Great Moments in Computer Programming

[pinback]

Gooood. Feel the hate flow through you.

[Flack]

To strip formatting in Google docs, highlight the text and hit ctrl+space. I agree it's annoying, which is why I know that keystroke by heart.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Gooood. Feel the hate flow through you.

I feel ready!!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

So, I got an "update" e-mail from Yahoo! Groups. I am in one Yahoo! Group. Believe me, it's not my idea. I do not need updates from them.

I clicked on the link they helpfully provided, because I had no idea why I would want this new feature.

"UPDATE 4/28: The Updates Email is being enabled today for all users."

Oh, wonderful! Wonderful! You OPT-IN MOTHERFUCKERS.

There's been four or five instances lately with companies that have made me absolutely lose my fucking mind recently. Stubhub was one, Google is another and now I've got Yahoo sending me a redundant e-mail with no link to turn the feature off.

[pinback]

I'd like to hear more about your difficulties with StubHub!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

The ... company that has my mortgage wants $10 to pay it through the Internet. I will never do this.

So, I discovered my bank allows - for free - online billpay. They cut checks to companies.

My mortgage company, in their tediousness, wants me (on the paper bill they send) to specify where the money goes.

There is no way to do this when I cut a check to them through on-line bill pay BUT I ASSUMED they'd figure it out.

What they did, however, was take the money, cash the check, and not apply it to my bill. Then they also assessed me a $49.50 late fee.

They cashed the check and said, on this month's receipt, that they did not apply it anywhere.

I'm dealing with, literally, the world's most stupid company. Now I have to spend Monday morning yelling at them.

[AArdvark]

Remember that tenth-grade common denominator in the other thread? Guess what it applies to. Wait till I tell the story about the Monroe County child support debacle. Bureaucracy is the stuff that the word stupid can only dream about. This has to be in a future thread, tho, Still unfolding.


THE
BET STRAW COULD RELATE
AARDVARK

[straw]

RobB: HSBC? If not, their shitty tactics are eerily similar. It's not even as if the left hand does not know what the right is doing. It's more like a monster freak mutant octopod that at least one of its tentacles have become possessed like Ash's arm.

Vark: The child support system is horribly broken. It's designed from the ground up to punish the DAD, no matter who is the better parent. Even all the paperwork says "Mother" instead of "custodial parent" all over it. I had to cross out and make so many corrections.. on the OFFICIAL FORM. Fucking sad. And that's not even getting into when the shoe was on the other foot and all the special perks you get simply because you have a filthy slit instead of a bumpy rod.

[Flack]

Check out the below screenshot. This is a mandatory survey I received at work. Notice that it will not let me past field 1, as field 3 is blank. Figure out that logic and get back to me.

[Tdarcos]

This isn't... none of this is about computer programming.

I went into a Best Buy near work earlier this week to get some DDR3 RAM. Some kid asked me what I was looking for. After I told him, he said, "Mac or PC"? I flinched at that, because I knew what was coming next. I said, "PC."

"We only carry RAM for Macs," he said.

Anyway, the part that got me was that RAM's the fucking same for computers everywhere.

Not to sound stupid, but are you sure? This may be old but my understanding is that Macs do not use memory with parity and PCs do.

[Tdarcos]

I'd also like to state that the Word Processor for Google Docs is making its first foray into being shitware, too. Eventually, ALL Word Processors turn into bloatware crud... Open Office was there by version 2.0. I started to see the same things out of the Good Docs Word Processor over the weekend.

I've stuck with Word Perfect 8 for that reason (which is about, oh, 12 years old now). They had a trial copy of WP10 on some computer and I did not like it. WP8 does everything I want to do, does it the way I want it and does it right. I used OpenOffice.Org (OOO) just last month for a project I was working on and had to fight it to accomplish some things. The one thing I really miss in OOO - which Word Perfect has - that a lot of people apparently would like is "reveal codes" where you can see the internal contents of the document. This can fix a number of problems where you can see that you're not getting the correct internal code, e.g. you're getting [TAB] instead of [HRIGHT]. The difference being a tab only indents the first line of the paragraph, the second indents the entire paragraph.

I notice both Word and OOO seem to be bug compatible. I had Word Perfect save my book in RTF in order to open it in Word or OOO, I forget. Both OOO and Word misread the RTF the same way, it changed the appearance of the chapter headers. But I liked what it did, so I went into Word Perfect and changed them to the way Word had misinterpreted them. So you could say they accidentally improved my document.

I don't know if anyone is interested, but you can read/download a previous copy of my book at http://in-the-matter-of.com/instrument.pdf, it's a 718 page, 3 megabyte PDF. It's the story of the afterlife of a dead man and the dead people in his world:

Profane, profound, and parodically funny, Paul Robinson's Instrument of God tells the story of Supervisor 246, the lead supervisor of a "service facility." What sort of service do they provide? Well, that's what this story is about.

