|
Alystair posted:People that are forced or too dumb to switch away from IE6. I was told not to install IE7 on my home PC because the fuckers at my school got ambushed by IE7 and never even knew of it existence until it hit windows update. They were going to "evaluate" the program for the next 6 months or so. IE8 is slowly coming and 7 is still not installed on the school PCs.
|
| # ¿ May 5, 2008 18:21 |
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 23, 2013 09:57 |
|
|
One of my biggest annoyances of the last few months is a Dutch consumer organisation. It's not a useless organisation, but it does have a annoying tendency to be negative about EVERYTHING until a new version of the product gets released. It makes my weekly round to my neighbours twice as annoying, because they always will have read something that makes them think their new PC/Network/Virus Scanner/TV/Telephone is useless junk.
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2008 09:43 |
|
|
Fishstick posted:Out of curiousity, which is this? Consumentenbond, both my father in law as my neighbours are members so I get a double dose of annoyances. It's not a bad organisation persé and they're very usefull as watchdog, but their attitude towards new technology is pretty annoying.
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2008 10:46 |
|
|
Fishstick posted:My personal favourite is still this one keyboard mapping I get when I RDP from my linux machine to a windows machine. I don't know what mapping it is, only that "m" and "M" are two different keys, and there appears to be no @. And since I'm connecting from linux, for some reason copy/paste across RDP doesn't work anymore. if it's a dutch keyboard the @ is left of the 1 on the ~ key. My dad got one of those with his old fujitsu-siemens pc and it drove us absolutely bonkers since we all gotten used to the normal US-101 keyboard. gently caress you fujitsu-siemens! 
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2008 09:06 |
|
|
Fishstick posted:I don't know why this enrages me so but it does. Because it's like calling everyone in your phonebook because you got locked out?
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2008 14:02 |
|
|
Ryouga Inverse posted:It's like the guys who designed the interface just went with "it's a secret, it must need to be masked" without actually thinking of what the cryptographical definition of "secret" was. This is basically an extension of my gripe of a few pages back. Lack of response when your wireless passkey isn't typed in properly + obscured key when typing = call industrialpope: "MY NETWORK ISN'T WORKING!". At least you can check "show key" in Vista, it solves a lot of the problems. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at May 21, 2008 around 17:57 |
| # ¿ May 21, 2008 17:50 |
|
|
Dano Bodango posted:I mean, it's really cool that they are able to get so excited about IT, but they just move so much slower than the technology. The library world is actually kinda schizoid here. On one hand we're really trying to catch the big internet wave, but we're also hugely conservative about how we're supposed to intergrate all this into the library.
|
| # ¿ May 26, 2008 17:40 |
|
|
Whenever the library re-installs the computers at the desk, they switch back to 1024x768, the native resolution of the monitor is 1280x1024. Everyone agrees that 1280x1024 looks nicer, but it never gets changed. Our catalogue is a bit weird too, writing down all the annoyances will take to long, but i've run into this one a lot today. We've put all the "True stories" in their own category because people asked for that and they like to browse all the sob stories of criminals, drug addicts and other filth in one go. There is only one problem, the system we use for the customer catalogue never displays our own local category but chooses to display the "official" (and often non-sensical) category. This sends them on wilde goose chases along all the categories until they angrily ask me where the hell we keep the book they're looking for. I can see the category under "extra" but the system just doesn't display that for them and it's loving over customers.
|
| # ¿ May 28, 2008 13:04 |
|
|
A small annoyance compared to the shirtstorm about linux-notlinux and package managers. Why do people still stuff away their computers in cramped dark cabinets or somewhere that obscures the fact that they own a PC? All to often I have to clear piles of rubbish, goo and fold myself into awkward positions to fix someone elses PC. I can't fathom working there for long stretches, but these people do it often. Bonus points if they start complaining about having wrist/shoulder cramps a lot. I like to make the place where I use my PC a nice place to be, it helps my productivity and it makes me feel better and less depressed. But the majority of the people feel that the only place where a PC is allowed is the darkest, clammiest and smallest room they can find in the house.
