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I'm Libertarian u rear end posted:Because they're probably not making enough on the laptop itself if they have to pimp out the extra stuff so much. No I mean why did he go through all the pain. And if they can't make money selling the laptop without poo poo, they need to change their business model.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 08:28 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 07:49 |
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Blue Footed Booby posted:The computers in the lab in the science building all have deep freeze. They were frozen such that every computer except for two throws up not one but two "would you like to report this error to Microsoft" windows every single time they start up. Also, neither IE nor firefox were configured, so they throw up all those phishing protection and import settings boxes when you first open them. I want to stab the entire IT department. They do this at my school, too. Not to mention the horrible 1024x768 15" monitors, you have to resize them EVERY GODDAMN TIME to even become readable.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 08:32 |
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On the note of LCDs that are never configured right, does anyone know of a good way (either natively in Windows or with a portable app, no installation) of changing the resolution and font smoothing options from the command line so I could just have a batch file (or portable app and batch file for calling it) on my thumbdrive and can just execute that? I think it'd be nice day to day. I know it's not a big deal to go in and do it manually, but an automated solution (without installation) would be awesome.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 09:05 |
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ryanmfw posted:Righteous, man, you really are a total rear end in a top hat! You're only coming off as a prick with your "Look, I can spin this edgy" garbage. Go get taken for a ride by retail sharks, tiger...
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 09:12 |
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Way to go!
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 09:47 |
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ProjektorBoy posted:Sweet Jesus. This. There are a shocking amount of corporations who still use this and are (hopefully) are regretting the decision to do so. It may have been cheaper but there's nothing truly compatible, intuitive, or good about Lotus Notes. Even the SameTime clients are nothing but bottled rear end. The interface is straight out of 1999 even on the newest versions. You can break the entire program by nuking a single DLL, INI, or NSF file. It's slow, buggy, and a complete mess. It's such a mess they even included allowing you to hit Ctrl+Pause/Break to get the app to stop program activity so it'll start responding again. 
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 11:31 |
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hyperborean posted:I think they made Notepad like once and never touched it again. My piss off gently caress poo poo aggro story is Vista / Server 2008 and it's inability to remember what columns or window sizes are for ANYTHING, or just randomly changing them for no reason at all. This is with SP1 integrated, clean install; I set up one folder exactly how I want ALL folders to look and uncheck "Remember each folder's view settings" and then click the apply to All Folders button to make them uniform. Classic folders is enabled. Hey, guess what? Vista still decides to flip into some lovely metadata view if I go into a folder with pictures or videos... but only SOME of the time!
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 12:59 |
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hyperborean posted:I assume this is to 'protect' the user but it just pisses me off. Any hacks to disable it?
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 13:36 |
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Failure to prioritize user input. I know that partitioning a computer's resources is a very complex technical task and the machine can't always be perfectly responsive, but why are modern commercial OSes so loving sluggish in response to user input? Right now I'm encoding video in the background and one of my processor cores is pegged. The other is bouncing between 5% and 30% depending on what I'm doing. Only about 40% of my 4GB of RAM are in use, and I've got a lot of stuff loaded. I have plenty of system resources available. If I drop to the Desktop and try to open an Explorer window, the machine will slow to a crawl, the hard drives will thrash like a trout on a hot rock and I'll have to wait several seconds for the UI to become responsive again. OK, OK, task management is complicated; I get that. You'd think, though, that with all the money and human resources that go into OS development, someone would say, "Hey, the computer's supposed to be working for the user. When he tells it to do something, maybe everything else should take a back seat and wait." I don't care if Microsoft Obscure Function Manager is asking for more CPU time; when I click, I want the machine to pay attention. I used to joke that I want a "RIGHT loving NOW" button on my mouse that tells the OS to do whatever I'm telling it to do, drat the consequence. I'm no longer sure that's a joke. My current desktop computer is orders of magnitude faster than the Mac Plus I used to have back in 1986, and does work in seconds that older machine couldn't have done in days, but overall its interface is no more responsive.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 14:14 |
