# Problems unsolved since the dawn of computing **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 7, 2014, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528 "2014-04-07T03:55:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/21 "2014-04-07T15:51:37Z")
I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t yet figured out a way to project powerpoint slides while allowing the presenter to view slide notes. Or maybe they have. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/22 "2014-04-07T15:57:48Z")
> [@you\_with\_the\_face](#): > > I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t yet figured out a way to project powerpoint slides while allowing the presenter to view slide notes. > > Or maybe they have. I know that at least on Powerpoint for Mac when you have your computer hooked up to a projector the laptop screen does, in fact, show the slides with the notes while the projector shows the slides themselves. You might have to enable some setting to do it, though. I think at least you have to set up the OS to use the projector as a SECOND monitor rather than making it take control as the primary monitor. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/23 "2014-04-07T16:05:24Z")
At my office, killing print jobs is easy, though it’s not a one-step deal: just open the print queue for the printer you sent the job to, then right-click on your job and delete. The printer will usually crank out another 4-5 pages of the job before it gets the word, but if you realized you accidentally sent a 200-page document to the printer instead of the three pages you intended to print, that’s still a big gain. Or you can go to the printer, and cancel the print job there. Again, it’ll print out a few more pages, since they’re already in transit through the printer. But that’s life. Firefox has a download mini-window that pops up when you download something, and it shows you your recent downloads by filename, with most recent on top. Here’s mine: IRL, I go by my middle name. Would it be so hard for online forms to have a checkbox to toggle you from first name, middle initial to first initial, middle name? And travel-related applications that want your full name could at least have a toggle to indicate which one you actually use. How hard would that be? While I realize that most people go by their first names, those of us who don’t are a pretty sizable minority. ---
**Author:** ![TimeWinder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bcef8e/32.png) [@TimeWinder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimeWinder)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/24 "2014-04-07T16:07:24Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > I know that at least on Powerpoint for Mac when you have your computer hooked up to a projector the laptop screen does, in fact, show the slides with the notes while the projector shows the slides themselves. You might have to enable some setting to do it, though. I think at least you have to set up the OS to use the projector as a SECOND monitor rather than making it take control as the primary monitor. Correct. “Duplicate” on Windows and “Mirror” on Mac force the two monitors to display the same thing, so not showing the notes is what the user asked for. If you use “Extend” on Windows or turn off Mirroring on the Mac (i.e. treat the projector as its own screen) then Powerpoint will show notes on the main display and project to the second one…since at least Office 2007. That said, this is one of those scenarios that basically everybody gets wrong (because to display anything OTHER than PowerPoint, you’d want to mirror your desktop to the projector), and you’d think after 20 years or so, there’s be some automation around it offering to set it up correctly for you when a second monitor is detected while running PowerPoint. ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/25 "2014-04-07T17:07:11Z")
> [@MeanOldLady](#): > > It is impossible to print anything onto an envelope. Make labels and save yourself the rage. I will join with **Rick** above and say that MS Word seems to handle this quite spiffily, as long as you are using any of a large number of standard size envelopes. The printer is probably the place where most envelope printing comes unglued. I have a small Brother laser printer at home; it has a manual slot in the front, and a flap in the back you can fold down so that your envelope comes out straight in the back and doesn’t bend around the rollers to go into the output tray (if you care about wrinkles in your envelope). Sometimes it takes a couple of tries before it grabs the envelope, but once it does, no problem. What I do to kill a large print job at work is 1st to turn off the printer, then go into the print queue and delete the job. Then I have to clear out any partially printed pages in the printer, and turn on the printer again. This usually works, but I haven’t had to do it in a long time. We have very good electronic document storage, online document signing, etc. so we actually don’t have to print out that much anymore. ---
**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/26 "2014-04-07T17:41:21Z")
> [@Sal\_Ammoniac](#): > > 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. These problems have been solved LONG ago. You just don’t know the solutions. I guess I learned something in the 3 extra years of computing experience I have over you. Seriously–if there is something you think a given program or system _ought_ to do, it probably does do it. (There are exceptions–I’m looking at you, Adobe Acrobat!) Try googling for an answer. Cancelling print jobs: Press the button on the printer that stops the print job. Confirm if it asks you to. If there is no button, unplug it. If it goes to some central printer, there should be a menu in there showing the print queue and cancel it from there. If you don’t get there in time, then having printers so far away from desks is a problem created by your IT department. Printing envelopes: Open Word. Go to the envelope wizard thing. Follow the instructions. If your printer doesn’t handle envelopes well for some reason, that doesn’t make it a problem unsolved. > [@Joey\_P](#): > > 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. Click on “Date Modified” and it will put the items in date/time order. Problem solved. ---
