The minor rants thread.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @RaceProUK said:

    Sounds like it's coming from a sound system that costs anywhere from 3 to 10 times the cost of the car…

    Plus wheels and tires.



  • There is little or no point telling the home of edit wars about it.

    As for canonicality, I don't think the BBC vets them for consistency the way, say, the SW Extended Universe was. So there's no revealed truth because it's pure speculation in canon terms. A number of the novels were written after being turned down as regular stories...


  • kills Dumbledore

    @Onyx said:

    Did you check The Guide?

    I asked my Guide mk 2, but it turned into a giant bird and initiated a series of ever more unlikely events, which didn't really answer the question



  • I always wondered how that felt like inside the car. My car's sound system is not great but if I put it loud enough it gets annoying inside the car, and you still can't hear it well from outside.


  • FoxDev

    @dstopia said:

    My car's sound system is not great but if I put it loud enough it gets annoying inside the car, and you still can't hear it well from outside.

    Probably still less annoying than this sound system:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M9GjeeUk-4

    OK, technically it's not a sound system. But that is a speaker. It's just driven by the diesel engine 😆


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Bug: I couldn't hear what that sounded like over Discourse and Youtube!



  • @boomzilla said:

    Hmmmm

    It's kinda the opposite really. When you're a zombie, you're not yourself, but your dead body stays the same. When you're regenerating, every single cell of your body goes poof in an increasingly more spectacular lightshow, but you're still the same person (kinda).


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    It's kinda the opposite really.

    I agree. The word has been pretty thoroughly misused in this thread.



  • @dstopia said:

    I always wondered how that felt like inside the car. My car's sound system is not great but if I put it loud enough it gets annoying inside the car, and you still can't hear it well from outside.

    I doubt it's as loud as you think, deep bass frequencies don't attenuate well. I had a roommate who played electric bass. One day while walking home from work, I could hear his bass from two blocks away! When I got to the house I realized it really wasn't any louder inside than it was from a distance.

    (Not that I'm defending jerkwads with $8,000 worth of subwoofer in their cars.)



  • Hmm. Here's a minor rant for y'all.

    Here there is a topic which was started before I joined the site, and which is active up until an hour ago, and at no time had Ducroseis ever notified me as to its existence.

    :wtf:TF is even the point of a forum which actively tries to prevent you from participating. What the even fuck how am I even other topics it's hiding from me?



  • @tar said:

    at no time had Ducroseis ever notified me as to its existence

    Like it didn't show up on Latest? (with or without the "new" marker next to it).



  • It does now...



  • Minor rant: Maybe there's a good reason that I am unaware of, but why do wireless mice, etc., require proprietary dongles that consume scarce USB ports, instead of using the Bluetooth that is built into every laptop? Or have the dongle for desktops/older laptops that don't have built-in Bluetooth, but not need it for laptops that do have Bluetooth. If such an option is possible, it is not discoverable from the wordless, language-neutral pictures that pass for manuals these days.

    Second rant: The above-mentioned manuals.

    And a bug trying to post this. @discoursebot!



  • @HardwareGeek - Days Since Last Discourse Bug: -1


  • BINNED

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Maybe there's a good reason that I am unaware of, but why do wireless mice, etc., require proprietary dongles that consume scarce USB ports, instead of using the Bluetooth that is built into every laptop?

    Honest question: I have a Bluetooth headset. Could I use it at the same time as a Bluetooth mouse? Can laptop Bluetooth transcievers handle multiple devices at the same time by some form of multiplexing?

    If not, I would appreciate the choice between Bluetooth and wireless. Though I do agree that there should be more Bluetooth devices available, they do seem to be pretty scarce.



  • I always found Bluetooth sucky in various ways. I'm hoping it's better today, but for example some devices had no code at all (stupid Wiimotes) but Windows wouldn't let you skip it to pair it.

    Bluetooth sucks. Wi-Fi sucks. Routers suck. Everything sucks. I'm going to go to bed now and hope it will be better tomorrow.



