The Vent and Rant Thread

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Seriously, man. I need my own emoty. The KillMeNow emoty. {sigh}.

Hitch

[CRussel]

Here you go, Hitch.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Here you go, Hitch.

Oh, thanks, Charlie. I knew I could count on you. ;-)

Hitch

[doubleshuffle]

A heart-rending sound,
all the way from Phoenix: the
e-book maker's wail.

[Rumpelteazer]

A local shop specializing in candy from the UK and US has a cartoon next to the door. Saying "the customer is king but I [shopkeeper] is emperor".

We regularly have upset customers. Most of the time it's because we have to tell them that what they want is very dangerous and that we're not selling them whatever they need/want. I'm not sure what the laws are about selling something you know will be used to make something life threatening, but morally we don't want to do that. Most of the time we can convince the customer to go for the safe, if slightly less elegant, option. But there are always those that get angry and tell me that they'll buy it somewhere else/online.

[pdurrant]

I ordered a bedframe. Just a simple wooden double bed with a slat base. It came in two boxes.

I was impressed with the manufacturing quality. All the dowel holes were the right size and in the right place. The screws were all there, and fitted the screw holes, which were also in the right place.

And then it came time to fit the headboard to the long rails and to the footboard. And the holes on one leg of the footboard were the wrong way around (instead of parts 8 and 9 we had two part 8s). And.......... the footboard was 6" narrower than the headboard.

Yes, they'd managed to ship us one box for a 4'6" double bed. And one box for a 4' "small double". And the wrong box also had a wrong part in it.

Sigh.... waiting for the correct box to arrive....

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I swear, people get worse all the time with this sort of endless list of demands, entitlement (yes, yes, I know it's a grossly abused term), and behavior. It's like the Net stripped off the veneer of civilization and turned everyone into completely self-absorbed, self-centered @$$holes. It's crazy.

It's probably caused by the fact that the largest webshops have their own packet shipment centers, and you can order up to and including 23:59 hours, as well as call the helpdesk up to that time. Everything is (almost) instant and 24/7 nowadays when handing stuff over the internet, and people have forgotten how 'normal' shops work, or sometimes, that they even exist. And then, they complain when the 'normal' shops go out of business.

With regard to self-intitlement: have you ever played Caesar 3 in the 90's? It starts with: "We want a tent to live in. We want water." And in the later cities, when you need to gain huge prosperity to beat the the level, your trying to build palaces, and people are complaining: "We need a fourth type of wine, a second type of bread, fish, meat, and 3 types of fruit. Oh, and access to 6 gods. And a school, a university, a library, a doctor, a hospital, bathhouse, and a barber. AND I WANT A COLISEUM AND A HIPPODROME!"

If it's in a video game to that extent, I'm sure real people can be worse

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

In Dutch we have a saying "De jeugd van tegenwoordig...." with means "today's youth..." to put them down as rude. However, in my experience, it's the older customers that are rude, know everything better and are unreasonably demanding.

Oh, that one. The old customers who think they are always right and can do whatever the frack they please just because they're old. I know one older man who, if he wants to convince you of his right or authority to do something, starts his sentences with:

"Listen boy, I've worked in the mines and in construction work for 41 years, so..."

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Well, I'd love to run Linux to have more control over my computer, but if I'd do so, I'd run into:

- Having to fiddle with WINE to get my games to run (if they'll even run)
- Switching from one software package to another for several applications, where there is a great Windows version, and nothing that even comes close on Linux
- Run into the fact that there's NO alternative for some applications I use, so it's WINE again.
- Even if I get everything to run, the system parts are chained to one another: if you upgrade X, you often upgrade library A, which makes program Y break, so the package manager upgrades that as well, but that one also uses library B which is then upgraded as also, which makes program Z break, which then can't be upgraded because the maintainer is a jackass and and refuses to use the new version of library B because the curly brace style in the code has changed from K&R to Allmann. (True story, that one.)

If you are a gamer, you run Windows. No choice.

