Posts by Shred 65 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2014
And don't forget the obligatory "null modem" adaptor that crossed over RxD to TxD and so on.
I still have a great long chain of all the RS-232 "square peg to round hole" converters from my toolkit at the time. Male to male, female to female, null modem, 9 pin to 25 pin (male 9 pin to female 25 pin and female 9 pin to male 25 pin), plus the little break out box with LEDs.
And the agony that came from coming across one of these machines where a non-standard, but "close enough" disk definition had been applied, but the CMOS backup battery had failed or the CMOS settings had been reset. Now you have to figure out which not-quite-right disk definition the guy before you had used.
I was nice to people who had to come after me and would write it down inside the case, but not many other people did this.
The directors demanding shiny new iPads sounds familiar.
The next thing is that when the iPads are barely run in, there will be complaints that they have poor battery life, are slow etc… until you buy them the latest shiny iDevice.
The old units will never be seen again, although they will demand that the mobile device management software is removed so that they can be used by their kids.
I started off as an electronics technician. It was impressed upon me that:
a) tradesmen are given a tool allowance and must buy and maintain their own tools
b) getting caught using someone else's tools without permission is on the spot dismissal.
Without a), tools get abused, broken, lost, left inside equipment etc etc.
Without b) nobody gets any work done, because they spend all day going around in circles trying to find their tools.
Use of spreadsheets and word processors is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect). People who know a little bit think they are experts.
While working in a university, I came across an academic who was about to submit a 500+ page research paper. Page breaks had been created by pressing <Return> multiple times, meaning any edit led to a major manual reformat of the following sections of the document. Each heading had been formatted individually - no styles used at all. The table of contents was being updated manually… I could go on.
A word processor is the most basic tool used by an academic, much as a hammer is the basic tool of trade for a carpenter. If I had asked if they knew their way around Microsoft Word, I have no doubt that she would have told me that she was an expert user… yet the staff member was not using any of the features that make a word processor powerful. Training in Microsoft Office was freely available and offered regularly, yet this individual must have declined to take it multiple times.
I used to do password audits - run a few lists of well known passwords against the company active directory using Hashcat to find any weak or compromised passwords.
Some people, including a normally very straight laced sys admin used some rather “saucy” words as their passwords. I used my best poker face when I explained the problem and asked them to do a password reset, but I could still tell that “they knew that I knew” if you know what I mean.
Parasites!
Having dealt with these sort of organisations, not only do they put massive markups on the products they on-sell, but they tell their customers that they are getting big discounts for them using their "buying power".
As Troy has pointed out - if a company really wants a product and can't get it through the official reseller, someone can put it on a company credit card.
Same thing with laser printers...
User phones up "my printing is coming out with lines across the page". We'd ask "have you tried a new toner cartridge?" Invariably, they'd answer "yes".
Tech goes on site. Swaps out cheap and nasty refilled cartridge for a new one: printer output is as good as new. Tech sends a bill for an hour's labour, plus the new toner cartridge. It used to happen all the time.
“We've acted decisively to increase customer value since we closed the acquisition in late November,"
LoL wot?
Our licensing price has just gone through the roof for absolutely nothing in return, other than continuing to use the same VMware product with the same features.
Another month or two and the new Azure HCI cluster will be bedded in nicely and then it is “bye bye VMware and good riddance to Broadcom”.
I'm amazed that there is actually some sort of filter on entry to Australia on a skilled worker visa. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they let pretty much anyone in.
Last time we were hiring, a recruiter put forward a couple of candidates who were here on skilled worker visas. Their English skills were appalling - we couldn't understand what they were saying and they were clearly struggling to understand us. One job interview was conducted over MS Teams and it was obvious that after we asked each question, the candidate was stalling while he furiously Googled for an answer. This was not for an entry level job paying peanuts and some of the questions we asked at the start were dead easy "confidence builder" questions partly aimed at helping the candidate get comfortable.
Yes - and don’t forget that some developers were given access to prototype Mac development systems (on Lisa hardware) before the launch of the original Macintosh. Microsoft was one such developer, hence Windows being “Copyright 1983…). Even back then, Apple knew better than to launch a new machine with no third party applications in the pipeline.
