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?
No unicode on Slashdot. All I ask for is a Thorn!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
When my computer's OS lies by stating a username/password combination is wrong, when actually the account has been (temporary) disabled. Or the prompts I get in my company lately where sometimes I should login with domain\username, sometimes usename, and sometimes email address and password. What moron feels that there should not be an indication of what it wants? In general I get the impression software nowadays is seen as being good, when it replies with a message, even if that message has no relation to what is actually going on. Sorry, if an application can't be bothered to give an accurate message then let it just say "fault fuck off".
When I'm typing on my keyboard and some application thinks it's important enough not just to pop up in front of all the other windows but also move the cursor to its windows.
Especially funny when you're entering an internal password with a customer looking over your shoulder.
I also very much hate it when I enter a domain and the browser goes "Oh, I know tha tone! Let me autocomplete that for you, even though you hit enter after the ".com""
I want the computer to sopt trying to think for me until it's actually smarter than me. But at that point, I want to be able to copy a url, a username and a password and just hit ctrl+v three times and the system pastes the correct value in each field.
When you get off a horse in Minecraft and it becomes invisible.
Glitches are annoyances, but if there's support behind the product, I don't tend to get angry. What I hate is the 'this has been a known issue for a few years, and nobody knows how to solve it and the company doesn't seem to want to fix it' type of problem.
Why is it so hard on Android phones, though not on Windows phones going the way of the dinosaurs, to move apps to the SD card?
1. When you tell windows to restart/turn off and it starts the shutting down process then crashes. Pisses me off because the OS should always be in control of turning off.
2. Windows fucken update updating my working drivers when I dont want it to and breaking it instead. Since the driver update is clobbered in with all the other windows updates (thanks a lot windows 10 you useless pile of shit) I have to install all updates including the one that I know will break my sound and then reinstall my sound drivers manually at the end of every windows update. I even have driver updates disabled in the registry and control panel and stupid windows keeps on insisting on updating it.
3. I have a freenas server sharing files to windows machines. On the odd occasion windows 10 will refuse to read shares and the only way to fix it is to restart windows.
4. windows changing your privacy settings by itself. eg turning off your camera/mic/location settings yourself and finding out later it has inexplicably turned itself back on. Happens even what I dont have a camera/mic/gps installed!!!
I have spent *HOURS* trying to debug code that I could see nothing wrong with, and another human being looks at it and sees the problem in seconds, such as having an inverted condition, or some other typo that the compiler would not detect as a syntax error, but which is plainly obvious in the context of what is being done, and meanwhile I didn''t see the problem because I was reading the code as what I *thought* I had typed instead of what I actually typed.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Drivers NEVER have to be re-compiled.
False. You just make yourself dependent on the good will of vendors to perform the builds for you, since they won't let you have the sources.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm so sick and tired of dealing with this yearly upgrade bullshit.
Nothing ever works properly anymore. By the time they work out most of the bugs (but not all), it's time for a new "major" release with improved Emoji support or some bullshit, which inevitably breaks a whole bunch of other crap, and the cycle repeats. Eventually everything becomes too bloated for your "old" hardware to handle and things start to slow down. If you're lucky, you can downgrade to a less crappy version of the software and things will speed up again. If you're not, tough shit, go out and buy a new system like a good little consumer.
I've learned not to rely on ANYTHING modern anymore. The most reliable systems in my house are running Mac OS X 10.8.5 and Windows 7 SP1. They're dated as fuck and they don't run a lot of new snazzy software, but they continue to run what they've always ran with zero problems whatsoever. It's a crapshoot if my Windows 10 box actually lets me use Maya or Photoshop today because Microsoft installed some faulty patch or helpfully upgraded a random system driver somewhere.
That's what makes me angry. People don't care about writing reliable software anymore and testing it before release. Everything is just one big giant rolling beta that will never actually conclude. And some companies (like Adobe) actually expect you to pay monthly for it too! Fucking hell.
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.
One out of 3 or 4 "full repair" that I have to do on this software will end up with it be unsitanlled and thats it. Than I have to go back to the origina DVD (or 365 in case of signature - you cant use the same source for both, it would be too easy) and install again. The second problem is finding the install key, there is always a problem and someone misplaced it (on my company or on the small business in question). In the end Office is the only original software that I have to pirate. Its way faster for the user... in case MS ever knock on the dor they will give us days to find all the licenses.
Add the Blue Screen of Death to the list.
Today an OS should be able to cope with driver errors and recover.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I get furious when a paid-for piece of software thinks I'm not allowed to use it. So I consider that broken bij design.
Drivers NEVER have to be re-compiled.
False. You just make yourself dependent on the good will of vendors to perform the builds for you, since they won't let you have the sources.
Not really. A driver from 2009 will just work on Windows 10. Can't say the same for my ATI 5770
http://saveie6.com/
Auto update that closes open applications with unsaved work in progress, How hard would it be to send save commands before closing a file and appending a WIP designator to the file name so nothing is over written. That should be a standard required windows feature. Webpages that jump during load have popover, popunder or autoscroll. The fricking browser should be designed to not even allow these things to happen. The commands that even allow those things to happen should be banned and the people who thought them up drawn and quartered. It would make for a much much friendlier web experience to make the web flat again. But the most annoying thing that forces me to keep the volume muted on my computer is the autoplay curse. Web pages that somehow play video or audio when they open. I want my computer to do as its told speak when its told show video when told and stop when told. Any programmer that does not create software that enforces that basic human machine interface rule is a curse to mankind.
I see bugs, non-ideal behaviours, wrong approaches, easily-improvable bits, etc. almost every day in virtually any piece of software. The software which I develop might also include bugs. Everyone makes errors. How could I feel angry about any of this? I would be constantly angry! What kind of life would be that? I find most of bugs funny or irrelevant. Some of them might be somehow annoying, but I would plainly ignore them or even stop using that software.
A different story is gross incompetence, careless/abusive attitudes (sometimes, even intentionally!) or dishonest reactions. I wouldn't feel angry in these cases either, but might stop taking that company seriously or have a more aggressive reaction.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
And dialog boxes for software installation in the middle of the screen is a bugger too, especially if you have something that takes an eternity to perform.
Some dialog boxes aren't even showing in the task bar and when you close all other windows you see one at the desktop. WTF was they thinking about?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
While working on audio projects. That is real time audio streaming/ recording. Usb.sys trows up deffered procedure call latetency... at random. Some days no glitches at all and other days one after another. Without any apparent reason.
Car manufacturers are the worst for software updates. Some worse than others. There's a couple of stupid little bugs in the audio system of my 3 year old car, that make it too painful to use, that could be fixed easily enough with a software update but probably will never get one.
The dealer and manufacturer are aware of the problems. The dealer just gives me a blank look when I ask when a fix is coming.
It's that lack of appreciation of software's importance that sank the likes of Nokia et al in the mobile phone market.
I fully expect the same to happen to the traditional big car manufacturers, they deserve it.
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.
Long file paths in Windows have not been properly supported FOR DECADES !
Windows 10 File Explorer ( yes, even with the new flag ) cannot handle files with long paths THAT IT ITSELF CREATES !
Microsoft added a flag to support Long File Paths.
But Microsoft's File Explorer DOES NOT USE IT !!
Meanwhile they are adding millions more lines of code to Windows, and making it more and more rotten.
I can't believe how horrible the user interfaces of household appliance can be. We have a microwave which takes at least 5 button presses to get going (yes, I know some microwaves have the nice start button which defaults to 30 secs or 1 minute with a single press). Also, the oven requires powering off at the switchboard to reset the time. Then there is our car which shows the reversing camera, but only after the phone has connected via bluetooth. That's not much use when the first thing I want to do when getting in the car at home is backing out the driveway! I would be happy to be more patient if these design issues were unavoidable, but they are not. How did these things get past QA?
Selinux failures commonly being interpreted as file permission failures, leading to misleading error reporting.
