TheHut.com there, after I had just clicked submit on an order , thankfully an email confirmed it had gone through...

Blasted IT Systems!

Covered a session that were meant to be doing exams this morning, but they couldn't as the IT system wasn't working...

Proprietary formats!!

Why do people insist on sending important documents via email in stupid formats? I mean who on earth actually has a bona fide copy of Publisher on their home machine? Just send me a bloody PDF already!

And will someone PLEASE tell inform the general populace that even Office 2010 doesn't fully support .docx files, so the rest of us have no bloody chance.

Stop it!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!

Someone did give me a link to MS to get a file to allow older versions of office to open docx.
I'll see if I can find it.

EDIT

Sorry, I deleted it.

My work computer.
XP, on a Core 2 with 2GB of RAM and a 40GB HD. Through that I'm expected to push a 50 centimetre x 4 metre, 300 dpi image through to our A1 printer.
Even before I threatened it with that, I had to power it down at the button 3 times after it locked up, all before 11am.
What's more irritating is the back log of work that it's creating and the fact that the techs did a roll back on it about 2 weeks ago.

I've asked for a Mac.

+1


Given that email was never really meant for sending files, the fact people do that really narcs me...

Email may not be a technically efficient way to send non-text information, but it's a damned site better than printing something out, posting it, waiting 3 days, posting another copy, putting it on someone's desk, losing it under a stack of junk mail, posting another copy, the dog eating it, posting another copy, spilling coffee on it...

At least email just works, the documents are backed up, it's searchable, it arrives almost instantly and you can't spill coffee on it.

If someone sends it in a stupid format, then a reply saying "send it as X" is usually all that's required.

Older versions of Office have a free plugin which enables reading of .docx files:

Microsoft Clicky

Yes, better than snail mail, but with FTP, SCP, a multitude of networked file systems, and other methods, email is almost as bad as snail mail.
Email clients get bogged down with attachments, they become slower and have the extra work of indexing the attachments, this should be the job of the file system and file manager. Plus services like Gmail are quite generous and give something like a whole 25MB, whereas a lot of services and organisations have a maximum message size of 5-8MB, which is great until you need to send something bigger, but by that point everyone is used to using email to duplicate information so a better infrastructure is turned down and you end up sending external hard drives through the post...

</grump>

It does rather depend on the file. I think we were talking about Word documents being sent between companies, so the file size is only a few K and they're unlikely to have shared access to a network drive. For something like that, using a secure FTP server just adds needless complications that the users do not want.

Internally, we simply have shared folders on the server for the different documents that we all use. We do have an FTP server, but we only use it to transfer things like large binary files to customer sites.

I know, but if email had never been able to have files attached a better and more elegant solution would have appeared I feel.

Cpufreq

Why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why won't you load?

FRAK!

Came this close to setting light to the work PC.
The software RIP we use has been deleted and reinstalled AGAIN by me to get it working again.
And now the printer's loving it's magenta all of a sudden. Or it's hating yellow. One or the other. But it won't load the paper colour profile either.
I mean, hey, it's not like I've got 10 A1 files and a 50cm x 4 metre images waiting to print or anything. Fscking thing.

Rant update:

After hours of digging around the innards of this bloody machine it turns out that because Toshiba went with a cheap-crap BIOS, the DSD tables are buggered so ACPI won't work with Linux and it's pretty crap under Windows.

Toshiba you useless b*st*rds!

Sounds like the yellow nozzle is blocked, the best way to clean a print cartridge is to throw it in the bin and replace it.

It's a fresh cartridge. I changed it today. They're £80.76 each. And they're not exactly next day delivery either.