Ah yes.. the Michael Spindler era. I guess you had a PowerBook 5300 - a dog of a machine in every way possible. Most of them literally fell apart before Apple put out a rework programme to fix the many issues with case hinges and charging sockets falling off the logic board. But at least Apple’s marketing people could say it had a PowerPC processor.
Bluejeans seemed to have the technology down pat, but the administration side of things was lacking.
They forgot to bill us for a whole year’s use (a fairly large sum of money). We brought this to their attention, but BJN just couldn’t be bothered sending us an invoice…. You can’t do that too often without it impacting the bottom line.
You raise a valid point, but having worked for an organisation that provided regular training in the use of office computers and applications, this is how it worked in practice:
The good sensible users (some of whom were in senior management) would make the time to attend the training - even though they were not the ones who really needed it. The attendees would often provide positive feedback, saying how they had picked up some new skills and tricks and this woukd save them time in their jobs. Things like someone who used MS Word all day, churning out 100 page long papers. Prior to the training they would create a page break by presssing <Enter> 20 times to get to the next page. Discovering “Insert Page Break” was a revelation.
The people who really, desperately needed the training - often senior management - would consistently fail to attend, stating that they were “too busy”. Strangely, they were never too busy to generate an endless stream of help desk tickets for trivial dumb user problems that would not have happened if they had attended the training.
I always found SCSI super reliable and easy to get going… except where a smart-alec manufacturer “knew better” and built gear that didn’t fully comply with the standard (just like the problems above with serial not using the correct +/- 3-25v etc). Almost always, problems were due to people not understanding the termination requirements, or not setting the correct IDs.
Apple in particular were bad for not fully complying with the standard. The Mac Plus, Mac Portable and PowerBook 100 did not properly terminate the bus, or supply termination power. As a result, they could be “picky” about cable length and what they would work with. The problem was exacerbated by users ignoring the instructions to power off before connecting or disconnecting SCSI devices and blowing the termination power fuse in SCSI devices. Once you had a computer that failed to supply termination power to the bus and an external drive with a blown termination power fuse, the two could not communicate.
Exactly. The scumbags have wasted my time and interrupted me from what I was doing, so now I’ll jump through whatever hoops are required to get a real person on the line and waste a bit of their time.
If everyone did this - just talked to them for 30 seconds, the whole scam would collapse.
I recall hearing a story (possibly via The Register) about a prank played on an office worker who spent most of the day talking on the phone.
His colleagues glued a single 5c piece into the phone handset. The next day, they glued a second 5 c piece into the handset. This continued for several,weeks, with the victim spending each day getting used to the new ever so slightly increased weight of the phone handset.
Eventually, it was ridiculously heavy and there was simply no more room for coins… so one night, they took all the coins out again in one hit. Cue the victim smacking himself in the side of the head with the much lighter handset the first time he tried to answer a call.
Even Dell Enterprise support can be pretty special. Working for a university about 15 years ago, we had the misfortune to buy a hundred or so Dell GX270 desktops for our department’s labs.
The machines started dropping like flies with bulging capacitors on the motherboards. In the USA, Dell extended the warranty to seven years for this fault. In Australia, they did nothing. Worst of all, the replacement motherboards also contained faulty capacitors. One machine was on its fourth motherboard at the end of the three year warranty. A bunch of machines that would normally have auctioned off at the end of their life simply went in the rubbish skip.
The worst part is that unlike what happened to the vendor in the original story, our organisation kept buying Dell, despite them knowing selling us faulty gear and not fixing it properly.
I was doing IT support in a university Teacher Education area. We had a frantic call from a "teacher of science teachers" stating that he couldn't get the video projector working in one of the tutorial rooms. (See last week's on call re "if it plugs in to a power point, it's an IT problem").
I arrived to find a wannabe science teacher standing on a table faffing with the controls on the ceiling mounted projector. Much wailing 'we tried everything'.
The AMX panel (colour touch screen) that normally controlled the system had failed and had been removed. Next to the empty space on the wall that the panel would normally occupy were neatly writing instructions, complete with a drawing of the projector remote control and arrows indicating which buttons to push in which order. The remote control for the projector was neatly arranged on the bench.
