• (nodebb)

    Barry was probably sick and tired of his children looking at stupid stuff on social networks.

  • Prime Mover (unregistered) 
    If Not comment.Contains("Taxation is theft") OrElse comment.Contains("frist") Then
         filterContext.Result = New ContentResult With {.Content = "Your comment is not supported. Please use correct GroupThink."}
End If
  • Industrial Automation Engineer (unregistered)

    But..., but..., but...,

    Sent from my iMac

  • (nodebb)

    We don't use these weird newfangled things! An ox cart gets the job done just fine!

  • pif (unregistered)

    On one hand, I understand and support Barry: if competitors learnt to say no to a childish temper tantrum, customers would not be so spoiled and would accept to use what I want them to use!

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    During dot-com we went to a large prospective customer; during the meeting we found out they were using an accounting package from a company long out of business, where even the company that took over support of the package went out of business, all because the IT guy did not like change.

  • Chronomium (unregistered)

    Let's be real, if more people stood up against mobile devices like this, maybe the programming world would be a better place.

  • (nodebb) in reply to my name is missing

    ..., all because the IT guy did not like change.

    I suspect that his superiors liked him for it. Otherwise the possibility of a change of employment status would have been a larger argument than the change of some software.

  • (nodebb)

    True story:

    Our ERP is web based, and the company delivers this code, which works with Chrome but nothing else:

    if (ua.indexOf("Chrome") != -1 ) { < Code to make it work > }

    < Notice there's no "else" here... >

    If I remove that "if" and the braces, it works in any browser, but some browsers render things a little funkier than desired. Bottom line: They just wanna support "the standard" -- whatever that is.

    I should also mention that when Chrome decides to stop supporting something, there is no "fix" from the ERP vendor. Instead, they supply configuration and/or registry hacks to get it to work. Mostly, that is.

  • (nodebb) in reply to my name is missing

    During dot-com we went to a large prospective customer; during the meeting we found out they were using an accounting package from a company long out of business, where even the company that took over support of the package went out of business, all because the IT guy did not like change.

    In the late 1990s, I worked for a short time at a law firm in NYC that was using Wang OIS for all their legal documents and billing. Wang was closed at least 10 years at the time.

  • Sole Purpose Of Visit (unregistered)

    There's always the possibility that the company in question was making millions on easily supported "standard" software. (Your choice of "standard" may vary.)

    It's not like you can move, seamlessly, to another platform. And it's not like, in the early 2000s, it was easy to move to a "standard" mobile platform. And it's not like the ROI for this move is made explicit, in any way, in the article.

    So, just to be contrarian, I'm going to support the PHB here.

    (I may be biased by the fact that my company is trying to transition a CAD product to the Web here. It's fiendishly difficult. And it would be absolutely impossible without advances in the last ten years -- Typescript/equivalent, massive WiFi data pipes, and the like.)

  • (nodebb)

    I can't find it right now, but I am positive I once saw an entry on this site complaining about VB's "ORELSE", written at a point before the entry author understood that it's just VB's way of saying "||"

  • Hasseman (unregistered)

    Andrew S. Tanenbaum: “The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”

  • Airdrik (unregistered)

    This made me think of https://despair.com/products/disservice. Or was it https://despair.com/products/apathy?

    Because nothing says "we care about you" like pushing around "standards" like you're Microsoft in 1990. At least back then, MS had the weight to do it.

  • kaewberg (unregistered)

    This is basically what my bank does. No banking unless you use approved versions of Windows, as badly detected through user agent strings. (Although everything would work just fine if they just lifted the block).

  • Perfectly Legal (unregistered) in reply to Prime Mover

    Taking money against people's will, collusion to set prices, Ponzi schemes, ... please don't mislabel them as crimes if they aren't in the books as such! Kinda makes you wonder why we all aren't allowed to do such things. Well, I guess we are, as long as we can just get elected.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Perfectly Legal

    Don't get him started now. Hahaha

  • Meir (unregistered) in reply to Perfectly Legal

    Correction: …“as long as we can get elected as a Democrat.”

  • iWantToKeepAnon (unregistered)

    "By the time the iPad and Microsoft Surface took off" ...

    Wait, Microsoft Surface took off??!? That's the real WTF.

  • (nodebb) in reply to iWantToKeepAnon

    Well, MS Surface was more thrown than flew, but I still have one in the office for me to support. Too bad it is just sitting there; nobody is really using it.

  • (nodebb) in reply to iWantToKeepAnon

    Wait, Microsoft Surface took off??!? That's the real WTF.

    To be fair, Microsoft isn't interested in creating a market dominating device, but rather in telling their hardware partners to get their act together. That said, for me tablets are still "either iPad or not at all", even though I'm not using any other Apple hardware.

    Addendum 2021-10-14 02:46: Though personally, I'd prefer a Windows tablet with proper mobile apps and games. Just, as long as the tablet can run desktop apps, I doubt this will ever materialize natively, and if it can't, it will be considered a downgraded version of Windows. So I'm having hopes for builtin Android App support. Though it still leaves the question of how to install them, short of getting Google Play to work on Windows. Because many devs won't bother to add their app to a Windows store.