|
| # ¿ Jun 3, 2008 09:35 |
|
|
The Gunslinger posted:A friend of mine is a graphic artist and constantly bitches about how people always some variant of the Nike ellipse. For reference this thing: There used to be a website called swoosh-no-more that was all about pointing out the countless variants of the Nike swoosh and other logo cliches.
|
| # ¿ Jun 20, 2008 14:07 |
|
|
Something that pisses me off regularly but not daily: Schools/Universiteits that do not teach their students the necessary skills to write proper papers. I'm not talking about bolded text in Word and so forth. I'm talking about plunking my unprepared girlfriend in front of AutoCAD 2008 and be told to "Learn it on the fly". Gee, if autoCAD is such a important part of writing a paper on an archeological digsite, wouldn't it be nice if you at least TRIED to learn her some basic skills? She hasn't seen the software in the 6 years she's following courses and now you expect her to master it within 3 weeks? Also, you practically force her to pirate the software, because even at a reduced price it's around €400 and you don't offer her a solution other than "deal with it". Their response to complaints about this? "We're teaching science, not basic skills" It's not just my girlfriend, lots of people are expected to learn software on the fly when there hasn't been any mention of it in all the years. When they do teach you basic skills, it's bolding text in word.
|
| # ¿ Jul 9, 2008 12:54 |
|
|
Sweevo posted:It would be even nicer if they tried to teach her some basic skills. Sorry, non-native speaker of english here. stupid mistakes like that slip through sometimes.  quote:But yeah, I know what you mean. When I was at college I used to see large numbers of non-IT students doing all their word processing in Powerpoint - because that was all they were taught how to use. Yeah, I can understand that older generations haven't had that education at school, but it should be mandatory by now to get those classes. Don't expect kids/students to learn it "by themselves", because there's a lot of people out there who aren't going to fool around with software in their spare time to get the hang of it.
|
| # ¿ Jul 9, 2008 13:40 |
|
|
Sweevo posted:My college actually had a mandatory IT class for non-IT students, but it was just laughable. It was like something straight out of the 1980s - the difference between ROM and RAM, how to use DOS, how a dot-matrix printer works, and other useless trivia that nobody really needs to know - certainly not someone in 1998. Yet there was nothing about how to use basic software like Word of Excel, nothing about why you shouldn't pull the metal slider off the one floppy you store all your work on, or anything else that would actually help people. Oh yeah, that falls under the: "if they do give courses, it's about bolding text in Word for 59 weeks"-clause. It sucks even more when you're starting a new study and they won't accept your grades. My horror story in this regard was coming from and lower level IT study into my current study and ending up into another round of basic level courses. I've had around 5 basic computer knowledge courses by now, one for every level of education and they never accept the other courses. I'm a bit out of the loop now, but is the European Computer Driving Licence at least somewhat accepted now? Because it sounded like a really good idea at the time, a standarized test for all EU countries that was transferable to all studies. The only problem was that no one offered it. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at Jul 9, 2008 around 15:09 |
| # ¿ Jul 9, 2008 14:57 |
|
|
WebDog posted:Computer skills education really needs a kick in the arse. Try explaining to your Prof that the program he suggested to the class for XML editing is not suited to the task because it doesn't support DTD and that it costs 150€. quote:The ironic thing is I've seen people gain esteem by knowing how to set a border in word. You'd think a study that hopes to produce the next generation of Magazine-, Newspaper-, Television- and Webeditors would focus on this. What do we get? The basics of HTML and let half the class pass with godawful colourschemes, instead failing them like they should.
|
| # ¿ Jul 11, 2008 10:13 |
|
|
Bradzor posted:Most of the Logitech gaming keyboards, like the G11 or G15 don't work. I can't even boot into safe mode without plugging in a second keyboard. I never had problems with the g11/g15 keyboards and the BIOS and I've used them on several PC's.
