Tired of the Bullshit?

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I deffinately have some stories to email in.

[bascule]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

I wield my mighty necromancer powers and revive this thread from the grave!

Okay, really, I just have to fucking rant about this, because I'm so goddamn pissed off.

So I go and buy a shiny (or rather, midnight black) new MacBook with a blazing Core 2 Duo processor and all that jazz. It's awesome! I love it! I have once over bent over, spread my asscheeks, and invited the bulbous tentacle beast that is Apple to ram one of its phallic-like tentacles into my warm, inviting colon.

But, believe it or not, this rant has nothing to do with Apple (although I already got a kernel panic in the AirPort driver, WTF?)

A friend of mine suggested downloading Monolingual to remove the unnecessary language packs that were eating up a few gigs of my massive 120GB hard drive.

I was like... what the hey, why not?

I look over the list of languages and think about micromanaging for a bit, and I notice that it removes mostly languages I've never heard of and leaves standard things like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and ones I'd kinda like to display rather than ??? even if I can't leave them. The defaults look sane, so I hit ok.

The next day, I try to install a legacy PowerPC app, knowing that the amazing Rosetta engine should give me a near seamless experience running it.

I double click the .app folder. It bounces for a bit, then stops. WTF?

So I hop on the console and run the binary directly. The Mach-O interpreter is bitching that it doesn't know how to handle a PPC binary. I'm momentarily confused... surely Apple with their seamless Apple experience would have installed Rosetta by default? It's not something on the install CD (which was presently at home) that I have to throw on as an extra, is it?

So I Google a bit for the specific error message. I start finding forum posts on... Monolingual.

You see, it seems Monolingual does a bit more than its name would suggest. It IRRECOVERABLY removes Rosetta from Intel Macs PER DEFAULT. The only place this information could be found was by going to the front page of the Monolingual Sourceforge, which thanks to the Google I usually skip over.

I find thread after thread of PISSED OFF USERS:

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-sy...etta-help.html
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=61458

The users there feel dumb... they shouldn't. The guy who should feel dumb is the guy who REMOVES CRITICAL OS FUNCTIONALITY WITH A LANGUAGE PACK UNINSTALLER BY DEFAULT.

My dismay was only further increased upon discovering that the only way to safely and effectively restore Rosetta is... to reinstall MacOS X.

That's not the only total system breaking stupidity in Monolingual too. OS X language packs have a dependency structure that Monolingual totally ignores. Monolingual will happily let you choose to keep U.S. English while removing "English". Doing so will brick your machine. The author posts this information on his web page, but for some reason completely neglects to do any kind of check in the app. WELL DONE, DOUCHEBAG!

Whatever guy wrote Monolingual, you are a fucktard, and if I met you in person I'd punch you in the goddamn face.

Here's some interface suggestions for your fucking horrible ass turd of a program:

1) IF YOU KNOW A CERTAIN COMBINATION OF SETTINGS WILL BRICK A MACHINE, DON'T LET THE USER SELECT THEM AND TELL THEM WHY.
2) IF YOU POST ON YOUR WEB PAGE THAT PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW YOUR LANGUAGE UNINSTALLER TOOL IS REMOVING CORE OS COMPONENTS WITHOUT ASKING, CONSIDER EITHER CHANGING THE DEFAULTS OR AT LEAST PROMPTING, RATHER THAT DOCUMENTING PEOPLE'S ANGER AT YOUR SHITTY PROGRAM ON YOUR WEB PAGE

ktks?

[Voltage Spike]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

A friend of mine suggested downloading Monolingual to remove the unnecessary language packs that were eating up a few gigs of my massive 120GB hard drive.

Not to discount the rest of your rant, but I thought I'd mention that I have used DeLocalizer without any problems. It is much more simplistic (removing only program localization resources and not fonts, non-native binaries, Rosetta, etc.), but it will still free up a surprising amount of space. The developer's page says it has only been tested on 10.2, but I have successfully used it on 10.4 systems.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

so tonight i had an experience attempting to get rudimentary wifi functionality onto a spare laptop which inspired me to write a rant for possible submission to the fucktard hall of fame. as always, i value and appreciate the thoughts of others...

