Slashdot Mirror
When Users Attack
AdmiralKit writes "Ever wonder how much damage some users can inflict on their computers? This site documents the cream of the crop of parts that have been returned because they are "defective" or "broken." Pretty amazing what people can do to computers in the middle of the information age."
Quite interesting.
"With Microsoft, you get Windows. With Linux, you get the full house" - unknown
Sounds like a really bad "B" or hell even "c" rated movie!
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
=[
They'll return their melted server tomorrow because it is 'broken'
All the fried Mobos seem to be for AMD.
Middle of the information age? You have got to be kidding me. The way I see it, we've barely progressed beyond the point of last night's erection.
this may be the Information Age, but we're all cavemen at heart. *sniffs keyboard*
Looks like the site is now /.ed. Wonder when it will be back up.
"With Microsoft, you get Windows. With Linux, you get the full house" - unknown
....after all, look how much my parents F'd me up ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
The user who drilled holes in his laptop to improve cooling
The man who had a Pentium motherboard, and installed his new Pentium2 processor in the PCI port (with the help of a hacksaw)
My CD Rom drive, which started expelling smoke while installing Windows 95 (hardware with good taste)
The woman who brought in her computer wondering why it was crashing... she had had the thing for 3 years - without a CPU fan and heatsink attached
The incompetent computer shop who couldn't figure out how to fix my uncles computer (when its 9$ cooling fan had died)
If it wasnt for the customers!!!!
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Ever wonder how much damage some users can inflict on their computers?
:]
No, not really. After seeing some people submit their own sites to a Slashdot front page story, everything else pales in comparison.
I'd say their server is "defective" or "broken"!
ah yes but nothing beats the good ol' cup holder/platform
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
I know there are 2 Dell laptops in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that used to belong to an upper management mofo in a company I used to work for. Seems he liked to take his laptop fishing with him. Of course, he may have been stealing them.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
He'll need to add a snapshot of his smoldering webserver to his gallery.
Where are the pics of some creamed keyboards?
We need pictures of some of the users!
Why, you ask?
When I was twelve I fried a power supply when I opened it up to install a longer cable for the power switch... Problen was it was still plugged in and I managed to fry my fingertips while I was at it (yes, I know, it was a miricle I wasn't killed)
Imagine some of the injuries/electrocutions/burns some of these could have inflicted! Better yet, I wonder if these users are the types of people who should never ever have tried to use a computer without supervision in the first place. Come on. You know who I'm talking about ("Marge! The computer's cup-holder's broken again!")
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
I can't get the "Index of the pictures" page to load fully, but the pictures are loading slowly for me via the Google caches:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
I'm not sure how many pages there are in total, but these ought to get you started.
Only 17 comments so far and the server's melted. I happenned to get a few picts myself, but that's about it.
We really need a slashdot cache! Come on commander taco, surely you can program that!
I got to see the first page before it got /.ed
All I can say is WOW....I mean I've fried components before, but nothing with this kind of visible damage.....well, except for the time I burned out my zip drive, scsi card, motherboard and floppy by accidently pluging my speaker transformer into my zip drive (they look identical and have identical connections, except as I noticed afterwards one is 12VAC and the other 2.5VDC).....left pretty burn marks all over my scsi card and motherboard. And then there was the time I was serviceing my old laptop (loose connection somewhere inside) and I forgot that when I moved workspaces I had slipped the battery back into its slot....ZZZTZTZ....smoke, and a fried out chip on the motherboard.
Luckly everything I've destroyed since then has not had such spectacular effects associated.
So....I guess I can see how this stuff happens.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Why not just solder the broken lead on the capacitor? I had a cap sheath come off once, all I did was widen the sheath with pliers and that ram it back onto the dielectric. My computer works fine now, nothing wrong with the mobo. BTW, I have an Abit KT7A-RAID rev.1.2 and have noticed other cap sheaths coming loose or undone- beware.
"An error occured while loading http://www.thetechboard.com/mishaps/index1.html:
Timeout on server
www.thetechboard.com"
Dear Sir
I'm sorry to inform you that your server has suffered a mishap due to the slashdot effect.
Please feel free to blame the whole thing on CmdrTaco. It's all his fault.
Sincerely
A frustrated "./" user.
Can't get to the page, it seems that the servers they are using consist of those "defective" parts.
C:\>
I hate stupid people.
Ever wonder how much damage some users can inflict on their computers?
No, because I know how much damage some users can inflict on websites.
I stole this Sig
Obligatory Google cache, though it seems to be largely a picture collection, so it's not too helpful.
According to the news on this page, the URL posted originally belonged to jonnyguru.com. But, unfortunately, the Wayback machine's archive for that site goes back to just after it was displaced, so it appears we're SOL until the server comes back to life.
Oh well...
Something to try: Put a copy of all those photos on a bogus web page with the title, "Here is what Microsoft software does to your computer."
Then show the page to your "favorite" manager.
Table-ized A.I.
So he came to me with a question about causing a break or failure in the computer that looked like an accident.
I told him flat out, that the best thing about computers is that if one thing breaks, that component can be replaced. It's also the main problem with what he was trying to do.
In the end, I told him to just live with it. Thats the best he could hope for in that case. Tech support might sound like they were picked up off the street, but when money's involved they look really close at what caused the accident.
Wow. That was a whole lot of nothing. Cool.
| - | - |
I know someone who unplugged a hd while the computer was powered up and running windows.
No, it *wasn't* meant to be hot swappable.
And all he did was fry a fuse in his PSU. TANJ.
"God protects fools, children, and the cataclysmically stoned."
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
My parents are the typical lot when it comes to machines. When we first got one, they felt that it was "their toy" and wouldn't let me have at it. Not that I was taking computer classes in Elementary School or anything. Even at 10 years old, I was more way more qualified.
/. bunch goes through that as well. And it doesn't stop when you leave home, either.
Since that time, my parents have learned to scream for me whenever something goes wrong. I'm sure alot of the rest of the
I remember that first PC. No hard drive, DOS on a 5.25", and another floppy with something called "Microsoft Desktop 2.0" Call it the prelude to windows. On to the mishaps. Dad thought he could take it apart and tinker as if it were some sort of Ford model. Genious that he is, he has it on and is looking in complete awe at some of the parts. Inside was a 1200bps modem. He had no clue what it was, even though I told him several times. Guess 10 year olds don't know much, do they. Anyway, while this thing was still running hot, Dad rips the modem out. Two chips on the card, toasted. Several other resisters, capacitors, etc. fried. The 8 bit slot it came out of, useless. From then on, my father couldn't, for the life of him, figure out why the machine would screw up every so often. Later I learned that he'd semi-fried the motherboard, and continual (ab)use wore it out.
Then came the 486. This was the first one with anything that resembled Windows on it, that being 3.1. Well, mom wanted to see what she could do with Windows (and again, new machine, I wasn't allowed to play). What she did was got into the settings area, played with numbers, changed addresses, and basically sent Windows to hell. Then she discovered that F1 gave her setup options. Thinking that would solve the problem, she proceeded to lock herself out of the BIOS (by forgetting her password in a matter of moments). This was at the advent of Prodigy and AOL, so I found my way around after learning that BIOS passwords could be cracked hardway, and fixed the problem.
Since then, I'm the PC fixit guy. But with all the advances we have, I'm still trying to get them to move forward. I can't wait to see what they do to Cable lines and modems, network hubs, and next-gen stuff. No matter how inept our fellow peons in the workforce get, the people we know at home always seem ever the slightest bit worse...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
us slashdotters can do to a pittily website that isn't prepared? =P
"Pretty amazing what people can do to computers in the middle of the information age."
What's far more amazing is how we're about to go from the information age to the stone age(DRM) in just 10 years time.
Really makes me wonder what the word "progress" is doing in our vocabulary.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
My personal favourite was a new member of the staff complaining that she was tring to access some old 5.25" disks, but the disk drive was making a horrible sound when she would put them in. It took me 5 minutes to figure out that she was putting it in a CD-ROM drive, not a 5.25" disk drive
That was 22 years ago. He bought a Commodore PET (the big one, with 32 megs), floppy disk drives and printer.
Two weeks later, he comes back with a box, and asked us if we would buy back the printer from him. In the box was the printer.
Totally disassembled.
Down to actual TTL chips, resistors, diodes and transistors. Heck, he even took apart the printhead and separated the tiny coils and the actual needles!!!
We laughed for days about this, and since he was a classmate of mine, I got teased pretty well with that afterwards...
Most of the stuff shown is much more a result of bad design not the user being stupid.
Case in point. Linksys uses two diferent voltage adapters for their router and wireless access point. Yet, they both use exactly the same connector size and the converter portions are identical unless you read the fine print.
I used to be the Windows system administrator at a small (300-person) company. Before we got mail filters installed on our server, we would just get nailed with viruses. We were on about our third round of Melissa at that point, and each time, I would send out a company-wide email telling people not to click on attachments.
;)
Well, I knew most of the people in the company quite well, including the sales guys. One of the sales guys happened to be a pretty close friend of mine, and the thought he really knew a lot of computers. In fact, he was so cocky about the belief that he would never get a virus that he didn't usually read my emails.
