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Admin
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That would never pass peer review. Images don't "prove" anything, they only "illustrate" or "demonstrate".
Admin
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.
Admin
Ummm... Maybe going off on a tangent here, but where does the sys admin fit into all this? Surely s/he would have final say and the authority to keep all IT resources working and used correctly - and then I'd like to see Mr. "the world revolves around me" say or do anything.
The fact that the sys admin wasn't made aware of the 'fault' was probably the first mistake Bob made!
Admin
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.
Admin
Son, we live in a world with print servers, and those print servers need to be guarded by word documents with writing. I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom... We use words like postscript and code; We use these words as the backbone of a life spent number crunching something... I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the very blanket of print services I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you and stopped cancelling my print jobs. Otherwise, I would suggest you setup a print server and buy your own toner cartridges.
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Wasnt much more easy if the programmer just put a broken sign in the printer. Then people will not try to use it and complain. He is not much smart besides postscript (anyone that can program basic, can program fortran, can program postscrip also, just must be a fool to waste time is this kind of shit), i it was, then he will prevent people from using the printer, perhaps changing network port, and ductaping its inputs and outputs, and puting a sign, now it is broken and cannot be used anymore, then take away kboard and monitor, and put a sign dont touch. Perhaps even taking the printer to his room was the best response first.
Admin
FTFY
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From the sysadmins viewpoint
Admin
What difference?
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Witness the power of this fully configurable print server!
Admin
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?"
Admin
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Honestly, if you want to piss people off on the internet, it's much easier just to find people with genuinely stupid opinions (and by "find" I mean "throw a rock") and tell how stupid those opinions are. Hell, you don't even have to be rude- the dumber and less informed somebody's opinion is, the more likely they are to react with violent rage to have the logical fallacies in their arguments pointed out to them.
You basically know you've won when it devolves into them saying "I DIDN'T SAY THAT, RAGE RAGE!" and you copy-pasting the earlier post where they said exactly that.
Admin
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Well, it is a problem when the printer freezes, or, in Polish, "drukarka wisi".
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You missing two points: a. That dork might be sysadmin himself b. His PC processing power might be busy with REALLY important things, like watching video in SVGA quality or running ADOM game
Admin
You exist in this world, that one
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Make up your mind!
Admin
Thanks to a recent "green initiative" we have three printers on our floor, and that's fairly typical in the building.
Each floor has hundreds of people.
And two of the three printers are the Sharp copiers.
Admin
What's next? You're going to ask him to chew his food before swallowing!
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This is not a communication problem, this is a moron problem. If the printer is backed up, you kill the job that's choking it and you move on. If someone keeps sending the job that chokes it, you beat them about the head and shoulders with a tire iron until they stop. Simple.
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If (job.elapsestime > 5 hours) job.kill();
Period. I don't care of Carmak, Gates, Gosling or God himself created the fucking job.
Admin
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I am always RELUCTANT to cancel someone else's job, but I can't agree that "you just don't".
Suppose you saw a truck with no driver accelerating toward the kindergarten playground. Would the responsible thing to do be: (a) Do everything possible to get control of the truck and stop it before children are hurt; or (b) Do nothing, on the assumption that someone must have deliberately set the truck in motion for a good reason and you have no right to interfere?
So okay, in this case no one is going to die if they can't get their printout. But no one is going to die if this mysterious print job doesn't run either. The stakes are lower but the principle is the same. It is bad manners and inefficient business practice to cancel someone else's job because you want the resource now. But it is equally bad manners and inefficient business practice to unreasonably hog a resource that others need.
In real life, when I see a job hogging resources and denying service to others, I try to find the person who initiated the job and find out what they are doing. If I can't find the person, I'll kill the job. 9 times out of 10 they thank me later for fixing the problem that they accidentally created. (If the person insists on hogging a resource and they outrank me I'll talk to a bigger boss about it. Otherwise I'll kill the job.)
Admin
Oh dear god, what's happening to me?!?!?!
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In the old days, a PostScript printer processor might be running at 10MHz with the computers at half that speed, so it made some sense to use it as a number cruncher, especially if it was idle a lot.
Just reading up on it -- looks interesting, especially the portability of the language, might play around with it for kicks.
Admin
The Apple LaserWriter, when it came out, had the fastest processor of any apple product. It was 50% faster than the Macintosh with four times more RAM. If you're crunching numbers, that's a serious improvement.
Admin
Maybe I'm being stupid or missing something obvious, but I have a question about this.
In the end, Bob created a virtual printer for the job. In other words, the job wasn't sent to the actual printer for processing, but instead the processing was handled on the print server itself.
Right?
So did the job ever finish? If so, I assume that the output was to a file on the print server's hard drive instead of to the printer. Or can you have a virtual printer send the output directly to a real printer?
Of course, if a virtual printer on an old machine retasked into a print server could do the job, then that would show that the piece of crap PC wasn't so piece of crap as imagined.
Admin
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.
Admin