So... I picked up the remote control and pushed the two buttons on it in the order indicated in the instructions on the wall. The video projector sprung to life and the day was saved. Bear in mind that the lecturer had a PhD and all the students in the room were studying to be science teachers.
I once had an interesting technical issue converting a building from the late 90s token ring over UTP to 100Mb switched ethernet.
Take a wall outlet that was working perfectly on token ring, patch it into the ethernet switch and the shiny new ethernet card on a PC… didn’t work. Swap back to token ring on the same Cat 5 cable… worked perfectly. Cue much scratching of the head when the same thing happened in the next office over (and the next…).
Bearing in mind that this happened in Australia, where any electrical work is over-regulated beyond belief and even back then, you needed a special license even to run a pre-terminated patch lead through a wall cavity… Every wall outlet was wired using the 568A wire colour codes. Every outlet at the patch panel had been wired as 568B. The result: every wall outlet was a crossover cable. A token ring network didn’t care, but ethernet back then did care.
Token ring had a massive technical advantage over ethernet before ethernet switches became a thing: there were no collisions. You load up a 4Mb token ring and it would sit there all day with 4Mb/sec throughput. Attach lots of chatty clients to a non-switched ethernet and it would collapse under all the collisions. Sadly, it was a bit like the beta vs VHS thing. IBM’s proprietary token ring cost big $, because… IBM. Ethernet was cheap and “good enough” for most applications.
Driving a work pool car to the big city two and bit hours drive away from home. Just as I get in to heavy traffic on an unfamiliar road and with nowhere to safely stop, the damn thing starts beeping and whistling at me. Look down. Yikes! There’s a yellow light on the instrument panel. Something has gone wrong and it’s going to break down on me!
No… it was a little icon of a coffee cup. The car had decided that it was time to take a break,
Death would too good for the sort of people who dream this rubbish up. I drive a 24 year old car for a good reason.
I never found the facination with Outlook
Microsoft write “kinda sorta ok” software The company’s real skill is in marketing that software. To try to convince users that they could use anything other than an MS Office product in the 1990s was an exercise in self- flagellation.
We’re currently seeing the same thing with Microsoft Teams. It’s like an unflushable turd. Horrible, inefficient software that can take 30 seconds to struggle to launch on an i7 with SSD. But all the users just have to use it, because amicrosoft’s marketing people have brainwashed them so. The world will end if they don’t get MS Teams RIGHT NOW!
A variation on this:
Uni lecturer, “I have PhD, therefore I know everything” demanded that their home drive space be increased from an already extremely generous 10GB (this was 2007). Hauled the IT manager before the Dean to explain himself when the request was denied.
A quick run with a duplicate file find utility showed that the space was consumed with the same group of high resolution (work related) photos, stored over and over again. Every time she wanted to back up the photos on her computer, she created a new directory and copied the same photos to her home drive… over and over and over.
Thank you! You’ve just given me a way to fix a major irritation with modern Windows.
Every new version, I have to spend hours and hours turning off all the new shiny “change for the sake of change” “features” and get back to where I was before I was forced to upgrade.
It amazes me that we put up with this. I recently saw a video explaining why people pay big $$$ for a certain brand of electronics test gear. Partly, it is because large organisations want to buy (say) a multimeter, then specify it as standard equipment and write all their test and repair documentation around that device. They need something that is guaranteed to be in production for 20 years or more, because it just costs too much to keep updating.
When will the computer industry mature to this point? The OS should be invisible to the user. Pretty up the user interface if the user wants.., or let them keep the same one for decades.
I think that was a story in The Reg.
His first attempt flipped images upside down. He progressed to applying a blur effect and even published the scripts used to implement this as a transparent proxy. He wondered how many neighbours had take “faulty” computers in for repair to fix the out of focus images.
Supporting Apple gear in the late 80s and early 90s… the all in one Macs of that era had a brightness knob concealed under a little edge on the front panel. A very common cause of “black screen” was that the knob had been messed with.
Apple’s printers of that time tended to not have many user accessible things to go wrong. If the printer would power on, but the computer wouldn’t print and didn’t throw a “printer has a fault” kind of error, you could be sure that the printer wasn’t plugged in to the computer. I learned quickly to never ask “is it plugged in?”, since the user would ALWAYS respond with “of course” and not even check, because they had not unplugged it.
