* Posts by Shred

53 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2014

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Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

Shred

We've acted decisively to increase customer value since we closed the acquisition in late November,"

LoL wot?

Our licensing price has just gone through the roof for absolutely nothing in return, other than continuing to use the same VMware product with the same features.

Another month or two and the new Azure HCI cluster will be bedded in nicely and then it is “bye bye VMware and good riddance to Broadcom”.

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

Shred

I'm amazed that there is actually some sort of filter on entry to Australia on a skilled worker visa. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they let pretty much anyone in.

Last time we were hiring, a recruiter put forward a couple of candidates who were here on skilled worker visas. Their English skills were appalling - we couldn't understand what they were saying and they were clearly struggling to understand us. One job interview was conducted over MS Teams and it was obvious that after we asked each question, the candidate was stalling while he furiously Googled for an answer. This was not for an entry level job paying peanuts and some of the questions we asked at the start were dead easy "confidence builder" questions partly aimed at helping the candidate get comfortable.

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Shred

Yes - and don’t forget that some developers were given access to prototype Mac development systems (on Lisa hardware) before the launch of the original Macintosh. Microsoft was one such developer, hence Windows being “Copyright 1983…). Even back then, Apple knew better than to launch a new machine with no third party applications in the pipeline.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Shred

Re: Rebooting for 5 of every 25 minutes, mind you

Ah yes.. the Michael Spindler era. I guess you had a PowerBook 5300 - a dog of a machine in every way possible. Most of them literally fell apart before Apple put out a rework programme to fix the many issues with case hinges and charging sockets falling off the logic board. But at least Apple’s marketing people could say it had a PowerPC processor.

Verizon to 'sunset' Blue Jeans vidconf platform

Shred

Re: that's a shame

Bluejeans seemed to have the technology down pat, but the administration side of things was lacking.

They forgot to bill us for a whole year’s use (a fairly large sum of money). We brought this to their attention, but BJN just couldn’t be bothered sending us an invoice…. You can’t do that too often without it impacting the bottom line.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Shred

Re: Training?

You raise a valid point, but having worked for an organisation that provided regular training in the use of office computers and applications, this is how it worked in practice:

The good sensible users (some of whom were in senior management) would make the time to attend the training - even though they were not the ones who really needed it. The attendees would often provide positive feedback, saying how they had picked up some new skills and tricks and this woukd save them time in their jobs. Things like someone who used MS Word all day, churning out 100 page long papers. Prior to the training they would create a page break by presssing <Enter> 20 times to get to the next page. Discovering “Insert Page Break” was a revelation.

The people who really, desperately needed the training - often senior management - would consistently fail to attend, stating that they were “too busy”. Strangely, they were never too busy to generate an endless stream of help desk tickets for trivial dumb user problems that would not have happened if they had attended the training.

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

Shred

Re: Hope MS are listening

MSCE - I prefer "Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert"

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Shred

Re: Noisy installers suck.

Obligatory XKCD cartoon: “The author of the Windows file copy dialog goes to visit friends”

https://xkcd.com/612/

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Shred

Re: Bridge technologies

I always found SCSI super reliable and easy to get going… except where a smart-alec manufacturer “knew better” and built gear that didn’t fully comply with the standard (just like the problems above with serial not using the correct +/- 3-25v etc). Almost always, problems were due to people not understanding the termination requirements, or not setting the correct IDs.

Apple in particular were bad for not fully complying with the standard. The Mac Plus, Mac Portable and PowerBook 100 did not properly terminate the bus, or supply termination power. As a result, they could be “picky” about cable length and what they would work with. The problem was exacerbated by users ignoring the instructions to power off before connecting or disconnecting SCSI devices and blowing the termination power fuse in SCSI devices. Once you had a computer that failed to supply termination power to the bus and an external drive with a blown termination power fuse, the two could not communicate.

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

Shred

Re: The scammers are starting to ban my number.

