The computing stuff rant thread

[barakta]

Indeed.

Sadly BlackBoard is also horrific. At Leeds ~2016 it looked like something from 1997.

Canvas which my former employer procured (dodgily) has its faults but turns out to be one of the least-worst of the options... And to be fair a lot of the accessfails did get blatted out of it...

Why o Why can't someone design a VLE that is NOT SHIT!

[hellymedic]

I wanted to read a blog.
The blog was on Linked In.
Linked In required me to update my browser.
Apple required an OS update to update Safari.
Downloading Big Sur took HOW LONG?
Installing Big Sur took HOW LONG?
I became a progress bar zombie.

It took me over two hours just to read a blog, consisting only of formatted text.

Blogs on Linked In are the fucking pits!

[Jaded]

Linked-in is the pits.

[Kim]

It still makes marginally more sense the Pinterest, in that a way of presenting sanitised profiles to prospective employers is at least marginally useful, whereas something whose only discernible function is to pollute search engine results is completely inexplicable.

[hellymedic]

Linked-in is the pits.

Agreed but this was an important medical blog I really wanted to see and could not access otherwise.

[ian]

It still makes marginally more sense the Pinterest, in that a way of presenting sanitised profiles to prospective employers is at least marginally useful, whereas something whose only discernible function is to pollute search engine results is completely inexplicable.

It was useful for me. Do you have a CV? Rummages, finds one from 2004. No, look on LinkedIn.

Other than that, it's a bit of a UX mess, beyond the profiles, god knows what it's supposed to do.

[Jaded]

It sends me emails saying "Congratulate Xxxx on their Work Anniversary!"

I go to look and see I am celebrating a work anniversary for a company they left 7 years ago.

[ian]

I get those, but it's the wrong date that I've never bothered to correct, which means everyone else congratulates me on the wrong date because they get the same reminder. I've somehow managed to live with this.

Other than that, it seems a mess of blog-type posts, I guess simply hosting and linking profiles wasn't enough, they wanted more zing. It's not zingy enough for me.

[Pingu]

Hello Mrs Pingu,

We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service. Please take a moment to answer one simple question below:

How would you rate the support you received?

Good, I'm satisfied

Bad, I'm unsatisfied

Here's a reminder of what your ticket was about:

That was it. The retailer thinks the ticket was about nothing. How should this 'support' be rated I wonder?

[Mr Larrington]

Do they give you any option to provide further details in coruscating prose, or interpretive dance?

[Pingu]

Sadly not given the world-wide fame of my interpretive dance routines.

[Kim]

How should this 'support' be rated I wonder?

Null stars.

[Pingu]

How should this 'support' be rated I wonder?

Null stars.

Not one of the options, but I did say 'should'.

[SoreTween]

How the fuck is it that grabbing a file off the desktop and dropping it into an open explorer window at C:\temp\here is slower than:

Code: [Select]

<Win>+r
cmd<enter>
cd Desk<tab><enter>
move file162<tab> C:\temp\here<enter>
exit<enter>
I am not a fast typist.  Ok I'm not a slow typist either but really, I'm nowhere near software engineer fast.  The latter takes about 15 seconds of which 99.999% is me, the file move is instantaneous (on a human scale).  Drag and drop takes about 20 seconds. For Fuck Sake microshit how?  How can you make a simple file movement take so long? Stop wasting time drawing a progress dialog, calculating the remaining time, animating the progress etc and just fucking do it!
(Core i5 a couple of years old and SSD.  The file was 122Kb)

[Pickled Onion]

Maybe there’s a separate thread for the Internet of Shit but …

My new washing machine* supposedly connects to the *internal* WiFi so that it can tell me it’s done if I’m out of range of the annoying beeping. Such as in the garden. Well it’s just done exactly that but I’m on a mountain in Romania and my washing machine definitely isn’t. Ignoring the fact that such behaviour is inherently useless,

(a) How did it do that? Is it phoning home for every action?
(b) How do I tell it to get the fuck off the internet before someone hacks in and sets my house on fire for a laugh?




* Miele, as recommended by denizens OTP. Don’t get me started on the clunkiness of the setup or the app that was written by a five year old and has bugs that make it virtually useless. For eg your washing will be ready in <object=“fix” text=“{0}”> minutes

[Kim]

(a) How did it do that? Is it phoning home for every action?