  • @Onyx said:

    Though I do agree that there should be more Bluetooth devices available, they do seem to be pretty scarce.

    I have a Bluetooth mouse1, but it seems to no worky no more, so I bought a new mouse. I couldn't find any with Bluetooth in the store.
    @Onyx said:

    I have a Bluetooth headset. Could I use it at the same time as a Bluetooth mouse?

    Survey says, yes (at least in theory; I've never tried it, and don't know any more than this):
    SO onebox is useless.

    Bluetooth 4.0 Allows you in a Bluetooth piconet one master can communicate up to 7 active slaves

    1 It's several years old. It came with an used laptop that I bought on eBay (which was stolen when my house was burglarized; it broke soon after I bought it, so the only real loss from having it stolen was the data on the hard disk), but without the dongle needed to make it work with that old laptop without built-in Bluetooth. However, it paired fine with my work laptop.


  • BINNED

    Oh, as a general comment on wireless vs Bluetooth headphones / headsets.

    I paid approx. $30 for this headset. It supports A2DP, so full stereo on it. The downside is that it will switch to horrible mono if you want to use the microphone as well which is pretty much crap even for Skype. Use only with mobile phone is my advice. Which is fine with me, that was my requirement - being able to use it both with my phone and laptop, but be warned. The built-in Li-Ion battery lasts for about 20h. No joke.

    I got a wireless one for my sister. The cheapest semi-decent headset was around $65. It's full stereo in all situations, so that's nice. But the battery lasts for 6h only.

    What gives? 😕



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    why do wireless mice, etc., require proprietary dongles that consume scarce USB ports, instead of using the Bluetooth that is built into every laptop?

    Or conversely, why did my laptop suddenly refuse to have anything to do with by bluetooth trackpad, "forcing" me to buy the dongled model of the same trackpad?

    That was a minor irritation. At least the BT one works with my Brix (for the time being at least...)



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    SO onebox is useless.

    Yeah, that one doesn't display a grinning douchebag. I thought that was the intended behaviour?



  • @Onyx said:

    Oh, as a general comment on wireless vs Bluetooth headphones / headsets.

    I have a Philips SHB4000 set:

    It's really nice, so lightweight that sometimes I forget I've put it on my neck at the beginning of the day, but fits the ears almost perfectly. The battery is smallish (I'd say... 15-20 hours, somewhere in that ballpark), but I'm not surprised.

    OTOH, my sister has a proper wireless headset, antenna et al, and while it lasts longer and is a bit better in quality, if your source doesn't play any sound for a minute or so, it disconnects and greets you with a full-on blast of white noise. So, um... no.


  • BINNED

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    if your source doesn't play any sound for a minute or so, it disconnects and greets you with a full-on blast of white noise.

    Ouch. I have some problems with audio not playing properly from my laptop after a longer pause, but in my case the cause is PulseAudio being a piece of crap.


  • BINNED

    @anonymous234 said:

    Everything sucks.

    That's what she said!

    Not what she did ... and that sucked at at different level ...



  • A few months back I bought a Sony eBook reader. Two months later, Sony decides they aren't making any money from their eBook store and decide to trash it. Some markets got absorbed by other eBook services, like Kobo in the US. The market in Spain for eBooks is basically Amazon and now I'm left with an eBook reader that can only read pirated eBooks.

    Oh well, at least it's pretty good reading lots of formats and works without any Sony software installed over USB.



  • I had a Bluetooth mouse for a while. It was overpriced (like $70 or something), it sucked, battery life sucked, it was prone to random disconnects, and lots of movements and clicks wouldn't register as if there was somehow major packet loss across the 3 feet of open air between the mouse and the laptop.



  • I've got a bluetooth mouse and I noticed (before I stopped using it) that it seemed to be performance dependent. If you weren't doing anything intensive it would be fine, but if you were e.g. playing a high-end game (not a very high threshold on the laptop), it would lag and jerk around the whole time.