Selinux failures on libraries or other files that programs don't expect to experience permissions failures on, leading to mysterious failures which you have to track down with strace.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
...which I can't really turn off on managed @work machines. I will get anything from 3 to 20 freezes per week, each lasting around 1min or more, which when looking at a side screen's top output all I see is a 100% spike on "unattended-upgrades" process. And yes this is on an SSD machine so I doubt it's disk access.
But on second thought, my biggest gripe these last 2 years has been BDPROCHOT flags on my Lenovo U41 laptop, and I believe I'm not alone on this one. It seems most Lenovo's consumer-grade Intel ULV laptops (any Core-I that ends with no HQ) ship with a firmware-based, trigger-happy BDPROCHOT flag. The flag turns on constantly, even when nothing around the CPU or the cooling solution is remotely close to 1/3 max temp. This is another one of Lenovo's long-standing signature fuck-ups to low-level and consumer-proof the shit out of their bad BAD warranty and "marketing" policies. Another example is that infamous BIOS-based insta-installed crapware on newly installed Windows on first boot.
It's been 3 BIOS updates and Lenovo still considers my CPU cores should be ULTRA THROTTLED to 8x multipliers (i.e. 500mhz per core!!!) every time the GPU wakes, such as for playing the most basic vid clip that the GPU natively decodes, or any use of OGL or D3D API calls.
Throttlestop's BDPROCHOT spoofing has been the only single way to mitigate this, but TS is understandably a half-baked enthusiast app that cannot be minimized to tray and has a weirdly justified expiration date that forces update, basically meaning the laptop will become useless when the dev stops support. Furthermore I have yet to find a solution on *nix machines to fully disable BDPROCHOT flags forcing 8x multiplier.
This is to you, Mozilla, Google, Firefox...
STOP deliberately breaking things. I don't care that my 5 year old IOT thing uses HTTPs with old encryption. I don't care that it uses self-signed certificates. It's still better than unencrypted, and I can't update it. You just deliberately broke things so now I'm forced to use unencrypted communications - what idiot decided that's better than even weak encryption? Put up a warning, fine, but don't break it. Idiots.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is no excuse for professionally written code to suffer memory leaks.
Over time, the Chrome browser (on OS X) leaks more and more memory until it eventually loses screen synch and flickers on scrolling refresh. Eventually, it just locks up and crashes. This has been the case for at least 10 years.
I don't care what the excuse, professionally written programs should never crash due to memory leaks. Ever. Period.
I'm sure Bing has similar issues on Windows, but Google should do better w/ Chrome on OS X & Linux. They should be ashamed.
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
The guy in my office who upgraded to MS Win10 despite being warned otherwise who has to get other people to print for him disagrees. The even more annoying thing is an update broke support for those older printers and plotters and they worked for a few months after the "upgrade". There are plenty of examples like that out there of hardware where the drivers no longer work in MS Win10.
In Ark Survival Evolved (under Linux), I get some horrible bugs, even with a 1070 card. No matter what settings I try, I will eventually get the ACID-Rain on LSD effect, meaning that everything will glow in 1000 colors and cover the entire screen so navigation and vision becomes impossible. Sometimes the Dark rays of death appears, meaning...there's some strong sun reflection from some water, and long black stripes will emerge from them and eventually cover the entire screen. Sometimes the dust from Animals and gathering will turn into black clouds and cover the entire screen with "trippy LSD like colors" as if your card was on a bad acid trip.
For hours, everything seem normal. The ARK developers blame Nvidia for this. But ARK is the only game I'm having problems with this, not under Windows 10 though.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
No, its NOT OK.
I once had a very nice piece of shareware where the dialog box said "Your system is totally fucked because of <insert total gobbledegook here> [Oh Shit]" - definitely better.
Ideally, there would be the option of getting a diagnostic dump to send to the developer or just aborting. Better still, developers could test their apps before shipping.
As for the idiot who shipped Ubuntu Mate 16.04 in a condition where you cannot access the CDROM drive with k3b or any other cd buring tool I could find, because it is no longer accessible as /dev/cdrom, and there is no documentation as to where it is - people like that should be removed from the OpenSource world - by force if necessary. I have moved to *BSD (ok systemd was part of the problem).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
First of all, when I type something in the Windows search box, I'm not looking for things on the Web, I'm looking for things on my computer. Yes, I know there is an option to turn off Web search.
Second, when I do look for something on my computer, Windows search can't find obvious search results. For example, I have a VPN client with the title "Global VPN Client." If I type "VPN" in the search box, Windows can't find it. If I just type "VP" it finds it just fine.
Then, if you want Windows search to actually find files that contain the text I'm looking for, you have to go deep into settings to turn this on for specific folders. But even then, the search results are temperamental, sometimes showing you what you want, and sometimes not.
I have about 15 messages in my inbox at work. But when I type text in the search box, the search process goes on and on forever, never actually finding what I typed. For larger folders, just forget it.
One thing that infuriates me more than just about anything else is when the feedback mechanism for a keypress or mouse click is so decoupled from the acceptance of that keypress or mouse click that you get the feedback without the input being registered.
E.g., sometimes the visually presented region of a button will be larger than the region that registers the click. You click your mouse, the button blinks or whatever to give you feedback, and nothing happens. Because you didn't click right in the tiny region in the middle of the button that actually registers mouse clicks. But you got the feedback anyway. This is just criminally stupid.
Another example. Years ago I used a very expensive and complicated piece of equipment to do some field work. It was weatherproofed, and had a sealed membrane keyboard. There was not a lot of tactile feedback from the 'keys', so when you pressed a key it helpfully generated a 'peep' noise. Except the mechanism that made the peep noise was totally unrelated to the mechanism that recorded the keystroke. What good is 'feedback' if it is not connected to the event you want feedback on?
It was possible to blithely enter, say, plot ID codes and have every other character dropped, with the machine peeping away all the while. Ditto launching various functions: OK, I'm gonna start a sample run now. Press the button. 'PEEP'. Wait for the run to complete. Only to discover that it never began.
I wrote a fairly spicy email to the manufacturer of the device one day after being bitten by this bug and having some measurements rendered unusable. Fortunately, I showed it to a colleague before I sent it, and he suggested that I adopt a more, um, professional tone ;-)
I reboot my computer after apt-get dist-upgrading, reboot, and get a blank screen responsive only to Magic Sysreq[1] (and probably SSH). It's the video driver issue: no nvidia module is available for loading. I think that any time apt-get installs a new kernel, it needs to re-install the nvidia drivers. The solution I've found (so far) is to manually issue apt-get install --reinstall nvidia-375 after any apt-get dist-upgrade has updated the Linux kernel.
Anyway. It's 2017. Why am I still dealing with this shit?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The damn NVidia "optimus" laptops without hardware mux.
My laptop (2017 Gigabyte Aero 14W) has an nvidia GTX 1060 that I never use (the i7's internal GPU is perfectly adequate to run IDEA IntelliJ, YouTube's videos, and GNOME's desktop animation at QHD 2560x1440p. PLENTY ADEQUATE). So I never, ever waste 25+W running the damn nvidia chip, except for ONE thing: enabling the external outputs.
Yep, if I want to display something on a beamer, I must run "intel-virtual-output -f" in a clunky shell away.
Older laptops/chips at least had the good grace of having a real HDMI multiplexer on the external outputs, now it must be blitted through the nvidia chip.
Fuck you, NVidia. Fuck you again.
(and yes, Gigabyte, you failed. If you sold the same machine without the nvidia chip, even at the exact same price, I'd have bought it without hesitation. But yours was the only 14" option with a real (really quad-core) i7 and ability to have 32 GiB of RAM, under 2kg, this winter).
Programs which hide (delete) menu entries based on state.
I once spent two days trying to figure out how to recover a low quality software raid disk because the recover menu entry had been deleted and the documentation was useless. The menu entry to start the recovery wasn't visible until the spare disk had been precisely configured as the software wanted. Of course with no feedback of that being the case I was left searching through the interface and floundering around until I managed to luck into the solution.
What pisses me off is when dealing with a copy of Windows that hasn't had sticky keys disabled. Real fun when playing a game that makes use of the SHIFT key.