In this particular case, I happened to be sitting a few feet away from him when he was going through his email. He came upon my email and asked me if he could delete it. I said, "Sure, as long as you don't click on attachments." Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him delete the email and click on the next email in his box. Then I watched him double-click on the attachment and immediately get nailed by the virus.
I sprung into action. "What are you doing? That's the virus!" I yelled. I disconnected his Ethernet cord so he wouldn't spread it, and spent the next 20 minutes cleaning the damn thing off his computer.
This company was full of people who really thought they knew their stuff when it came to computers. I watched one of the Linux gurus there sheepishly admit that he didn't know that removing an NT box from a domain removed his ability to log in with his domain account. (Since the IT staff was the only group with the local administrator password, he actually had to log a helpdesk ticket saying that he couldn't log in to his NT box.) I watched our VP of sales call our network admin away from an off-site meeting because "ALL OF MY EMAIL HAS DISAPPEARED! OH MY GOD! YOU DELETED IT!" (In actuality, he had scrolled all the way to the right in the pane that showed his mailboxes, so he couldn't see any of his mailboxes. One very pissed network administrator had to explain to him that there was a scrollbar at the bottom of the screen that he needed to scroll back to the left.)
It happens all the time, but before you spout off that those users are stupid, I must remind you that we all have those things we know nothing about. Do you know the correct usage for its vs. it's? (Hint: Only use it's in place of it is -- no other time.) Can you fix your car every time something goes wrong, or do you take it into a mechanic? Do you know how to ballroom dance?
The moral of the story: We're all stupid sometimes. Learn to laugh about it. Heck, that's the only way you're ever going to get through a single day as a sysadmin.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I had the side panel off of my tower off... I put it back on, it had sparks and smoke when I just put it against it. The computer shut off. I turned it on again, never happened again. (ATX style, K6-300).
To this day I never actually figured out what happened.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Reminds me of my friends computer, the case has a nice dent in it (on the top) from when he hit it a few times with a bat. I also hit my computer alot (back in the IBM PS/2 days, and if you had one of these computers you'd understand why I would beat the crap out of it) I dented the case with my fist, very painfull but it relieved alot of stress.
I also have a keyboard missing alot of keys from when I smaked my computer with it. After I started learning alot more about computers I stopped attacking mine. Well it crashes alot less and when it does crash I can actually read the error message and understand it (and fix it). Whenever people call me for help with computers, I always say "Well did you kick it? Good! Now doesn't that feel good?" or "Ok now go to your window, open it. Now stand near the computer, bend your knees slightly and keep your back straight, now lift the computer and carry it to the window. Drop."
Saying you've never gotten angry at a comptuer would just be a flat out lie, I bet there's millions of people who have typed up a term paper in 6 hours right before it's due, go to print, computer freezes and you realized you haven't saved the file since you opened it. Or you could be momemnts away from capturing the flag in your favorite CTF style game when suddenly the game closes for some stupid reason (IM received, accidentally hit windows 95 key, game crashes.) Most of the problems are user related but the computer makes a good outlet for your anger.
Then there's the stupidity errors,
"I was banging my mouse against the desk because the button got stuck and now it doesn't work anymore, why not?"
"My cd-rom drive doesn't work!" (open it up to find an upside down CD)
"My computer turns on for 5 minutes and then it crashes and won't turn on", spent 2 hours looking for a problem with the PSU or something like that then hear "Oh yeah the fan doesn't spin." looked at the fan, was covered in dust and wouldn't even spin if I pushed it with my finger
"I think my motherboard's bad" "why?" "Well the computer keeps freezing, oh here it goes again, don't try the power button just yank the cord from the wall and plug it back in"
"Our printer doesn't work!", opened it up, the ink cartrige was leaking everywhere since someone tried to clear up the nozzle with a pen
Those are all problems I had to fix for people I know.
Probably the worst thing I ever did was fry three athlons. One was a XP 2100+, the next was a t-bird 1.4 ghz, and the last was one of two MP 2000+'s. Two motherboards fried too all because I installed a heatsink with no thermal compound.) Although I turned the XP 2100+ into a nifty 1.73 GHz keychain. The MP 2000+ was replaced free, but the other two I have to pay for myself (although I still haven't gotten a new motherboard so I've been stuck with my 600MHz PIII for a while)
This job would be great if it wasnt for the customers!!!!
There's a way to get them to stop bugging you...
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
I was running some normal telephone cable for a friend of mine behind a desk. Modem, answering machine, and two telephones, all from one jack. I was running the cable and trying to get all of the power cords set up, as well. I was running out of hands, so I held one or two cables with my mouth. I was under the desk, so it was hard to work with.
I was getting things set-up when I plugged in one telephone cable to another piece of equipment. Sure enough, the telephone cable that was in my mouth just became live.
I cannot describe to people that have not felt their tongue being fried what it feels like. Not a good sensation at all.
It also caused me to hit my head on the bottom of the desk.
All in all, not a great install at all.
This may or may not be related to what the site says, but it is not responding (even at 1am EST), so I thought I would add my own little story.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
A year ago, I dropped my monitor (sony e210) a distance of about 2 feet onto a marble floor. It landed on its front-top-right corner, and it still works perfectly!
c-hack.com |
I had been doing general troubleshooting on-site in people's homes when I went to one genius' home to fix his modem problems. I did the usual check to make sure that the software has set to the right com port (this was Win3.1), right IRQ, etc.. based on what the default setting was. Nothing seemed to work. So, I determined that it was a hardware issue.
So, I start to open the computer (which is the FIRST thing I should have done, but, oh well..) to make sure that the modem was jumpered correctly, etc.. and the (l)user tells me that, "I can't believe how amazing computers are. You just place a modem board in the computer and it's supposed to work!" Needless to say, when I looked in the computer, the modem was just laying on the motherboard, not plugged in anywhere (but nicely screwed into the case) and shorting out god-knows-how-many traces.
With the door-knob standing over me, and me trying not to call him a moron to his face, I plug the modem into the mb and again attempt the software fix. Not surprisingly, the modem was fried: the computer was working (amazingly!). I told him to bring the modem back and get it replaced--and this time, don't try to install it yourself. I never heard back from him, but, I can only assume that the next-time round his computer blew up and killed him...
While attending school I did some part time work repairing PDAs. You would not believe the reasons people would send units back to us. My company had (still has) what has to be the finest customer service I have ever encountered, and promised to fix just about everything. Plus customers often lie about the problems and then include the truth in a note with the returned unit. I very quickly noticed that the units sold at large chain stores were operated completely by idiots.
Some of my favorites:
"Unit dropped in ocean. Screen does not seem to work."
"Screen has air bubbles" This unit was actually returned TWICE with the same problem. I read the problem description, looked at the unit, and realised HE NEVER TOOK THE PROTECTIVE FILM OFF THE SCREEN!
"Dog chewed on my PDA"
"Screen was too dark so I removed a cable from inside. Now won't work."
"Batteries won't charge in cradle" (Umm...they weren't supposed to)
It goes on and on.
The sysadmins where I used to work had a CD server that they were installing NT 4 on. Everytime it would get about 2/3s through the install, it would blue screen. They tried this 4 or 5 times before calling me (I just happened to know something about computers)...
I watched it go through the motions of loading and BSODing... Opened it up, and sure enough, the processor fan wasn't turning at all. The connector to the fan had gotten unplugged.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Well, the site is /.ed, but I've got this friend who's clumsy and excitable, a dangerous combo when building a system!
He managed to break the Athlon chip by forcing the heat sink. Trying to fix that, he somehow managed to destroy the thermocouple, the transistors that switch the CPU fan, and damage the socket. Before that, he shoved a DIMM in backwards and powered up the system.
The DIMM had a contact and its trace burn and lift off the DIMM PCB. I mixed him a batch of conductive epoxy and painted in a new contact and trace. That worked.
The mobo was toast. He packed it up and sent it back... I expected the company to simply give him a new board, but the same board came back with a new socket, thermocouple and transistors.
I couldn't believe it!
Anyways, the combination of cheaper hardware and the sheer number of computers out there means there will be more accidents.
There isn't if slashdot offered a caching proxy ... But IANAL
In the United States, a rider to the DMCA made it legal to run a caching proxy provided that you 1. use technical measures to obey the content provider's wishes (a conforming HTTP/1.1 proxy will work fine), and 2. designate an agent to handle takedown requests.
When will we see a working "cachedot"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
When I was on the tail end of my college years I kept up my habit for comps by buying and reselling them fairly quickly.
I had just picked up a p-90 for a very good price and had a buyer for my dx266. Check these specs.
16 megs of ram
2 meg video
windows 3.1
CD-rom
15 inch monitor
Colorado 250 Tape Backup(still hearing it whining on these late lonely nights)
and a 540 meg Connor drive(worst comp in history).
Well I had a buyer for 1600 bucks, I had paid 2400 for the thing, buyer was getting a fair deal. 2 years warranty...
I had opened the box for whatever reason and it was running on the kitchen table at my place.
I go out the night, get a little ripped with some friends. Come home, crash, and up bright and early cause I had to deliver the box.
So I do not notice that the case is back on. Probably in some hangover funk it swept by me.
