I’m pretty sure I’ve done most of these at some point or another.
It really depends whether I like you or not.
Liking my users is entirely dependent on how much work you make me do, and how difficult that work becomes because of your personality.
I’ve gotten tickets that were literally “$thing is broken”, or “help! Call me!” With no information given, not even a callback number. I’ve also gotten a rambling voicemail, in which a user describes an issue with a piece of software and doesn’t identify themselves, not provide any callback information. The CID on the voicemail wasn’t available either, and since I work with several companies doing support, I couldn’t even identify the client, nevermind the specific user.
There’s also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay… Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.
There’s also the unavailable users, they are not available ever, at any time, for any reason. I have literally gotten critical tickets which require me to access the users workstation to fix, while it is logged in as the user, and I could call less than 5 minutes after they create the ticket, and they’re busy. Email them and they have an out of the office message, or reply with something about them being in a meeting (with no information about when they will be free), or simply don’t reply at all. After a few weeks of trying to contact them to connect and resolve their very simple (but “critical”) issue and getting nowhere, close the ticket, only to be met with a flurry of emails from them about how the problem isn’t solved. Immediately call or reply and you get voicemail and silence.
Most of my users do fine, and it’s usually a minority that are troublemakers, and I want to make that clear… But the troublemakers are the driving force for me to find ways to fix pretty much every problem without ever opening their system though remote control. I can do all kinds of things from registry edits and hacks, to writing and scheduling PowerShell scripts to fix their shit every time they log in, and deploy that by a remote PowerShell command prompt, and nothing more.
Yeah William, you might be the c-whatever bullshit, but if the issue is sooo fucking critical, make five goddamned minutes for me to fix your shit or it’s not getting fixed. I don’t care if you own the goddamned planet, I can’t fix your shit without access.
There’s also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay… Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.‘’
This could be weaponized incompetence. “Oh I keep having issues with my computer that interfere with my work, so I can’t work and IT is incompetent and can’t help me, look at all these tickets and how long IT takes. I just can’t get any work done!”
To be slightly fair to the tech illiterate, there’s no sfp transceiver specified or shown in the picture… how the hell is someone supposed to plug that in?
I think this really comes down to whether the employee was IT (and to an extent part of the network team). If so, I'd say there's a lot of questions to be answered here. If not, there's also a lot of questions to be answered but not from that employee :P
I remember there was a virus that had a tiny cat on the screen and it would chase your mouse cursor. Once it catches your mouse cursor, the computer would crash. It was freaking awesome.
It’s just Linux. It chases you and your mouse throughout the fediverse, and when it catches you and you install it, it crashes your computer because the mouse drivers are written by a 12 year old with undiagnosed ADHD.
Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don’t think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
Computers in 97 didn’t need much in the way of cooling. A large passive heatsink was plenty for those CPUs. They’re not the 300+ watt behemoths we have today.
I really remember heatsinks being a thing on overclocked systems around that time frame and then once we got to P4 cpus the chilling towers appeared those things were massive
The lower power 486s didn’t even need a heatsink. The P3 was the first to take a heasink resembling what we have today, but damn did the P4s need some serious cooling.
It’s kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
Edit: I’m an idiot, T series is low power socketed, not mobile. 14900HX has a TDP of 55W but boosts short term to 157W, which is still pretty ridiculous
My 11950H (and all other “full power” Intel mobile CPUs) have a PL1 of >100 watts (109 for mine), and mine a PL2 of 139 watts. This laptop is about an inch thick.
Nothing about this laptop sips power, I’ve gotten as bad as 30 minutes of battery life out of a 90 watt hour battery not playing games.
If you meant cell phones and tablets, that’s mostly due to the different architecture. RISC processors are super energy efficient, which also makes them much cooler to run.
x86-64 is a CISC architecture, which tends to be much more power hungry. There are only a couple of very low power Celeron CPUs that work under 10W of TDP, while that’s very common among phones’ CPUs.
In many cases it’s actually RISC under the hood and uses an interpreter to translate the CISC commands and run them in the most optimal manner on the silicon
ARM and RISC-V absolutely scale up to multi-hundred watt server CPUs quite easily. Just look at the Ampere systems you can rent from various VPSes for example
The big benefit that ARM and RISC-V have is they have no established backwards compatibility to keep carrying technical debt forwards. ARM versions their instruction sets and software has to be released for given versions of ARM cores, and RISC-V is simply too new to have any significant technical debt on the instruction set side.
Atom cores were notable for focusing the architecture on some instructions then other instructions would be a slog to execute, so they were really good at certain things and for desktop use (especially in the extremely budget machines they got shoved into) they were painful. Much like how eCores are now. They’re very carefully architected for power efficiency, and do their jobs extremely well, but an all eCore CPU is a slog for desktop use in many cases
I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won’t stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.