1. No quick and easy way to fix a domain trust relationship problem. Always have to unjoin and rejoin. 2. Windows 10 can't really remove built in apps. They come back. 3. Switching domain users is unintuitive. 4. Changing passwords when screen is locked and password is expired is also unintuitive. Meaning I have to explain it to users weekly.
* Go to the search tab in the mobile twitter app. The search bar is hidden by default and you have to scroll up and click on it.
* Media player on PS4. Fast forward and rewind buttons go at an insane speed, i.e. you can skip through an entire film in a couple of seconds. There are YEARS of forum posts complaining about it.
* Pretty much everything on iCloud is broken and has been for years. Handoff, Airdrop and iMessage sometimes work, sometimes don't, and if you can't rely on something then it's useless. Apple support forums are full of workarounds but the faults are never fixed.
* Unity. So many broken features, never fixed. The latest release carried a huge list of impressive new features, but was greeted by hundreds of "will you ever fix XYZ" comments. The dirty secret of Unity development is that it's great for prototyping, but you need to custom write everything that matters. Right down to basic stuff like vector maths.
* Steam. For some games it asks your date of birth, which is remembered between sessions so you can just click ok. But occasionally it forgets, and if you click ok with the wrong date set then you can't access that game... ever. If you try to access it again then it says you're underage, with no option to enter the correct date.
Generally, I resent becoming a beta tester for literally everything. It seems like some time in the mid 90s, companies started doing away with in-house validation and decided that consumers would be the new quality control auditors, because almost every electronic/computer/software product I've bought since then has been utter shit, with a constant stream of patches, bug fixes, and other problems that should have been flushed out before the products were ever released.
Almost everything sold to day is chock full-o-glitches, gaping security holes, fatal errata, and other things that should never be shipped to consumers.
Auto-updating software that provides no user control over their schedules. This appears to be a modern trend in software updates. Chrome and the Dropbox client are pretty bad offenders but there are others as well. I have very limited bandwidth on my connection to the Internet and any time my system becomes unusable for the web it is usually because DropboxMacUpdate or ksfetch are consuming all the bandwidth. I swear, it's like all modern software assumes everybody is on a fat pipe these days.
And don't get me started about auto-playing videos in the web browser...
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
systemd.
- Same hole used for eating, drinking, and breathing
- Same hole used for liquid excretory function and pleasure release
- Same hole used for solid excretory function and object input
- Self copy feature confused with pleasure feature
- No updates, ever
- The only fixes are user-created workarounds and patches from expensive industry
I recently acquired a modernish Dell laptop (Inspiron 7537) that will not boot to anything but a pure mechanical hard drive in legacy mode. I've tried two different brands of SSD and two different SSHD drives. None will boot. The 640 Gig mechanical boots just fine. Either a bios bug or something deliberate to prevent you from running newer drives in anything but UEFI/Secure boot mode.
The fact that there is no way to properly shutdown a system when an update is scheduled. The shutdown option changes to 'update and shutdown' and instead of the 20 minute margin you allowed yourself to the next customer visit, you now are *forced* to wait for the updates to complete, and run late for an otherwise comfortable start of the meeting.
For f*ck sake, I want control over *MY* computer!
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The only software glitch that really makes me angry, is when I've been using an app for a while and then after an update I need to log in again...
The reason it's so aggravating is usually I discover it's dropped the login when I am out somewhere trying to use the app, where I can't access my computer to look up saved passwords.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have an older Toshiba Satellite laptop that still works fine. Win7 runs like an asthmatic snail on it, but it at least boots. I used to have Linux on it, but at some point kernel and other updates caused the laptop to stop booting. I even tried those distros that advertise themselves as great for older hardware. To be fair, Win 10 doesn't boot on it either. Not so much as a glitch as I assume it is done intentionally so, but I have by now a stack of older tablets that would be neat to refurb with a newer version of Android, but those suckers are locked down and closed up. Some of them are barely three years old and otherwise in perfect condition although a bit slow. Way to go with reducing e-waste! Win 10 on VMWare Server is a major pain. Each time a new build comes through the system boots into a black screen and that's the end of it. By the time I figure out what might be going on I have the new build downloaded and reinstalled. Still, glitchy as hell. OS X not being allowed to be used on non-Apple hardware...also not really a glitch, but intentional. I could understand if Apple makes its money with Mac hardware sales, but compared to other stuff those sales figures are dismal. And Mac hardware is nothing special, outdated off the shelf components wrapped in a pretty box. Detaching OS X from Mac hardware might even drive more sales in other areas.
All these file system features take time to execute. Journaling, error correction, scanning all your data for the nsa, and so on.
"His name was James Damore."
Having the DJI GO4 app crash while I'm flying my Mavic Pro. Repeatedly. Bad bad bad!
The ribbon and craptastic UI WERE found during testing and thousands of beta testers commented on it, many with quite floral language. In Win 10 we get a bokred up UI and still suffer from an inadequate and totally outdated file system. The UI was the least of the issues in Windows. VisualStudio isn't too bad, but I wish MS would put the same attention and effort onto Test Manager. Glitchy as hell and no, the web view even in TFS2017 doesn't cut it. What is worse is that it is impossible to query on many fields. Say what? I cannot get a list of all tests that are assigned to a specific tester? I have to create a project in VS and write C# code to get that information through the TFS API? It's one thing if Microsoft gives a damn about QA, but don't sabotage the QA of other companies.
Lately, the version of XOrg in CentOS 6 has been really pissing me off. For some unknown reason, it randomly fails to determine the resolution of the monitor on bootup and I end up with a screen resolution of something stupidly low like 1024x768.
I can fix this by putting in a hardcoded xorg.conf file, but it's 2017 and that kind of shit really shouldn't be necessary anymore.
Firefox is leaking like a sieve since forever. Mentioned many times, typically got a rant with personal insults from Asa Dotzler in return blaming it on stupid user and add-ons. If the Mozillas spent as much effort on their software as they do on insulting their users we all would be in a way better position.
is a big one for me right now. I'd love to use a Netbook with Linux for serious work but 4 hours of battery life doesn't cut it for me. Hence I'm leaning towards getting a Mac once again. A current day MacBook it would be, even though they are really expensive. Apples power management still rules. My MacBook air from 2011 still gets 4+ hours out of one charge.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The Win key on keyboards sucks...at least its placement. I cannot count how many times Windows went apeshit on me just because I hot that friggin Windows key while pressing Shift, Alt, or Control keys. Keyboard shortcuts are easy to implement even without an OS specific key....unless you use a US keyboard where an entire layer is missing. How come European keyboards have two different Alt keys allowing for a wide array of options, but not US keyboards? Instead, they stick that effen Windows key on it.
Yea, I wouldn't admit this too publicly because you violate Apple's shitty license agreement. What is about as bad is that hackintoshes have to use the ridiculously overpriced Intel processors because Apple did not put AMD support into the OS X kernel when they cloned BSD.
They were thinking that it will cost a penny less per connector. That makes a huge difference when building ten thousands of mobos. I agree, it will get worse because folks go for cheap stuff. That said, I never had a problem with RAM once I managed to get the board to work with it. What annoys me is that you cannot just buy RAM that fits the standard supported, oh no, it was the right timings and latency and this and that. What good is a standard when many do not adhere to it?
Are you willing to pay for more quality? OK, in case of an iPhone you already overpaying....then again, why the heck do you buy an iPhone? There are plenty of droid phones that are way better at half the cost. If you keep feeding the gremlin don't complain that it sticks around. In other words: stop buying Apple products!
If you put off restarting for too long, it will restart for you. The point of the dialog isn't to allow you to defer restarting indefinitely, but to let you pick a good time to restart. If you fail to do that your PC will do its best to pick one for you but it would have been better if you helped.
It seems almost every time I hear about a major PC infection, it always comes with the footnote that the exploit being used was patched by Microsoft months or years earlier. So knowing this it's not hard to see why MS is making Windows Update more aggressive with patching PCs.