You could say it's the story of his life but that's not true at all.

You see, Supervisor 246 is dead. Everyone in this story is dead - or so it seems - and so we learn what it's like in a place they call the Afterlife. Take the world as we know, turn it upside down and shake it, and you get the mixed up and strange place he, and everyone else around him resides in, a world very similar to our own and yet is in so many ways a mirror image.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

This isn't... none of this is about computer programming.

I went into a Best Buy near work earlier this week to get some DDR3 RAM. Some kid asked me what I was looking for. After I told him, he said, "Mac or PC"? I flinched at that, because I knew what was coming next. I said, "PC."

"We only carry RAM for Macs," he said.

Anyway, the part that got me was that RAM's the fucking same for computers everywhere.

Not to sound stupid, but are you sure? This may be old but my understanding is that Macs do not use memory with parity and PCs do.

I think everyone's using the same RAM these days. I think. There was a list of what RAM the various Mac computers can take floating around out there, and I think RAM with parity checking is A-OK on a lot of models now.

[Flack]

Google Docs recently changed a few of they keyboard shortcuts for no apparent reason. I have when companies/programs do that. Whatever could be gained by making a keyboard shortcut different surely has to be lost in frustration by those of us who already learned the old one and now have to forget it and then learn a new one!!

[Tdarcos]

Gooood. Feel the hate flow through you.

No! Listen not to Vader. Dark side of Force, be not seduced by.

[ICJ]

I bought something from Apple, to be used as a Christmas present. They fucking went right ahead and required a signature.

In what is the most hilarious waste of time, money and gasoline, UPS will only come to people's homes when regular people are at working work. It's one of the most sadistically hilarious problems with our cul- well, this stupid fucking corporation, in UPS.

Thanks, Apple! Thanks for letting me know a signature was required. I would have shipped it to work, then. Here's something I can't wait to do during the holidays: go to the fucking UPS plant that looks like a deleted scene from Half-Life 2, and wait literally 30 minutes for some choadling to go get it.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

[AArdvark]

I make a point to have all my internet purchases shipped to either my workplace or my wife's. there will always be someone there during business hours and it's cheaper, believe it or not.


THE
REASON THEY ARE CALLED BROWN
AARDVARK

[Flack]

Only a 30 minute wait? Wow, you must have an upgraded UPS center. Mine takes at LEAST an hour to get anything, and by all outward appearances seems to be run by gangster thugs. Fortunately they have a television so you can stand around and watch sitcoms while you wait. Unfortunately, there are only about 2 chairs, and there will be at least 15-20 people standing around, waiting for their packages. When I had to go pick up my flat screen television, I found out they don't even carry the big stuff out to your car. They just dropped the TV off in the waiting room and said, "see ya." I had to beg to borrow a dolly, and a customer held the door open for me.

And unfortunately, ever since they stationed guards and built a perimeter around my work (about a week after the Murrah Building got bombed), having things shipped to my work is no longer an option. Fortunately my dad just retired, so if I have to use UPS again, I'll have my stuff shipped to his house. Why they only deliver things during working hours and refuse to leave items on my porch like everybody else is baffling.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

EVERY FUCKING TIME I go to print something over the network

1) I can't find the printer
2) The computer upstairs won't show up on the fucking network map, on my main Windows 7 computer.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, GUYS.

[Lysander]

Nobody cares about audio quality.

This is an unfortunate and painful lesson that I have had drummed into my head for 5 years. I first noticed this frustrating fact on HD torrent sites (yeah yeah, bare with me). On places that only allow bluray encodes at 720P or greater, it is accepted practice for the audio track to be AC3 at 640 or DTS at 1510Kbps. For all of you reading who don't know this (which I am assuming is, well, all of you), the bitrate of audio on most bluray discs for either format usually ends up being around 3500Kbps and at times tops out at 5400Kbps. I don't mean to be a stickler, here, but if it's basically the same quality as the DVD then you can't really fuckin' call it HD, can you. But moving on...

For years I had an Onkyo sound receiver. It was a good receiver that I got for ultra cheap because I was lucky in craigslist browsing. I would run an optical cable, which has enough bandwidth for up to 24-bit, 96 kilohert 5.1-channel audio. I say would because I didn't because doing so is pointless, because the only digital transmission standard pretty much any consumer gear supports is s/pdif, which can only do 2 channels at 48KHZ, maybe 20 bit but usually more like 16. The reason for this is because blah blah copyright policies must ensure the protection of SHUT UP FUCK YOU. Understand, 16/44.1 is about what CDs use. There is nothing wrong with this. However, when I have a DVDA with audio at the 24/96 resolution and an audio card that can play 24/96 files with a software player that can send 24/96 information over a cable with enough bandwidth to handle 24/96 data with 0 quality loss to a receiver that can decode 24/96 signals to all 5 (.1) of my glorious, glorious speakers, only I can't because some pencil-pushing squint-eyed accounting fuck decided 30 years ago it would hurt the bottom line of businesses that have since gone under due to their CEOs having been indicted for cocaine possession, I get a teansie bit testy. (I can, of course, just use analog cabling. But then, I run the risk of turning into the type of person who never sees the sun or feeds himself or has sexual intercourse or does really anything else in his empty, empty life except post on the hoffman.tv forums about the "warmth" of gold-plated audio cable that glows in the dark and needs its own AC adapter (not joking). From there, it's a short walk off a long drop into the ravine of crazy that *is* the $10,000 6-foot Monster cables. I will. Not. Do this. Dealing with digital, ulcer-forming as it is, at least grounds itself in reality, with scientific principles precluding most of the out-and-out lunacy that's infected, well, everywhere else in the hifi audio world.)

