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Oh hi, HP. Hey, remember when we ordered 11 identical servers with dual dual-port 10GbE cards? Yeah, we really didn't want two of them to show up with dual FC HBAs. And we really didn't want one of them to come in with its riser cards not even seated all the way and the cover of the server just mashed the gently caress down on top of them.
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Oct 4, 2013 19:19
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ookiimarukochan posted:It's not. We may not have the insanely overdone worker protection of France or Germany, but neither are we America. Given how badly that could gently caress up her future career I'm surprised she's not taken your company to court. Turns out they got around it because she was still on her 3 month probation, where you can (legally I think) fire someone for no reason. She was PA to the MD, and like... well... like all of them, they didn't get on. Every one of his PAs always used to come into our office (across the corridor) to vent, it's pretty funny how they all did the same thing but yeah apparently he's rather demanding to work for (childish strops etc, they seem to be part of the personality with CEOs and the like?) and I think he's given up trying to have a PA now!
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Oct 4, 2013 19:35
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AlexDeGruven posted:Oh hi, HP. Hey, remember when we ordered 11 identical servers with dual dual-port 10GbE cards? Take a picture of that server and complain to HP's Customer Support. Feedback from customers is the only way things will impro-oh gently caress it. Who am I kidding?
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Oct 4, 2013 20:11
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Maniaman posted:Where's that pic of the APC surge strip that had a fire extinguisher emptied on it? gently caress me. I still have a bunch of those around (not used on my PC's anymore, but for poo poo like lamps/cordless phones/etc.) Time to see if my house is going to burn down!
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Oct 4, 2013 20:18
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Agrikk posted:Take a picture of that server and complain to HP's Customer Support. Feedback from customers is the only way things will impro-oh gently caress it. Who am I kidding? That worked when APC sent me a step-down transformer without a power switch. Wish I'd noticed the problem before I racked that drat thing.
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Oct 4, 2013 20:19
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quote:Ticket #XXXXXX  I wanted to yell "She's crashing, how far out is ALS?!" except I am standing alone in my house and not on duty, so all that would get me is an annoyed cat glare. Turned out she'd picked up over a dozen grayware/BHO program installs in the past two days. Her: "I have no idea how these programs got on here!" Me: "Well, a lot of times people don't pay enough attention to the popups that come up on their screen. They're in the middle of visiting a webpage and they see something like 'Your Adobe Flash Needs Upgrading' in a popup window, and they just say 'Okay!' and click through and run the programs without really studying the link to make sure it's safe or calling in to us to check it out first." Her: "...Yeah, you pretty much just described what I've been doing for the past two days. I kept saying to myself 'Why do I have to keep upgrading my Flash, I just updated it yesterday?!'..." I don't suppose there's any way that we can roll out a GPO that prevents users from being able to left click?
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Oct 4, 2013 20:29
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They'd learn... they'd learn fast the horror that is... right-click enter enter
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Oct 4, 2013 20:47
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I love it (no, seriously, I unironically love this part) when people choose not to proofread their emails for unintended innuendo. When a female admin assistant sends out an email about Flu/Pneumonia shots with the content: quote:Just a reminder as we have several openings that need to be filled. That just makes my day.
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Oct 4, 2013 21:17
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Agrikk posted:Take a picture of that server and complain to HP's Customer Support. Feedback from customers is the only way things will impro-oh gently caress it. Who am I kidding? Skip Customer Support, go straight to Account Manager.
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Oct 4, 2013 21:19
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/\ /\ beat up sales first, this guy's rightAgrikk posted:Take a picture of that server and complain to HP's Customer Support. Feedback from customers is the only way things will impro-oh gently caress it. Who am I kidding?
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Oct 4, 2013 21:20
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bort posted:/\ /\ beat up sales first, this guy's right I've done this to both dell and HP successfully.
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Oct 4, 2013 21:30
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Jeoh posted:Skip Customer Support, go straight to Account Manager. I would make sure that they know and give them the case number for support so they can help get it sorted by adding "customer satisfaction issues" to the ticket. And then tell them you have a meeting with the Cisco UCS guy next week for completely unrelated reasons. 
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Oct 4, 2013 21:32
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I'd just like to remind people of the HP Engineer loving around with a metal screwdriver in a CPU slot to remove the thermal paste. Yep, he broke it (more).
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Oct 4, 2013 21:32
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Jeoh posted:I'd just like to remind people of the HP Engineer loving around with a metal screwdriver in a CPU slot to remove the thermal paste. Yep, he broke it (more). I don't think those techs make a ton of money do they?
