More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Scaramouche posted:

Thermal printers. Over serial.

Thermal printers over USB are far far worse.

Serial works, whereas the USB version have the shittiest drivers know to man.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 13:30

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 00:49

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Shadowslayer81 posted:

Mac products. Technically my company doesn't support mac, except when we do. Like constantly. We seem to cater to anybody who has a mac anything. So long as they are half semi important. Vpn with rdp sure, need email with activesync sure. Doesn't help that half the iT staff has a Jesus phone. Bleh.

Our IT policy literally says "No Macs, no exceptions!". And we constantly get people asking for one. Someone actually cried about it once!

# ¿ Sep 30, 2013 10:27

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

John Dough posted:

It's 2013 and Excel still can't handle opening two files with the same name.

Excel has a million bad quirks, some left over from the Windows 3.1 days. None of them will ever be fixed because a large part of the Excel userbase is people who just memorise by rote the series of things they have to click to make X happen - and you're not allowed to change anything to upset those people ever!

# ¿ Oct 16, 2013 13:58

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Carpet posted:

Well son, you obviously don't know computers if you can't use DIP switches to manually set IRQs, like in the good old days

# ¿ Nov 12, 2013 11:46

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

There was some reason the COM ports had to be on different IRQs. I can't remember what it was (maybe mouse driver?). IRQs 3/4/5/9 were the only settings the card allowed, and 7 was already used for the on-board parallel port and couldn't be disabled. So 10 was the only free IRQ for the sound.

Setting up your perfect fantasy IRQ allocation is easy. In real life you have to work with what you've got, and work around the restrictions.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 14:53

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:

We're moving offices and I keep finding awesome things.

I picked this up at work some years ago:

It's a 40MHz 486DLC - a 486 upgrade chip that fits a 386DX motherboard.

Sweevo fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Nov 21, 2013

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 19:36

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Heatsinks appeared around the mid-486 era. The low-end models didn't really need one but sometimes had one fitted anyway. The faster 486s would normally have one (usually just a heatsink though - no fan).

Pretty sure even the slowest Pentiums needed a heatsink, but the sticker probably wasn't enough of a thermal barrier to cause problems.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 17:03

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Standard procedure at many companies seems to be to not pay bills when they're due and to wait for a 2nd/3rd/final demand instead. Then pay it and repeat next time.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 12:11

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Pyroclastic posted:

I was recently reminded of something else I hate: tape. Staff members who decide to do their own 'cable management' with scotch, masking, or duct tape. I don't think I've seen tape not leave a horrible residue after a few years of sitting. Even if the masking tape is so old it's disintegrating, the adhesive is tenacious. Luckily hand sanitizer is everywhere in schools now and it does a reasonable job at getting that poo poo off your hands.

White spirit is great for removing glue and tape residue from most things.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2013 15:47

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

XP got crazy slow during it's life. The original release ran fine on an ~800mhz P3 with 256mb.

Sweevo fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Dec 17, 2013

# ¿ Dec 17, 2013 16:57

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

When did Windows Update stop supporting IE6? I know they stopped supporting IE5 a while ago (I want to say about 18 months) because I remember it being an issue with Windows 2000 and having to install IE6 by hand first.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2013 19:28

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

toe shoes posted:

Dear new c-level guy

You've been here a week and this is going to be iPhone #3

edit:
vvv
No kids and they're not going missing. It's probably been swims / being dropped and they're covered under warranty. Current problem is the touch screen failing to work about half the time.

They'll be fixed under warranty and all it's just amazing to see how quickly they're getting broken.

Is it an older or not top-end model? Is there a newer model due soon? Maybe he's breaking it because he wants a better one.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 11:37

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

He's putting in the groundwork. He wants to seem clumsy so that it doesn't look suspicious when he does it again later. :v:

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 13:33

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

40MB PDF "manuals" that consist of:

1 cover page containing a huge image scanned at 600dpi
2 pages of legal bullshit in 3pt font
1 blank page to make the next section start on an odd numbered page (it's not a loving real book nobody cares!)
3 contents pages listing every single diagram, table, and sub-sub-sub-subsection
1 blank page to make the next section start on an odd numbered page
4 pages of marketing waffle about the company and their ISO 9001 certification
4 pages of contact information and how to obtain sales brochures
3 pages of static electricity warnings in 15 different languages
1 blank page to make the next section start on an odd numbered page
3 pages of actual content
2 blank pages marked "Notes:"
2 pages describing how and where to buy the product
3 page index

# ¿ Feb 27, 2014 23:13

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Also one of the "3 pages of actual content" is a full-page diagram showing how to plug the power cord into the wall.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 01:03

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Lum posted:

[ID cards]

They were probably using an off the shelf ID card program - all of which are terrible. It was probably a Windows 3.1 program that's been hacked to run inside a Windows XP compatibility wrapper. It probably supports 24-bit uncompressed bmp files and nothing else, and has small and completely arbitrary image size limits because it was originally designed to run on a computer with 4MB RAM.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 13:21

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

There needs to be some kind of ICANN clearing house for assigning which model numbers companies are allowed to use for their products.

