VerifiedReports

Oh yeah... every day half the mail I receive at work is flagged as "unsafe," and then the banner that tells you this in Outlook presents a button to "manage safe senders."

So I press it and add (for example) OUR OWN JIRA SERVER to the whitelist... which HAS NO EFFECT. Every goddamned day, every Jira message is flagged as dangerous and has blocked content.

I complained to Microsoft, who made up some pathetic excuse about how that's not what that button does... and how every person at my company should contact OUR IT department to have the senders of every E-mail they receive added to some OTHER whitelist, one at a time. Seriously.

The stupidity level at Microsoft today isn't funny. It's sickening. It's also offensive, wasting paying customers' time to the tune of thousands of man-hours daily (and that's probably just at my company).

But Microsoft can't even handle its own whitelist... and floats offensively absurd excuses for their incompetence.

Is what?

Recently? They've been shipping absolute trash for 15 years, and still haven't reached the bottom apparently.

Billing for what?

And, most of all, HIGHER BITRATE.

Not to mention that we don't even get GOOD 1080p at streamers' current bitrates, let alone "4K." Any talk of 8K is an absurd joke.

Swift is OK, but with the introduction of SwiftUI, we see some hypocrisy.

We were all told to "prefer structs" over classes in Swift, but structs are always passed by value.

We're also told to maintain "one source of truth" (which I'm sure a lot of us did anyway). But you can't do that when you're copying stuff all over the place.

So now what? I got so sick of trying to figure out how to pass structs into views for modification by the user that I made everything a class. What a relief. Now I could get back to work on functionality instead of constructing absurd gymnastics to get altered data back from a view.

I find the whole "structs are passed by value, classes by reference" thing hokey as hell and poor style. People reading the code don't know if the called function can change the passed-in object or not; they have to go see if it's a class or a struct. Lame.

Thanks. I should get around to just remapping it. I've had to replace my original remote, and the new one still has the Netflix button.

From what I've seen in forums where people asked this, the answer is: nothing.

I only have two devices providing material to my media system: a Shield Pro and a Blu-Ray player. The Shield is the critical element, used daily for streaming and playing local media from a USB-connected SSD.

I hope Nvidia revises the Shield with up-to-date hardware and maintains its flexible nature. It's a pretty cool product. The biggest shortcomings I've encountered are the fault of moronic media companies. Great example: Spectrum (the cable company). These dolts have an Android application with which subscribers can watch content. But it doesn't run on Android TVs. It's called "Spectrum TV." It's so gallingly stupid that I hate rewarding them with money every month.

Oh, and I love how they addressed the goddamned Netflix button. If you so much as LOOK at the remote, Netflix launches in the middle of whatever you're watching. I actually removed the button from the remote entirely.

Except apparently they can't. I'm in L.A., a city where resources presumably represent what's available in modern cities, and the first thing I've been asked in any 911 call is "what's your location?"

This is particularly offensive considering that everyone was forced to replace his phone in the early 2000s to comply with "E-911." Verizon refused to let me activate a StarTAC I bought to replace my original, months before this mandate actually took effect.

Looking back on it, it was a perfect scam: Congress got paid off to throw a huge bone to everyone except the consumers. We were all forced to buy new phones, and for millions of people that meant renewing service contracts. Telcos win. Phone manufacturers win. Consumers lose.

Are you counting flight 191, a DC-10?

It's a shitty descendant of another shitty plane: the DC-10.

Yeah, same. But it can be tough for people with full-tine jobs to conform to mom-&-pop store hours.

Good luck even finding Liquid Wrench now.

Home Depot is such a wasteland. One shit brand of every product, and that's it. Row upon row of worthless, crumbly Dap wood filler, for example.

I went there and asked three employees, probably separated in age by a decade each, for household oil. It's as if they didn't even understand the words. We're talking about 20- to 40- or 50-year-old HD employees who don't know WTF 3-in-1 oil is. Incredible.

Who cares about WD-40? Evap-O-Rust is a much better product and more worthy of formula analysis.

What an absolute crock. Rittenhouse traveled across state lines to shoot people, not protest; and he was not "attacked by a mob." He was attacked by a couple of people AFTER he murdered others.

And gee... he's notably absent from Minneapolis. Why is he not "defending" people from tyranny now? Because he's a coward who only goes on field trips to shoot unarmed people.

Only if they're regular citizens. Somehow masked federal thugs don't get shot; somehow the 2nd Amendment gun-humpers who so opposed federal tyranny have disappeared.

Didn't they start chirping and alert the thief?

The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.

They were not doing skeuomorphism. They were using simple visual clues, like "bevels" on buttons, to convey the existence of a control and its state. They weren't disguising controls as "paint" on "felt" on a gaming table, as Apple Game Center did at the peak of their cheesiness.

The overreaction known as "flat" design (AKA no design) has fortunately started to recede. Still... some derelict "designers" are still deliver Advent calendars instead of usable applications.

Nonsense. And 98 was even better.

This was back when you'd hook up a new printer or other device to a Windows computer, and it would detect it and prompt you for a driver disk. During that same era (and well past it, into the 2000s) if you plugged something into a Mac... nothing would happen. You had to go hunt down a driver for it and initiate the installation process yourself.

How times have changed.

Improvements? Windows has suffered an ever-accelerating slide into the toilet, starting with Vista.

Yeah, the regressions in Mac OS are particularly ill-timed and infuriating because there is no real competition now. I consider Windows unusable. It's not even worth talking about anymore; and I was a big Windows fan (and developer) into the 2000s. Now I don't have a single instance of Windows running in my house.

If Apple's slide continues, computing will recede back to its hobbyist/academic roots, I guess.

Fair or not, we could lump in application regressions that came along with Tahoe.

One glaring example is Music, where the playback controls were moved from the top of the window (which is now empty space) to a "transparent" panel that overlaps the content in the browser. I mean... WTF.

Downvoted by... Node shills? WTH?

Yeah, I'm sick of endless JavaScript libraries that assume that everyone and everything has Node installed.

Pff, Apple can't even keep your contacts intact if you go abroad.

I traveled to Australia and got a local SIM. Suddenly every incoming call was from an unknown caller, even though every one was in my address book. Apple is too stupid to handle international calling in the 2020s. I mean... WTF?

Then again, this is the same company that "helpfully" changes all your calendar appointment times when you travel to a different time zone... with NO WAY TO PREVENT IT. So if you go east, you're going to miss any events you set up in advance... including flights home.

Thanks for the anecdote backing up my longstanding suspicion on that.

This is also why using E-mail addresses as user IDs is monumentally stupid: People will think that they need to use their E-mail password, too. So now any entity with this ID policy becomes a gatekeeper not only to their own site or service, but the user's E-mail account.

One poor security regime or disgruntled employee at one obscure Web site can now enable identity theft on a grand scale, by exposing E-mail addresses and passwords.

There's a reason that banks and brokerages don't employ this ignorant policy. It's disappointing that Apple set such a poor example by implementing it. Then they had to run around trying to mitigate the harm with 2FA and other measures, after high-profile "hacking" attacks on journalists and celebs.

I took an XML class as it neared its heyday, and even the teacher was rolling his eyes at the inclusion of namespaces.

Amateur hour.

He also mentions namespaces as a plus, so credibility is pretty low.