|
| # ¿ Jul 11, 2008 18:31 |
|
|
MW posted:And if you have no desire to learn these tools by yourself, you are unfortunately not going to get far (academically) and ultimately blame the system, at least in my experience. I'm sure this AutoCAD class would not had come out of the blue if you had just looked ahead a semester or two beforehand. It was not a class, it was her final assignment to get her degree. They never offered anything prior to it that resembled a course to teach her AutoCAD, not even extra curricular. They also never mentioned the software prior to the assignment. Ultimately it comes back to: If you expect your students/users to buy and learn software by themselves without supervision or guidance you're going to be disappointed. At least tell them in the first few years that it pays off to learn about some specialized software and offer courses for them. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at Jul 11, 2008 around 21:56 |
| # ¿ Jul 11, 2008 21:53 |
|
|
Bucket Joneses posted:How did she not know this was coming up? Does she not talk to her peers who are a year ahead of her? Well there's not a lot of interaction among peers in Archeology, the projects you do are all over the place and it's not uncommon for people to never see their peers the moment they specialize in the second year. The Archeology department also has horrible staff and funding problems, which lead to cutting some introductionary courses that could be usefull (Like AutoCAD). In a better staffed, better funded and a more social study (like mine) there's not a lot of excuses for not knowing what software to use. We've gotten some good courses for the software we're using (ADLIB) and it gets mentioned often. It just drops the ball on common software like Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Kapinga posted:At some point, though, it is not unreasonable to give an introduction to specialty programs such as AutoCAD. It could easily be a student's first encounter with technical programs and to at least provide an introduction/simple tutorial on the use of said tool is not out of the question. If I use an expensive, specialized tool in a laboratory, someone has always taken the time to show me how to use it; why waste your time rediscovering the wheel. The same should apply to software. I'm not asking for two weeks of class devoted to holding everyone's hand, just a tutorial on how to do the basics. Like I said, these introductions are not longer given because of funding problem, they chose to focus on more archeological topics (and why not?). Anyway: In the end it all worked out. We got some books about the software and finished the assignments, The graduation ceremony is in September. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at Jul 12, 2008 around 09:46 |
| # ¿ Jul 12, 2008 09:34 |
|
|
What's up with Speaker, Earbuds and Headphone manufactures labeling their products "also works with iPod, iPhone AND MP3"? It's a useless phrase and only confuses people. If it works on your iPod, it drat well works with MP3s!
|
| # ¿ Jul 23, 2008 11:15 |
|
|
Smoke posted:Adaptation to the terms the public uses and their general ignorance in the technical field. Users are actually confused easily if the term they know their device by isn't mentioned, and it can lead to them purchasing the competitor's product because it directly tells them it works with their device. And these days people refer to their portable digital audio players as "MP3" apparently. "Works with all portable audio players including the iPod and iPhone" sounds like a much better phrase for this.
|
| # ¿ Jul 23, 2008 11:58 |
|
|
Ryokurin posted:Mp3 is the new Walkman/Diskman name. Just saying portable audio is not enough for some people. I'm gonna have to explain MP3!=digital audio player for the rest of my days isn't It? 
|
| # ¿ Jul 23, 2008 12:14 |
|
|
WebDog posted:Your sanity begins to decay when you reckon the number of people who ask "how do I play MP3s on my radio" is reaching into three or more digits. Most radios come with mp3 support these days isn't it? the Philips WAC3500 supports wireless and has a harddrive, but it's not Squeezebox when it comes to audioformats. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at Jul 23, 2008 around 13:13 |
| # ¿ Jul 23, 2008 13:00 |
|
|
Sniep posted:People who ask me questions that are easily googled. I don't mean complex computer questions, but, like yelling across the office "How many grams are in an ounce?" - Because I'm the answer guy. When I applied for my current study (Information Management), I had to motivate my choice. I simply wrote down "I'm already a human search engine for most of my relatives, I might as well make money from it". 4 years later and I am Currently the answer guy, the book guy, the movie guy, the music guy, the videogame guy and the computer guy. Recently, I helped someone get the candlewax of his piano. It can be really annoying and I do tell people occasionally that I'm not their personal search engine. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at Jul 26, 2008 around 10:34 |
| # ¿ Jul 26, 2008 10:03 |
|
|
MrMoo posted:It doesn't help everyone trying to use Word & Excel as desktop publishing software, OpenDoc seems to completely ignore the need for recording font metrics. People using word to edit the layout of a document are sad creatures. I saw many people turn into horrible wrecks/angry gorillas when they tried to add a image file to a document and preserve the layout of it.
