• Mark (unregistered) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    The Guy With the "Z":
    C-Octothorpe:
    The Guy With the "Z":
    Fondle memories of childhood.
    ZTFY

    Oh dear god, what's happening to me?!?!?!

    Milhouse^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ZTFY is now a meme.

    You're actually pretty cool when you're not being a FUCKING ASSHOLE who responds to trolls.

    Not that I haven't waged a love affair with assholes.

    The days that I'm dancing with the trolls are usually the days I'm in a bad fucking mood and need to have my access to this site blocked.
    Sounds like you'd never get to read an article...

  • (cs) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    boog:
    The Mr. T Experience:
    The Guy With the "Z":
    The Mr. T Experience:
    The Guy With the "Z":
    The Mr. T Experience:
    All you nerds are a bunch of jerkoffs...
    I used to fuck guys like you in prison.
    You ever see the movie "teeth"? I'm like the protagonist, butt in the back.
    ...what's your point?
    That's where me second set of teeth are.
    Based on everything I've read, Zuneberry prefers ears and eye-sockets.
    I've also heard him state on occasion that he likes to create new orifices, too.
    Pedicadio, it's called. Excellent call.
  • (cs) in reply to The Mr. T Experience
    The Mr. T Experience:
    The Guy With the "Z":
    The Mr. T Experience:
    The Guy With the "Z":
    The Mr. T Experience:
    All you nerds are a bunch of jerkoffs, and you deserve every punch you've ever received.
    ppfffft. You're hardly scary. I used to fuck guys like you in prison.
    Says you. You ever see the movie "teeth"? I'm like the protagonist, butt in the back.
    Yes I did. And yes, she did have her butt in the back, like most people, and it doesn't surprise me that you do too... what's your point?
    That's where me second set of teeth are. Our ewe to aspie two be able too parse text with homophone replacements?
    Oh yes, that's after I hit you so hard your teeth ended up in your arse.
  • lvl 2 support (unregistered)

    You are all wrong, if someone has inadequate resources (standard pc) to do their job (2 days, use of a printer) they should plan in advance to have the adequate resources available. If they can't get what they need to do their job, they should be talking to management in advance.

    CAPTCHA: genitus - optimas primes gay brother

  • (cs) in reply to boog
    boog:
    C-Octothorpe:
    The Mr. T Experience:
    BTW-I'll punch a fat guy too.
    Sounds like fun. Lets start with your mom.
    Hahaha!

    Normally I don't care much about the "your mom" jokes, but calling his mom a fat guy: +1

    Hey, let's have a little sensitivity here. I have a son who's mom was a fat guy...

  • Laserjet 2000 (unregistered) in reply to eric76

    Great story, however the ending regarding the virtual printer solution seemed fishy to me as well. Surely the PostScript Wizard would have noticed that suddenly the number crunching was at 1/50th to 1/200th of the previous efficiency due to the virtualisation overhead.

    I've worked with people like the PostScript Wizard and they always cause trouble no matter what they're 'working' on. In all fairness sometimes they create brilliantly unexpected results due to their obsessive nature - but mostly they're remembered as 'that guy nobody ever wanted to end up stuck on a project with'. Sad.

  • (cs) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    Watson:
    geoffrey:
    Hell is paved with good intentions.
    Translation: good intentions alone aren't worth spit - they need to be backed up with deeds to count for anything.

    Not necessarily. Except for the motto having been misquoted - it should be: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", it is often taken to mean that a lot of really bad stuff is done in good faith. It's often used as a defence against meddling busybody do-gooders who interfere in things a lot and break them.

    Although your interpretation works as well.

    But if the intended meaning as as an excuse for not doing anything - that doing nothing is preferable to doing something - then surely it would be "The road to Hell is paved with good deeds".

    I'm reminded of the generic Boy Scout helping the generic Little Old Lady across the street - whether she wants to cross or not. But on a more serious note (too serious for this forum by far, I'll wager), I'll cite the recent toddler-vs-van hit-and-run incident: I'm sure everyone who walked past had the best of intentions.....

  • Snow (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    Mister Galloping Asperger ...
    On behalf of all of us who have Asperger's syndrome I would like to say "FUCK YOU" Not every asshole has Asperger's syndrome, and not every person with Asperger's syndrome is a self-absorbed asshole.

    I am sick of being maligned by Asperger's being thrown around as a byword for medically-excusable sociopathic-jackassery by lawyers, the media and people like you.

    From this point forward I ask that you make an effort to call the assholes 'assholes' ane leave the medical diagnoses to the professionals, you 'jackass'.

