The computing stuff rant thread

[mrcharly-YHT]

Hmm, it's not barfing because you've used too many activations ( you just tell the robot it's installed on 1 machine when it asks ).

That doesn't work with office 2013 upwards. There is no option to tell it the installation is on one machine, the check is made when connecting to MS to activate the product.

[ian]

So basically, I have to defeat the robots to speak to a real person. Well, I suppose they finally defeated SkyNet. But that involve time machines and robots from the future.

Remember, this is to activate software I've legally purchased and am using within the licensing terms. Seriously, considering Microsoft's business model is based around regular computer upgrades, they never contemplated that Office customers might, you know, upgrade their computer? There's no option at any point that says 'I've got a new computer.'

All the Mac stuff just, you know, works. I don't have to type ludicrous strings of characters and digits. This is giving me flashbacks about The Quark Dongle. Shiver.

[mrcharly-YHT]

All the Mac stuff just, you know, works. I don't have to type ludicrous strings of characters and digits. This is giving me flashbacks about The Quark Dongle. Shiver.

effing iCloud doesn't 'just work'.

[ian]

It does here and for, I imagine, most users.

Anyway, I set up an iMac from scratch in not very much time (they've even paired the mouse and keyboard, ahhhh), other than transferring umpteen dozen GBs of media, the only bloody issue is Office 2011. My point is that it shouldn't be difficult. Having to type a 54 digit number is utterly ludicrous. More so when it's destined not to work. Microsoft really didn't get beyond 1995 did they?

I only use Office because it's still 99% compatible with files from my mothership Dell. I'd frankly dump it otherwise. I'm not moving to the latest version because it's subscription-based.

[Mr Larrington]

While the brace of Apple Airport Expresses now piping tunes to the remoter corners of Larrington Towers do indeed "just work" getting them to the state of grace required for zen-like just workingness required research on the Internets, bad language and frequent impersonations of Alice Morgan out of Luther, only with the business end of a mechanical pencil rather than a hat pin.

[Pickled Onion]

Put seriously, 54 digits is laughable (that's about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations and I may have missed a few zeros, they probably got tired of lining up and wandered off for a pint or three). Really, they can't create a unique hardware key with a few fewer digits?

It was supposedly¹ Gates who once said the world will never need more than five or six computers. He doesn't want to be caught out again.

Alternatively MS really are expecting to sell more copies of Win10 than there are atoms in the universe.



[1] it wasn't, it was the president of IBM, but it's regularly attributed to Gates.

[Mr Larrington]

As prescience goes that was right up there with Ken Olson's "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home".

[Kim]

It was supposedly¹ Gates who once said the world will never need more than five or six computers.

[1] it wasn't, it was the president of IBM, but it's regularly attributed to Gates.

Nahh, Gates was the 640kB of RAM thing.  And it think that was more of a short-sighted design decision rather than a future prediction.

[DDCyclist]

Gates. No-one will ever need more than 640kB of RAM.

The 'five or six computers' thing was attributed to Professor Douglas Hartree who, in 1951, is thought to have said all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built—one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, "would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."

Others,of course, have said similar things which turned out to be equally naive and short-sighted.

[Jaded]

I truly believe that one day, there will be a telephone in every town in America. Alexander Graham Bell

Apparently

[Kim]

I truly believe that one day, there will be a telephone in every town in America. Alexander Graham Bell

That one was right, thobut.

[TheLurker]

As prescience goes that was right up there with Ken Olson's "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home".

Umm. He was right.  No one really _wants_ one.  We've just got to have the bloody things because all the sodding companies and the agencies of HMG have decide it's cheaper to use shonky web sites than people answering telephones to fob people off.  Hell; I'm paid to write bloody software and I certainly don't _want_ a computer.

[Kim]

As prescience goes that was right up there with Ken Olson's "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home".

Umm. He was right.  No one really _wants_ one.  We've just got to have the bloody things because all the sodding companies and the agencies of HMG have decide it's cheaper to use shonky web sites than people answering telephones to fob people off.

Respectfully disagree.  At least in the days before shonky websites, computers were new and exciting and everybody under the age of about 30 wanted one.  Since then they've evolved into (primarily) communications tools, which are sometimes frustrating to use on account of shonky websites, but have opened up all kinds of opportunities that simply wouldn't have existed without them^[1], and they remain an empowering alternative to having to deal with idiots by telephone.

Hell; I'm paid to write bloody software and I certainly don't _want_ a computer.

That'll be why, then.


_{[1] She says, on an online forum for niche cycling.}

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

As prescience goes that was right up there with Ken Olson's "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home".

It's understable tho' when you consider that early on a home computer for most people was an Acorn Electron or whatever that you could use to program the lyrics of 'Ten Green Bottles' in BBC Basic.

We've only really got computers now because we wanted to know what the Germans were saying to each other in WW2.

 
 

[Mr Larrington]

And Clever SCIENCE Man¹ who predicted electronik branes the size of the Empire State Building with the equivalent of Niagara Falls to keep it cool.  Though someone with too much time on his hands reckons that if you lumped all Google's servers together in one place you'd have something not dissimilar.

1: National Defense Research Committee head honcho Vannevar Bush.  Though he did also "predict" Wikinaccurate, or something.

[Mr Larrington]

Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, you have raised twattery to new levels.

My fondleslab wants to upgrade to iOS 9.1.  Now or later, it asks.  Later, I say, fo I am using it to look make up random "facts" about Croydon.  Between 2 and 4 tomorrow, then, it says, provided it's plugged in and has wi-fi rays. I plug it in and bung it on the coffee table, two metres as the well-aimed half-brick flies to the wifi router.  Mr Jobs' SCIENCE will do its stuff and I can come down in the morning for tea, toast and iOS 9.1.