If I'm searching for information on hardware then I don't want fifty pages of results about laptop batteries, digital cameras, or ink cartridges for some lovely Epson that all have the same model number.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 18:13

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

topenga posted:

My boyfriend will do this. He claims that I know how to Google better than he does. And I think it's true. I watched him search for stuff once. He does it...wrong. He's either way too specific or he uses the wrong words or something. Error in whatever game he's playing? He will swear he searched for an hour and can't find anything. I do one quick "battlefield crashes to desktop" (Because holy poo poo, that's what's happening. How can you not just type that?) and BAM a bazillion hits and a solution.

My friend is a bit like this. I was helping him fix his car at the weekend and we needed to look up something. There are usually pretty good guides out there for most things - especially on model-specific forums. He went into the house for 40 minutes and then came back out and said he didn't find anything. I went in, typed "BMW E91 turbo replacement" into Google and the first result is a forum post with full removal and reassembly instructions, and about 50 photos. I have no idea what he was searching for.

Sweevo fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Oct 30, 2014

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 20:10

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

I know some people type in full questions like "How do I wash small lemon curd stains out of my white and pink tablecloth?". Then they'll click on the first result and read the whole page to see if it has the answer, then move on to the second, and third, and then after about 4 or 5 pages get annoyed and give up complaining about how computers are too complicated.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 20:23

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Dudley posted:

As someone who has been on the "employer" side of this we do it because they're loving annoying and we'd like to deal with as few of them as possible.

They're no more competent to us than you, You give over the requirements for say, a senior c# programmer and you get an intern from Malaysia with no VISA and a BA in Economics but who can just about point out a copy of windows in a line up.

We literally eventually gave up and employed someone to act as an internal recruitment company.

Recruiters know nothing about any industry besides recruitment. Combine that with the fact that they run every CV through a dozen lovely macros to pick out the key points, but which really just end up mangling everything and you end up with a recruitment process which goes something like:

"C# is the same thing as C right?"
"Cos I've heard of C, it's a kind of programming"
"So is HTML"
"You can save Word documents as HTML"
"Word is part of Microsoft Office"

So your request for a "C# programmer" becomes "Someone who can remember which order to click two buttons to run an Excel marco"

# ¿ Mar 12, 2014 14:54

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Is that better or worse that people who say "go ahead" at the start of every sentence?

# ¿ Mar 27, 2014 21:18

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

I thought it was international law that default signatures had to be 40 lines of unenforceable legal bullshit, a 2MB BMP of the company logo, and links the the webpage where they describe their ISO9001 certification.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2014 16:25

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Esser-Z posted:

...stuff being sent to corporate for repairs...

This doesn't make sense. Broken things don't get repaired, they get put into storage and then 10 years later you're told you can't throw them away because "hey, those were expensive in 1995!"

# ¿ Apr 7, 2014 22:52

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Caged posted:

Jesus gently caress Cisco, stop featuring stuff on your website that's discontinued. Leave it Google-able or in your support pages, but don't show it to me when I'm browsing through your products.

I don't think there's any site I hate more than the Cisco site.

Anything that isn't a current product is buried 50 layers deep with constantly-changing urls, which they don't even bother to keep track of themselves. If you search for a manual for a 10 year old router then half the results will be pages that no longer exist, or which redirect to an EOL declaration with no link to the original content.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 10:47

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

SEKCobra posted:

But why doesnt the user just keep it then?

Probably because they saw someone with a better one and suddenly their almost new laptop is "a uselessly slow piece of poo poo BUY ME A NEW ONE!"

# ¿ Apr 24, 2014 12:35

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Daylen Drazzi posted:

I don't understand why people feel they need to break a two year old laptop.

Let me introduce you to a creature known as a "Salesman".

Imagine a petulant whining 5yr old in the body of a grown adult, whose only desire in life is to have a newer laptop and a more expensive company car than all the other salesmen.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2014 11:26

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

dox posted:

We did this at my old student worker position at the university. Everyone was (fairly) technical and we challenged who could get this lovely machine filled with malware and viruses first? Everyone tried (by searching porn) but no one was "dumb" enough to actually get it infected after at least 30 minutes of trying. Finally I stepped in and went to a malware research site and won, but it was a sad, sad victory.

Porn sites realised years ago that they could make more money by selling porn legitimately than by tricking you into installing viruses or premium rate dialers.

These days you have to hit coupon sites, activation cracks for <popular software>, or those "watch any movie 100% free!" places.

# ¿ May 20, 2014 00:58

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Carpet posted:

Why do Lenovo make it so hard to find older versions of their drivers?

Curse every company that does this. A thousend tigers apund their head!