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hyperborean posted:Oh definitely. It's improper, and terrible. Whenever I have to use somebody's MacBook I get irritated over how little space there is. There's ample space: 
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 14:54 |
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hyperborean posted:This is Firefox waiting on the server to actually start transmission of the file. It has the name from the link you clicked, but until there is data, you aren't allowed to hit 'ok'. Don't ask me why this is, I don't remember.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 15:47 |
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KaLogain posted:No I mean why did he go through all the pain. And if they can't make money selling the laptop without poo poo, they need to change their business model. The margin on low to midrange laptops at BB is often only $40-80. I'd be willing to wager that there are very few retail outlets (that don't rhyme with Snapple) actually making anything more than that on PCs of any kind.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 16:04 |
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hyperborean posted:I think they made Notepad like once and never touched it again. Well, there was that  -inducing 64KB size limit back in the 9x days.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 17:54 |
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KennyG posted:This brings me to another resolution pet peave. 1024x768 on a widescreen. Seriously why does windows even allow this without serious tomfoolery. All of you are guilty of this (Apple, M$, Linux Community), but the one that pisses me off the most I guess is the Mac people. Especially when they justifiy the expensive mac purchase with the graphics claim!!!!! FWIW, OS X will default to the native resolution of whatever DVI screen you connect it to. You have to make a conscious effort if you want it to use some wacky resolution.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 18:31 |
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Tapedump posted:His cause was just and the other party more than at fault. There IS a time to stand up for consumer rights, even if it entails being an rear end in a top hat. Dude, he came off sounding like a complete rear end. He started the interaction by immediately talking down to the salesman and then acted surprised when he got pushback. At the very least, it's a good idea to treat other people kindly unless you have reason to do otherwise. Personally, I get around Best Buy's sales pitch by telling them that I'm going to wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu. After you say that, they don't bother you at all about Geek Squad services or warranties.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 18:38 |
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such a nice boy posted:Personally, I get around Best Buy's sales pitch by telling them that I'm going to wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu. After you say that, they don't bother you at all about Geek Squad services or warranties. A polite but firm "no thank you" always works. If you don't provide an objection, they can't try to overcome it.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 18:46 |
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Wireless in linux. The gnome networking apps suck, but it seems like wicd has saved the day - for now. After using ndiswrapper for my card and blacklisted the open source drivers which wouldn't work but end up being used by default for no apparent loving reason, of course. I'm afraid to reboot my computer now that all that poo poo is done... I can only hope there is no electric storm anytime soon...
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 19:14 |
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Green Puddin posted:Wireless in linux. The gnome networking apps suck, but it seems like wicd has saved the day - for now. Really? Wifi was flaky as heck for me in Ubuntu 7.10, but it's rock solid in 8.04.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 19:18 |
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wolrah posted:Back on the LCDs at non-native resolutions thing, one of my customers is the worst offender I've ever seen for this. She has a Dell 30" (you know, 2560x1600 monster panel) which she runs at 1280x960. Not even 1280x800, which would scale cleanly and just be a waste of a good panel instead of distorted and looking like rear end. This screen is positioned 3 feet from where she sits, and she can't be older than early 30s, so it's not like the old farts who use 800x600 on 20" screens (my grandma is an offender there). I've seen a 30" Dell at 1024x768. No poo poo. I set it to the lowest-res widescreen and asked if they liked it, and thankfully they agreed. I then started bumping it up, asking whether or not it was better. I felt like an eye doctor. I think they stayed with my first change. Preinstalled OEM crap. I