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A Letter On Behalf of the World's PC Fixers
Barence writes "PC Pro's Steve Cassidy has written a letter on behalf of all the put-upon techies who've ever been called by a friend to fix their PC. His bile is directed at a friend who put a DVD bought on holiday into their laptop, and then wondered what went wrong. 'Once you stuck that DVD in there and started saying "yes, OK" to every resulting dialog box, you sank the whole thing,' Cassidy writes. 'It doesn't take 10 minutes to sort that out; it requires a complete machine reload to properly guarantee the infection is history. No, there is no neat and handy way I've been keeping secret that allows you to retain your extensive collection of stolen software licenses loaded on that laptop. I do disaster recovery, not disaster participation.'"
Well, one more reason to take away the computers from every stupid person. Boy, that'll be the day of comfort and silence. Can't wait for it to happen.
Newsflash: there are douchehats in every profession.
Computer fixers deal with people who click 'ok' on all the addons their favourite 'free' download site suggests.
Computer programmers deal with specs and users that want features they don't understand, and will never use.
Mechanics who deal with people who figured the 'little oil can light' wasn't anything serious and kept driving.
Accountants whose clients figure they didn't need to file their taxes for the last 3 years, or that it was acceptable to write off that hooker as a 'business expense'.
Teachers whose students are dumber than bricks, and have parents who insist its your fault.
If you don't like it, get a factory job.
"Buy a Mac"
Oh snap!
My brother, who isn't averse to saying "you can fix my computer", is a truck driver. Next time he comes to visit me while on vacation I'm going to get him to haul some furniture for me. I wonder if that will be enough to make him get the point.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Personally, I enjoy the challenge in discovering and fixing the problem. Being asked to solve computer problems all of the time can be a hassle at times, but, it can be fun. I'm also the type of person that gets bored and re-installs the OS n a pc to have something to do. Maybe eventually, it'll take its tow and I won't get the same enjoyment out of it, but that hasn't happened yet...
I remember the days when most PCs got their viruses from removable media...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Oh, and the "gas gauge" indicators in MS Windows (for example, when installing software), perhaps we could get something like:
"Your wait from this point: 20 minutes"
And somebody please tell me why my hard drive heads are parked someplace called "Tigger 14" . . .
Apparently word hasn't gotten out that you "know horses"... Those fuckers are about as fun to fix as eMachines, and substantially more likely to attack you.
Hey, Some of us play Magic: The Gathering. Don't lump us in with those pokemon losers!
It's been 13 years since I did front-line support for home PC's. Back then I spent a lot of time fixing the computers of my relatives.
When I got a job writing and supporting industrial software for a pipeline company I started getting "out of touch" with home systems. Requests for assistance started getting replies beginning with, "I don't know if I can help - I haven't really done that kind of work in a while." Horse crap, to be sure, but it worked.
Now I help my parents when they need it, and recently I replaced a keyboard in my sister's laptop - but requests from cousins, aunts, and uncles have long since stopped.
Play dumb. It Works.
You've never tried this, have you? The sort of person who is easily frustrated by technology but has been barely getting by on windows gets utterly enraged when presented with different UI paradigms. I know because I tried this "fix" a couple of times for people. The problem isn't that either UI is too difficult-- the problem is that you're dealing with somebody who is utterly refusing to learn anything, and handing them a new OS is asking them to learn quite a few things all at once.
You are part of the problem. Instead of educating, you had them buy a unicorn. Way to go.
It's a perfectly reasonable response. All the computers on TV have a nigh-magical, unerringly task-specific UI (magically only available to the team's 'geeky tech genius') that can do anything the plot requires. In this case, the plot of their personal psychodrama requires magically fixing their machine. And you, the team's geeky tech genius, have just failed....
Now, go watch an .avi of Star Trek.
As a person who has fixed more relative's and friend's computers than I care to mention I have to say I think we need a union.
On a related note, I remember one time, about 10 years ago when I was working at a small PC shop. A customer came in and their windows install was hosed. The owner's daughter was the one who used the computer most. This 16 year old did her best to use her 'wiles' to convince me to somehow transfer all of her warez to the new install I was going to do for them. It was so easy to say no. I hope I held back my smirk well enough. Pay for your software.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
You just need to learn to say no. This works 100%:
Did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said "Free PC repair"?
You know WHY you didn't see that sign?
'Cause it ain't there, 'cause repairing dead PCs ain't my fucking business, that's why!
Kinda like putting foam padding on all the sharp objects in your house...
Hey, some of us play Call of Cthulhu! Don't lump us in with those Magic losers!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
You feel better about yourself now that you've insulted every geek and nerd in the place? Personally, I see an antisocial rant like this, I think "projection." And now you can't even get mad at me for insulting you, or you will look like a hypocrite.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And switched to Linux/Solaris/NetBSD. Now I can claim ignorance when presented with some Windows related issue. And people quit asking for my help when I started suggesting they try Ubuntu instead.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
oblig.... http://dumpalink.com/videos/Nick-Burns-Your-Companys-Computer-Guy-193e.html
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
It's never warez: they always "got it from work" or "lost the CD"...
My solution is simple: I refuse to touch Windows machines. The help choices I offer are:
1) I'll install Linux on it for you
2) I'll help you choose an appropriate Mac for your needs
No takers on either so far, and I don't often get bothered.
I went a little more in depth with my wife's cousin's wife, whose kids had installed Limewire and who knows what else on it and whose trial version of Norton had come with the computer and had expired over a year prior: I can't fix this, it's Windows and would be a bit out of my depth trying to fix it. If it were a Mac or a Linux machine I could, but if it were that, you probably wouldn't have this problem in the first place. You only have the manufacturer'l "Damn the data and re-image the disk" recovery CD, which makes it even harder.
