Posts by TSM 162 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007
Yep, Teams does this. We've been having a fortnightly address from our CEO (during which the rest of us are muted, naturally) and it's amusing to see Teams helpfully remind me that my microphone is muted whenever I happen to cough or blow my nose while that's going on.
In the first few days of our WFH period, I was just using one of our dining table chairs. But my back pretty quickly told me that wasn't good enough for 8 hours a day. I did start using my home office chair, but that meant my wife couldn't use it for anything she had to do on our computer.
Fortunately we were allowed to come in and pick up our office chairs (as well as monitors and monitor stands) so that I could set up a space with the same gear that I had in the office. My office gear is generally rather better than what I have at home, so that was necessary for a prolonged WFH stint.
And no, not everyone can afford to go and buy a bunch of equipment on essentially no notice - and if we had tried to, we might not have been able to; my boss was unable to get a monitor at half a dozen different places in the early days of the restrictions. You mention second hand furniture, but such stores would likely (I didn't actually check) not have been considered essential businesses, and would therefore have been closed. The nearest furniture store to me certainly was closed while the heavy restrictions were on.
> changing "Default Printer" in Windows 3 times a week and then telling me they didn't do that, a phenomenon that I do not understand to this day, (Does anybody know why users do that so much?)
Are you aware that current Windows, by default, manages the default printer setting for you? It does this by setting it to "whatever you last printed to at this location", so that every time you print to a non-default printer, your default changes.
I'm not sure who came up with this idea, but it seems like a bad solution for most users; I suspect most people follow the pattern "print to this one printer 95+% of the time, but once in a while somewhere else", rather than "print exclusively to this printer until the next office reorg, then print exclusively to the printer nearest my new location" which is the only scenario I can come up with where this makes sense.
For games.
Depending on how the game was programmed, it might run properly in Turbo mode (if it used timer interrupts) or it might run in "everything happens blazingly fast and you have no time to react before you get killed" mode (if it used CPU timing loops). The Turbo button allowed you to play the latter sort of games by reducing the clock to the speed the game was designed for.
Obviously, using CPU timing loops fell out of favour as higher speed CPUs proliferated, but for a while there the Turbo button really did have a useful purpose.
"Something like a Panasonic KX-P6100?"
I had one of those! Well, actually two, after someone relieved us of the first one and some other computer kit after entering our house via a window they'd jimmied open. Lovely little machine with a very simple paper path so the occasional jam was very easy to correct. Did have a limited lifespan though. The one that got nicked was approaching its end, so getting it replaced on insurance wasn't the worst thing that could have happened.
These days I use a Canon MX870. Yes, it's an inkjet, and quite chunky, but apart from the cost of feeding it I have never had any issues of any kind. It just sits there and does its thing day in, day out.
Now if I could just stop SWMBO from making pointless copies of any form we send to anyone [if you REALLY need to keep a copy, just scan it on the very same device and we can always print a copy out if we ever need to], plus printing out random web pages which she almost never refers to again, we could cut the fodder bill quite a bit...
> I would point out that evisceration = disembowelling cannot commonly be done with vitriol = sulphuric acid...
I dont really see why not. I mean, yes, you'd have to be careful, and it would take a while. But you could get there in the end. Much sooner if you weren't worried about a bit of collateral damage, which if you're disembowelling someone is quite possibly the case.
Oh God so much this. I run with data off a lot of the time (because many of the games I have on my phone are only playable in this state; turn data on and they spend so much time retrieving and displaying ads that they forget about the game part) and this frustrates me every time I turn it back on.
A moment's thought would lead one to the conclusion that if the user has just turned data services back on, it's probably because they want to DO something that requires data, and therefore care should be taken to prioritise the thing the USER wants to do and not the fifty background apps the user isn't trying to use that all see the connection go back on and decide now would be a really good time to use it.
> Google Play Services I'm looking at you
And GMail. Those seem to be the top tier, then after that all the other background apps get a go, and at some indefinite point in the future it might deign to consider the app you're actually opening.
> It's only a brief hiccup on 4G.
