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comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

Sometimes it seems like tech firms are faced with only two options: 1) fire hordes of people that have already proven their worth by building great products/software or 2) keep them around and force them to "improve" existing technology. And yes, by "improve", I meant "completely fucking ruin".

My /opt/ folder disappeared when I updated to El Capitan, and I had to execute shit in the command line to be able to see it again. Fuck that.

My parents just wanted to transfer pictures between their iPhone and their computer that magically "upgraded" to Windows 10 in the middle of the night. They never accomplished such an ambitious task. Fuck that.

The new Google Maps? Fuck that.

Every new iTunes release? Fuck that.

I should cut myself off here, but I've got an endless supply of atrocities.





mk  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hey insomniasexx, let's hold off on that UI update.

insomniasexx  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hahahhahahahhaaaa aaaah...

am_Unition  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'd be surprised if anyone on team Hubski pushed for a bad update. :)

steve  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

bwahahahahahahahaha

user-inactivated  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's more a combination of design by committee, "there are no stupid ideas", and business school fuckwits who feel compelled to prove their leadership by making their mark, so what you get is the centroid of "actual improvements" and "proof that not only are there stupid ideas, most ideas are stupid."

The only solution I've ever come up with involved blunt instruments, and it has some obvious drawbacks.

galen  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    business school fuckwits who feel compelled to prove their leadership by making their mark

This fucked over our radio station. Two GMs ago we had a guy that was determined to leave a legacy so he pushed through a new system that we didn't need or want, without consulting the rest of the board or our faculty advisor. Right now the board's primary concern is cleaning up the fallout, because the new system and its shoddy implementation pretty much fucked our image.

ButterflyEffect  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

What's the system?

galen  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Fuckin RCS NexGen. Designed for Top 40 stations.

ButterflyEffect  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There are at least 3 open source options way more suited for college radio...yikes. Good luck with that, feel free to send me a PM if you're ever looking for an outside opinion on this kind of stuff.

galen  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

'ppreciate it. Unfortunately after a $60k investment I think the university would kill us if we tried to switch to anything else.

ButterflyEffect  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    'ppreciate it. Unfortunately after a $60k investment I think the university would kill us if we tried to switch to anything else.

Oh, totally. Moreso the navigating your image side of things at this point. What you have is what you have for the foreseeable future.

steve  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    /opt/ folder disappeared when I updated to El Capitan

Yep... I went hunting for the Network Utility the other day for a "quick thing" and spent the next five minutes googling "where in the hell is my network utility?" Only to find it buried in some new folder instead of the "UTILITIES" folder where it's been for 15 years.

kleinbl00  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My favorite is the "hold down the option key, say three Hail Marys and cross yourself in the name of Saint Jobs if you wanna see the Library folder in Finder."

But hey - "all my files?" Yeah, that's really fuckin' useful. Hierarchy and taxonomy, after all, are for proles.

StJohn  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Microsoft has always tried to be everything to everyone, but Apple has never been pro-consumer as far as I can tell. They try to make a small set of features perfect for the majority of users, but the second you want to do anything outside their supported features you're fucked. /opt folder? You must be dreaming. I work a lot of tech jobs and developers always seem to prefer Macs. I have no idea why — they're not built for development work and to get anything at all done you have to hack and circumvent everything that comes with the system.

But let's not end on a negative note. There is an example of how it can be done right. My favorite computer ever is the Amstrad NC100, an A4-sized Z80-based computer from the early 90s — sort of a proto-laptop. For the non-savvy users the keys were all color-coded for ease of use — you've got your word processor, your calculator, your address book… Savvy users could also access a BASIC interpreter, allowing them to write their own computer programs. And really expert users could get access to an assembler, allowing them to hack the Z80 CPU and even write their own OS for the machine. It was beautiful — an infinitely hackable computer that was both simple and complex. Oh, and this was also the early 90s, back when computers only ever did what you told them to do. No secret Windows 10 upgrades in the middle of the night!

user-inactivated  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We were big fans of macs when developers also had to do support work, support work not really being our jobs. Supporting nontechnical users in a more conventional unix environment is hard if you don't have people whose actual job is to be a sysadmin, and none of us are familiar with or want to be familiar with Windows. So Apple's combination of catering to non-technical users and being a unix, albeit a crappy unix, was a decent compromise.

Most of us installed linux when we stopped having to do support though.

