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I've just installed the VOIP SDK from Ozeki and wondered if I had unwittingly just installed a virus since the installer was creating thousands and thousands of new files in the program's Documentation subfolder. To be more precise, when it finally finished, there are more than 14 thousand guid-named htm files alone! At first glance, it appears to be a really complete kit with examples and references, but then it should be for as much as it costs. I just need to work through an article I found here at CP to see if it's something that could change the world make some money. Oh joy...something new to learn... 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Actully, it may have been unexpected for you, but I'd be happy with that*.
* Depending on the quality of the content of the files, of oourse
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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15K pages, 3 API calls! 
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I've got a shredder, and I know how to use it!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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They made it so you can install it on a web server or VM not your desktop   
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I've had the blessing of having to use Word, lately -- Word 2013 & 2010, to be precise.
At home, I have Office 2003 on all my machines, primarily because of the #@$%&*^ Effluent Interface that they introduced with Word 2007 (which is unquestionably the biggest "It wasn't broken, so we fixed it!" in the history of computing), but also because they haven't fixed any bugs in the program since 2003, because they're too busy working on "GREAT NEW FEATURES!" that don't work well, to replace features that do.
Today was the absolute final straw.
Tables.
Tables in Word are bug-ridden nightmares to begin with -- for example, you have to do the WP equivalent of a hack to make them stay inside the text areas, and cell alignment is exactly the same as it has been since Word 2 (a joke) -- but the one thing in their favour was that, after you had spent countless hours to get a table to work properly, you could save it as a Style, letting you:
- insert a clone of it anywhere
- reformat other tables to be the same, just by clicking on them, then its entry in the Styles list
- export it to other documents and tables, with a few clicks of the mouse
But, rather than fix any of the bugs with tables, they've "fixed" yet another of the bits that worked well.
You've now got "quick tables", which are pretty much absolutely useless, compared to a style -- it's essentially a document that contains a bunch of tables that you can copy and paste the exact same tables out of.
There are still table styles, but they're now detached from the Styles list, because some absolute #@$%&*^ genius "fixed" that perfect functionality by making table styles a separate thing that you can only access through the Effluent Interface -- i.e. you click to get to a table style, and half your screen is covered with 180 #@$%&*^ useless styles that you don't want, will never use, and can't get rid of without a lot of pissing about.
You can't take your perfect table, where you took weeks getting around the bugs to make work perfectly, and make it a style, any more; you have to use a barely functional dialog to create the table style on the fly (and they've somehow managed to break the Table Properties dialog -- that always worked OK -- which you have to call from there).
But at least you get a table style out of it, that you can clickety apply to existing tables.
But you can't export the #@$%&*^ things to other templates and documents!
#@$% knows where they're stored, but it's not in the template, and not in the moronic "building blocks" file, so if you've got a suite of templates for a product, you have to spend forever and a day repeatedly creating table styles for each individual template!
Enough. BackOfCamel = Broken. I am soooooo sick of having to find workarounds, hacks, and fixes for all the things Mindlessoft has broken in the OS and their application software, over the last few years.
I was one of their biggest boosters, for over twenty years. Now I've really had enough of their cretinous "fixes" and "improvements".
The only thing they haven't completely screwed over is VS -- but that's only because it's what they themselves use, and not just force onto other people.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
modified 6-Apr-16 15:25pm.
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I too hate the 'Ribbon'. I hate the chunky PlaySchool style buttons. I have a mouse. I can click a single pixel with no problems. I don't need a 75x75px button to click on to do something...
Though I'm used to it now, so it's not as bad as it once was. I suppose it's sort of like the numbness you get after being poked in the eye a thousand times...
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But there are still two things to take into account, even when thinking of touch interfaces:
1: You know where a button is. If it's all the way to the right of the window, you move the cursor in that direction - but it's not there (often because of an automatic tab change)! So you have to move the cursor back to the left of the window to select the tab, then all the way to the right again, to click the button. This was not a problem, with toolbars,but it pisses me off many times every day, with the Effluent Interface.
2: The primary reason for the Effluent Interface is the "one windows"(sic) thing. That is, if you can't do it on a 3" mobile-phone/cellphone screen, then you can't be allowed to do it on a 36" monitor. What this rule fails to take into account is that people send SMS messages, using -- with their fingers -- buttons that are half the size of toolbar buttons.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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You don't have to use the icons on the ribbon. The old key shortcuts still work (even though you use Alt-<menu letter><menu option letter>despite the menu no longer being there).
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Kyle Moyer wrote: I can click a single pixel with no problems. I don't need a 75x75px button to click on to do something...
I also still have my first computer with a resolutions like 64 x 32 or 64 x 64 pixels 
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Mark_Wallace wrote: screwed over is VS -- but that's only because it's what they themselves use
Are you sure about that? And I could name a few screwed-up things in VS. Like when you're typing away and suddenly there's a dialog that essentially says, "This dialog will go away when the background task completes". Argh!!! WTF!!??!! If it's a background task, why're you in my face about it?
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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I'd bet a month of your income (not mine, of course) that if this was something that the NS developers encountered, it would be fixed Prio 1.
You're not an MS dev, so they don't give a assign it the same priority.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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That could very well be.
Another though that is sure to be encountered by everyone: Sometimes while debugging one likes to examine this or that variable and expand the value by hovering over it and clicking the right icon. Sometimes that expansion never completes and the debugger goes into lalaland. If you try to detach or otherwise recover from the state, the debugger gives a rather cryptic message about not being able to detach because "not all function whatchamacallits have completed". The only solution is to kill DevStudio. Very aggravating.
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Mark_Wallace wrote:
Tables in Word are bug-ridden nightmares to begin with...
I guess everyone has their take, but since I was introduced to Word tables 23 years ago, they've been the greatest thing since sliced bread. Solved countless problems as a result. Yeah, it's sad that when one or two things go (seamingly) wrong, it paints a negative picture for the whole lot.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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I'm not saying that tables aren't useful; just that bugs in MSO tables have remained unfixed since I've been using Word -- and Word 2 was my earliest version.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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There's always WordPad. Or Libre Orifice. 
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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When I'm at work, it's not my choice --and Word 2003 works fine, for me.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Agreed, the 2003 version of Office is superior compared to more recent releases.
It's a pity that nowadays working in Windows in general, feels like being stuck in the sewers and waiting for someone to flush, i.e. you never know when Microsoft's gonna hit you with another "improvement".
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Precisely.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Has it never occurred to you to, you know, just give up computers? Take yourself off to the Himalayas or a desert somewhere there's no electricity? You obviously hate everything everybody in computing does and all this bile can't be good for you.
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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I already live in a forest, in an area where cows and sheep outnumber people: without computers, I'd have to trade for a padded cell.
I just can't get behind the moronic "if it's broke, we won't fix it, but if it works, we will!" path that MS has been going down, for the past decade.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The best version of Word, as I saw it, was Word 6, which was around in 1996. Simple, and functioned well.
And then Word 7 came ... and things started going down, I feel.
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It is a tragic thing to outlive your fans.
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Was he your fan?
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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