work in a small computer store, and I hate having to tell people that the first time they start up their brand new computer, they'll have to wait 15 loving minutes. Fortunately, most people buy a dedicated video card with their tower, so I can clean all that crap out and install the card. People who use the wrong words. Why is everything 'downloading'? "I downloaded this file to this CDR." "I want this computer crashed out." Apparently that means having Windows reinstalled. "I got this computer trojan horse worm virus spyware." Yes, I'm sure you did. Another great one: "My Internet stopped working." "Alright, let's check it out." Fire it up, plug the network cable in, ipconfig gives me a valid address, I can ping google, but any browser instantly throws a cannot connect page. Aha! I then reach for my Norton-hunting gun (Norton removal tool) and it instantly starts working. Christ, blocking the entire Internet is not the correct way an 'Internet Security' suite should work. This happens daily. Laptop keyboards that have Fn in the very left bottom corner. No sir, that location is reserved for Ctrl. Also, Toshiba keyboards that have the Windows key at the top. Dell desktops that have no PS2 ports. Guess what always works, really works well, and doesn't require drivers: PS2 ports. USB keyboards are handy and all, but we have a ton of PS2 KVMs, and motherboards without them piss me off. Computers of people who smoke: Dear god, take two handfulls of mud and smear them around the insides of your computer. Then make it smell like rear end.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 19:44 |
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DevastatorIIC posted:Laptop keyboards that have Fn in the very left bottom corner. No sir, that location is reserved for Ctrl. Thinkpads 
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 20:12 |
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EoRaptor posted:This is Firefox waiting on the server to actually start transmission of the file. It has the name from the link you clicked, but until there is data, you aren't allowed to hit 'ok'. What? No, this is wrong. It's a security feature, designed to prevent an attack where someone would lure you to click on a certain area of the screen, then, using Javascript, when they see your pointer is over the intended area of the screen and about to click, they'd do some action that required a confirmation window -- the confirmation window would pop up, and since they chose the area of the screen where they wanted you to click specifically for this reason, the confirmation window's OK button would be right under your mouse button and you'd inadvertently confirm the operation. The same type of attack works with the keyboard as well (and in fact is a lot easier to pull off). Personally, I would have solved it in a much less intrusive way -- make sure the confirmation window always pops up in a place that doesn't overlap the mouse pointer; and make the window appear without taking foreground activation (but still on top so it's visible), requiring a keyboard user to use their OS's equivalent of Alt-Tab to select the new window first before it'd get keyboard input. biznatchio fucked around with this message at Apr 27, 2008 around 20:20 |
| # ? Apr 27, 2008 20:16 |
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biznatchio posted:What? No, this is wrong. That sounds a bit more confusing. Maybe if it had focus but placed the cancel button under the mouse pointer by default. Or disallow onmouseover to fire that type of event, though that gets tricky. The reason I thought it worked the way i mentioned was I remember the feature getting added during a discussion of mime types, where the browser was incorrectly displaying, not downloading, binary data passed as text. The browser had to pause until actual data arrived before the download window could be considered a success, instead of trusting the mime type. Meh, it doesn't matter, it's a cover up of an inherent design problem, not a proper fix.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 20:40 |
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deviant. posted:A polite but firm "no thank you" always works. If you don't provide an objection, they can't try to overcome it. You must have an extremely well-mannered Best Buy where you live.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 21:23 |
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The Best Buys around here are pretty good that way. They ask if you want an extended warranty and if you say "no", then they usually glance around to make sure their manager isn't anywhere nearby then whisper: "Sorry, we're required to ask that." Now the Future Shops are another story. I've only actually used an extended warranty once. It was on a set of tires.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 21:27 |
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HPL posted:Really? Wifi was flaky as heck for me in Ubuntu 7.10, but it's rock solid in 8.04. Mint hasn't upgraded to Hardy... Maybe I should drop Mint? How is Xubuntu 8.04? Anyone happen to know? And to totally not derail, I also hate that "YOU'VE JUST WON A FREE IPOD NANO" ad. gently caress that poo poo. edit: To clarify, the one that screams that you've won a free ishit and it doesn't seem to have a mute button on it (and if there is one it must be tiny as hell)...