|
| # ¿ Aug 19, 2008 17:33 |
|
|
Pantsmaster Bill posted:People who can't organise their computers for poo poo. How hard is it to put music in my music, documents in my documents, and photos in photos? I try to keep some sort of order on my drive, because I'm not the only one using the computer and I like other people to be able to find stuff as well. But there are people that save files to any free space they can find and make a goddamn mess of everything. They do not have any naming schemes or anything (save for: new document (1)) and quicksearch won't do me good either because of that. Funny thing I noticed over the years: very clean and neat people have often a very messy harddrive, while complete slobs have the most ridiculous organized filesystems on most occiasions.
|
| # ¿ Aug 20, 2008 11:18 |
|
|
Pavol Paska posted:Also I am thankful for the fact that ball mice went extinct, the little shits sure loved stealing them balls. They sealed the lids shut at my school. There was much gnashing of theeth and throwing of mouses when the balls gathered so much dust that it was impossible to use them.
|
| # ¿ Sep 5, 2008 19:07 |
|
|
deviant. posted:I'm sure you IT professionals have seen this before - a "Halt all internet traffic" option buried in security software? One that kills all network traffic without notifying you? Norton did this once on my former neighbours computer, to them total internet security means "you are not allowed to go online or browse your local network".
|
| # ¿ Sep 24, 2008 09:58 |
|
|
afflictionwisp posted:So I get the laptop and try to make the discs. The app tells me I don't have a burner in the system. Drive is there, works fine, I tested it, gently caress you application. Call HP, spend an hour on the phone, talk to four people, now they are sending me recovery CDs. the ones they dont have. The ones they couldn't possibly send me when the machine was purchased because they Don't Have Them. gently caress. I had a similair problem when I tried to make the recover discs for the laptop my girlfriend bought, the dvd would burn but with errors and it wouldn't work. I had to call 3 times before they sent me the physical DVDs. Creative tried to charge you for driver cds for a while and the downloaded drivers would only work when you had an original driver disc in the drive or had them installed.
|
| # ¿ Mar 9, 2009 08:37 |
|
|
It's still stupid (and only partial incorrect), even if you could beat the error with such a simple trick. These days they offer the sub-installers as stand alone downloads, that's a huge improvement.
|
| # ¿ Mar 9, 2009 12:08 |
|
|
LowJack posted:The worst I deal with is other IT departments whose problems I solve, in reverse. As in, I don't have access to their system from an administrative level, but I can see the client issues and figure out that their server system isn't running a required security update or hotfix. So then I get to spend an inordinate amount of time asking for them to apply the hotfix to resolve the problem, even though they should be doing this in the first place so that the system is reasonably compatible with variances in client setups. This is basically how it happened between me and my sister, she's a systems administrator and I'm a assistant systems administrator (now trying to become a librarian). This made for volatile situations when managing the home network since our approaches differ so much and we are quite stubborn. It did bemuse a lot of people seeing us fight about how to manage a network/patches and not about that one book/cd you got from one another ten years ago.
|
| # ¿ Mar 11, 2009 16:22 |
|
|
nmfree posted:So raging alcoholics can take them either to 1) the grocery store to get cashed or 2) directly to the bar to get cashed. Hell, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century some companies gave you the option to get paid in liquor.
