The computing stuff rant thread

[Oaky]

Microsoft - you bloody bunch of incompetents!

How did you manage to write a quite of programs (Office 13 in its Office365 guise) that share a common looking print dialog, but manage to make it so that one of them (Powerpoint) will silently   fail to print via said dialog whilst other programs in the suite succeed?

Powerpoint 2010 however, RUNNING ON THE SELF SAME LAPTOP, can print the same file fine.

Fuckwits!

[David Martin]

Uni network, what is going on? It is only penniless student oiks who get wednesday afternons off. A simple test of 'install.packages(rmarkdown) has taken nearly an hour and a half. Not acceptable.

[barakta]

Uni network... ... ...

[perpetual dan]

Laptop screen. Where did you find that green line? Please put it back where you found it.

[ian]

Powerpoint again. Every time I do a presentation I have to convert my stuff from Keynote to Powerpoint so the muddy masses aboard the mothership can steal my best slides and not give me any credit. Now the export sort-of-works-but-not-quite. Text doesn't agree with box sizes, that kind of thing, and for reasons unknown Powerpoint decides to use colours slightly different to the ones carefully selected from my palette.

It would all be easily (if tediously) fixable if Powerpoint wasn't such a hideous pile of shit. Seriously, nothing works. You have no idea how much this process makes me swear as I frantically try to select something. Click. Click. CLICK! Oh you fucking shit pile of fucking selection fucking tool, you donkey felching mother of a fucking bonobo etc. I probably shouldn't do this in the open plan office.

I'm would seriously build a Terminator and send it to kill everyone involved in the Powerpoint for Mac 2011 project (OK, the entire Office for Mac team) before they could squeeze out the steaming pile of software turds.

[ian]

Gah, fuckity fuck fuck.

[billplumtree]

ian, maybe you could book David Gaffney, master of miniature short stories, for a presentation?

http://www.davidgaffney.org/destroy-powerpoint.html

Destroy PowerPoint is a set of ultra-short stories about PowerPoint presentations, using PowerPoint technology to tell the tales. Through his unique, funny and profound stories of a complex corporate world, David demonstrates how PowerPoint dominates, destroys and pollutes workplace communication...

[Tim Hall]

Microsoft. I don't think the idea of updates is to comprehensively b0rk Outlook.

(kb3097877 refers)

[ian]

ian, maybe you could book David Gaffney, master of miniature short stories, for a presentation?

http://www.davidgaffney.org/destroy-powerpoint.html

Destroy PowerPoint is a set of ultra-short stories about PowerPoint presentations, using PowerPoint technology to tell the tales. Through his unique, funny and profound stories of a complex corporate world, David demonstrates how PowerPoint dominates, destroys and pollutes workplace communication...

Ironically my most stolen shared presentation is entitled Alice vs. Powerpoint.

[Afasoas]

Having tested Frankenserver's "Wake on LAN" option and finding that it just doesn't work because the network card is not powered whenever the machine suspended or shut down, I tried the "Wake on RTC*" BIOS option and that seemed to work.

So off I went and automated my backups. They've failed two nights running now with target host unavailable. Seems that Wake on RTC cannot be trusted.

I could use a Raspberry Pi with a relay to turn it on but I figure this is the last straw given that I can't boot it from USB and the network stack falls flat on it's face at anything over 100 MBit/s. Time to be hunting for another mother-freaking-board.


*Real Time Clock

[mcshroom]

The wonders of mixing CSV files and decimal commas

Usable data?  I'm sure our CE&I guys have heard of it once.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

TalkTalk

They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do.  At the end I have to choose between free gifts

weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream

I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do.  Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.

Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!     

[Pickled Onion]

TalkTalk

They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do.  At the end I have to choose between free gifts

weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream

I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do.  Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.

Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!   

err - are you 100% sure the survey came from Talk Talk? 

[Pickled Onion]

The wonders of mixing CSV files and decimal commas

Usable data?  I'm sure our CE&I guys have heard of it once.

Nothing wrong with that if it's done correctly. CSV can cope with commas in data, quotes and even line breaks within a field. Though it would have been far easier if the standard separator wasn't a comma, for eg. a character not in use other than computer keyboards.

[CrinklyLion]

TalkTalk

They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do.  At the end I have to choose between free gifts

weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream

I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do.  Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.

Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!   

err - are you 100% sure the survey came from Talk Talk? 

http://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Unlimited-Broadband/Online-survey/td-p/1604904

[Kim]

...and if you want to tell TalkTalk they're rubbish, you could always rate them by doing a speed test on thinkbroadband: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html


(I'm surprised they're averaging 3 stars, tbh.  I suppose some people only care about price.)

[David Martin]

Sony. Your latest update to my Xperia phone has surely been designed solely to get people to upgrade to a new phone. Unfortunately for most it will be Anything. But. A. Sony.

The perfectly usable email client has been replaced with something designed by eric, half brother of stan. It tells me I have new mail, but won't update the message list, telling me I have new mail but it will only show me mail until abut 6 hours ago.
And switching between email accounts doesn't. I presume some halfwit rewrote the sync code to resync the entire mailbox rather than just 'changes since X' and as my inboxes are of the order of tens of thousands of messages, it just freezes. Easier to just quit the app and reopen it to get it to sync properly.

Very frustrating. A  n   d          v     e     r     y                <insert tumbleweed>      s       l         o             w

[mcshroom]

Southern Railway have just "upgraded" their booking system. This means that now you get a slow, graphics heavy system that shows you a map of where you can go, but has far less information available to choose tickets, and now has nether the facility to put a bike reservation on the order, or request assistance should someone need it.

It worked fine as it was, why did they have to 'fix' it?

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

TalkTalk

They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do.  At the end I have to choose between free gifts

weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream

I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do.  Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.

Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!   

err - are you 100% sure the survey came from Talk Talk? 

I see where you are coming from.  I thought I saw where the survey was coming from but now you mention it..

[tiermat]

Microsoft "Dynamics" CRM. What a total crock of shit you are.

Combine the above with getting no help, whatever,  from those that have experience of do the install of same to suit the organisation you have the recipe for 4 days of frustration followed by half a day of uninstall and reinstall from scorched earth.

I have had zero fun at work this week!

[Feanor]

I am, for my sins, the Subject Matter Expert in a software house that writes highly specialised, high value software.
My job is to translate high-level Customer Requirements and Support into language that our developers ( who have no knowledge of the actual technical stuff our code does ) can understand.

I'm a Petrophysics <-> C# Translator.

We had a bug.
It crashed our software under certain conditions.

We fixed the bug.
It no longer crashes.

BUT... Projects that had been previously hit by the bug still failed even with the fixed version.
That's because the bug failed to write out critical stuff to the project, leaving the project corrupted.

Wail: "Can you fix that?, patchup the buggered projects?"
Me: "Soz, no. There's nothing to recover in the project file  The critical data is simply not there.  Re-load from source data and start again!"

No matter how many times and in how many ways, the answer does not change.
SORRY. The affected well must be removed from the project, and re-loaded.
I do appreciate it's a bit of an inconvenience, but I don't have a magic wand.
That's the problem with bugs; they are an embuggerance.

[Pickled Onion]

So updating to El Capitan has nobbled ripping DVDs, due to something to do with "System Integrity Protection"

Very poor show, and not something one expects from Apple. Jobs wouldn't have allowed this...

I have fixed it now, but not after assuming my old DVD rewriter was cream crackered. Expect to see it on the Free to a Good Home sometime soon 

[Mr Larrington]

Machine, I do not know why you suddenly decided that my system SSD suddenly had only 3GB of free space on it, especially as after a reboot you miraculously found another 40 GB down the back of the sofa.  Just don't do it again, you knobstrap.

[Mr Larrington]

Machine, since all USB devices connected to you are present and correct would you kindly stop already with the cryptic error message about "the last USB device connected".

"Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)"  O RLY?

"Unknown USB device (Configuration Descriptor Request Failed)"  If you don't know which one it is how do you expect me to find it, eh?  EH??

But let's see:  USB 3.0 hub and attached devices are working.  iPod plugged into USB 2.0 port round the back is working.  Bluetooth dongle plugged into USB 2.0 port on the front is working.  I therefore conclude that you are full of shit and should keep your worthless op!ons to yourself.

[Zipperhead]

Woo hoo, the MacBook Pro went back into the spare machine pile today. It may look pretty, but what use is a keyboard without a delete key? Or home, or end, or any of the other useful keys?

I know you can press some other magic key and another key (by guesswork since they don't seem to be marked with their other function) - but why press two keys to perform a simple operation - just so the machine looks pretty.