• Anon (unregistered) in reply to dpm
    dpm:
    geoffrey:
    There is a reason why everyone else was hesitant around the printer - they knew cancelling the job was wrong.
    geoffrey:
    Notice that his co-workers understood this which is why they didn't take any action themselves.
    You are assuming that. I think it equally, if not more, likely that they hung back because they did not want to get yelled at by a socially-inept bully.

    Or that they lacked the technical know-how to cancel a job.

  • Hortical (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    What you're suggesting amounts to no more than allowing ourselves to be intimidated by blowhards.

    YOU SHOULD NOT POST THAT KIND OF THING ON HERE!!! THAT'S WHAT TERRORISTS DO!!! ARE YOU A TERRORIST!!?!

  • Dr Bob (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    TV John:
    geoffrey:
    Notice that his co-workers understood this which is why they didn't take any action themselves.

    You could be right, but I get the impression from the story that Bob was the only one who knew how to kill the queue.

    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    A large number of psychological experiments and studies have proven this statement to be flawed. In addition, a significant number of victims of crimes perpetrated in view of large numbers of by standers who did nothing, would take umbrage at this statement as well.

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    TV John:
    geoffrey:
    Notice that his co-workers understood this which is why they didn't take any action themselves.

    You could be right, but I get the impression from the story that Bob was the only one who knew how to kill the queue.

    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    The fact that there's a shouty message attached to the terminal might also have something to do with it. From the tone of the behaviour of Bob, I suspect that he may have actually held a position of some seniority in the company, and therefore able to wield considerable responsibility, for example, the knowhow and chutzpah to make executive decisions about whether to kill print jobs that are holding up productivity.

    I still think he should have been somewhat more proactive at finding out what the story was behind the scruffy colleague and his difficult personality.

  • ceiswyn (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    Let me throw a curve ball at you. What if the job readout was in error and the job was actually 50 megabytes of important company report - a report which management urgently needs to close the quarter?

    If the job readout is in error then either the print server or the job are FUBAR and it's most likely not going to print anyway. Letting it sit there blocking the print queue is wasting valuable time in which to sort out the problem and resubmit the job. Why oh why do you want my company to fail?

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    boog:
    geoffrey:
    ...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.
    Bullshit. Say, let's all stop calling it "a job you know nothing about", shall we?
    1. The job was only a few bytes.
    2. It had been running for almost an hour.
    3. It hadn't started printing yet.
    4. It was holding up everyone else.

    On any normal print server, this would be an error state. And if cancelling a tiny blocking long-running non-printing print job could potentially bring down the entire company, you've really got bigger issues.

    Let me throw a curve ball at you. What if the job readout was in error and the job was actually 50 megabytes of important company report - a report which management urgently needs to close the quarter?

    Try explaining why there will be mass redundancies to your coworkers standing round the printer next week.

    Then the sooner the job is killed and resubmitted the better. It's hung, so it is not printing.

    And, to reiterate, it should be printed on an Important Report printer.

  • (cs)

    "Someone Bob didn't know rounded the corner, following the grunt like a disgruntled Doppler effect."

    But if you disgruntle a grunt, what are you left with?

  • Code Slave (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    centurijon:
    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.

    There are times when you need a maverick, or at least someone to take initiative in a poor situation.

    Having a line of people waiting for a print queue (like sheep) is completely unacceptable - especially if the non-print job is expected to take two days to run. The article stated that he tried to find the person responsible for the print job and that person was missing. In that situation I would not have even hesitated to cancel the job either.

    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.

    Something tells me that geoffrey was the Post Script Wizard (PSW) in question.

    The fact of the matter is the PSW has made a kludge and stopped cold the work of dozens of other people. It's like parking a car across two lanes of traffic on a two land bridge and pitching the keys over the railing; because it's very important (for him) to be able to safely herd his flock of ducklings across the bridge in safety. Most people would look at him as being nuts. Clearly it would have made more sense to carry them across in a cardboard box.

    To carry the analogy further, a cop coming buy would assume that the car was stalled, call a tow-truck and have it removed. No harm done to the car (it can cross the bridge again)... and he/she would have no idea that the PSW's ducklings were being squished by passing cars. Nor should they - wrong tool for the job.

  • anonymouser (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    TV John:
    geoffrey:
    Notice that his co-workers understood this which is why they didn't take any action themselves.

    You could be right, but I get the impression from the story that Bob was the only one who knew how to kill the queue.

    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    So, when a baby gets run over and I notice that everyone is standing around unwilling to help, I should assume that is would be immoral, criminal or otherwise unadvised to take the initiative to help?