Server space isn't expensive, so there's no excuse not to make all their old drivers available. ALL of them - if I want the DOS software that came with an ATI card from 1988 then it should be right there on ATIs website. gently caress this trend for removing anything older than 3 years and pretending it never existed.

:argh:

# ¿ Jun 2, 2014 13:57

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Soylent Heliotrope posted:

There are five people at the little tiny remote site I support. Not a single one is willing to run an Ethernet cable I sent them between the printer and a labeled switch 5 feet away, even with me walking them through it.

e: the site is four hours away, so it's not like I can just drive over there and do it myself.

One of my friends once had to drive 400 miles to turn a printer on. Then spend the night in a lovely hotel, and drive back the next day.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2014 11:03

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Keeping timesheets for internal work is part of that "internal market" horse poo poo that has infected every medium to large business in the last 20 years. They don't value your experience or knowledge, all you are to them is a replaceable grunt who costs X per hour to do Y.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2014 16:30

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

evol262 posted:

There are three zillion schema out there, and:
code:
<outer>
  <elem>val</elem>
</outer>
is dandy and readable.

Or this (from libvirt) is worse, but ok:
code:
  <currentMemory unit='KiB'>4194304</currentMemory>
  <vcpu placement='static'>4</vcpu>
  <os>
    <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-1.2'>hvm</type>
    <boot dev='hd'/>
  </os>
But it starts to get really bad a little further down in the same config file:
code:
    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2'/>
      <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/vash.qcow2'/>
      <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/>
    </disk>
Why is all the information for these nodes in the attributes?

Then there's "XML" (this is from armybuilder from years ago when I still played warhammer)
code:
<link id="dwWarCrew" count="1" actual="1" script="0" sequence="106" pseudo="no" totalcost="0" \
name="Crew" category="Equip" visible="no" sourceid="dwBoltThrw" sourceindex="1"></link>
Why are you using XML at all in this case?

gently caress XML. The flexiblity is ok, and if you're going to distribute something in XML and you give me an XSD or XSL that I can point my parser at, I'll forgive you. But there is no reason to have "human-readable" config files in XML, because they invariably turn into something no human wants to look at after your developers turned over and the new developer really likes it this other way instead.

It's the perl of configuration languages.

Those are way too readable and have too much structure to be real XML. Everybody knows that XML is just for storing key-value pairs in the dumbest way possible. XML is supposed to be 1000+ line files that look like this:

code:

<entry name="type1" value="346" \>
<entry name="size1" value="195795" \>
<entry name="protocol1" value="8" \>
<entry name="type2" value="64754" \>
<entry name="size2" value="345595" \>
<entry name="protocol4" value="5" \>
...
<entry name="type1435" value="6078" \>
<entry name="size1435" value="0" \>
<entry name="protocol1435" value="24" \>

Sweevo fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Jul 13, 2014

# ¿ Jul 13, 2014 12:23

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Just been on the phone with something trying to talk them through working out whether a Paypal email was genuine or a phishing attempt. It was only 25 minutes into the call that they told me they didn't have a paypal account.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 13:18

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Rz666 posted:

Working part time at a school as sysadmin and it has been an IT shithole since I arrived here.

I worked for a school back in 2002. They were still using Windows 3.11 to run a piece of poo poo school management system that was basically a flat database with hundreds of fields, and a suite of viewer/editor programs no two of which looked or worked anything like each other. Just adding a new student took 15 minutes and required running six different programs (some of them DOS-based and clearly not updated in a decade) to add their details, assign them to a tutor group, enrol them in classes etc.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2014 18:12

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Someone just asked me if we had any 5.25" floppy drives.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2014 13:03

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

We've probably got one somewhere, but I have a nasty feeling they only want it so they can try and blame me when the disks they've got don't work.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2014 13:25

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Yeah, I think a lot of people tend to forget that people used floppies for 30 years without major problems. It was only when the quality went to poo poo in the late 90s/early 2000s that the thing about them being bad out of the box became true. I've got boxes of Amiga floppies in the loft that all still work fine.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2014 20:57

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

USB->Serial adaptors are terrible. They don't work, even the ones that people say do work.

I'll buy a PCI serial card before I'll buy another USB->Serial adaptor.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2014 11:34

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Nine times out of ten they do know what you're talking about but they're playing dumb because they know they have the version you don't want and they're hoping that making you come and look at it in person will make you think "gently caress it I might as well buy it now I'm here".

# ¿ Nov 25, 2014 22:09

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Let them pay you $200/hr (minimum 3 hours) consulting fee to tell them the documentation exists.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 11:50

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 00:49

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Lum posted:

poo poo that pisses me off? I went for a third date, supposed to be just cuddling up and watching a film. She asked me to fix her laptop!

"Oh it looks like this virus scan is going to take an hour or two. We'll have to find something to do to pass the time..."

# ¿ Dec 30, 2014 11:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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