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Bad Technology / Good Technology

Atratus's picture
Submitted by Atratus on

Pheh. This week is off to a flying start. Yesterday afternoon my laptop at work decided to start spontaneously rebooting. I spent a couple hours troubleshooting it before I decided to bag it and go home. Once at home I set about to installing a new DVD-RAM drive I picked up on the weekend and ended up having a most annoying problem. The hardware installed fine but my old buring software left a troublesome registry entry behind that ultimately ending up forcing an "upgrade"-type reinstall, a lot of cursing in the direction of Redmond, and thankfulness that my other box runs Linux. Got that all fixed and went into work to contend with the flakey laptop. After a little over an hour of troubleshooting I got our systems administrator in on the act. We both beat our heads against it, alternately cursing Microsoft and Dell depending on whether our theory-of-the-moment was hardware or software. Finally I gave up and finished the day working from home and left it to him to troubleshoot the hardware further (talking to Dell's outsourced-to-India tech-support line gives me an anurism). So while technology caused me a grief last night and this morning, it also came to my rescue this afternoon since with my local forwarded to my cell and remote access I'm as good as in the office, not to mention I can drop what I'm doing and actually *be* in the office in minutes since home and work are only a block apart.

Still though, I think I'll spend the evening finishing off my latest painting. ;)

I think nothing and I mean NOTHING can ever come close to the pain that Internet Explorer causes to web-developers lately. Ever had the problem when you make a site and it displays right and proper in ALL other browsers BUT IE? And than after spending hours trying to figure out some grotesque workaround and finally getting it to work alright, something else innevitably brakes when you move the site from one host to another!!!

Funny thing. I redesigned my website a month or so again... completely using CSS, PHP, and DIV tags (it was also all properly W3C XHTML validated)... It was completely table-free. I use IE as my main internet browser, so I previewed my work in there. It looked absolutely perfect.

But when I looked at it in Firefox and Opera, the layout was everywhere. The DIV tags weren't working like they were supposed to. Even though my coding was completely valid, apparenly Firefox nor Opera likes CSS+DIV.

What I'm trying to say is that FireFox and Opera LOVE websites with tables and DESPISE CSS+DIVtags.

Sorry. A bit off-topic.

Dell. Yes.... them Dells. All the workstations at my workplace are Dells. I mean, I'm fine with them being dells... but the fact that all the hardware drivers are so different and they're pretty much brandless (other than being "DELL"), it's a real pain to find drivers online. I mean sure, they're all in one place... but it's still a major pain (I manage 3 Dell workstations, and 2 builds).

I agree that MS is mostly evil - I have been supporting computers and networks for 15 years and it seems clear to me that an Operating System that has evolved from a simply user interface for loading programs would not be a good choice for my company.  Don't get me wrong, Windows is fine for desktop use - it's just too insecure IMHO to be running our infrastructure on.

However, despite the robustness of our other mainstream OS (Solaris) we've decided, thanks to a flawed study to standardize on Windows as a server platform to leverage the cheaper Intel hardware......um did you ever hear of LINUX? 

My resume is almost finished. 

.. that's Dell for you, b'oy!. 

here's my steam off on good/bad technologies:

I think nothing and I mean NOTHING can ever come close to the pain that Internet Explorer causes to web-developers lately. Ever had the problem when you make a site and it displays right and proper in ALL other browsers BUT IE? And than after spending hours trying to figure out some grotesque workaround and finally getting it to work alright, something else innevitably brakes when you move the site from one host to another!!!

but than good ol' google always fetches a solution or another groteque fix.