- -- ----- ----------
earlier tonight i experienced one of the cardinal sins of package installer design. for me, this one ranks right up there next to setup executables that place a dozen shortcuts to a new application all over your goddamn computer or setup tools that don't have an "advanced" option and automatically bloat your hard drive with 100+ megs of nonsense when all you wanted to install was some little utility that's about 79KB in size.

the asinine authoring abomination that i encountered earlier was of the "nonsensical dependency barrier" variety.

around the house we have an assortment of older computers. many of these simply collect dust until i cannibalize them for a random part, but occasionally something gets put to good use. more often than not, it's one of our two spare laptops. none of these guys will win any prizes, but they're useful when a relative or friend needs some portable computing power for a day or two. (while no longer being champions, i must admit that i love one of these to death... it's an old Gateway Solo, a model that didn't get a lot of attention when it came out but was before its time... a bright LCD that supported crisp 1024x768 when everyone else was maxed at 800x600, integrated speakers that don't make all music sound like "the retarded kids' sewer kazoo revue", and two USB ports when many laptop owners were lucky to have one.)

one of our laptops is slated to be used in the coming days... by someone who will need wireless connectivity. so, since all of my cards tend to be older Orinoco models for wardriving (which have very austere control utilities) i picked up a Linksys WPC54G at the store on the way home today. i figured, hell... out of all our options, a dumbed-down device like a Linksys should offer the least difficulty both in terms of installation and user operation. (their network connection utility looks like the set from sesame street it's so goddamn cushy and cutesy... i figured its non-threatening appearance would help whatever users wind up with this system)

don't ask me why, but i attempted the out of the box setup (which typically alleges to install the driver and control utility, but which i've seen fail to install the driver properly on like 75% of other products) only to be immediately greeted with the error message "This product requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later to run. Setup will now exit." excuse me, but what the fuck?!?! this requirement was not listed on the box or in the manual. i can understand minimum hardware requirements. god knows there's always going to be some asshat who tries to run Photoshop CS on a 486DX with 64 MB of RAM (achieved with a mixed-mode setup of a 32MB DIMM installed next to a pair of 16 MB SIMM chips) and i'm sure Adobe saves their call centers from a variety of wasted hours by preventing installation on such a box. but true software interdependency is rare... far more rare than many setup executables would have us believe.

my old, spare systems don't see a lot of action and are often used by less than uber techy people, so they traditionally sit idle with an custom install of win2k. we're talking aunts and uncles a lot of the time... it's not like i can just send them out to their local book club meeting with a live CD of the latest Auditor. i do, however, lock down the windows o/s as best as can be done. a big part of that is something i do for every friend, relative, and client... i use a system modifier tool like LitePC to rip out most of the default Microsoft applications, and tossing MSIE into the trash is a big part of that.

now why, i ask you, would a WiFi card possibly care what web browser i have installed on my computer? my original assumption was that for some goddamn reason, a dickhole moron at Linksys decided that he just couldn't spare the half hour of time and the 300KB of space it would take to write a fully-functional, self-supporting control utility. He just had to call up some random HTML rendering engine in order to populate the contents of some window, because god knows there aren't a dozen ways to do that even in a crappy language like VisualBasic.

that was my initial assumption... and it's one i've encountered before. The folks at Intuit have done this with Quicken. Once while upgrading my mom's finance software i was greeted with the message that i needed to install IE 6.0 and there was no way around it. thinking i could fool the computer i installed it, installed Quicken, then removed MSIE again. sure enough, the financial software ran... but couldn't draw tables properly.

the issue with Linksys wasn't that, however. i was able to browse deeper into sub-folders on the CD and easily see the driver files (which installed just fine) and run an independent setup for the control utility (which also installed with no hiccups)... so, what then?!? was the requirement that i fuck up a whole custom security profile and take time downloading and installing a shitty web browser over 50 MB in size merely included by the developers so that their CD start window would pop up in some fancy, HTML-rendered celebration of crap? i truly think that may have been it. god, i thought we had seen the last of the bloated and uselessly slow piles of steaming, smelling animated waste that software CDs would generate when people got bored with Flash-powered installers from Macromedia a few years back.

Linksys, you're acting like fucktards on this one, i say. Don't get me wrong... i still love some of your products. You make things with low price tags and have some fun access point hardware that's very hackable. Still, much like HP printers in the post-1999 era, it's unbelievably frustrating to love the quality of a product and at the same time be thwarted by control software that isn't in the same league.