  • geoffrey (unregistered) in reply to Hortical
    Hortical:
    geoffrey:
    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    What you're suggesting amounts to no more than allowing ourselves to be intimidated by blowhards.

    YOU SHOULD NOT POST THAT KIND OF THING ON HERE!!! THAT'S WHAT TERRORISTS DO!!! ARE YOU A TERRORIST!!?!

    obvious troll is obvious

  • trtrwtf (unregistered) in reply to anonymouser
    anonymouser:
    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.
    So, when a baby gets run over and I notice that everyone is standing around unwilling to help, I should assume that is would be immoral, criminal or otherwise unadvised to take the initiative to help?
    Well, at that point the baby's already street pizza, so I wouldn't be surprised if no one wanted to go near that mess, except maybe to collect a souvenir.
  • Doc (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    geoffrey:
    boog:
    geoffrey:
    ...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.
    Bullshit. Say, let's all stop calling it "a job you know nothing about", shall we?
    1. The job was only a few bytes.
    2. It had been running for almost an hour.
    3. It hadn't started printing yet.
    4. It was holding up everyone else.

    On any normal print server, this would be an error state. And if cancelling a tiny blocking long-running non-printing print job could potentially bring down the entire company, you've really got bigger issues.

    Let me throw a curve ball at you. What if the job readout was in error and the job was actually 50 megabytes of important company report - a report which management urgently needs to close the quarter?

    Try explaining why there will be mass redundancies to your coworkers standing round the printer next week.

    Then the sooner the job is killed and resubmitted the better. It's hung, so it is not printing.

    And, to reiterate, it should be printed on an Important Report printer.

    Well, to answer the curveball, I'm the guy in my department that runs those important jobs. That's why my boss said screw it to corporate policy and made sure that I had my own printer. No waiting because some nurse decided to print some 160 page document on the shared printer because she doesn't know how to select "current page" in the options. No worries that unauthorized people will kill my print jobs when I'm running off all the monthly reports for the management committee. I maintain it all myself, including the print queue. And if a job runs more than about 2 minutes without producing ANY output, it gets killed and I resubmit.

    When I see comments like this, it makes it seem like the people have never worked in a real office before. I have never seen a report that could bring down the company if it wasn't printed get sent to a shared printer. I've also never seen a situation where someone had the access to kill a job (either from their own PC or by going to the print server) but was not supposed to use it without first tracking down their manager. Especially in a lab environment, where you're expected to work with greater independence than a normal desk job.

  • kktkkr (unregistered)

    I'm just waiting for someone to port distributed computing efforts to PostScript and make full use of the unharnessed 'power' of printers.

    (Also, else's is correct.)

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    Hortical:
    geoffrey:
    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    What you're suggesting amounts to no more than allowing ourselves to be intimidated by blowhards.

    YOU SHOULD NOT POST THAT KIND OF THING ON HERE!!! THAT'S WHAT TERRORISTS DO!!! ARE YOU A TERRORIST!!?!

    obvious troll is obvious

    I agree. You are indeed an obvious troll, and obvious.

    That Hortical person, on the other hand, makes a good point.

  • (cs) in reply to Master Chief
    Master Chief:
    geoffrey:
    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.

    I don't care how fucking self important someone is. He has no right to occupy the printer 24/7, I don't care how critical his needs are. If they were that critical, he'd have space on a real mainframe to use.

    His tiny-dick-syndrome reactions don't entitle him to anything except mockery, preferably continuous mockery. Hell, I might cancel a few of his actual print jobs just to watch him stomp helplessly.

    I also agree with Master Chief. At both my old high school, university, and my current job if you queue a job on a printer, leave it, and it is not printing something, it is treated as an abandoned job, and anyone can kill it (without asking or telling you).

    Also companies should always have multiple printers available, so if a printer gets stuck or worse broken you do not put your employees in such an unnecessary bind.

  • C# Guy (unregistered) in reply to neminem
    neminem:
    geoffrey:
    Hortical:
    geoffrey:
    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    What you're suggesting amounts to no more than allowing ourselves to be intimidated by blowhards.

    YOU SHOULD NOT POST THAT KIND OF THING ON HERE!!! THAT'S WHAT TERRORISTS DO!!! ARE YOU A TERRORIST!!?!

    obvious troll is obvious

    I agree. You are indeed an obvious troll, and obvious.

    That Hortical person, on the other hand, makes a good point.

    Not that obvious, judging by the number of responses he gets.

  • ceiswyn (unregistered) in reply to C# Guy
    C# Guy:
    Not that obvious, judging by the number of responses he gets.