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Oct 4, 2013 22:12
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Jeoh posted:I'd just like to remind people of the HP Engineer loving around with a metal screwdriver in a CPU slot to remove the thermal paste. Yep, he broke it (more). I did that with a temperature probe on a hard drive array. Turns out you don't want to touch the exposed circuit board of the drive above the one you're temping, who knew!
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Oct 4, 2013 22:58
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Maniaman posted:Where's that pic of the APC surge strip that had a fire extinguisher emptied on it? I'm sure glad you posted this. All four of my APC surge protectors are recalled including the one that cooked last week during a whole building surge. I was going through the process to get a free replacement and the rep didn't bother telling me the drat thing was subject to recall. I had just purchased two new ones, not realizing how drat old they all are. Time to put them to work! Dick Trauma fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Oct 5, 2013 |
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Oct 5, 2013 01:50
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Sickening posted:I don't think those techs make a ton of money do they? Doubtful. If they're anything like Dell, they send some poor schmuck from Unisys, who all too often don't know their rear end from a hole in the ground. I think I mentioned in the last thread the tech that came to replace the shell for a dropped Latitude E5510. He was able to replace it, but managed to break the clip that holds the ribbon cable for the trackpad, so they ended up having to replace that as well.
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Oct 5, 2013 02:15
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TWBalls posted:I think I mentioned in the last thread the tech that came to replace the shell for a dropped Latitude E5510. He was able to replace it, but managed to break the clip that holds the ribbon cable for the trackpad, so they ended up having to replace that as well. Back in my days being a junior and dealing with plotters I had an Oce tech come out to replace a cog that had broken in the printer because someone screwed up a toner refil. He wrecked the drum three times.
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Oct 5, 2013 03:31
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I had a guy come out to repair some cheapo 14" laptop I had made worse while attempting to replace the hard drive (they decided to position the hard drive so that every single piece of the laptop has to be disassembled to remove it) and he was a goddamn wizard, so they aren't ALL incompetent.
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Oct 5, 2013 06:44
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Submitted late in the day on 10/1 by HR: "For Monday we have five new hires on floor (mumble) of building (mumble). Please provide computers and emails*." (*: domain accounts) Replied early AM on 10/2: "Please advise names/desired email addresses, required distribution lists, etc. Also please advise what department they'll be under, as we are out of stock computers and need budget to order more." On 10/4 (today): "Here are the eight new hires you've known about all week, where are their computers and why haven't you made emails for them yet?"
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Oct 5, 2013 06:45
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I've had nothing but good experiences with our Dell techs (via Unisys) in the Minneapolis, MN area.
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Oct 5, 2013 08:03
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ratbert90 posted:I don't mean go program in assembly, but to have a basic understanding of how memory on a OS functions and is managed. If you don't, I am convinced your code ends up in the coding horrors thread. Congratulations, you've just described about 70~80% of people being paid to program - and it's not helped by the number of degree courses that seem to only teach languages like Java and C# which don't really do memory management (but can end up with resource/memory leaks if you don't know what you're doing!) An anecdote - rather than "data" - I know, but there was one guy I knew, with a freshly minted degree from the University of Waterloo (which is supposed to be good!) who had absolutely no idea of how anything "low level" worked because it was one of the last things they studied and it had failed to sink in (i.e. they started with the highest level programming languages and worked down, which to me seems like a terrible way to reinforce bad habits)
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Oct 5, 2013 11:59
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ookiimarukochan posted:Congratulations, you've just described about 70~80% of people being paid to program - and it's not helped by the number of degree courses that seem to only teach languages like Java and C# which don't really do memory management (but can end up with resource/memory leaks if you don't know what you're doing!) Anecdotally, at my university the computer science majors get taught C++ and Java while the non-computer science majors (think industrial engineers and the occasional math major) are given one class in C.
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Oct 5, 2013 13:24
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FISHMANPET posted:I've had nothing but good experiences with our Dell techs (via Unisys) in the Minneapolis, MN area. We get World Wide Tech Services where I am. We got the same guy for about a year and I got to know him. He was quite good. He quit and got himself a real IT job because the Dell work is apparently piece work and pays poo poo. We then went through a series of techs that were an amazing combination of incompetent, slow and always late. One guy took six hours on one laptop. Another screwed up so hard that the LCD fell off a visiting VIP's computer on her way home. I ended up escalating through our account rep and got to the US service director. We started getting a good tech in from 100 miles away who mentioned to me that both the local techs had been fired because of my complaints. I felt a bit guilty, but only a bit.