  • @mott555 said:

    it sucked, battery life sucked, it was prone to random disconnects

    Not entirely unlike my experience with mine, but I always attributed that to it being a random piece of used junk from eBay, rather an inherent problem with Bluetooth mice. Perhaps I should be glad my new one is not Bluetooth, instead of ranting about it. As I said originally, "maybe there is a good reason." Perhaps there is indeed.



  • Mini-rant: I built a small Python GUI program using Tkinter (the "official" GUI library), and like most GUI toolkits you have to call a mainloop() function which never returns. Why the hell can't it launch a thread in the background by itself? Why completely forbid me from running any more code? I hate this stuff.

    The worst part is, Tkinter does not support multithreading even if you do it yourself. It HAS to run in the main thread, can't run in the backround because of reasons.

    Hell, why are most programming languages still built on the single-threading model where only one function runs at the time and if you want multithreading you have to manually launch new threads?



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Hell, why are most programming languages still built on the single-threading model where only one function runs at the time and if you want multithreading you have to manually launch new threads?

    Python's from 1995. It's pretty old.

    Not that it justifies your complaints, but just sayin'.


  • FoxDev

    Am I right in thinking Objective C (from 1983!) also has language-level multithreaded support?



  • @RaceProUK said:

    Am I right in thinking Objective C (from 1983!) also has language-level multithreaded support?

    I don't know shit about Objective C.



  • Why do you not correctly free heap space upon succesive redeployments, Weblogic? Pray tell me why?

    You goddamn piece of shit software.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Mini-rant: I built a small Python GUI program using Tkinter (the "official" GUI library), and like most GUI toolkits you have to call a mainloop() function which never returns. Why the hell can't it launch a thread in the background by itself? Why completely forbid me from running any more code? I hate this stuff.

    The worst part is, Tkinter does not support multithreading even if you do it yourself. It HAS to run in the main thread, can't run in the backround because of reasons.

    Eh, the Windows and X11 APIs are the same way in many ways, and Python isn't really a multithreaded language to start with, so I'm not sure what you're expecting?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anonymous234 said:

    Why the hell can't it launch a thread in the background by itself?

    Because the underlying libraries have some major infelicities in them. Or at least did in the past, and nobody's had the time to go through and fix all the cargo-culted defence code to deal with the fact that things have improved.

    Tk (which Tkinter sits on top of) can do multi-threaded work, but it's really tricky stuff and not recommended at all (especially if you don't want entirely separate window hierarchies).
    @anonymous234 said:

    Why completely forbid me from running any more code? I hate this stuff.

    You run further code in callbacks that fire in response to events.

    That said, you could use the update() or wait_window() methods instead. The former would just process events until there's nothing to do, and the latter is just like mainloop() except it stops when the window on which it is called is destroyed. (I think; double-check that!)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dstopia said:

    Why do you not correctly free heap space upon succesive redeployments, Weblogic?

    Memory leak in thread closedown. Or something holding onto a classloader. It's a bugger. (It's easier to fix the thread problem than the classloader one, and the two tend to be intimately entangled…)



  • I'm expecting a language where all the commands regarding GUI updates are completely implicit and handled by the system/framework/library/language/magic pixie dust. A bit like HTML+Javascript programming, your code sends updates and handles events, but you don't have to call document.redraw() every time you alter the DOM or document.processEvents() every 5 milliseconds.

    As I have confessed in other places, I have no real programming experience despite hanging in this forum full of programmers every day (bite me), so that's why my preconceptions of languages are often far from reality. But I think that can be a plus, the first time you use something is when you really notice all the things that are wrong with it.

    And multithreading aside, I wrote a program that embeds a matplotlib graph in a window and updates it every second, and it takes about 30 lines of boilerplate code for something you could explain in 3, and that bothers me even more because Python was supposed to be Cool and Simple™.



  • It's a single-threaded JPA based app. I haven't really checked if the app is doing something stupid because I inherited most of its code, but it's a very straightforward application. I assume the bug is somehow related to TopLink (yes, no eclipselink for us, and we're still on JPA 1.0 with no upgrade in sight).