I deliver the box. And a week later my customer calls and tells me there is this horrible funk coming out her new computer.
I go over and crack the box, and there is some rotten scum in the bottom of the case. Slightly boozie smelling. I clean it out, tell her I do not know what it easse, but looks like a rodent got in... she buys it.
I go home and my roomate says that he had come home drunk and was about to finish doom and he got motion sickness from the game but instead of running to the bathroom, he yacked in the case. He freaked, mopped mostof it out, and put the cover back on.
Heheheh.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
My relatives asked if we had any spare CDROM drives as they had just bought some new software
that required 4X CDROM and they had only one.
reminds me of a story from techs upport at our company
tech:"sir you are gonna have to open your computers case(i forget why)"
luser"alright"
(sound effect of something grinding)
tech:" um sir...sir?...SIR!!?!?!?"
(more sounds)
customer:"yeah?hold on i almost got the case off"
tech:"um what are you using to take the case of sir?"
customer" a grinder why?"
tech:"please hold while i transfer you" silently"dear go this job sucks"
I think we slapped his site into a last month, literaly..
http://www.thetechboard.com/ is now just a banner page that says "Coming Soon." Pity too, i was on page 3.
Sorry for the bad wrestling reference (I even hate wrestling), but did anyone else start to smell burning fumes after seeing those images...on a second thought I better check on my Athlon XP
Seems the website that this article links to couldn't withstand the slashdot effect, i get now:
/mishaps/index.html was not found on this server.
:(
The requested URL
and it appears the root of the site was chdir'd. What a waste of resources.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let me tear down any hope you might have left: it doesn't stop even when you marry and give them grandchildren. It only stops 10 or so years after that when, if you raised your children correctly, you can pass the gramma/grampa computer support contract to your son/daughter. Believe me, I speak from experience.
Now they've taken down the page and no one can see the story. Or was that the plan all along?
Not Found.
Any mirror?
Is one of the smoking Cisco Router the slashdotting caused!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Main
Index 1
Etc..
There are not images, and in this page images are very important.
hahaha
I don't think I've ever heard an overclocking joke before.
I accidentely left a screw unber my motherboard. Turned the computer on and the chips on the motherobard began to fry. Managed to get an exchange though, they must have took pity on me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Google has a few of the pictures here.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Gee, how appropriate that a web site about when users attack, is /.ed.
I fried a mobo for a Cyrix 586 by putting in the memory backwards. When I smelt smoke and the machine wouldn't boot, I figured something was wrong. At least modern DIMMs and such aren't symetric anymore. I felt stupid at the time but it wasn't blazingly obvious which way the RAM went in.
I managed to save our first mouse from death-by-fist. We had just gotten our first PC, and I introduced my mom to solitaire. An hour later I came back to find her balling her fist and putting her weight on to the mouse buttons while she moved it with the other hand. I asked her what she was doing, and it turns out she thought you had to press harder to pick up more cards. On this particular move, she was moving ten cards, and she wanted to be sure she didn't drop any along the way.
My fiancee calls me for help getting a new HD to work. Go through everything- even oddball BIOS settings that in no way should help, just on the off chance they will. Everything that should have helped was tried and failed.
Turns out, she had plugged the hard drive into the floppy connector because the hard drive cables wouldn't fit. Whenever I run across that, I go get a new hard drive cable that has a keying method that works with my mobo and drive. But thats me. Surprisingly, no damage to the hard drive. Not even bent pins. And she showed me later the cable she used, it was indeed a floppy cable, and wasn't just poor phone skills leading me to believe it was.
Then there were all the calls and visits to get the system stable. Finally I go to the temperature monitor in the BIOS. It reads 110 degrees CELSIUS. Yes, you could have boiled water according to that monitor. MY foolish self didn't believe it, so I powered it down and touched the heat sink. Pain was immense. I recommend that you trust the hardware monitor in the BIOS, if you have reason not to trust it, get a handheld thermometer to place against the heat sink, DON'T use your finger. Looking more closely, I discover that at some point she has disconnected the CPU fan.
The system is now running quite well. But was annoying getting it to that point.
Customer wanted me to take a motherboard back because he couldn't get it to fit in his micro-ATX case. Upon opening the box we discovered the customer had used a saw to cut off the bottom 3 PCI slots, CMOS battery and BIOS chip in an attempt to "make it fit." Then honestly could not understand what he had done wrong. Best comment was his closing arguement that he was going to report us to the state DOJ and the BBB for not honoring our 30 day return policy. It doesn't end there tho folks. He actually went to another of our store locations in an attempt to possibly get a different answer from that store's manager.
The first PC I put together kept resetting during use, for no real reason that I could find. Other times it wouldn't boot, unless you pushed on the top of the (desktop) case when turning it on.
It was only after several weeks of this that I realised I'd only used half as many standoffs as you're meant to, meaning various parts of the motherboard were touching the chassis. Ouch. :(
Another annoying thing was the CD-ROM drive on the 486 I owned back in 1994 - it was a crappy 2x Longshine drive (bonus points if you've ever heard of the manufacturer). Anyway, just after a year (ie out of warranty) the wretched thing wouldn't eject if you didn't have a CD in the drive. You had to push on the front of the drive while pressing the eject button, as usually that would eject the tray. Eventually, it trapped my Windows 95 CD in the drive and wouldn't eject it. So I did what any frustrated user would do - grabbed a screwdriver and forced the tray open. Funnily enough, that killed the drive.... Of course, most CD/DVD drives now come wit emergency eject holes, but I've not had to use one since.
1. Lets make a directory named space, yes like in ascii value 20. Now under the directory named space lets copy /usr/local. That was the day I found out the real reason for the "-ls" option to the FIND command. Try 'find . -ls'.
2. I need a symbolic link from here to "/". (L)user says "I don't know why you can't use GTAR's option to follow symbolic links".
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Back in the stone age, a friend of mine was a supplier of BBC computers. Now, these came either complete or in component form. Both were mail order. He received a letter from a customer who had bought the kit and was having problems getting the computer to work. Nothing happened, not a sausage, no lights, no beeps, so my friend paid the postage to have the computer sent back to him. Upon opening the case he could easily see what the problem was. All of the components had been fitted with precision, with care, with glue.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
Is there something you want to tell us about the interesting angles of Mars and Jupiter? Are the lights on your DSL modem blinking messages to you in Morse code again?
Personally, I think we're still very close to the beginning in the scheme of things.
Okay, so my all your base joke was lame.
In my normal role of "The computer guru to the Moron masses" :-
:-
On the phone
Me:- "Are you running windows ?"
Moron:- "Yes ! (confident answer)"
Me:- "What version are you running ?"
Moron:- "Er, not sure, I think it's windows 97 ?"
I mean, for christs sake, when you boot your computer there's a large graphical screen with BIG LETTERS that tell you what version of windows you are running. It's also written on the Start Menu (when you have large icons enabled)
There is simply NO excuse for that kind of lazy stupidity.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
what if you had some apache module connected to some type of hardware that would make the whole case get hotter and hotter???
i saw it in a warez shop in hk.. it was never officially released
I had a relative (not by blood thank goodness) who just became an MCSE. He decided to celebrate by buying himself a really expensive system on credit, that had way more power than he was really going to use. I figured I would test his abilities, so I gave him an older SCSI hard drive to install on his system as an extra drive. When he opened up his box, he knocked his ram half out of it's socket. The system naturally wouldn't boot. He spent weeks trying to fix the computer himself in embarrasment. After a month of this computer sitting useless, and his wife getting angry seeing bills come in on a useless computer, she ordered him to call me. Right in front of him, I opened the case, looked around, noticed the ram, pushed it in, closed up, and the system booted just fine. It took me perhaps 5 minutes, and he was red faced.
It just goes to show, you actually need brains behind the MCSE to make things work. Apart from a semester of a 9th grade computer class which taught me how to use obsolete Apple II's and program in BASIC, I havn't taken a single class.
Bork!
Don't tell me this! I don't want to hear it! I've been away from home for 15 years now and still deal with parents (I'm single with no kids!). At least allow me the illusion that one day they may start to understand that simply typing the name of a program at a dos prompt does not mean that their program is password protected! No! Lie to me! Tell me that GUI's are going to make things so simple that they eventually won't need my help! PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS FOO, TELL ME AN IDIOT PROOF BOX IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER!
He? (Hint: its name is 'SlashChick' :-P )
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
1. eat poo
2. imagine beowulf cluster of these
3. ?????
4. Profit!!!
LOL, I was trying to make a joke off of all of FOX's "When (insert plural noun here) Attacks!" shows that they used to run a while ago.
Rook takes pawn. You sunk my battleship.
"Thanks to Melmac over at TheTechBoard.com, the Mishaps section of jonnyGURU.com are(sic) being hosted on a faster server with moer(sic) space!"
karma capped
the site may be down but now you too can recreate the wacky antics of hardware failure.
plug in one of these and hilarity will ensue.
Its all Tweaks fault!! go fried mobo, go fried amp, go fried computer!! WEE!!!
It's a *joke*, OK. Nobody *actually* believes it - at least, nobody with a functioning brain cell or two.
/. just posted. Apparently, some editor did take that obvious hoax seriously. Yikes!
