Hey, don't disparage the mighty Raspi2 - I have six of them running 150' automatic truss table lines...
;)
1381 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2011
Not an IT horror story per se, but so fucking hilarious I don't even care if he finds this some years from now...
I have this friend, 49 years old, who's been trying to get disability for what seems like forever (I think he can work, but thats just my opinion). For the last few years I drop in on him a few times a week, see if he needs a ride, food, etc. Pretty pathetic really, but he's shown signs of improvement in the last year, running 4 Obamaphones with FB on borrowed wifi. Well, he started trading baseball & football cards online, showing a profit, so much so that it was becoming difficult to keep track of.
Enter me, with a surplus half-a-Gateway laptop that my lovely daughter stepped on weeks before, hook him up with an HDMI cable to his tv, wireless kb & mouse, borrow some more wifi, and show him the wonders of 1995 via a Windows 8.1 Pro half-a-laptop. Spreadsheets, tracking, getting a paypal account so he would leave me alone about it, better pics of the cards, etc, etc, etc.
Three weeks later, I come by to see the laptop with a nice doily-type thing on it, kb and mouse turned off and tucked away under the sidetable, I ask him WTF? I was expecting Moneybucks here to be conquering the internet via collectible cards. Nope. Problems with the mouse, with the computer, Excel was tripping out, etc, etc. Mkay. Show Me. He then proceeded to log in and USE BOTH HANDS TO CONTROL THE WIRELESS MOUSE. < shellshock > Wait. What year is this? Who am I? What is this place? < I come to my senses > WTF are you doing Jr? "I can't make it work right'. I guess so. Sigh.
I patiently explained/demonstrated/made-him-do-it operations with a two-button scroll mouse and started him on Minesweeper with a huge 3" icon in the middle of his tv.
It is almost 2016, right?
Untrue statement.
We all know IT 'Professionals' with MCSE's,Netware (remember how important that one was back then?), Cisco etc etc certs that are completely useless because reality isn't always covered in Microsoft's KB's. Business owner's sons who didn't know dick about IT yet got paid for it and my all time favorite: The Office IT Guru Who_Installed_Office_That_One_Time...
IT has been and will increasingly become a commodity with increasing Great Ideas That Are Horribly Bad decisions as a result.
Damn fine idea! I'd love to hear the silence from Exede Satellite when faced with that one. I've sent logs, banned the kids from the network, switched out routers for the sake of those logs, spoken with corporate, had them out to replace the modem three times, transmitter/dish twice, and pretty much all they do is add data in one GB increments. Simply cannot be using 15GB* a month, I schedule everything to occur during unlimited data time from midnight to 5am, tight access control for the kids, and stern looks to outright WTF's at the wife over that damn FuckerBerg page of hers. They make it tough get through, there will be a lecture on data use, which I can quote verbatim before they do, before anything useful will get done.
Brilliant. Unplug the damn thing.
*Cry me a river, Comcast customers. I'm paying $90.90 a month for 15GB, then it's back to dialup speed until the end of the month unless you pay $10 a GB for more. Welcome to the bandwidth fuckyou game, it sucks.
Quick edit: Yes, we're moving someplace with infrastructure if we can find the right sucker.
Lieutenant as in 'lew', like 'in lieu of' - you don't say 'in lef of', correct?
Example of Southern craziness: They pronounce bedroom suite as 'bedroom suit' - I'd hear them advertising bedroom suits on the car radio and I'm WTF is a bedroom suit? Pajamas? Some damn expensive pjs... They don't use 'peTIT' for the word petite...
The first taste is always free...
Disclaimer: I'm anti-cloud - I figure if you can't fold, spindle, and mutilate your data when your internet connection is down, it ain't your data. Call me crazy, but I learned that back in the 90's when US Robotics was still making modem racks, high density modem cards, and flashing to 56k were something new and exciting. Sure was a wondrous thing to turn the lights out in the largest Qwest datacenter colo, watch all the lights on 100's of modem racks blinking from folks connecting/disconnecting in the dark. Didn't take too much imagination to wonder what all those folks were doing at 2am in the morning while we were doing maintenance, porn without Playboy was new, and it probably pissed them off to lose connection in the middle of a download - didn't have a resume function back then lol. Used to wonder how much damage one guy with a supersoaker water gun could do since all our competition colo-ed in the same datacenter, just separated by chainlink fencing.
On topic: My office and my home networks back up to each other on NAS boxen at each end (30 miles or so apart as the crow flies), with a fiber connection (had the supplies/equipment, figured why not? Overkill is good.) to a larger NAS sitting in a power/climate-controlled Amish-built shed in my back yard. My desktop data drives are hot-swappable so I can fling them out the window in case of fire*, I even make a few bucks reselling remote back up services for select local clients who were overly impressed by the big tits... I mean cloudy sales representative... and accepted my compromise to give them 'Cloud' bragging rights** at the local Chamber of Commerce.