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Oct 5, 2013 13:26
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ookiimarukochan posted:Congratulations, you've just described about 70~80% of people being paid to program - and it's not helped by the number of degree courses that seem to only teach languages like Java and C# which don't really do memory management (but can end up with resource/memory leaks if you don't know what you're doing!) This is getting pretty off topic, but I'm currently working through a Computer Engineering degree. I've gotten through a few C++ classes and am working on Assembly stuff now. What ways does knowing the lower level stuff help? I know not to leave dynamic memory tied up and not to write horribly inefficient functions, but so far I'm not really sure I've learned lessons doing lower level things to apply to higher level coding.
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Oct 5, 2013 14:37
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I've always found that it's just helpful to know what's happening underneath the code I'm writing. It gives you a more intuitive feel for certain problems. For example, even in a language like .NET, it's handy to know the difference between the stack and the heap, and the penalty you can pay for value type boxing etc.
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Oct 5, 2013 14:47
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WLU starts their comp sci people off with python now, I believe. They do lots of high level stuff though, and I don't get why you would start with that. My program started with C/86k assembly in first semester and then did C++/8086 assembly in 2nd semester, and I'm glad we did because I have a much better understanding of how the low level stuff works. Which if nothing else makes me appreciate how much high level languages do for you. This semester is C# which is a whole other world (we're also keeping up with regular old C though, doing real time stuff in QNX). There's really no excuse for a decent programmer not to know what's going on under the hood. Edit: and in very high performance environments a low level language is going to be faster anyways since it gives you more direct access to the hardware rather than something interpreted or with a JIT compiler. WHERE MY HAT IS AT fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Oct 5, 2013 |
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Oct 5, 2013 15:07
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Mattavist posted:This is getting pretty off topic, but I'm currently working through a Computer Engineering degree. I've gotten through a few C++ classes and am working on Assembly stuff now. What ways does knowing the lower level stuff help? I know not to leave dynamic memory tied up and not to write horribly inefficient functions, but so far I'm not really sure I've learned lessons doing lower level things to apply to higher level coding. Well, for starters just the exercise of writing something in Assembly reinforces core concepts that are abstracted away in higher level languages. And what languages like C# and Java provide at that high level can be a great tool, but for too many people it's a crutch. And the people that only ever touch those high level languages in school get out into the job market and find out that they can't even get through the interview process at the places they really would want to work. Sure, they might be able to tell me that a function they write has an n^2 runtime, but what's with all the unnecessary variable usage, or why did you use an ArrayList when an array would have worked just as well? When you've worked with lower level languages you tend to have a better appreciation for the cost of each line of code you write, and you tend to be more careful with what you do - even if the language "will take care of that for you" anyway. And to kind of bring this back on topic, it's just anecdotal but in my experience programmers who are comfortable with lower level languages tend to be more competent in general with computers. They tend to be able to give better information to IT when there are issues because they understand what to look for. Instead of tickets for "the internet isn't working", it becomes "DNS is resolving correctly, and I can ping servers outside the LAN, but everything over port 80 isn't making it outside of our LAN".
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Oct 5, 2013 19:34
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I want a little gif avatar now of the animation of han solo doing a flip jump. I'm pretty sure it looks like its just his upper half spinning.
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Oct 5, 2013 19:40
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If we're getting into programming chat I learned pretty much exclusively on Java and I'm feeling the pain in moving to C++ right now. All the pointer stuff throws me off, but I think I'm getting the hang of memory management. It would help if I wasn't working on a labyrinthine codebase written mostly by one guy whose coding style involved writing no comments, giving functions ambiguous names and overloading them with code that either does something completely different or is the exact same code from the function of the same name copied and pasted. Variable names are almost exclusively the type that the variable is of. In all honesty I didn't realize how to use programming style to my advantage until I ended up taking a Software Engineering class which convinced me to go down that path. There are too many programming classes that teach you what you can do without teaching you a thing about architecture and maintainability, and I had a couple really great professors that taught BS level Software Engineering classes that taught me how to write code that is readable and easy to debug.
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Oct 5, 2013 20:08
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It's time to decode tickets from native English speakers again! These are just from today, and two of them are from managers.quote:When store is on a call any incoming call is knock off line quote:Needs Adode Acrobat added to her CD in [name redacted] desk shelf. quote:[name redacted] need 2nd motor on her PC the monitor is plugged in but cannot get it to work Alright, so we've got a case of any incoming calls...knocking something offline? Someone needs Acrobat added to her...CD on the...desk shelf? And someone needs a 2nd motor for their monitor. It's frightening to think what their regular work is like if they can't even make a single sentence ticket make sense.