Without a doubt the most sluggish and buggiest S/W I work with on a daily basis is the software (and cloud backing) on my cable box. It's either running on a slow processor or is horribly inefficient. It frequently takes more than a second to reply to button press. And the UI requires too many button presses to navigate. Deleting recorded programs takes about 5 button presses. Delete a bunch of episodes - you'll be there a while! Frequently the deleted content remains in the listing for hours or days. If you try to watch one of these 'zombie' episodes the DVR reports that service is temporarily unavailable.
One of the screens suggests that resetting the box will often solve problems. That's an admission of failure from a software quality standpoint. Alas, they are right. Unfortunately it takes several minutes for the box to come up following a reset. That's ridiculous.
Just last week the box stopped responding to the remote. The green LED on the front of the box lit when I pressed buttons but there was no response to the button press. Time to pull the plug. A couple days earlier our other box (not DVR but just player) stopped playing content. I could pull up menus but the screen was otherwise black. Time to pull the plug.
Unbelievably buggy (and s-l-o-w) for a consumer device.
Playing movies on Ubuntu (using VLC) eventually the video stops, the audio is still going but the whole machine is frozen solid. I don't know whom to blame, and that makes it even more annoying :D
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Annoying is that many applications especially on windows don't support triple click (to select a whole line of text) .... software with ribbons is IMHO unusable. .... ... pisses me off so big time that I mostly use the GitShell and find ... outlook makes me vomit. /. being close to unusable since month. The thread of posts is wrong formatted, only covers about 2/3rd of the space from left to right. The ads in the upper right area are jumping up and down, so you can not zoom into the posts. After a while the ads stop jumping around, but meanwhile I basically close them all the time and give google the message: add covers content.
Related to that: browser adressbar. The whole text gets selected, instead of just placing the curser where I clicked (and that is 99% of the time I click there what I want: position cursor to fix a typo) Even Safari does it now wrong on OS X.
Windows text copy paste. Select a word and cut/copy it: in case of cut there is correctly one of the surrounding spaces removed (so that there are not 2 spaces between the remaining words). However, that space is in the clipboard (also why you do copy), which makes it impossible to simple copy paste initial passwords.
Now if you paste that cut word at another place in the same document, the space from the clipboard is most of the time added wrongly, so you have to manually fix it by adding one space on the other side of the word and deleting the wrongly added space.
Ribbons
Autoplay of videos. Browser/Computer crashed. On reboot it tries to load 100 youtube videos and tries to start them
Related to text selection: on Mail.app it is impossible to fix a mistyped email address. After you have hit ',' or tab to go to the next line, the text of the recipient is converted into a "blue button", which you can drag around but can not edit anymore.
Pointless UI changes, especially when they make the UI ugly. I like the gem stone like red orange green buttons on my old OS X, on OS X 10.10 it is simply super ugly.
Windows file search not working
Without a good shell windows is completely unusable anyway
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What bugs me after the joyful demise of IE6 and the move to standardized HTML5/CSS3, browsers *still* manage to fuck up and prefer things to do their own way. . (Hello position fixed, zooming safari etc. etc.)
You say Apple is overpriced. You say Intel is overpriced.
Are storage devices overpriced too? Do you use a punched paper roll to store your information because Western Digital/Seagate/etc are overpriced?
#DeleteFacebook
Here you go - where I work I need to use proprietary applications on my Linux system at work (yes they exist). Here is my list (you had to ask).
These applications: :)
1. refuse to follow X standard cut/paste.
2. crash and hang all the time
3. loose focus a lot, forced to use a mouse to gain focus
4. All are JAVA based, so that to me indicates there is something wrong with JAVA
5. These applications do not play well with window managers, you are forced to use either GNOME3 or KDE
Freedesktop.org - do not get me started. I used X for many years and I liked it's eccentricities - freedesktop (and maybe others) seem to be trying (and succeeding) onmoving X Window to a Microsoft model and that may be the root of the my complaints. Here is my big one: These applications (and a few others) ignore ~/.Xdefaults (X server resource database). That make it hard to impossible force a geometry on them.
Granted there are some good things done by Freedesktop.org, but it annoys me when old working utilities are thrown away because they are not shiny.
This OS is still in beta, new issues appear with each release while older ones either get resolved or partially resolved. I thought my mouse was bricked until this month's patch Tuesday. The issue was whenever I left-clicked the right-click context menu appeared, it was so frustrating that I decided to get it replaced until this month's update arrived.
Today my laptop spent well over an hour installing updates (downloaded them in the background, asked to install it, time was OK for me, but an hour later it was still not finished).
Then when the updates were done, WiFi didn't work any more. A problem with the driver, Windows said.
So using my Linux Mint system I go to the Asus website, download and install their 2015 Win10 drivers (first had to find a USB stick for the transfer, different computer!), no luck.
Browse a bit again, see the suggestion to install the Win8.1 drivers.
So downloaded Win8.1 drivers, installed them, and well, this post proves that this work. Latest Win10 with 2014-dated Win8.1 drivers for the WiFi.
Why can't MS with all its resources not get this work properly? Like in Linux where while I upgrade my system to the latest Mint I can continue working, then a quick reboot later everything Just Works?!
It is, by the way, not the first such issues. Before I've had a driver problem with the touchpad (had to connect a mouse to be able to fix that - downgrade to an older, already installed driver was the solution). Also related to a Windows update.
Screencast/Mirroring the screen from Mi Pad to Chromecast doesn't work. The audio gets cast but the screen is shown as blank/black.
MIUI is the most fucked up of all Android ROMs
How about trying to order a simple thing online, being forced to open an account, then getting spam to rate them, review them, survey and more spam exactly one year after they finally remove you from the email list.
Even worse with companies who send junk mail too after web orders...
**** those idiots.
Also, *** websites that scroll into a different article after reaching the end of the current one.
You know, the forced updates that break open files and running processes logging critical data doesn't even both me so much. Its this god awful Delivery Optimization service that ships with Windows 10. Its like Windows Server Update Services where it will cache a bunch of updates that other computers in your organization might need. Unfortunately its completely broken.
I have 4 Win 10 PCs in the house. All of them routinely download more than 10GB worth of patches for the other machines in the house that are already 100% up to date. Instead of filling up the server drives though, it downloads to tablets as well taking up the tiny SSD drives. Its an absolute joke.
It used to be that this service could be stopped and disabled, however after the Anniversary update it automatically re-enables itself and MS have removed the 'stop' option, so if you want to turn it off you will either need to go hunting for the process image or restart the computer. As none of the computers in the house require these updates, this service only manages to fill up disks and cause our netflix to stall while our data is hoovered up. By most definitions this service is actually a virus.
Systemd...
Hands down the biggest frustration I face daily.
Is an obtuse error code really the best Microsoft can do for its users.
I really hate the latency on a lot of modern devices. My microwave for example, requires each button to be held in for about half a second before it registers. I just want to cook my food, and don't like waiting for the button delay capacitors to charge a few times. My car's XM radio interface has so much lag that i canceled my service. My dad's new TV has so much lag, then even he couldn't figure out how to turn it on/off. I discovered he wasn't holding the power button down long enough. WTF? This isn't the future i was hoping for.
wireless mice don't seem to work with my hand for some reason. It's like my hand is blocking the signal. touchless sinks are the same way. it takes me longer to get the water started than it took for me to shit.
You like letting your vendors make your decisions for you, fine. But don't try to pretend that isn't what it is.
You really stuck it to them by giving them your money and then changing operating systems TWICE before you found a setup you were happy with. I'm sure they'll consider your preference based on a generic complaint on Slashdot in the future.
Thankyou for your feedback sucker ... err I mean valued customer.
Apart from all its clunky UX in just about every element of its design, the one that bugs me the most is after you have done something to an image and saved your changed version. You then go to close the original and it asks if you want to save the changes.
Next worst is the stupidity around saving JPG files. I can't save as a JPG - I have to export it. I don't care about the technicalities. I don't care about free and non-free. I don't care about any of the "theoretical" or purist reasons. I just want to click SAVE and the data appears on disk.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
At work, we have templates for Word and Excel. That's great, but...