At that point, I advised her to just write off that desktop (which she was using for her work as a real estate agent) and get a good laptop and never allow her children to touch it. I also offered to set up a second wireless network in their house that her computer and her kids' malware-infested computers never shared the same network. That was nearly a year ago, and I'm pretty sure she hasn't acted on any of that advice.
One of the morals of the story here is that if you are buying or selling a house, it couldn't hurt to ask prospective agents what they do to protect any data you give them. If they are utterly clueless about computers (as nearly all agents are), you'll find out soon enough.
I've converted more than a dozen individuals and families to the Mac. All have lived happily ever after.
A before you all geek rage on me, I have steered a few of the young-uns with a clear interest in computers as more than tools toward Linux.
You are part of the problem. Instead of educating, you had them buy a unicorn. Way to go.
Oh please, you've never heard the term 'Windows rot'?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
We techies need to help guide people toward safer sources of software that won't infect their machines. Open source software from reputable sources is generally much safer than pirated software from the darker corners of the internet. If you pirate software, you need to take inconvenient precautions like setting up a virtual machine that you can assume is totally insecure. Yet another reason to choose open source.
http://xkcd.com/691/
Actually, you may be increasing your attack surface, as only one of the four has to be vulnerable in order for you to get compromised.
It also depends on if you isolate each browser to certain websites, or all the sites you visit get each of the browsers with less frequency.
The idea that it is harder for attackers if no browser has 10% market share, is defeated if you use all 50 browsers to visit their website.
Work bio at MMWD
If the skills of a pc-fixer are worthless, why even ask someone to do it? If the fixer is as worthless as an ass wiper, why aren't as many people asking others to wipe their ass for them as there are expecting free anti-software support?
So essentially you have 4 angles of attack instead of 1, each with security settings deliberately set to something different instead of something, say, secure? Tell me again how this in any way would limit possible attack vectors. Actually, tell me if you even know what that word means.
How about a screed against his fellow technical people?
You know, the one who *create* the malware and junkware and root kits and junk operating systems and whatnot.
Oh yes, I've tried it many times. Generally, they're already at their wit's end with Windows bloatware, viri, and cheapo printers that don't work half the time. Oh, and lets not forget the layers of WiFi management software piled one on top of each other causing even more confusion.
Ok, so I recommend they try out a Mac at the nearest Apple store. I tell them there's generally only one way to do something in the Apple world, but it works 99.99% of the time, all the time. The floor salesman are so good at Apple, I just let them handle that part.
A week or so goes by after hearing they got a new iMac. At which point they love it, but are still trying to get used to navigating the GUI (as you pointed out). But they're not angry or frustrated. They just happen to be in that discovery mode still. But the best part is when they ask me "Hey, on this Apple, where do I find X feature?". I just tell them the truth. "Umm, good question, not sure. But poke around in this menu and I'm sure you'll find it". Well, they do without further assistance and thus feel satisfied and EMPOWERED. Mission accomplished.
Mac, that shit just works man.
Life is not for the lazy.
i use 4 web browsers each with different security settings and plugins enabled to maximize possible attack vectors.
Ya well, it comes with a rainbow and happy ending. What else did you want from me?
Life is not for the lazy.
That was a very whiney "letter", its why some technology people sit at home in the dark on the weekends alone.
And home is Mom's basement.
I switched to linux more than a decade ago. My friends with windows ask me questions and I can honestly say "I dunno... I haven't used Windows since the Clinton administration."
The funny part is some don't even seem to grasp that, and ask again the next time soemthing goes bad. At that point I usually ask them why they haven't already asked their denitst about the problem, or their car mechanic...
"What's wrong with your PC? You're a warez whore who still uses windows. Here's an ubuntu CD..."
I have this horse and it has been acting up after .......
Fight Spammers!
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
If that does not work, get a copy of the tech support script from... well, pretty much any tech company in existence. Then read it with a sloooooow ruuuural draaaaawwwl. If they interrupt you, then look confused and start over at the beginning.
"Sure I'll fix your computer. If I get to fcku you."
"If I knew how to do computer, I would help You so you should help me." Well my brother did help me move from my parents' house to my apartment --- ten years ago.
I wouldn't mind if he actually LEARNED something, but he's still stuck at the "how do I make firefox fill the whole screen" or "I have firefox open - how do I get back to desktop?" stage (try minimize and maximize like I taught you back in 1999). He never learns.
Just shut the hell up. I'd mod you down even lower but I see you're already at (-1) you fucking cockstucker. You really should be BANNED from posting
Are you the brother?
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
He's not wrong about the infection of course - you have no way of determining whether an infection has overwritten basic driver files such that it is literally impossible for your OS to see it, let alone remove it. A clean boot CD will find it, if it's a known infection. Generally I just clean with antimalware and antivirus software and if the computer seems to be running at full speed with no obvious tells call it good enough -- but if you actually care about your data, it is not.
And AVG is OK home use, have you tried it? It installs for free, it auto-updates fine and it keeps most crap from infecting a machine. It's a couple years beyond its peak now, but for people who don't even reinstall after pwnage, it's surely good enough.
Changa hates change.
It can be worse. I'm an EE, and people I know think I can automagically fix *any* electronic device ever created.
One guy wanted me to fix his neon beer sign. I know just enough about neon signs to know I don't want to mess around with voltages like that.
Sometimes I get lucky. One friend called me and said the ceiling fan he installed is working oddly, and wondered if I knew what was wrong. From 10 miles away. :-/ A sudden brain wave made me ask if he had connected it to a dimmer switch. Sure enough, he had.
i use 4 web browsers
Jargon File
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I suggest setting these down yourself, if you're frequently called upon to help. Generally, I've found it actually makes people slightly happier with you - apparently, placing more value on your skills makes others value them more as well.
It was a perfectly rational decision; I decided since I didn't have tits, I'd better learn tech skills or nobody would talk to me!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I find that when you are kind to family and friends, they are kind back. I help people with computer issues and in return they help me in their skilled areas. My dad, while not a mechanic, has a great deal of automotive experience and worked in the industry many a year. He has helped my numerous times with car problems. A good friend who comes to me for computer advice has been plenty happy to help me with home improvement work, as a couple of examples.