  • rwtagh (unregistered) in reply to the beholder

    Furthermore, there is no irony in the sign, because it was Bob who made the don't use as mainframe addendum.

    Also, to those who suggested the printer be powercycled... if you look closely enough, the "power-skirt" said she turned the printer on and off.

  • kvvbassboy (unregistered)

    "Of all the things the problem that wasn't his was, being not his problem wasn't one of them."

    I am adding that to my sig. Context doesn't matter, that sentence is just pure awesome.

  • dna (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    Surely the real problem here is that this guy just figured he could cancel someone's job without bothering to discover the nature of that job or its priority.

    Your serious about this ? I'm helpdesk technician, and no matter what the priority is, every printing process waiting for more than 20 minutes in a SHARED printer is open for killing. even if the job originate from the CEO.

    the point here is the fact the printer is shared... so yes, it's like killing an locked session in a SHARED computer, and let me tell you, this happens a lot, because, well shared mean shared.

    I see it comming that the job was not printing. The real WTF here is not using the printer for some obscure meaning, it's just telling anyone : don't use this commun printer, without saying why (but may be it's because if he say why, someone will talk with his supervisor and find a "solution" to this problem...)

  • Martijn (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    evilspoons:
    geoffrey:
    Surely the real problem here is that this guy just figured he could cancel someone's job without bothering to discover the nature of that job or its priority. That's much like someone coming along and disconnecting your terminal while you work. I believe that kind of behaviour should result in you being marched from the building. There is a reason why everyone else was hesitant around the printer - they knew cancelling the job was wrong.

    If anyone should be marching down to HR it should be the guy whose job was cancelled without warning. Oh you can add ignoring warning signs to the charges too.

    Seriously? The printer isn't FOR running computational jobs, it's for printing. There's a reasonable expectation of availablility for a resource like that. If it's sitting for hours doing nothing, you can safely assume it's broken because no pages are being printed by a device whose sole purpose is to make pages have toner on them.

    You are absolutely correct, I agree with you. We have the benefit of understanding the situation however, the guy who just cancelled the job did not.

    An unnamed person had submitted a job to the internal reader. You don't just cancel it unless you know it's purpose and it's priority. you just don't. In this case the guy who submitted the job was in the wrong it turns out, but the ends do not justify the means. "Bob" was equally in the wrong here for acting like a maverick and just pulling the switch. In certain situations that might result in disciplinary action. Notice that his co-workers understood this which is why they didn't take any action themselves.

    His co-workers didn't understand it at all. Possibly they were easily intimidated by the psycho idiot. Possibly they were intimidated by the technology itself. They certainly didn't understand the need to give up their printing ability for some moron, or they wouldn't be crowding around the printer.

    And Bob was entirely correct in canceling the job. When a tiny job occupies the print queue without printing anything, you cancel it. That's how it works. That's what the ability to cancel print jobs is for.

    In fact, Bob was accommodating far beyond reason by letting the guy's job run at low priority. Most reasonable people would have kept killing it and kept explaining to the idiot that the printer is not meant as a compute server, and tried to get him fired for blocking everybody's business with his sophomore pranks.

    Using PostScript for computation jobs is funny when you're in college, but in a real business, people get fired for blocking everybody's work for days with pranks like that. And if he really honestly thinks that this is a sensible way to use a printer, he needs to be kept away from any kind of computers at all costs. And be fired, of course.

  • Martijn (unregistered) in reply to Bldsquirrel
    Bldsquirrel:
    I can't tell if you're retarded, a troll, or a highly intelligent Wally honing his art of staunchly defending an absurd decision which involves you not working.

    "I couldn't do any work boss, the printer was tied up and I was waiting on a management decision to fix it. You didn't want me to not respect management, did you?"

    Exactly. If it was my company, I'd have a serious talk with everybody who didn't cancel that job. Everybody carries responsibility for the proper functioning of the company.

    Well, assuming there wasn't a sysadmin right next door. In that case, people should go to him and he should kill the job, but considering people were merely queueing around the printer with no sysadmin in sight, leads me to believe that this company has no full-time sysadmin to watch over print queues, and therefore anyone moderately technically proficient is supposed to cancel hanging jobs.

  • (cs)

    Shared printers is one thing, but shared print queues?

    The company headquarters: I don't know how many printers there would have been in all the offices in total, but easily more than a hundred. Not a problem when it's printing your stuff and you're free to tie it up with PostScript apps as much as you like. For most people most of the time that was how they were used.

