The computing stuff rant thread

[Feanor]

Ha! Network printers FTW

Phone rings from London. "We've got several copies of this document printed out, did one of your staff print it?!"

"It seems to be quite confidential. It seems to contain the pay grades of all the staff. Should I post it on the notice board?"

[Mr Larrington]

There's a painful slice in my scrollwheel finger after being bitten by a fan during yesterday's UPS fettle.  Hoping the fan wasn't radioactive, lest this end in a crap superhero origin story.

Chortle!

[Kim]

Fangirl!  Fighting crime with her powers of wind, squee and irritating whining noises!

[CrinklyLion]

*snorts unattractively with laughter*

[David Martin]

{snip}
Have anyone ever tried to feed a printer successfully with paper that have gone through it once before, I think not!

Yeah, ooooooh ages* ago. The old DEC LN03 laser printers would happily print on the unused side of  previously used paper without jamming.  This was back before double-sided printing was a thing on small printers and when printer / photocopier paper was expensive enough to warrant doing this. It was a right bugger if you put the paper the wrong way up in the tray.



*30 years.

Yes, yesterday. With 200gsm paper. Not a hitch. Needed to print front and backs for some playing cards.

[Mr Larrington]

Backups keep failing because unspecified network error or glitch in the matrix or something.

Bah!

[Chris S]

Back in the early 2000s, I had to write a webapp. Layout was fucking torture - getting a side navbar to be 100% of the browser page height without random scroll-bars appearing was nigh on impossible.

Fast forward a decade, and guess what? Yes, I'm writing a webapp - this time with AngularJS and Bootstrap. I (rather naively) assumed it would now be a cinch to create a SPA which would dynamically occupy 100% of the browser space. Oh how wrong I was...

Random scroll bars? Yes! Main content shifted down by exactly the height of the banner row? YES! Content randomly disappearing when browser resized? HELL YES!

FFS! Well done, The Internet - progress in the last 10 years - zero.

[Kim]

FFS! Well done, The Internet - progress in the last 10 years - zero.

I don't think that's entirely fair.  I'm sure the modern browser's using far more CPU and RAM to fail to achieve the same thing.

[Greenbank]

Ha! Network printers FTW

Phone rings from London. "We've got several copies of this document printed out, did one of your staff print it?!"

We now have cloud printing in the office. No matter where you are you print to a single generic 'cloud' printer and nothing happens until you walk up to a printer (any printer anywhere in the company in however many different countries) and prod your ID badge against the reader, then your stuff prints.

Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.

[woollypigs]

Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.

Yeah, you can't come back from a liquid lunch and blame the return delay on a paper jam anymore

[David Martin]

Ha! Network printers FTW

Phone rings from London. "We've got several copies of this document printed out, did one of your staff print it?!"

We now have cloud printing in the office. No matter where you are you print to a single generic 'cloud' printer and nothing happens until you walk up to a printer (any printer anywhere in the company in however many different countries) and prod your ID badge against the reader, then your stuff prints.

Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.

And anything that takes more than a few minutes to print?

[SoreTween]

Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.

We have a not quite so advanced version of that system.  You still select a particular printer but the job doesn't emerge until you slap your badge on the doohickey.  Or rather the job doesn't emerge until you slap your badge, wait, slap again, wait.  Then wake up the screen which you know damn well has nothing to do with printing but you do it anyway.  Wait some more and slap again.  Get a cup of tea or go recycle the previous one.  Slap again.  Blaspheme.  Go back to desk & print again (I must have not hit the final 'yes get TF on with it button', silly me).  Return to printer, slap one more time and collect two copies.

[TheLurker]

We have a not quite so advanced version of that system.  You still select a particular printer but the job doesn't emerge until you slap your badge on the doohickey...

Ohh, we've got that system as well.  If it works it's good.  If...

[Pingu]

My access card refused to work so I was given a password for cloud printing. So when I forget my card I cannot access the toilets, but I can print stuff 

[woollypigs]

My access card refused to work so I was given a password for cloud printing. So when I forget my card I cannot access the toilets, but I can print stuff 

Well at least that is a handy thing to be able to do ...

[Mrs Pingu]

My access card refused to work so I was given a password for cloud printing. So when I forget my card I cannot access the toilets, but I can print stuff 

Just piss on the printer, that'll get you a new card.

