RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Mierdaan posted:

Submitted for OP:

You kid, but our April Fool's joke this year was a blog post stating that our database platform could now be run on a Blackberry Pi within a BeOS VM. One of our customer's DBAs decided that that was just. too. possible to be an April Fool's joke and spent a week trying to actually make such a beast to prove to us that it wasn't a very funny joke.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 18:29

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 22:32

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Vin BioEthanol posted:

Maybe some type of warning or indicator light could be implemented in keyboards or laptops to let you know the num/caps-lock is on. Forget OS-level, that's HW level there and should result in no confusion.

I've seen a few laptops that don't actually have lights for capslock and numlock, instead just showing a little popup for 4 seconds on the screen when you hit those buttons. There's no persistent indicator that they're on at all.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 17:15

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

larchesdanrew posted:

Don't they generally have an indicator on the taskbar?

You're expecting way too much thought from Asus.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 18:58

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

The company I work at doesn't drug test, and when a customer asked our VP if they could drug test project staff working at their site, he laughed at them.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 16:12

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Negromancer posted:

Really? I have always been really happy with AnyConnect, especially compared to all of the other lovely solutions out there. As long as the VPN is configured correctly, and you have a competent networking team supporting it, it is really the best solution I have dealt with.

I just wish it would let me specify a few ports not to send through the VPN connection. Nothing more annoying than uTorrent quietly crashing into the background instead of closing and then getting a flood of angry emails from the admin about using p2p on the company network.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2013 22:35

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:

Use a VM and stop sending torrent traffic through your workplace!

What's the best free VM solution out there if all I plan to use it for is VPN/RDPing into my work computer?

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 05:50

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Crowley posted:

Like when one of our student workers forgot to stop his torrents before going to work, and made the 1 GB line grind to a halt when his moviez really picked up steam. At least he found out himself when his machine got "sort of sluggish" and the HDD light was constantly on.

(it was about 6 years ago, noting came of it except relentless teasing)

And pretty drat expensive. Just use VirtualBox.

I just installed virtualbox, but it doesn't seem to support x64 Windows 7 and that's the only copy of windows I have around.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 01:36

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

AlexDeGruven posted:

It most certainly does. You either don't have something set right, or your processor doesn't support VT-X/AMD-V.

It's a core i5 so I'm assuming my bios just has it off by default for some lovely reason.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 07:05

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

My mother still does that on occasion.

My mom asked me to edit her resume and freaked out when I sent her a file full of tracked changes. "You ruined it, it's ugly now" etc. Even after I showed her how it worked, she was just all "Just edit it yourself next time."

# ¿ Dec 5, 2013 20:37

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Our software's codebase used to have some pretty arcane restrictions on variable and routine name length. As a result, I'm constantly finding variables and functions with names that are something benign with the vowels removed, but look like sex words as a result. Imagine debugging and find a function called "anlzeHM".

# ¿ Dec 22, 2013 18:30

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

ookiimarukochan posted:

How in the gently caress can you end up with a job writing financial software and not have had it drummed into you WHY you don't store money as floating point values, ever?

I work with a database that includes financial information and it stores all numerical values as doubles. But you can't explicitly type them that way. It just tries to figure out whether you're calling the variable as a string or a number based on context.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 16:46

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

ookiimarukochan posted:

I actually can't parse that (or at least my brain doesn't want to) - is it some sort of VB/Access abomination? Because I had to debug a VB6 app once (without knowing any VB, merely having touched BBC Basic 20-odd years earlier as pretty much every British kid interested in computers during the 80s did) and all the "helpful" type conversion caused far more issues than it solved. At least Perl has "use strict".