Exactly. The scumbags have wasted my time and interrupted me from what I was doing, so now I’ll jump through whatever hoops are required to get a real person on the line and waste a bit of their time.

If everyone did this - just talked to them for 30 seconds, the whole scam would collapse.

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

Shred

I recall hearing a story (possibly via The Register) about a prank played on an office worker who spent most of the day talking on the phone.

His colleagues glued a single 5c piece into the phone handset. The next day, they glued a second 5 c piece into the handset. This continued for several,weeks, with the victim spending each day getting used to the new ever so slightly increased weight of the phone handset.

Eventually, it was ridiculously heavy and there was simply no more room for coins… so one night, they took all the coins out again in one hit. Cue the victim smacking himself in the side of the head with the much lighter handset the first time he tried to answer a call.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Shred

Even Dell Enterprise support can be pretty special. Working for a university about 15 years ago, we had the misfortune to buy a hundred or so Dell GX270 desktops for our department’s labs.

The machines started dropping like flies with bulging capacitors on the motherboards. In the USA, Dell extended the warranty to seven years for this fault. In Australia, they did nothing. Worst of all, the replacement motherboards also contained faulty capacitors. One machine was on its fourth motherboard at the end of the three year warranty. A bunch of machines that would normally have auctioned off at the end of their life simply went in the rubbish skip.

The worst part is that unlike what happened to the vendor in the original story, our organisation kept buying Dell, despite them knowing selling us faulty gear and not fixing it properly.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Shred

I was doing IT support in a university Teacher Education area. We had a frantic call from a "teacher of science teachers" stating that he couldn't get the video projector working in one of the tutorial rooms. (See last week's on call re "if it plugs in to a power point, it's an IT problem").

I arrived to find a wannabe science teacher standing on a table faffing with the controls on the ceiling mounted projector. Much wailing 'we tried everything'.

The AMX panel (colour touch screen) that normally controlled the system had failed and had been removed. Next to the empty space on the wall that the panel would normally occupy were neatly writing instructions, complete with a drawing of the projector remote control and arrows indicating which buttons to push in which order. The remote control for the projector was neatly arranged on the bench.

So... I picked up the remote control and pushed the two buttons on it in the order indicated in the instructions on the wall. The video projector sprung to life and the day was saved. Bear in mind that the lecturer had a PhD and all the students in the room were studying to be science teachers.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Shred

A former colleague had previously worked in a school. One day, a teacher brought her hair dryer in from home and asked him to fix it for her.

To many users, we are not highly skilled IT professionals: “you’re just the guy who fixes things”.

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Shred

Re: Fun with RJ-45!

I once had an interesting technical issue converting a building from the late 90s token ring over UTP to 100Mb switched ethernet.

Take a wall outlet that was working perfectly on token ring, patch it into the ethernet switch and the shiny new ethernet card on a PC… didn’t work. Swap back to token ring on the same Cat 5 cable… worked perfectly. Cue much scratching of the head when the same thing happened in the next office over (and the next…).

Bearing in mind that this happened in Australia, where any electrical work is over-regulated beyond belief and even back then, you needed a special license even to run a pre-terminated patch lead through a wall cavity… Every wall outlet was wired using the 568A wire colour codes. Every outlet at the patch panel had been wired as 568B. The result: every wall outlet was a crossover cable. A token ring network didn’t care, but ethernet back then did care.

Shred

Re: Fun with RJ-45!

Token ring had a massive technical advantage over ethernet before ethernet switches became a thing: there were no collisions. You load up a 4Mb token ring and it would sit there all day with 4Mb/sec throughput. Attach lots of chatty clients to a non-switched ethernet and it would collapse under all the collisions. Sadly, it was a bit like the beta vs VHS thing. IBM’s proprietary token ring cost big $, because… IBM. Ethernet was cheap and “good enough” for most applications.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Shred

Obligatory XKCD cartoon:

https://xkcd.com/456/

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Shred

Re: New car

Driving a work pool car to the big city two and bit hours drive away from home. Just as I get in to heavy traffic on an unfamiliar road and with nowhere to safely stop, the damn thing starts beeping and whistling at me. Look down. Yikes! There’s a yellow light on the instrument panel. Something has gone wrong and it’s going to break down on me!