Oh how I wish. Even on 4G, turning data on pretty much locks up my phone for a few minutes. You can try to do other things but there's no guarantee anything will work, and I struggle to access any data until after GMail at the least has had its fill. Most of the time, after GMail I also have to wait for Slack et al. to finish looking for stuff before I can do anything.
I used to believe that he wasn't as stupid as he seemed, but it's become increasingly difficult to justify that opinion. When he came out with "testing makes our numbers go up so I asked our people to slow down the testing", I lost the last few remaining shreds of any desire to do so.
My ISP's technical support used to be really good, but then they got bought out by a larger firm and now it's back to script monkey level. Fortunately I hardly ever need them so it's not too big a problem.
It was difficult when my 10-year-old ADSL modem died though. It was impossible to get them to understand that a problem with the line would not cause the modem's power light not to come on, nor would it stop the various computers on the LAN from being able to talk to each other. They insisted that I had to try moving it to a different phone socket, replacing the phone cable, etc. before we could do anything else. We even had to have a tech visit to test the line, which unsurprisingly was fine.
When we finally did manage to convince them that the modem was dead, they wanted to charge me $150 or so for a new one - I had to explicitly ask why I couldn't get the "free modem with a 2-year contract" deal that any new customer could get to get them to concede that yes, I could do that and not have to pay for a new modem.
We had a (recent) song called Agnus Dei on our church roster for a while. Except for some reason when our pastor at the time downloaded the PDF from SongSelect, it didn't put the title on like it normally does. So he helpfully wrote it in as Angus Dei for us, which annoyed me every time I saw it. Fortunately it's not in our current rotation any more :)
One of the first times - but far from the last - in which my life was made a lot easier by being in Western Australia rather than the eastern part. By the time we rocked up to work that day, our IT people in the eastern states had already slammed the gates and sent out emails explaining the issue, and giving us clear directions on what emails to delete unopened.
These days I work for a company that has its headquarters (and IT staff) here in the west, so we don't have that exact protection, but then the automated filters are a lot better these days, as well as all the anti-macro protections that have been put into place since those days of course.
The main threat for us now is phishing instead, but I've had far more fake phishing emails from our cybersecurity partner organisation than real ones. It's easy to detect the fake ones: I do a DNS query for the domain name in the link, then do a lookup on that IP and see if it belongs to our cybersecurity partner.
The ones I thought might have been real have so far turned out to be genuine emails from partner organisations. For some reason some organisations think it's acceptable to send you a "Welcome to our portal" link without any warning. That one turned out to be from the firm that was doing our audit - we'd changed auditors since the previous year so I didn't recognise the domain. I never wound up using the portal anyway; I just emailed stuff to the individual auditors.
I once had a work machine - can't remember if it was NT4 or 2000 - which completely failed to boot, due to a faulty mouse. The precise details are mercifully lost to time, this being around 19-20 years ago, but I was surprised at the time that such a small issue could have such severe consequences.
I always go to my work's Christmas do. It's a free meal, at the very least.
Nothing says I can't take my Kindle and just sit in a corner reading, when I'm not eating and drinking. And when I've had enough I can head back to the office or home, depending on the time and whether I have anything pressing I want to get done.
In 2013 I had long service leave due and we organised a 3-week trip to go and visit relatives in the north of the state -- basically 1 week driving up, 1 week there, and 1 week driving back. Particularly on the way up, we'd be out of mobile range most of the time. (We went up through the interior, and came down along the more populated coastline; still mostly no signal, but more frequent spots where signal could be obtained.)
Shortly after we set off, I got a text message from one of my colleagues asking for help with something that had broken.
By the time we lost reception, we'd gotten to the point where I'd made a tentative diagnosis and sent him the appropriate procedure. But I didn't get confirmation that it had worked until a couple of days later, when we got to a major town.
No, it wasn't DNS - that would have been a different team and not my problem at all.
No need for any hijinks here - I do normally spend a week or so down at my dad's place over the holidays, and as they're in a semi-rural area there is indeed no mobile signal either there or on most of the trip down. (If you really desperately need signal, there are a couple of places on the property where you might be able to get a trace of it, if you wave the phone around enough and the wind is in the right direction. Had to call Microsoft for an activation code while I was there once, that was fun.)