    But some jobs came straight from the site's AS/400. Poor thing could only deal with two printers concurrently, so it was given two virtual printers for which jobs would be switched to the appropriate physical printer as appropriate. The virtual printers had no spools, so could only start the next job when the physical printer it was switched to had finished.

    My personal record was four and a half hours. Not as bad as "until Friday", but without those manifests we wouldn't be shipping.

  • (cs) in reply to ContraCorners
    ContraCorners:
    boog:
    C-Octothorpe:
    The Mr. T Experience:
    BTW-I'll punch a fat guy too.
    Sounds like fun. Lets start with your mom.
    Hahaha!

    Normally I don't care much about the "your mom" jokes, but calling his mom a fat guy: +1

    Hey, let's have a little sensitivity here. I have a son who's mom was a fat guy...
    Okay, I hate the Bob meme, but that was a fantastic application of it. Well played!

  • big picture thinker (unregistered) in reply to Bill
    Bill:
    A print job that hangs without printing anything for a significant time is almost always hung. It's pretty routine for someone other than the job owner to kill it.

    Agree. I work in a large office and print jobs get hung all the time. It's normal for people to either cancel the job or reboot the printer. It's a NETWORK printer - therefore accessible to everyone on the network and purchased for everyone's use. If you care about your print job, you will hit print and immediately walk over to the printer to make sure it prints and you get it. If not, then you lose your priority by default and anyone else who wants to use the printer has the right.

    If someone wants to lock it up for days, they can get their own crappy $75 ink-jet desk-side printer. Locking up a shared printer for any period of time is not going to fly... no matter how many angry signs are taped to it. If they expect people to just wait, they are out of touch with reality, not a team-player, and probably need to be let go.

  • JJ (unregistered)

    I don't usually get all picky about things like this, but since no one else brought it up (that I saw), let's look at this line from the article:

    "I don't know," she said. "I tapped the paper, shook the toner-- I even turned it off and on. Nothing's printing!"

    If "it" is the printer, then turning it off and on would have killed the job and should have brought Mr. Grumpy doppling down the hall, so that part is a little...inconsistent.

  • (cs) in reply to ThePants999
    ThePants999:
    TRWTF is this sentence:
    Of all the things the problem that wasn't his was, being not his problem wasn't one of them.

    Seriously. WTF. That sentence could be weaponised and deployed in surgical strikes.

    It reminded me of Douglas Adams. ("They hung in the air the way bricks don't", "It has been said that Vogons are not above a little bribery and corruption in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds", and so on)

  • The Crunger (unregistered) in reply to Martijn
    Martijn:
    ... and tried to get him fired for blocking everybody's business with his sophomore pranks.

    Using PostScript for computation jobs is funny when you're in college, but in a real business, people get fired for blocking everybody's work for days with pranks like that. And if he really honestly thinks that this is a sensible way to use a printer, he needs to be kept away from any kind of computers at all costs. And be fired, of course.

    It's amazing how many people concluded this story was about a company (and replayed their own strong feelings about how such frustrations should be resolved in corporburbia).

    There be no managers in this story:

    • No for-profit can pay a crowd to stand around for hours (wtf?)
    • Businesses use managers to resolve resource conflicts, rather than intimidation, yelling, etc.
    • Paid employees are coached to avoid bottlenecks of any sort, let alone waiting on a print job
    • No one makes it their business to make sure their department's projects get funded
    • There was no HR to fire Bob and/or Asp^Hsergeek for being the only rational actors

    This be a rime of academia, as you seem so close to guessing. In academia:

    • People do spend lots of time trying to get funding approved
    • Funding matters, since that might be your paycheck for the next year, so yes you might wait for hours (just like you might camp out overnight for concert tickets, too)
    • Resources are provided, but not always managed. What administrator got promoted for finding wise solutions to student's resource conflicts?
  • (cs) in reply to The Crunger
    The Crunger:
    This be a rime of academia, as you seem so close to guessing. In academia:
    Evidence for the prosecution: this is taking place in a "lab" with a "head researcher"; someone writing their program in PostScript to take advantage of the printer's CPU.

    "You fool! You don't understand at all. That job is a piece of PostScript code. The print server isn't running my numbers. The PRINTER is! It's far more powerful than you can imagine! BWAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!"

  • (cs) in reply to Snow
    Snow:
    QJo:
    Mister Galloping Asperger ...
    On behalf of all of us who have Asperger's syndrome I would like to say "FUCK YOU" Not every asshole has Asperger's syndrome, and not every person with Asperger's syndrome is a self-absorbed asshole.

    I am sick of being maligned by Asperger's being thrown around as a byword for medically-excusable sociopathic-jackassery by lawyers, the media and people like you.