Part of being a family is helping one another in ways that you can. That can be emotional support, advice, using your skills, etc. Give and get. Now if the other party is someone who just takes and takes, well then ya they aren't someone who you help, or probably associate with all that much. However you find that in general if you are nice, other people will be too.
I'm very happy to help friends and family and they are happy to help me. Works out well.
Actually, there's this:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/
Which I have successfully used from Wine before. Of course I only saved the Windows XP OEM key (the sticker was illegible) and not the Photoshop one. I figured she can reinstall that if she actually has it. I also installed Ubuntu right beside Windows for good measure, and she actually uses Ubuntu to this day. Of course she has switched most of her computing activities to her Android phone, so it wasn't such a stretch.
Sir you haven't been working on the same eMachines that I have if you think they won't attack you.
I got here through a series of tubes
I've converted more than a dozen individuals and families to the Mac. All have lived happily ever after.
That's the power of Saint Steve's RDF. FEEL THE POWER!
Actually, that was the slightly less dickish thing to say than what I was going to say: "All have lived happily ever after, until they decided they actually didn't like something about Apple or iOS, at which point the Apple Customer Relations ninjas assassinated them. But they died before they could fall away from the faith, so that's good."
Yeah, I'm kidding.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I'm not likely to geek rage about anything-- it's interesting to hear it actually worked for somebody. I like macs, although I don't have one because I'm a colossal cheapskate.
Don't you think it's about time you moved out, then?
I don't know about "substantially". I've got a couple of scars from those cheap as shit cases that must have been made by Schick or Gillette.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I used to do computer work for females at work, since I considered it a friendly gesture. (I'm not terribly attracted to girls, btw, most times I was looking for friendship.) Then I noticed that after the work was done, just like straight guys have found, you get entirely shut down. I noticed there were two things going on: 1.) the girl assumed that I was fixing her computer because I was interested in her tits and 2.) actual attraction to said tits has nothing to do with it, i.e. there's nothing I was doing wrong like drooling all over her.
I don't fix anyone's computers for free anymore. I started telling the girls at work that it would cost $100 per hour for a minimum of one hour for me to even look at it, and they stopped asking after about the 3rd time.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
The problem with horses is that you can't take any of the good parts from a non-functional horse and use them to upgrade your existing horse. I don't see the Amish building new horses out of spare parts in their basement. On the other hand, horses are a good excuse for having hot grits in the house in case anyone asks.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
You just need to learn to say no. This works 100%:
Did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said "Free PC repair"?
You know WHY you didn't see that sign?
'Cause it ain't there, 'cause repairing dead PCs ain't my fucking business, that's why!
I've built three boxes. Impressive systems which could withstand the changes of time for about a decade with minimal upgrades. Lian Li cabinets, PC Power & Cooling PSW, ASUS mobo, Radeon AIW video cards, 4GB of ram, 500GB of drive space, DVD RW, the works.
Two are still going strong.
One was tossed (TOSSED!) due to a minor issue, in favor of a Big Box Store PC which was inferior in every way. Then the owner wanted further help. Why did you toss a system which was an absolute brick for a discounter's offering? Nope, not going to touch one of those. Wouldn't even want to try with the way those things are bundled up with stuff.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If the user is that frustrated with technology, we just tell them to get a Mac. Problem solved and we end up both happy.
Yeah, right, because if they're too cheap to pay for someone to repair their PC in the first place they'll be more than happy to buy all new hardware so they can run a totally new OS.
This never works in reality, the type of people willing to switch are willing to learn in the first place, and are less likely to be the type of person the article is addressed to (who pirates software and blindly clicks OK on all warnings). Nor would a Mac save these people, because they'd just happily give the malware rights elevation when prompted, without bothering to stop and think about what the hell is going on when that prompt pops up. It's not so much that they're idiots, it's that they're lazy and refuse to even try to learn what to avoid.
Who will comb his mother's hair & make sure she's taken care of?
[cue shower scene]
I may just have more stubbornly anti-learning people among the group I do family/friend tech support for. I'm not even remotely anti-Apple... I've had better success recommending iPads as alternatives for people frustrated by computers than macs. Particularly the ones with cellular data-- it removes even wifi configuration from the confusion. I think you're talking about people who have a genuine desire to find a better way to do things and are willing to do a little learning, and I'm talking about people whose primary computer issues stem from a stubborn refusal to learn, rather than from experimenting and failing. I haven't yet run into one of the people you're talking about who hadn't just bought themselves a mac on their own, but I'll keep an eye open.
While this doesn't apply to the fool running 4 browsers, having multiple engines is generally better than having a single engine in an aircraft, because of redundancy. It's just like RAID, in fact. Yes, your possibility of a failure is doubled with two drives or two engines, but all drives and all engines fail at some point, and by having two of them, catastrophe is avoided. With a single-engine aircraft, an engine failure can be disastrous if you can't find a good place to land in time. This is especially true in a helicopter where you have only a couple seconds to react properly and start an autorotation in the event of engine failure. With a dual-engine aircraft, however, you simply keep flying, albeit with much-reduced power. Now you can just fly back to your base and get the bad engine repaired, instead of hoping you can land safely on a road or in a field (you're screwed if you're over mountains).
Similarly, with RAID-1 using mirrored drives, your possibility of failure is doubled. However, if one drive does fail, you still have one good drive, and can keep working until you replace the bad drive. There's no downtime, and no data loss. If you only have one drive, and it fails, you have both downtime, and data loss (at least everything that's changed since your most-recent backup).
Redundancy costs a lot more, and increases failure probability, but makes things much easier when (not if) failure does occur.
It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket.