You'd think with their entire hardware division in the PC side focused towards one single product line they would be able to resolve basic stuff. But no. In the interest of maintaining an efficient production line they are also focusing on backwards compatibility, .... except when they don't.
The Type Cover 4 and the new Surface Type Covers are the only ones sold on the MS website. Both list compatibility with the earlier Pro 3. Both cause the Pro 3 to lockup for about 8 seconds when waking from connected standby with the cover flipped backwards making their premier tablet unusable as a tablet while the keyboard is attached.
Microsoft is aware of the problem
Microsoft is aware of the exact hardware details of the problem (relating to applying power to the type cover to identify it's orientation).
Microsoft has been aware for this since December 2015.
Microsoft has been promising a fix for this since January 2016
Fuck Microsoft for not being able to even get ONE PRODUCT right.
I really hate that I love everything else about this tablet/laptop/slate/whateverthefucktheycallitrightnow enough that I'll probably buy another when it breaks. The bug is infuriating.
Keyboard navigation is becoming more difficult as time goes on, but I find it much easier and faster to do what I want with the keyboard.
Even on Linux Mint, keyboard ALT+* combos are being hidden on button labels, sometimes CTRL+Q can quit an application, sometimes it can't, sometimes CTRL+W works to close a window, but sometimes it doesn't and you have to do ALT+F4.
In the Nemo/Gnome Files application, when you type a few letters it jumps to the file that starts with those letters, then you can press ESC to get out of the typing box and use arrow keys to highlight files or move the cursor. Sometimes it will jump back to the top of the file list if you attempt to move the cursor, or sometimes it will work as expected and use the filename you started typing out as the point of origin. But in Linux Mint the cursor sans highlight is invisible (i.e. if you are holding CTRL to select files and moving the cursor, you are supposed to see a dotted outline).
Random behavior like that drives me nuts.
Twinstiq, game news
CTRL-ALT-DEL to login to windows! Why a hard to use key combo? That was the fucking soft reboot in DOS. Also, blinking cursor in windows login password field, that you must move the mouse into to activate it. What the fuck is the blinking cursor for if that text field is not focus.
Related... ...when the OS swaps out commonly run things, or doesn't cache them in the first place.
I realize this is how Microsoft convinces us we need the next version, but as annoying as it gets. Nothing like penalizing power users...
I come here for the love
The real killer OS will be born when systemd is ported to Windows 10.
My biggest gripe is that Apple hasn't bothered to fix their samba implementation to not drop connections several times per day. It is criminal, and I assume they just don't care about selling macs in business environments any more.
What drives me literally to drink is when IT departments don't properly manage and upgrade their "security" software.
I'm working with a customer now that is two years behind on updating the version of their enterprise antivirus software. Literally half of the BSOD crashes on desktops at this company are a known bug that's fixed in newer versions of their AV.
The other half of the BSODs are mostly Intel Wireless and Video driver bugs that have also been fixed. There has to be a better way to manage these than "Hey, this driver is crashing let's go check the manufacturer website."
Laptops used to have full-sized keyboards and ouiji keys.
Now, in the quest for thinness, they have chicklet keys. (I thought we'd learned not to do that back in the early home computer days.) Not only do they work horribly, creating a typo storm, if your fingernails are not trimmed to the quick, but they have backlit keys that are mostly clear and painted/molded with a thin layer of plastic on the top. Use them a couple months and the opaque layer scrapes off, causing the common characters to have irregular white spots instead of illuminated letters.
Touchpads can be nice. But a giant, hypersensitive, touchpad on the palm rest, where you REST YOUR PALMS WHILE TYPING, causes the gui to go all wonky while you type. The cursor jumps back into the text you typed and your continued typing corrupts it. Windows get selected. Different tabs get selected. The slashdot "submit" button gets hit in mid-entry or mid-proofread! The selection goes out of the text entry box and twenty browser "keyboard accelerator" commands fire off before you realize what's happening.
(And why DO browsers have all these (apparently undocumented - or dig for it) lower-case-alphabetic "accelerator" actions, anyhow?)
Apparently they've standardized on this, across diverse manufacturers (or they're all using the same OEM/ODMs). I got a Toshiba (through work) a couple years back that had the problem. Then it went belly-up and the only linux-compatible replacement I could find at Fry's - a Lenovo - had THE SAME KEYBOARD and a different touchpad that was THE SAME SIZE, LOCATION, and HYPERSENSITIVITY.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
zombie bugs: they come back after being killed, because coder B overwrites fix from coder A
Gratuitous API changes Old APIs should keep working as long as the equivalent functionality is available in the new API. An adapter function should be supplied.
When AD thinks entering the same password several times is a hacking attempt (due to it being my previous password, CAPSLOCK or keyboard malfunction) and it needs to lock my account.
Compare Intel CPUs with AMD CPUs and you pay far less with AMD for the same computational power. Plus, AMD motherboards are significantly less expensive. Yes, Intel is way overpriced. Apple's hardware is off the shelf parts with a custom housing, yet it costs about twice as much as the parts would be individually...and that is comparing with consumer prices, not volume pricing that Apple clearly gets. Apple is far too expensive, which is also explained by the piggish margins that Apple enjoys. Storage isn't that expensive...unless of course you have an Apple box that at times makes upgrading with 3rd party components difficult if not impossible.
Yeah, I'm a graybeard sysadmin from Teh Oldz. But a standard issue browser that grabs a quarter GIG of memory just to start up and present a blank window strikes me as criminally inefficient by at least one, and probably two orders of magnitude. You can likely sub out your favorite application for "browser" in the above.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Haven't tried Antix...duly noted, downloading right now.
How do you avoid them?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Had to swap around laptops the day before yesterday, moved the 16GB over. Had three problems in 24 hours (two failures to wake from sleep and one kernel panic), so popped it open, took out the RAM, pencil erasered the SODIMM contacts and brushed them off, put them back in tight. I've been doing this since SIMMs back in the '90s, I remember one Mac SE that would spontaneously reboot until I cracked it open and re-seated its memory.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Best experience with my Surface Book was when it died after six weeks. Back to the Mac. I really wanted to like that machine. Great keyboard (until it went tits up that is).
Stupid OS X works better with old versions of Exchange than Windows 10.....
Sigh.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When I leave deezer in an open chrome tab running for more then a day or two (regardless if its playing or not) it turns into a huge memory hog and slows my system down by causing swapping. If I remember I just switch to this virtual desktop at the start of the day and restart the tab, but its still annoying.
"Working on it ..." and a green progress bar. I have just a few (maybe 60) entries. The damn thing cant open a folder with a few files without making me wait. WTF MS???
Many happy little committees have met over the years to help you. All of their ideas were Good Ideas. Every idea only "increased loading by 0.x percent!" but the combined percentages have added to 20,000% thus far. And some of the ideas were APIs for Microsoft Partners and Script Kiddie Partners to sink their pus-filled meat hooks into your bloated registry to affect basic computer operation. Every time you open a folder...
