I’ve been using computers a good while – since about 1983, long, long before most of you were born. And from that day to the present, the best minds on the planet have not been able to solve two problems that seem to me to be perfectly trivial. To wit:
Killing a print job in one easy step. Why is this so freaking hard? It’s a multi-step thing always, involving both the computer and the printer, and it rarely works: the printer acts as if it no more wants to contain itself than a volcano does in the middle of an eruption. Why the heck don’t printers contain a kill switch to signal, “Kill the current print job and empty the print queue”?
Printing an envelope. Again, why such drama? 99.9% of the time, you’re using a standard envelope in a standard configuration. Why isn’t there a simple wizard? “Are you using a standard envelope in a standard configuration, yes or no?” If yes, enter the return address, enter the recipient, put the envelope in the approved fashion into the printer, and voila. But not in the real world. This evening I spent about an hour, 20 sheets of paper and ten envelopes before giving up.
Computers. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
Grin! The “real” answers are easy… But… Yes, the problems are damn irksome!
Print queues are set up to run in background mode. “Asynchronous.” They have a kind of independence, a life of their own. They’re intended to do their own thing. Breaking into this is tricky. And envelopes are messy because they aren’t of uniform thickness; they have thicker places and thinner places. Plus they have that flap hanging out. So they’re tougher for paper-handling rollers to work with.
A lot of people just print to mailing labels and stick those on envelopes.
And…a lot of people take care of what they assign to be printed, so they don’t have to interrupt a print job. But, sure, who among us hasn’t accidentally sent out a 100 page print job when we only wanted to print the first four pages?
The envelope wizard in Ms Word is very simple. You can enter a permanent return address for all your envelopes. You choose your envelope size and it remembers it.
I use the manual feed option on my inkjet. Theres a special feed slot for envelopes.
The problem is that you have two independent devices. You sent a job to the print queue, it sends it to the printer. To make the printer stop you have to cancel it in both places. With today’s more complex drivers that support two way communication, it could probably be done, but at this point, I don’t see it happening.
The problem isn’t the flap. The problem is figuring out which program of your programs is even willing to attempt the job (Works? Access? An Open Office program? Print Shop? Notepad?) Then you have to convince said program to actually do it, which will involve the help files. Then trying, probably more than once to feed the envelope in in the correct orientation (this is where all the wasted paper comes in.
Like the OP, the last time I tried this, it took about a half hour, I got it, but I’ll never attempt it again, it was an total waste of time for something that I could have just grabbed a co-worker with better handwriting to do for me.
Bloody right - it always seems to have one of two outcomes:
You try to cancel the job, but nearly all of it still prints; in some cases, you will get multiple copies of the same incomplete set of pages you didn’t want, as the printer and spooler wave their dicks at each other.
You cancel the job. Nothing prints, ever - including any other documents you subsequently send - only returning to operation after everything has been flushed, rebooted, uninstalled, reinstalled and blessed by the appropriate archbishop.
You cancel the job. The printer makes it a point of expressing its frustration by printing one sheet that contains bits of Postscript with “OffendingCommand” somewhere in there. It may also add a blank sheet, just for kicks.
Yes, it’s ridiculous, under Windows at least. Cancellation is something everybody does at least a few times a year. Now that printing is less fashionable, people probably make more mistakes the few times they do it and need to cancel even more often. Cancellation is a basic functionality of the spooler and of the printer, and nobody seems to have planned for it.
[QUOTE=Trinopus]
And…a lot of people take care of what they assign to be printed, so they don’t have to interrupt a print job. But, sure, who among us hasn’t accidentally sent out a 100 page print job when we only wanted to print the first four pages?
[/QUOTE]
It’s not just a question of choosing carefully what pages you want to print. It’s a question of knowing in advance exactly what the printer will do with them: print on letterhead, print in colour or grayscale, print N copies like the previous document I printed.
In the case of at least one printer at work, these settings remain in effect for a few minutes but are definitely reset to default an hour later; so you always have this uncertainty unless you click on the Printing Properties button for every print. And when you find out your document is coming out wrong, you want to cancel.
And, at least at home, there’s also the question of the price you’re paying for that black-and-white picture that’s being rendered in colour ink.
Just in case people aren’t realizing it, the printer has a substantial amount of memory buffering data sent to it by the computer. When you decide to cancel a print job on your computer most or all of your document has been sent to the printer already, so telling the computer to stop printing is like turning off a faucet and expecting the water already in the sink to stop draining. The computer can tell the printer to stop printing but it often doesn’t work because of the large number of different printers that may not recognize the command to stop, or in other cases because the printer has blocked communications with the computer until it prints some or all of what it has buffered up already.
Some of the newer high-end printers around here (HP Laserjets using the HP Universal printing driver) do have a button on the console to cancel the print job.
Another thing that I haven’t seen solved is letting novice users know where their file went when they download something. Browsers don’t even ask the user where to save the file by default, they seem to have a “download first, find it later” mentality.
All the HPs I’ve had, have had a red X on the printer. For the rest of them, turning them off (with a hard switch) or pulling the plug almost always dumps everything out of the memory.
I hate that, especially if it’s something that gets downloaded with some wonky filename. I mean, if I download a picture of an elephant and I go to my download folder and see the thumbnail or see elephant.jpg, that’s fine. But if I download a pdf and it’s called F-3216-s.pdf (real one in my folder) amongst a sea of other similar names, well what the hell. Firefox will take you to “containing folder” but that doesn’t solve the problem of telling you which thing you just downloaded. How that little green arrow just showing me my last few downloads and when I click on one give me a few options: Open/Run, go to folder, Save As etc.
That one annoys the hell out of me, control-z. Instead of saving a file directly to where I want it to go, I have to save it to the default location, then go find it, then copy it over to where I want it. What genius decided this was a good idea?
I’m also annoyed that there’s no really good way to transfer large files over the Internet. (From individual to individual, I mean. If you run a server, you can put the file there and let people download it.) I understand that, say, GMail doesn’t want everyone eating their bandwidth and storage by sending 250 MB+ attachments. And of course people worry that this would make piracy even easier.
Still, there should be an easy, intuitive way for Person A to transfer a large file to Person B that doesn’t require any third-party software. There are times when it’s easiest just copy a file to a USB dongle and drive it across town to hand over physically. That seems wrong.
I’ve done that plenty of times. My accountant finally set up an FTP site for all their clients to upload/download files, but even then there’s times where I just toss it on a thumbdrive and make the hour round trip or drop it in the mail. Come to think of it, it’s kind of funny that in this day and age, we actually still snail mail digital files because it’s faster (and cheaper in some cases).
The first setting I change on Firefox is where to save files. I normally use the person’s account username. For example JRSchultz might be a account username. So, C:\JRSchultz will be their personal download folder.
Staff enter their username all the time logging in. It’s easy for them to remember their download folder.
If someone quits then I only have one folder to delete. Then I setup a new dl folder after a new person is hired.
In Chrome, your recent downloads appear in a bar at the bottom. Click on the arrow next to it, select “Show in Folder”, and a window opens with the downloaded file already selected.
Every tray I’ve ever seen (printer, copier, scanner, fax, etc.) has a rectangular icon with a missing triangular notch on it . The icon represents a piece of paper that was folded back on itself “dog eared”. The icon has little lines representing writing either on the main rectangle area or on the dog ear, representing which side of the paper gets printed.