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Oct 5, 2013 20:22
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So, I love my job but sometimes I hate our clients, and/or the service providers our clients use, especially for internet. I talked to a client yesterday that I worked with 3 times over the last month - they couldn't get their wireless printers working, nothing would print out. I jump on one of the affected PCs remotely, everything is set up the way it was when I first configured it and it worked up until this past Tuesday. Their office had a power outage and she mentions that the receptionist had to unplug and reconnect their little wireless gateway/AP from CenturyLink. Ever since then, they can't print...so my immediate suspicion is that there's more to the story. I get on one of their office PCs, printers are still showing up but docs just sit in queue and error out. I walk her through trying to reconnect one of the wireless printers, and get a "network not found" error. Maybe the printer went bad, methinks, but I decided to check everything else out first. That's when I notice on the PC that the wireless SSID has been changed, which explains why the printer can't find the network. I try logging into the router console, and the old admin ID/password doesn't work. I do a test to see if the old password for their wireless works, and it won't connect with it. Meanwhile, the user and her boss are swearing up a storm and I'm getting bitched at for a problem that wasn't even the fault of our company or team. Called CenturyLink, they had a service ticket in to have an ethernet jack installed in one of the offices on Tuesday...the day the printing stopped working. No notes on anything about changing the SSID of the router, or having to replace any hardware from their power outage, so at this point I don't even know if they have the same wireless AP that CenturyLink originally provided over a month ago when they first moved into their office. The user I talked with had a conference and didn't call me back, so I may have to make a trip on-site or at least find out if they can locate the wireless AP and get the login info off the label for me, so I can compare it to the one I originally set up. TL:DR - I loving HATE CenturyLink and any other ISP that not only sends a tech on site, but doesn't notify the company doing managed services for the site, and makes a shitload of changes without documentation, causing us to get bitched at for a problem we didn't cause.
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Oct 5, 2013 21:02
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Ozz81 posted:TL:DR - I loving HATE CenturyLink and any other ISP that not only sends a tech on site, but doesn't notify the company doing managed services for the site, and makes a shitload of changes without documentation, causing us to get bitched at for a problem we didn't cause. I couldn't agree more with this. I work at a NOC that provides remote support for circuits end to end, and this is an ongoing fight we have with CenturyLink, AT&T, and a few others. Is it really that loving hard to make a quick phone call to the NOC that created the ticket with an update? Even worse, when our customers call us requesting a fix action, we get nothing but redirects, dead air, and indirect answers from the ISP. This happens at least once a day. I am sorry to hear you deal with this as well.
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Oct 5, 2013 21:17
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Ozz81 posted:TL:DR - I loving HATE CenturyLink and any other ISP that not only sends a tech on site, but doesn't notify the company doing managed services for the site, and makes a shitload of changes without documentation, causing us to get bitched at for a problem we didn't cause. CenturyLink can eat my balls. One of my guys had to spend 4 hours on the phone trying to convince them that some new equipment they sent had a port dead/disabled and finally the third person we talked to was like "Hmm oh yeah that port isn't enabled one sec" 
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Oct 5, 2013 21:35
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Prosthetic_Mind posted:If we're getting into programming chat I learned pretty much exclusively on Java and I'm feeling the pain in moving to C++ right now. All the pointer stuff throws me off, but I think I'm getting the hang of memory management. Pick up this book. I had to do C++ development after learning Java, and this book was fantastic. Didn't talk down to me, assume I was new to programming, or try to teach me OO from scratch.