All 32x32 icons on the system are upsampled to 1024x1024 and scaled down again; Microsoft Security Essentials loads completely, realizes you turned it off a year ago, then unloads; Windows checks for updates; Internet explorer checks to see if it is the default browser (it isn't); two dozen corrupted registry branches left by incomplete installs are accessed and the system looks for 50 programs that aren't there; the ILOOKATEVERYTHING utility is run because it installed a registry to look at everything though you have never used it; Windows converts extensions to MIMETYPES and back again just for shits and giggles; media handlers load in multiple threads; folder display flags are inexplicably set to the dumbest view possible; everything is alphabetized; Windows re-sorts by 'group'; a blank window is shown; media apps are struggling to produce thumbnails; (W10 only) inactivity! Time to reboot NOW for updates; Cortana thought she heard you grunt, she transmits a voice-snippet over HTTPS; SSL certificate services loads causing everything else to swap out; certificates are checked for revocation because Paranoid Nerd Is Paranoid; media hooks still trying to make thumbnails; problems with media length detection on improperly encoded files causes long delay, then length is discarded anyway because "..." no one asked for it or there's no room on the display; now media metatag information is being accessed for NO DAMNED REASON; cute (but empty) film borders are painted, what the hell are film sprockets?? Where are those thumbnails??; file names finally appear, mostly hidden after "..."; virus checkers are invoked, both the one you use and the other OEM checker that Windows doesn't know is still operational; twenty smartphone-specific pieces of bullshit code briefly run and then exit (every second); a media codec triggers an Internet lookup for mysterious reasons; DNS delays stall 10 threads and an indeterminate amount of resources; DESKTOP.INI is accessed for Windows 95 compatibility; mouse pointer turns into a pointer for a moment just to torture you then flips to 'busy' again; Windows has synchronously finished counting files, GOLLY GEE, now you have an (unclickable) scroll bar; thumbnails finally starting to come in; dipshit 'subdirectory logic' is triggered for subfolders, all this shit starts to happen for them too; subfolder shit completes and the calculated result is discarded because it wasn't to be displayed anyway; OH HOLY SHIT, ANIMATE/THROB is on, we need more power Scotty because we need moving thumbnails; 3rd party media apps run to see if they are needed now (they're not); you clicked the right mouse button on an item to attempt to regain control which actually starts a whole new CONTEXT MENU WORLD OF SHIT completely separate from this shit; hold on, CrystalFonts has to smooth the edges before you can get control; timeouts for stalled threads finally trigger (cleanup routines delaying you again); a whole second goes by where everything is finished or stalled; inactivity triggers fire making you think the waking nightmare is still going on; finally THE FOLDER HAS BEEN DISPLAYED.
Queued mouse and keyboard desperation events have been detected! Launch stuff you clicked on, push that button that wasn't even there when you clicked, display a context menu and a balloon tool tip containing useless junk and wasn't that easy.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Don't autocomplete.
Don't pop up "helpful" suggestions like a retarded version of Clippy.
Don't *ever* ask me to log into *anything* with my facebook account.
Don't ask if I really want to install your insecure, buggy, virus laden app to improve my "user experience." You're tracking me for marketing purposes, OK? I wasn't born yesterday. Go suck an egg.
Don't *ever* shift my focus to where *you* think it should be.
Mouse "Gestures". Ye Gods. Really?!
Don't turn on "mouse gestures" by default. In fact, take all mouse gestures out and shoot them. Then shoot the marketing moron who thought they might be a good idea. If you can't get rid of them, turn them all *off* by default. I'm sure that both of the people in the world who like and use them will figure out how to turn them on.
Not a software issue, but laptop clickpads consisting of only one bug button. WTF were you people *thinking?*
Annnnnd the worst one of all. Software that responds to a click or keystroke with ..... NOTHING. It sits there and thinks a minute. This is just slightly less infuriating than software that doesn't disappear on close. Get it out of my face. Clean up after yourself on your own time. Not mine.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Right. Some AC on Slashdot is worried that the nefarious bean counters at Apple will delve deep into the logs at Slashdot to find out that this guy actually is running a Gateway box running XP.
Then you wind off on a tangent about Intel?
Time to go outside.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We use Citrix deployment for our ERP software. When using an external monitor on a laptop or Surface Pro it literally won't work if the external monitor is on the right side of the laptop. It cuts off half of the window, and the mouse doesn't click where it's actually pointing (you have to click a half inch to the right of a button to get it to click). Move the monitor (physically and logically) to the left of the laptop, it works perfectly.
Try doing that in XP and you find one file among thousands is locked. It will complain and stop there leaving the remaining files.
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, you'll remember you can Control-Z/undo to reverse the effect of a Windows copy... BUT if you do it now are you fixing the effects of the aborted copy, or are you undoing the last successful drag'n'drop operation you performed? Or will nothing happen? Would you still be confused about this if I hadn't said anything?
You're going to have to make a choice. In the one hand you'll have Morpheus' life and in the other hand you'll have your own. If you select Control-Z/Undo, one of you is going to die. Which one will be up to you. I'm sorry, kiddo, I really am. You have a good soul, and I hate giving good people bad news. Oh, don't worry about it. As soon as you step outside that door, you'll start feeling better. You'll install Cygwin and start using rsync all the time, and can devote the remainder of your days to fixing file ownership and permission problems. You'll remember you don't believe in any of this Windows crap. You're in control of your own life, remember?
Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you finish copying these files, you'll feel right as rain.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I was pretty annoyed to buy a brand new Epson label printer for use with iOS, and LESS THAN A WEEK later, iOS was updated and the damn app stopped working. It's not like this was totally unpredictable to the developer, or something that would be even vaguely difficult for them to plan for. Apple (and all other O/S vendors) make betas available for months before releasing updates, so why the developer couldn't be bothered to test their app on the beta and rebuild if necessary is beyond me. Of course, I submitted a support case to Epson; they told me they'd get back to me, and never even bothered. A month or so later they finally pulled their finger out of their ass and updated the app, at which point my printer had been not working for about 4 times longer than it'd been working.
When I updated a laptop to Windows 7, the trackpad started working at ninety degrees to the screen. So up became left, left become down, etc. Just the level of quality control I've become used to.
What more common and just as annoying is when you're typing and a dialog box pops up and steals focus, and you inadvertently select some option because you're still typing and you have no idea what you just did.
Also, when you go to click on something on a webpage that's still loading, and the browser decides to redraw the page at that very instant, and you click on something else because the thing now is to make the entire webpage a clickable element for some stupid reason.
Oh hell, those damn Windows keys. Both the Windows and "menu" keys steal focus when brushed by accident while touch-typing. It is especially annoying when you're playing a game in full-screen mode and it switches the screen back to the desktop--from just bumping a bottom row key by accident. And then there's the Insert key. What the fuck is the point of overwrite mode in a GUI text editor? Who needs that anymore?
In my previous workplace, I removed various key caps of annoying keys (including Windows, Menu, F1, Insert, and another F-key that did an annoying thing in the IDE) and put them in a small baggie under the monitor. Really, that's the best solution.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
My passwords already have upper case, lower case, number and special char, at least 8 chars. Having many variations on what is allowed or not exacerbates the problem when sites don't allow a special char like '*' or have some other unusual requirement.
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.
Everything about ubuntu has been fscking awesome so far.
Sound is just annoying. Everybody has at least ways to fix it and none of them work.
On about 1/2 to 2/3 of reboots, ubuntu finds the sound on my laptop. Once it goes back in my bag, I roll the dice again.
Read the forums, the official troubleshooting procedure, random articles found in google, etc.
a *lot* of people seem to have this problem, and have been for a long time.
How can they do everything else so well and sound so poorly?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Every time it opens, I can't scroll the file list panel because focus is automatically given to the filename input. One of the few times Windows, the OS that tries to train users to do everything with the mouse, expects them to remember how to type.
Once you're consciously aware of this, it will eat at you like a traumatic experience.
If you google for "windows 10 iso download" you get to the official page by Microsoft where you can download the .iso - but only if you do this from non-Windows platform. If you try to access the same URL from Windows you are redirected to "media creation tool", or some other nonsense. Web installers with no full installer available fall into this category too.
Somewhat related - web pages that display different content depending on their idea what my preferred language is, what my geo-location is, what OS I run, .... often with no possibility to override.
What bothers me most is terrible web site compatibility with browsers. How many times has clicks not worked, or the site crashes the browser or some other compatibility problem.
There is an insurance consortium out there I was directed to under protest, that only works with Internet Explorer. But not that one. Or that one. By spoofing my Firefox Agent string I managed to complete the signup process fine and can log in fine and it claimed I have 2 messages unread, flagged Important!
The messages are Just Damned Text [tm] but impossible to read because it is a Savage Syntax Script button running code that expects non-standard DOM of DOOM which jerks off on JSON and Quietly Fails [tm]. I would have completely diagnosed the (simple-ass) problem and sent them a fix, or explain the Wonder Internet of Yukon days when links loaded text, but there was a small but terrifying risk I'd end up working for those people. So I just called them and asked for everything by U.S. Mail.