Nope. This language literally has only the following concepts for data storage:
Local variable/array (untyped)
Permanent variable/array (untyped)

Which can result in nonsense like this (pseudocode)

code:

create var1
var1="150";created as string
create var2
var2=var1/2
write var2; output will be 75
var2=var2_"butts"
write var2; output will be 75butts
write var2*2;output will be 150

This actually ends up being less problematic than it sounds 99% of the time. Of course, that makes debugging the odd case where it creates a problem suck really bad.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2014 06:42

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

ookiimarukochan posted:

Is it MUMPS? The idea that large banks are using floats to store financial transactions because it's ~fast~ strikes me as negligent if not criminal (I have only come across MUMPS in stories on The Daily WTF so it's possible that there are no actual issues here, but given the content of the stories, I doubt it)

Good guess. It is MUMPS. You can write very, very compact code in MUMPS, but you can also write code that is literally impossible to read ten minutes after you write it if you're not leaving comments. It's fun.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2014 20:37

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

What's especially annoying is that, if they seriously can't be bothered to write good code that won't break by updates to Java, they could just use one of the several AOT compilers for Java to produce fully compiled executables that don't require a JVM at all. You're already losing the whole "platform neutral" thing anyway when your lovely software won't run unless a random unsecure version of Java is installed, so just say gently caress it and .exe for everyone!

# ¿ Feb 1, 2014 06:30

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

ratbert90 posted:

Linux/Unix doesn't exist in enterprise environments.

Not on desktops, no. Who gives a gently caress what's running in the datacenter? All these lovely java apps run on workstations.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2014 05:24

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Collateral Damage posted:

I have an deep hatred for anyone who doesn't use ISO8601 for date fields in internal data formats. I don't care how you present it to the user, but if your systems are sending data files to my systems with m/d/y or some other rear end-backwards date format in file names or data fields meant to be machine-readable I'll hunt you down and gently caress you with a rusty shovel.

You'd be surprised the crazy poo poo some platforms use for dates internally. ANSI M was the fever dream of some guy designing database platforms for hospitals, so he decided that the date 0 should be the day before the birthday of the oldest currently living American and that dates should be the number of seconds since that time. Pretty much any date coming in or out of software implemented on an M-based platform as to do hilarious work to figure out what format they're receiving or need to send in and translate.

This is made more hilarious by the fact that several major banks also run software that uses M (why????), so they have to deal with the weird epoch and the fact that all numerical values are stored as doubles and there's no built in way to truncate them precisely, which makes dealing with currency amounts weird.

I'm sure I've posted about this before, but it never stops being hilarious seeing the workarounds programmers have to use to get things that are completely standard in most modern database platforms.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2014 18:58

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Volmarias posted:

MUMPS is considered a canonical example of "how not to do it" for most values of "it". Think of it as COBOL's hard-living cousin.

Yeah, MUMPS is alive today only because of two things:

1-Having built in general trees that work fairly efficiently lets them get away with a lot of the dumber aspects of the language
2-A lot of software vendors are tied to the platform without any way to migrate off without rewriting their code from the ground up. It just isn't enough like any other language to try interpreting the code to a new platform.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2014 17:38

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

DrAlexanderTobacco posted:

Why didn't they just exclude it from the update list?

If I read him right, they don't have WSUS at all. Their machines are directly connecting to Windows Update.

# ¿ May 2, 2014 20:42

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

kensei posted:

On a scale of One to "Oh Dear God No," how badly do I not want to be the SharePoint Administrator?

I wrote my own java app to manage internal documents to get away from SharePoint.

# ¿ May 5, 2014 22:53

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

I really, really loving hate that all the widescreen monitors are 16:9 instead of 16:10 now. Monitors are for doing work and playing video games, not watching movies. 16:10 allows you to view to standard size pages at 100% side-by-side. 16:9 allows you to be cranky that you can't quite multitask on this huge rear end monitor that is hogging your desk. So stupid.

# ¿ May 14, 2014 06:04

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Our president laughed at the CEO of a client who wanted to drug test our staff coming on site. Laughed right in his face.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 15:32

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Sirotan posted:

We have to keep patient records for 7 years OR if the patient was a minor at the time of interaction, for 7 years or until they turn 21, whichever is longer. So if we see babies we've got records we have to hang on to for potentially 21 years.

The basement for one of our sites has nothing but dozens/hundreds of boxes of paper charts in it that no one will probably ever look at again until it's thrown into the shredder truck.

Seems like it would be better to use some OCR and interface magic to get this stuff into an EMR. Records that seem worthless now could turn out to be lifesaving later when someone turns up with a weird malady and the only clue was in some random fetal blood screening or something.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2014 20:56

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Sirotan posted:

It's incredible how often I come across websites that will only allow you to launch PDFs from them (hell, even VIEW them in some kind of I-frame) if you've got an Adobe product installed. I tried really hard to get everyone in our org onto Foxit instead of Adobe, but there's a handful of users I had to reinstall Reader on because some lovely bank or government site will only let you open PDFs with Adobe.

