ozzie286

With floppy disks, a crt monitor, and a kvm switch with a big knob that went ker-thunk every time you switched inputs.

Yeah, these are vulnerabilities that we're just finding out about, but we'll never know how many people knew about them before now.

Someone's salty.

Probably meant the office phone, not their personal cell.

Never weld a case with electronics inside of it, you're just asking for trouble.

You guys assume that thieves know enough about servers to recognize old vs new equipment. I'll pretty much guarantee they were just grabbing anything that looked techie that they could get their hands on, regardless of age.

I think all the good puns have already hatched, these are going rotten.

That's the one, your searches were apparently more fruitful than mine!

I know that someone else must remember this story. A manager joins a company, finds out that the grey beard system administrator with the same first name as him has the [firstname@company.com](mailto:firstname@company.com) email address, and pulls strings and rank to get that email address for himself. Tons of reports and alerts are set up to go to that email address, and he has no idea what to do with them, so he ignores them. Things do not end well. Anyone know the story I'm talking about?

The history of Dennis the Menace is crazy. For two separate comics, both with the same name, to debut in the US and UK on the same day, is quite the coincidence.

The DNS issue is the root cause of everything. The hosts file edit was a workaround, and the wrong IP was a consequence of humans being human. The DNS issue was the weak link in the chain that allowed this to happen.

I'm a printer technician, I've seen many different models of A3 printers. All A3 printers sold in the US are going to be designed to handle 11x17. Think of it this way - 2 sheets of 8.5x11 next to each other are the same size as 11x17. The only differences are that one ream is still in the packaging (maybe an extra mm of width), and instead of the guide being on one side of the paper, it's between the two sheets of paper. So, if handling 11x7 requires the guide to be tight to the inside of the tray, that extra ream is going to be tight getting in and out, and if there's a notch for the guide to drop into (which I don't think I've ever seen on an a3), it won't work at all. It's even easier if you're outside the US, A3 paper is only about 8 1/4" wide, so you get an extra 1/2" of wiggle room.

I once had a user load a ream of paper in the tray, still in the wrapping, then try to print. The printer lifts the ream, then tries and fails to grab the top sheet. When it shows a jam, they opened and closed the tray and tried again. And again. And again. And then eventually put a ticket in for someone with a brain to look at it. I think I must have already been in the area when the call came in, because I can't imagine it would have been too long before someone else came along and found the problem, but I got there first. I wish I'd taken pics, but at the time I was rocking a flip phone. The paper wrapping looked like someone had done the world's smallest burnout on it. The pickup roller was the most worn I've ever seen a pickup roller, and the normally gray rubber had turned brown.

I can't figure out if that means you're the oldest or the youngest child.

I had someone who absolutely could not get their printer to work. I looked at the back of the printer, and there's the USB port. And there's the USB cable, plugged in....to the phone jack.

And the user walked in, sat down, with a seein' eye dog.

>Anyway, after much back and forth we finally agree a date & time (15:00 on a Friday) [...] >I'm told the VIP has already left for the day - in fact, they left at around 9:00 in the morning. You are far too nice. I would have left, closed the ticket, and sent an email detailing that I was there at the scheduled time but they were not, and to open a new ticket when they were available. cc as appropriate. If I show up unplanned and unannounced, that's on me, but if we've got a scheduled meeting for me to fix your stuff, you better be there. I'm sick of people disrespecting my time. I mean, sure, in this case it worked out that you could get in relatively quickly and resolve the issue without them. But that is not always the case, and you don't want to set the precedent that it's ok to make you wait an hour for security to find a key (or to not find a key), then get in and find that there's nothing wrong with the printer itself, they've taken their laptop home for the day, and now you need to come back when the user is in to find out what the problem is.

Those are 4 words I've never seen together before, but now I need to try it.

You should be able to use a powershell script to just change the IP of the printer, assuming they're using the IP and not WSD. [https://github.com/PackeTsar/Win-Printer-IP-Change](https://github.com/PackeTsar/Win-Printer-IP-Change) [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/security/remoting/running-remote-commands?view=powershell-7.5#run-a-script](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/security/remoting/running-remote-commands?view=powershell-7.5#run-a-script)

>it sounds like his account is compromised and a 3rd party is handling his mailbox. That's what I was thinking as well, especially if the rules he "didn't create" don't seem to jive with his normal work. Someone could be using his email to send phishing or other malicious emails, and using mail rules to hide the evidence.

"We paid for the suggested articles feature, you're going to use it"

LMAO, I woke up at 3am when one of the hard drives in my home server started failing.

Page 6: Once the thermal sensor has detected that the processor temperature is out of the specified operating range, it is up to the microcontroller or chipset to begin throttling the processor into a lower power state. In other words, it needed to be implemented by the motherboard manufacturer. And in practice they never did.

Not as bad as you might think. You buy IDE to CF adapters and CF cards, they're fairly cheap and not 30 year old NOS.

Pentium 3s didn't throttle, they just shut down. It wasn't until the P4 and S479 that the CPU could control the clocks like that.

Clone the drive and replace it with a compact flash card/adapter. Keep at least one spare ready to go.

Don't turn it off, just disconnect it from the network. God knows there are enough horror stories about old servers not powering back on.

IIRC at one point emails in the trash didn't count toward your quota, so people did that intentionally to free up space without actually freeing up any space.