If this is how you react to a joke, I'd hate to see your reaction to the Tesla-coil powered PC story
220v -- 'nuff said
Tonight, 20 years later, I finally figured it out.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
get em a new mac
if they manage to break that, I will give them a cookie.
I'm quite serious, if there is such a thing as idoit proof, I think these beasts qualify.
(that us until they rm -rf / accidently or something...)
I live in a giant bucket.
I agree with this post.
Actually he can blame him. Here's the clue.
"I figured I would test his abilities, so I gave him an older SCSI hard drive to install on his system as an extra drive. When he opened up his box, he knocked his ram half out of it's socket."
By your reasoning he shouldn't have to know how to do the above, and should heve admitted such, and declined the test.
As other people pointed out. If you don't know how. 1-decline to do it. 2-Find someone who can.
One month, the plan for their full page color advertisement in Byte magazine fell through. I'm not sure what they'd originally planned to advertise, but they ended up advertising the EPROM programmer instead. It wasn't unusual for EPROM programmers to be advertised in Byte. But it was somewhat unusual for there to be a full page color ad for one.
The ad was very successful. We started getting a lot of orders. And as far as I know, most customers were happy with them. But we did get a few customers who called us saying things like "I installed it, now what do I do with it?" You'd think that people wouldn't buy a $250 accessory for their computer without some idea of what they planned to do with it.
Anyhow, one of these customers was really irate and demanded that we refund his money. Company policy at the time was to only allow exchanges of defective products. So he said it was defective and sent it back. When it arrived, we discovered bullet holes through the box. Looked to be the result of a 9mm, though I could be wrong.
Jesus, pull your head out of your ass.
Nice.
Your teacher decided to use the authority and trust inherent in his position to publicly humiliate and victimize some kid... and YOU went along with it like a good little drone.
What made you think something like that was OK? I'll BET the kid has behavior problems. If the teachers did this to him in addition to the abuse you probably heaped on him, it's no mystery why.
Amazing that somebody didn't have the balls to speak up, but I guess you thought it would be cool to have a laugh at his expense. Sounds to me like this Chris could be any geek... young, intelligent, and mostly misunderstood/subjugated/hated by people like you.
Yeah... hilarious... I'll bet Chris thought it was a hoot.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Anyway, back to the real story.... we started producing an budget range of machines with, IIRC, a Cyrix 300Mhz 6x86 CPU. They were known internally as a model 86/87's and had a sticker on the back which read 203C87 IIRC. Everything was onboard on a really cheap and nasty far-eastern motherboard.
The first we heard was when a customer phoned up and told us that his PC had just made a loud bang. I asked him if he could boot it up, but he told me it was still running just fine. The next day he brought it in and said it wouldn't boot up the next time he tried. When I took the lid off, I noticed that a large electrolytic had exploded with enough force to actually blow a 1 1/2 inch section out of the motherboard and dent the case next to it!!! (Honestly! I have *no* idea how these machines carried on going!)
We had a fair few of these over the next few weeks. One time I had a machine on the bench for a different problem and I actually saw it happen! You've never heard anything like it, it was like a firework going off and made me throw my coffee over my shoulder! Jeeezzzz...!
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Just check,
:))
http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
You won't believe what you read, those will show up like some sort of fake to you but not, I have computer shop owner friends and it happens, they verified.
Oh, btw, isn't it worth talking when a site deletes their own pages when linked by slashdot too?
Heh...
For a little while, I worked for a large chain of restaurants who were changing over to a new point of sales system (POS).
Each restaurant was instructed to package the original POS and mail it back to the company's headquarters.
One of these restaurants decided they should really clean up the POS before sending it back, and ran the thing through the dishwasher. The dishwashers for this restaurant run fairly hot, causing the plastic to warp and buckle, effectively ruining the POS.
In another incident (same place), a certain restaurant had been hording hard-drives from the new POS (we would occasionally send a hard-drive with an image of the original OS to resolve problems, and these guys still had two of the old ones, which we wanted to reuse). I politely asked that they return the hard-drives in the same boxes we sent them in.
Instead, they returned them in one of those plastic FedEx bags. However, they were thoughtful enough to include the silicon gel pack.
Needless to say, the hard-drives were very thoroughly dead, with no hope for redemption.
And so it goes.
We took on a new graduate who was given one to connect to a test rig. A straightforward application, controlling a few solenoids and little AC motors.
Eventually he showed up with the most fried piece of hardware we had ever seen. Mobo blackened and burnt, case full of evil smelling smoke. And a strange home made cable soldered to the twisted remains of the IO port adaptor...
He hadn't understood what the solid state relay block was for, and had soldered the mains connections (240VAC) direct to the TTL outputs (5V DC).
Amazingly, a new mobo, good cleanup and a new PSU and it worked reliably for years afterwards, even when it got dropped 2 ft. onto the breech of a tank gun.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
n/t
Actually, I'm sure it cuts down on the amount of calls for connectors loosened in shipping. As long as you don't overdo it (one glob on the corner of the plug that can easily be removed with a knife will do it) it should provide protection from jostling.
On the other hand, if the integrator went berserk with the hot glue...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
the OPEN SOURCE LINUX MOVEMENT would fund a study into how people damage their xbox running linux once it gets ported over.
You mentioned Longshine, well I have an Ethernet card from Longshine. It's a Chinese manufacturer which for some time had an internet site in English. Looks like they don't have it anymore. You can just choose beetween traditional or simplified Chinese :-(
This site documents the cream of the crop of parts that have been returned because they are "defective" or "broken."
Kinda like this link?
I was not pleased. It was glued several times, and even used without the tray in my cdromless server for a while.
Its final task was to burn a CD -- and it wasn't a burner. I was trying to upgrade my old server to RH7.1. Due to some problem that I have yet to understand, It was spinning when it started emitting sparks and a big puff of smoke. The black marks on the CD made it unusable...
Michael
How many of these people had deliberately destroyed their equipment to get an insurance company to replace it
Only this last weekend, a friend of mine tried to get his insurance to buy a new system for him after he told them it was fried in an electrical storm.
The storm in question though happened to be a spare USB cable, wired to the mains power. He wasn't sure whether this was enough to convince them so also wired up a telecoms cable to the mains.
I was at home and could see his house from mine. Every few seconds the lights would go out and the place was plunged into darkness.
It is strange what people will do to save a bit of cash!
That story is fucked up, teachers like that need to realize they're not better then other jerk students.
They've taken the pages down, and now they just give the 404 error. Look fuckers, if you don't want people to look at your shit, DON'T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET. I bet he had to call his mom for advice.
I was first in to see what these new machines could do I loaded my CRT prog and the screen went dead. Tried the next machine, and the next.....
In the inquest later it was discovered that the Amstrad's used ASIC's which weren't 100% compatable with the IBM.
I was within inches of being suspended until one of my supervisors pointed out that I was doing what I should do!
The moral of the story..... peek and poke are dangerous :)
It doesn't even stop then.
My girlfriend managed to get a kernel panic on bootup with a new ibook with mac os 10.1.2
How? I have know idea.
All I could do was take out the battery and put it back in. Came back up fine.
I'm at a local computer store and the kid before me is there with his mom seeing if he can get his processor "fixed". The owner of the store opens the case to see the 486dx266 chip laying mangled on top of the socket. All of the pins are bent, the chip is cracked and blackened, and there's still a nice little burnt smell even from a couple of feet away.
The shop owner asks the kid what happened. The boy confesses that he and a friend were monkeying about on the computer and the friend decided they should overclock the processor. Surely overclocking must be achieved by putting the processor on in a different direction. The friend puts the processor on backwards. Doesn't work. They try and try to "overclock" the machine and eventually *POP* the processor dies. The kid states that he got mad took the processor out of the machine threw it on the floor and gave it a gentle coaxing by jumping up and down on it. After that they attempted to fix the pins and put it back it the right way. No luck though just more ZZZZT ZZZZT ZZZZT from the processor.
This kid must have been 13 or 14 years old standing there with his mom. His mom just had this little smile like "You poor stupid kid, you'll be living with me until your 36" kinda smile both frustrated and amused.
It took everything I had to keep from falling down on the floor with laughter.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Tons of mind-boggling cases of hardware, software, OS and tech support abuse can be found at the Computer Stupidities Page.
As for the squeaky clean computer, this is one from there:
* Customer: "My computer doesn't work."
* Tech Support: "Ok, what happens?"
* Customer: "When I turn it on, nothing happens."
* Tech Support: "Hmmm. Can you think of anything you might have done to cause it to stop functioning?"
* Customer: "Well, I just cleaned it. There was dirt on the fan, and I wiped it off."
* Tech Support: "Oh, that shouldn't have hurt anything."
* Customer: "Then I opened up the computer and wiped the insides as well. I took it apart and washed everything with Windex."
nice.
Anyone remember the old style CD-Rom drives with the little arm thingess that held the CD while it spun around? well, a friend of mine worked for a small computer wholesaler, and one of the techs jokingly told a customer that they were "brakes" and if he removed them, the CD would go faster... a week later they were replacing the drive... I assume this is true (I didnt actually see it) but if its not, its damn funny anyway :)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Most of those companies offer a warranty where you only need to bring the box to get a replacement (they only make sure no part is missing, they dont actually check if they're really broken).