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 21:48 |
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Zorilla posted:You must have an extremely well-mannered Best Buy where you live. The store is irrelevant. Salespeople are trained to overcome objections, and when you take that away from them they have nothing. If they get rude get the manager or just walk. I've never had to though - if they don't listen you just say "no thank you" again and that usually paints a pretty clear picture.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 22:17 |
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I actually like Notepad the way it is. It is what it says. It's a loving piece of scrap paper and that's it. DevastatorIIC posted:Dell desktops that have no PS2 ports. Guess what always works, really works well, and doesn't require drivers: PS2 ports. thebruce posted:There's ample space:
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 22:27 |
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DevastatorIIC posted:"I got this computer trojan horse worm virus spyware." Yes, I'm sure you did. Well, part of a bulleted list.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 22:31 |
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deviant. posted:The store is irrelevant. Salespeople are trained to overcome objections, and when you take that away from them they have nothing. If they get rude get the manager or just walk. I've never had to though - if they don't listen you just say "no thank you" again and that usually paints a pretty clear picture. Except when the typical checkout experience is: "Would you like an extended warranty on this item?" "No, thanks." "Will you be putting this on your Best Buy store card?" "No." "Do you have a Best Buy store card?" "No." "Would you like to sign up for one?" "No." Clothing stores are just as guilty of this one though.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 22:43 |
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DevastatorIIC posted:Laptop keyboards that have Fn in the very left bottom corner. No sir, that location is reserved for Ctrl. Also, Toshiba keyboards that have the Windows key at the top. Worse:  Why yes, I would love my backslash key moved to the half of my backspace key which my pinky finger can reach! Backspacing should be a thoughtful process, nothing that can be done impulsively on a mere whim. And it's not like anybody ever edits text files or does anything else with those silly insert/delete/home/end/page up/page down keys, so I'm sure nobody would mind them all being moved down a row to fit the stupid wake up/sleep/power buttons which by all means should never be placed far above the escape key in the far-left of the keyboard where nobody will ever think to accidently punch them. No, much better to place them in a slightly more high-trafficked area where they can snare foolish KVM-users who dare to tap "scroll lock" without mulling the process over! I'd go find a picture of the idiotic "vertical" design of the home/end/etc keys on the latest batch of Microsoft OEMs, but I'm actually too mad to type any more.
uncle wrinkles fucked around with this message at Apr 27, 2008 around 23:26 |
| # ? Apr 27, 2008 23:23 |
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Zorilla posted:Except when the typical checkout experience is: You're missing one: -"Would you like to try a three-month free trial of these magazines blah blah blah" That one really kills me. If I wanted magazines I sure as gently caress wouldn't go to Best Buy to get them. Best Buy doesn't really seem to give a gently caress about the customer experience. You can't buy anything there without being hassled to buy additional items. Even if you just go in to buy a CD they'll try to nail you with magazine subscriptions and a best buy card at the register. It's ridiculous. I go out of my way to avoid stores that do things like this. The last place I want a confrontation is when I'm trying to buy something and get out of the store.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 23:33 |
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DevastatorIIC posted:
Where can I get this wonderful Norton-hunting gun? I need one to purge my parents' computer of the evil.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 23:45 |
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Fishstick posted:screenshots in .doc, jokes in .doc, jokes in .pps, screenshots in .pps, 23meg camera JPEGs, ... I pretty much hate everything the non-internet-savvy crowd emails. God, please stop forwarding me clipart too! I'm sick of the cat with huge eyes and frowny faces.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 23:53 |
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taiyoko posted:Where can I get this wonderful Norton-hunting gun? I need one to purge my parents' computer of the evil. I dont know about the Norton-hunting gun, but an old friend of mine got a job at a local independent computer shop. and on the shelf behind the counter, they keep a prominently displayed sledgehammer with "Norton Hammer" written on it. It works well for them because when your typical idiot brings their computer in for repair, they use this as proof that they're not just making this up specialy for them, and when any even half way technical person walks in, they see the hammer and immediately know that they're in a shop run by people who genuinely know what they're talking about. I suspect it also works quite well on theives, since in the UK it's illegal to keep a weapon explicitly for that purpose, but a display piece that just happens to be within reach during a robbery is perfectly fine.
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 00:24 |
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Zorilla posted:Except when the typical checkout experience is: Well, I thought you were talking about a salesperson pushing ONE product on you. This is a little different, and sadly the norm. You see that "just saying no" works, though. 
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 00:33 |
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Dirk Muscleton posted:Worse: I honestly don't mind the vertical setup. I have it on mine. I did a double take at first, but after getting used to it, it's fine. I use delete a lot more than insert, and insert a lot more than scroll lock. My only real complaint about keyboards these days is replacing the right Windows key with the stupid right click key. I don't want to bring up the context menu thanks, I want to lock my computer with one hand without streching across the whole keyboard, thanks. Oh, and half-size function keys. I don't mind the circular ones on my logitech, but half height f-keys need to die.