Tip: be passive aggressive and sarcastic when helping them. It both teaches them the solution in a memorable way, makes them not want to get help from you again, AND makes them think twice before doing so.
I don’t think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that’s about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.
You could just about play speech using one bit output using pulse-width-modulation. But it was almost unrecognizable. And would take a lot of memory for the time.
It was usual to have different numbers of beeps for POST errors.
But this was an age when a PC would say “Keyboard error. Press any key to continue”, so things were not thought out that well.
If your keyboard was actually working, you pressed a key. If it was not working, you went to get new keyboard. What is “not thought through” about that?
I had an Athlon motherboard with voice POST messages… one night I woke up to it saying “your CPU has a problem!” over and over and was freaked out until I was completely awake and figure out what was wrong.
It wasn’t high quality coming through the piezo speaker, but it was good enough.
I definitely remember short 2 or 3 second clips of relatively high quality music being played through our family’s IBM XT’s motherboard speaker at one point using a demo we got from a BBS or the Public Domain Software site in the mid-80s. It wasn’t easy but some madman made a proof-of-concept that did it and it was incredible at the time.
Back in my day, that used to be the only way a computer could produce sound. Later on you could purchase a specialized sound card that would take up a slot in your motherboard.
My dad used to disable the motherboard speaker because the noises games made back then were more annoying than fun. We eventually got a soundcard, and that was awesome.
386 era machines often had a 4 inch speaker in the front panel. It couldn’t do much. Some main boards still come with headers for a speaker, some even come with an electret beeper
A good number do, but you won’t hear anything during normal operation. If your vomputer has ever beeped at you when you try to turn it on at 0% battery, accessed the bios, etc., there’s a good chance that was the motherboard speaker.
There was also a program that would open the CD-ROM drive and play a raspberry noise at random intervals. It was a fun prank to set it to run at login.
Ah shit the sheep thing! In fact, there were others I can’t remember. And I seem to remember somewhere along the line they went from fun to spam things walking around your screen trying to make you buy shit or maybe they were trying to scam you, I can’t remember but they weren’t fun anymore, and hard to get rid of.
Haha, in highschool I put sheep.exes into the school labs startup folders as a prank once. A couple days later the tech teacher approached me and was like “nobody’s in trouble but these things are a nightmare and if I have to reimage half the lab to get rid of them it would personally ruin my day”. Somehow all the sheep were gone by the next day
I remember labs full of networked Win 98 machines in middle school, with like Novell software on them for login credentials and whatnot. The computers sat there with a login screen and when students logged into it you would be presented with the Office suite and a restricted web browser and some educational packages. A lot of normal Win 98 stuff wasn’t there though, like any settings menus. But there was some convoluted way where you could bring up a help text and then by navigating deep in the menu system somehow cause it to launch to a “normal” Win 98 desktop.
I remember getting sent to the principals office for “hacking” (pinging the computer in the next room) in like 8th grade.
Back in 4th/5th I actually was hacking, modifying our user menu to add Windows 3.1 and a password (copying config from a teacher’s profile). Also brute-forced at least two teachers passwords.
Lol the für Elise thing is funny. Back in highschool I got a “PC maintenance” credit which had me assigned as support in the computer lab. I made a batch script that ran on startup and showed a warning message saying the hard disk will self destruct and did a countdown from 10 with the motherboard speaker beeping down, fun times
We use windows at work, which is annoying as a software developer, and I WFH three days a week. I need some files available on both machines and cloud is the best option. I’m not about to be taking a flash drive between home and work.
We use it on Azure, but I don’t always want some files in version control. I might just want things for myself to share across both machines.
Plus I really don’t care what Microsoft is or isn’t tracking on my work machines. If my company is satisfied with us using everything Microsoft then who am I to complain.
For reference on what we use of Microsoft:
Azure for Git, BlobStorage, hosting, database storage, etc
Office Suite - never imagined I would work so much on excel as a dev, but every project so far has required reading from or writing to excel.
Visual Studio Professional
C# .net and entity framework
Typescript mainly with React
Teams
One drive
CoPilot integration in Visual Studio Professional, which saves countless hours in writing code, as it learns your standards. It’s like Intellisense on steroids.
SQL Server Management Studio
There’s probably more that I can’t think of right now. We have an honourable mention of GraphQL as a wrapper for our API.
If you are comfortable with a cli you could use gnupg. Its man page is good.
If I have cloud storage mounted somewhere I need to be able to drag and drop directories in and out, see the files inside in an unencrypted form, and they should transparently be uploaded encrypted. This could very well be achieved by a bunch of scripts involving gnupg, but then that’s what’s I’m looking for, because gnupg by itself wouldn’t be productive to use unless as a one-off.
Well it depends on your use case. You could make a script to encrypt a copy of all the files in a directory, make a folder in the cloud storage, and then move the encrypted files to that directory.