    Some of us just like shooting fish in a barrel :)

  • Hortical (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    Hortical:
    geoffrey:
    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    What you're suggesting amounts to no more than allowing ourselves to be intimidated by blowhards.

    obvious troll is obvious

    There, is that better? Tell me what do you think of the content of the message as opposed to complaining about its form.

    You're a really curious figure, you know that? And I can't say what my cynicism tells me about your veracity. I think that everyone here is a troll, so your persona must also be disingenuous, arguing incredibly stupid points of view just for fun, but I'm also well aware that there are people like that out there.

    What kind of company do you work at? Is everyone there similarly as incompetent, or are you a nepotistic hire? So many questions...

  • justsomedudette (unregistered)

    Geoffrey admit it. You're the print job guy aren't you? You're the only one defending this ridiculous situation, and the only one who thinks running to management every time there's tiniest of problems is a sensible solution.

    Just be proud of your novel use of tech and admit you could have handle the situation better.

  • iToad (unregistered) in reply to kktkkr
    kktkkr:
    I'm just waiting for someone to port distributed computing efforts to PostScript and make full use of the unharnessed 'power' of printers.

    (Also, else's is correct.)

    MATLAB now automatically does this with your CPU cores. It takes them over to do parallel processing. I run scripts that make all six of my AMD CPU cores go 100% busy for about 30 seconds at a time, without any special coding needed to make this happen. The newest version of MATLAB can also take over the GPUs in your CUDA-compliant graphics card.

    Also, Postscript is indeed a programming language. It looks very like Forth.

  • (cs)

    It occurs to me that in all this, we've lost sight of one essential WTF-worthy element of this. The owner of the rogue jobs clearly ran up against a compute-power limitation. OK, fine, (bad word) happens. However, I have some questions:

    1. What job was so compute-intensive that he needed to off-load it to the printer and stuff up the work of a whole department?
    2. What printer was it that actually had more compute power than a desktop PC?
    3. Why didn't he ask the relevant powers-that-be for more compute power of his own?
    4. If he did ask for this, and was refused, why didn't he take it as an indication that his vaunted "numbers" weren't so important?
    5. Were the vaunted numbers perhaps something not actually related to his job, such as something pronogaffic?

    Meh, whatever.

  • geoffrey (unregistered)

    I am tired so lets agree to disagree for now and leave it at that

  • Rnd( (unregistered)

    Who would even think of someone running some computational intensive on a freaking printer(apart from the one guy)? I might have believed it to be some manager comming up with "neat" way to save some paper and toners, missing the whole reason for printers existence. But, hanging up the computer for computation?

  • (cs)

    Oh, yeah, and:

    1. How on earth is a virtual printer going to help numbers-boy? Allegedly nothing in the department except the real printer has enough compute power. The virtual printer is, presumably, not on the real printer, so won't benefit from the compute power of the real printer rather than the admittedly feeble print server...

    I smell a fictionalisation error. (It smells like a herring that's been left out on the kitchen counter for a week, by the way.)

  • gnasher729 (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic

    It's a Postscript printer. When Apple released their LaserWriter, around 1985 or so, it was the most powerful computer that Apple had ever built. And Postscript is a programming language.

  • The butler buttles (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Oh, yeah, and:
    1. How on earth is a virtual printer going to help numbers-boy? Allegedly nothing in the department except the real printer has enough compute power. The virtual printer is, presumably, not on the real printer, so won't benefit from the compute power of the real printer rather than the admittedly feeble print server...

    I smell a fictionalisation error. (It smells like a herring that's been left out on the kitchen counter for a week, by the way.)

    The fictionalisation error is a Red Herring!

  • ņăĝęŠĥ (unregistered)

    How exactly do you program the printer to do computation?

    This story is fishy.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Oh, yeah, and:
    1. How on earth is a virtual printer going to help numbers-boy? Allegedly nothing in the department except the real printer has enough compute power. The virtual printer is, presumably, not on the real printer, so won't benefit from the compute power of the real printer rather than the admittedly feeble print server...

    I smell a fictionalisation error. (It smells like a herring that's been left out on the kitchen counter for a week, by the way.)

    I think the point wasn't to help numbers-boy, but to trick him into believing that his job was still running.

  • Hortical (unregistered) in reply to C# Guy
    C# Guy:
    neminem:
    geoffrey:
    Hortical:
    geoffrey:
    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    What you're suggesting amounts to no more than allowing ourselves to be intimidated by blowhards.

