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rscott posted:Odgen Lake on 5.25" floppies for the Apple ][c hell yeah. I remember playing one of the King's Quest games on my parents' Apple ][e. You had to swap disks about every 3 screens. Must have been like 30 disks. And we liked it that way.
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| # ? Oct 1, 2010 20:56 |
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| # ? May 21, 2013 03:18 |
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My first PC had a 5.25 floppy drive with a spring that was just a tad bit too powerful. You had to catch the disk when you flipped the lever or it'd fly halfway across the room. It was awesome.
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| # ? Oct 1, 2010 21:41 |
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Rohaq posted:Holy poo poo, what? Wasn't approved, supervisor made the demands straight to employees. More stuff that pisses me off every day: Vendors and Instant Messaging. Specifically, why does nobody understand XMPP is supposed to use server-to-server federation magic to function like email (so user@mycompany.com can chat to user@yourcompany.com)? I'm sick of going through the approval process to make exceptions for AIM. If you, Mr. Consultant Company, can't be assed to set up your own XMPP at least have the courtesy of using an IM service that follows proper standards, like Jabber.org or Google Talk. 
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| # ? Oct 1, 2010 23:35 |
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Why do people have their enormous heavy rear end oak desks smashed up against the only power outlet in the room? How is anyone supposed to replace your lovely computer or printer when you need a loving forklift to move the desk out of the way to get to the outlet?
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 01:10 |
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The worst are the lovely desks with a hole above some drawers in the desk so there's no way to reach the cables when they go in the hole. Just put the hole in the back middle of the desk you jack asses. We actually got maintenance to come and drill some holes for us in a counter top. 
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 01:20 |
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J posted:Why do people have their enormous heavy rear end oak desks smashed up against the only power outlet in the room? How is anyone supposed to replace your lovely computer or printer when you need a loving forklift to move the desk out of the way to get to the outlet? Hole saw. They may not like it but I refuse to move furniture that shouldn't be oriented the way they have it.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 01:29 |
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J posted:Why do people have their enormous heavy rear end oak desks smashed up against the only power outlet in the room? How is anyone supposed to replace your lovely computer or printer when you need a loving forklift to move the desk out of the way to get to the outlet? The inverse of this, when people decide that absolutely have to have their desk on the wall farthest from the only network drop in the room.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 03:37 |
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The Fool posted:The inverse of this, when people decide that absolutely have to have their desk on the wall farthest from the only network drop in the room. Lets meet in the middle, how about the ones who want their desk dead center in the room with no cables visible at all? No cable runners or anything. Yeah, they didn't get quite what they wanted. I voted to have one of those hollow power poles run down into the middle of the desk, that idea was vetoed.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 04:56 |
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PirateDentist posted:Lets meet in the middle, how about the ones who want their desk dead center in the room with no cables visible at all? No cable runners or anything. Yeah, they didn't get quite what they wanted. I voted to have one of those hollow power poles run down into the middle of the desk, that idea was vetoed. The correct answer is "Okay. I need $250 for a concrete saw, around $100 for some steel channeling. Around $2000 for the building modification permits, and around $5,000 to get a general contract to sign off on it when it's complete. Here's my purchase request." If you have multiple floors, double the costs and remove the concrete saw so that the GC is liable for the ceiling falling through to the next level down.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 05:25 |