Anyone who argues this way is a moron. No one's figured out how to make a basket that good; that's why redundancy is necessary. Our own bodies even have redundancy: lungs, kidneys, eyes, ears, etc. Even if you DO make a basket that's ultra-reliable, you never know what kind of damage it's going to suffer while in use. Aircraft engines, for instance, have a nasty habit of occasionally sucking in birds. Military equipment has to worry about people shooting at it. And other equipment sometimes has to endure conditions that weren't planned for: severe weather, for instance.
I've heard it... never experienced it though. Seems like it mostly happens to people who install and remove programs all day long, download crapware, and so on. Doesn't happen to a normally used system where you install the programs you need to be productive and then just use them.
Dirty little secret: "rot" can happen to any OS if you add and remove enough things. Especially if you don't know or don't care exactly what you're adding and removing.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Your right, those Emachines are vicious.. I gave up working on them when one kicked my dog, crashed my pickup truck, and ran off with my sister's netbook. I was lucky to escape with my IPOD alive.
what you do is this: tell them that it isn't a mac. Instead, it's a BSD box that runs photoshop, MS Office, and generates PDFs as a builtin function, has a 2GHz 4 core cpu, up to 8G of RAM and can run linux in a vm if you want. Mine's about 2 years old and I'll get another in 2 years from now.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
As the guy who receives these infected and mistreated computers in my large circle of friends, family, and co-workers (and then combinations thereof), I have to say: If you have a problem fixing any computer, just don't fix it.
I've gotten such severely infected systems that I spend the greater part of my weekend cleaning said infections and uninstalling malware only to pop in a couple spare sticks of RAM or an old video card (where there was once only on-board video). Why? Because I like the people around me and I like to make sure the quality of life is good... if not better than what it was. Seriously. I care about my friends and coworkers and friends of coworkers and coworkers of friends. If they need help and I can help them, I'm going to do it.
Just remember to do a full write-up of all the actions you did:
--Quote the number of infections
--Install as much free/open-source alternatives to their malware-ridden pirated software as possible
--List the names of the software and describe what they do
--List some "best practices" for real-world computer usage.
--Let them know that you do this so their lives can be easier and so they have to spend less money now and in the future.
Put that write-up on the desktop and give a mini-presentation to the owner before they retake the computer. They'll appreciate the education, they'll appreciate the free utility and any upgrades you surprise them with, once they understand the effort involved in the service a friend provides for free, they'll appreciate /you/.
"Sure I'll fix your computer. If I get to fcku you."
So, Michael, how long have you been "into" your cousin? I think that's a bit creepy, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yeah, but "fixing" an animal requires a somewhat different skillset than fixing a machine. I know if someone tried to "fix" me, I'd probably attack them, too :D
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Dear [Insert Name Here],
I completely sympathize with your situation, but I will not touch your computer. First off, I can't 'just take a look at it.' If I take a look, I promise that I will find things wrong with it. And then, inevitably, you'll ask me to go from 'just looking' to tweak it. Then after tweaking, full on, sleeves rolled up, virus killing, settings-changing, registry-editing, repair mode. Which is what you wanted all along, isn't it? You don't want me to take a look, you want me to fix everything that's wrong, speed it up, clean up your files and complete advanced maintenance tasks which you can't even pronounce, let alone perform properly. .dll isn't being found by what .exe, which isn't running when another program expects it to be and fails silently with no log file that cascades into a waterfall of failure that rivals Niagara on a good day.
It's a fifty-fifty shot on whether I can fix the computer. I'm not really dealing with 'a computer' here, what I'm dealing with is the combined stupidity of every Redmond employee and every developer, decision-maker, and contractor that worked on any piece of software on your computer. Because the thing starts up and POSTs just fine. I'm the poor sap who has to figure out what
And that's only if it's a real bug! You've probably downloaded cracks, and serial numbers (I see you've got the complete Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Edition installed, that's only $2600, I'm sure you bought a legal license...) and oh, what's this, 13 toolbars in IE! Bonsai Buddy! Password Saver Online! I'm sure all these are totally legit, and none of them are software deliberately trying to mess up your computer. That's a whole other ballgame, not poorly designed software but maliciously designed software that will make you part of a botnet, steal your passwords and let someone watch everything you're doing in real time. I'm sure that's going to be really easy for me to clean up, because I'm an expert in the intricate, retarded, ineffective internal design of the Windows security model.
Let's even say I manage to get your computer into some semblance of working order, after five or six frustrating hours (while you watch TV and relax after your hard day at the Dress Barn.) Pray tell what will I get in return? Maybe if you're generous twenty-five, fifty bucks tops? Not even enough to fill up my gas tank. Would you do something frustrating, something you consider vile and degrading, for $5 an hour after you just got out of a long day of work making way more than that and being much less frustrated and degraded? Let's put it this way, what if I walked up to you and asked, "Hey, why don't you do my laundry? C'mon, most of the time you're not even doing anything, the machine does all the work. And make sure it's folded right! How about you scrub my floors on your hands and knees while I watch from the couch? No? OK, make me some dinner. Nothing too special, just a standard egg and cheese souffle, lobster thermadore in a white wine sauce and chocolate mousse for dessert." You'd answer "No?" Wow, what a surprise.
But besides the insulting pittance and the degradation, what I'm sure you'll give me is the blame if anything ever goes wrong with anything on your computer from now until eternity. (About that dinner, don't worry, I'll buy the parts, er.., ingredients. But I'll blame you if you break a dish or the stove goes out two months later.) Because I messed with it. That's because nothing ever breaks, everything is forever and entropy is just a made-up word. (Who am I kidding, you don't know what entropy is.) That's my thanks for fixing the computer.
On second though, how about I don't fix it and I save myself a huge fscking headache and you keep your fifty bucks?
No. What kind of idiot would sell a dwelling in this market?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
UAC works fairly well for this in Win7 /if/ you can get away with not giving them an admin account. Just like not giving root on the linux box. I've done this for two sane people, set up autoinstall of updates (including Windows defender), and so far no problems.
