Fuck Toasters: The Complaining About Electronics Thread

[ChiliConCarne]

I got an Android tablet as an early birthday present and it only worked for about 5 minutes before the touch screen stopped working. The reset button refused to work, too. Needless to say, I was sadface. I guess I'll be able to use it in another week or two when the manufacturer sends me a replacement. *whoo...*

[unbridledExüberance]

Battle.net is stupid. I stopped playing WoW shortly after it was there (it was because I was bored of WoW though, not because I hated Battle.net). It forced me to change (and I couldn't just keep it the same without first changing it then changing it back again) my password 3 times because it detected "a change in my play habbits". Yes, Blizzard, it is called having a life. I do not schedule my life so that I can play WoW on fixed intervals at similar ammounts of time. I play when I want to. Just because I didn't play last weekend when I normally do IS NOT SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE THAT MY ACCOUNT WAS HACKED.

And I'm now in the process of putting VMware back on my Mom's Windows 7 computer. I do not understand it's file permissions. At all. After some googling, I ran command prompt as administrator, changed the ownership of the folder with TAKEOWN, and attempted to remove the read-only flag (it turned out it's useless, is always on for certain folders, and doesn't actually reflect the read-only-ness of the files it contains. Seriously?). It still wouldn't work because I "don't have sufficient permissions" even though I am now the owner of the file and it has all permission flags set to true. Moving it out of C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMs and into Documents solved the problem. WHAT. That doesn't- it shouldn't- there's no... WAT. I already had read permissions on ProgramData, VMware, and VMs, and I was able to move the file there from a USB key without issue, so why can't I read the file there? *sight* You know what, I don't even care anymore.

Relatedly, I discovered that Windows XP will refuse to let you delete seemingly random DLL files (not even system files- just ones in Program Files for user installed programs) even if you are administrator and using command prompt. It has no problem, however, with you moving (or renaming) files into another directory, so they won't be accessed.

[curiousTerminal]

I think we can all agree that every operating system has its fair share of bullshit, which you only look past if you use it on a daily basis.

Unless it's Vista.
Nobody likes Vista.

[unbridledExüberance]

If I were forced to choose between using Vista and using Win7, I would actually choose none of them Vista. Sure, it's infuriating to use, but 7 is so much worse.
Actually, Vista might be the most useful version of Windows yet (which isn't saying much). At least Vista lets you see what file a process was loaded from- makes fixing people's computers easier. Can't do that on XP.

Of course, when fixing people's computers, half the time I end up using a Linux live CD (which is very slow because CD drive) anyways because Windows won't let me delete the friggin virus. IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT A PROCESS IS "USING" THE FILE. LET ME DELETE IT.

[curiousTerminal]

That is my main gripe about windows, that it won't let me delete files if they're being used by something.
Instead of that, it should throw up a message about instability and ask if I actually want to delete it.

[dialecticBlight]

Bought a new personal laptop for a good $2,000 that I was hoping to use for the next 4 years.

It won't. stop. BSODing.

I swear, if I can't fix it (which may yet be possible, I'm looking into it actively), I am sending its broken ass back and getting a refund.

[curiousTerminal]

My computer won't make virtual drives with which to mount an .iso file.
And this isn't even piracy, I'm only trying to do this because the disc drive won't read CD's, since it's broken and I want to install Oblivion again.
It won't make virtual drives, and none of the fixes on any of the websites work for me for some reason.
I don't want to buy Oblivion a third time.

[unbridledExüberance]

Don't use Windows

Try this

[BRPXQZME]

I would recommend Virtual CloneDrive before DAEMON Tools because one of these two phones home....

(Though I am not sure the program used is necessarily the problem.)

[curiousTerminal]

It's not, I've tried Daemon already, and that's not the problem.
Neither is windows, since virtual drives work on my other computer, which I used VD's for so I could play games without having the CD in the drive.

[unbridledExüberance]

Well, it can't be a hardware issue, so it's either Windows or your ISO file.

Are you sure that your ISO file is correct? A lot of companies will intentionally put bad sectors on the disk to prevent copying -- an effort in futility for *nix users, but it works pretty well at causing copying programs on Windows to fail, and most people still use Windows so I guess they figure that's good enough? I guess it's better than the more recent DRM crap. ANYWAYS, you can still copy it on Windows! It's kind of a pain since you'll need cygwin, but you can do it. (If you happen to have a Linux live CD, it would be quicker to just use that. Otherwise, read the following link) Here's how. (NOTE: Stop once you finish copying the ISO with ddrescue. Doing the extract and shrink thing is not necessary.)

[curiousTerminal]

The problem isn't the .iso file, I have that, that works perfectly, the problem is that the virtual drives themselves won't be created due to some sort of error it doesn't tell me.
The error message just says "Error: Could not create virtual drive."

[Bohandas]

Has anybody make the obligatory joke that you'll burn your penis if you fuck toasters yet?

[Panda-s1]

Has anybody make the obligatory joke that you'll burn your penis if you fuck toasters yet?

God, just this morning I was using my toaster when I realized I forgot to unplug it. I hit the cancel button before anything bad happened, but you think they'd put one of those flesh detection things in toasters nowadays just in case of accidents like this.