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PirateDentist posted:Lets meet in the middle, how about the ones who want their desk dead center in the room with no cables visible at all? No cable runners or anything. Yeah, they didn't get quite what they wanted. I voted to have one of those hollow power poles run down into the middle of the desk, that idea was vetoed. Last time I dealt with this, I just dropped cables, everythign including non fire-marshal approved drop cables, up a wall, and drilled a hole in the ceiling tile and dropped it to dangle. . . Things that piss me off, I have severe anxiety issues. I have been known to wake up screaming if I'm not plastered drunk, about work. Thursday I took off cause I had spent a night of waking up screaming every half hour, puking, working for a half hour, dozing back off, waking up screaming, puking, working, rinse repeat. A lot of people at work understand the stress I'm under and appreciated, and didn't mind I took a day off when they knew why. One person though told me I needed to suck it up and get on xanax. My family has a history of drug abuse problems, my grandmother overdosed herself to death when my grandfather wanted to ween her off of them, my dad has a severe issue with them after my brother died a few years back (bottle of oxycontin a week, mixed with xanax, and whatever else his crooked doctors prescribe him). People wonder why I don't do anything other than drink and smoke.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 05:25 |
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Maker Of Shoes posted:Hole saw. They may not like it but I refuse to move furniture that shouldn't be oriented the way they have it. I went into an office a few months ago that had elected to move every single desk, phone, and workstation to a new location to celebrate having new, heavy, bolted-together multipart desks. They were, as can be predicted, somehow placed in each instance in the worst possibly orientation for anything involving cabling or power. Someone had taken a hole saw and thoughtfully cut a three-inch diameter hole straight through the desk in front of each power outlet and network drop. No one involved in the project has any idea who did it, which is a shame, because I'd really like to make them cookies.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 06:00 |
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Hard drives and disk controllers. Dammit do they piss me off. Seagate? Oh look some of the drives need a firmware upgrade not easily searchable on the Seagate site to get it to work. Main hard drive? Why oh why do you make the Linux bootup sequence freeze like that? I swear, I should ditch this PC and get an abacus.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 06:02 |
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Yaos posted:The worst are the lovely desks with a hole above some drawers in the desk so there's no way to reach the cables when they go in the hole. Just put the hole in the back middle of the desk you jack asses. We actually got maintenance to come and drill some holes for us in a counter top. I've been onsite to a branch that got these fancy custom desks and counters, but they didn't want any power or network drops anywhere but 6 inches from the floor. They also didn't want to drill grommets, because it would look bad. Also, cords couldn't be visible. Took them awhile to work up the guts to talk to the designer and have her reconsider the grommet concept. Speaking of that, people who make floor plans and never think to run them by IT, or someone with a working knowledge of computers is frustrating. Funny how getting a cabler to run 10 new network drops with finished walls is a lot more expensive them having them do it before the drywall is up.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 06:19 |
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psylent posted:Server's C drive partitioned to 10GB The shop I have moved into had, as one of its previous linux guys, a greybeard who was still stuck in the early 90s and treated multi-TB RAIDs almost like pre-ATA IDE disks. Our partition standard was likely stolen from the debian 3 installer: 512MB /boot 2GB / 2GB swap 6GB /usr 8GB /usr/local 5GB /var rest of space /mnt/disk0 I remember back in days of yore you had to do this to keep block sizes down, to deal with older distributions that just suicided themselves if / was too big, and the 3ware cards we're using won't let you boot off a >2TB volume, but splitting up /usr, /usr/local, and /var hasn't been necessary since the pre-Lewinski Clinton administration. Fortunately everyone else in the group is much saner and allowed me to redefine the official partitioning standard as 128MB /boot (overkill but it was a compromise to some groups that frequently build weird kernels), 2GB swap, 32GB /, everything else mounted as /sda.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 06:26 |
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In 2003 or 2004 I worked with someone who split every drive into multiple 2GB partitions and formatted them as FAT16 because he was convinced that FAT32/NTFS "wasted too much space".
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 08:43 |
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I take it the judge ruled your actions justifiable?