|
| # ¿ Mar 26, 2009 12:57 |
|
|
Casao posted:Whether someone is in a CS major or not, they can still benefit from a laptop. And then there's the catch 22 of learning to use a laptop. "Don't give it to people who don't know how to use computers." "But I can't learn to use computers without one." The only time i get annoyed with Colleges providing discount laptops for students is when the IT department refuses to support anything beyond XP when the laptops come pre-installed with Vista. The official word is "Not until june 2009".
|
| # ¿ Mar 28, 2009 07:40 |
|
|
Paratus posted:I bet they pitch a fit if you turn in an assignment via email in .docx format, because the professors' machines are all running Office 2003. They're running Office XP and some professors are running OpenOffice at home. Those who do demand you email them PDF files to make sure they can read it, it's standard practice for me now to send them in PDF to everyone. Of course there's also the few that still demand a hard copy of everything, because they don't trust our ability to put our name on the document. This is really infuriating, because I have to pay for printing and they get a employee card that grants them free prints. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at Mar 31, 2009 around 08:03 |
| # ¿ Mar 31, 2009 07:59 |
|
|
Crowley posted:- No, Mr. Teacher, I will not block Facebook, Youtube, or any other website because your students would rather surf the net than listen to you. We don't use technology to solve pedagogical problems. I loved this when I worked at a high-school. Teachers giving classes where they had to search for information on the web, but didn't want to walk around and check if they really were working on the assignments. We should've blocked all things not needed for the assignment, leaving 3 sites they could use. Yes that sounds like a plan, the purpose of the assignment was teaching kids how to look for information on the web. The solution to unwanted behaviour was to block everything but the right answers. Christ, these people would've taken away pen and paper if they could.
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2009 17:19 |
|
|
Just rant into this again today: People who cover up their faults by blaming the computer/our catalogue. "I'm Looking for a book, but i can't find it in the system. I'm not good with computers you see" "Don't worry, what's the title?" "eh.. something like the forbidden city.. by.. whatshername" and it turns out that she needed a completely different book and forgot the title. THIS IS NOT A FAULT OF THE SYSTEM NOR IS THE LACK OF COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE ON YOUR END. I know this sounds a bit strung up, but I've had 6 people today trying to act as if their lack of computer knowledge was the problem and not the fact that they simply forgot the title of the book/CD/DVD they were looking for. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at May 13, 2009 around 14:40 |
| # ¿ May 13, 2009 14:26 |
|
|
Crowley posted:Our single biggest solution provider - who the ministry demands that we use - is playing Enya when you call them. last ISP had Air - Ce matin-Lá playing for ten years. It's a nice soothing song, but not for 20 MINUTES!
|
| # ¿ May 30, 2009 19:12 |
|
|
afflictionwisp posted:did this with an acronym of 'Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock', set it never to expire, user never forgot his password again. That's actually the way I tell people to make their passwords, get a sentence you can remember easily and make the password the first letter of each word. Add a number you can remember as well and presto, you've got a good enough password for most systems.
|
| # ¿ Jun 10, 2009 12:28 |
|
|
brc64 posted:Why not just use the whole sentence? Any competent* password system should allow spaces and a fuckton of characters. I've noticed that most password services people use (like your bank) are restricted to a maximum of 16 characters for some reason.
|
| # ¿ Jun 10, 2009 13:31 |
|
|
Midelne posted:That way if they ever need to get into your account, they can brute-force it. The "best" system ever was at my old college, it was an old Technical College run by nerds and all fantasy, SF and Videogame terms were on the forbidden list. I could still use "Cookie" as a password, but not "THX-1138".
|
| # ¿ Jun 10, 2009 13:39 |
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:I've seen websites that include your password as a part of the generated URL. oh yeah, clanbase.com did this back in the day, when you weren't carefull with linking you practically gave someone else full acces to your account.
|
| # ¿ Jun 11, 2009 13:25 |
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 23, 2013 09:57 |
|
|
hermand posted:Oh yeah, we know off hand each and every error message in each and every application you use. They send them to us like a big yellow pages. I used to have a list of BIOS beeps and what they meant, saved my rear end several times.
|
| # ¿ Aug 27, 2009 04:36 |
|