Of course you usually can't get away with that because users really really want to install that cool malware. And by users I mean family members.
Easier to tell them that you don't use a PC, and save them from a long and tedious explanation.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Speaking of noobs... the irony is palpable.
It's not impossible to remove an infection. It IS impossible to be sure you have removed ALL infections. AVG is perfectly serviceable, even if it has gone downhill lately. I honestly just recommend Microsoft Security Essentials any more... fast, low clutter, and it just works, at least as well as any other commercial program.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I switched to using Macs in 2001. Which was great because I could just tell everyone I knew who used Windows "oh sorry, I use Macs.. I really have no idea". This worked pretty well until about 2007 when my parents finally got a Mac. On the plus side, stuff usually just works for them now, so it's not really a big deal.
I for one I am out of the business in general. I hate the snickering "geek" moniker everyone thinks is so funny cheapening the trade. Then again you get the other folks who are in order of magnitude grateful for your resurrection. I miss the enterprise level tech support/sys admin though. Tough economy and cheaper by the dozen sys admins have dried up that well. At least at the end of the day you got paid without the "how much?" complaints, you know that someone supported/appreciated *you*, and you got to play with the cool toys (ahem, tools) not something picked up somewhere cheap without source disks and/or licenses. Be careful out there...
That most geeks are the problem in that situation. Geeks in general seem to have less social skills and social graces than most people. They also seem to get a bit big-headed about their abilities and computers in general. Their attitude is "You should know that," and "RTFM noob." They feel put upon and act like martyrs when someone has the audacity to ask them for help.
Well guess what? Act like that and it shouldn't be a surprise people aren't so nice. Even if you do help them, if you are abusive about it they don't feel like you really did them much of a favour.
I'm not saying that geeks are always the ones at fault here, but I think it is more often than not. When you are nice and polite, help when you can, say no nicely and explain why when you can't, people are nice back. I've had good luck with that in general, and not just with family.
Some time ago I had a roommate who was a plumber. I helped him with his laptop. Old piece of shit, ran really poorly. While I couldn't make it great, I made it better. Took a fair bit of work, probably 4-6 hours of my time and really isn't worth it for something that old when you get down to it, at least had I billed him. However I did it to be nice. In turn, I got a lot of minor plumbing problems fixed. Heck he redid my kitchen drain without asking or charging for the parts (which were only like $10), he noticed it was rusting out and would be a problem in the future, and since it was cheap and simple he just did it.
Really it is on you to be the nice open one with people. If they are jerks, then you cut them off and stop helping. But you can't expect people to come and lavish help on you and only then do you open up to them. Be nice and friendly, you'll find many people are back.
No, no. He uses them in series, not parallel. Web pages are so sanitized he might as well just use lynx.
60 mA at 60 Hz? Hell yes that's dangerous. Neon sign transformers don't have enough energy for arc-flash or serious heat damage, but they can drive plenty of current through your heart. They can, however, be trouble-shot safely. If you can draw an arc form the transformer and the short-circuit current is in spec, the problem is the tube or the insulation somewhere in the system. Resistance at the terminals of the transformer (as measured with 10 volts or more) should be at least several Mohm. If it's less than that, replace rotted HV cables and wipe case of transformer and sign tube with isopropanol.
If you can't draw an arc, the transformer is potted in tar and the labor to repair one (if it can even be done) is far more expensive than the replacement. If neither of the above fixes it, you'll have to get a new sign.
The behavior of a switch-mode supply when driving something other than the specified load is somewhat unpredictable, so testing the power supply in that case requires replacement with a known-good part to see if the problem is fixed.
Ya well, it comes with a rainbow and happy ending. What else did you want from me?
The problem being, there's a set of the consumer public that suspicious of rainbows.
It helps when you have a reputation among your friends of being highly amused by being able to sarcastically taunt them for doing something stupid, like keeping critical business records on a home PC with no backup plan. It helps even more when they finally realize that $2500 for data recovery on two failed drives is actually a fair price for the clean room work being done.
It also helps if you can set up an easy to use backup system for them.
Apparently word hasn't gotten out that you "know horses"
If word spreads in an Amish community that you "know horses" no one will ever leave you alone with their horses.. Or talk to you.
" I tell them that if they had a real OS then I could help them, but since they have a toy I cannot."
Dripping nerdy OS-based condescension to family. You must just be a laugh riot at the gatherings.
real horse experts don't need no stinkin' badges.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Next time tell them they get 90 days free support for OS X and the iLife apps from time of purchase.
You'd be surprised at the amount of simple help they can get on the phone, and the amount of useful links they can get as well.
Similarly, with RAID-1 using mirrored drives, your possibility of failure is doubled. However, if one drive does fail, you still have one good drive, and can keep working until you replace the bad drive. There's no downtime, and no data loss. If you only have one drive, and it fails, you have both downtime, and data loss (at least everything that's changed since your most-recent backup).
Except that, with RAID's requirement that drives be identical in capacity (or you waste space), you tend to have a set of drives that have the same age, and thus the same time to failure. One fails and you're immediately stressing out the remaining drives, accelerating their failure to possibly before you return to a protected configuration.
The moment you're saved by redundancy, you're no longer protected by redundancy.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Good job jumping to conclusions, there. You don't know OP's situation, and therefore, you don't know what (s)he tried first.
OP may very well have tried to educate, but may have just been working with someone who refused to learn. I've been there and done that. I had a relative that needed lots of help with his/her computer (staying anonymous to protect the guilty). This person would invariably create a new document in Word/Excel/Publisher, then click the little "x" icon to close the program, click "Yes" when asked to save it before closing, and then would freak out when (s)he didn't know how to find it again later. I don't know how many times I explained how to use the "open recent documents" option in the menu to find the file they had last edited, and I don't know how many times I suggested that (s)he actually use "Save As" to save the document (what a concept...). Sometimes people don't want to learn, especially when it's easier to ask the "computer guru" to help dig them out of the hole their willful ignorance has landed them in.
