Internet shit that never works.

The BBQ Pit
41

Our IS department tried locking us out of our workstations when we moved to Windows XP. This lasted about 3 months, and then one day, we quietly all had administrator rights again.

I suspect that they looked at the volume of helpdesk calls and the time spent doing things like installing Quicktime and decided it was cheaper to deal with the occasional fucked-up computer than the constant barrage of requests for installation.

Oh, and RealPlayer is the devil. It is the most ill-behaved application that I have ever installed. Among its many flaws is that it lays claim to every goddamn music file format invented, even if you tell it not to, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT IT CAN PLAY THE GODDAMN THING. As a result, following an install of RealInsult, we have this fabulous scenario:

Brainiac4 double-clicks an audio file
RealPlayer starts.
RealPlayer says “I do not recognize this file format”
Brainiac4 says “then why are you trying to play it, you stupid piece of shit?”
Brainiac4 uninstalls RealPlayer.

I categorically refuse to inflict RealPlayer on our customers. Our audio providers offer RealMedia streams of song clips, and we will NOT use them as long as I control the decision.

I do maintain an installation of RealAlternative for those occasions when I want to get something that is in RAM format. If RealAlternative won’t play it, it’s dead to me.

42

I’m not even going to bother looking into work-arounds, I just refuse to look at PDF files on principle anymore.

43

Guinastasia: I’m gonna say that’s a bit… extreme. Will you consider printing them out? That’s what the format was intended for, after all.

Let me make that clear:

PDF is the Portable Document Format. It was intended to replace PostScript, a language that could create documents of frightening complexity, as a way of shipping printer-ready documents around a network to machines that could allow humans to briefly flip through them in graphical preview applications and then send them off to laser printers capable of rendering the nice bezier-curvaceous fonts and scalable vector drawings at whatever size and aspect ratio best fit the page without ugly pixellation.

PDF excels at that task. It even allows you to include traditional pixel-based graphics if you absolutely need to have your corporate dingbat at the top of the title page and nobody has taken the time to draw his portrait in a vector graphics language.

PDF even allows you to do things to make it nice for the people who have to read PDFs on-screen and need easy ways to navigate though them. I have on my hard drive PDFs that include hyperlinks, navigation sidebars, and clickable URLs that my PDF viewer of choice (evince) will feed to my browser of choice (varies) in a user-configurable way. Reading those PDFs are no worse than reading the average webpage, and sometimes even better: PDFs don’t have animated graphics or banner ads.

PDF also allows you to do things that make it terrible for the people who have to read PDFs on screen and need easy ways to navigate through them. Remember how I said the format made it possible to inline pixel-based graphics? Sometimes, the whole damned thing is a pixel-based graphic, something which makes searching impossible and resizing an exercise in horrible, horrible eyestrain. More commonly, the sins are not that blatant. The most common sins are those of omission: Omitting a table of contents, omitting to make the table of contents’ page numbers match the PDF’s page numbers, omitting hyperlinks, and omitting a navigation bar are all extremely common, and all serve to turn reasonable people into Guinastasia.

In conclusion, a well-made PDF is its own heaven, a badly-made PDF its own hell. The tools exist to create PDFs that are even better to read on-line than printed out.

As for the rest: I do my surfing in Linux, and apparently none of the eee-vil applications under Windows are even very annoying in their Linux ports. Both Acrobat Reader and RealPlayer exist for Linux, and neither of them are worth writing home about: They do what they set out to do in a workmanlike fashion, neither too much better or worse than their Linux-native counterparts. I have RealPlayer 10 and RealONE 9 (apparently), and neither of them bug me about updates or burning my dog or ensue my penis. Acrobat Reader 5.0.9 is ugly but functional, and the worst thing about it is that it will crash Firefox if used embedded in a tab. It also don’t know anything about scrollin’ no mouse wheels, which is annoying. Windows Media Player doesn’t have any Linux port (gee, what a surprise) and MPlayer, its equivalent, is as far from evil as it gets.

44

Then send me the darn thing on paper. I want information, not fluff.

If you are so uncomfortable with the content that you must align every piece of data pixel perfect, then I don’t give a rats about it.

Same problem besets Powerpoint people. It’s all about how flashy you can make it.

To reiterate, I want content, not form and style. Give me the damn information, keep the presentation out of it.

45

Caught@Work, I actually fully agree with you. I have made that very clear in the past, to the effect that I vehemently and almost profanely castigated Flash in an SDMB thread. PDF can be even worse than Flash, in that the files are usually much longer and, in the worst cases, require you to wade through micrographic bitmapped text that turns into an unreadable mass of pixels the moment it is resized to any scale other than the original designer’s window size.

