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I am surprised how long the discussion went on before "English is tough stuff" was brought up!
For more than thirty years, I have been handing out this poem to numerous native English speaker, and most of them end up laughing too much to complete the reading of it.
I have also met a few who read it without any stumbling at all over spellings and pronounciation. Those are the people who didn't learn the letters in grade school: From day one, they learned to read words, as single symbols, almost like Chinese pictograms. Each word identifies a given concept, and the name of that concept has a certain pronounciation, irrespective of the individual pen strokes making up the word. Not until much later will the kids learn to break the word symbol into separate components (letters), to enable them to 'decode' unknown word symbols they might encounter, and to understand how to create a composite word symbol for a concept you know the name of, but haven't learned the word symbol for.
Obviously, first grade kids are not introduced to 'concepts' (i.e. the concept of a concept) as such: that is an just academic way of desribing the idea behind. I must admit that I am somewhat fascinated by the idea: Even though a 'concept' is far more abstract than the physical pen strokes, the kid knows very well the concept of, say, an 'apple'.
Mapping the 'apple' concept to some (language dependent) pronounced name is an abstraction that the kid usually can handle. Then we break up that sound into another, rather unrelated, concept of small pieces called 'letters' having no direct connection to the apple concept - that is non-trivial! And then these letter concepts are mapped to a graphical representation which is quite independent of the letter concept: The concept of an 'A' can be represented as 'A' or 'a' (in any of ten thousand typefaces), or as the bit pattern 01000001 or 01100001, or as .- (morse), or as the upper left dot in a 2 by 3 matrix (braille)... For a kid to learn to write, the graphical A or a must be further broken sown into separate strokes, and then the kid must learn the fine motor skills to hold a pencil/pen and form these strokes.
Learning the word symbol for the concept is a much simpler task! Note that most schools teaching reading by word symbols rather than by letters also hold back the writing till after the kids are reasonably familiar with the word symbols. Usually, they start breaking composite words into individual simple words, such as 'grandmother' is composed of 'grand' and 'mother'. When the kids have been playing with breaking up composite words for a while, they go further by looking for some correlation between sounds (phonemes) and the letters making up the word symbol. Only after that will they start drawing word symbols made up of a few letter symbols (like drawing a man from head, torso and limbs), where the only new element is the fine motoric skill - everything else is familiar.
People who learn reading that way have much less problems reading Tough Stuff without problems.
(A side note: They also tend to learn foreign languages more easily, because their brain has been trained from day one to see the abstract concept of an 'apple' as the fundamental element, whether it is represented by the word 'apple' in English, 'eple' in Norwegian or 'pomme' in French. Different language word symbols are not that much more than upper/lower case differences or Arial vs. gothic letters differences.)
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I run a website called "NJTheater.com", and I'm constantly have the remind those artsy-fartsy actors that it's not NJTHeatre.com, "because this is AMERICA, DAMMIT!"
Truth,
James
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My brother-in-law is an English teacher at a local university here in Kuala Lumpur. He has to know the names of every structure in the language and I have difficulty understanding what he is talking about when he discusses them.
It seems far too technical and I feel very sorry for his students whose natural language is either Malay or Chinese.
And, guess what, the biggest sticking point is differentiating between British English and American English.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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What the heck is "Salesforce" .
The definitions I'm seeing are quite a murky mix.
Is it like Azure/AWS? It is like SAP? It's just a CRM Application?
OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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I think it is a CRM software written in Classic ASP.
___ ___ ___
|__ |_| |\ | | |_| \ /
__| | | | \| |__| | | /
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+On Cloud + lots of bloatApps on top
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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It is a CRM application but it is also a platform. In other words, if you wanted a web app that has forms then SalesForce can make that very easy to do, without having to know how to code. It has workflows built-in and many, many other features. It's actually pretty awesome.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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The original "Salesforce" was a customer relations management application. As they have grown, they have expanded now into Platform As A Service for building application / services to meet your own specific needs.
You could have of course just gone to their website and done some research!
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DaveAuld wrote: You could have of course just gone to their website and done some research!
But Lounge makes it lot easier . lol I got the picture a bit, but I wanted to register the fact here - "The definition of salesforce sounds very polymorphic" as I did my little research.
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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SalesForce is anther one of those apps that is supposed to turn normal (work cheap) employees into "programmers", thus allowing you to fire all of your real programmers (don't work cheap) until you realize that the product is indeed snake oil.
On the other hand, thank your stars that you don't have to use QlikView...
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
modified 26-Jul-16 11:40am.
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Sounds like SAP stuff!
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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Vunic wrote: OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
No. SalesForce is an amazing CRM, completely customizable in its database, UI's, table relationships, workflows, etc. The website is fast and responsive. I'm duly impressed with it, and frankly, some of their UI elements are outstanding.