    YOU SHOULD NOT POST THAT KIND OF THING ON HERE!!! THAT'S WHAT TERRORISTS DO!!! ARE YOU A TERRORIST!!?!

    obvious troll is obvious

    I agree. You are indeed an obvious troll, and obvious.

    That Hortical person, on the other hand, makes a good point.

    Not that obvious, judging by the number of responses he gets.

    I think people know he's a troll, as we've encountered him before, but realize that it is not the man we're attacking, but the message. (I later went on to attack the man, I know, but that was for fun.)

    It's the idea that misinformation is being spread that is alarming. There's a human being on the other side of this internet, but since all I know of him is his promotion of this awful idea (speaking generically, it could be "Never cancel print jobs" or "Build your own database for each project" or "Linux Sucks!"), that's all there is to that person in my mind: a fountain of terrible ideas that must be killed.

    Cool reasonability fails though a process of spontaneous dereasonabilification and all that goes through one's mind is ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!

  • (cs) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    6. How on earth is a virtual printer going to help numbers-boy?
    Your mistake is in assuming that anybody wanted to help him.
  • derrick (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    centurijon:
    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.

    There are times when you need a maverick, or at least someone to take initiative in a poor situation.

    Having a line of people waiting for a print queue (like sheep) is completely unacceptable - especially if the non-print job is expected to take two days to run. The article stated that he tried to find the person responsible for the print job and that person was missing. In that situation I would not have even hesitated to cancel the job either.

    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.

    That sounds fine in a normal environment with no deadlines. However in a Lab environment like that if I need to print pages for management...you better believe I will cancel a job that looks hung. But then again I'm one of "those people" who gets to deal with high priority projects and sic their boss's boss on them if they piss me off. But if you have projects that can handle being two or more days late, then by all means go ahead and wait.

  • Ganesha (unregistered) in reply to Hortical

    tl;dr IHBT

  • ac (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    It occurs to me that in all this, we've lost sight of one essential WTF-worthy element of this. The owner of the rogue jobs clearly ran up against a compute-power limitation. OK, fine, (bad word) happens. However, I have some questions:
    1. What job was so compute-intensive that he needed to off-load it to the printer and stuff up the work of a whole department?
    2. What printer was it that actually had more compute power than a desktop PC?
    3. Why didn't he ask the relevant powers-that-be for more compute power of his own?
    4. If he did ask for this, and was refused, why didn't he take it as an indication that his vaunted "numbers" weren't so important?
    5. Were the vaunted numbers perhaps something not actually related to his job, such as something pronogaffic?

    Meh, whatever.

    From wikipedia, cannot comment on its accuracy though...

    However, the cost of implementation was high; computers output raw PS code that would be interpreted by the printer into a raster image at the printer's natural resolution. This required high performance microprocessors and ample memory. The LaserWriter used a 12 MHz Motorola 68000, making it faster than any of the Macintosh computers it attached to. When the laser printer engines themselves cost over a thousand dollars the added cost of PS was marginal. But as printer mechanisms fell in price, the cost of implementing PS became an increasingly greater percentage of the overall printer cost, and thus it succumbed to cost competition in the lower-priced market tiers.

  • (cs)

    Okay, I've heard of people implementing major process on everything from the sacrosanct IBM PC-that-must-never-be-moved to a major web service on one laptop to major accounting applications dependent on maxed-out dBase systems. (In fact, we have one of the latter running here now. Really.)

    But this is a new low: I had heard that Postscript could be used to program fancy things for printing. Never in my worst nightmares did I consider the idea that someone might use Postscript to develop an accounting application.

    It's like...it's like building Mars-shot navigation around an advanced scientific calculator.

    Even worse than the worst combination you can imagine...

  • (cs) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    It's like...it's like building Mars-shot navigation around an advanced scientific calculator.
    It's like using a calculator to do calculations? Wow, you sure told him.
  • Andrew Norman O'ther (unregistered) in reply to Doc
    Doc:
    No waiting because some nurse decided to print some 160 page document on the shared printer because she doesn't know how to select "current page" in the options. No worries that unauthorized people will kill my print jobs when I'm running off all the monthly reports for the management committee.

    When I see comments like this, it makes it seem like the people have never worked in a real office before.

    When I see comments like this, I wonder in what "office" a management committee's monthly report might be more "important" than a nurse might need in a hurry?

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    I am tired so lets agree to disagree for now and leave it at that

    No, let's not. (and no, you're not)

  • (cs) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    It's like...it's like building Mars-shot navigation around an advanced scientific calculator.

    Why not? It worked for the moon shots...

