“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge.”

This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a “client area” that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.

A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.

It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.

What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.

They should ditch Microsoft 365 due to lack of not sucking balls.

Ah, I was thinking Portuguese-esque.

Microsoft’s business model has always been getting businesses who are even stupider than them to give them tons of money. Nothing is ever going to change that calculus.

forgejo

How is this generally pronounced? I feel like “for-GAY-hoe” would be the only workable pronunciation.

I had a friend in college whose parents were big into world government and had founded an organization to promote that. Talking to them was a weird experience because 1) they felt every problem facing the world could be solved by a one-world government, and 2) they actually felt achieving that world government was a realistic possibility. And it wasn’t like they thought the solution was just the USA taking over everything; they were very critical of everything about this country.

I don’t know if this is irony or not, but that friend is now worth $34 million after her parents’ company went public. She doesn’t say anything about world government any more.

the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate)

There was a study years ago in Norway where they wanted to see if there were correlations between any disease and living underneath high-voltage power lines. They found that 5% of all diseases were so correlated … when using an alpha of .05.

Where I live (Philly suburb) there was an incident where a guy driving a 12,000 gallon gasoline truck pumped out 4000 gallons at his first gas station stop and then decided he just wanted to go home rather than making the rest of his deliveries. So he ran the hose to the back of the station and dumped the other 8000 gallons onto the ground. This happened to be right above a creek and about 200 feet from an elementary school.

It just doesn’t make any sense how anybody could be this stupid. He got 20 years in prison for it or something like that. He certainly deserved it, but meanwhile executives who manage to create far worse disasters never see a day in jail.

TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.

How about an example from the last 40 years?

MS is waaaay too big to fail.

I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people

As a programmer, I’ve had numerous colleagues who have ended up as software engineers at MS. They were mostly either unbelievably lazy or extremely incompetent. The rest who were both ended up there as managers.

“Comedic” is a better title for this than “Tragic”.

I was a mobile developer and worked on Windows Mobile and Windows CE (un-ironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft themselves) applications some twenty years ago. It was basically just Windows with a lot of unnecessary cruft stripped out. The basic UI was indeed absurd, with the standard Start menu and utterly dependent on the fucking stylus to work. But for applications it wasn’t actually necessary to even use that shit. You could actually write applications that ran in kiosk mode and had nice big buttons so that users never had to deal with the Start menu or use the stylus at all. And in that mode it was actually extremely powerful – you could do anything that you needed to do programmatically. I never once encountered a situation where something that I needed to do programmatically wasn’t still available in the stripped-down WinCE API.

I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing

Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).

When I read that shit as a kid, I thought Asimov’s laws of robotics were like natural laws, so that it was just naturally impossible for robots to behave otherwise. That never made any sense to me so I thought Asimov was just full of shit.

Limbed Lugubrious Motherfucker

I want my AI to sound like a Speak & Spell.

Excuse me? Comcast belongs on that list.