So today I bought myself a CAT5e Crossover patch cable - thinking it would be an easy thing to just link my laptop to my beige box 'puter from time to time. Easy thing? Oh no. That's not allowed. I just get a 'limited or no connectivity' message - and trying to puzzle out what I had imagined would be the proverbial piece of piss is in fact a bewildering load of gibberish. IP addresses? what? why? Why can't I just plug it in and the computer go 'oh you've plugged something in - what would you like me to do with this?' Like it does with USB things. Nah.
After trying to wade through all of this: I'm still no wiser.
In the world of computing I've noticed a few things. Techy computery people seem determined to keep things unnecessarily difficult and awkward for no very readily apparent reason. (I suspect a deep seated need to affect revenge upon the world.) Secondly - they can't write an coherent sentence for toffee. Hell, those help pages I've linked to have been translated from German. I haven't a hope in hell. *sigh*
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Oh and before any Mac Zealot pipes up with their standard (braindead) 'get a mac' reply. The simple fact is macs are way too expensive - I can't afford one not even a mini mac - if you think I need one so desperately. Then either buy me one or just shut up. End of story.
4 comments:
Get a second hand mac!
Mine's seven years old now and runs all the up to date stuff. Talks to my PC over Ethernet fine too, though the PC's a bit reticent to talk back.
*eyeroll*
So, the thing with techie-computerie people is they tend to be in it for the geeky bits. The elegance of the algorithm, etc.
But it's the user interface that's important these days. The thing about the user interface is that making it right is really hard. It involves thinking like a human and not like a computer, then translating. Waaay more difficult than simply making an efficient network transport protocol or something.
Really, it's a whole separate discipline. Not that I'm defending MS.
What happened is, they had the geeks to make the underlying structure work. But they never passed it to the UI dept. Letting the engineers do the UI is always a bad idea.
Sorry, couldn't resist it.
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