No… it was a little icon of a coffee cup. The car had decided that it was time to take a break,

Death would too good for the sort of people who dream this rubbish up. I drive a 24 year old car for a good reason.

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

Shred

I never found the facination with Outlook

Microsoft write “kinda sorta ok” software The company’s real skill is in marketing that software. To try to convince users that they could use anything other than an MS Office product in the 1990s was an exercise in self- flagellation.

We’re currently seeing the same thing with Microsoft Teams. It’s like an unflushable turd. Horrible, inefficient software that can take 30 seconds to struggle to launch on an i7 with SSD. But all the users just have to use it, because amicrosoft’s marketing people have brainwashed them so. The world will end if they don’t get MS Teams RIGHT NOW!

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Shred

Re: Simples...

A variation on this:

Uni lecturer, “I have PhD, therefore I know everything” demanded that their home drive space be increased from an already extremely generous 10GB (this was 2007). Hauled the IT manager before the Dean to explain himself when the request was denied.

A quick run with a duplicate file find utility showed that the space was consumed with the same group of high resolution (work related) photos, stored over and over again. Every time she wanted to back up the photos on her computer, she created a new directory and copied the same photos to her home drive… over and over and over.

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Shred

Re: Vertical Scrollbar

Thank you! You’ve just given me a way to fix a major irritation with modern Windows.

Every new version, I have to spend hours and hours turning off all the new shiny “change for the sake of change” “features” and get back to where I was before I was forced to upgrade.

It amazes me that we put up with this. I recently saw a video explaining why people pay big $$$ for a certain brand of electronics test gear. Partly, it is because large organisations want to buy (say) a multimeter, then specify it as standard equipment and write all their test and repair documentation around that device. They need something that is guaranteed to be in production for 20 years or more, because it just costs too much to keep updating.

When will the computer industry mature to this point? The OS should be invisible to the user. Pretty up the user interface if the user wants.., or let them keep the same one for decades.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Shred

MCSE = “Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert”

Shred

Re: Several times...

I learned to ask them to unplug and inspect the pins, then put it back in. That way they actually feel they have to “do something useful”.

Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection

Shred

Re: Be my guest...

I think that was a story in The Reg.

His first attempt flipped images upside down. He progressed to applying a blur effect and even published the scripts used to implement this as a transparent proxy. He wondered how many neighbours had take “faulty” computers in for repair to fix the out of focus images.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Shred

Re: Fluke logging multimeters

Did you know that you can move a single resistor and turn it into a Fluke 77 (well, it gets the touch-hold feature anyway)?

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Shred

Supporting Apple gear in the late 80s and early 90s… the all in one Macs of that era had a brightness knob concealed under a little edge on the front panel. A very common cause of “black screen” was that the knob had been messed with.

Apple’s printers of that time tended to not have many user accessible things to go wrong. If the printer would power on, but the computer wouldn’t print and didn’t throw a “printer has a fault” kind of error, you could be sure that the printer wasn’t plugged in to the computer. I learned quickly to never ask “is it plugged in?”, since the user would ALWAYS respond with “of course” and not even check, because they had not unplugged it.

The usual technique to get the user to actually check that it was plugged in was to talk them through unplugging the printer from the back of the computer, inspecting the pins (are they all straight? are they shiny?), then plugging it in again, Repeat for the printer end of the cable. Invariably, I’d hear a “whirr… clack clack clack” as the printer sprang to life. The user would always say “oh, it seems to be working now”. On only one occasion did someone admit that the printer hadn’t been plugged in.