Second, what if OP didn't recommend Mac because "it's an operating system designed for idiot^Wmommies and daddies" (I wish I could find that video again...), but rather because it's the OS that (s)he is competent fixing? I don't like Windows, and so I work on it grudgingly, if at all. OTOH, I rather enjoy both OS-X and the various Linux flavors and I tend to be rather proficient at them. Consequently, if someone wants me to provide free tech support, IMHO, it's reasonable to require that they use one of these OS's because it's what I can best support.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Your right, those Emachines are vicious.. I gave up working on them when one kicked my dog, crashed my pickup truck, and ran off with my sister's netbook. I was lucky to escape with my IPOD alive.
The owner was illegally downloading country music, am I right?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You stole my sig!!!
:D
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If I was writing this letter -
Dear Friend,
Please understand that you broke your computer. Maybe it was your kids. Maybe it was an accident with no malicious intent. But you still broke your computer. You've been in the software equivalent of a car crash, and now you want me to fix the software equivalent of your car.
Maybe we're good enough friends that that's cool. But please remember that above everything else, you broke it. Not me. And now you're asking me for a favour. It's a favour that I get asked for a lot. And honestly, if we weren't friends - I'd want a whole bunch of money in exchange for doing this work. It's going to take me a fair chunk of time and it's a pain in my ass. Like most 'computer guys' - my main job isn't fixing consumer PC's - I have another job that I have to go to if I want to pay rent, so your computer is getting fixed in what would otherwise be my relaxation time, spent doing things I enjoy. And despite what you may have heard about 'computer guys' - fixing computers for free isn't really something that most of us enjoy.
So please, remember, I don't actually care that your computer is broken. It's not my fault and it's only my problem because I'm the friendliest/cheapest/only 'computer guy' you know. And if you aren't nice to me, and if you don't remember how nice I am about doing you favours when I next need a favour in return... don't think that I need your friendship so badly that I'm prepared to be your bitch.
Thanks
Local Computer Guy
"If you want support from me, buy a Mac. I don't do Windows for free."
Those of my family who bought Macs, well I was called once because my ex-brother-in-law broke off the power connector in his iBook. That and maybe a couple other calls in over a decade.
Those who have Windows PC's don't call me. Granted it took my mom's new husband a couple times before he figured out I wasn't joking, but he lets the grand kids go wild on his computer every time they come over. No way in hell I'm cleaning up that mess... over and over and over.
With the cost of pc being so low, it's pretty hard to ever justify taking a system to a professional fixer. Most people just decide it's time to upgrade and throw out the old system.
Now, some people genuinely need a new computer as the last time they've upgraded was 2001, but most of those parts are more than usable.
i have lots of good, usable parts left over from upgrades. Eventually, i put enough parts together to reassemble the system and pass on to a relative, which always ends up being an upgrade for them. For those systems, I give free support, since i don't want to see a good, usable computer end up in a landfill. for everyone else i expect something, and charge by how much i like them or how much work it will be for me.
Thanks for nothing, King James...
I don't have geek rage, but I was wondering why you hate your family so much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's because the bible doesn't say mounting a filesystem is supposed to make a computer immediately try to load and execute code from that filesystem. Back in biblical times, nobody ever thought of doing anything so ridiculously stupid with their computers. Unlike today, all they had was rampant mysticism, ignorance, and blind hatred and violence (good thing we finally conquered all those things) .. but nothing approaching the awe-striking dim-wittedness of "hey, the user inserted some media, QUICK!! LET'S EXECUTE IT! AS THE USER, TOO!"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Oh good, for once a MTG player I can respond to so the mods don't sink me.
Run a Type One analysis on the recent news trends and be horrified. The last time I tried I was accused of bad Perl.
The general formula, converted to MTG, is GoldCard - Negated-Limitation.
So we have PutPeopleInJail -NegateZimbabwe, "Pretend To Track Anonymous Emails" - Negate FalseResults, etc.
Once one random jurisdiction puts an unholy measure into play, the entire rest of the world goes "oh cool, let's do that".
For anyone whoever built any of the 100 MTG decks that later became banned, this reasoning is a cinch. For everyone else the mods call it -1.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
but it works 99.99% of the time, all the time
Sex panther. 60% of the time, it works every time. It's made with bits of real panther, so you know its good.
I wonder if Macs have bits of real apple in them.
Yeah, but in my experience it's a myth to any who knows what they are doing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If I do not know something, do not grill me on the intricacies of it, as "I do not know" means exactly what I say.
What you see as grilling you on the intricacies, the other person might see as rephrasing the question in different terms to jog your memory. Their mindset appears to be the same as that of a text adventure player who runs up against a guess the verb problem.
How did you know?
I've told one family, when asked, that I don't install a cracked product. They stopped asking me for help. That's great!
I don't install file-sharers - LimeWire's popular here. If they want to, up to them but they can figure it out. And I'll clean it up next time 'round and get two bottles of wine from Dad for the labour.
Worst I've seen is when I cleaned up (reformatted) one PC, then had to do it again as the teenager had wrecked it within a week. I sat with her once while she went to a website and clicked "ok" to everything that got between her and the screen she wanted. All the time keeping up a stream of chatter. 'Did you read that message?", I asked. "No", she said. The family went to a Mac within a year, because "PCs just don't seem to work for us", the mother said. No shit.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Yeah, but in my experience it's a myth to any who knows what they are doing...
What are we discussing again?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I can call my son's pediatrician in the middle of the night and asking for help, he'll provide me a free consult. If the problem is too complex and involves x-rays or antibiotics he will tell me to go with him the next day.
Not every free help we ask is because we feel is wothless.