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 12:10 |
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Pretty much anything done by Abertay University. "Here's your modules, we will be putting your class materials online but OOPS THE CLASS LINKS AREN'T UP YET AND WONT BE FOR ANOTHER MONTH GUESS YOU NEED TO WAIT AND SEE IF THE LECTURERS REMEMBER TO EMAIL EVERYONE IN THE CLASS THE LECTURE NOTES AND WORKSHEETS AFTER EVERY CLASS WON'T YOU" And I am so loving glad I have roboform. The wireless system requires you login twice; once to get on the Abertay network, again to connect to "Websense", then you have to provide login credentials for the Portal, followed by Blackboard. And if you want to check your university mail, do it again. The whole Abertay system is a loving clusterfuck of lovely services bolted together piecemeal. Thank god it lets me forward emails from the lovely microsoft service to my gmail one.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 13:41 |
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Ted Stevens posted:I hate Quantum drives. I've never had one last more than a year. Stupid Compaq computer I had in 1999 went through drives like nothing else. Take my advice: don't bother going after girls who are into computers. You have maybe 1 in 1000 chance of nabbing a nice, sane, attractive girl. Usually you'll just get one of the three.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 13:57 |
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The Fool posted:The inverse of this, when people decide that absolutely have to have their desk on the wall farthest from the only network drop in the room. Isn't this just always guaranteed. If someone moves their desk, it will almost certainly be at the furthest possible point from any networking or even power sockets. Even if you have those interchangeable square floorboards (which can be blank or have a socket box) like we do in the bigger offices, they will still manage to pick the one square that your underfloor power cabling just can't quite reach so you have to call the 'leccy out (they've already moved at this point without asking and are blaming you for not having power for another 24 hours, because turning things on is clearly an IT function) and probably the one part of the floor that requires the most slicing of carpet tiles once the floorbox is in place.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 14:07 |
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Syano posted:I dont get it It was actually a case of give and take, see a lot of services now require a pretty decent upload as well as download, if you make youtube videos, back up stuff to dropbox etc then it could take ages to do that. We wanted to increase the upload but not have people who saturate the upload do that (people using P2P for example) New speeds are like so 50Mbit Download - 1.5Mbit upload, now 5Mbit upload 20Mbit Download - 768kbit upload, now 2Mbit upload 10Mbit Download - 512kbit upload, now 1Mbit upload Now going to link the full traffic management page for the rest as this could get long: http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/tr...er-uploads.html Now depending on network utilisation all P2P and Newsgroup traffic during peak times will automatically have a 75% restriction put on them. Everything else would be okay. Announcement that was going to happen Friday was pulled for reasons I will not go into, will be announced just not the best time for it.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 15:55 |
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Not to derail but will this include legal, gaming P2P connections such as WoW's new streaming torrent-based client, Borderlands, MW2 and the like? 12.5mb/s should still be good enough for these especially if the remaining bandwidth is still available for other things such as youtube streaming. Also will this be similar "peak time" to other ISP's such as BT's nice 16 hour window of 8am to midnight. Or is it similar to the vague times in this article? http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2270608...usiness-unveils quote:"The peak service time on our network is usually around 10pm, and in the daytime it's essentially empty. So we want to leverage that unused capacity to enable businesses to do more with their connections," he said. -edit. Just looked at the page you linked. As a 50mb customer this is awesome. Verizian fucked around with this message at Oct 2, 2010 around 16:55 |
| # ? Oct 2, 2010 16:40 |
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Midelne posted:I went into an office a few months ago that had elected to move every single desk, phone, and workstation to a new location to celebrate having new, heavy, bolted-together multipart desks. They were, as can be predicted, somehow placed in each instance in the worst possibly orientation for anything involving cabling or power. Probably someone that had once lived life as an IT grunt and got out before he went insane. Assembling office furniture is calming in a way.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 19:20 |
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Anaxite posted:I swear, I should ditch this PC and get an abacus. Get yourself an extra one so you don't have to wait for it to show up in the mail when your nearest MBA walks in and says, "Can this be redone in 64-bit? The sales team already put it on the box." CitizenKain posted:Also, cords couldn't be visible... ... or people who make office layout plans without thinking at all about ergonomics, workplace lighting, office purpose and expected traffic flow, and so forth. Holy gently caress, you'd think that people would have this poo poo figured out by now. Last year during a promotion one of my requirements was an office reorganization; I already had some thoughts about wiring feasibility so the tech wouldn't complain much, but whoever put in these desks was a serious asshat. "I know, we'll place everything right up against the windows for maximum lighting because the 1500W/m^2 from fluorescents isn't enough!"  Problem: These are 50% "customer service offices", which means you should be facing the client and, oh yeah, now we're sitting with our back squarely to the door.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2010 20:58 |