    The version of Weblogic is also old as tits, which is mostly the reason why we're still on JPA 1.0, as far as I gathered from the previous developer. I still haven't fact-checked what he told me, I should probably start seeing if we can actually upgrade to something more sane.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dstopia said:

    It's a single-threaded JPA based app.

    You're using Weblogic. It's not single threaded. It'd be a lot simpler if it was.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    every single cell of your body goes poof in an increasingly more spectacular lightshow

    That was added for the new show. It never happened in the original, possibly because their budget was so low.

    I always thought the glowy stuff looked really stupid, partly because the CGI quality was so shitty.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anonymous234 said:

    I'm hoping it's better today, but for example some devices had no code at all (stupid Wiimotes) but Windows wouldn't let you skip it to pair it.

    Many times, 0000 or 1234 worked for a device that didn't have a code.


  • FoxDev

    I prefer the light show; it actually gives the event impact.

    Having said that, using it as an excuse to severely damage the Tardis at the end of 'End Of Time' was overkill.



  • @FrostCat said:

    That was added for the new show.

    The lightshow, yeah. I CBA to look up what the explanation was in the old Who, but since regeneration energy seems to do any sort of deus ex machina the writer needs (see: 11th's final episode), it probably doesn't even matter.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @RaceProUK said:

    I prefer the light show; it actually gives the event impact.

    If you're going to add CGI, you need to spend enough money so it doesn't look like someone drew over the film. What we got detracts significantly from the experience.

    Besides, cheap shitty sci-fi is a barrier to story-telling. Go back and watch Tom Baker's transformation to Peter Davison and compare that to any of the modern regenerations but the last one, where they copped out from the CGI at the last second with the head-shake.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @RaceProUK said:

    Having said that, using it as an excuse to severely damage the Tardis at the end of 'End Of Time' was overkill.

    Oh. Yeah, that too. "Oh look, every time lord does this a dozen times, but we can't build our fleet of ships to withstand it, even though it withstood the previous one?" Bullshit.

    But to me it also feels like when they gave the Klingons head ridges in ST:TMP. Why? Because they had a budget to do so for the first time, but nobody ever just said that, followed by "and we don't have the money to redo TOS, so just pretend they always had the ridges" or something.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    The lightshow, yeah. I CBA to look up what the explanation was in the old Who, but since regeneration energy seems to do any sort of deus ex machina the writer needs (see: 11th's final episode), it probably doesn't even matter.

    This is the first ever Doctor Who regeneration. My understanding (which Wikipedia corroborates) is that there was a technical problem with the video mixing board, which overexposed the transition, whiting out the screen.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY3-bkoJXoo

    EDIT: the regeneration starts around t=51 for the impatient.



  • Two minor WTFs for today:

    Somebody in one of our offices really, really, really, really, really, really ... really wanted everyone to know their office is going to be closed for holiday on 1 May. They emailed everyone in the multinational corporation to tell us ... 14 times.

    One eBay seller that I follow has taken to emailing his customers to say "Look at these really cool auctions that you missed out on yesterday." ⁉ Why? I missed it. I don't care any more (if I ever did).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Why? I missed it. I don't care any more (if I ever did).

    Obviously, since you're following him, you care about his sales. Therefore, he's reminding you to pay closer attention, so you won't miss them.


  • BINNED

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Somebody in one of our offices really, really, really, really, really, really ... really wanted everyone to know their office is going to be closed for holiday on 1 May. They emailed everyone in the multinational corporation to tell us ... 14 times.

    Time to "Reply All"? 👿



  • @Onyx said:

    Somebody in one of our offices really, really, really, really, really, really ... really wanted everyone to know their office is going to be closed for holiday on 1 May. They emailed everyone in the multinational corporation to tell us ... 14 times.

    Time to "Reply All"?

    Better still, reply to each notice, copying the same distribution list, to inform them that your office will be open on 1 May like it's supposed to be.


  • BINNED

    @da_Doctah said:

    on 1 May like it's supposed to be.

    Great! That will give someone else the opportunity to inform the entire list that 1 May is an official Belgium Holiday


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