But they must have shared my personal information because lately other web sites have begun arriving in the mail too. String-tied brown packages with fanfold printouts, glossy brochures that fold out to 10 feet tall (the scroll bar is printed on!) and postcards that are pop-up ads. Amazon sent me a box containing a login prompt with my ID printed on a sticker. To complete the login I have to bake cookies and drop them in. Also, my house is now surrounded with abandoned shopping carts.
I sent Microsoft a letter asking them to ship the latest version of Internet Explorer. They sent back a large box of rubber snakes. They might have signed me up for MSDN by mistake.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Error messages that lie:
"(...something...) failed. Please try again later." (when in reality, it will NEVER work without outside intervention).
If you don't want to acknowledge that an account exists or has been locked out, at least have the decency to note that possibility somewhere in the error message. Like, "(...something...) failed. If the username and password you entered was indeed valid, it's possible that the account might be locked out, in which case you'll have to contact tech support at 800-999-9999 for assistance before it will ever work again."
Error messages that lazily tell you to "contact your administrator". Goddamn it, if I'm logged in AS an administrator, there should AT LEAST be something in the error message to point me in the right direction (like, "Please check the Windows Security Event log for item 277382438 for additional details").
Telling a user to "try again later" does NOTHING for security (an attacker already knows it's a lie), but frustrates end users ENORMOUSLY by sending them on a wild goose chase and wasting their time. And telling them to "contact their administrator" (without giving them the specific contact info) is unhelpful (they might not have any idea who the Administrator *IS*). Even MORESO when they are, in fact, logged on AS a goddamn Administrator.
Slashdot comments taking up only about 60% of the screen width, with nothing but a very wide blank white space on the right hand side of my monitor.
(Windows 7 specific from here on, not sure what's been fixed since:)
Windows Explorer expands folders inappropriately, jumping the folder you expand to the bottom of the navigation pane. This one has been driving me crazy for years. Not just the bug itself, but MS's unwillingness to fix it.
How the system generally thrashes and grinds to a halt when simply copying a large file.
The amount of time and painful sequence of events when switching some graphical application or game between windowed and full screen mode. The screen turns blank, then off, then on but blank again (there was also a nasty click back in the Trinitron monitor days), then off again, then on and blank, and finally the desired image is displayed. Why this takes 5 seconds and not 5 milliseconds is a mystery to me.
why the fuck is there a capslock key anyway
JUST BECAUSE.
I usually pop off CAPSLOCK and put a bit of electrical tape over the post. It's still operable but no longer bump-able.
When I ran an ISP in ~1997 CAPSLOCK was the bane of our existence... UNTIL I added custom code to the Radius server managing our logins, which stored customer passwords as crypts. Username always forced to lower case. If a login failed on the first attempt, it completely FlIpPeD (fLiPpEd) the case and tried with that. If that worked, let 'em in. This instantly reduced tech support calls by 80%... tossing the log after the first month it had quietly 'salvaged' over 10,000 logins. All of a sudden whole nights went by without a single tech support call, which were forwarded to our homes because we gave a shit. And the flip case trick only decreased password space by a linear factor of 2. Which wasn't any deal at all because we were already set to lock out brute force attempts. Not one of which was ever encountered.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Better laptops have touchpads with "palm rejection" that can tell a mistake apart from a real tap ... or rather, they are supposed to. Does not always work.
I usually disable the touchpad (if at all possible...) and instead use mouse or trackpoint. (And also the reason why I request for a ThinkPad over other types of laptops when I start a new job)
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
You should try NetBSD on it. The NetBSD folks don't push the 'bleeding edge' and their current OS even runs on old 68K Macintoshes. All versions on all architectures build from the same source tree, both kernel and userland. There aren't dozens of 'distros' all with their own dogs breakfast of a userland. Cross-platform development by necessity keeps software robust and 'honest.'
The lenovo laptop i'm typing this on has a bunch of oddball issues i've yet to figure out.
If you have windows driver issues in the future I recommend drp.su it's a advertising riddled mess but it works great!
This laptop in windows 7 has a couple minute delay after startup before the wifi will work also if I connect a usb wifi dongle it also has a few minute delay before it will work my best guess is tinywall is doing something it shouldn't.
I dual boot XP to run some old games that won't run in anything newer the wifi driver works but for whatever reason greatly limits my connection speed everything works it's just slow.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Same problem in Linux. I think Mint Mate uses either Nautilus or a re-branded Nautilus (I might be wrong) as file manager. When I go to copy or delete a bunch of files (in the hundreds), it takes forEVER to "prepare", and sometimes it seems to completely hang. I end up switching to another file manager & it does the same task almost immediately.
What normally gets me. Is when there is a UI control that for all purposes could be the standard one. But for some crazy reason, they rebuild it, so there is some action on the control that just isn't quite right. Say using a standard keyboard action will not work.
This normally get me when a web site that has no reason to do do, will use Silverlight, flash or a Java Applet, vs just using the standard HTML controls.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Each time a new build comes through the system boots into a black screen and that's the end of it.
There is/was a bug in some video drivers that caused the screen to come up black, though the system was otherwise working fine. (I ran into that several years ago installing Ubuntu on a Toshiba laptop. They had just gone to Unity and the chip in the laptop wasn't quite initialized correctly.) There was a workaround (with an argument to the bootloader?) for startup, to get an initial live screen, then another to make it work automatically and persistently.
Don't recall it. But I was able to find it on the net by googling with the laptop model and verbiage about the problem. (Since you're on tablets, if it's a similar problem it might be different in detail, so my experience wouldn't apply directly.)
If you've got some older tablets gathering dust, you might want to try installing a later-patch-release version of a recent release of some linux distro - and if they don't come up, google for the symptoms. You might end up breathing new life into them.
IMHO it's not that the developers are deliberately dropping support or killing older machines. It's just that, as they work on new stuff, sometimes they break older stuff and don't have enough thousands of different machines to discover it before release - so it goes out and gets fixed (if at all) only after somebody complains.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Adobe prides itself on making its photo editing and organizing software convenient for professionals by offering a massive variety of shortcut keys for every conceivable operation in applications like Photoshop and Lightroom. If Adobe had stuck to a set of shortcuts that could be annotated in the application menus in the usual manner there wouldn't be a problem, but Adobe quietly implements a vastly larger number of shortcuts that even experienced users tend to find out about years later upon reading someone's obscure photographic blog.
What this leads to is accidentally pressing one of these hidden shortcut combinations while in an editing session and having your Lightroom screen suddenly change beyond all recognition, with no obvious way to change it back to your preferred normal state. Then you have to take a few days off scouring more obscure blogs to find out that Command-tab-tilde-wave a chicken around your head was what caused all of your fonts to display the same color as the background.
What I find worse is the "silent" pre-update work that happens. I travel for work, and we get either a laptop or a desktop. So I get a laptop. I'll be crunching some data, and suddenly shit slows to a crawl. Outlook fails to respond. My scripts fail. I restart Chrome to see if my 20 tabs are causing the issue, and it persists. 20 minutes later I get prompted to reboot. How we not do that, and just update on reboot? Please?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
[AC says] software. Just. About. Everything. Is. Made. For. Stupid. People. Republicans. Caused. This. Mess.
Score -1 comment copied because it is funny and priceless! It is also MAD!
I STARTED THIS WHOLE THREAD and I'll decide who gets voted down to oblivion! I appreciate that the editors sanitized my submission (and even linked to it, thank you that's a class act, not joking) instead of flipping past it. But regrettably extracting the calmest paragraph within it... has resulted in a rather sedate discussion of gripes. I wanted to weed out the moderates, incite the ingrates and get a rip-rollin' festival of (collectively hilarous) anger going.
I wanted to bellows of rage! Profanity! Even wordless frustration!
Here is the original submission:
Ask Slashdot: Are you MAD AS HELL and not going to take it anymore??
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Howard Beal's rant in the 1976 movie 'Network', and I am staring at a laptop in the throes of a Windows 10 Update 'gasm'. Progress has rolled past 100% several times and started over. They decided people don't mind that. Some cutesy-pie message "close to goodness" flashes by that was probably 'tiger-team tested' by overpaid professionals. I am on call, supposed to be monitoring a sewer plant. Instead after several dismissals to the screens without a LATER, NOT NOW or I'LL LET YOU KNOW, I pushed the reschedule 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). In addition to the flaky Bluetooth and countless options missing or rearranged beyond belief to accommodate stupidphones, 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.