[SkyeNicole]

Our main computer's hard drive crashed, our router doesn't get wireless connection outside of a gogdamn ten foot radius because it's a piece of shit, the oven doesn't work, the refrigerator is leaking, the push mower won't start, this computer is so slow it makes me want to throw it out the fucking window, and the TV upstairs gets a picture that's about 6"x6" 'cause the guy who came and installed the hi-def fucked up.

GOD I LOVE TECHNOLOGY. =_=

[reptilesShadow]

I'm pretty lucky when it comes to electronics, but sometimes my NOOK will just randomly black out for hours on end.

[Bohandas]

All of my rechargeable electronics have unreliable batteries, and the word processor on my personal digital is prone to random crashes that wipe outr my work.

[BRPXQZME]

Dear Hori Fighting Stick 3 that I own: why do you have such a hard time deciding whether to work in Windows or not? I know, I know, I could have gone with 32 bit windows and just used a preexisting driver. I could put my major to good use for once and write a driver myself. But I really, really, really don’t know if I’m up to the whole writing drivers thing, and honestly it’s a bit much to ask for a fully digital USB game controller.

[unbridledExüberance]

That should just be standard joystick with a different name. There's no reason it shouldn't work- then again, Windows tried to "help" by downloading completely useless- if not broken- drivers for things when it detects a joystick that has a name in its database. Try uninstalling the driver, then choose not to install the driver next time you plug it in and just let it use the default generic driver.

[BRPXQZME]

There is no reason it shouldn’t work, but then there are the reasons it doesn’t work, and why it is random about not working. Basically, it is designed for PS3 only. Anything else is gravy. So it sends signals, only some of them being right for a normal USB game device (this probably sounds familiar to those with knowledge of the workings of Xbox and Sixaxis controllers? ... who are probably only hypothetically reading this, of course). The driver Windows chooses is the generic one and that leads to the iffy results; I could get it to work half the time on my brother’s computer when he still ran Vista x64, but on my Win7 x64 machine it doesn’t. For 32-bit XP, I had a driver that made it work just fine, but the author of that driver said he couldn’t do anything about 64-bit OSes due to Microsoft’s signed driver policy (not entirely true, but disabling this isn’t really worth the trouble). No workaround I’ve seen posted on the Internet works for me (things that work for Sixaxis don’t work because it isn’t a Sixaxis), and a driver that knows what the hell is going on would still be preferable to any of these. But Hori doesn’t provide it, Hori probably won’t ever provide it, and nobody seems to be working on one.

On OS X it started out working iffy (sometimes it seemed to flood the system and make other devices work just as inconsistently as it did; I unplugged it before it started making mice floating around and flipping the lights and trashing the fine china...), but after exposing it to the driver for WinXP it worked consistently well, with only some delayed events which might actually just be be the fault of my system being not that fast.

This is largely frustrating because I know what’s basically going wrong, but fixing it would take a lot of knowledge I don’t have and won’t acquire quickly (namely how to whip up a working driver for this thing), which is kind of troublesome when all I want to do is play some shooters and fightan gaems.

[guillotineGuardian]

Old news, but I feel like venting anyway. Adding on to my prior complaints about Flash: Adobe is cutting NPAPI plugin support on Linux systems. So for those Linux users who use Chromium, it looks like they'll be just fine. For those of us with Firefox, however . . . . Well.

(I know one can just install Chromium to get Flash support, but really, Adobe? This is ridiculous. You aren't encouraging me to ever buy anything from you.)

[unbridledExüberance]

Yeah I heard about that, but I don't care. It's almost a good thing because this version of Flash almost works (it works "perfectly" if you have hardware acceleration disabled), so at least I don't have to worry about it breaking anymore due to Adobe being braindead and not testing their crap before releasing it.

Plus flash is on its last breath anyways. Well, at least for playing video. (And the internet rejoiced) Maybe not so much for animation.


It's still incredibly stupid that they dropped Linux support for non-Chrome web browsers. I guess they didn't learn from what happened to NVIDIA when they decided Linux didn't matter. Sometimes I get the feeling that tech companies are still stuck in the 70's and 80's.

And while we're talking about Adobe, Acrobat Reader sucks. I've been using Evince for reading PDF files, but I recently installed Acrobat Reader to see if there was any difference. There was a difference: speed. The Acrobat Reader browser plugin for Firefox is as a slow as a 3-legged turtle going uphill in winter. And it's even worse on Windows. (Though to be fair, the only Windows computer I tried it on was my Mom's which is not exactly a paragon of computing.)

[SunglassescladGunslinger]

God, you sissies.

I still use a slide rule, get on my level.

I love my nice little Pickett N1006-ES TRIG.

[guillotineGuardian]

God, you sissies.

I still use a slide rule, get on my level.

I love my nice little Pickett N1006-ES TRIG.

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Slide rules? Man, slide rules are the shit. They are the epitome of personal computing. I mean, you just pick it up and get your level on, and let the logarithms get their jive going, and soon you've got an answer like bingo. The turn around on those suckers is so fast that it makes your head spin. It's almost as if the piece of magical miracle's got the answer right prepped up for you before you even ask the question. And don't even ask me how that's possible. Something ironic like time shenanigans or shit like that. Man, slide rules.

Though I should probably learn how to use this sucker. It's kind of been collecting dust for the past few months. But no, slide rules are awesome. The only mention they deserve in this thread is to say that they are the ideal of mechanized mathematical operations.

[DiplomatZergling]

windows 7 is starting to annoy me, i tried to play Diablo 2 but the colors fail beyond belief.