**Author:** ![Folacin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folacin/32/3195_2.png) [@Folacin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folacin)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/27 "2014-04-07T17:53:32Z")
> [@Green\_Bean](#): > > Click on “Date Modified” and it will put the items in date/time order. Problem solved. Unless you downloaded it two (or was it three?) days ago. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/28 "2014-04-07T18:01:54Z")
Not surprising that newbies like the OP have problems. 😃 Pretty much all the answers have been given. When I taught Operating Systems we covered print spoolers - I guess they are too taken for granted now. As for downloads, in Firefox if your download window does not open you can click on the green arrow in the upper right of your window and that will open it. Default download location is set in options, and you can get it to ask you where it goes also. Thunderbird too. I don’t print many envelopes, but the masses of junk mail you get everyday proves that the problem is solved. If I have a lot, I do labels. Word has templates for all the popular label brands. It takes a few steps to set up, but it works really well. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/29 "2014-04-07T18:02:53Z")
> [@Green\_Bean](#): > > These problems have been solved LONG ago. Cancelling print jobs: \*\*If there is no button, unplug it. \*\* Wow, who is the engineer who designed that? 30 years of computer expertise, billions of printers sold, and that’s the only solution? No other industry is as stupid as the computer world. (example: The original VW bugs in the 1950’s had no gas gauge. There was just an extra tank with one gallon of fuel, and when your car sputtered to a stop, you pulled a lever to let the extra gallon spill into the empty main fuel tank. But they _fixed_ that stupidity–and it took a lot less than 30 years.) ---
**Author:** ![johnpost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f17d59/32.png) [@johnpost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/johnpost)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/30 "2014-04-07T18:12:57Z")
lack of an any key. ---
**Author:** ![TimeWinder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bcef8e/32.png) [@TimeWinder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimeWinder)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/31 "2014-04-07T18:43:01Z")
> [@Green\_Bean](#): > > These problems have been solved LONG ago. You just don’t know the solutions. I realize this was meant to be flip, but…no. Many of these things are basic problems that effectively all users of a product will run into, and which could have nearly foolproof technical solutions by now…and don’t. The rather elitist “these are solved, google it” answers don’t help the person who just printed their envelope upside down or on the sealed side, or got the ubiquitous “I was printing from a web page, and it used only part of my paper and cut everything off,” or “I faxed the wrong side of my paper” question. _Why did the device let them do that?_ The printer has, or could trivially have with a few extra sensors, every piece of information necessary to do it right, every time, and completely eliminate these mistakes. Why hasn’t that been done? Mostly because of the “well, the people who are having this problem are stupid/uneducated. They should have known or googled for how to write a cron script to parse regular expressions to heap-allocate the driver…” attitude. If you have to use a web search to perform the basic task a device was designed for, the device is badly designed. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/32 "2014-04-07T19:01:47Z")
> [@BlackKnight](#): > > 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. There are Dropbox and all its various competitors. It works well for me. The recipient doesn’t need the Dropbox software, even. You just email them a link. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/33 "2014-04-07T19:02:18Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > 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. Which doesn’t prevent a programmer from writing the code that checks the incoming data and if it finds instructions to cancel a job, does so. There is no requirement to process data sequentially if the last byte received is more important the earlier ones. This is Computer 101, or maybe 102. > [@Green\_Bean](#): > > Cancelling print jobs: Press the button on the printer that stops the print job. Confirm if it asks you to. If there is no button, unplug it. Which doesn’t work, either, if the print job is only partly in the printer buffer. Turning on the printer again will result in resuming of the data stream, but now the printer isn’t in the correct mode, and each byte will be misinterpreted, resulting in garbage. I heartily agree that cancelling a print job is stupidly impossible, and it’s only because the developers don’t actually use the product they produce. They spend too little time on error detection and mitigation and too much time on features most of us never use and don’t want. As far as handling a job cancellation in software…I wrote software in the 1980’s and was able to handle this just fine using an extremely simple procedure. I stuck a “check\_status” call in every possible place where there was a loop, and if the status returned was “cancel,” I jumped to a place where the stream was stopped, the job flushed, and everything initialized, ready to go again. It’s not rocket science, folks. It would have been even easier if I had access to an interrupt handler in the hardware. Trivial, even. (Actually, it _was_ rocket science, since I was writing software for rockets and other military hardware.) ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/34 "2014-04-07T19:05:53Z")
> [@TimeWinder](#): > > ``` > Why hasn't that been done? Mostly because of the "well, the people who are having this problem are stupid/uneducated. They should have known or googled for how to write a cron script to parse regular expressions to heap-allocate the driver...." attitude. perform the basic task a device was designed for, the device is badly designed. > > ``` If you have a problem with something, it’s your responsibility to make it known to the company what features you want or need. I don’t know Green Bean, but I assume she does not work in printer R&D so if you have a problem with her solutions, try taking it up with someone who could implement others. Badly-designed machine or no, if the answer to your problem lies a google search away, then the smart people are the ones who do the google search. ---