So I need a new receiver which will cost me upwards of what I spent on the whole system. Fine. Whatever. The current one does way more than I need anyway. Tried to sell the thing on craigslist at a considerable loss and got no takers because--see above, so I had to leave the damn thing behind when I moved into a different apartment that is a whole 5 miles down the same goddamn avenue. So I replace it with something that can do HDMI (here we go.)

Because the system is in the living room, the computer is in the bedroom and this apartment is already starting to resemble the Lurking Horror's underground steam tunnels (in large part thanks to my crazy) I have a certain small interest in getting the content to the box wirelessly. Yamaha sells a blutooth adapter. It is 100 dollars. Yeah, seriously. Otherwise known as half the price of the new receiver, roughly. There's also the whole mess of bluetooth compressing audio and all but the point is A hundred goddamn dollars for a Christing bluetooth dongle I can get for my computer for $20 at Best Buy for the love of fuck. So that's out. The sexiest way to do it would be to buy something like a Popbox or a Boxee (I hear Time Warner is offering free slingboxes as signing bonuses actually) that would connect to my LAN, but as some of you might have heard, Lysander is blind LOL!! so that's kind of not helpful. Also apparently some of that stuff doesn't even support audio over HDMI at all, because--shut up, there is no reason for that.

So instead I drop another hundred bucks on a wireless media extender, thinking I'll use a USB port to beam the stuff over. It only supports 720P for video for again, no reason, but the girlfriend doesn't give a shit so neither do I. What it didn't mention was that it, again, only supported 16-48 audio. By not mentioned, I mean it said specifically on the product page and in the manual that it had "full HDMI audio support." The only way to find out that it couldn't do this was to hook it up and check its capabilities in Windows. Again, not trying to be a stickler for details here, but when your shitty driver support limits what the product can do that is a far cry from "full," in my opinion. To be fair, it was probably just a terrible product because it also demanded line-of-sight from the transmitter to the receiver, I assume because no one at the company who made it considered that people might be planning to use it to bridge distances longer than 10 fucking feet, or around a corner.

So fine. Product resold, I ended up making most of my money back on it which I then resignedly spent on long cabling ("highspeed" cabling, it is important to note). Plug it in, and after some tinkering, I get sound... and it's 16/48, again. This time it's because that's what the drivers for my audio card support. As they're dated July of 2011 and support HDCP (DRM, long story short), there literally is no reason why this shouldn't work but it just doesn't. What I need to do, and here is where we pass irrevocably into crazytown, is buy... a better... video card. To transmit the... audio. Yeah. Seriously.

There is no logical reason why this shit needs to be so goddamn complicated. The only reason why it is is... because nobody cares. Can you imagine how pants-shittingly furious people would get if the situation was reversed? You go to buy a TV, only to find out that it doesn't support the picture over the interconnect designed specifically for the purpose of carrying both. So you get a second cable, even though the only reason to have that first port there in the first place is to not need the second cable. Then, HDCP decides to turn that second cable off at random, with no explanation, because due to being human you don't deserve one. So you buy another TV. But due to lazy driver support from the graphics card manufacturer, you're getting standard def picture over your highdef cable to your highdef display from your highdef content, even when you're playing unprotected content. When you complain to ATI, they tell you it's not their fault, and that you need to buy a better sound card. To enable the features of the hardware you already fucking bought. It'd be the goddamn london riots all over again, only this time instead of desperate poor people furious about police brutality it's pampered rich assholes and art snobs who feel they have the God-given right to see Helena Bonham Carter's acne pits in 48-bit deep color on their video wall. In both cases there would be the breaking of storefront property and stealing of plasma television sets, I guess is my point.

[Tdarcos]

I think everyone's using the same RAM these days. I think. There was a list of what RAM the various Mac computers can take floating around out there, and I think RAM with parity checking is A-OK on a lot of models now.

Actually, I found out from a guy on eBay who was selling memory that there is a different kind of memory used in servers that won't work in regular desktop machines; I think it does have extra parity or something like that. The guy explained why he advises people so they don't buy server memory for a PC.