Shit that you come across daily that pisses you off

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > Shit that you come across daily that pisses you off

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

I've had good luck with Radioshack's usb to serial adapter. I use it all the time with my Thinkpad, as it doesn't have a comport. I've got another one being used for some proprietary temperature graphing software that hasn't had a problem yet.

It requires drivers under windows but Linux is good to go.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2008 21:21

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# ¿ May 22, 2013 07:05

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

The Gunslinger posted:

You cannot escape the serial port in the agricultural or industrial sectors, its impossible. Hell, half of my corporate clients still use thermal bar code printers that have serial port adapters and dongles. Serial ports will be around for awhile still.

Hell, most Thermal printers still have DB25 serial ports. What fun sourcing replacement cables is for these setups.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2008 18:31

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

deemaunik posted:

"Please email me a couple shots."

"Can your inbox handle 4Mb Jpegs?"

"Yeah, I've received images before."

"UNDELIVERED MAIL RETURNED TO SENDER"

... Goddamnit. Every time man. It's at the point where I offer to set up GMail accounts for people to save myself the hassle.

Me: We need the original vector file. Not your lovely compressed jpg.
Dumbass: Sure. Is an illustrator file ok?
Me: Thats fine. Heres my email: ThinkFear@invalid.com

New mail: "C:/Documents and Settings/Dumbass/My Documents/Image.ai"

every. loving. time.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2008 17:20

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Raluek posted:

I just can't trust hard drives from ebay though, plus who would want a 120GB WD from some guy on the internet?

Its tempting just to run some recovery software on the drive.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2008 00:03

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Casao posted:

For tabs, I tend to have 1 or 2 open but I also middle click like crazy to open new tabs in the background for future reading.

This is how I do things. I have my one or two main tabs and I middle click stuff that's interesting to bring it up in the background. Once there's a nice collection of stuff, I sort through it all.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2008 11:50

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Sniep posted:

As said just in the last couple pages, this, including the Google installer. Want to download Google Earth? Sure... it downloads an installer, that it itself downloads earth + chrome + probably the google toolbar + picasa + who knows what else if you let it. What the hell?

Google does offer a direct download. That doesn't make this any less of a bullshit move though.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2009 15:46

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Wouldn't 13 drives daisy changed absolutely kill IO speeds?

# ¿ Jan 31, 2009 23:54

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Really, once you start talking about 18tb of data, daisy chained firewire drives is downright frightening. Do you have any kind of redundancy?

Post a picture if you can. 18 external drives and the nest of wires would be interesting to see.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2009 02:25

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Jerk McJerkface posted:

My boss punched a whole in a wall Friday because I forwarded a remote users extension to their cell phone after hours of remotely troubleshooting the issue, and not being able to fix it.

I've been telling them I need to fly there and fix some serious problems, but they didn't think it was important at the time, but now they're flipping out because me and the other tech (the guy that saved the day during the Adtran debacle) didn't think that it was a bad idea to forward his phone.

We got a phone call to join a conference call, where I got absolutely screamed at for a half hour. The other tech kept trying to call in, but they kept not taking his call. My boss kept telling me that even though he's mad at me, he appreciates that I had the balls to call in and man up to it, and that the other tech is a failure because he's not trying to call in to the call. In the meantime he's calling in over and over trying to get in, and they kept rejecting his call.

What exactly is so terrible about what you did?

# ¿ Feb 2, 2009 17:46

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

ProjektorBoy posted:

The worst is when I'm supporting end users, and they read off to me the minutes/seconds remaining or tell me the position of the progress bar like it's the holiest authority on chronology that ever was fabricated by the cosmos.

Couple this with the progress bars that continually fill and start over, providing no actual indication of progress, and we have a winner for insanity.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2009 23:02

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

sirbeefalot posted:

I don't personally interact with her daily, but I hear stories from my girlfriend about her boss on an almost daily basis, and I've dealt with her enough to know they're all true.

Just now, I helped my girlfriend diagnose one of the iMacs in their office with a borked hard drive. I quoted them 200 to run over to Frys, grab a new 500 GB, and come install it real quick. They have been using Time Machine, I could have the thing up and running again before the end of today no problem.

What does the boss want to do instead? Because she wants the "heart of her company running on solid, reliable hardware" (honest to god this is verbatim) and doesn't want the "downtime" of me replacing the existing hard drive, she wants to BUY A NEW loving IMAC. Which won't be up and running until next week some time.

This is a small company, 3 employees including this delusional boss. She won't give my girlfriend a raise from her nearly entry level pay she's had for a couple years, but this will be the third new iMac in about a year. They replaced a Polycarb Intel iMac with a brand new 20" when all it was being used for was to tag photos in Bridge.

I don't really have any stake in the company, and the complete level of ignorance in this decision is still making me furious.

Order it, install it, and offer to dispose of the squishy, unreliable hardware that you replaced.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2009 18:58

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

beyonder posted:

A manual. A manual that requires a 11MB executable which fetches pages and shows them with a flash app. Also nope, offline copy isnt available.

Will it at least let you print? Print the bitch to .pdf and have another drink.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2011 13:59

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

PhancyPants posted:

1) Does the password work to login locally?

2) Does someone else have the password?

3) Have you tried moving the keyboard?

4) What is your BAC?

# ¿ Apr 19, 2011 17:22

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

FISHMANPET posted:

Is there a way to launch an elevated explorer session from Win 7/2008 R2? I could do it in XP, but it looks like they might have changed how things are done with 7 to make that not work.

Type explorer in the start bar, shift + right click windows explorer, run as different user?

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 18:14

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Yeah, big piece of poo poo is what instantly comes to mind. Though, that tends to apply to all POS systems as well.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2011 19:50

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

GWBBQ posted:

This is at home, not work, but I have to vent and this is what I'm payingg $50/mo for. I will literally get higher speeds tethering to my phone.

Haha, cablevision in NJ is loving atrocious. To make matters worse, Fios sends me 3-4 fliers a week and all sorts of specials, however when I call up, they tell me its unavailable.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2011 14:50

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# ¿ May 22, 2013 07:05

ThinkFear: Sep 14, 2007; igni ferroque

Sab669 posted:

Fax machines really just need to go away

Seriously, gently caress faxes.

# ¿ May 10, 2013 13:03

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