In the case of computer parts that you know wont be available at the end of the warranty, this means you get a free upgrade!
Useful for CDR-drive, for example...
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
forgot that PCI video cards are not hot-swappable
Except for hot-swappable PCI of course. I always get a little freaked out whenever I have to pull a card while a box is on though....it just seems to be wrong somehow.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
I worked in the early 90's for a VAR in western MA... man, that was an experience, even aside from the customers. But there were a few memorable repair calls we had.
We came in one night from a repair call and dinner to find the following message on the answering machine:
"Um.... hi... this is Jane Doe. My Commodore 64 started smoking earlier, and I shot it with a fire estinguisher. Um... do you think it's safe to turn it back on?"
Another call we got was:
"Hi... I was wondering if I could buy a Q, L, and C key from you... my parrot ate those keys off the keyboard."
While sort of not a supid mistake by users, I did see one specatular mess made by a power supply that flamed out. As we did the autopsy, we realized that the thing had gone up because the airflow was blocked because of some buildup. We realized, when we visited their site, what this was. THey were in a small auto-insurance office packed with five or six chain smokers. I couldn't stand it in the office more than a minute or so. I suspect that the PSU had gotten a fair amount of ash from a nearby ashtray in addition to just general gunk from the smoke.
The last two paragraphs of the parent post comprise one of the most insightful thoughts I've ever read on /. Kudos to you for helping to break the stereotype that all sysadmins are holier-than-thou bastards. I'd mod you up to 6 if that bug was still around that let you do that..
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Ya wanna see defective? Several times in the last couple of years I have purchased Nics, mainboards, soundcards and once a 300$ display card that when I open the box, the thing has been crushed into unuseability or has burn/scratch marks on it. When I take it back to the store, I am the one that gets snickered at or refused replacement. I have taken to buying the product, Opening the container right there at the register (something that is almost ALWAYS refused to me before I pay for it) and making sure the damn thing at least looks useable. The fact is, when I buy a sealed product, I expect the damn thing to work. The big chains are the worst offenders and I have stopped going to those places unless I can't find the thing elsewhere.
Stupid Humans.....
Ok, its not much, but it still amazed me.
.
At my old job, we had a lot of interns (wich the boss saw as free labour), one particular intern once had his computer screen go blank on him. So he called me up to help. I go there and knowing the computer, and the guy, I figure he had kicked off the power cable again. But I could still hear its fan humming... I turn the case around slowly, all the cables are still pluged in, so I proceed to push 'em back in (the case was at the cable's limit...big stupid table, not my idea, anyways...).
The guy (same intern who admitedly didn't know much about computers) reaches across me and YANKS THE POWER CABLE OUT.
Long story short it turns out the monitor was defective and would shut itself down when it got hot, but I came very close to punching that intern in the face
ARGH!
You can't take the sky from me...
You mean like this guy?
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Maybe they (we ;-) ) are, but I don't recall any hardware stuff when I did my MCSE. In my work (I work as a consultant) I never deal with hardwareproblems, and I don't need to.
So, let me get this straight, because I just can't believe that I'm understanding you right. You are saying, straight-faced, that software people don't have to know about hardware issues, and don't need to? And you work on/with computers for a living?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA. Man, I've been giving MCSE's the benefit of the doubt up until now, mostly because I haven't had any direct experience with them. But you just sunk the ship, me ol' porkchop. If you can't, or worse don't want to, fix basic hardware problems, you are an employee I would not want in my organization. The memory stick wasn't plugged in all the way ferchrissakes! That's some basic, basic stuff. If you can't at least pop the top to your box and see that crap isn't plugged in like it's supposed to be, that "E" in your certification title is a complete and total misnomer.
I'm quite serious, if there is such a thing as idoit proof, I think these beasts qualify
You've never done help desk work, have you?
Macs are harder to screw up, but they make up for it by being a total PITA once they are fucked. Which set of obsolete/conflicting extensions actually work? "Oh, look: it boots from a CD but not from a clean install from that CD. That's weird..." Couple with the endless joys of "My Powerpoint won't open/save. It says something about running out of memory. I've got 512MB- why is it running out?"
OSX so far has been better, but not much. My TiBook has Finder locks about twice a week now when trying to access a CD: no alternative but to reboot the machine. My very expensive video editing system and Final Cut won't talk to my Formac A-D bridge. Apple has no clue why: they want me to install the OS9 version of Final Cut but it refuses to install on my system. Again, no idea why. I can't wait until I have to train our Mac-using technophobic faculty how to use OSX: they're going to have a cow.
Then, of course, you get Apple's legendary service. We sent away a Cube the other day after it was dropped by a mover. Came back and wouldn't burn CDs. Hmm- I wonder why? Maybe it's because they replaced the CD-RW with a DVD-ROM without asking. Kind of goes with the first system I ever sent back to Apple that came back without the CD cables attached.
Macs suck. (Before I get flamed by Mac partisans, I'm the Mac guru here and the one keeping them from going away entirely. ObBossQuote: "Anything that gets rid of a Mac on campus I'll approve.") But Windows sucks even more. I had a parent ask me the other day why we don't just transition to Linux and I couldn't help laughing out loud. I've got a Linux machine of my own, but the day I have to support faculty members trying to use Linux is the day I quit to go work as a garbageman.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Wrong, its the bandwidth and hardware.
Design includes software AND hardware.
Do you work in QA?
some of the things I've seen users do to laptops.
One user took her laptop home before a long trip out of town and, out of fear of having her house broken into and her laptop stolen, hid her machine. But in an odd place; the oven! The day she was to return her mother came to her house and decided to make her daughter her favorite cake. So what do you do when you want to bake a cake? Preheat the oven! Interestingly enough, the machine still SORTA worked. The CDROM was fused to the case but the LCD still luminesced in certain areas!
While we've had the typical fried computers resulting from spilled drinks, we've also had a few that have been run over (how they ended up behind the tires I will *never* understand) as well as several that were actually urinated on. That's right, someone apparently had a few drinks and thought it would be funny to evacuate their liquid wastes on a laptop. I hope they got a nice shock!!
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
The voltage switch on PCs are certainly a dual edged sword. Whilst working in .uk, I had to set up 50 new workstations (needed yesterday)in a call centre. I had set them up in rows of 5, going back and forth adding memory, plugging them in, installing the OS, network set up, etc. I was keeping a pretty good pace and was plugging in the last row, then I heard a "POP!". I'm not sure if it was a disgruntled phone clerk or if the switch just moved during shipping, but I found 2 more switched to 115v (I switched them back to 220v).
OTOH, the pay was shit (£5/hr in 1998), so I really couldn't blame anyone for wanting to smoke a few new workstations to retaliate against the cheap cunts that ran the place.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
One time at a Lan Party I had a friend's machine who had the reputation of being possesed by Satan. While trying to upgrade to W2K (had just come out) there were all sorts of errors right after the installation. He got frustrated and started to hit the machine over and over again until the monitor went dark. When he opened up his case to see what happened the video card was popped out. He brought in his old video card in and plugged it in, forgetting that he forgot to turn off the computer which was still up and running. All that happened was sparks and two of his PCI slots, and one memory slot (along with the chip in it) burned out but the video came up and working, with W2k having no problems after rebooting.
Hmmm, I have 5 mod pts, its time to metamod, and on top of that I have to meta-metamod? When do I get to read slashdot?
Rather, mean and cruel, and inexcusable on the part of a teacher, whose job description probably does not include "attempt to damage children's psyches through public humiliation". The person who asked about the parents suing the school was right on, in my opinion. Ordinarily I loathe over-zealous litigiousness, but in such a case it would be well warranted.
Here is a link to a clip of a "User who attacked".
Id like to point you to the following /. story..
Power Your AMD Via Tesla Coils
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
All electronic devices are powered by smoke. Once you let the smoke out of the box, they cease to work.
My worst experience was not to long after starting a job where I was in charge of putting computers together. Back in those days, not many people asked for video RAM, well one decides they want it, so I give it to em. The computer is all ready to go when I leave, but I get in the next day and turns out I put the RAM in backwards and it fried everything. Fortunately it didn't cost me and I got a standing ovation.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
Homosexual secret code embedded in parent comment. This proves the gay linux agenda.
lol you guys are poisoned animal eating cave men, but we the enlightened 'few' ..
Terms like 'hard-boot', 'fire-wire', 'punched card', 'soundblaster', 'fatal exception' and 'bill gates' are just bound to inspire aggression. And that's before we've even had to use any software!