I used to have to work on a printer like that. LaserJet 8000 or 8100, I don't remember which, and this would have been around 2016-2018, so around 20 years old. Every time a plastic panel had to come off, it would break, usually around the screw holes. Covers were held on with duct tape or gravity. Eventually it lost a power supply, and the 2 "refurb" power supplies both failed, one so bad it tripped a breaker and caught fire. After that we finally told the customer we wouldn't be fixing that dinosaur any more.

On most PCs, there is a key or key combo you can press to cycle through different ways to treat the monitors - only laptop screen, laptop + external clone, laptop + external extend, and only external.

I have a Chromebook running Linux and have never had that problem. Sounds like a crappy implementation of the embedded controller firmware, not an OS issue.

I always figured it was because it was the best of times and the worst of times.

>I dont want that the printer counts only the pages and says ink is empty. I want that the printer can real say ita empty. As a printer tech, I can tell you that this is not a thing that's actually done, at least not on any business class machine I've ever seen. Measuring ink/toner levels inside of a cartridge that you want to make as cheap as possible is not easy. A good printer knows how much ink or toner it's applying to the page, how much it's using for printhead cleaning, and/or has a good idea how much is going to be going in the waste toner bin, and bases the amount remaining in the cartridge on that info, not just on how many pages its printed. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. The printer may tell you "3700 pages remaining", but that's only an estimate based on average coverage, it's not actually counting down 3700 pages before it tells you that it's empty.

As a printer tech, I highly recommend the M401 series, if you can get them. They're extremely durable little beasts. I've seen M401s with millions of pages on the clock that needed nothing more than a set of rollers and a new fuser.

Printer won't lift the trays, print jobs, or do anything, no errors, just sits there saying "Ready". Root cause: user installed new toner, didn't pull out sealing strip.

>Microsoft having unrealistic CSAT goals is awful but it isn't customer facing. Correct, which means no one ever calls them on their bullshit.

It is. It gives people who have no idea what you do or how it works a way to assess your performance without them having to do any actual work. Fucking twats.

Shame on the agent, but also shame on MS for creating an environment where this happens. A 4/5 should not be considered a bad rating.

So surveys are pointless and your only options are either 5 or 4-1. Do you not see the problem with that? If 4 and 1 are treated the same, then there's no damn point in having 5 stars, you might as well just have good vs bad. And that is not an issue with the customer. That is a management/company culture issue.

I have as well.

>I think that having a machine read machine-readable data is probably better than having a human read it, where possible. Wow. The stupidity in this statement is overwhelming. I told you that I use Notepad for taking notes. Those notes are often url or user IDs, which you decided makes them machine-readable data. But they're still just notes - snippets, reminders, the full url to that page I need to access every few months from a PC that doesn't have my bookmarks. Having an LLM read them would be useless and pointless. Having that data out in the open could open up vectors for hacking or social engineering - "Hi, is this Alice Applebee, ID 123456?" Microsoft at this point can't make a Solitaire game that isn't stuffed full of ads and collects and sells your data. Microsoft no longer sells Windows, they monetize Windows users. I have no reason to believe that they have spent $72.4 billion (so far) on Copilot just out of the kindness of their hearts to give to all the users of the OS that they either practically or literally give away. So, no, I do not trust Copilot. I have a lot more trust in LLMs running in an ollama container on my home server. But I also don't want them reading everything I write, I want to choose what data to share. I want AI to be more like a friend or colleague that I can talk to, not a micromanaging boss or overly intrusive mother who needs to read everything and butt in with suggestions all the time. But, I'm also conflicted, because I don't want all the data centers gobbling up chips and resources to train these AI models.

Great typo, but I don't see the point. What does it matter if the text is human or computer focused? I still don't want an AI reading it or sending it to the cloud.

I mean, yes, but they're in a format intended for a human (me) to find and use them, not for a computer to process them.

>Sure, let's work offline and not use the cloud. I chose what I put on reddit, knowing that it's going to the open internet. I expect that what I put into Notepad will stay on my PC. And yes, I also do not use OneDrive.

It's human focused. Notes, urls, commands, names and usernames and IDs, etc.

>CoPilot pops up and says "Were you aware that your XML is duplicating data in section XYX that you weren't looking at, and had assumed was fine? You might want to consider changing it to be more like this \[...\]" In that specific case, it might be useful, so long as it's prompting about suggested changes, and not just silently making changes. But that also seems like a situation where you should be using a more full-featured editor. My concern is that it will silently make "corrections" that I've dealt with other things "correcting" over the years, such as changing the formatting in a .c file from the project's standard 4-space indentation to "proper" tab indentation.

The point is everything. It bloats notepad adding a feature that shouldn't exist that can fuck up what I'm working on and compromise my data.

It sounds like you have a lot more trust in Copilot than I do. I don't trust that it will never create errors trying to be helpful.

I wonder how many of the other 17 corporations that have managed to lose my data in the last few years have had corporate ready data security controls. Anyways, that's still not the point. Notepad is supposed to be a simple text editor. Nothing else. Nothing fancy. It should not be wasting system resources feeding everything into an AI. If you want coding help, they've shoved Copilot into VS code now as well, use it there. Leave notepad, and for that matter, paint, the hell alone.

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