Entertainment
“The quest to rediscover Microsoft's soul”
I'll sit back and wait for the comments.
Microsoft has created a special “Employee Edition” of CEO Satya Nadella's new book, Hit Refresh – and The Register understands every full-time worker at the software giant will find one on their desks. A copy seen by El Reg replaces some text from the edition ordinary folks can buy. Hit Refresh gets an added “FN+F5,” …
Hopefully not as a PDF.
Microsoft removes PDF Reader on Windows 10 Mobile from July 1, forces you to use Edge
"Hence the logo that looks like a tent."
My impression was of a sail boat. It doesn't associate with MS, cloud or Azure in my mind at all. But then all the "best" (ie expensively acquired via world leading consultants and designers) have to be explained because they are never obvious.
Azure. A remote server that you have to pay monthly for.Because we all like renting.
About that:
- Microsoft said the new logo “is a bit more abstract, and it doesn’t include a cloud in it anymore. -
Hell, it's down so much, they don't even include it in the logo anymore! ☺
At least for the case of Steve Jobs, he was a visionary and had a bit of an interesting life story. You would be compelled to read the book.
SatNad's book seems to be propaganda material from the company's internal corporate communications team. Anyone who has ever worked for a big, hierarchical company definitely has had such material forced upon them.
I'd go a bit further than just a slap when it comes to the designer of these abortions. i.e. the designer that didn't comprehend that having a hibernate/sleep/crash-very-slowly button one accidental press away at all times was a bad idea. A very bad idea. Likely the same designer who put power keys on a normal keyboard as well as sticking prev-page and next-page buttons where they can also be accidently pressed at the least convenient moment.
"If they're calling it FN+F5 internally, does that mean everyone there uses those stupid laptops with the "useful functions" overriding the F buttons?"
Every one I've ever owned or used has been like that. I haven't bought one in several years, but I can say I would have had much more limited choices, at the very least, had I demanded a Fn-less keyboard each time.
I presume your objection is the presence of the Fn key, since you can simply not use it if you don't find its functions "helpful." If that is the case, you can always buy laptops that have the Ctrl key to the left, which is the main objection I've seen to Fn. My ancient HP laptop has CTRL on the left, which I appreciated, but my current (ish) laptop has it in the "wrong" spot, with the Fn on the left. Even so, I've become accustomed to the CTRL key being the second from the left. Not the order I would have chosen, but it is what it is.
Compared to other failings that laptops often have these days (16:9 displays, buttonless touchpads, non-removable batteries, soldered components, cases that can't be opened easily for repair, Windows 10, etc.), it's hardly an offense that would call for slapping someone.
@Updraft102
You've got the wrong end of the stick. The OP was talking about how the F1,F2,F3... keys can only be used by holding down the function key first as without holding it down it just activates the keyboard provider's own non-standardised shortcut. That is the reverse of a normal mode where you can press the F1,F2,F3... keys with one press and you need to use the Fn button to access the shortcuts.
The OP deduced this by the fact that to 'Hit Refresh' normally just requires hitting the F5 key, but if you have to hit Fn+F5 then it is one of those reversed mode keyboards (and a ridiculous design).
Cunningly the Lenovo I have uses Fn Esc to give either logic! Default is function key is not special.
An LED shows which way round it is. Stupidly though the dot on 'i' of Thinkpad on lid and inside is an LED yet there is no CapsLock LED. So I set pressing both shift keys together to be Caps Lock and the Capslock to be UNIX Compose and a notification tray for the three missing keyboard state LEDs
So Lenovo doesn't quite have the keyboard right.
But have they no risk management processes in place?
Books of pompous, self-aggrandising tripe like this are boring beyond any form of scientific measure. Doling them out to the unfortunate employees could be very dangerous. What happens if somebody slips into a coma as a result of reading the drivel for too long? What about the wider impact on employee well-being and mental health? What if the vile, upbeat monotony of the prose trips somebody over the edge and they go postal? What if abandoned copies of the volume create new fire or trip hazards?
I wonder if Microsoft's employees will be expected to read this, and if so, will that be in working hours, or as paid overtime? Even then, it's pretty degrading, exposing them to the vacuous thoughts of the PHB in chief.
Back when I when ntl:Telewest rebranded as Virgin Media, they gave all us a little A5 book on how to be a Virgin (oh, those marketing wags). It was stuffed full of tripe about Virgin values, encouraging employees to be energetic, engaged, and all sorts of words beginning 'en'.
One page gleefully declared we should hug the colleague next to us.
Probably worked quite well in the soft, fluffy, and bitchy world of cabin crew... fundamentally less successful when dealing with hairy arsed telecoms engineers whose idea of positive colleague engagement was to not 'accidentally' electrocute the apprentices.
That one page probably cost us an entire day of engineering, company wide, as the fibre stranglers completely lost the plot.
Bill Gates is the author of two books on IT (the road ahead and business @ the speed of thought) and he was also involved in the development of Microsoft Basic and he invented an improved pancake sort algorithm.
Do you remember someone called Steve? Jobs? Ballmer? Wozniak!
Good question. Not something I'm planning to spend any money unless it's in the remainder bin (which I anticipate will happen shortly).
Followed up by "Did you do it voluntarily?"
An honest Microsoft book might contain chapters titles like.
"Building the monopoly*" "Keeping the monopoly*" "How we f**ked the USG anti-trust case." "Expect no mercy" and "Everyone is expendable"
* No actual Microsoft monopoly is implied by this statement.
Ch 1 - Remaining humble whilst being great - I don't mind being poorer than Bill Gates, because I have my successes, which are priceless. And all he has is bile and memories and some charity thing that gives pills to peasants.
