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If I were still living in North Chelmsford, I may have have contacted you. 
/ravi
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You might try a little more formatting in your ad, I personally felt a little disconcerted.
A good portion of your intended audience tend to be a little pedantic and will find the lack of periods and overall look as somewhat unprofessional.
Have a look at some of the other ads to see what I mean. If your potential applicants don't feel you've put in some amount of effort how are they to think your company is being run.
I mean this to be helpful, not to poke fun at your ad.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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OT: Every time I see that sunburst LP I turn green with envy. 
/ravi
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If your ever in the Twin Cities, you'll have to stop by and take her for a spin.
To be honest I got lucky when I got it for only 1K. The previous owner was an idiot kid who had abused it and didn't know what a nice guitar she actually is. It's a joy to play.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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These job looks like you want to touch at all MS technology, desktop, web, yada yada, how cool!
I just happened to be the man!
Bad luck though I have an other excellent job 10.000km away, sorry! 
But good luck hey, looks fun! 
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From the Requirements section:
B.S. degree in Computer Science
I've known a few devs with qualifications like that.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I second Monster.
Would you hire someone off of CraigsList? Didn't think so!
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A soccer mom just walked in to my PC shop saying she had deleted all the pictures from her phone and now wants them all back. I said, you deleted all your baby pictures, did you have a backup? Knowing full well no soccer mom backs up anything deliberately. She said she thought it was all on the cloud. I asked her just for illustration, "Where is the cloud". She shrugged.
That's just great you cloudies. Just great.
Yes we're going to try to un-delete them, but for cryin out loud, why give the innocent and the ignorant (one of the same) the false sense that there is some sort of white cloud looking over them?
Tornadoes are clouds too ya know.
Stupid Cloud.....
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Let's be honest here for a moment.
Your criticism is spot on but the fact of the matter is that even if she had them on her home computer they'd be doomed to die on a failing hard drive or, perhaps, backed up on a lost disk tucked away in the basement somewhere.
Had she managed to get them onto the "cloud" they'd be lost behind a forgotten password or a closed service a couple of years down the road.
I guess what I'm saying is the moment this woman went digital she was doomed to lose the pictures.
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Or we could stop treating users as sheep being led to the slaughter and (collectively, as an industry) work to make it so things like this are less likely to happen.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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I'm all in favour of that - but I suspect it'll never happen while there is money to be made from backup software (that they don't use after the first time), recovery software (that they try to use too late)...
Mind you, Google is impressing me with it's interface to my Nexus 7 - people and appointments and so forth get backed up automatically to my G+ account and I don't have to think about it. It's a start!
The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.
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It's not even limited to G+. On my phone it's syncing everything with Hotmail.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Abraham Lincoln
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Let me know how that works out for you.
User manuals, instructional videos, community college courses, forums, Google and the like all remain unused by this oblivious woman completely unaware of what she has in her hand or what she is even talking about when it comes to technology.
Unless of course you're talking about some sort of government mandated course with Inquisition style tortures for those who fail to take the class or don't succeed in passing the final exam. If you're proposing that I'm on board.
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I think what Chris is talking about is making it work right out of the box - so that if the handset is broken, lost, or the files are deleted, they have been already backed up without her attention.
Of course, this raises the media hackles and leads to "Google is stealing my pictures of my naked baby on a bearskin rug" type stories... 
The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.
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Doing the backup 'out of the box' doesn't solve the underlying problem.
If she doesn't understand the technology enough to know whether or not her photos are backed up then she doesn't understand it enough to retrieve the photos - has no clue about archiving, storage limits, or the terms of her storage. This clueless dingbat could have signed an agreement to upload the pictures to child porn sites - she wouldn't know either way.
Here is the deal: Technology takes an investment of time to understand and use.
You cannot build a device that will ensure the safety of someone who refuses to take the time to understand what they are using. If you don't have the time to learn then you don't need the technology despite what you've been brainwashed to believe. Don't blame the industry because salesmen talk people into buying crap they don't need.
How's that for a rant? 
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You're right, but...you're also wrong! 