Adobe also recently snuck into their ToS that they could use whatever you made with their products for training AI and then gaslit everyone saying “we never said that” and changed their ToS. You know where you can’t access my stuff? Offline.
I mean I would fucking love somme puppies at work. but also pizza. pizza is good.
my old workplace used to have free breakfast which was the shit. freshly baked bread from local bakery and all sorts of toppings too, it was so nice to go to work, do stuff maybe 30minutes and just go to coffee break and eat some super good bread. and that was every day
I wish at least a little :D I’m pretty underweight because my body just rejects fat and I’m too lazy to do any body building to gain mass by getting muscle xd
We had that, but people knew what the delivery driver looked like or maybe reception had a secret list of buddies to notify …whatever. When breakfast was delivered, within 10 seconds, all the vultures in the office pounced in it, leaving nothing.
Anytime pizza was given on Fridays, same vultures would rush to be 1st in line then walk out with a plate stacked with a whole pizza… Rest of us usually got nothing.
i work for a big multinational and there was this woman who walks around with a little yappy thing. she’s the only one and i haven’t seen any rules about it in the employee handbook. i think she just turned up with it one day.
I’ve seen this kind of thing too many times to count. First it was in high school, then the workplace.
Person notices there is no explicit rule for a thing, or maybe there’s a loophole somewhere
Does the thing
Annoys someone
Now there’s a rule for the thing
Some people just want to push the envelope. Other times, people can have a poor grasp of social norms, or they simply don’t respect others. But on the other side of the coin, people get annoyed for good and bad reasons; sometimes, no reason at all.
Bottom line: it’s a mess, so we get rules. But nobody wants to spend time writing these things and enforcing them, so there’s usually a reason/person/event why they’re there.
Yes, they can indeed be a problem for people with allergies. In my case dogs (and cats unfortunately) trigger respiratory issues. I had that issue at a workplace where dogs were allowed, not fun times. And unfortunately medication like antihistamines are not an option for everybody, personally I get extremely drowsy from them, even from the latest generation meds.
Sure but it still requires trusting them when they pinky promise they won’t send any recall data. Fuck them tbh. It just makes me feel even more right about my decision to switch to Linux years ago.
That’s the part that makes everybody nervous though. Everything from the global dragnet surveillance network to the marketing company behind your grocery store app is most interested in “metadata.”
Companies like Microsoft will loudly say they don’t want your cat pictures and memes and college papers, they’re not tying your usage to an explicit file with your name and favorite pasta varieties…
…BUT that forced transmission of “anonymous user data”, could potentially be super effective in identifying and manipulating you. With enough of it, you can easily put together a profile of an individual.
Heck, for a while, TOR would advise against resizing your brower window because the window size in pixels could potentially help fingerprint you on the web. How nuts is that?!
Most people actually worried about a spook digging through “videosHomework” are indeed paranoid.
But there’s been a lot of research at what can be done even if you’re just “userID 1284hdkfuw724bfiueb”
Firstly, no, it’s not gone forever. It remains in your onedrive recycling bin for a month. Secondly, that behavior makes sense. One drive is a mirror of your synced folders. If you just want to not have the file downloaded in your computer, just right click on the file and select “free up space”.
It is. Another indicator you get is a status icon next to each file telling you if the file is permanently or temporarily (meaning it will get auto-deleted locally if you don’t use it) dowloaded to your pc or if it’s only on the cloud.
Oh, and you also get a prompt when you delete a file letting you know that it will be deleted from onedrive as well but it will still be in the recycling bin for a while. The only way to not get that prompt is to tick a box to not get reminded again.
Microsoft software has a lot of flaws but this isn’t one of them.
Python is NameError: name ‘term_to_describe_python’ is not defined
JavaScript is [object Object]
Ruby is TypeError: Int can’t be coerced into String
C is segmentation fault
C++
Java is
<span style="color:#323232;">Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot read the termToDescribeJava because is null at ThrowNullExcep.main(ThrowNullExcep.java:7)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Exec.main(ThrowNullExcep.java:7)
</span>
CSS j ust # sucks
<HTML />
Kotlin is type inference failed. The value of the type parameter K should be mentioned in input types
Go is unused variable
Rust is Compiling term v0.1.0 (/home/james/projects/Term)
I’ll happily download 63928 depends so long as it continues to work. And it does, unlike python projects that also download 2352 depends but in the process brick every other python program on your system
Crates aren’t exactly runtime dependencies, so i think that’s fine as long as the 1500+ dependencies actually help prevent reinventing the wheel 1500+ times
I once forgot to put curly braces around the thing I was adding into a hashmap. If I remember correctly it was like ~300 lines of error code, non of which said “Wrong shit inside the function call ma dude”.
programmer_humor
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.