**Author:** ![TimeWinder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bcef8e/32.png) [@TimeWinder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimeWinder)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/35 "2014-04-07T19:35:18Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > If you have a problem with something, it’s your responsibility to make it known to the company what features you want or need. I don’t know Green Bean, but I assume she does not work in printer R&D so if you have a problem with her solutions, try taking it up with someone who could implement others. Badly-designed machine or no, if the answer to your problem lies a google search away, then the smart people are the ones who do the google search. And that, right there, is why Apple is a 100+ billion dollar company. ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/36 "2014-04-07T19:39:23Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > IRL, I go by my middle name. Would it be so hard for online forms to have a checkbox to toggle you from first name, middle initial to first initial, middle name? And travel-related applications that want your full name could at least have a toggle to indicate which one you actually use. How hard would that be? While I realize that most people go by their first names, those of us who don’t are a pretty sizable minority. That is not a problem with computers, it’s a problem with the design of specific forms. And yes it would be sort of hard. I can’t even follow how or why this would be done or be worth the cost and space and confusion of adding a toggle - because for as many people who this might possibly benefit, there’d be 10x more that get confused by it. Adding a “what should we call you?” field to a form is not that big of a deal but once again that’s for the business owner to know their customers and know their data and know that it’s needed. I can’t think of too many applications I’ve built, or forms I’ve filled out myself, that something like that would be needed. It just sounds super niche. But still, not a computer problem. Where’s the toggle button on a paper form? If you go by “Richard Firefly” but your name is really “Thomas Richard Firefly” and you’re not signing an affidavit that says “My real and true official name is Richard Firefly” then why not just put “Richard” as your first name? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/37 "2014-04-07T19:46:34Z")
> [@TimeWinder](#): > > I realize this was meant to be flip, but…no. Many of these things are basic problems that effectively all users of a product will run into, and which could have nearly foolproof technical solutions by now…and don’t. Oddly I never have a problem canceling jobs. Sure they may print more than I want, but not a big deal. I think the problem people have is that a print spooler is an example of a cooperating asynchronous process, but most people have a model of a computer of something that listens to you and then does something. With that model it is no wonder that people don’t understand why the printer doesn’t stop right away. They don’t get buffering either. > [@](#): > > The rather elitist “these are solved, google it” answers don’t help the person who just printed their envelope upside down or on the sealed side, or got the ubiquitous “I was printing from a web page, and it used only part of my paper and cut everything off,” or “I faxed the wrong side of my paper” question. _Why did the device let them do that?_ The printer has, or could trivially have with a few extra sensors, every piece of information necessary to do it right, every time, and completely eliminate these mistakes. Why hasn’t that been done? Mostly because of the “well, the people who are having this problem are stupid/uneducated. They should have known or googled for how to write a cron script to parse regular expressions to heap-allocate the driver…” attitude. If you have to use a web search to perform the basic task a device was designed for, the device is badly designed. Most fax machines have little symbols telling you which way to put the paper. Hardly takes knowing how to write a regexp. Sensors? What happens when you want to fax something with writing on both sides of the page? ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/38 "2014-04-07T19:51:53Z")
> [@TimeWinder](#): > > And that, right there, is why Apple is a 100+ billion dollar company. Can you run that by me one more time? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/39 "2014-04-07T19:54:18Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > I heartily agree that cancelling a print job is stupidly impossible, and it’s only because the developers don’t actually use the product they produce. They spend too little time on error detection and mitigation and too much time on features most of us never use and don’t want. If a printer can’t take a cancel signal, I agree it was badly designed. All the el-cheapo ones I’ve owned can. > [@](#): > > As far as handling a job cancellation in software…I wrote software in the 1980’s and was able to handle this just fine using an extremely simple procedure. I stuck a “check\_status” call in every possible place where there was a loop, and if the status returned was “cancel,” I jumped to a place where the stream was stopped, the job flushed, and everything initialized, ready to go again. It’s not rocket science, folks. > > It would have been even easier if I had access to an interrupt handler in the hardware. Trivial, even. > > (Actually, it _was_ rocket science, since I was writing software for rockets and other military hardware.) The people who wrote the printer firmware do have access to the interrupts. I’m pretty certain that they let you load a cancel print instruction. What they don’t do is anything about the latency between you getting around to issuing a cancel print command on whatever machine you are using and it generating the proper instruction to send to the printer. Printer software using polling instead of interrupts would be quite stupid - at a higher level it makes sense. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2014, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528/40 "2014-04-07T19:56:18Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > Can you run that by me one more time? It’s why they have such predominant marketshare in the PC market. Oh, wait … [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/problems-unsolved-since-the-dawn-of-computing/685528.md?page=3)