Sounds like it.  Locating and communicating with other devices on a random LAN is a relatively hard problem, and may be impossible if are multiple TCP/IP subnets or WiFi client isolation.  Much easier to make something that works (for now) by phoning home.

(b) How do I tell it to get the fuck off the internet before someone hacks in and sets my house on fire for a laugh?

Separate VLAN for internet-of-shit devices with no routing to the internet.  It's the only way to be sure.

[grams]

If you were in the garden out of wi-fi range but within cell range, I bet there'd be people complaining they didn't get a ping.

The other thing is the Apple and Android notification systems are centralised. Most* "app" notifications you see on your phone are being put there not by the app running on your phone but by the app owner's server sending them to Apple or Google which forwards them to your phone. Your phone has a connection open to its maker 24/7 which means it can always receive them.

(* on Apple at least where the "local notification" system is flakey and weird and barely used. Android I think is more variable)

[Clare]

Dear Clare
Yes that is fine, I will order a new laptop for you.  The Managed Service team will email you shortly to arrange a time for collection of the new machine.  They will also ask you to return the loan machine at the same time, so please make sure that you have backup copies of any data that may be saved on it (the email will give you instructions on which folders to check etc).

Well, that went better than I expected.

[Kim]

The other thing is the Apple and Android notification systems are centralised. Most* "app" notifications you see on your phone are being put there not by the app running on your phone but by the app owner's server sending them to Apple or Google which forwards them to your phone. Your phone has a connection open to its maker 24/7 which means it can always receive them.

(* on Apple at least where the "local notification" system is flakey and weird and barely used. Android I think is more variable)

That sounds like a weird Apple thing, and a frankly ridiculous design decision - connectivity is never 24/7, even in Cupertino, USAnia.

I'm reasonably sure that Android notifications are local ("You have a calendar appointment", "Could not connect to server", "Playing Queen's Greatest Hits" sort of thing all work fine without any network connectivity), though notifications frequently result from an app phoning home to determine that there's something worth generating a notification about ("You have mail", "Someone is better at PE than you on Strava", "Tornado warning!", "Buy $product").

[Pingu]

Some FLACs in the muzak collection have been split across two albums and I can't see why  The album, artist and album artist tags are all the same.

[grams]

though notifications frequently result from an app phoning home to determine that there's something worth generating a notification about ("You have mail", "Someone is better at PE than you on Strava", "Tornado warning!", "Buy $product").

I believe even on Android notifications like these are typically generated by the app maker’s server, even in cases where they conceivably could be produced by the local app.

(Mail is the exception if the phone is doing the pop/imap itself)

[Kim]

Ah, that's probably what that Google Cloud Messaging thing is for.  I assumed they'd renamed the SMS/IM app again.  I didn't realise it was in widespread use where there's a perfectly good app that could generate a notification locally, rather than whatever webby stuff it's presumably intended for.

(Admittedly, my app use tends towards the old-school and/or open-source, where such things tend to be eschewed by the developers.)

[geraldc]

Stylii & Pens

Fancy new laptop, works with a stylus pen magnetically attaches to the side. Stylus/pen does not get touched for months. Decide that you need to use it to add details to a photo. Can not find pen.

This is not solely limited to microsoft, my street's whatsapp group has had a flurry of lost only to be found again, or incorrect Apple pencil purchases up for sale.

[Mr Larrington]

Some FLACs in the muzak collection have been split across two albums and I can't see why  The album, artist and album artist tags are all the same.

Some brain-damaged third-party software that thinks J Random Database on the intertubes knows better than you?  Plex insisted that a Robyn Hitchcock album yclept “Oscar” didn’t exist and therefore all the tracks on it should be appended to the “Luxor” album instead.  Even iTunes isn’t that dim…

[Jaded]

Ah. shiTunes is doing that to an album I have. Three separate albums for one. The tracks, i have ascertained, ar e credited to different artists. (Its a collaboration).

I shall have to tour the interweb to find a solution, or just put up with the tracks being played in the wrong order, and only if I select all three “albums” before playing.

Actually it isn't shiTunes any more - they split out all the functionality and hid it in other apps.