I didn't think there were any keybindings not used by Emacs.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
I find that charging people money makes stupid things less frequent. Or at least profitable :-)
Same goes for family - if they do something I consider below common sense for a non-techie, they can pay up or put up. And if they have stuff with iffy licenses then I won't even touch it. I can't afford the liability.
One fails and you're immediately stressing out the remaining drives, accelerating their failure to possibly before you return to a protected configuration.
Incorrect. In a mirrored configuration, there's no difference between reading/writing one drive, or two drives. If one drive goes down, you're just back to a regular single-drive configuration, at least until you plug in a fresh drive and do a rebuild. Now, that rebuild operation will stress the old drive, but before that, there's no difference at all. Same goes for RAID-5: when one drive fails, you're only stressing the CPU (or dedicated controller) more.
The moment you're saved by redundancy, you're no longer protected by redundancy.
Yeah, so? It's better than not being protected at all. Plus, there's nothing saying you can only have two of something. It's perfectly possible to have a 3-, 4-, or more-drive RAID-1 mirror. Obviously, the storage efficiency sucks, but if you want excellent redundancy, you can easily mirror 4 drives, and suffer 3 failures before you're not protected.
Our own bodies even have redundancy: lungs, kidneys, eyes, ears, etc
How's that second heart, second liver, second penis, second uterus, second vagina, second mouth, second rectum, second esophagus, second stomach, second large intestine, second small intestine, second gall bladder, second spleen, second pancreas, second spine, second larynx, and second bellybutton coming along?
The heart and liver are good examples of the "all your eggs in one basket" approach - not 100% perfect, but if taken care of, should last the normal warranty period (and until recently, the warranty was "for the life of the owner" by definition).
Humans are products of evolution, not design. Unfortunately, we haven't yet evolved any redundancy for our heart or liver, and as a result, those two organs are responsible for a large portion of our fatalities. Heart disease is the #1 killer of Americans, I believe. Also, mechanical devices such as airplanes and computers have external repairpeople who can replace faulty parts when needed; humans didn't evolve with the assumption of doctors available to transplant bad organs. If we were to redesign our bodies with modern assumptions (medicine being available, the types of foods modern people eat, etc.), we'd do many things differently. Dual hearts with circulatory systems that automatically shut off parts in the event of rupture (in case you sever an artery or get a limb cut off) would probably be part of the new design, to improve survivability. But obviously, somewhere along the way, it was found that organisms with dual lungs and kidneys survived longer than ones without, so we have them now as a result.
Many of the other organs you mention are not critical anyway. Gall bladders and spleens are non-essential, and people can live quite well without them, just like they can live without an appendix. Bellybuttons aren't organs, nor are they necessary or even useful; they're just a by-product of the "manufacturing process". They cease to be useful as soon as your umbilical cord is cut. As for spines, some things simply can't be feasibly made redundant. A parallel to this in aviation is the rotors on a helicopter. Once your rotors are damaged, you're done for, and there's no feasible way to design around that. In the future, however, it might be possible to make a 3- or 4-rotor helicopter with automatic control, so that if one is damaged the others can continue to work, but as long as humans are the pilots, it's not possible (it'd be like trying to have fully manual antilock brakes, with individual wheelspeed sensing and control, at the driver's feet).
I wish I knew what the hell MTG players are talking about.
Signed: someone who sells MTG and owns a comic book shop where tournaments are held.
And I'm not kidding!
Your astounding rhetoric has convinced me. I now realize that Pokemon is the best thing in the world.
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
it's not possible (it'd be like trying to have fully manual antilock brakes, with individual wheelspeed sensing and control, at the driver's feet).
Heavy equipment has had this for decades. Individual brake pedals for left and right sides, and a little slider so you can lock them together if you don't want to "play the brake pedals".
Also, heart failure was far and away from being the major cause of death for most of humanity's existence. Disease, exposure to the elements, starvation, war, accidents ... these all killed humans in great numbers.
Or how about these snapshots:Murder being the #1 cause of death for pregnant women in Maryland, and the #2 cause nationally, behind accidents, or the #2 cause of death for infants/a
I dunno... sounds pretty ragey to me. :-P
Heavy equipment has had this for decades. Individual brake pedals for left and right sides, and a little slider so you can lock them together if you don't want to "play the brake pedals".
Wrong. Separate left/right brakes on tractors are nothing like ABS, and certainly made for the purpose of retaining control at speed in bad weather. Tractors don't usually even go over 5-10 mph, and drive on dirt or mud, not paved roads. It's not possible for humans to control four wheels simultaneously, with millisecond response times.
Also, heart failure was far and away from being the major cause of death for most of humanity's existence. Disease, exposure to the elements, starvation, war, accidents ... these all killed humans in great numbers.
Wrong again. Before humans became overpopulated and created agriculture, societies, cities, etc., these things weren't major problems. It wasn't until humans reproduced so much that they had to live in communities and farm their food, instead of being hunter-gatherers, that these things became problems. The development of agriculture was a giant leap backwards for humans, and they were better off as hunters and gatherers, and it was only overpopulation that forced them to grow their own food and suffer for it. Did you know humans lost a full foot in height when they changed to agriculture, due to poor nutrition? It's only been in the last century or so that we've gained that foot of height back.
When you get to old age, it's frequently your heart that gives out first.
Or how about these snapshots:Murder being the #1 cause of death for pregnant women in Maryland [now.org], and the #2 cause nationally, behind accidents, or the #2 cause of death for infants/a [benbest.com]
Obviously, whenever you look at a select group of people, the causes of death will change. I'm sure the leading cause of death for inner-city males (in east coast USA cities like Detroit) under the poverty line is also not heart disease, but that just shows the problems with poverty, lack of education, gang mentality, etc. For the population as a whole (where access to education and avoidance of a violent lifestyle isn't much of a problem), heart disease is the #1 killer, and cancer is #2, IIRC. I think auto accidents were #3, which shows why everyone having a car and there not being any decent public transit in this country isn't working out too well.