I do not what made it not update but the first thing it asks this morning is whether I want to update to iOS 9.1.  Look, FruitCo, If you're going to offer this service then make it fucking work, and if it doesn't find conditions to its liking then at least give me a fucking error message.  Cretins.

In contrast it decided to do the last update unilaterally.  While I was on holibobs.  In a hotel with shite wifi.  Which caused it to conk out and turn the fondleslab into a paperweight.

"Lobotomised shitlarks" is not too strong a description of the people responsible.

Oh look!  iOS 9.2 and exactly the same thing happened.  Once is a glitch in the matrix, twice is further proof that as far as the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia is concerned, only Little People do testing.  Just works?  My arse.

[RichL]

My colleague just upgraded the compiler to 'fix' an error in his code, despite his code quite obviously containing the error reported.

I know only 0.000001% of the population are interested in this, but I had to let it out...

[TimC]

My iMac has started suffering from graphics gremlins. The picture disappears then sometimes reappears either misplaced on the screen (and unresponsive) or with some colours missing. Sounds like the graphics card is breaking down. I had thought it was an El Capitan issue, but it's now happening in Windows too. As a late-2010 model, it's not covered by the free replacement graphic card programme that Apple offered to affected 2011-12 iMac owners, chiz. A replacement card seems to be around £300+. Bugger.

[Pickled Onion]

My colleague just upgraded the compiler to 'fix' an error in his code, despite his code quite obviously containing the error reported.

  Poor lad. He'll learn eventually.

I know only 0.000001% of the population are interested in this, but I had to let it out...

YACF - where you can find 0.0000001 % of the population interested in just about anything.

[perpetual dan]

My phone developed a virus, which used up my data allowance (and then some) and then started with the fake update stuff. So, factory reset and from-laptop lots of password changing. Do I need to justify a phone upgrade on the basis that it might be better protected, or just be more selective about what websites I visit? I didn't think there was anything particularly dodgy in what I've done.   
And now, one of the email addresses is on an ISP that blocks me after about 2 wrong password attempts. I think my laptop mail reader gets through those before prompting me to try another password. Sigh.

[Jaded]

My iMac has started suffering from graphics gremlins. The picture disappears then sometimes reappears either misplaced on the screen (and unresponsive) or with some colours missing. Sounds like the graphics card is breaking down. I had thought it was an El Capitan issue, but it's now happening in Windows too. As a late-2010 model, it's not covered by the free replacement graphic card programme that Apple offered to affected 2011-12 iMac owners, chiz. A replacement card seems to be around £300+. Bugger.

Macs with bad video cards (and there are many iMacs and MacBook Pros among them) can often be rescued by keeping the GPU temps lower than the point at which the chips malfunction and either cause video artifacts, blank the screen, or even crash the Mac. I use 124F as the max but YMMV and, of course, different machine configurations have different fans (and number of fans). It will not fix -all- of them but it will for many.

Read that and thought of your post here. Worth a try.

[TimC]

Thanks, Jaded. It seems to have gone away for now, and didn't seem related to load, but I'll keep an eye on it. I'm probably going to buy a new one soon, but I'd like to keep this one for the pain cave which will soon be under construction in the garage.

[Mr Larrington]

I have just spent two hours trying to eliminate a Windows startup error message.  Why does it come up when running in that ---> room but not in this one?

Eventual answer: because in this room it was plugged into an individually on/off-beswitched 4-gang and the actual socket was off.  When really running on mains power the message doesn't appear

[HTFB]

Thank goodness for the BSD command line, for those of us who don't speak Apple. Why, you might reasonably ask, is it impossible to open your technophobe parent's iPhoto library as a directory in Finder, when it so totally is a directory? As soon as you have found the path to a subdirectory of the library (../Originals, it was) you can navigate within it, but there seems no WIMPy way to find the bloody path in the first place.

Also, why do Apple hide perfectly sensible controls and configuration switches---to, say, choose between photo libraries---behind scarcely-documented magic buttons that you have to hold down as the application launches? Who knows, if frustrated users were able to click through a dialogue to a control that said "Repair Library Index", or something, then the option hidden behind a different magic start-up button might actually work and, say, look in the directory to see what was in there: in this case, 12000 more photos than iPhoto knew it had.

I know it is supposed to be user-friendly, suitable for the least savvy of users, but if you have attracted users who scarcely dare press a button for terror that they will somehow irreversably destroy the machine and everything on it, it is no help at all to confirm their fears by (a) screwing up (b) stopping marginally more savvy users---like, say, your customer service agents---being able to set things right.

What with making backups onto an external drive, and creating the new library there before copying back onto the local disk, the whole process meant copying 240GB to and fro. With a bit of forethought I could probably have saved a quarter of this, admittedly. And we've lost a bit of user-entered metadata along the way: they'll have to turn all the photos the right way up again. Still, the Apple Genius Bar couldn't do it at all.

Possibly the longer-term solution is to send the whole lot to PhotoBox. At under 3p a picture¹ it won't be all that much above a thousand quid, and nobody ever had the screaming abdabs in fear that tapping the wrong place on a box of 6"x4" colour prints would delete the lot.

(240GB takes a long time to copy. For example, it's 5 million 48k tapes, and as everybody knows 48k tapes take 5 minutes 2.95 seconds to load, that's exactly 48 years of faffing about. Buuuh Bip. Buuuh biddly biddly biddly schwaahahahaha biddly schwaaa.)

1. Buy one, get two free.

[ian]

But that magic button toggles everything in the Mac world (and I doubt non-savvy users change the default). Anyway, just right-click and select Open Package to get at the contents and the Originals folder without command line incantations.