Ch 2 - Windows 10 - hotter than a Kardashian, smarter than Paris Hilton, prettier than Simon Cowell, more of a hot dame than Hillary Clinton, more popular than Trump, more stable than Trump. Just. Like the Mona Lisa in software.
Ch 3 - Getting to know our customers, bit by bit. Byte by byte and document by document, come to think of it.
Ch 4 - Inspiring a generation - My coffee was a bit cold but I worked on through, only firing two of my PAs and screaming at an intern for 20 minutes. You can do it too.
Ch 5 - Windows 10 - the more we get wrong, the greater we become. And we are surely great now.
Ch 6 - Inspiring a generation #2 - people tell me they dream about my grin!
Ch 7 - Managing diversity in Microsoft - even the idiots get to code here, and I got to be CEO.
Ch 8 - Listening to your customers when they say the things you want to hear.
Ch 9 - Windows phone - Idiocracy: how an entire global market can be completely stupid and wrong and buy other phones even when they cost more.
Ch 10 - Windows phone - how a global developer community who wrote apps for other phones can be as stupid, ugly, smelly and as wrong as it is possible to be. Fools.
Ch 11 - Raymond Chen - why the hell is he still here? I mean, really! The Old New Thing can kiss my hairy b***sack!
Ch 12 - Bill Gates, Bill bloody Gates - why the sh*tting buggery are people still talking about him? And that sweaty ape Ballmer. Screw them. Screw them to hell. And Gates' bloody sanctimonious bint of a wife... Oh she got her claws in didn't she? Oh yes. Lean in, my arse.
Ch 13 - Remaining calm when the idiots surround you.
Ch 14 - Closing remarks, interrupted by a forced Windows update.
Ch 15 - Can anyone fix my PC? This doesn't happen on my Mac at home.
Each "special" book probably has a unique licence number so if anyone is so dis-loyal as to attempt to sell it, not only will they traced, but both seller and buyer will be sued into oblivion for abuse of the license terms. Or they'll be promoted for showing a shark-like aggressive business acumen.
I heard that the last book by Microsoft had the font enlarged so that only one paragraph could fit per page. They were calling the 'Metro reading style'. Metro reading style worked reasonably well on a small screen, such as a smartphone, but on anything larger it was liked by only a few people, who had nothing but bad things to say about the majority who did not like it.
And I hear the book by SatNad "listened" to customers complaining about the Metro reading style, and so restored the font back to normal size. But instead of giving us what we want -- a logical, traditional reading style -- the paragraphs are written in strict alphabetical order. Most of us like reading things in a natural logical progression just like we like our start menu to be a natural logical hierarchy. But remember, the new Microsoft really cares about our feedback, which is why the book has many paragraphs per page again. But Microsoft also knows better than us, so they know we don't really want a traditional reading style, but the one they give to us.
Having recently brewed coffee at the office (and tagged it with "Coffee" in Klingon for fun), I noticed that the Azure logo looks strikingly like the "F" in the Mandel Klingon character set, or "D" in the (evidently more forgiving) pIqaD_KLIpIqaD character set. Either way, not a great mark.
Although perhaps http://gradha.sdf-eu.org/textos/klingon_programmer.en.html has it right:
What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
Sounds like Windows 10, all right.
Anon because otherwise the Trek-geek label would stick forever.
At least his red book was little.
OK, you had to read and memorize it, and repeat passages verbatim from memory, and pretend it was wonderful or you'd get shot, but at least it was little.
What's the betting the Micropeons have to carry this piece of drivel around everywhere they go and gush over it at the water cooler?
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(Context for overseas readers: the Manic Street Preachers are a very successful stadium rock band from Wales with famously Trotskyite politics.)
The title track and closer of the Manics' second album, Gold Against the Soul, starts with the line:
Somebody told me to vote Conservative...
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-HSjtwmbeI
... sung rather expressively, with a nice mix of disbelief, hatred & contempt.
Now a few days ago, after yet another rant about the nightmare hellhole I'm currently berthed, someone I know on Fb outed themselves as a MIcrosoft employee and suggested I consider joining them, as they're hiring people in all sorts of security-related roles.
I thanked him kindly for the well-intentioned thought and mumbled something about not really fitting in in huge megacorps -- which is perfectly true -- but in truth, my reaction was rather like the Manics'. I suppose you think I should buy an Audi and some comfy fleeces, too? Join the PTA and the Freemasons?
DO. ME. A. FAVOUR.
the fact is that I got started in IT in the 90s, and the founding tenet of everything I've learned since then was and remains that Microsoft, however smiley and cuddly the face, are hiding the face of hell: that they are an emissary of Beelzebub, vomited onto the corporate and computing landscape for not other reason but to fuck shit up.
Now I realise they've come a long way since I grabbed that screenshot of an interim ruling in the antirtrust case saying that the company should be broken up. The technical quality, in security especially, has improved enormously since then. But their DNA remains the same: steal an external idea. co-opt it, hideously mangle the syntax (Powershell? Are you fucking KIDDING me?! It makes Java look clean and efficient! And don't get me started on Active Directory...) and above all slap on the most disengenuous, slimy yet droolproof marketing front and pitch it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
In summary: no, no, no!
Microsoft, however smiley and cuddly the face, are hiding the face of hell: that they are an emissary of Beelzebub, vomited onto the corporate and computing landscape
So, not a fan then?
I have, in my small humble corner of the computing world, a slight reputation for not liking Microsoft stuff.
But it appears that my small flame of dislike is as nothing to the solar-mass of burning hydrogen that is your fear and loathing.
Good work! Keep it up.