These days even the 'Kernel Dev' icon in RedHat looks a bit subversive...
i am so glad i am willing to learn that not EVERYONE who wears a turban is involved in ANY sort of terrorist attack. i am so glad i am willing to learn of other cultures. on the other hand...i am so embarrassed that i live in a society of people who are so willing to not only HAVE such hatred for those who are not responsible, but to show it in a manner that is SO FUCKING IGNORANT.
sure we have the freedom in the US. (by the way, have YOU fought for your freedom? have you done anything POSITIVE to keep it? or do you just accept and not give back?) but as it has been said many times before, "your rights END where mine (or the girl whose face you spat upon) begins." you have no idea if she was born here and is an American. you are judging her by her religious beliefs of wearing a scarf/turban. what the hell makes you so much better?
there the girl is, minding her business when someone spits in her face. i doubt she was even trying to impress her beliefs on "anonymous coward". i imagine she was talking to her family or friends, reading, shopping or some such activity.
im not saying i like "Jihad Johnny", Zaccharias Moussoui (sp?) or any others who were involved. im not condoning the acts... but it was those living the TERRORIST school of thought that take the lives of others ---- not neccesarily some innocent person who is here in the U.S. for what is a seemingly free society.
another thing... if you ascribe so much to these hatred beliefs of yours, why dont you identify yourself?? because you dont want people spitting in YOUR face?
get with it. and after you do... BRING IT.
bastard.
"The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion." George Bernard Shaw
"Respect must be our goal if we would diminish prejudice in our time." Selma G. Hirsch
"It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling." Pierre Bayle
"Without tolerance, our world turns into hell." Friedrich Durrenmat
> How the hell does BS like this get modded up to 5? I'm sorry, but thats not believeable at all. For one, no adult is that stupid, you would literally have to jam & crumple that floppy in to get the tray to close.
Careful, you're showing your age, child. Back in the days when many machines had CD-ROM drives and 5.25" drives at the same time, many CD-ROM drives were cartridge drives (put the CD in a carrier and insert the carrier into the drive), and I have personal experience with many attempts to slide a 5.25 incher into the cartridge slot, into which it fit fairly comfortably.
> Second, besides the tray being jammed shut, I really don't think there would be any "horrible sound" as a CD-Rom doesnt try to spin up unless a real disc is inserted.
See above. The sound is the lever that opens the sliding door on the carrier rending the diskette asunder. Again, I've personally heard it, and when the disk inside contains valuable information that you know the user never backed up, it can be truly sickening.
Virg
A friend of mine works for a large national online business. One morning he and all his colleages were having trouble logging onto the network to begin work. Basically, they couldn't log on at all. Upon phoning the IS guys he was told 'For the hundredth time today! We had a fire over the weekend and all the servers are down! Doesn't anyone read their email in this place?!?!'
I laughed for hours when he told me this!
Here's an IDEA.
./ users who have server space and are willing to provide a cache. When a site is about to be posted, an e-mail is sent out giving those users 5, 10, 15 or whatever min to mirror the site. As the posted site is ./ed, these "cache ./ers" post links to their mirror.
./ cache user, and would happily mirror sites for ./ use.
Have a listing of
I would like to be the first
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
www.thetechboard.com/mishaps/index.html: HTTP 404 - File not found
www.thetechboard.com: The website for thetechboard.com is Coming Soon!
For more information, please click here to contact us.
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
"Lighten up Francis."
Are we at the beginning? No.
Are we at the end? No.
Must be in the middle then!
We Build Beautiful Websites
I never knew Commodore made supercompters.
In 1980 most desktop computers had 64k at the VERY MOST, most had 1 or 2 k.
At the time, the most advances supercomputer in the world was slightly less powerful than a low end Celeron.
After a couple of years of use, the cooling fan on my PowerMac 6100 started flaking out. The machine would get too hot, and frequently the fan wouldn't go unless i poked the blades with a q-tip, which would unstick the fan, and the computer would cool off again. This was clearly not a suitable long-term solution, so I took it to my local computer shop. I told the repair guy that the cooling fan was intermittently refusing to run. He gave me the ID10T look, and patiently explained to me that cooling fans didn't run all the time, only when the computer got hot.
I took my problem elsewhere.
They are out of business now.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Many students had the nasty habbit inserting their ball point pens into the floppy drive. Typically they would insert the pen cap first, but when they tried to remove it the cap stayed in the drive. Of course no one would tell us so the next five studens to use the machine would try to force their disks into the machine often causing use to have to replace the drive.
I had to help one student figure out how to insert a disk into the machine. The interesting part is that this student claimed to be a CS student trying to work on his programming assignment. I wonder where he is today?
One professor, who was renouned for his cluttered office (every school has at least one), had no place to rest his cigarett. This was no problem for him though, he had a PhD and could figure out a solution. Just open the CD ROM drive and rest it there. After a few days of doing this he managed to leave some nice burn marks on the drive tray, not to mention the ash that fell onto the keyboard. We took his computer for the better part of a semester. We kept telling him "the broken parts are on back-order". Remember the great CD ROM drive shortage of '96 ;)
Pretty amazing what people can do to computers in the middle of the information age
It's amazing what people can do in the middle of the information age, as opposed to say, the end or the beginning, yes.
May we never see th
The magnets on this guys braclet would have to be so strong that his keys, pocket change, watch, pens, paper clips, kids braces, belt buckle, and any stray gardening tools would be permanently stuck to his wrist. Most likely in a comic cartoon fashion. Just like thoses Acme magnets that Wyle 'E' Coyote uses.
any who, "holistic healing mumbo jumbo" wont destroy hard disks, only Vodoo "mumbo jumbo" does that.
the funny thing is some this post was modded up from -1 to 0, so someone must feel the same way i do... and for those of you that think its a joke, 'why did the chicken cross the road' is a joke too, but no one finds that funny now do they?
Dear site owner,
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Sincerely,
C. Taco
May we never see th
Well, I work in technical support, and I always say, "if the customer was always right, they wouldn't be calling us for technical support."
More evidence...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Are we supposed to be impressed with the fact that your teacher managed to be more of a jackass than you were?
People like you two are pulling down people like Chris.
May we never see th
1) Did you pop out of Mom's womb knowing everything about computers, or did you have to learn it through experience, probably with a few mishaps along the way?
2) People make mistakes all the time that *could* have had horrible consequences. Of course, only the few that actually happen make the Darwin Awards. We then laugh at them. I dare say you've made a couple of potentially fatal mistakes in your own life.
3) People that make fun of people trying to do computer repair piss me off. Yes, I understand that it's monumentally annoying to deal with a user who has destroyed their computer, but that doesn't give you any excuse. I'll bet a lot of people here on Slashdot could easily get their hands ripped off when poking around inside a car, or get chemical burns messing around with chemicals, or (here's a good one) ruin food, equipment, and sometimes damage themselves trying to cook something. Why? We aren't all experts in the given domain. So unless you think it's funny to have a chemist cracking up at your permanently scarred hands, why don't you lay off the user that toasted their CPU?
4) Any sort of useful learning, esp. research or new stuff, usually involves getting burned a few times. You make a mistake or a bad assumption. If you aren't getting burned every now and then, you're doing rote memorization of existing work out of textbooks.
May we never see th
I've got a dedicated encryption card generating diagnostics in Morse code here right now!
My boyfriend is the antithesis of a computer geek - as far as he is concerned, a computer is simply another appliance. It should just work. It should do a few things and it should do them well.
He makes very few demands on his PC. He types reports. He reads email. He plays free-cell, That's about it.
So, I found it very amusing and kinda understandable when, after accidentally deleting his autoexec.bat file ( Windows 3.1 ) that his solution to the problem of the, now defective, computer was to... Buy a new computer.
Later, after magically fixing his broken computer, we returned the new one. But it got me to thinking, that there's probably LOTS of people just like him. Life is too complicated to be bothered with the details of how this damn machine is supposed to work. It should simply work - like the microwave.
When was the last time you 'fixed' your microwave by updating the BIOS?
You know, I liked most of this post, but one thing here is a pet peeve of mine. It always made me lose a lot of respect for sysadmins -- company-wide emails telling users not to do "foo" on their computer or they'd damage it (email viruses being the worst). Why the hell do you ever tell a user something like that? What if your car mechanic said "don't shift into third gear or else your car will explode"?
Why is this sort of thing even exposed to users? Block the damn things.
My opinion is that sysadmins should *never* give technical instructions to end users to do routine maintenance ("You can upgrade to Lotus Notes 5 by clicking on these two icons and then dragging this. This must be done by Friday"). Do it yourself, install remote administration software, do whatever.
Second, why is it funny that the Linux guru didn't know NT? Do your NT gurus know Linux internals?
That being said, I agree with the "we're all stupid sometimes" bit.
May we never see th
I sold a computer to a user who lived on the hillside and had frequent power outages. I told him to buy a surge protector for the power and modem. Sure enough, he had a surge and didn't have the modem plugged into the surge protector. I went over there and the modem was recognized by the MB but wouldn't dial up. I opened the case and found that the connections between the plug and the card were fried. I was amazed that the only thing that fried was the connections to the jack.
> There is one manufacturer here in the UK who still glue things together - it's damn annoying trying to change a drive and finding both the power and data cables have been glued in (with hot-melt glue)!
No, think farther back. Back then, when computers came in components, they meant components, as in loose LEDs, connectors and wires. Assembly was supposed to be affected with solder, since glue is non-conductive. This wasn't a case of gluing ribbon cables down, it was a matter of gluing resistors and power lines in.
Virg
How come computers are the only things that DON'T have a sticker saying "No user servicable parts inside"? It sure sounds like they need them!
You know, there's a logo on the front of most microwaves telling their brand name.
Just out of curiosity, can you recite yours?