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 00:46 |
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Our school is pretty drat restrictive, and I don't blame them because there are kids who just itch to use their own batch scripts and gently caress with anything possible, but it just ruins everything for everyone else. What bothers me though is that we don't even have the permission to change the desktop walpapper. The loving wallpaper. I'm sick of seeing that generic gloss blue of Vista and would like to have my Calvin and Hobbs or some other whacky picture up... But hell, I can. The tech guys give me poo poo because when kids don't log off (stupid kids, you should always log off) I go into some documents and write about the time that person covered themselves in mayonase and took a dump in a hat or something stupid like that, then I change the desktop wallpaper to George W. Bush through paint. And because the kids don't know how to bypass or change the wallpaper because, you know, they don't have the permission, they have to call in the tech guys to see if there was a security breach or something... But they find that it was the student who made all the changes, and didn't know why they seemed to be complaining so much. Until some poo poo ratted me out. But I do the kind deed of logging them off, so they can be pleasently surprised with their next log on. Still, it's too bad they just can't let me feel a little more comfortable with what I have at school, jeez guys it's just a wallpaper
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 00:50 |
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Casao posted:I honestly don't mind the vertical setup. I have it on mine. I did a double take at first, but after getting used to it, it's fine. I use delete a lot more than insert, and insert a lot more than scroll lock. The vertical setup freaks me out a little, but if you look at that picture again, they kept the horizontal setup only with the printscreen/numlock/pause keys grafted onto the top to make room for some useless power management keys. I'm also not a fan of the oversized enter key. My mother's computer usage is a reliable source of annoyance. Her files are strewn haphazardly across the computer: mostly on the desktop and labyrinth of folders that resides there, with a few in "My Documents" and some placed randomly in system folders or C:\. For some reason she keeps half her bookmarks as shortcuts on the desktop. Most of these are from the '90s and a significant portion of them link to pages have been taken down. She has at least ten years worth of files from multiple computers which she refuses to delete. My favorites are the ones with generic names and no extension--just a file called "tiles" or something equally vague. God knows what software created it or if said software even exists anymore. She also double-clicks on hyperlinks. And keeps her 1600x1200 native LCD at 1152x864.
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 01:12 |
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liquidXenon posted:My favorites are the ones with generic names and no extension--just a file called "tiles" or something equally vague. God knows what software created it or if said software even exists anymore.
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 01:16 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 07:49 |
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such a nice boy posted:Dude, he came off sounding like a complete rear end. He started the interaction by immediately talking down to the salesman and then acted surprised when he got pushback. At the very least, it's a good idea to treat other people kindly unless you have reason to do otherwise. Do you have any idea how many times I have put up with Best Buy's horse crap just to emerge with 18cents of product marked up to $19.99, only to have them offer an $8 service plan on it? Do you know how many things I've been offered extended service plans on? Seriously, they try to push them on you for LIon batteries. Because I'm going to go "poo poo. These batteries suck." and dig out paperwork on them in two years and get them replaced. I also didn't say it in a smart-rear end way, I said it politely, and logically as to the reason they don't interest me. Because if I'm going to complain about something, I'll complain to the offering party, without getting the manager. I worked at Best Buy years and years ago, and I know that they harass their employees for ideas to sell better. And I wasn't suprised I got pushback. But the fact that they offer to remove *spyware* from OEM computers, and immediately blame the OEMs for putting the spyware on there is a complete lie to sell a service. This is contrary to most state laws, and I could sue the eff out of them if I paid the $50 for whatever they were trying to sell. Sure, I became an rear end at this point. Because my pet-peeve threshold had been reached. Oh, and I've used the "wipe hard drive and replace with x" line. They just fire back that "x" is a virus and will surprise sex your children. I once, just to be cute right after OSX went to the Core processors, said that I was going to wipe and install OSX on it. The immediate response was that "Apple doesn't know how to code programs. OSX is really just DOS, and is really crappy. You'd be better off using Windows. And we can set that up for you sure thing!" I kid you not. After fifteen years of this kind of treatment and utter bullshit from them, I don't have any problem being a complete rear end to them when they say stupid poo poo. I also don't have a problem talking down to them at the drop of a hat.
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 01:36 |
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