Not only is it a ‘thing’, it’s an endless, recurring and potentially critical and extremely easy to forget source of bugs, problems, errors, unintended behaviors and whatever other shenanigans you can name in IT.
I’m not kidding. Having the wrong decimal mark or placing the currency symbol in the wrong place (before/after the number, that’s also a thing) can make some programs simply not start, silently not output logs when they should, fail to save files to disk while pretending everything’s okay (I’m looking at you, MS Office 2002!), print some pages mirrored upside down (still not making this up!), cause protected internet webpages fail to load (mostly secured connections to banks where the primary currency is different than the ones in your OS / browser), and I’m not yet halfway through the list of examples I’ve personally experienced.
It’s not all that special in terms of technical details. When I was younger and living with my parents, my father had at some point an imported printer for some reason. This is back when XP was still the latest Windows version for sale. Wish I remember the details of who and what, so we could point and laugh at the silly printer-makers or something, though. (I wasn’t older than 16 at the time, probably closer to 13)
Sometimes, when printing full screen images directly through some software, or maybe when printing oversize images or documents that had to be “fitted” to the printer’s page size, the first page of the queue would come out mirrored upside-down or sideways, or rotated. It would only do this from my father’s computer, not fom mine. After much troubleshooting and head-scratching, we tried something dumb: his Windows was in French, mine was in English, we changed the windows language to English (and the locale settings got reset in the process, maybe? I don’t remember that part, but that makes sense). The problem was gone.
Skipping over the tedious examination that follows, he told me that the region settings were at fault, and had to be set to the same thing in the driver software’s control panel as that of Windows for it to not do this. My best reconstruction with my current technical knowledge of what I remember but didn’t fully understand at the time is that this printer used (and probably abused) Windows XP’s multi-monitor features for processing the documents sent to the drivers for processing and printing, generating an image on a windows “monitor” of the right size before sending this out to the printer.
I assume the coding they had made this virtual monitor “reset” or perform some kind of self-diagnostic, either of which including rotations and mirrorings of the monitor, when the regional settings were different or when it was internally different from windows’. The printer would send to print anyway while this happened, resulting in a “virtual monitor” image that was mirrored/rotated, and thus, an upside-down or otherwise transformed printout.
Most of this, though, is speculation on my part from remembering that putting region settings identical in windows and the software fixed it (and different caused the issue) and that the printer used some weird virtual monitor scheme, filling the blanks with my own current limited technical knowledge.
Whaaaaat?!
I had no idea this was a thing.
Not only is it a ‘thing’, it’s an endless, recurring and potentially critical and extremely easy to forget source of bugs, problems, errors, unintended behaviors and whatever other shenanigans you can name in IT.
I’m not kidding. Having the wrong decimal mark or placing the currency symbol in the wrong place (before/after the number, that’s also a thing) can make some programs simply not start, silently not output logs when they should, fail to save files to disk while pretending everything’s okay (I’m looking at you, MS Office 2002!), print some pages mirrored upside down (still not making this up!), cause protected internet webpages fail to load (mostly secured connections to banks where the primary currency is different than the ones in your OS / browser), and I’m not yet halfway through the list of examples I’ve personally experienced.
This is too good not to hear the story. Google turns up nothing. Tell!
shrugs
It’s not all that special in terms of technical details. When I was younger and living with my parents, my father had at some point an imported printer for some reason. This is back when XP was still the latest Windows version for sale. Wish I remember the details of who and what, so we could point and laugh at the silly printer-makers or something, though. (I wasn’t older than 16 at the time, probably closer to 13)
Sometimes, when printing full screen images directly through some software, or maybe when printing oversize images or documents that had to be “fitted” to the printer’s page size, the first page of the queue would come out mirrored upside-down or sideways, or rotated. It would only do this from my father’s computer, not fom mine. After much troubleshooting and head-scratching, we tried something dumb: his Windows was in French, mine was in English, we changed the windows language to English (and the locale settings got reset in the process, maybe? I don’t remember that part, but that makes sense). The problem was gone.
Skipping over the tedious examination that follows, he told me that the region settings were at fault, and had to be set to the same thing in the driver software’s control panel as that of Windows for it to not do this. My best reconstruction with my current technical knowledge of what I remember but didn’t fully understand at the time is that this printer used (and probably abused) Windows XP’s multi-monitor features for processing the documents sent to the drivers for processing and printing, generating an image on a windows “monitor” of the right size before sending this out to the printer.
I assume the coding they had made this virtual monitor “reset” or perform some kind of self-diagnostic, either of which including rotations and mirrorings of the monitor, when the regional settings were different or when it was internally different from windows’. The printer would send to print anyway while this happened, resulting in a “virtual monitor” image that was mirrored/rotated, and thus, an upside-down or otherwise transformed printout.
Most of this, though, is speculation on my part from remembering that putting region settings identical in windows and the software fixed it (and different caused the issue) and that the printer used some weird virtual monitor scheme, filling the blanks with my own current limited technical knowledge.