It's always interesting heading into one of the nearby towns from their place - and suddenly receiving a whole set of increasingly frantic text messages and missed call notifications, because something broke and my colleagues couldn't figure out how to fix it.
Unfortunately there's no way I can forward my alerts (nearly all of which are caused by random Oracle webservice failures, usually returning a 502 Bad Gateway, the fix being to send the exact same request a minute or two later) to the people at Oracle who wrote the webservice code. So I have to deal with the fallout.
I think you're mistaken here. In "Prelude to Foundation", we find that R. Daneel Olivaw is the one (acting in the persona of Demerzel, the Emperor's right hand man) who sets Hari Seldon on the path to developing psychohistory. And of course he also turns out to be the one who set up Gaia.
I haven't actually read the Foundation books that were written by other authors, so it may be that what you say is true, but if so it would be a massive contradiction with the canon books.
Eh, you're not alone. I have to feed date criteria into a system that is only designed for numbers and strings, so they go into strings in YYYY-MM-DD form. There's always a start date, but open-ended rules get defaulted to 2999-12-31 for the max value.
I started with this company working on replacing a precursor to this system, in 2002. We replaced it again in 2006 and then we replaced that again in 2014. So I'm not too worried about what happens if we get to Y3K and this is still in use. (But if we did, it's fairly easy to change.) There are other end date type things in this system that will cause us much more rework much more often.
Might just be some missing commas. They had two buildings, separated, with a laser link [between them]. It's actually a fairly reasonable interpretation IMO, because if the buildings weren't separated there'd be easier ways to connect them, so the separation is germane. Though "separated by [whatever]" would have been better for scene setting.
That could well be true. Even here, the systems I work with for 95% of my job can only be connected to from our office's wired network. I don't usually bother taking my laptop to meetings because the few things I can usefully do with it over the wifi aren't worth having to reconnect to everything.
So when I have to fix things in the middle of the night from home, I have to remote desktop in to my office computer first, otherwise I can't do anything.
One time when I was away on leave but still logging in from time to time, I emailed the helpdesk saying "I can send email OK, but I'm not receiving any new email." They emailed me the description of the cause (which was that they'd migrated my mailbox to Office 365 while I was away) and the steps I needed to do to fix it, and were somewhat surprised when I sent in a text message a few days later saying "has anything been done about this? I'm still not getting my emails".
If you're using Firefox - as I am - then there's no need for the add-on. If your text selection looks like a URL Firefox adds the appropriate options to the context menu. Just select the URL, right-click, "Open link in new tab", simple as that.
You have to remember that multiple users in Win98 were a convenience feature, not a security feature. There *was* no security; everyone had administrator access to the machine because there was no other kind of access. Having multiple users allowed you to have separate document folders for everyone, individual preferences for wallpaper and desktop items and so on, but there was no reason to enforce logging in as an existing user if you didn't want to.
At home, on the kids' computers, I use the same password on each for my account (which is the only admin account on their machines).
The password hint for my account on computer A is "Same as on computer B" and the password hint for my account on computer B is "Same as on computer A".
Very much the case here, since we got fancy "Follow Me" printers - you can go to any printer you like, tap your keypass on the sensor to log in, and get it to print out any jobs you may have waiting. Of course, people tend to want to pick up their print jobs from the closest printer to their location, so it doesn't really provide much benefit over the old model of just sending your job to that printer, and as an added bonus it's now impossible to send off a large print job and wait for it to be processed before you go and pick it up, because you have to do the keypass thing at the printer to start your job actually printing. (I think the rationale is more about security - since you have to be at the printer to print your document, there's little chance that someone else will see it before you collect it.)
But I hardly have to print off anything nowadays (and when I do it's usually no more than one sheet of paper) so it doesn't bother me unduly.
[giving the user an old laptop of the same vintage as their broken one]
> I thought that was standard BOFH policy :)
No, standard BOFH policy is to give them one of the same vintage as their broken one, but with half the memory somehow missing. And probably a special keyboard driver that inserts extra characters about 5-10% of the time.
In the BOFH's company, elevators are definitely more dangerous. Not that there haven't been stair incidents as well, of course, but at least if you take the stairs you're not going to find yourself locked in them for the weekend after having somehow accidentally consumed a large dose of laxatives...
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