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“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

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Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#211

Post by Starwatcher2001 »

tabtab wrote: post #190
chasd00 wrote: post #101

One of my favorite pieces of debug folklore was the story of a minicomputer or some other serious machine rebooting in the middle of the night. I can't remember exactly but it was in some university during the 70s/80s. An important server would spontaneously reboot in the middle of the night on some days but not all. Finally, someone sat up all night to watch what happens and observed a cleaning lady unplugging the m…

Re: " someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency...cause the drive to walk away " On some TRS-80 models I discovered a certain POKE command would make the screen flash, click, and "bounce" the image, similar to a power spike. So in the university lab I wrote up a small BASIC script with a delay timer to repeat "DANGER: Computer Overheating!"…

That was the port that switched the screen from 64 columns to 32. A different bit in the port also controlled a physical relay that was used to switch the cassette tape recorder on and off. Toggling the pair together quickly did indeed look and sound quite dramatic - and would probably knacker the relay if left for long enough.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#212

Post by AllNightLong »

I've only had issues with the software for school in the nights before I had to submit work.

For exemple, I recently had to give back a work on matlab. And at 9 pm it didn't show up in the windows menu. So I tried to run the installer that was too long, until I found out you had to use a flash drive.

Then it returned a lot of errors saying I didn't have the modules.

And I have the same issue with every damn software.

What should I do ?

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#213

Post by ducaale »

hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

We had an xbox 360 that kept ejecting the CD. Later we discovered that it was due to the sunlight coming from the door. After putting it in a dim place the issue never recurred.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#214

Post by efreak »

zaarn wrote: post #104
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I am pretty sure a lot of printers support text directly, they use control codes for additional capabilities.

I'm fairly certain (minus Linefeed Printers of the old days) most modern printers are either Host-rendered (ie, the host renders text and tells the printer what to print) or use something like PCL, which even in the most plaintext mode, still requires some setup to describe and format the page. You can't just pipe a textfile into printer port and hope your printer spits out anything useful.

I'm not sure if there's a different process involved here, but I vaguely remember that a recent network printer I had came with an ftp server that could be used to print, simply by dropping supported files into it. I never experimented with it, though, so I have no idea if it supported simple text files or required PostScript or some such.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#215

Post by zaarn »

efreak wrote: post #214
zaarn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain (minus Linefeed Printers of the old days) most modern printers are either Host-rendered (ie, the host renders text and tells the printer what to print) or use something like PCL, which even in the most plaintext mode, still requires some setup to describe and format the page. You can't just pipe a textfile into printer port and hope your printer spits out anything useful.

I'm not sure if there's a different process involved here, but I vaguely remember that a recent network printer I had came with an ftp server that could be used to print, simply by dropping supported files into it. I never experimented with it, though, so I have no idea if it supported simple text files or required PostScript or some such.

It most likely converted incoming files whenever necessary.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#216

Post by Kirby64 »

soared wrote: post #53

Arguably the most famous example of a bug like this is the person who would drive to the store to buy ice cream and depending on what flavor of ice cream they bought, the car would or would not start back up. https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-allergic-t...

This was one of the Puzzlers on Car Talk back in the day...
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