    From this point forward I ask that you make an effort to call the assholes 'assholes' ane leave the medical diagnoses to the professionals, you 'jackass'.

    Apologies to all Asperger's people - it was an unworthy comment. Inexcusable of me.

  • (cs) in reply to The Crunger
    The Crunger:
    Martijn:
    ... and tried to get him fired for blocking everybody's business with his sophomore pranks.

    Using PostScript for computation jobs is funny when you're in college, but in a real business, people get fired for blocking everybody's work for days with pranks like that. And if he really honestly thinks that this is a sensible way to use a printer, he needs to be kept away from any kind of computers at all costs. And be fired, of course.

    It's amazing how many people concluded this story was about a company (and replayed their own strong feelings about how such frustrations should be resolved in corporburbia).

    There be no managers in this story:

    • No for-profit can pay a crowd to stand around for hours (wtf?)
    • Businesses use managers to resolve resource conflicts, rather than intimidation, yelling, etc.
    • Paid employees are coached to avoid bottlenecks of any sort, let alone waiting on a print job
    • No one makes it their business to make sure their department's projects get funded
    • There was no HR to fire Bob and/or Asp^Hsergeek for being the only rational actors

    This be a rime of academia, as you seem so close to guessing. In academia:

    • People do spend lots of time trying to get funding approved
    • Funding matters, since that might be your paycheck for the next year, so yes you might wait for hours (just like you might camp out overnight for concert tickets, too)
    • Resources are provided, but not always managed. What administrator got promoted for finding wise solutions to student's resource conflicts?

    OTOH you're got mention of HR, a power-skirt and a dress code, none of which are prevalent in the academic community. Having worked in such an institution, I would suggest a colossally large company in perhaps the late 1980's, early 1990's, where cheap printers (and indeed, cheap computers) were way ahead in the future, and the only technical people worked in "computer labs" doing "research". Nobody argued with the computer guys, because nobody really understood what they did. They were offered the sort of respect that regular army personnel would offer to ninja assassins, and as such the only people who could keep such nutcases in check were other computer people, who understood the BS.

  • Chirstopher (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey

    Then, as has been stated already, it would not be running on the shared printer because then any random joker could kill the job and doom the company. It would be on an executive's personal printer, and/or there would be a notice explaining this fact and suggesting an alternative printer for printing run-of-the-mill documents.

  • Chirstopher (unregistered) in reply to Chirstopher

    Er, sorry... I was replying to a comment on the first page and didn't see there were more pages of comments.

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    obvious troll is obvious
    Your comments, "geoffrey", are all an "obvious troll"
  • user (unregistered)

    In 1988 when I was using the department Scriptwriter to do computations, it was more powerful (because Postscript is powerful) and more stable than the crappy Epson PC on my desk.

    At least I only ran my jobs after hours.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey

    Are you an idiot?

  • mbourgon (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey

    Really? It's a PRINT JOB. That's what gets submitted to printers. I'm not to go bother my boss and ask if I should cancel a print job, unless it's my boss's boss. MY boss would wonder why I was wasting his time.

  • (cs) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    Sounds far more like he was competing with everyone else for scarce funding and his little print job was just a way of holding up other people's applications causing some to miss the deadline, increasing the likelihood of his project being approved.

    I mean honestly, though it may be possible to use Post Script to perform some computation, how are you going to get the result? Print it out then take a photo of each page sitting on a wooden table, submit it to a cloud based OCR service.

    Email. Yes, networked PostScript printers can do email.

  • (cs) in reply to appellatio
    appellatio:
    His job running on the printer had nothing to do with printer's CPU. Unless all computers in the building are from 1992 and the printer was from 2011, there is no printer in the world coming from the same age as computers around it that can do anything faster then any of those computers.

    Not true.

    Back before GPUs were common, there were printers who could handle a particular class of processing better than an Intel CPU of similar vintage.

    In order to process PostScript even half-way efficiently, you need a vector processor. That is, one capable of decent Single Instruction, Multiple Data. Like the MMX instruction set, but more hard core - you give it one CPU instruction, it does the same thing on a whole line of data, rather than, say, two blocks of four bytes.

    That having been said, if this was even as recent as 2003, it was inexcusable, because the printer CPU to computer CPU gap had increased so far that the computer CPU could brute force through this stuff faster than the printer CPU, even without the SIMD. So even if you didn't know how to harness your GPU, you were better off keeping it local.

