Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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erlando said:
I don't "need" someone to be stupid. But having multiple timezones on a 150 miles long north-south journey where the time of day doesn't actually change is pretty stupid. It's also pretty stupid to have DST observed or not on an almost county level.
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The issue here is sovereignty. The relations between the tribes and the US, and thus the states, are governed by treaties between each tribe and the Federal government. (There is an exception: In Virginia, two treaties predate the establishment of the United States. These treaties are still in force.)

Hopi and Navajo reservations are in some sense sovereign nations, and in some sense part of the United States -- but not of the individual state(s) in which they are located. For instance, they have their own vehicle licensing system, their own tax collection which is independent of the state's collection*, etc.

*That is, tribe members do not pay income tax to the state, and a state sales tax is not collected nor remitted to the state in which the reservation is located. Thus, for instance, many people who live near a reservation, always buy gasoline on the reservation.
 
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Wudang said:
Amazon s3 storage does something similar. It's annoying because they sort of adopted unix syntax (ls,cp, etc) but have this.
Also vendor products that have their own scripting language that is almost but not quite the same syntax as perl or existing languages. Just write perl packages or something you <expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted>!
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Domain-specific languages are a hoot.
 
erlando said:
Exactly. I absolutely hate it when someone says "Nothing happened, it was all a big hoax". Yea, clownface, nothing happened because a great many people worked their asses off fixing the code that would have caused problems if left untouched.
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On a related note, especially in support, people who fight fires get more recognition than people who prevent fires from happening in the first place.
 
zooterkin said:
On a related note, especially in support, people who fight fires get more recognition than people who prevent fires from happening in the first place.
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Very much so. A good office admin or a good computer systems person is essentially unnoticed until something goes wrong and stuff hits the fan. For the office admin, people get paid correctly, suppliers get paid, receipts are deposited, and the books are kept up to date every month ... no one notices unless there's a mistake. For computer people, the file shares, websites and databases stay up, the networks are reliable, email is received and delivered, backups get done (and restores as well!), and the firewalls and anti-virus systems keep the malware out.
 
xterra said:
"Everything is going bad, breaking down, failing! Why are we paying you?"


"Everything is working fine, no problems, no issues. Why are we paying you?"
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Very old story I heard during my contracting days:

Big machine at a factory broke down and failed to proceed. Nobody on site could figure out how to fix it. Orders backed up, no income, hair-tearing-out time in the boardroom. "GET SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO FIX IT!", they cried in anguish. Someone remembers...Old Bob who was their senior engineer knew how to fix it. But they had sacked him and he was a contractor now. "DON'T CARE!" said the chairman. "GET HIM IN NO MATTER THE COST!"

In comes Old Bob, who looks carefully at the machine, and marks an X on it carefully in chalk. "Hit it gently here", he said. They did, and lo and behold the machine whirrs back into action.

Old Bob then presents his bill, and it is huge - $100,000. "You want THAT MUCH for just drawing an X in chalk?" whined the chairman. "Yes", says Old Bob. "But how can you justify $100,000?! That's ridiculous!" "Easy", said Old Bob. "It's $5 for marking the machine with chalk. But it's $999,995 for knowing where to put the X."
 
Jeez, I'm getting all the weird and crazy calls today that I can't resolve at first level. The software that didn't associate its file type properly on install and can't be manually associated. The free time for other people not showing in the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook, even though the user could view free time for rooms and shared mailboxes. The web page that won't load and won't give an error - just hangs, even though other tabs are working normally and that I can't test to see if it's the site because it requires a logon. I haven't had a single easy, straightforward call all morning.

Yes, I did all the basic Tier 1 things for all of these. Nothing worked. I haven't had a single easy, straightforward call all morning.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Very old story I heard during my contracting days:

Big machine at a factory broke down and failed to proceed. Nobody on site could figure out how to fix it. Orders backed up, no income, hair-tearing-out time in the boardroom. "GET SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO FIX IT!", they cried in anguish. Someone remembers...Old Bob who was their senior engineer knew how to fix it. But they had sacked him and he was a contractor now. "DON'T CARE!" said the chairman. "GET HIM IN NO MATTER THE COST!"

In comes Old Bob, who looks carefully at the machine, and marks an X on it carefully in chalk. "Hit it gently here", he said. They did, and lo and behold the machine whirrs back into action.

Old Bob then presents his bill, and it is huge - $100,000. "You want THAT MUCH for just drawing an X in chalk?" whined the chairman. "Yes", says Old Bob. "But how can you justify $100,000?! That's ridiculous!" "Easy", said Old Bob. "It's $5 for marking the machine with chalk. But it's $999,995 for knowing where to put the X."
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The first time I heard that story the protagonist wasn't Old Bob. It was Nicola Tesla.

And he did his own tapping.
 
Have you guys ever read The Story Of Mel? It's from 1983, and it's quite long, so there's the link, but it starts like this:

A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:

Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and “user-friendly” software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term “software” sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.
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I heartily recommend reading the whole thing, whether you're a programmer or, like me, not. It's beautiful.
 
xterra said:
The issue here is sovereignty. The relations between the tribes and the US, and thus the states, are governed by treaties between each tribe and the Federal government. (There is an exception: In Virginia, two treaties predate the establishment of the United States. These treaties are still in force.)

Hopi and Navajo reservations are in some sense sovereign nations, and in some sense part of the United States -- but not of the individual state(s) in which they are located. For instance, they have their own vehicle licensing system, their own tax collection which is independent of the state's collection*, etc.

*That is, tribe members do not pay income tax to the state, and a state sales tax is not collected nor remitted to the state in which the reservation is located. Thus, for instance, many people who live near a reservation, always buy gasoline on the reservation.
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That changes matters of course. I wasn't aware of this.

I learned something new today. Thank you.
 
arthwollipot said:
I swear, I ask people this question several times every day.

There's a reason why that stereotype exists.

I couldn't watch The IT Crowd. It was far too true.
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Dogbert's Tech Support:

"Hello I-"
"Shut up and reboot."
"Hey it worked-""
"Shut up and hang up."
 
arthwollipot said:
The software that didn't associate its file type properly on install and can't be manually associated.
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I've occasionally had something similar on my home PC. A program would suddenly lose its association with a file type it previously opened, and if I tried to manually change "Open with", the changes wouldn't save. The problem would go away after a Windows update, so I assumed it was something that they messed up.
 
Also Microsoft my users have to use Chrome.

It's literally undignified and desperate how much you push Edge when all I'm doing is just choosing a default browser.

I'm waiting for the day I try to switch a user to Chrome and message pops of my house "Nice house you got there... be a shame if something happened to it. Just saying maybe you choose Edge..."
 
Armitage72 said:
I've occasionally had something similar on my home PC. A program would suddenly lose its association with a file type it previously opened, and if I tried to manually change "Open with", the changes wouldn't save. The problem would go away after a Windows update, so I assumed it was something that they messed up.
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I've certainly had problems when a Windows update has been installed (automatically, without telling me) but still needs a reboot to finish. Some applications, e.g. Lightroom, start misbehaving and the reboot (and completion of the update) fixes it.
 
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