Breaking Bad or just a bad breakpoint? That feeling when your predecessor is BASIC

Shred

Re: The problem

Two reasons spring to mind:

a) It avoids the ambiguity caused by Americans insisting on using the truly bizarre, non-sensical mmddyyyy format

b) It's really easy to sort into chronological order if the dates are yyymmdd format.

IBM email fiasco complicates sales deals, is worse than biz is letting on – sources

Shred

Notes was an abomination 20 years ago. In the late 1990s, a company I worked for was taken over and the new owners inflicted Bloated Goats on us. We reverted to hand written sticky notes, because we could write a message on a note, walk downstairs, stick it on the recipient’s monitor and return to our desks in less time than it took to type up the message in Scrotes and send it. What on earth is IBM doing still using it?

Words cannot explain how much I loathe Lotus Notes… this goes close (Hitler switches to Lotus Notes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1dbsBWQ3k

Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

Shred

I wonder if Microsoft employees actually realise that they’re in the same business as car makers? i.e. Microsoft is primarily a marketing company.

Every 18 months or so, bring out a “refreshed” model. Some of the black bits are now chrome. Things that had square edges now have rounded edges. Move stuff around for no apparent reason other than making the previous version look old and dated, but annoy the user, who now has to find it again. Now some people feel the need to race out and buy the new model for no apparent reason, other than that it is fashionable and the latest.

Guess that’s why I use LibreOffice (no toolbars… yay) and drive a 23 year old car.

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Shred

Re: The knob......

>> The workers were happy. The thermostats were never connected to anything...

Seems to be standard practice in the environmental control industry. I once worked in a building where it was always hot and stuffy. Middle of Winter (-3 deg C outside) - hot and stuff. Middle of Summer, hot and stuffy. Many visits by HVAC experts failed to fix it. Finally, with much fanfare, a thermostat was attached to a wall.

The thermostat did nothing. Turn it all the way up... still hot and stuffy. Turn it all the way down... hot and stuffy. One of my colleagues had enough... "this bl...dy thing isn't even connected!". Grabbed the cable to the thermostat and started pulling on it. About 10 metres of cable piled up on the floor and the end emerged - cut flush... it had never been connected to anything.

The junior tech climbed up on a desk and put his hand in front of a vent - nothing coming out. He pulled the grill off the vent. "There's a butterfly valve in here and it's closed". Opened the valve... a vast amount of black dust and gunk poured out all over him in his white shirt... we finally had fresh air!

I've since regarded the whole HVAC industry with deep suspicion.

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Shred

Very common in some areas. The Fluke 75 multimeter could be converted into a more expensive Fluke 77 by moving one end of a single resistor.

Shred

Re: Blame the Cable

I had a project to convert a customer site from IBM token ring over CAT5 to ethernet. I started rolling out new 10/100 ethernet cards and they wouldn’t work. It couldn’t be the cabling, because it had worked before. Cue much head scratching, swapping out the new Cisco switch and so on.

The numpties who had installed the fixed cabling had wired the patch panels as 568A and every wall outlet as 568B. Effectively every cable in the entire building was a crossover. Token ring didn’t care, but ethernet did.

Shred

Re: Blame the Cable

The Chinese knock offs of those USB logic analysers are notorious for shipping with faulty USB cables.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Shred

Re: Where’s The Effing Ignition Lock!?

And if it’s unlocked, you cannot remove the key until the gear lever is placed back in FIFTH gear! Only Saab would do something that insane. Very little braking assistance from the engine if the hand brake fails.

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Shred

A decade or so ago, I was doing IT support for the teacher education school within a university. One day, I was asked to drop everything and run to the video conference room - the fax used to receive documents wasn't working and they needed it fixed right now.

On looking at the fax, I found that its LCD display was showing "Paper tray empty. Insert paper and press GO". I filled the tray and pressed GO and away it went. Disaster averted.