[ian]

Oh this snarks me rotten. Riles up a fury of righteous indignation. A tempest of tetchiness. A tumult of testiness (stop - ed).

I like the way my Mac does things. The dictionary slinks along the background, the thesaurus roars, all at a little three finger tap of the touchpad. I double-click the top of an open window and the application quickly folds itself into the application icon on the toolbar. I press the full screen button and it muscles everything out of the way and makes it's own space. I can swoosh between desktops like that bloke in Minority Report. It's all rather spiffy. Autocorrect and user dictionaries follow me through every application.

But the bit that snarks, it's you, Microsoft and Adobe. Because you know better. Except you don't. You've got to have your own conventions, your own dictionaries, your own shortcut keys, your own UI paradigms, all just to make me say buggeryfuckingsnodlands sixteen times an hour when things don't do like they're supposed.

Fucking cheeseknuckles.

[SoreTween]

Microsoft can't even get their own UI conventions consistently applied in their own office suite on their own OS, you've no hope on a mac.  Adobe couldn't find their own arse with both hands and a map, noone has a chance anywhere ever.

[TheLurker]

The children at work do so laugh when Great Uncle Lurker tells them how much better things were when it was just VT-100s and everything was text.  But then Great Uncle Lurker sits and smiles quietly to himself thinking, "Told you so.", when the poor little dears are driven to tears of distraction or a paddy by unusable Fisher-Price interfaces with pretty colours and charming, if incomprehensible, pictures.

Now if you'll excuse me there are a couple of pleisosaurs in the pond that I really must deal with. They're worse than herons for taking the goldfish...

[Mr Larrington]

Microsoft can't even get their own UI conventions consistently applied in their own office suite on their own OS, you've no hope on a mac.  Adobe couldn't find their own arse with both hands and a map, noone has a chance anywhere ever.

The Mac versions of both Word and Excel predate Windows though.

[Jaded]

Indeed.

And MicroSloth have removed one of the best bits of the Excel interface. I may have ranted before about it but it deserves another one. You used to be able to put a '=' in a cell then click on whatever cells you wanted and it would put them in the formula with a '+'

Now it behaves in the Windows way and doesn't do that any more 

[Kim]

And MicroSloth have removed one of the best bits of the Excel interface. I may have ranted before about it but it deserves another one. You used to be able to put a '=' in a cell then click on whatever cells you wanted and it would put them in the formula with a '+'

I thought you were supposed to start every formula with =SUM()   

[Jaded]

Ha! Indeed.

[Mr Larrington]

Dear Creative,

Thank you for updating the software that Does Things with my sound card.  However, I had the default sound device set to the optical output on said sound card for a reason, viz. that is the hole out of which the sound travels on its way to the amplifier.  So there's no need to change it to something which ISN't connected to anything other than thin air, is there?  Just stop it.

[barakta]

Fucking Plusnet have deleted all the folders in my mum's email account. I'm stuck in a queue for their online support as there is no offline way I can deal with them. If they cannot/willnot restore data I will be calling the ICO on them. I searched online and found others had had similar and they weren't over the storage amount and did not receive warning. I have been waiting 7 mins and counting. I'm now 4th in the queue. The system doesn't really tell you what is going on for ages. User interface of fail. I'm hassling them on twitter in case that's faster...

Fucking keychain doesn't know when to STFU and fuck the fuck off. Mum changed her mac password, keychain (which I thought I had told to go away on config) shat errors everywhere which wouldn't cancel and she didn't seem to know right password for them. She ended up with eleventy windows ninging all over her screen. I managed to change the keychain password, poke the windows in enough persistence to make them ALL fuck off and sort it. But user interface fail.

Mother managed to sign herself up for Amazon Prime. She claims she thought it was like magic first class post so when it offered free next day delivery on an order she clicked on it. She says it didn't show her any info saying she would be charged £79 or what it was but just took money off her card... She moaned at her CC company who v kindly explained what Prime was and told her to moan at Amazon which she duly did, so it is cancelled... Parents should not be allowed on the internet *headdesk*...

The scanner driver is shit, it keeps timing out so I have to reboot to get it to give me a 'scan' option again. Need to RTFM better options. Also can I have two fucking trackpad buttons which aren't the same surface as the trackpad itself, I hate this no 2nd mouse click option without keyboard contortions. Oh and the keyboard itself is giving me visual stress