Technology needs an investment to time to understand and use in it's early stages
Once it gets released to the "normal idiot user" it needs to be as "you-don't-need-to-know-this" as possible. Think about it: a modern car driver isn't expected to change a wheel, much less know when to advance the timing, oil the valve gear and change the carb jets to compensate for altitude. But cars and bikes demanded that knowledge in the early days (along with a good collection of spanners and a big hammer). The technology we work with, build, and maintain is reaching the point where it isn't ready for the users because the way we think about it gets in the way - we need to take the software equivalent of the spark timing and move it to electronic ignition, and replace the whole technology "engine" with a "black box" so users don't have to understand what is happening to use their devices safely.
That's my two cents worth!
The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.
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I think your analogy misses the point.
I understand what my car does for me even if I don't understand how it does it.
I also understand how to get my car to do what I expect it to do for me.
This woman treasures her pictures but has no clue as to whether or not her phone is backing them up and if they're backed up she has no idea as to where they're backed up. For the task she has chosen for her phone she has no concept if it's doing it or not.
She doesn't have to understand how her photos are backed up - but she should at least know if they are backed up.
She'll complain that her phone provider failed.
She'll complain that the phone failed.
She'll complain that the technician failed.
This same woman will go out and buy a $65,000 Lexus and wonder why she cannot pull water skis on the lake behind it. She's not connecting the dots between what she wants to accomplish and the technology she's using.
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OriginalGriff wrote: we need to take the software equivalent of the spark timing and move it to
electronic ignition, and replace the whole technology "engine" with a "black
box" so users don't have to understand what is happening to use their devices
safely.
Nice analogy - wrong of course but still nice.
You are equating the car to the phone\tablet while ignoring the complexity which means that one app on the phone is equivalent to the car. After all someone might be upset that their pictures disappeared but they are also going to be upset if all the money in their bank account disappears too. One phone - two completely different apps.
And it also ignores the rate of innovation. After all cars have been around for 100 years and electronic ignition for 50, but how long have cell phones with apps been around? How long has the cloud been around?
Not to mention of course that there were in fact people who drove cars in the early days who didn't know how to do minor repairs. And then they ended up stuck on the side of the road until someone came along, perhaps in a car or even a horse drawn wagon and got them to where they needed to be.
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MehGerbil wrote: User manuals, instructional videos, community college courses, forums
You're missing the point.
You said "Had she managed to get them onto the "cloud" they'd be lost behind a forgotten password or a closed service a couple of years down the road"
My point wasn't that we try and teach someone about how technology works. How many drivers know how an internal combustion engine works? Does that make them stupid or unqualified to drive? I'm suggesting we keep pushing to make technology the same: ensure data is automatically backed up to the cloud without even offering the option to not have it happen. Make it easy to restore from these backups, and if someone is unable to even do this, then make it easy enough thay most other people she knows will be able to do it for her if she hands over her device.
Sure - people forget passwords all the time, but secondary questions, fingerprint scanners, 2-factor authentication - all these are working towards making it easier to recover lost credentials.
I just don't believe in giving up on people. Not always.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: Or we could stop treating users as sheep being led to the slaughter and (collectively, as an industry) work to make it so things like this are less likely to happen.
That would the correct thing to do but no one is going to do it unless they can make a butt load of money off it.
I've got photos from when I was in diapers on paper and has lasted all these years (60+) and I've got a hard disk with 150GB of photos I've taken in the last few years and when I'm gone, or god forbid the backups fail, or technology no longer recognizes them they will be gone forever and my kids will have nothing.
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But then who are we supposed to laugh at...? 
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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Chris Maunder wrote: Or we could stop treating users as sheep being led to the slaughter and
(collectively, as an industry) work to make it so things like this are less
likely to happen.
How exactly does one do that?
Hopefully you have a general answer because it would be nice to be able to apply it to many things - for instance keeping people from sticking their hands into lawnmowers that are running.
Naturally it won't work if it isn't really, really cheap also. Because, for example, even though it possible to create a car which would practically eliminate all automobile deaths (but not pedestrian) it would be so expensive that it wouldn't sell.
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But all my pictures are in the cloud...because I have Dropbox set to sync all my pictures. Which turned out great when I had to replace my phone, no need to transfer them because I already had them all. People need to realize computers aren't magic though, you do have to configure these things...
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Well... on the other end of the spectrum... something happened to our VPN some time ago and our IT guy replaced the components providing the service and said, "there, fixed". Weeks later, and I still can't get onto our VPN  .
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