We're not supposed to act this way, get angry. I'm sure there are no angry people North of Oregon, or it could never have come to this. And replacing signed components with other signed components could not possibly take this long, there must be eons of just-in-time crapulation going on behind that blue screen. I'm done with it. 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. Are you MAD AS HELL? Let's get a Real Beal rant rolling.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I looked at your post again and I think maybe it WAS the same problem. (Mine was a Toshiba - satellite, I think - bought surplus from work that went to black-screen-on-login after it updated to Natty 11.4 and was still broken with Oneiric 11.10)
So here's my notes from the install.
==
Sat May 19
==
- Backed up critical part of home directory to white 4G thumb drive.
- Used "upgrade" button in update manager to go to new revision.
- It went to Natty. (11.04?)
- Broken:
- New workspace.
- Freezes once taskbar shows.
- Could get console login on pseudoterm ctl-alt-F1
- Console login prompted for another upgrade.
- Upgraded again (using command interface.) Went to onieric (11.10)
- Still frozen.
- Live CD can't see encrypted disk.
==
Sun May 20.
==
- Much debugging: /etc/X11/xorg.conf)
- Initially thought it was mouse buttons. But:
- Mouse worked fine on login screen.
- Control-alt-delete, enter: Logs out. Screen flashes then
back to login.
- So it looks like a permission issue.
- Much looking around on net found stuff on it:
- Related to Nvidia driver:
- (compiz?) isn't changing permission somewhere like previous
workspace did so userspace stuff can't touch screen.
- User got past it by:
- Going to classic no-effects in login screen options.
- Uninstalling nvidia "recommended" driver in "additional drivers".
- Then fixed by installing (via Synaptic) and enabling
(in Jockey/additional drivers) xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
driver (which he reports as being faster than Nvidia's
proprietary driver.)
(Something about moving-aside
==
Mon May 21 21:47:14 PDT 2012
==
- Continued debugging: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-local.conf (only entry)
- Was able to get it working by selecting a 3D session.
- Tried disabling Nvidia's driver.
- This ended up with a system that didn't display X screen asking
for full-disk password.
- Got around that by rebooting, which got grub options to
try recovery mode and using that.
- Disabling driver apparently works by:
- putting nvidia in
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Probably 80% of the time that Windows Explorer pops some kind of confirmation dialog (e.g.: move/delete files) the confirmation dialog pops up *behind* the Explorer window you're currently using. I'd never experienced this particular issue until Windows 10.
Normally, the scroll bar gives you some idea how far you have left to get to the bottom of the page you're on, right? But now, I'll be just about to the bottom (alright, I'm done with this page!); then suddenly, the scrollbar indicator suddenly jumps about halfway up the page & more content loads at the bottom. And often when this happens, I completely lose my place on the page. WTF?!? How can I turn off this INFURIATING behavior?
How about 30 year old focus stealing bugs still in Windows? M$ is just too incompetent to fix Windoze.
Detaching OS X from Mac hardware might even drive more sales in other areas. Exactly - they've got you by the balls with the iTunes and app ecosystem (both of which they take a cut of) so I'm surprised they aren't spreading the OS around to whatever the fuck you want to run it on by now.
The last Windows 10 update removed built-in support for nVidia GT 420 cards, amongst other things. I had to download and install drivers from nVidia to get native resolution (and correct orientation) back. Also... when the fuck did graphics drivers grow to nearly 500 megabytes???
The guy has a working laptop, he won't be constantly interrupted by updates, he won't be flooded by malware and his bookmarks and browsing history won't be stored on a Microsoft server. In the big scheme of things, I'd say he did better than if he had "stuck it to them", and I suspect that he doesn't give a shit whether "they" learn from his post on Slashdot or not.
lucm, indeed.
Ubuntu Mate [...] *BSD
I sense a pattern of despair and misery.
lucm, indeed.
Is it just me, or does MS Word in the most recent 10 years or so seem to have real problems with the typesetting on the screen? The spacing always looks wrong, like some letters packed too tight and others so loose that they look like two different words? But no other apps seem to have this issue?
I did learn.
I found out about a problem.
It's you who does not wish to learn that it exists and have gone as far as insulting someone who dares to mention it.
WTF is it with hypocritical fanboys?
Clone git repository, edit file in Visual Studio, commit, now file is treated as a binary file in git because VS saved it with UTF-8 byte-order-mark.
You want to save a file, or open a file or whatever, and you want it on your D:\ drive. Does Windows actually _ever_ remember that? No, because Microsoft has this grand vision of 'libraries' of 'documents' that get replicated over network acounts and whatever, so it will always... always... ALWAYS... open on c:\users\yournamehere\documents\. I store precisely zero documents (or files of any kind, really) there, but it is still the default for EVERY file dialog box I have the misfortune to encounter.
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-22147
Come on. Somebody had to...
Mind the frickin' laser...
why the heck do you buy an iPhone?
My iPhone is 3 years old and still works great. This is not the point anyway. the point is "Glitches that could have been fixed easily thanks to a bit more testing". And since Jobs was replaced, these annoying glitches are much more frequent. Apple trend is "new features" but it seems the new management lacks authority to prevent the simplest software regressions.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That is my second most disliked thing in a app, like you if I load up something and I get a login before I can do anything, I just delete the app unless it's something that I have other ties to that I really need to have access or is reasonable to have to have credentials to use... (like a bank app).
But something simple that wants a Facebook connection? No.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When a new (to me) software installer gets about halfway into it and then discovers an obscure issue, so it starts asking me what it should do. I'm like, "You're the smart one, YOU figure it out."
It seems to happen approximately daily when consuming open source projects. I'll get so far down the path of trying to build out my project, then hit a broken feature that's actually (to me) a killer feature of the program/framework/library/IDE/etc., but the developers couldn't be arsed to implement it properly / keep it up-to-date / fix severe bugs with it.
Just in general. Because it happens so often that I can't list all the cases where this happens to me. .NET CoreRT would be awesome if it could compile native DLLs that can be called from C, but nope. Lead devs have no interest in implementing it.
Go would be awesome if it could compile native DLLs that can be called from C, but nope. There are branches with working code out there, but nobody's managed to package it into a release of Go. Which kind of sucks, because compiling Go from source is horrible on non-Linux platforms.
Eclipse Dali's SQL to Entities reverse engineering code has been broken since 2011; it doesn't pick up most relationships and constraints between tables. So I have to use NetBeans for my SQL to JPA entities generation. Bah.
I guess I'm the "never lucky" developer -- anything I try to do, the platform I'm using is fatally flawed in exactly the area I'm exploring. But the marketing material makes it sound so great and perfect...
Copy-and-paste a User ID into a login form: "System Unavailable!" The paste function added some extra whitespace.
Enter a dollar figure into a form, with a comma for the thousands separator: "An unexpected error occurred!"
Fill in a credit card of phone number with dashes or other punctuation: you guessed it!
Capitalize (or not) a username: "Username or password is incorrect."
Today's software applications and web applications really suffer from terrible input filtering, spitting out nonsense errors or complaining about invalid input, when it's really a matter of simply filtering out the unwanted data. Heard of RegEx?
When using multiple desktops in MacOS Sierra (10.12.5), pressing ctrl-left-arrow to return to the previous desktop toggles the next app in rotation instead of returning to the one you had open previously. So there's always an extra mouse-click just to resume what you were doing. Annoying.
When I compose or reply in iPhone GMail, there app inserts a space character to the left of the first character I enter. I am forced to manually go back and remove that space in order to avoid an ugly single character indent of my first paragraph.
After Windows Creator update lost connection to Onedrive. Accessing onedrive.live.com results in and unsolvable issue:
This site can’t provide a secure connection
login.live.com sent an invalid response.
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR
Not even disabling the firewall solves the problem
-- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.