Years back, there was a Win9X tweaker from an Australian vendor. The developer had painstakingly worked through what the minimum Windows modules were to have a system that booted and ran, and his package removed everything from Windows that was not absolutely required. One of the things removed was Internet Explorer, which Microsoft back then swore blind couldn't be removed and still have a working Windows system. (It was in the days when MS was getting a lot of flak over bundling a browser, and making it difficult to use something else, like Netscape.)

The intended market for the package was gamers who wanted a lean, mean, gaming machine dedicated to gaming, with just enough of Windows to run the games.

WINE is noteworrthy, but not everything successfully runs under it, and as you noticed, there are many Windows apps that simply don't have decent Linux equivalents.

If I were a serious gamer, I'd either set up my system to dual boot if I wanted Linux in the mix, or have a separate Linux machine entirely with a KVM switch to pick which on my monitor, keyboard, and mouse were connected to at any particular time.

And one reason for preferring Ubuntu these days is good package management - select a package to install, and the installer looks at what I already have and bundles any pre-requisites I don't have with the install. It's been a while since I've had to chase down libraries, or set $LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the script that ran the app to point at the location of the specific library it should use if there was more than one version installed.
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

<snippety-snip-snip-snip> "We need a fourth type of wine, a second type of bread, fish, meat, and 3 types of fruit. Oh, and access to 6 gods. And a school, a university, a library, a doctor, a hospital, bathhouse, and a barber. AND I WANT A COLISEUM AND A HIPPODROME!"

If it's in a video game to that extent, I'm sure real people can be worse

You got something against Hippodromes? :-)

I have to confess...I have not played a computer game, other than stuff like scrambles/anagrams, and Pacman. Way back when. That's it. No Lerps or Morphs or whatever. No MPGs, or MMRPGs, or whatever those are. (I understand the concept, but not the precise initials.) I used to believe that it was, you know, just for kids, like teens, but people I respect play them, so one of these days, I have to try one. ;-) Plus, half the damn movies out these days seem to be from games.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

You got something against Hippodromes? :-)

Chariot races are so last millennium...

I have to confess...I have not played a computer game, other than stuff like scrambles/anagrams, and Pacman. Way back when. That's it. No Lerps or Morphs or whatever. No MPGs, or MMRPGs, or whatever those are. (I understand the concept, but not the precise initials.) I used to believe that it was, you know, just for kids, like teens, but people I respect play them, so one of these days, I have to try one. ;-) Plus, half the damn movies out these days seem to be from games.

Because games (and comics) provide story lines easily adapted to films.

And in the current gaming market, the similarity between games and films is even more pronounced.

An old friend is CEO of a small company attempting to turn written SF into films. Because he's known me for many years, I find myself a director of the company. My actual function is "guy Bill calls whenever he doesn't know about something, figuring I will know", and generally speaking I do. Part of what I know and have been pounding into him, is that making movies is fantastically expensive and takes a long time. "Those Executive Producer titles you're curious about? Each of those people represents an entity that has put up a substantial amount of the money to make the film, and is protecting their investment. Because their employer put up a lot of money, they get to pee in the soup. You don't want Executive Producers in your efforts."

Current desktop games are nearly as involved and expensive. One feature is elaborate visuals with jaw dropping art. It can take years to finish and release a game from the time it is first designed, and the company making it prays to $DEITY it becomes a hit and flies off the shelves, because they might be belly up if it doesn't.

And the games are complex and demanding of system resources, and require high end kit to play effectively. It's possible to get a graphics card with a faster processor than the CPU on your machine, and more video RAM on the graphics card than you have on the motherboard, because the games you want to play need it.

The local computer retailer I shop at has a DIY department devoted to those who build their own systems from components, and most of those are gamers trying to get the last ounce of performance.

I'm old skool. I still play a a few games, but they tend to be things like Nethack, that began on Unix systems, and run in character mode in a console. I prefer games that require strategy over fast reflexes and the ability to shoot it before it shoots you.

Humor helps, too, like the bit in Nethack: "Congratulations! You have reached the center of the Earth! Unfortunately, this is where Hell is located. You burn to a crisp. You die!" Part of the fun is finding new and different ways to get killed. The game abounds in them.