46

I see where both sides are coming from with regard to PDFs. On the one hand, they can be a very good way of locking down a document before distribution so that they can’t be fucked up by Ms Office trying to be helpful. If something has been properly converted, it will generally give a document that is just as readable as anything else.

On the other hand, trying to extract something useful from a PDF is like having a blind blacksmith with the DTs give you a root canal without anaesthetic, and the only good thing you can say about PDFs embedded in webpages is that at least they save time compared to alternative was of fucking up your PC, such as ringing the local pig farmer to have him bring his prize boar over.

RealMedia - the only thing I can add is to ask ‘Really What?’ Really shit, really incompetent, really annoying… I guess they had so many alternatives they went with Real <Insert Hate Here> Media and then it somehow got shortened.

47

Here’s something that’s been frosting my ass.

I’m typing email in gmail. It “conveniently” auto-saves what I’m doing. I guess that’s good thing. I’d hate to lose that email to my buddy where I’m informing him that FedEx Field will now be called “Brokeback Stadium”.

I guess they figure we’re all using gmail for drafting memos of important national security – gotta auto-save.

But the way it handles this is to take control of the cursor, “tab” to the auto-save button, click-it, and leave control there. So, I look at the screeen and realize the last 20 characters I’ve typed haven’t shown up in the window.

They can search the library at Alexandria, and they couldn’t figure out a smart way to auto-save, or at least give me a friggin’ way to turn it off?

48

I understand your complaint, but I’ve lost so many e-mails in Gmail that I don’t care how they did it, I’m eternally grateful for the autosave.

49

Doesn’t do it to me. I’m on Firefox 1.something-or-other. Maybe it’s broken in some browsers.

50

Doesn’t do that with me, the autosave never interrupts my typing. I just verified it.

I’m using Firefox 1.5 on Windows.

51

Unfortunately, PDF seems to be the industry standard for printable reports. Our clients insist that every reporting tool we design have the capability to export to PDF. All god’s chillun have Adobe Acrobat installed, it seems.

I use CutePDF.

52

Any program, internet or not, that steals focus should be burnt in the flames of hell for all eternityyyy!

53

Ditto everything Derleth said about PDFs. I practiaclly make my living off them. They have saved me sooooo much hassle with font issues, jumping graphics, etc.

It’s not the architecture of PDFs that’s the problem. It’s how they’re made. Many people don’t realize they can optimize PDFs for the Internets by changing the settings in Distiller. Distiller defaults to a “Standard” setting that can be changed to “Web,” which changes DPI to 72 and makes file sizes much smaller. Printing compaines require something more specific and detailed which results in bigger files, but they’re intended for print, not web.

PDFs CAN be edited with full Acrobat (not Reader) if they were converted from electronic documents. But the reason they’re PDFs in the first place is so that ANYBODY will be able to print them out and have them look like the originals, and not have some jackass change them along the way. If they’re scans, you can’t edit them. If you need to edit, ask for the originals.

Distiller has saved my bacon when graphics get lost or unavailable. I can just open the PDF in Illustrator or Photoshop and get them back.

So yeah, sorry your Reader took forever to load, but it’s not really Adobe’s fault. :slight_smile:

54

With all the complaining about Acrobat here, can I ask a question about an odd problem I had recently? My wife was applying for jobs, and she downloaded a .pdf application to print out and fill in. I opened it in Reader 7.x - the latest version. When it printed, only some of the letters showed up, and in other places it had lines of random characters, and even some of the solid lines on the page were absent. The form was unusable. I almost never need to use Acrobat, and this was the only time I’ve seen it do something screwy. What do you suppose was wrong?

55

Already done it. It makes no difference, Java is a piece of shit whether it’s running on Windows or on Linux.

56

Huh. I must have just the luckiest computer on the world, because it always works for me.

57

Well, it “works for me”, it just takes an age to load, something which all Java programs seem to have in common, witness how long it takes IntelliJ IDEA to get going.

58

Gmail works for me, too- Firefox 1.0, 1.5 on Win 2K, Safari on OS X.

59

Totally agree. Java applications are bloated, slow, memory-hogging pieces of crap. The JVM is a blight upon mankind. Java apologists always say something like, “It’s the way the app’s written! You can write bloatware in any language!” or FUD like “How fast is fast enough? Memory is cheap!” Bullshit. Java has a cool name and not much else.

-DarrenS,
Sun Certified Java Programmer & professional Java developer.

60

Well yes it is Adobe’s fault; Reader is bloatware. It takes an age to launch just as an application, even on a fast computer. Foxit is butt-ugly yet opens in an instant.

Sure people making PDFs for browser display should render it in 72dpi instead of 300dpi but a lot of people dont even know what dpi is or means. If it is for browser display why not just render the damn thing in HTML since most authoring tools will do that just fine.

Maybe XML will save us.

Nice touch with the sig there Darren