I’ve been trying to get it to say that other stores like B&H are better than Amazon (for the lulz) but it keeps saying “I don’t have an answer for that” :(
As an IT person, hearing that someone has already restarted to try to fix it, gives me mixed feelings.
First, they might be lying. I’ve had it happen that people tell me they’ve done something when they have not. Restarting is usually an easy one to verify, just check the uptime of the system.
Second, maybe they did everything right, and actually restarted, that’s cool that they tried something before calling in. I appreciate that.
Third, if the second thing is true then, I’m now frustrated, because now I have to get dirty with whatever is happening since a reboot that should have fixed the problem, didn’t fix it. I know it’s not going to be an easy fix. Most of the time, I’m right, unfortunately.
I’m all for users trying stuff before calling in. But recognise that you don’t, and shouldn’t have access to some things. Sometimes that’s administrator rights, sometimes that’s a piece of software, sometimes it’s the ability to turn off the AV/firewall.
It can be a lot of things. If you’re not sure if what you’re trying won’t screw things up more than they already are, then don’t do it. If it’s something simple that you know how to do, go for it. If you happen to get it fixed, so much the better.
“Customer self resolved” is usually the fastest way to get a problem resolved. That’s good for you, for me, and good for everyone.
Meanwhile I had an IT guy think I was just being an idiot. He was so confident I hadn’t checked something. Felt good when I showed him where it went wrong.
As system administrator, yesterday, one worker told me that they accidentally exited email and couldn’t get in, guess what, i just hit the log in button and it entered, guy just wanted a smoke break
I think the idea is that average people have no clue what color they are. So they’d be forced to take it out to check and thus have to restart their PC. It’s a trick!
Altho, maybe I’m misunderstanding something because all the pins of all the electrical cords I’ve ever seen have been silver?
I’d make up some BS about an old version of the product using brass or copper, and newer versions using aluminum or iron, so knowing the color will help me know how to fix it
I worked with a guy that would tell people that coax needed to be “released to ground” occasionally, by unhooking the cable and putting your thumb over the end. That’s how he made sure people were disconnecting and reconnecting the cable from the back of the box. He also told someone that “data might be trapped in the Ethernet cord” and advised they unplug it from both ends and swing it around their head in a circle to “loosen the stuck bits and clear the line”…
Its actually the worst advice when you haven’t figured out what it is, something like a virus (ransom ware, ad shit or similar) usually only works after a restart, if you don’t restart, the IT guy can remove it without much damage.
If I had a nickel for every time I was troubleshooting with a friend and discovered they thought turning the monitor off and on again was “rebooting the computer” I’d be depressingly wealthy.
*Shuts the laptop lid and opens it.
“Ok! It’s restarted”
IT person: “Well that was certainly quick. Are you sure you restarted it?”
Person: *Feels smug about how they were able to restart quicker than most people.
E2: of course that’s not why I told her. I explained how fastboot sometimes takes over and doesn’t actually restart the device, only “refreshes” the experience. I recommended she restart at least once a week. We’ll see what happens.
Idk how that person’s IT works, but in mine, that would probably warrant a lot of paperwork. The techs would have to pitch the change to client management, client management would have to pitch it to change management and provide test results to show it has no side effects, then deal with the techs complaining about the uptick in tickets about slow boot times or people justifying never shutting down or restarting with it taking so long to boot.
Not that they’re actually slow, our users are just super entitled. I got to observe the rollout of automatic screen lock for security reasons, and the ensuing pushback. The audacity of having to reenter your password if you’ve spent more than ten minutes doing nothing!
Security even managed to push for reducing it to five minutes after some unfortunate incident… but it got reverted for reasons you can probably guess. Hint: shit always flows downward.
I recommend looking into Windows hello for business to reduce the usage of passwords in the first place. It’s so much nicer to use your fingerprint, face, or even a PIN.
I would never consider fingerprints or face scans to be secure even for personal devices. I guess if theres literally nothing to protect, if thats possible.