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enotnert posted:Holy poo poo stress problems. Dude you need to quit your job right away and get a job sweeping floors or something.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 02:44 |
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mono posted:Take my advice: don't bother going after girls who are into computers. You have maybe 1 in 1000 chance of nabbing a nice, sane, attractive girl. Usually you'll just get one of the three. Quoting this. Dated a couple computer chicks, only one was slightly sane. I wish smart women were more balanced. She either demanded that we drive 200 miles EVERY weekend to visit her parents or she would throw a fit. She refused to hang out with my friends, despite my willingness to hang out with her friends and family. She proceeded to mock my family and tell me how much she hated them. She hated that I worked on my own cars and hated my diesels, made me sell one. Nothing was good enough for her. I even tried to tell her what was wrong and warned her that I would be leaving if she could not makes some changes in her life like I was willing to make for her. She threw a tantrum. I dumped her, even packed all her stuff for her, she showed up to get it and punched me in the face. End of story. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at Oct 3, 2010 around 03:38 |
| # ? Oct 3, 2010 03:35 |
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Since MS Office 2003 (including 2007 and 2010), the Office installer has not been smart enough to remove/upgrade the trial version of Office that's often included on new laptops. So I get contacted every now and then by a user who's ended up with both the site licensed and the trial versions of Office installed, and the trial version is associated with office file types.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 05:12 |
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Mr Chips posted:Since MS Office 2003 (including 2007 and 2010), the Office installer has not been smart enough to remove/upgrade the trial version of Office that's often included on new laptops. So I get contacted every now and then by a user who's ended up with both the site licensed and the trial versions of Office installed, and the trial version is associated with office file types. Yet the trial version uninstalls any earlier versions of Office, even if they had components that the trial does not, leaving the user unable to open .doc files when the trial expires. Nice loving move, Microsoft.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 05:16 |
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CommieGIR posted:I dumped her, even packed all her stuff for her, she showed up to get it and punched me in the face. End of story. I actually really like breakups like that, stressful as they are. There's none of that sentimentality or wistfulness afterwards - you can be completely and totally certain that you made the right choice.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 07:22 |
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The attitude by manufacturers and technicians alike that it's perfectly OK for equipment to just stop working for no reason, and not being able to handle itself via watchdog or some other means. And it's not just isolated to cheapy consumer-grade equipment like wireless routers or cable modems, either. My company installed over 20 $10,000 marine satellite IP terminals on our ships, and not until they started operating at sea did we find out that the terminal will just stop tracking satellites sometimes for no reason and stops working. It's advertised as an "always on" service and we were sort of hoping we could depend on it to do VPN at sea. Well it can't if it just stops working, and the manufacturer's attitude so far through several firmware updates has just been "sorry we can't really figure it out, just keep rebooting them." Thanks that's what we paid ten grand per unit for.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 07:33 |
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I'm starting to notice that with pretty much all of our vendors. Hardware, software, service. No matter how much money we're talking about, the support is terrible. I feel like my average day is more "vendor wrangler" than "network / system admin". I think it was bad before and got a lot worse when the economy tanked and they still haven't made improvements.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 13:00 |
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I think it's just part of the bigger problem where things are designed to last the warranty period then if they break tough poo poo. 3yr old TV poo poo the bed? too bad pal, it was old, buy a new one.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 13:11 |
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Well, that's just like laptops. Oh, you have a 3-4 year old laptop and the mobo is shot? You need to buy a new one. To repair something like that, it's going to cost $200 or so for the motherboard, a good chunk of my time ($$$), and there may still be problems with it. You can buy a good netbook for $300-$400, maybe cheaper depending on the sale going on.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 15:32 |
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Ted Stevens posted:Well, that's just like laptops. Oh, you have a 3-4 year old laptop and the mobo is shot? You need to buy a new one. To repair something like that, it's going to cost $200 or so for the motherboard, a good chunk of my time ($$$), and there may still be problems with it. You can buy a good netbook for $300-$400, maybe cheaper depending on the sale going on. You'd be lucky to get that mobo for just $200.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 15:35 |
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Ted Stevens posted:Well, that's just like laptops. Oh, you have a 3-4 year old laptop and the mobo is shot? You need to buy a new one. To repair something like that, it's going to cost $200 or so for the motherboard, a good chunk of my time ($$$), and there may still be problems with it. There's really no way to make a laptop so that this wouldn't happen, if you also want it to be relatively light weight. Let alone the fact that of course if your motherboard is broken, it needs to be replaced, it's not like it's common for desktop mobos to break and then be able to be repaired...