An auto salesman doesn't ask you if you own your own home before he sells you a new car, a waiter doesn't check to see if you know how to swim before bringing you your lunch, and a stripper doesn't need to see proof of health insurance before giving you a lap dance... a piece of software should never demand the presence of an unrelated application before it will properly install and run. Anyone who codes otherwise is a fucktard.

[Thorn]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

Dev, having encountered this very same problem last week with my son's laptop, I merely installed the Linksys driver, and then let the Windows Wireless Client control the connection. And yes, WZC was disabled to prevent it from attempting to connect to every wireless network within the Tri-State area.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

well, i sent off my Linksys rant... we'll see if Chris deems it worthy of inclusion in the hall of fame. in this post-holiday rush of installing newly-gotten hardware and playing with new tech, i've encountered a new piece of asstard thinking which i felt the need to rant about for a moment.

New Rule: any peripheral device which captures or stores data should appear as a generic removable disk drive when connected to a computer.

Yes, i just had the privilege of playing everyone's favorite game when certain cameras are installed on a win32 box... the game called "just show me the goddamn motherfucking JPG files, goddamnit!!1!"

The specific perpetrator in this case is Canon, whose Digital ELPH is a nice enough camera but was frustrating the hell out of me this morning. one school where i work ordered a few of these bad boys and i found the UPS package waiting for me upon my arrival back to work after the break. i immediately set about taking a few test shots and trying to see how the turned out.

It seems that the windows drivers for the ELPH are amazingly capable and aware -- they communicate back and forth with the camera in a variety of ways -- but they are incapable of a simple goddamn task like just showing me the camera's files for easy copy within a win32 environment.

the camera's control software can update the device's settings, trigger timed photos, etc etc. but connecting the camera to one's PC triggers a horrid series of automatic events wherein the drivers attempt to fire up photoshop or some other TWAIN source and fill the screen with idiotic windows, all of which purport to be for my "convenience" and are going to "aid me in the downloading of my photos" etc etc.

Cameras, MP3 players, and other digital multimedia devices should all do one thing... they should function as generic USB storage volumes. i should be able to copy and move files back and forth from them as if they were a thumb drive or a card reader (which i ultimately decided to use with the camera since the software was proving way too irritating to install on many machines at the school)

Between this and their idiotic foray into the world of proprietary file formats (ask any digital shutterbug their thoughts on the NEF file type) i feel Canon potentially deserves inclusion in the Fucktard Hall of Fame.

[renderman]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

Between this and their idiotic foray into the world of proprietary file formats (ask any digital shutterbug their thoughts on the NEF file type) i feel Canon potentially deserves inclusion in the Fucktard Hall of Fame.

Interesting. I've got a Canon Powershot A85 that plays very nicely. I've found that with cameras for the most part, *not* loading the included software seems to make the most sense. Mine just shows up as a removable device and the images are a couple directories in.

I think that the 'driver' software just goes memory resident and looks for a camera being inserted and launching it's 'helper' apps.

Try uninstalling everything and see if it actually shows up as a storage device. Every elph I've played with in the past does exactly that.

[theprez98]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

Interesting. I've got a Canon Powershot A85 that plays very nicely. I've found that with cameras for the most part, *not* loading the included software seems to make the most sense. Mine just shows up as a removable device and the images are a couple directories in.

I think that the 'driver' software just goes memory resident and looks for a camera being inserted and launching it's 'helper' apps.

Try uninstalling everything and see if it actually shows up as a storage device. Every elph I've played with in the past does exactly that.

I don't use the included software which is needllessly bloated. My Powershot A70 shows up as a "camera"/removable device but operates like a normal drive and is simple and easy to use.

[Z^2]

Re: Tired of the Bullshit?

Between this and their idiotic foray into the world of proprietary file formats (ask any digital shutterbug their thoughts on the NEF file type) i feel Canon potentially deserves inclusion in the Fucktard Hall of Fame.

I originally thought that of the Canon G3 I've recently acquired, but then realized it was just the Lexar POS reader that decided to crash several other running applications on my computer, not display as a drive, pop up several (on the order of 50?) error boxes while spattering my desktop with zombie-like folders, then crash the whole computer it was attached to (is an iBook G4). And now to figure out why half of the pictures I took are corrupt, after finding an old Dazzle reader lying around with which to finally put the pictures on the computer - I have a feeling it may have to do with the way the Canon formats cards.