Once upon a time, I was end user support at a bank. The Small Systems manager put up word processing on a DEC minicomputer to support the secretaries. The DEC box also had games on it. So I'd get official support calls like

"How do I get the bucket to rise to the top of the well in Dungeon?"

"Under what circumstances does a bucket normally rise to the top of a well?"

"When it's got water in it... Oh! So I need to have the water bottle to poiur some into the bucket!"

"Right!"

Fun, while it lasted.
______
Dennis

[Freeshadow]

Most of the good new stuff is actually the good old stuff with higher quality graphics - if you're lucky. If not, it's the good old stuff simplified to garbage.

[Katsunami]

Heh. Talk about graphics. Sometimes, I don't understand computers.

I've (finally, after a pause of two years) returned to my Baldur's Gate savegame, in my quest of playing all of my old titles once more before they're shelved (probably forever).

As said, there are graphical glitches with the game on graphics cards from after 2008 and newer versions of DirectX. (You know it's possible to intstall DirectX 9 in Windows Vista-10, for games that actually need it? For some reason, it was *REQUIRED* for Baldur's Gate in Windows Vista and 7, but not in 10.)

There are three two solutions:
- Switch to 16-bit color and software rendering, but that makes the graphics very choppy. (Don't know how it EVER could have worked in the 90's.)
- Force Direct Draw Emulation through a mod, or a setting in the registry. (Worked with Windows Vista an 7, doesn't with 10.)
- Use a DirectX wrapper that restores the old/dropped functions. This works in Windows 7 and 10. Some guy was kind enough to write one around 2012. I don't know enough about DirectX to do such a thing.

When installed, graphics are fixed, and the game *seems* to run fine, but at some point, the animation gets stuck. Characters start to jitter up and down, and can't move.

The fix is to run the game in Administrator Mode, for whatever reason... it doesn't use ANY files outside of its own folder AFAIK, and I've set the security settings to allow anyone to read and modify the game's files.

I don't particularly mind giving the game Admin rights (as it would have had under Windows 98, for which it was written), but I don't understand why it's needed.

And yes, the DirectDraw wrapper is safe. It's open source, and if something had been wrong with it, someone would have reported it on GOG.com. Basically the entire RPG community that still runs, plays and mods the Infinity Engine games to this date uses it, because it's absolutely essential to make the game playable. (Along with the Widescreen mod to force at least an 800x600 resolution on BG and Planescape, or it's even blurrier than it is now.)

[Rumpelteazer]

Because we sell lightbulb we also take them in and sort them in the right bin (old fashioned ones are to be thrown away. CFL, fluorescent tubes, discharge lamps and LEDs are regularly picked up for recycling). We also have a bin for batteries and although we don't sell appliances or electronics we don't mind taking the smaller ones in.

What I hate is when people can't be bothered to hand them in during opening hours and leave them against the door. It has happened that I opened the door in the morning and a bunch of fluorescent tubes fell, most of the breaking. Not healthy for me, not good for the environment and it defeats the purpose of leaving them for recycling.

What I hate even more is when people thrown batteries through the letterbox. Most of them are bright and I spot them when I come down in the morning. The batteries thrown through the letterbox between 6pm last night and 9.45am this morning were dark and I didn't notice them on the dark doormat until I stepped on one. Result: a bruised arm (the entrance way is about one square meter, wild arm waving is not advised) and a very swollen, very bruised and very sprained ankle. My father was making a phone call and my mother wasn't dressed yet, so I had to wait almost half an hour before I could go upstairs to put an ice pack on it.

I'm considering taking a picture of my ankle, put it up on the store's Facebook page with the request not to throw batteries through the mailbox.

Luckily, it looks worse than it feels. Tomorrow won't be fun day, but on Sunday and Monday I can rest and hopefully by the time I'm leaving for my trip to Newcastle next Sunday the worst will be over.

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

I'm considering taking a picture of my ankle, put it up on the store's Facebook page with the request not to throw batteries through the mailbox.

Don't just consider it. Absolutely do take a picture and post it! Put it on your front door, too, for a few months. People don't think, and that might help them to find a smidgeon of sense.