    But back around 1992, I wrote a little PostScript program to do some numerical analysis stuff for my CS class, and it ran in under half an hour, when the equivalent C program took about four hours to run on the (small and old) mainframe, while the mainframe was otherwise idle. The mainframe CPUs were about 2.5 times faster than the printer's CPU, in raw MHz, and it had ten of them (I said it was a small mainframe). Running the same program on my roommate's PC took about 10 hours, despite its CPU running at 10 times the MHz as the printer.

    I don't think it was all PostScript printers - just the good ones.

  • Michael (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    The real clue for Bob should have been to figure out why all those people were not willing to cancel the job. In life in general this is often the first sign that an action is immoral, criminal or otherwise unadvised.

    Or... (looks at state of the world) those persons are sheeple and unable to assert themselves. Just because everyone does/thinks something DOES NOT automatically make their actions/thoughts any of: moral, ethical (two separate concepts people), legal (for actions, we don't yet have thought-crimes), or advisable.

    Not in general nor in specific.

  • Toon (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    evilspoons:
    geoffrey:
    Sharing is caring, and number crunching on a printer is stupid.

    I disagree, it's far better to hold off and wait for management to deal with the situation then cancel a job you know nothing about which could potentially bring down the entire company. Hell is paved with good intentions.

    You show me a company that can be brought down by canceling a two day print job and I'll show you a firm destined to go bankrupt. And deserving to do so, too; I mean, if it's that important, why not just buy the guy his own printer?

  • El Oscuro (unregistered) in reply to StMarc
    StMarc:
    Long, long ago I tried to print a document which was generated by an algorithm designed to take data from an x-ray experiment and create a very crude sort of 2-D CAT scan. The highfalutin' LaserWriter (no numbers, no letters - LaserWriter) in the university computer lab would happily accept the print job, then start to choke as its buffer filled. At the time I knew very little about how printers worked, so I just sat there like an idiot and watched it settle into a coma.

    After an hour or so the other users in the lab started to complain, and the lab monitor killed the job, let them print, and then let me restart mine.

    Same thing. The problem was not in our stars, it was in our jobs. In that the damn job was just never ever going to print.

    After a few hours of this, the lab monitor remembered that THAT VERY DAY, an even newer, bloodier-edge piece of tech had come in and was ready to be hooked up.

    A StyleWriter.

    (This was Apple's first inkjet printer, the equivalent of an HP Deskjet.)

    Unlike fancyschmancy Postscript laser printers, this little marvel rendered its prints one line at a time through its driver. (You can't print "part" of a laser print. The whole thing has to be rendered so it can be applied and fused in one go.) So we sent it and, after a few minutes, it printed a line.

    Then, after a few more minutes, it printed another.

    After an hour and a half, my shadowy blob of output slid neatly onto the print tray. And there was much rejoicing.

    Up until now, that was the worst story I knew about jamming up print jobs and screwing other people over. But this is way better. WAY better.

    Speaking of Apple II inkjet printers, back in about 1985-1986, We got a fancy new ink jet printer (not Apple brand) with special power point type software that you could use to print on transparencies (Powerpoint before its time). This printer could print really nice slides but required lots of special maintenance, mixing the ink, filling the cartridges, etc. It also had something called "print head maintenance liquid" which cost $30/quart. I bet my boss $1 that the "print head maintenance liquid" was plain water, and to win the bet, I drank some. I am not making this up. Of course, I had already figured that out by accidentally splashing some in my eyes. When it didn't sting, I tasted it to make sure.

  • HP LaserJet 2000 (unregistered) in reply to El Oscuro

    Bit off-topic here (and a year late) but just because you can drink the printer's magic "maintenance liquid" and not die does not mean you can use tap water in its place to clean a cartridge.

    Even the best drinking-quality water still contains micron-sized impurities in the form of bacteria & faecal matter at levels that are completely harmless to humans, but can totally clog up the fine nozzles in an ink cartridges. Our tongues are just not that good at detecting the purity of food/water below a certain level – otherwise we’d never get food poisoning.

    So $30 may seem a lot for magic water, but seeing as the equipment for filtration and deionisation can cost $5k, it may be reasonable.

  • G (unregistered) in reply to z

    Why? I found it hilarious! ; )

  • Axel (unregistered)

    I think "being slapped by Schrodinger's stupid" is my new favorite phrase.

    Oh, and to "geoffrey:" welcome back, TopCod3r! That's some industrial-grade trollsmanship, there.

    (Yes, I'm declaring "trollsmanship" as my neologism for the day.)

  • Axel (unregistered)

    Geez, using a printer to crunch numbers is like going to Mars with a hammer.

Leave a comment on “The Killing Job”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article