The usual technique to get the user to actually check that it was plugged in was to talk them through unplugging the printer from the back of the computer, inspecting the pins (are they all straight? are they shiny?), then plugging it in again, Repeat for the printer end of the cable. Invariably, I’d hear a “whirr… clack clack clack” as the printer sprang to life. The user would always say “oh, it seems to be working now”. On only one occasion did someone admit that the printer hadn’t been plugged in.
Notes was an abomination 20 years ago. In the late 1990s, a company I worked for was taken over and the new owners inflicted Bloated Goats on us. We reverted to hand written sticky notes, because we could write a message on a note, walk downstairs, stick it on the recipient’s monitor and return to our desks in less time than it took to type up the message in Scrotes and send it. What on earth is IBM doing still using it?
Words cannot explain how much I loathe Lotus Notes… this goes close (Hitler switches to Lotus Notes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1dbsBWQ3k
I wonder if Microsoft employees actually realise that they’re in the same business as car makers? i.e. Microsoft is primarily a marketing company.
Every 18 months or so, bring out a “refreshed” model. Some of the black bits are now chrome. Things that had square edges now have rounded edges. Move stuff around for no apparent reason other than making the previous version look old and dated, but annoy the user, who now has to find it again. Now some people feel the need to race out and buy the new model for no apparent reason, other than that it is fashionable and the latest.
Guess that’s why I use LibreOffice (no toolbars… yay) and drive a 23 year old car.
>> The workers were happy. The thermostats were never connected to anything...
Seems to be standard practice in the environmental control industry. I once worked in a building where it was always hot and stuffy. Middle of Winter (-3 deg C outside) - hot and stuff. Middle of Summer, hot and stuffy. Many visits by HVAC experts failed to fix it. Finally, with much fanfare, a thermostat was attached to a wall.
The thermostat did nothing. Turn it all the way up... still hot and stuffy. Turn it all the way down... hot and stuffy. One of my colleagues had enough... "this bl...dy thing isn't even connected!". Grabbed the cable to the thermostat and started pulling on it. About 10 metres of cable piled up on the floor and the end emerged - cut flush... it had never been connected to anything.
The junior tech climbed up on a desk and put his hand in front of a vent - nothing coming out. He pulled the grill off the vent. "There's a butterfly valve in here and it's closed". Opened the valve... a vast amount of black dust and gunk poured out all over him in his white shirt... we finally had fresh air!
I've since regarded the whole HVAC industry with deep suspicion.
I had a project to convert a customer site from IBM token ring over CAT5 to ethernet. I started rolling out new 10/100 ethernet cards and they wouldn’t work. It couldn’t be the cabling, because it had worked before. Cue much head scratching, swapping out the new Cisco switch and so on.
The numpties who had installed the fixed cabling had wired the patch panels as 568A and every wall outlet as 568B. Effectively every cable in the entire building was a crossover. Token ring didn’t care, but ethernet did.
A decade or so ago, I was doing IT support for the teacher education school within a university. One day, I was asked to drop everything and run to the video conference room - the fax used to receive documents wasn't working and they needed it fixed right now.
On looking at the fax, I found that its LCD display was showing "Paper tray empty. Insert paper and press GO". I filled the tray and pressed GO and away it went. Disaster averted.
There were about 20 people in the room, at least 15 of them having a PHD, but none had been able to solve the problem. As they say: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. If you can't do and you can't teach, you teach teachers".
It’s surprisingly common for small “Ma and Pa Corner Store” businesses (and some larger ones who should know better) to back up to an external USB drive. Typically, after the first few backups, this gets left permanently connected to the host computer and voila! Your only backup is now encrypted too.
Ah yes... Apple ][ 5 1/4in drives.
Woz had the genius idea of saving 5c on the cost of each drive by deleting the track zero sensor. To ensure that the heads were positioned at track 0 prior to boot up, the computer would smash the heads against the track 0 stop 39 times. That is the source of the awful “brraaaack!” sound characteristic of these drives at power on.
This feature / abuse provided Apple service centres with a regular income stream; customers had to present their drives to have radial alignments performed at regular intervals.
