Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Software (Or Hardware) Glitch Makes You Angry?
This question was inspired when Slashdot reader TheRealHocusLocus found their laptop "in the throes of a Windows 10 Update," where "progress has rolled past 100% several times and started over."
I pushed the re-schedule dialogue to the rear and left it waiting. But my application did not count as activity and I left for a few moments, so Windows decided to answer its own question and restart (breaking a persistent Internet connection)... I've had it. Upon due consideration I now conclude I have been personally f*ck'd with. Driver availability, my apps and WINE permitting, this machine is getting Linux or pre-Windows-8...
That's mine, now let's hear about the things that are pushing you over the edge this very minute. Phones, software, power windows, anything.
There's a longer version of this story in the original submission -- but what's bugging you today? Leave your best answers in the comments. What software (or hardware glitch) makes you angry?
That's mine, now let's hear about the things that are pushing you over the edge this very minute. Phones, software, power windows, anything.
There's a longer version of this story in the original submission -- but what's bugging you today? Leave your best answers in the comments. What software (or hardware glitch) makes you angry?
Switched to Linux several years ago for the final time. Although some GUI-bugs here and there, I get around them, and not looking back. Keeping W7 in a VM and only for the 2-3 Windows applications I still use now and then. Forget Wine, find and support alternatives.
Forced W10 at work and lose productivity and motivation to work due to that and cloud solutions being rammed from above.
The thing that pissed me off in a major way was the flexlm "protection" software that was changed so that a perpetual license expired in the year 2000. It took a few weeks for that to be resolved before the stupidly expensive software that was "protected" could be used.
For added laughs their USB dongle updater used MSDOS stuff and would not work in a 64 bit operating system. How that happened I have no idea since they must have had to add USB support to MSDOS to get that problem to happen in the first place.
"You have to restart your computer in order for the changes from this patch to apply" [Ok] [Cancel]
"The software have been succesfully applied" [Ok]
Pressing OK restarts the computer.
Photoshop and Lightroom. I'm more or less forced to use these tools because all competing products dropped off the face of the Earth, so there is no viable alternative to the work that I do (yes, I know there are some RAW processors out there, but they don't have the feature set that I need for my job) - but PS and LR are so god awful fucking buggy pieces of shit. Over four years ago, LR5 Beta introduced a UI bug. It made it into production. It continued to exist in LRCC/6. It continues to this day. Yes, over four years for a stupid UI bug. Photoshop is so notorious for crashing, they implemented a crash recovery system that never works! Oddly enough, today PS "recovered" a photo from a crash from six weeks ago, despite the fact I've been using PS nearly daily since then until now. DRM is both also routinely fail at LEAST once a week, even though they are supposed to go 30+ days without a phone home connection. LR-CC had a very nice DRM bug in which it 100% failed for everyone at launch! Luckily THAT was patched quicky.
A few years ago, I bought a 64-bit laptop that came with 32-bit Windows. I put 64-bit Windows on it only to discover that the wifi card had no 64-bit Windows driver. Period. I found that there was a Linux driver for the same card for which source was available. So I put 64-bit Linux on the machine, got the source for the driver and one make && make install later I had a 64-bit machine running a 64-bit OS with all hardware supported, including wifi. Something that was not possible using Windows, in spite of the fact that the machine came with Windows on it, for neither love nor money.
You like letting your vendors make your decisions for you, fine. But don't try to pretend that isn't what it is.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Exactly what I've been asking for for ages!
Slashdot doesn't need to allow all of unicode (feel free to leave out emoji, for example), but at least allow common letters and symbols. Slashdot's current behavior - silently stripping them - is terrible. It can distort the meaning of text - when talking about foreign matters, when using math / science symbols, etc. It's made me look like an idiot several times - e.g. there's a world of difference between "My morning coffee is fine, but 10(DEGREE MARK) more would be perfect" and "My morning coffee is fine, but 10 more would be perfect". And thorn is a common letter where I live, so whenever I mention people or place names from where I am they get mangled. I've also had problems copy-pasting text from other sites that happened to have unicode symbols in them. On occasion, rather than silently stripping them, Slashdot has instead transformed them into gibberish.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
Exactly. I used Windows XP for several years and finally jumped to 7 after 10 was released. I immediately noticed a change in the way the OS gives focus to windows. In Windows XP if you were active in one window, no other window could get auto-focus. The best it could was 1) flash the taskbar entry 2) draw on top of the active window but not have focus. The exception was, if the active program launches another one, eg browser launches the default app for the file you downloaded. Or through user interaction eg start->programs->X program. In fact there is a specific WINAPI call that lets you give your "focus rights" to another applications. eg when you launch a program and that program checks if there is another instance running. It communicates with it to show the mainwindow or a dialog and exits itself. Without the WINAPI call that older instance wouldn't get the focus. That WINAPI is AllowSetForegroundWindow
Now, in Windows 7 it seems that at least newly started apps can steal focus. I don't know what happens for already running ones.
In the days before on-screen spellcheck there was a lady at our printshop who was voracious and speedy reader, but she was also a perfect final proofreader. Try as we might all we could do is plod along but she was fast and caught everything, every misspelling, word choice error, even inconsistent spaces. I asked her how one day. She made two passes over every paragraph, the first eyeballing the words in reverse order while noting only spelling and spacing. Then (in double-time she said) moving forward sounding the language normally for meaning, style and grammar.
While she was reverse reading she said, there was NO mental distraction from the actual message, to her it was like being presented a series of word puzzles/problems in a sort of "game" mode. Perhaps you could adapt yourself to examine troublesome code meticulously in reverse sequence this way while not perceiving the task. You seemingly work in some type of overlay mode where as you lay it down you are reproducing a (fuzzy) mental image.
If everything compiles perfectly in your brain, just use that and to blazes with the computer. Best of luck.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Ambient Authority in all of our operating systems is the cause of most of our grief, and the fact that most technical people don't even realize it's happening makes it even worse.
It's going to be about 5 more years until everyone wakes the fsck up, and another 10 years to finally fix things.