There were about 20 people in the room, at least 15 of them having a PHD, but none had been able to solve the problem. As they say: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. If you can't do and you can't teach, you teach teachers".

Don't pay the ransom, mate. Don't even fix a price, say Australia's cyber security bods

Shred

Re: Easy to say

It’s surprisingly common for small “Ma and Pa Corner Store” businesses (and some larger ones who should know better) to back up to an external USB drive. Typically, after the first few backups, this gets left permanently connected to the host computer and voila! Your only backup is now encrypted too.

Haunted disk-drive? This story will give you the chills...

Shred

Re: Put a heater in the safe then ?

Ah yes... Apple ][ 5 1/4in drives.

Woz had the genius idea of saving 5c on the cost of each drive by deleting the track zero sensor. To ensure that the heads were positioned at track 0 prior to boot up, the computer would smash the heads against the track 0 stop 39 times. That is the source of the awful “brraaaack!” sound characteristic of these drives at power on.

This feature / abuse provided Apple service centres with a regular income stream; customers had to present their drives to have radial alignments performed at regular intervals.

Oz retro computer collection in dire straits, bulldozers on horizon

Shred

There’s a video walk through of the collection over at the EEVBlog:

https://www.eevblog.com/2018/08/09/eevblog-1112-vintage-computer-warehouse-diving/

Boss helped sysadmin take down horrible client with swift kick to the nether regions

Shred

Have also caught a dodgy air conditioner mechanic trying to “fix” a problem by applying the placebo effect.

Our office was hot and stuffy all the time. Middle of Winter, -3deg outside - hot and stuffy. Hot Summer day - it’s hot and stuffy. Many complaints were made to the building management, multiple visits by air conditioner mechanics, who hung anemometers from air vents and pronounced the system to be working correctly. It was still hot and stuffy.

One day, with much fanfare, an adjustable thermostat was installed in a prominent location, to fix the problem once and for all. We were warned that it would only adjust the temperature +/- 3 degrees and that any change would take some time to be felt.

It was still hit and stuffy. We turned the control as far down as it would go... a day later, still hot and stuffy. Turned it all the way up. Didn’t get any hotter.

Our boss said: “this *$&*ing thing isn’t connected”. He grabbed the cable to the thermostat and started gently pulling on it. There no resistance and soon he had 10 metres of cable piled at his feet. The end was cut off cleanly, proving that it was a dummy control that had never been wired up.

The actual problem, diagnosed and rectified by our junior tech, was that every air outlet had a butterfly valve in the back of it and every one was turned off. I’ve never trusted air conditioner mechanics since!

Shred

A former colleague had a user complaining that he didn’t have permission to defragment the drive in his locked-down Windows XP laptop. It didn’t need defragmenting, but the user was convinced it had to be done regularly and kept logging Hell Desk tickets requesting a defrag.

Some would have simply granted him the rights to do it, but no...where is the fun in that! An application was written that displayed a progress bar showing “Defragmentation Progress”, while performing random seeks on the hard drive. Never had another complaint from the user!

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

Shred

> tied together with serious steel cables, attached to the machines with some quite

> serious adhesive on a plate secured direct to the metal chassis of the machines.

I remember those well. You didn't even need a screwdriver. Just grab a computer and drag it across the desk, while letting the cable holding the plate back. A nice steady lateral force would slide the plate off the computer. It seems the makers assumed that thieves would only ever try to pull the plate away from the box. Uni students used to remove the plates this way purely for fun.

Office junior had one job: Tearing perforated bits off tractor-feed dot matrix printer paper

Shred

Back in the late 80s or early 90s, a customer logged a fault with an Apple LaserWriter II printer (Canon LBP-SX engine).

"Printer has a paper jam, but there's no paper stuck in it... and please bring a replacement cleaning brush"

The printers came with a tiny little green plastic brush clipped inside for cleaning the corona wire. The brush had somehow passed through the hot fuser rollers and was now 20cm wide and about 0.1mm thick. It had concertinad up behind the little lever that detected a paper jam in the fuser exit area.