May we never see th
A friend of mine bought a cd-rom drive, tried to install it himself, and didn't know what he was doing. He calls me up and asks me to come down to his place and take a look. When I got to his place I could smell smoke coming out of his computer. Turns out that he decided it wasn't working because the cd-rom drive's power cable must be plugged in upside down. So he tried to flip the power cable over but noticed it was bevelled so it wouldn't let him plug it in upside down. So he decided to pull the 2 end red wires (5V and 12V) out of the bevelled power connector and put them back in swapped. Really bad idea.
The scary part is that this guy is now a computer tech for a company with about 50 computer users.
Aparently Gateway Country's customer service leaves much to be desired. This actually happened in my home town.
To summarize: A guy who was dissatisfied with Gateway's service decided to place the computer in the entrance to their store and smash it with a sledge hammer. So they threw him in jail. This guy just can't win.
When they mention "central processing unit", they are actually referring to the case. Clueless reporter.
Put any non circular CD into a slot-loading iMac, and you will see an effectively useless mac. Or watch as the memory kills itself because it's right next to the processor cage, or the analog board dies because you move the thing. Of when the power button needed to be sanded because the plastic they used wasn't finished properly.
For the amount of sales that macs have versus PC's, we had to fix an awful lot of iMacs...
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
They might be trying to learn, you know, reach a point where you aren't classifying them as "morons" any more.
May we never see th
I put together a computer for a person that did not have much experience. I set it up in the store with her watching and explaining each step. Later that day I got a call from her stating that the monitor did not work. After talking to her I found that she had plugged the monitor's cable (data) into the computer but she did not know that she had to plug the monitor in to the power strip. I also knew a guy that would attach notes to his computer with small speaker magnets. He could not figure out why his mother board whould quit working.
"The mishaps page was hosted on http://www.thetechboard.com (aka "TTB").
The site was linked from the front page of http://www.slashdot.org.
Typically when a site gets linked by slashdot, also known as "slashdotted", it tends to encounter large bursts of traffic.
Due to the gross incompentence of the hosting service http://www.webmasters.com, the server crashed twice under the pressue of being "slashdotted".
The complaints of the other clients that were using the same server and therefore also experienced outage prompted Webmasters to threaten to permanently close the TTB acount.
Of course, the account has always otherwise been in good standing, but the folks at Webmasters don't even have the mental capacity to limit bandwidth for a particular site so it does not bring down the entire server, so why would they take TTB's otherwise "good behaviour" into consideration?
Please forward any hate mail to: security@webmasters.com (this is from whom the mail about the account cancellation came from).
Thank you.
Jon "jonny" Gerow (pronounced muck like "Guru", hence the handle)
"
Actually comptuers can survive quite well under high heat. The main bproblem are plastice peices on the cdrom as you said and lcd's warp under even little heat. Even though those fail that actual chips wont. Many comptuter chips are cooked at several hundred degrees when they are being assembled to keep out every trace of moisture possible.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I have also removed an unknown number of 5.25" floppy disks and CDs from between the drives, as users mistake gap for drive. And I can't even remember the number of "which one is the ANY KEY?" calls I used to get in the DOS days.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Another coworker could have used that last month. He sent a board back and they claimed it was fine. He had to waste even more time to figure out that it only failed if you flexed it a certain way (bad solder). It always failed when you mounted it, but the tester at the factory never did. Too bad we didn't have a way to zap it.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Read the post about physical network security. Information age? Someone can take you out of your "information age" really quick with a physical gun. I suppose though you're waiting for phasers, and you don't drive cars because they aren't powered by antimatter.
In one job I had I ended up having to do internal support for the PCs in the office.
One Monday I get a call from the CEO saying that his mouse isn't working. I go down to his office, and check out the mouse.
It's in about 15 pieces. I notice there's a mouse shaped dent in the plaster on the opposite side of the office.
I ask him what happened. He tells me that he was trying to use Excel when the pointer stopped moving and he just couldn't make it work anymore. I say "ok" and go get another mouse.
I plug it in and reboot the laptop, and suddenly the begins to work again.
Silly CEO.
So I'm working for a non-profit group that gets all sorts of donated computers. Mostly old nasty ones -- we're still getting Pentium and PII machines *today*.
;-)
Anyway, about two years ago, we get this *amazing* PII dual-processor box. Donated by its previous owner since he couldn't get it to work.
I plug it in, turn it on -- sure enough, it doesn't work. Nothing happens, *at* *all*. Heck, the power supply fan isn't turning!
So I give it a check. Everything looks fine when I take the mobo out and put it on the table. I hook up another power supply, plug it in... it boots.
Turns out the previous owner must have bought all the parts himself -- including the case -- and hadn't removed all the mounting screws in the case. Two of them were shorting out the power supply connector.
One new power supply and we had a shiny dual-processor machine. Fun.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
More Zip anecdotes...
When we first got Zip drives at my workplace, we had a case of bad firmware leading to the drive not ejecting. My supposedly tech-savvy cow-orkers (who had never seen a mac) didn't realize what the pinhole ejection, erh, hole was for. They didn't bother to read the manual either.
They agreed that the best way to save that expensive media was to apply a large plier and main force. They ripped that sucker right out of the drive.
Needless to say, both drive and disk were in shreds after this. Me later: "All you had to do was poke the hole! Yeah, poke the hole! Have you guys never even seen a Macintosh?!"
Lamenting the loss of Mac Eject Holes,
Johan
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
remember AT cases? remember how the power switch was a *real* switch attached to the power supply? guess what happens when you change out power supplys and get the wiring on the power switch wrong... the computer explodes! I've never seen a computer on fire before until then. Blew off most of the insulation on the wires and caught the remaining plastic on fire. btw, the circuit breaker and plug in the wall didn't make it either ( no surge protector in place ). ahh good times good times
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Wait a sec... chicken... road... I get it! I finally get that stupid joke after all these years.
Well-said, and in far fewer words than I used.
I have a very visceral reaction to this kind of abusive behavior, particularly when it comes from someone in a position of responsibility.
Had a similar incident when I was in elementary school, except I was the butt of the joke... never forgot it either (even 20+ years later).
Like most young geeks, I was socially awkward until college... took a while to grow into my brain, so to speak. A particular teacher was telling the class about a really funny 1-800 number he had called, like a "joke of the day"... something like "1-800-Quick." He assigned me to go call it and come back with the "Joke of the Day." I recognized the number of digits was wrong, and said something to that effect. He told me to shut up and go call it... so I went.
As I sat in the office down the hall trying to find a "Q" on the telephone dial (not realizing there wasn't one... I was only 11 years old at the time), I never even considered the possibility that the "Joke of the Day" was on me. Only after I got back to the classroom and reported my bewilderment at not being able to find a "Q" on the telephone dial did I find out that this "teacher" was really one of the enemy.
There is nothing quite like being forced to stand in front of a whole room full of people while they laugh at your "stupidity," trying not to gag from that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that says "you've been set up." I actually recommend the experience to the original poster... might teach him some empathy.
As far as I'm concerned, that kind of behavior on the part of any "teacher" is a career-ender, and in the same category as a psychiatrist who sleeps with his patients, or a cop who takes bribes. All should be fired, gone, sacked, history.
Were it my child, I'd be all over the principle like white on rice.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Reminds of when my Biology teacher asked me to take a look at his computer -- he'd bought a new graphics card and now it wouldn't work. I opened it up and what do you know?! The poor guy had just thrown the graphics card in, not placing it in the AGP-connector. My maths teacher goot a good laugh from that one...
Wow! That's liberal parenting if you are ok with your ten year old having children.;)
12 volts 'shock' you?! Bah, that's hardly enough to leave sour taste.
Back in school we had an electrical outlet that was severly broken for a few months. The unprotected copper wires hung right out into a well-populated set of stairs. As I live in Sweden we had 220V of brute power coming out of those wires, and kids would brush against them by the dozen every day...
After I got shocked a few times, I used to go there and shock myself voluntarily every now and then. High voltage, high current AC is the ultimate pick-me-upper... BANG and your adreline is pumping, your 100% awake, 100% alert, ready to go, Go, GO!
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Someone gift me a P3-500 that their local shop had spent plenty of time on and had failed to resurrect. It had finally reached the point where it wouldn't boot, let alone run.
:)
CPU fan was so corroded from cigarette smoke that it literally *crumbled* when I touched it. Well, gee, I think we found the problem!! Not to mention that it had been so hot for so long that the onboard video circuit was fried and there were scorch marks on both mainboard and case. (Much of that because the CPU fan motor was still running and generating mucho heat, thanks to the fan bearings being seized solid.)
But miracle of miracles, the CPU was still alive, and is now being perfectly reliable in my XP/ME machine. A nice upgrade from its former C400.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I want my cookie. :)
:)
Friend managed to render both a Toshiba laptop and a Compaq desktop inoperable inside of a week, just from mucking about with the bowels of the OS (this was in the DOS/Win3.1 era) without having the first clue what she was doing.
I told her to get a Mac, under the theory that if it was harder for her to get at the OS, it would take her longer to screw it up.
Six months.
So much for security thru obscurity.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
1. eat poo
2. ???
3. profit!