I do understand the point that the biometrics are replacing very short pins usually, oftentimes 4 digits only but I dont quite see how that makes the passcodes worse than the biometrics.
I’d say even a 6 digit passcode with a randomized number pad, alongside an emergency wipe pin, would do better than biometrics, which also need to have a passcode setup as backup anyhow.
Maybe you could play out a few scenarios that illustrate your point?
Why exactly do you think biometrics are so terrible? Is it because you could theoretically access someone’s computer when they are sleeping or something?
As far as I’m aware that is not the consensus in the industry. I even need biometric (in combination with a card and a pin) to enter a specific datacenter.
I do think that bringing up specialised and uncommon hardware like randomised number pads is out of scope. Are you talking about highly sensitive and restricted systems? I’m talking about normal user computers.
Randomized keypads are for touchscreens, although like you said sort of not common for desktop workstations.
Just comparing a password to biometrics though on say a laptop or desktop, there is the major drawnback that you can be forced either knowingly or unknowingly to put in a biometric to unlock a device. It would be easier to circumvent then a standard password (at my company and the clients we work with, 16 characters is standard) with an encrypted hard drive.
This is all deduction ive made from other things I know to be true though, if you happen to know of a resource that explains both methods of securing g a workstation and the risks associated, I’d love to read it.
I also do agree overall that password less makes the most sense now, as people are never going to get better at making secure passwords and remembering them.
windows doesnt actually shut down, its some kind of hybrid hibernation now. it only really reboots if you actually reboot. so they may actually be “shutting down” every day.
They have successfully circumvented the reboot. I just always turn that setting off. SSDs are ubiquitous, nobody needs a fake shutdown. It just causes more issues.
“Hi so to save us some time I’ve restarted the computer, went ahead and assigned a static IP to all devices and put them all on the same sub net. While in the router I noticed there was a firmware update so I managed to do that removing the ROM chip and wrote an open source os that uses half the resources of the factory one…”
It helps too. I lost internet, did two full reboots of the modem and router. Nothing. Called support. He walked me through the process of rebooting the modem and router. It worked that time.
My tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory is that ISPs switch peoples’ Internet off intermittently to see if anyone notices and save on bandwidth. And they only switch it back on when you call in to tech support.
The number of times I’ve had Internet issues, restarted my modem and router and have it not fix the problem, but when I restart them when I’m on the phone with tech support and it magically fixes the problem just makes me so damn suspicious…
They probably are just incompetent. Killing internet to someone not using it wouldn’t really save anything. I’ve had the same service provider for 5 years and only had one interruption due to a downed pole or something. Cox and Comcast though, CONSTANT issues.
They don’t need to, they already use overprovisioning for bandwidth.
It’s only in rare cases where the backend is so old and limited that it only supports a specific maximum number of active clients that they do that, and I’ve only heard about it in rural areas and similar places
I spent months trying to tell my ISP that their side of a DHCP transaction wasn’t giving me my IPv6 address, being so specific as to send them the exact offending packets but it wasn’t until I took my entire network apart, unboxed their shitbox router and plugged that in that they would believe me.
One day my MIL’s Macintosh stopped being able to connect to the Internet over its internal ethernet, which was directly connected to the cable modem.
They called Comcast a bunch of times to no avail, so they sent someone out to check it. He had no idea what was wrong, so I said “Let’s connect your laptop to the Mac with an Ethernet cable just to make sure the Ethernet works.”
Dude looked at me like I had two heads. “It doesn’t work like that.”
I proceeded to grab a patch cable, hook them together, and mount the Mac’s public shares on the Windows machine, thus proving the Ethernet worked on both systems.
Turns out Comcast had changed the MTUs on the modems one night, which made the Mac not work for some reason. But getting a cheap router and putting it between solved the problem.
I had one where yes everything was plugged in but… The power strips never plugged into the wall… They were just plugged into each other.
That one turned out to be an annoying bit of cable management that I wouldn’t have had to do if they would have just left things alone and let me handle the original ticket
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