StJohn  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, installing Linux is always my first step. I worked inside a Linux VM for a long time, but eventually got so fed up with VM issues (especially USB-passthrough) that I installed Linux directly to the hard-drive and dual-booted.

user-inactivated  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

also, goddamn, six weeks ago i tried upgrading to windows 10 so i could avoid being caught by surprise like everyone else, and it totally didn't work. downloaded the file and just couldn't begin the execution. so i said fuck it, until last night when i was in the middle of a difficult lotro run my laptop spontaneously upgraded for 90 minutes after all.

and then at the end it sat on a screen with the text 'your files are in the same place as usual' and nothing else for five damn minutes while i hit every button on the keyboard hoping for a change.

am_Unition  ·  3051 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    and then at the end it sat on a screen with the text 'your files are in the same place as usual' and nothing else for five damn minutes while i hit every button on the keyboard hoping for a change.

this is hilarious. "Hey man, I was in your bedroom, and I just wanted to tell you that I left everything exactly where I found it, cool? I promise."

sorry for the late response, shit's crazy bruh. hope all's well with you, flag.

user-inactivated  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Lately, there is like a thing in my iphone's itunes that requires wifi or a tower? what could that possibly be? i have my 60 gigs of music stored locally! why does my itunes zone out and do a no connection screen?

WanderingEng  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Your phone's iTunes or your phone's Music? Music tries to connect to Apple Music to try to get you to buy a subscription.

I have my music all local, too. At this point I assume Apple is eventually going to stop supporting music stored locally.

user-inactivated  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

ohhh. i see. and yeah i'm sure they will.

am_Unition  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks for the heads up. So the last semblance of the iPod is dead, then. I'll never be voluntarily updating anything ever again.

Devac  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I have already suggested it to steve, but I think that I should share it with everyone. However, this comes with caveat that I have never really used Apple products. It works on Linux and similar systems, but I'm not sure to what degree it applies to Apple.

First of all, to my knowledge, the only files and links to files are considered as executable system-wide without knowing the direct location are the ones located in the $PATH environment variable. You can see it with from your console:

  echo $PATH

Now, you can either go around and look in these directories or use:

  locate -ir "/some/path/" partial_file_name

to see all of the possible results. It obeys all of the typical regular expressions (regerx) for both path and file name. The -i flag tells locate to ignore case, so there will be no difference between /usr/bin/Network_APP and /usr/bin/network_app if your query was

  locate -ir "/usr/bin" net*

I hope that helps. Main benefit of using locate instead of find command is the lack of rather obtuse syntax, plus it eliminates the need for additional search with grep in my experience. Plus it's really fast.

added: By the way, you don't have to specify path. But in that case you might end up having to browse through quite a lot of results. If that's the case consider something like:

  locate partial_name | less

that will make it that much easier to browse. I think it can be universally ended by ctrl + C or escape key or just by pressing Q for quit.

steve  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks again for the tip Devac!

if you're going to use it in OS X - you'll need to build the database first.

  $ locate ?

  WARNING: The locate database (/var/db/locate.database) does not exist.

To create the database, run the following command:

  sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

  Please be aware that the database can take some time to generate; once
the database has been created, this message will no longer appear.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/02/enable-and-use-the-locate-command-in-the-mac-os-x-terminal/

Devac  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No problem, I hope that it will help at least some of you guys :D. Does the $PATH thing work?

am_Unition  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, in fact, that's how I found out that my /bin/ folder was still inside the /opt/ folder, which had vanished from the GUI "Finder" file tree. I still use Finder to shuffle around a bunch of data files because I'm still developing a system and don't have a naming convention yet.

Anyway, thanks for dat knowledge. Apple has a pretty good tool (Spotlight Search) that does exactly what those lines of code do, with a little less hassle, but fewer options.

I'm still with 'bl00, probably hopping off the Apple bandwagon next purchase. I spent a lot of money, and now it just feels like I'm getting dicked around too often. Transitioning to Linux will be something I can only afford to do when I'm not entrenched in a daily grind. Hopefully it's this side of my thesis.

Devac  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
user-inactivated  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Main benefit of using locate instead of find command is the lack of rather obtuse syntax, plus it eliminates the need for additional search with grep in my experience.

Are you using -name and then greping? -regex matches the filename against a regular expression instead of a glob, but it might be a gnu extension.

Devac  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh, cool. I seem to forget about that all the time, thanks for reminding me about that :D. In general I don't find find (heh) as helpful as locate though. Sometimes I can't escape -regex + grep afterwards when I'm searching for something fancy. My regex-fu is not that strong ;). Locate is a bit easier for me to use so I went with that, that's all. But I do retract part of my reason for recommending locate in place of find since I was misremembering the utility.

Thanks again!