How does that even work? Once you click the link shouldn't the file be passed to the OS to figure out what to do with it?

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 18:58

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Inspector_666 posted:

Can you call the recruiter and just ask about those specifics? I want to hear the reasoning.

Most telecoms employ their techs as "independent contractors". This lets them gently caress them on insurance/vacation/etc on one end, and then also on the other end say "Why don't you have your own equipment, aren't you a professional, independent telecom technician?"

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 20:25

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

m.hache posted:

Pretty sure iTunes is the only reason what that relic still exists.

That's QuickTime.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 02:56

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

stevewm posted:

Some of ours are used in very dusty/dirty stores (commercial lumber yards). For the units in that environment I don't expect a very long life out of them, but I at least expect the fuser to last longer than a toner cartridge.

Even the ones in the nice clean offices died the same way.

That's a shame. When I was just a wage-slave at Staples I always tried to steer folks toward Brothers because they were the only printers left that didn't gently caress your computer to death with driver bloat that required dual-layer DVDs to install. Brother only moved to putting their drivers on CD when computers stopped coming with floppy drives.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2014 19:31

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Garrand posted:

I've never tried, but it's never occurred to me that printing a youtube page wouldn't be able to actually print a screen of the video itself

It's hardware accelerated, so I'm kinda amazed it gracefully degraded to having a play icon in there rather than just printing whatever color the GPU composites over.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 04:16

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

How is it remotely acceptable for software to require its end users to escape their own special characters. I don't care if it's just for IT guys, I shouldn't have to type \\ or \" to enter loving notes in a ticket.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 17:35

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

dogstile posted:

Being in an English office, every single room that has workers here has a kettle that boils in around 10 seconds, with decent milk and hundreds of teabags readily available.

Its a small perk, but its a nice one.

What exactly constitutes indecent milk? Does it curse at you while you pour it or something?

# ¿ Oct 16, 2014 18:26

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

lampey posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-qEutnxfMk

Unitrends mascot until recently has been some sort of anime character called Aptari. I think its a robot now.

The worst thing is HOW IN THE gently caress ARE THOSE EARBUDS STAYING IN HER CAT EARS?

A close second is the way this "support person" sarcastically responds "really?" to every customer who calls her.

This is clear a company that is all IT people and no managers.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2014 02:28

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Outlook's web interface is not as good or easy to use as the client.

I also don't understand getting mad about email retention. I've never deleted an email. They get archived in various folders because multiple times my rear end has been saved when a coworker accuses me of dropping the ball on something and I'm able to produce emails where they committed to doing some follow up and clearly didn't bother following through. In two of those situations, the email was from over 2 years prior.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2014 18:44

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Quick poll, who bothers with antistatic gear when opening up a machine? I always use it because one of my teachers was very serious business about it, but I've always been dubious about its usefulness when the machine is off and unplugged.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2014 19:44

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Or "Garbage Bin". Or "Dumpster". Or "poo poo you deleted".

# ¿ Nov 8, 2014 06:30

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

potato of destiny posted:

What's really great is the sheer amount of time and money that gets poured into having a scalable, high-availability infrastructure to take a modern Electronic Medical Record and cause it to be spit out to basically the same goddamn fax machine as the doctor's office was using 30 years ago.

Fax machine is just printer + phone, two terrible things that go terrible together.

The sick thing is, there's ANSI and HL7 standards for sending literally anything you can imagine electronically and most of the major vendors support them. The big orgs just refuse to implement them for fear of alienating the local small clinics that send business their way who also refuse to buy any electronics made after the CRT monitor went fossil.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 03:50

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

We don't have many paid holidays at my work, but all the other idiots here burn their vacation time on holidays, so I get basically a free vacation day by coming into work on those holidays and getting paid to gently caress around on the internet because you can't do anything productive in an empty office.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2015 20:51

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 22:32

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

There's a lady at my work named Philosophy Walker. I've also worked with several different MDs named Dr. Porn. Yay Thai names.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 19:15

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?