  • lesle (unregistered)

    The first time there was no sign on the printer--I give him a pass on killing the job.

    The second time there was a sign and "that particular desk was empty." At this point I would have gone to an appropriate manager.

    My personal opinion is that both need better office social skills.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    And in my time, I've hand-coded PostScript as well... although I'm not daft enough to put that on my CV.
    The proper thing to do would be to code a PostScript Quine program that also happens to print your CV without reference to Postscript (with the PS program as a supplementary page).

    ObCap: If you do this, you'll be my haero. --Joe

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    Hortical:
    geoffrey:
    Notice also they did not thank him afterwards. That's because they don't want to be seen as endorsing or encouraging that kind of behaviour and risk being hauled off to HR later.

    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.

    What you're suggesting amounts to no more than allowing ourselves to be intimidated by blowhards.

    YOU SHOULD NOT POST THAT KIND OF THING ON HERE!!! THAT'S WHAT TERRORISTS DO!!! ARE YOU A TERRORIST!!?!

    obvious troll is obvious

    That's comedy gold! A troll calling someone else a troll (obligatory yo dawg meme)...

    Congrats, I didn't think you would get this many bites.

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    I am tired so lets agree to disagree for now and leave it at that
    Spent already? My, my... You know, there's a cream you could get for your premature troll defeation problem.
  • blah (unregistered)
    DO NO KILL JOB UNTIL FRIDAY (or try to use the printer as your personal mainframe)
    Nice typo Lorne. :D

    I find it extremely ironic that the sign's author was indeed using the printer as a personal mainframe. He would be a woman in real life, if not for the fact that he can write a number-crunching PostScript job.

  • (cs) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    It's like...it's like building Mars-shot navigation around an advanced scientific calculator.

    Even worse than the worst combination you can imagine...

    Close-- it's like running a Mars-shot navigation via the brew-timer on Mission Control's coffee maker-- blocking the brewing of coffee for three and a half years. CAPCOM would be grumpy.

  • (cs) in reply to blah
    blah:
    DO NO KILL JOB UNTIL FRIDAY (or try to use the printer as your personal mainframe)
    Nice typo Lorne. :D

    I find it extremely ironic that the sign's author was indeed using the printer as a personal mainframe. He would be a woman in real life, if not for the fact that he can write a number-crunching PostScript job.

    Dang, almost made it through without one. You can't blame me, what with the text being so small... :|

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    boog:
    geoffrey:
    ...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.
    Bullshit. Say, let's all stop calling it "a job you know nothing about", shall we?
    1. The job was only a few bytes.
    2. It had been running for almost an hour.
    3. It hadn't started printing yet.
    4. It was holding up everyone else.

    On any normal print server, this would be an error state. And if cancelling a tiny blocking long-running non-printing print job could potentially bring down the entire company, you've really got bigger issues.

    Let me throw a curve ball at you. What if the job readout was in error and the job was actually 50 megabytes of important company report - a report which management urgently needs to close the quarter?

    Try explaining why there will be mass redundancies to your coworkers standing round the printer next week.

    If it's so important, someone will be watching their computer tell them the job is borked. And in this day and age, such a report wouldn't need to be printed out to be processed. It's why we have PDFs, and why I was part of a team which implemented a report-catching software so we didn't have to print greenbar paper reports in ... 1997.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Doc
    Doc:
    Well, to answer the curveball, I'm the guy in my department that runs those important jobs. That's why my boss said screw it to corporate policy and made sure that I had my own printer. No waiting because some nurse decided to print some 160 page document on the shared printer because she doesn't know how to select "current page" in the options. No worries that unauthorized people will kill my print jobs when I'm running off all the monthly reports for the management committee.
    Surely the managers don't want the schlebs to be reading their monthly management numbers anyway!

    TBH I was expecting the ending to be a Cunning Plan to stop other applicants for funding from getting their funding proposals printed, allocating all resources to the one project that actually did get printed (being the guy who blocked the printer). But this was much more interesting.

  • Josh (unregistered)

    Am I the only one that thinks geoffrey is the guy from the story who had his "print job" killed? Why else would anyone take his position on this issue? (and how is this even an issue?)

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    boog:
    3) It hadn't started printing yet.

    On any normal print server, this would be an error state.

    Let me throw a curve ball at you. What if the job readout was in error...
    Then the print server is in an error state. Not much of a curve ball.

  • redblacktree (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    I am tired so lets agree to disagree for now and leave it at that

    Translation: I now realize that I took a ridiculous position, and I can no longer defend it. However, my ego is much too large to admit defeat, so I will instead unilaterally declare a "draw."

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