    There's also the issue that any device running a full desktop OS will always suffer from battery life issues, since traditional apps aren't optimized for background battery saving. Just gotta look at Chrome...

  • Oggo (unregistered)

    Reminds me of a time around the time of the Second Browser Wars when a local cinema's page would work only with Internet Explorer. We Linux nerds took a look at the source and discovered what the problem was: if they just closed the right tag (I think they were using frames ... yeah, it was a different time) then everything would work fine in every browser. We sent a polite email about the fix to the site admin and got a long missive ranting about how everyone should use Windows, how all these "standards" were an abomination, nobody ever needs to use a browser that isn't Internet Explorer, and blah blah blah...

    Of course, the site remained unfixed. The cinema eventually closed (more due to piracy than the site, I suspect). I sometimes wonder where that dev is, and what they might be doing now...

  • CdrJameson (unregistered)

    "a company where management was absolutely convinced that tablets, smartphones, and frankly, anything smaller than the cheapest Dell laptop with the chunkiest plastic case was nothing more than a toy."

    TBH the opposite is a nightmare too. When I started work at a company I was allocated a lovely, brushed aluminium 13" screen multi-mode tablet with touch screen etc. which was worth more than my car because it was 'corporate standard'. Luckily I mostly work remotely, so it sits in a corner gathering dust while I use my desktop with such archaic luxuries as a 'keyboard' and 'monitor' to get actual work done. As an experiment I used the shiny-top for real work for a morning, then the desktop for the afternoon with one hand behind my back. The desktop was still better.

  • (nodebb) in reply to CdrJameson

    It probably says something about the complexity of their work, when people are convinced that a 13" tablet is a good choice for productivity...

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to Bananafish

    In the late 1990s, I worked for a short time at a law firm in NYC that was using Wang OIS for all their legal documents and billing. Wang was closed at least 10 years at the time.

    To be fair, in cases like that it's usually not IT but the lawyers or accountants who don't like change. And sometimes with good reason. They need systems that they know, 100%, do the right thing.

  • ZZartin (unregistered) in reply to iWantToKeepAnon

    Wait, Microsoft Surface took off??!? That's the real WTF.

    Yes, pretty well actually. the Surface line up is pretty big and fairly popular and I've found pretty good....

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to R3D3

    "I suspect that his superiors liked him for it. Otherwise the possibility of a change of employment status would have been a larger argument than the change of some software."

    Any IT guy worth his salt is giving advice in a way that gets the decision he wants.

    But tbh, there are a lot of unjustified upgrades companies go through where waiting a cycle or two longer would be fine and save a lot of money.

  • Kythyria (unregistered) in reply to Oggo

    The best bit is, these kinds of morons are responsible for a significant chunk of cruft in a browser engine. Writing garbage that worked by accident on sufficient scale that now it has to be supported forever, because browser maintainers want to not break any existing website but also not split anything into old and new versions.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Kythyria

    At least they probably have tests for it. We have to support the old bugs and have only manual testing currently. And the upcoming plans for testing are on the scale of "has to run over the weekend", probably because unit-testing isn't really possible the way the code is structured.

    Maybe it will work once the slow high-level tests exist. But even then having only weekly tests makes restructuring unlikely to happen.

  • (nodebb) in reply to ZZartin

    the Surface line up is pretty big and fairly popular and I've found pretty good....

    This isn't meant to be a product review but that's my experience too. I have a Surface tablet with a docking station where I can plug in a couple of full-sized monitors and the other usual peripherals, and it's just like using a desktop except I can bring it places. And the Surface Hubs in our meeting rooms are decent devices too.

    A far cry from the original Surfaces though--which, ironically, have been rebranded as PixelSense.

  • (nodebb) in reply to RLB

    To be fair, in cases like that it's usually not IT but the lawyers or accountants who don't like change. And sometimes with good reason. They need systems that they know, 100%, do the right thing.

    Agreed. Knowing what they do and knowing what software is available, Wang OIS is still the best thing they could ever use there. Legal documents are big and complicated, and Wang was built to make these very easy to assemble. The accounting part, which they also did on the Wang, could be done in almost anything, but since they can make a document and attach billable hours to it, there's no "data swap" or entry required. I'm still waiting for any piece of software that does the same thing, even though I left that industry 30 years ago and never looked back.

  • (nodebb) in reply to R3D3

    It is quite possible for people to do complex work without using a chair or desk or table, etc. In that case, portability would be the key to productivity.

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered) in reply to Kythyria

    Imagine a web browser that contains a HTML validity checker, and maybe also one for CSS and one for JS. It would pop uo a big red warning with a stop sign, "Alert! Alert! The web page you've requested is dangerous! Please report error so-and-so, index.html line 12345, to your IT department, superior, or local police station. Now!" It could explicitely request consent to access any 3rd party resources as well as JS execution. Currently there is a lot of stuff online that every browser maker wants to support even though it does not conform to existing standard (or by intention violates them) or tries to force the browser to do something stupid, like evaluation comments instead of ignoring them. Now imagine every browser would do that: At this moment, almost the entire web would be "disappearing" and only a handful of "boring" pages would probably remain...

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