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Oct 5, 2013 22:22
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dvgrhl posted:Well, for starters just the exercise of writing something in Assembly reinforces core concepts that are abstracted away in higher level languages. And what languages like C# and Java provide at that high level can be a great tool, but for too many people it's a crutch. And the people that only ever touch those high level languages in school get out into the job market and find out that they can't even get through the interview process at the places they really would want to work. Sure, they might be able to tell me that a function they write has an n^2 runtime, but what's with all the unnecessary variable usage, or why did you use an ArrayList when an array would have worked just as well? When you've worked with lower level languages you tend to have a better appreciation for the cost of each line of code you write, and you tend to be more careful with what you do - even if the language "will take care of that for you" anyway. If you need people who can avoid temporary/unnecessary variables or write algorithms to O(log n), you're not in the position of the majority of development these days. where ArrayList.Sort() is fast enough and is smarter at figuring out which sorting algorithm to use than your developer clinging to his copy of "The Practical Programmer" and "Design Patterns" is. You're making an argument from 1999. This isn't even mentioning how utterly useless assembly is unless you work with disassembled code daily. There are very low odds that your hand-tuned assembly can even beat the JVM's optimizer, much less clang or gcc. dvgrhl posted:And to kind of bring this back on topic, it's just anecdotal but in my experience programmers who are comfortable with lower level languages tend to be more competent in general with computers. They tend to be able to give better information to IT when there are issues because they understand what to look for. Instead of tickets for "the internet isn't working", it becomes "DNS is resolving correctly, and I can ping servers outside the LAN, but everything over port 80 isn't making it outside of our LAN". This is the essence of confirmation bias. "Programmers who are comfortable with lower level languages" are generally those who started in Java/PHP-land during the .COM boom and moved down, embedded guys, or longtime developers. You need a reason to be writing a "lower level language" in 2013, and it's usually because you need to muck with stuff .NET or Ruby can't offer for whatever reason. It doesn't make you inherently learn computers better. Your average graduate who learned C++ is just as clueless as the one who learned Java. Network programming and sockets are network programming and sockets in any language. You know how computers work or you don't. Please don't suggest new developers handicap themselves by trying to learn C++ or assembly in 2013 when they can (and should) be learning Python, Node, Go, or some other relatively abstracted language where they can drill down to memory management and writing sorting algorithms later if they need to. These are essential skills for CS grads. They're not essential skills for devs. evol262 fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Oct 5, 2013 |
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Oct 5, 2013 22:32
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evol262 posted:You also end up with people who have no idea how garbage collection works, leaky references, destructors that don't always get called, pointers to garbage, and a lot of other poo poo. It's not all roses. Most C++ developers are about as good with algorithmic complexity as .NET and Java devs. I think maybe you got the wrong impression of what I was meaning, as I don't really disagree with most of what you are saying nor do I see what I wrote as conflicting here. I'm not trying to imply that anyone should be developing in assembly, you won't beat a compiler and even if you do it won't have been worth the time cost to do so. But having taken courses in college where I was required to write assembly (by hand for tests!) definitely helped how I approach things as a developer. And I primarily work in C#, and I really like developing in .NET 4.5, I'm not trying to hate on it. The only disagreement I'd have is that unnecessary variable usage is a bad thing, regardless of if it makes a measurable performance impact or not it makes a code cleanliness and maintainability impact. If we're colleagues and I do a code review with you, and I notice somewhere that a new variable wasn't really needed, I'll point it out. And I think (perhaps incorrectly) that if you've had the experience of allocating memory for your variables, you probably got in the habit of considering whether you needed one before creating it, which is something I think is important regardless of the language. That's what I was trying to convey to Mattavist, that I think there are benefits to what he/she is learning now that will translate to higher level languages. evol262 posted:This is the essence of confirmation bias. "Programmers who are comfortable with lower level languages" are generally those who started in Java/PHP-land during the .COM boom and moved down, embedded guys, or longtime developers. You need a reason to be writing a "lower level language" in 2013, and it's usually because you need to muck with stuff .NET or Ruby can't offer for whatever reason. It doesn't make you inherently learn computers better. Your average graduate who learned C++ is just as clueless as the one who learned Java. I purposely prefaced my comment by saying it was anecdotal. Anyway, I think we probably are in agreement on most things here, so it's probably not worth arguing the little bit we do differ.
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Oct 6, 2013 00:07
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Volmarias posted:Pick up this book. I had to do C++ development after learning Java, and this book was fantastic. Didn't talk down to me, assume I was new to programming, or try to teach me OO from scratch. Thanks, I'll definitely pick that up.
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Oct 6, 2013 13:31
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I recall consumer backup solutions being discussed in this thread before, so I'm hoping someone can jog my memory. I've currently got my parents set up with a backup using Microsoft SyncToy, but the speed of the thing is best described as 'glacial'. It's now at the point where it takes over 24 hours, and we're not talking about much stuff here (20gb tops) and it's only inspecting file dates/times, not contents. So... what other options are there? Free is preferred, but if there's some magic paid software out there which can turn 24 hours into 2.4 hours then I'd certainly give it some thought.
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Oct 6, 2013 20:13
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rolleyes posted:I recall consumer backup solutions being discussed in this thread before, so I'm hoping someone can jog my memory. Crashplan?
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Oct 6, 2013 20:17
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