Evolution

[Mornington Crescent]

This forum has been a favourite since the early days of pprune. Professional aviators are a friendly lot and in my experience like to help each other and indeed punters in distress.
However, the nature of the replies to cries for help seems to have changed over time. There are so many replies of an unhelpful or even smart arsed type.

So we get “try a Mac” when a chap has a problem with rebooting his PC. “You should use LINUX” and invective when Win7 gives a problem. – and of course “What do you expect” if you should dare to confess to using IE 7/8/9. There is an unhappiness with Microsoft expressed so when a question arises about Office (The chap has presumably paid good money to be compatible with his business and colleagues) The cry is “go to Open Office” or whatever it’s called these days.

I won’t patronise the “good guys” by naming them but thanks to them anyway.

Now I can’t wait to be told “If you don’t like it go elsewhere” so I shall don my low visibility flak jacket.

[mixture]

Mornington Crescent,

Wow. Hope you feel better with that rant off your chest.... :D

It must be said that I'm with you on the evangelists front, particularly the open source and/or free evangelists whose answer is that if it's not Linux, not Open Office, not free Anti-Virus .... then it's not any good. There's sufficiently wrong with their platforms (ranging from incompatibility upwards) for them to remember to perhaps keep schtum next time !

As for me, well, I know my replies on here are occasionally on the terse side. However they are always on the well intended side. The reason they might come across as harsh at times is that I'm still of working age, have a hectic schedule, and hence don't have much time to post here.

I also have far too much real-life experience of the IT and telecoms industries, both at home and in business, and so occasionally it seems fit for me to tell things as they are and to give a reality check as to what you should expect from anything from broadband providers to software developers.

You don't have to read my posts, I won't loose any sleep over it.

Oh, and I forgot to say.... If you don’t like it go elsewhere ! :E

[Ancient Observer]

....but we do NOT want mixture to go anywhere else as they/he/she are one of the good guys.
Stay here, please, and keep answering our daft questions. Be as terse as you like.

[Mike-Bracknell]

It happens everywhere i'm afraid.

A lot of the battle is being able to spot the "it works for me so it must be the only answer" brigade, which is especially tiring when you know the only way towards the correct answer is to ask further questions (which are then interspersed with these oh-so-helpful "do it this way" responses).

I don't let it worry me these days, as you know it's going to happen, so as long as the OP gets the most appropriate answer for their own needs i'm happy :ok:

[Saab Dastard]

There are so many replies of an unhelpful or even smart arsed type.

I have noticed this too, and I am removing unhelpful and "platform bashing / cheering" posts that add nothing to the thread.

Perhaps I was too lenient in the past.

SD

[bnt]

Well, I've been quite the Linux advocate over the years, but the new laptop I bought earlier this year came with Windows 7, and it's a major improvement over previous versions, in my opinion. It helps that it's a pretty powerful laptop (Core i5, 4GB RAM), of course, but the stability has been impressive. I have some applications that require Windows, so I give it at least another year before I wipe it.

[jimtherev]

There is, of course, the other approach. I was musing t'other day when throwing out ICL's PLAN coding sheets about how much simpler everything is when doing routine jobs. (The last ICL job, as I recall it, could now be done with a very few lines of code in an Excel spreadsheet.)

I'm now at the stage when, having used m/c code for the EE Mercury, various 80xx machines, various BASICS, ALGOL, COBOL, I really, really don't want to learn to speak Linux or Apple - the M$oft learning curve stretches back to Dos 3.1, and I'm happy to sit at the feet of MikeB, SD Mix and various others who are willing to give of their time.

I echo the sentiments of bnt: nearly 2 years of W7 plus Avast! and various other little bits, and only one BSOD - and that was due to faulty hardware.