That said, it's complicated, hard to understand, requires thousands of dollars of training if you want to do anything intelligent with it, and the web (and their web help) is polluted with answers that apply only to previous incarnations of their product, making it useless for the current product, where screens and buttons and behaviors no longer match.
Reporting is based on what they think you want, which usually (and I imagine correctly) assumes that you are doing table join queries to get the specific data you want. That's great, but if you want a dump of just all your contacts, it's a sub-level report at the bottom of a huge list of report choices.
Import wizard makes you think it's smart, but it's actually the dumbest piece of what I think is an amazing product. Get your header in your Excel document to exactly match your table field names, otherwise you're endlessly mapping columns, only to discover the import failed because of some data type mismatch, and it's so brain dead, it can't even remove the $ and , from currency and numbers, and the error reporting is so lame you're often wondering why it failed. For a non-programmer, that can at least guess "well, maybe it's barfing importing this number because it's a comma-delimited string field in Excel", one can usually figure out the problem, but for a non-programmer, oh my.
Such has been my limited experience.
Marc
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Thanks for the detailed Reply Marc! The definitions for "salesforce" always sounded blurred, now it feels a lot better
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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Marc Clifton wrote:
It is amazing and it sucks
FTFY
Elephant elephant elephant, sunshine sunshine sunshine
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If you use the Apex data loader, free from salesforce, you can automate the imports from the command line. You just need to be sure to watch password expiration if the process is automated.
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It's funny you should ask that question, because every time I see an article about "Salesforce" I automatically think it is a recruitment company.
They could do with a bit of rebranding IMO.
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Salesforce, Sharepoint, Willy Wonka Chocolate factory. All very well contrived fantasies to allure you to a 'one size fits all' idea of software. Who on earth wants to learn YOUR platform when you could just learn how to program.
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I have to step on this post a bit.
We wrote a successful app for our company that really streamlined business process flows.
We grew, but it lacked lots of things, like a web interface that people could use from anywhere.
They migrated over to salesforce.com, and with some stumbling, figured it out. The company has a product they sell, and now uses salesforce.com for managing sales/contacts, etc. They have 1 programmer nowadays as the product is in maintenance mode until it dies a slow death as companies using it go out of business...
But salesforce.com was there, and is there. it works. And from a business standpoint, I would rather change my non-critical business processes to match existing (written and debugged) software to leverage that than to risk writing it from scratch.
I bet you could write a word processor, too... But why would you?
The ONLY time to write your own home grown software is when there is no software that allows you to encapsulate your business specific advantages (Special Sauce, as we call it). If you lose that, then you lose a competitive edge... Then you need either a different solution, or a different way to keep the Special Sauce alive. (We are currently bolting on a Special Sauce piece for a client who is moving the operations to a similar product. They cannot afford to maintain 40 year old Cobol code, or to rewrite it. Nor does anything have the Special Sauce. So, they will use the off the shelf product, and bolt on the Special Sauce).
Now, this is where Saleforce.com and similar models can be amazing. They let you customize their datastructures and screens. We can literally add to their system, the data we need, add a BUNCH of screens to make it operable, and have a consistent system that the reporting system works on.
This, to me, is where the industry will go. Your data will be in the cloud, your access will be everywhere, your customizations will be available, and your ability to expand will grow, without growing your IT staff by nearly the same amount. Fewer programmers, and more business analysts.
To compensate for the shortage of programmers, and also the loss of the good ones over time.
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Note: this is not meant to be a "rant" ... more of a "case study" ... and I'm interested in how you react to this. I deeply appreciate the countless hours of effort that creators of open-source software (and, of course, the incredible variety of useful content that sites like CP host/nurture) !
Case in point, I posted an issue on the HandBrake (written with .NET) GitHub site about how the app is unusable on a 1360x768 screen (with some font "enlargement" enabled because of my vision problems). I noticed other similar issues reported there.
The issue was promptly closed with this reply by (I assume a principal) dev [quotes from my issue post in italics]:Quote: As a .NET programmer, I wonder how it's possible_ to create a Window that behaves like this.
It's not quite as trivial as you might expect, especially when you have multiple dynamically sized regions that need to both up and downscale correctly.
It's not hard, it's just tedious to get it working correctly in all situations.
1366x768 should actually be fine, but only if you run at 100% or 96dpi which I'm guessing your not.
At the end of the day, we have so few people using HandBrake on low-end hardware that it doesn't warrent me diverting any time to tweak the UI to downscale better. I already have a huge list of stuff to do that would come in front.