Once upon a time I had a manual typewriter. (Yes, kiddies, this true story is from the Technological Dark Ages.) One of its critical parts, the part that took the most wear, was this little pointed thing that had a ball bearing balanced on top of it. It got worn out and replacement parts were not to be had, and after that it tended to slide over sideways and jam up the whole machine.
:)
I became quite proficient at fixing it -- which required that I balance the typewriter overhead in one hand, while carefully maneuvering the pointy thing back under the ball bearing with my other hand, and with my third hand screwing it back into place (you see the problem already). This usually took about an hour and a dozen tries before all the forces of gravity and luck coincided and I got the damned thing working again.
One day, after the umpteenth time the pointy thing slid out of its socket and I had to start over, I had enough. I took the typewriter outside and chopped it up with an axe, then hung the corpse on the fence as a warning to others.
I still have the axe. Perhaps this is why all my computers are so well-behaved.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
This is of course unfair because not sending warning is worse (and common practice), but I wouldn't expect a court case to go that way.
"Lighten up Francis."
That's it Pal.
You just made the list.
Just because there are asses out there with mod points to waste doesn't make you any less of an ass, now does it?
Ass.
When my wife and I were first dating back in college I was moving into a new dorm room and she was helping me unpack. She was fiddling with the phone while I was doing something else, and she handed me a phone cord and casually said "here, lick this."
Now, we're pretty strange people, so a request like this didn't faze me in the least, and I did it. She didn't think I'd really do it. I didn't think she'd hand me a live cable and ask me to put it in my mouth. We were both wrong.
It was an amazing experience, and not in a good way. It felt like I got punched in the head from the inside. There was no real damage, (though she may disagree) so we laugh about it now. It was 11 or 12 years ago, and I like to remind her of it just before I drop a piece of ice down the back of her shirt.
Like I said, we're strange people.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
On the plus side, they decided I was a genius and payed me in food. It's hard to stay annoyed when you're being fed.
My brother bought a cheap computer from one of those generic places. 6 months later, after it mysteriously died, I was summoned. I removed the case, and found the inside was full, and I mean packed, with a giant dust-bunny. They had installed the fan backwards - it was sucking air and dust into the computer.
I had a MCSE ask me what the IP address of the cable they were about to plug into a server was.
I looked at them - and with a dead serious look - said Oh. No! That is a BLUE cable - if it was a GREY cable I would be able to tell you... You could probably follow it to the other end of the cable and look for the little label but I think you better check with the networking department. (So they can get a good laugh out of you too...)
Following is a list some of the stranger things we found while fixing their computers.
Live mice (The computer was broken because a mouse had chewed through the ATX power supply's wires, electrocuting itself by touching the case while eating.)
Ham Sandwich (laid inside the case, the owner explained, because he didnt want his dog to eat it when he went to the bathroom. He then forgot it)
Beer Caps (I have no idea)
A dildo (I dont know on this one either, but when I saw the customer again, I could tell why she had one - butt ugly. Also bounced her check she paid with)
A childs blanket ("The computer was too noisy so I thought it would quiet it down". It did. Stopped her processer fan and burnt it up.)
One problem was'nt what was in the case, rather, what was'nt in her case. She had been told by a friend to "clear out some space" on her computer. So, she cracked the case and started removing things.
And finally, my cream story, which doesnt have to do with broken parts per se...
A woman called us back after picking up her computer claiming that it was not only still broken, but in worse shape than she left it.
I asked what she meant, and she told me that she "Couldnt plug in yellow!"
Yellow? What?
"Yellow. The cable that comes out of my computer TV."
Oh, the monitor cable...
Well, it won't plug in anymore!
Tell me, just out of curiosity... how many rows of pins are there on the hole you are trying to plug "yellow" into?
"Two!"
Now, if you would please, count the number of rows on the cable that comes from your "computer TV."
She hung up immediately.
(In case you dont know why this is so funny, count the number of rows on your serial port, VGA port, and monitor cable)
SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 rows returned
Perhaps we need a mirror.txt file like the robots.txt file. Tells people who can mirror what.
This is quite interesting. It appears that birds have a thing for keyboards.
Some sort of odd quirk in the avian psyche, I suppose...
May we never see th
I have worked for two fairly large computer companies. At the first I worked in the "returns" department before I moved into Tech Support. What I saw there convinced me most people that buy computers are total idiots.
We had people return computers for many reasons. At least one a month came back for religious reasons. Several came back filled with rocks, which never made sense to me since they were paying the return shipping charges.
One customer tried to 30 day return their computer because it was flooded. The entire computer was still wet when we took it out of the box!
All too often they would stick cheap generic parts in and take out the high-end optional parts that they bought with the computer!
It never really bothered me when the computers came back as parts but all too often they came back without any form or protective packaging (and were totalled).
But the ones that really frosted me were the ID-10-t's that would pour a can of coke or something in the computer and try to return it!
Working tech-support I would help out one of the expediter's who had the task of arranging out of warranty repairs for laptops that were sent in for repair. One laptop was sent in for an estimate - it sank in a lake. Asked how that happened the customer explained "it was in the back seat of my car when it went in!" Another repair involved the removal of a frog off of the motherboard of a laptop. This customer had no explaination how that happened but suggested that his kids had better have an explaination!
Oh and then there was this time we had a whole mess of Fed-X returns. About 50 of our computers were in a Fed-X jet that had some problems on a runway and smashed into another plane. Almost all were a total loss.
It took everything I had to keep from falling down on the floor with laughter.
Are we proud of our new independence? The average american does not get a "real" job till they are 30. It's nothing to be ashamed of really.
My roommate and I were both running FreeBSD. My computer died for some reason (i forget now) and I wanted to dd a new floppy image. He let me use his box, logged in as root, to make the floppy image.
I type my command, put the disk in the drive, and hit return. Immediatly returned to a prompt with the message "14400 records written" or whatever.
I try it again. Disk drive must be bad. I walk away, cluelessly.
A few days later, he reboots, only to be confronted with the FreeBSD boot screen (Full screen, command line, etc options.) He calls me into his room to try to figure out what happens, and my heart DROPPED.
I had accidentally typed wd0 instead of fd0 (or whatever it was) and had written the boot image DIRECTLY to his hard drive.
Needless to say, he was a good sport and DIDNT pound my spine into the floorboards. (Sorry again, Tet) I think it took him several hours just to get the disk to realize it wasnt really 1.44mb. Luckliy it was just some extra test box.
Some of the funniest things I head while doing ISP tech support were:
.'s on their keyboard, so they were telling the user to search for "winsock32 star dot dll", and the user was typing that verbatim into the search box. That little bit ALONE was a good half hour of figuring out.
- The "Astronaut key" (Asterisk)
- A lady's son had screwed up her computer so bad, whenever she tried to dial up to our ISP, her printer would print "ATDT.. "
And the worst call **EVER** was a 3 hour call (2 hours past my 11pm qutting time) with someone from the deaf relay service (you talk to operators who type to the person over a TTY terminal) who was calling us on behalf of a deaf user.
The operators apparantly had no *'s or
The deaf user was not to blame, but the communications medium was not ideal.
"When Users Attack" ... I guess this gives a whole new meaning to being 'slashdotted'. Sorry man, we really mean no harm.
We come in peace. Take me to your lizard.
How about another hosting provider, such as freeservers, or webpipe, or rackshackor one of the gazillion others? Maybe they actually spend their money on having more than one server so that they can handle a day of bursts on one of their sites... geesh.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Actually, Dell (or Compaq, can't remember) actually had a help topic on this in their FAQ.
Q: where is the 'any' key?
A: there is no 'any' key. 'Press any key' means to hit any key on your keyboard.
Or something to that effect.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
http://www.webmasters.com/testimonial.php
http://www.madhack.com/~madhack/shootme/
Now there's a telecom bill...
(yes, this is shameless self-promotion)
The teacher and I had a passive-aggressive dynamic, and he saw that I was mesmerized by the stream of vibrantly lit electrons, so he had me demonstrate the electromagnetic affect first. He hooked up a dry cell to a stiff piece of copper and handed it to me in a way such that I would naturally grab it by the unshielded part of the alligator clips.
Sure, I should have known, but I was 17 and that thing looked really cool. I moved the wire close to the electron beam when suddenly my arms went numb past the elbows, I blacked out, and when I regained some sense of what was going on, I was rotated 180 degrees from the demonstration and cursing uncontrollably. Everybody laughed, a fun time was had by all.
I was later told that I had been zapped by about 12,000 volts at microamps. Couldn't tell you if those numbers are legitimate or not, but it was the only time I blacked out due to electric shock.
And on-topic, I once shorted a motherboard to the case causing many neat-o sparks and a generous discharge of magic smoke. It would have been simply irritating, but it was at 2am half a week before finals. Ah well...
Kid who built his own computer brings it into the shop. It won't POST. Look insode and see that he was using an XT power supply on an AT motherboard. He had removed the plug at the end of the power cable and had soldered the wires to the connectors on the MB.
:).
I did something similar as a kid, with the difference being that my version worked. I spliced one power supply's (severed) cables to the other supply's (severed) connectors, taking care to match wire colours.
I guess the kid you met hadn't