche Welle is critical of Zuckerberg, so is the BBC (to a slightly lesser extent).
443.
by veddox 8y ago
I agree with that analysis. The main reason why Facebook is relevant in Europe is because everybody is still on it - but actual usage is steadily decreasing, especially in the younger generation. Most communications nowadays is done via Wha
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by veddox 8y ago
The US have no qualms about regulating European companies, so they shouldn't complain. Just recently they were trying to keep Europeans out of Iran to enforce their unilateral sanctions...
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by veddox 8y ago
In theory yes - in practice, the extra two decades of experience are almost impossible to fully compensate.
446.
by veddox 8y ago
+1 for Levy's "Hackers", especially if you're interested in the counter-culture aspects of computer folklore.
447.
by veddox 8y ago
Yes, yes, yes! Taking advice is incredibly important, and a trusted circle of advisors absolutely invaluable. And don't only include your own buddies in this circle: Reach out to older people and ask them about their experiences. Why r
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by veddox 8y ago
There's a couple of rules that I have been following, more or less consciously, for the past few years: 1) Seek advice from people you respect. 2) Don't let fear take your decisions for you: Will you regret (not) doing this? 3) If
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by veddox 8y ago
A very nice writeup of Stuxnet, although plainly intended for a lay audience... Shame the author didn't mention Flame (or any of the other since-discovered super-viruses) at the end.
450.
by veddox 8y ago
I have no idea what your CEO is like and have never been in this kind of situation, but one thing I would love to ask the CEO of a big company is: "What's your philosophy of leadership?" (I've been learning a lot about l

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