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 19:58 |
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ahh, network points. The site I work at had an extension built just as I was starting. About 2 months after I started we had an empty building to fill with computers. It was at this point I realised my boss or the CIO had never been consulted during the design of this building... In every room the trunking was at a different height, sometimes it would be around the floor, sometimes it would be above the desk height so you could easily access the plugs. Mostly it was below desk height so you couldnt really access it. I'm not sure but you'd think whatever logic they thought was best they would stick with it throughout the entire building? Apparently not.
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| # ? Oct 3, 2010 23:06 |
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fishmech posted:There's really no way to make a laptop so that this wouldn't happen, if you also want it to be relatively light weight. To be fair, I think this is true of a lot of products in the electronic world. I think most pre-high end 486 processors didn't really need a CPU fan, they were able to make a considerable processor speed and complexity jump when they added the "you must have a CPU fan" expectation of today. The earlier, simpler processors that haven't failed yet are perceived by some as effectively lasting forever; doesn't NASA troll eBay and similar places for really old processors (like 286 era) for this reason?
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| # ? Oct 4, 2010 03:55 |
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univbee posted:To be fair, I think this is true of a lot of products in the electronic world. I think most pre-high end 486 processors didn't really need a CPU fan, they were able to make a considerable processor speed and complexity jump when they added the "you must have a CPU fan" expectation of today. The earlier, simpler processors that haven't failed yet are perceived by some as effectively lasting forever; doesn't NASA troll eBay and similar places for really old processors (like 286 era) for this reason? NASA trolls ebay because 486 and down processors are not as messed-with in terms of cosmic radiation as the new processors. Basically, a 386 was 1,500 nm across, where today we have Pentogidgits at 45nm and smaller. If a radiation particle strikes today's processor, you can disrupt a quarter of the die, completely destroying whatever work you were doing (I hope it wasn't re-entry burn control  ), whereas the 386 would lose one bit, maybe two if it hit right.Slow, yes. Needed to not make all of our astronauts extra crispy most of the time? Definately.
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| # ? Oct 4, 2010 04:18 |
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Also, all they do is perform calculations. 100mhz is plenty for just calculating trajectories and mathematical calculations. They're not trying to play Crysis at ultra quality.
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| # ? Oct 4, 2010 04:21 |
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Ted Stevens posted:Also, all they do is perform calculations. 100mhz is plenty for just calculating trajectories and mathematical calculations. They're not trying to play Crysis at ultra quality. They should. It's of vital importance if gaming can have it's reaction times sped up by gaming in zero-G. Korean professional players NEED THIS EDGE.
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| # ? Oct 4, 2010 04:25 |
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| # ? May 21, 2013 03:18 |
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Ted Stevens posted:Also, all they do is perform calculations. 100mhz is plenty for just calculating trajectories and mathematical calculations. They're not trying to play Crysis at ultra quality. This becomes less true for interstellar trajectories and things like planetary impact events 500 years out. It pisses me off that I have to buy a chip that's 90% bloated graphics crap. I want a damned processor. If I wanted graphics, I'd get a graphics card. Despite all the "energy inefficiency", I wouldn't be surprised if earlier CPUs were more efficient in a cluster because the new chips, despite all the miniaturization, are ultimately wasting space and spreading around heat needlessly. Incidentally, claiming that this chip is faster just because it has multiple cores is something of a cop out. If it were faster, it would be 20GHz single pipe. 
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| # ? Oct 4, 2010 04:35 |
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