
Prime example
This is a prime example of a little bit of knowledge potentially being extremely dangerous
53 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2020
Windows 10 is no better, when it feels like it. I've lost count of the number of times it has ignored default browser and default PDF reader changes made by the user, sometimes popping up that there is a problem with the chosen PDF reader so it is setting back to default. Since when has the developer of the technology been a problem? (apart from Flash, of course...)
Many years ago I worked in a city centre ale house which had one of the new fangled CD jukeboxes installed, it was a large alehouse with speakers dotted around the walls, but there was also a speaker in the bottom of the freestanding jukebox unit. All was well Sunday to Thursday, but come Friday & Saturday evening the CDs started skipping.
An engineer was duly called, on multiple occasions, each time they were baffled, but convinced that it was just dirt on the discs. So each time they went through cleaning each individual disc (there was 100 of them), but the next Friday or Saturday evening the music was skipping Norman Collier style again. After a couple of weeks of this I suggested that the speaker in the bottom of the jukebox was causing the problem, as the volume was cranked up on a Friday and Saturday night, this was putting more and more vibration into the unit. The engineers dismissed my suggestion and continued trying to clean the discs, but still didn't cure the problem.
A couple of weeks later I turned up for work to find a shiny new speaker mounted on the wall above the jukebox, the one in the bottom of the unit having been disconnected and the wiring redirected. Lo and behold, no more skipping discs, so the lowly barman was right all along!!
I remember reading an article many years ago in one of the many IT publications that somebody used to put grotty keyboards through a dishwasher to divest them of various layers of gunk and detritus, the author said that provided they were given sufficient time to dry out completely before hooking up to the computer they were perfectly usable
Chatting to an engineer who was busy doing a warranty repair on a PC at the college where I work, the subject of switchable power supplies came up. He once had to visit a school and replace about 20 power supplies in PCs in the library, it turns out that one of the students had spotted the voltage switch on the PSU and flicked it to see what happened... Apparently he was quite enamoured with the sound, light and smoke effect, so proceeded to flick more voltage switches, until one of the staff caught him!!
Of fingers and telephones...
One site I worked at had a Siemens phone system, instead of the more usual button and microswitch receiver detection, they used an IR light beam. One of my colleagues was on a call one day and getting bored, he looked at the receiver recess and noticed that dirt was gathering so he used his finger to clear the fluff ball, cue a broken IR beam and dropped call....
"Most other manufacturers seem to know or have learnt that critical components require their own, independent dials/knobs."
Try telling that to Citroen, we have a C4 Grand Picasso as our pool car at work and EVERYTHING other than the normal binacle dials works through the touchscreen infotainment system
One of our tutors is infamous for having huge stack of paperwork bot on and surrounding her desk, one day she called the helldesk to say that her monitor wouldn't work and that she had checked all of the cabling. I knew she only had a 15" monitor and as a CAD tutor she would appreciate a larger screen, so I took a 17" one along with me.
I got to her desk and eventually found the root cause of the problem, the power was turned off at the socket, but said socket was hidden by all of her paperwork... As I'd taken a 17" monitor along with me I swapped it in anyway, but it would no longer fit into the recess between all of her stack of paperwork. When she came back into the staffroom she said 'Thanks for the monitor, I can tell it's a bigger one, because it doesn't fit into my slot any more...'
Many years ago I worked in the business machines section of a Staples Office Superstore. A doctor had purchased a PC from us, but about a month later it wouldn't boot up, so he brought it in for us to look at (with wife and children in tow). As I recall, a few simple BIOS tweaks resolved the issue and said machine burst into life. Just to be sure, we ran it for about 10 minutes, rummaging through the internet history and temp files for good measure. The amount of Pr0n was astonishing, I wonder if his wife knew....
I used to work on a helpdesk at one of the large outsourcing companies, there were a number of teams ranged across a large open plan office, each team servicing a number of clients. There were a number fo sites across the country, so their internal IT support was centrally managed (in India). Microsoft roll out their major patches on a Tuesday (good ol' patch Tuesday...) and there's a reason for this that was obviously slightly lost on out internal IT support.
They were in the habit of downloading the patch Tuesday updates, running their own tests, then uploading them to WSUS and timed to go out over the weekend, all sounds fine and dandy. However, in the UK we were taught to turn our computers off over the weekend to save power, so we all came in on Monday morning, the busiest day of the week, and turned our computers on. Needless to say, within half an hour, when the phone lines were red hot, you could hear a wave of curses spreading across the floor as people's computers started rebooting to install the updates, putting the entire helpdesk operation into meltdown.
After about a year of this mayhem the Indian boys finally got a rap across the knuckles and re-timed the WSUS release for 2pm UK time on a Friday
Because that's beer o clock, innit??
I work in IT support at a large college, we offer equestrian courses at a farm a few miles away where we rent out classroom and office space. In order to provide IT access for the little darlings in this space which has no options for upgrade, we supply laptops, which are stored in a metal charging cabinet, which has rather large ventilation holes in it... Needless to say, the local mouse population (of which there are many on a farm) found this nice cosy spot, safe from the farm cat, where they could bed down.
One of my colleagues went out to the farm during the summer recess, after the teaching areas had not been used for a few weeks, to install some updates on the laptops. They found copious amounts of nesting material, droppings and mice (both alive and dead) and spent half the day clearing up the aftermath and noting how many chargers needed replacing. So glad I dodged that one....
I once worked on an outsourced helpdesk, one of the guys there was always asking for assistance with the simplest of support calls, or giving incorrect advice. I won't give his full name for fear of a lawsuit, but he gained the nickname behind his back of 'Useless Eustace'.
A few years later I was contracting at another outsourcer, I happened to look at the user profiles on the PC I was using and spotted a familiar name. I turned to one of my colleagues and said 'Oh, I see you've had XXXXX working here', his response was 'You mean Useless Eustace...?'
One of the best features in Lotus Notes, which has STILL not been ported into Outlook by Microshaft, is the ability to detach attachments and save them to separate storage, thereby maintaining the audit trail but saving space on the Domino/Exchange server. We have enough trouble with full mailboxes where I work as it is, current circumstances have just exacerbated the problem!!
"Fujitsu and Post Office technicians remotely accessed accounts to correct the balances, unknown to the sub-postmasters"
Shipman was, in part, convicted on computer forensic evidence, having found to be modifying patient records post mortem. Was forensic evidence presented in these (now discredited) cases, and if so, how accurate and truthful was it?
That tag line reminded me of a very old hack in Windows 3.51 and maybe even early editions of 95. Back in the day when Windows serial numbers did not contain any letters, somebody spotted that they were always divisible by 7, so you could just mash away at the 7 key, hit OK and you were licensed...