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ultrabenos

Re:Don't use third party auth to sign in on Saturday November 14, 2020 @11:23AM (#25093238)
Off-topic, but legitimately purchased Kindle ebooks can still be quickly and easily liberated for the purposes of DRM-free personal backups of owned content. I won't comment on whether Amazon find this acceptable, or if it is legal in any given jurisdiction, but it is definitely possible.
I went around the office helping colleagues setup Zoom around mid-March before the UK went into "lockdown" and told people to work from home if at all possible, because it was obviously going to happen soon and the company wanted at least a stop-gap solution in place while everyone was still in the building with easy access to our IT team.

In my experience setting up accounts and installing the Windows software for 15+ people in one afternoon, I cannot believe what you're saying. Unless Zoom has gotten way easier to setup and use since March, it is a nightmare.

It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure was basically like this: 1) Enter email into website 2) Click link in email 3) Enter name and password 4) Invite others or skip 5) Click to start a meeting, which actually starts a download 6) Install software, meeting starts automatically 7) End meeting 8) Manually log in to Windows client despite it starting a meeting on your account immediately after installation

That is not easy or accessible to non-technical people at all, especially with how they hid certain buttons as really pale grey during the signup process. It was also a nightmare trying to oversee this process, and repeating it on each machine for those who got lost trying to do it themselves took ages due to waiting for emails, people deleting the email thinking it was spam, downloads not starting due to requests timing out, etc.

Then, a few weeks after we all started working from home, Zoom removed the automatic Company Contacts list and suddenly we could only contact colleagues through existing group chats. No warning, no explanation, not even a reference in the changelog or help pages on their website - rather, the help guides still said the feature was available and explained how to toggle it on or off. Everyone spent that morning adding all their colleagues as personal contacts by manually entering emails one-by-one and then accepting all the invites they received in return.

Zoom is useful once you get it working, but it is definitely not easy to get it working for non-technical people.

Re:Open Letter to the Linux Foundation on Saturday November 09, 2019 @03:13PM (#21494012)
> And ~50% of the American voting public chose him over Hillary, because it was a shit sandwich vs giant douche race, you can't reasonably suggest banning all those people from Linux conferences.

That is a very different situation to choosing to wear a MAGA hat. Choosing to wear a MAGA hat at a large event is a conscious decision to broadcast your endorsement of Trump's policies, ideology, and everything else. It means you want people to know you agree with Trump's stance on immigrants, women, and all the other shit.

Maybe such people still shouldn't be banned from a Linux conference, but they absolutely should be considered as racists and misogynists.

Re:Redesigning GitHub Repository Page on Friday March 01, 2019 @09:48AM (#19281072)
There's two main things I don't understand about the redesign and other comments here: what's wrong with nested tabs, and why is it confusing that "releases" is under "code"?

The latter makes sense because a release is basically just a snapshot of the code at a point that the developer(s) thinks it's in an acceptable state for users. Sure, it might reference Wiki pages or issues or contain binaries that aren't in the repo itself, but ultimately it's still directly related to code and at best only partially related to anything else.

As for nested tabs... how is that bad at all? Grouping related things together just makes sense. Maybe Github's current design isn't the best way to group them, but the concept of grouping itself is fine. Grouping related links together, assuming the links are grouped in an intuitive way, is far better than overloading users with a long line of different options. Maybe the current main tabs could be drop-down menus or something?

Also, as mentioned by some other people, I absolutely hate the current trend of making websites and apps be as plain white as possible. Separators, gradients, and soft colour backgrounds make it really easy to distinguish different content areas at a glance. The end result of this redesign is just a mash of text that looks like the CSS didn't load properly.

I'm also very surprised neither this redesign nor Github themselves have added a dark mode. Why do people enjoy staring at white screens for any length of time? I don't trust people who code with light themed environments.

I honestly don't know why anyone at the auction, who was interested in that piece, thought there would be no trick or strings attached, or why Sotheby's didn't suspect anything after investigating Banksy. The wiki excerpt shown by Google says "Banksy is an anonymous England-based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film director." It then goes on to call his works satirical and focused on dark humour.

Anyone willing to spend £1,000,000 on a piece of art by Banksy should know enough about him to imagine that he'd hate auctioning his work to the rich at an elite establishment like Sotheby's.

The first rule of Excel is to expect immense frustration.

Named ranges and tables can't be used as conditional formatting targets, Excel just converts them to absolute cell references right before your eyes. Even if you use INDIRECT.

Most formula errors result in #N/A, a generic error which never has anything remotely useful in the Excel help articles. You have to waste time searching keyword by keyword until you accidentally get the right combination to display relevant SO or obscure forum links from over 3 years ago.