*I began my career in IT by screwing up State of Arizona workstations to such a degree and with such regularity (I was a meddler, the kind I have a love/hate relationship with now, but they pay the bills), that the main state IT director came down and had a one-on-one talk with me in a closed room with no witnesses. After that, I had to do my own research and fix whatever I broke software-wise, which led to working for free putting workstations together at a local computer shop on the weekends. I attribute my back up fetish to a death threat from the wife years and years ago - not only did I destroy her computer and lose all her data, I did it TWICE. Men have been killed for less and I believed her when she said men die in their sleep all the time. I know numbers and statistics - married men dying in their sleep *does* seem abnormally high.
**That's a big deal in a small town in the South - I know of a lawn and garden center with a higher security network than most banks, tech bragging down here seems to be a subconscious reaction to the general world belief that the southern US states are backwards in every way. Interesting to observe if you've ever been anywhere in your life.
Mine's the antistatic coat with encrypted SSD backup drives filling every pocket...
01001111 01100011 01110100 01100001 01101100 00111111 00100000 01001000 01100101 01111000 00111111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01101111 01101100 01110011 00101110 00101110 00101110 00100000 01000010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01100001 01110100*
*How quaint, El Reg forums don't do binary...
So many paths crossing lately - El Reg ran a story 'Kids' tech skills go backwards thanks to tablets and smartmobes' a few weeks ago and I said then that my local school district was using tablets and chromebooks to replace paper, pencil, and textbooks - not really addressing 'digital' literacy.
I've been bitching for a while now about it because of serious concerns I have about the loss of certain aspects of my kids education due to the total reliance on electronic gadgets and huge issue with their privacy via Google. Appreciate El Reg for giving me another stick to use at the next school board meeting.
;)
Re: Charles Manning - Wondering why all the downvotes because you happen to be correct... upvoted to counter ;)
<deepthinking>
The older I get, the more convinced I am that there is no 'inner child' people talk about - people never grow up, they simply get experience to know what works, what doesn't, & how can they benefit from it. Your priorities don't really change, you may have people to be responsible for, but you're still essentially the same kid you always were - just older. All the stupid human tricks you, your friends, the people you know, the people you read about... think about it, everybody you ever knew and the dumb shit they did/have done/are currently doing - that's the exact same kind of people at Volkswagen or any other company, government, etc, but with power to create larger fuckups that affect/kill more people.
That's pretty fucking scary, to think about all the idiots you know and realize there are at least one or more like them in a position of power somewhere that can kill us all...
</deepthinking>
OR the all-knowing server case designers place the power button right where your little knuckle would naturally rest while levering out a thumbdrive from the conveniently placed top USB 3.0 ports...
Took three damn hours to resych the RAID on that bitch, ate the billable time because it was my fuck up. Spent it between staring at the percentage on the screen, praying the OS would boot, and hating on whomever genius that thought it was a clever design...
My banks have proactively replaced my cards three times already this year, two at one, one from another, just from a sniff of shenanigans. Seems to be their rather smart response to online theft instead of leaving possibly compromised cards active.
Only gotcha is I don't know *who* was molested for my data - that's something I'd like to know since I don't randomly buy random items from random sites, my purchases are from biggish companies* with reputations to protect.
*Edited to say sites like Staples, Amazon, NewEgg, Dell, Cisco, etc
.. that the schools are using iPads, Chromebooks, etc to replace paper, pencil, and textbooks - not anything IT related. New tools to replace old tools and in so doing, losing cursive writing, basic math, and memory skills.
We've had to supplement our kid's education with multiplication table memorization, history, and much to my dismay, cursive writing*. We have 6-7 Raspberry Pi's running around the house doing media, minecraft server, and development duties - gigabit wired/wifi network with draconian user rights*** - fully digital with everything they could want - and chickens**. Point is, as parents, you better pay attention to your school system, just because they may have the latest tech shineys - it doesn't mean they're teaching your children anything useful.
*Learned the school system didn't teach cursive when one of my boys couldn't sign a vehicle title transfer properly. Both of us were embarrassed.
** 4H project that got out of hand - have a dozen hens and one rooster. Lots of eggs.
*** Kids found a way to bypass the family AD user rights and surf late at night years ago.
Central government control... as seen in 'Idiocracy'
Car randomly pulls over on your way to church...
Siri/Cortana/OKGoogle voice says: 'Your vehicle is occupied by a wanted individual. The doors have been locked for your safety and protection. Please wait for authorities to arrive'.
*Then* 'BOOM, Headshot!'
OR The car simply takes you to to the local police lockup - think of the savings in traffic cops/pursuit vehicles/maintenance.
However, in our defense, we do have a 'power station' in a central area for the kids* to put *all* their devices on at bed time and mealtimes. Router set up by MAC address to kill network access at preset times for school days and weekends.
Occasionally we'll hangout each other since our floor plan has the kids on one end of the house while we're on the other, but the tech does help bring everyone together too. We have a family Minecraft server 'The Lonely Mountain' on the home network, CounterStrike LAN parties, neighborhoods in Hayday, clan in Clash of Clans, guild on Everquest, etc, so we actually play together too. Everything has it's +/-, moderation in all things= !Win!
*We have normal, sneaky, kids who don't believe parents were ever kids... and I was kinda an ass when I was young lol. Still am in a lot of ways lol.