I suggest you put a clear message on the download page on the HB site suggesting you do not use HandBrake if, in fact, there is a requirement to have a screen res > 1366,768
Then we'd have to mention 100 other things, at which point it's no longer clear. The new documentation when it comes online in the near future will have a recommended system requirements page that details all the in's and outs but I doubt most people will bother reading it.
If I or anyone else ever gets around to replacing our installer with something more flexible, some of this can be checked before the app installs. Too bad that such an excellent app (implements HEVC H.265 encoding) is encumbered with such a problem.
Of course, one can take the attitude that free software, and the generous people who implement it, should never be criticized. In my experience, the "attitude" shown in this reply to an issue is not typical of open-source software !
I wonder if it would be in "bad taste" to post a response to the person who replied to me at HandBrake with a link to an answer to a QA question I wrote today on this very topic: [^] ?
cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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I don't think (s)he is displaying 'attitude' in that reply, I think it's quite polite and detailed. They've taken time to acknowledge your problem, to explain that they understand the underlying causes and to set out how it could all be addressed, but because yours is an edge case they don't have enough resources.
It's open source though, so if you know how to fix it you could do so and help others in your situation.
Regards
Nelviticus
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Well, if I were the first person to ever report this problem, and it was unique to my hardware/software context, I wouldn't have any problems with the response.
But, the problem has been frequently reported, and they continue to allow new users to download their app, and find they can't use it because of screen-resize/resolution issues, and waste their time posting new issues on the GitHub site.
That I call negligence. If I were involved in this software project, I would be busy putting a simple notice up on the download page advising potential users that the software required a certain minimum resolution screen-setting to function properly. And, I would be apologizing profusely to someone who had just made me aware that there have been multiple instances of the problem reported; I would not be rather sarcastically expressing my indifference to users.
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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I read no "attitude" or sarcasm in the dev's reply. The telling point is:
"At the end of the day, we have so few people using HandBrake on low-end hardware that it doesn't warrent me diverting any time to tweak the UI to downscale better. I already have a huge list of stuff to do that would come in front."
If anything, the dev sounded tired.
Your problem is not high on their list of priorities. Sure, the resolution problem may have been reported 20 times ... but it affects a small subset of the users. I expect they have defects that affect the majority of the users, and the needs of the many come first.
BillWoodruff wrote: That I call negligence. If I were involved in this software project, I would be busy putting a simple notice up on the download page advising potential users that the software required a certain minimum resolution screen-setting to function properly. And, I would be apologizing profusely to someone who had just made me aware that there have been multiple instances of the problem reported; I would not be rather sarcastically expressing my indifference to users.
Ok. Get involved. If it bothers you that much, contribute to the project and fix it.
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BryanFazekas wrote: Ok. Get involved. If it bothers you that much, contribute to the project and fix it.
This. It's how open source works. If you care enough about something, add it/fix it yourself. Otherwise you don't care enough. That might sound harsh, but it's also the harsh reality that people working in their free time only have so many resources, and have their own personal interests.
If you - someone who needs the fix - don't care enough to at least try and fix it, why should someone else, who has no need of that feature and has 100 other bugs to take care of? It's not because of attitude, but because the day only has 24 hours and you are one of a large number of users - all of whom think their personal needs are more important than some other random feature they will never use, and all of whom are lobbying the poor devs
So the devs have to make decisions and determine priorities. In an ideal world, every good idea would make it into the software, and every issue would be fixed. In the real world, a more pragmatic approach is needed that weighs up the benefits and effort to determine which things make it onto the To-Do list.
You say yourself, you are a programmer. Surely, you have also had to make decisions of this nature: do I spend 2 weeks trying to track down and fix a weird esoteric bug that only 2 people have experienced, or do I add a much-requested feature that will improve the experience for the vast majority of users? You can't always do both.
That's not to say I don't sympathise with you! It's a crying shame that there is generally very little awareness about how to make software more accessible. I like to assume it's not a case of people not caring, but of simply not being aware that what many of us take for granted can be a real problem for other people. For example, a green/red traffic light status indicator might not be such a good choice for the colour blind. But if you're not colour blind, it's quite a challenge to realise this could be an issue without someone pointing it out to you.
So at the end of the day, I think this is less about you and a lack of understanding of your needs, and more about cost-benefit. It's simply not worth fixing the esoteric bug when there are far more users who have other pressing needs.
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Stephen McCafferty wrote: If you - someone who needs the fix - don't care enough to at least try and fix it, why should someone else I'm stunned that you can say such things without fainting from embarrassment.
"If you don't like the way the trains don't run on time, then why don't you fix it?"
The question that should be asked is: "If you can't handle this project, then why the *u** are you distracting us from the efforts of people who can?"
"Oh, it's free", is no excuse for bad work or bad customer relations, because the people who work on such projects really don't do it for the fabled "nothing". If they don't profit financially, they gain some other way.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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