'My dream job at Oracle left me homeless!' – A techie's relocation horror tale

Shred

Don't people have savings any more? A little bit of planning and some money in the bank to pay a deposit on a home would have saved all this grief... yet apparently it's all someone else's fault.

Stop asking people for their passwords, rights warriors yell at US Homeland Security

Shred

Note to self: If traveling to the US, first set up fake / disposable social media accounts with throw away passwords.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Shred

Re: Progress bar lies

"doing an application install on a Mac (probably OS 7.5) where the progress bar got up to 100 percent and then kept going towards the edge of the dialog box."

When Macintosh System 7.0 was released, the first boot after doing an upgrade from System 6 would trigger a "desktop rebuild". The desktop rebuild took ages, particularly on a disk with a large number of files - and the progress bar not only went towards the edge of the dialogue box, but would continue to the edge of the screen.

I recall doing an upgrade after-hours on a Macintosh II with a then gigantic 140MB Rodime SCSI hard drive and waiting an eternity as the progress bar stretched out beyond 100%. It's only been 27 years, but I still want to strangle the developer who created that bug.

Australia's Dick finally drops off

Shred

Re: I think I know where they went wrong...

That's the problem, isn't it. DSE didn't have anything worth buying before the big closing down sale. Junk that's not worth buying is still junk that's not worth buying when discounted by 80%.

I ventured in to the local DSE last week and found that I was the only customer. There were three staff standing around looking bored, lots of signs saying "SALE!" and big bins full of rubbish quality HDMI cables, mobile phone cases (for ancient phones) and stuff that even with an 80% discount was still over-priced for what it was.

Shred

My first computer was a Dick Smith kit called a "Super 80" (not to be confused with the "System 80"). In high school, I used to regularly visit the local Dick Smith reseller to check out the latest electronic kits and computers.

I remember the zany marketing - towing a fake iceberg in to Sydney Harbour for April Fools Day in the late 70s. The truck with sign writing: "The Electronic Dick". Some of his enterprises seemed a bit dodgy to me though - like selling 27MHz CBs by the truckload at a time when it was illegal to use them in Australia.

I agree with the earlier poster that Jaycar is going down the well trodden path that Tandy and DSE have both gone down. Every time I visit the local Jaycar store, there seems to be more space taken up by electronic gadgets and toys, while the electronic components are gradually getting pushed further to the back of the shop.

For sale: One 236-bed nuclear bunker

Shred

Re: Interesting

I just had a vision of a world populated by the Golgafrinchams from Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Golgafrincham

The slow strangulation of telework in Australia

Shred

It is appropriate that the photograph shows vans with Tasmanian registration plates. The island state of Tasmania has always fared worse than other Australian states, due to the high cost of shipping 1s and 0s across Bass Strait.

When Telstra was the only provider of this service, the costs were extortionate, but we were told they couldn't possibly be lowered. Strangely, once the Basslink cable gave Telstra a little competition, prices dropped to merely being "very expensive". Many ISPs over commit their bandwidth across Bass Strait to offset the cost, so even those with shiny new 50/20Mb/sec NBN connections may only be giving 1Mb/sec actual throughput in peak times.

20 years ago this week, Microsoft just about killed Australian PC manufacturing

Shred

Re: The missing bit

I remember that when Osborne hit the wall, I met someone who had paid in advance for a computer. They had been told that for each week the system was late, some amount ($100?) would be taken off the price. The customer thought this was wonderful, because it had been six weeks and counting. The penny hadn't dropped, that they probably wouldn't get a computer and would never see the money again.

In the end, I think most people who had paid in advance at the time that Osborne went under did eventually get a computer - a Gateway branded system. Unfortunately, by the time the machines arrived, they were outdated technology and many would-be Osborne owners had given up and bought a new computer elsewhere.

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