Who/why would somebody design an ATM like that? Even my godforsakenly secure CF-53 Toughbook won't say 'Boo!' without a BIOS/hard drive password*. Mebbe Panasonic should make voting machines & ATMs...
*Sad torrid story concerning my 5-year-warranteed baby, a $100 4GB RAM upgrade at a 'Panasonic Authorized Service' computer store, a suddenly missing owner, suddenly missing money, a deputy sheriff handing me my partially disassembled Toughbook, a bag of parts, a 2 month possession of half the dining room table, eventual successful assembly, encountering lockout, overnighted box from Panasonic NSC, and week later evening phone call requesting $800+ to finish RAM install. Final chapters not written yet, have a phone call to make, maybe several. /sigh
i7 = Gaming, engineering, programming, data manipulating
i5 = Business
i3 = Consumer
AMD = Consumer, get_the_intel_instead_if_possible
It wasn't always that way, I was an AMD fanboi for a long time. but let's face it, intel came back. Is that intel cpu thermal patent still valid? I've seen the magic smoke when an overclocked AMD or Cyrix processor popped, usually because the motherboard thermal sensor was bad or gave incorrect readings. Intel never had that problem due to internal thermal protection and would shut down rather than go 'pop'. When the Athlons came out, that scared the pee out of intel and they had the resources to pursue then surpass AMD. I mean AMD has done it twice to intel, back in the 486/586/686(Cyrix) days, then with the Athlon x64. Fast forward to today and AMD needs to pull a third rabbit out to stay in the game. I just replaced my dev workstation with an i7 Acer Predator I juiced up about 6 months ago, gave my wife my old one, an HP AMD Phenom II Black X4 945 3.0Ghz, and my work laptop is an i5 - major difference in speed between processors and I was pretty proud of my Phenoms.
Enough. Wife is looking at me funny because she doesn't believe I can listen to her and type at the same time (I don't care for the Kardasians, honestly. But I nod and make appropriate noises)
I made the complaint(?) that with my contract renewal coming up, I didn't see new phones compelling enough to replace our Note 3's - now I do.
Ran across my old BB Storm2 the other day and had to fondle it... sigh. Would be nice to run BES again too, I've been uncomfortable with security since reluctantly relinquishing those duties to Verizon and Google (security/Verizon/Google... those words shouldn't be in a single sentence). -
Biggest issue? The new BB Priv isn't compatible with Verizon - I've already started bitching at them on their boards ;)
Anybody can get boobs, even old Olympic Gold Medal winners... better question is will she make me a sandwich?
;)
Truth be told, I'd be more impressed with a Patrick Stewart or Sean Connery personal assistant - a voice that has character, not robot sex toy voices.
I've been replacing my office and home HDs with Samsung Pro 850 SSDs for OS/program drives after comparing all the manufacturers. Of all the SSDs I looked at, only Samsung & Sandisk offer a 10 year warranty, but the Samsung Pro has a higher endurance spec than the Sandisk and has faster read/writes than this new Micron product.
Love the Samsung 850 Pro, my office dev machine goes from cold boot to Win8.1 login in <6 seconds - color me impressed.
However, I'll stay with my Kirby Ultimate G - can suck the paint right off the wall and is rebuildable. I craigslisted this one for $200 after I lost my other Kirby in the divorce. Funny thing that, I got custody of the kids and received child support from her, she got the house, my truck, and my Kirby. Priorities...
Don't buy one new, they're like $1500. Paid $1300 for the one I lost.
We do it all the time to Canyon/Colorado mid-size trucks using hptuner software to access via the OBDII port, the different control modules for tuning. Improve fuel/air ratios, turn off certain items, tune for mileage or performance, etc. My GMC Canyon only averaged 20mpg when new, I average 24.7mpg with a 27.9mpg high after modding this and that, then tuning the electronics - just turned 180k miles on her last week. Still strong.
Pretty sure all makes and models can be tuned.
NSA calls the White House, says Microsoft isn't going to play ball with all that sweet, sweet, data being siphoned off by Windows 10. Emergency executive session of advisers commences immediately, due to the unknown data NSA has collected on their own identities. Ultimatum issued to Microsoft, they do not flinch. Result? Embargo *all* PC purchases by Federal government until Microsoft complies with NSA demands. The non-IT angle is golf.
It's obvious...
;)
'Because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to find the best computer hardware, network, and service for your Federal Office Needs!
https://www.crazybaracks.gov <----obviously not real.
Seriously though, why not an internal Federal Amazon website for all departments to make IT purchases? And any other stuff I imagine) Beancounters could count endless beans with bulk purchases/inventory, data security folks could quit pulling their hair out and standardize Federal networks. Win/Win.
You speak of senses when it's intellect that drives most humans. That intellect tells me that mathematically*, thus my rig is faster/slower than yours. The only sense directly affected is time and since my machine can do a cold boot to Windows 8.1 login in under six seconds. Which is much better than the Windows NT 4.01 server boxen, where I could go have some coffee while the RAIDs did their self-checks before boot.
*Math is everything. Everything. One wonders if having too keen a sense of time is a bad thing or not. There are cons.