Bullcrap. I had an old sign transformer when I was in college and we built a Tesla coil with it. The manufacturer's own data stated that the conditions at the output terminals are sufficient to cause fibrillation.
if only i could post slowpoke...
So far all six people I've 'converted' (same demographic as GP) over the last couple of years keep telling me that it was the single best computer related purchase they've ever made.
That being said, I only recommend them to people that are not going to have a problem in the first place - ie. I don't recommend them to hard core gamers, or people with specific Windows-only specialist software needs.
The total number of hours I spend resolving family/friends IT issues has plummetted to the point where it's actually enjoyable.
I am very surprised that nobody has said that this yet.
Number one rule: never login as Administrator (or root), unless you need to do maintenance. Playing a dvd is not maintenance.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/aaron_margosis/archive/2004/06/17/157962.aspx "Why you shouldn't run as admin..."
So a message to all pc-fixers out there: if your friend does want the automatic login, make sure it automatically logs in to an account that is in the "Users" group. And you could even go as far as not giving the Administrator password to your friend.
If users log in as Administrator when all they want to do is surf the web, write some email, write a document with MS Word or play a dvd. Then do not blame Microsoft if your pc gets hacked. It's your own fault.
This particular article by Aaron Margosis was written seven years ago.
The development of agriculture was a giant leap backwards for humans, and they were better off as hunters and gatherers
He typed on his computer from the comfort of his house using the electricity produced by society ;)
and it was only overpopulation that forced them to grow their own food and suffer for it. Did you know humans lost a full foot in height when they changed to agriculture, due to poor nutrition?
Are you completely sure it wasn't because without agriculture the short and frail people were more likely to fail at hunting and die of starvation before being able to pass their genes on?
Notice the hostile attitude, the "People owe me," mentality and so on.
I don't think I got screwed at all. I didn't say to him "Ok I am spending this time and I bill out at $100/hour for indy work so I expect that much back from you." No, I did it to be nice to him. In turn he was nice to me. Did he do anything big? No, didn't have any big jobs, but he was very willing to help with things in his area of expertise. Funny enough, if we actually were to compare billings I'd probably owe him money. the company he worked for charged $300 for a simple drain replacement like he did because people don't know how to do it themselves (though it is not hard) and leaking water is a major problem. That was just an example, that wasn't the only thing he ever did to help me (nor the only thing I ever did to help him).
As for "administrate the network" oh get off your high horse. I actually DO administer our building's network at work, and have previously done much higher level network administration. That can take some work. At home? My network is a cable modem plugged in to a switch. That's it. It's a consumer network, there ain't shit to administer son. If the lights on the modem go out I call the ISP, that's all.
I suppose I did more than him with it since I paid the bills and made the calls but that's called "being a homeowner" and is why I get to charge rent for someone to live here, if I so choose. I take care of all the services, and just charge them their share.
Seriously, you just provided an excellent example of the personality I was talking about. You are so concerned about not getting "boned" that you are a dick and thus "bone" yourself by not having people who will help you.
Life is kinda nice when you have friends and family you can turn to when you need help. It does mean you have to be willing to give as well as get though, and you can't sit and try to demand 100% parity on everything. It isn't a business transaction, it is a person helping another.
The real question how do they feel after a year?
The real question exactly how drunk are you?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Every man, woman, cat and dog used to ask me to fix their computer until I grew a backbone and just started saying 'no'. Word quickly got around and the requests stopped coming. Problem solved. Having said that, I still help immediate family and also friends that reciprocate when I need help from them.
There's no point getting angry about being taken advantage of. If you don't like the situation then change the situation. Stand up for yourself!
"thanks son, you sound like you know what your talking about, but as i have no idea wtf you just said I'm going to continue to jab this screwdriver into the network port because i saw on TV this is how you fix a computer glitch".
to be fair, mac is good for mom and pop because its harder for them to break. but the same could be said about Ubuntu etc. once set up properly it should be fine. windows is the only OS i know of that have made it harder to manage in an attempt to make things easier to manage.
Yeah, so? It's better than not being protected at all. Plus, there's nothing saying you can only have two of something. It's perfectly possible to have a 3-, 4-, or more-drive RAID-1 mirror. Obviously, the storage efficiency sucks, but if you want excellent redundancy, you can easily mirror 4 drives, and suffer 3 failures before you're not protected.
Plus there is always RAID-6. A six or eight disk RAID-6 has better storage efficiency than normal RAID-1/RAID-10 and you still need three simultaneous disk failures to fall over. Or if you have a large number of disks and you need an exceptional level of redundancy, RAID-15 or RAID-16, which has only slightly worse storage efficiency than RAID-10 and is pretty much only going to fall over as a result of a lightning strike or some other force of nature.
I'm 'retiring' from fixing other people's computers. It's not worth the headache. I have two machines that I have already agreed to fix, after that. If I'm not having sex with you or your mother, it's extremely unlikely that I will ever be fixing your computer.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The rant was concerning a security problem -- specifically, an unprincipled and careless user installed a lot of dodgy software, got burned, and took the techie's help for granted. The user's behavior is consistent: it's clear she doesn't think about the welfare of others or the consequences of her actions, so it's no surprise that she's ungrateful for the techie's help, and doesn't appreciate the amount of work involved.
I love helping friends and family with computer problems -- but the problems I get are requests for help in installing a hard drive, configuring a printer, or figuring out how to use some software. I usually get generous thanks for helping them.
The author of the rant needs to deal with his real problem: he has lousy friends. That the immediate problems were computer problem is incidental.
I used to get frustrated with semi-distant relatives or not-so-close friends. Now I just charge them. You'd be surprised at how willing people are to pay the rates you ask. If they don't like my rates, they always have some fourteen year old nephew they can bug.
and second bellybutton coming along?
Dude, you were doing pretty good til bellybutton?
Were you purposefuly trying for 17 examples? Do
you have a Perittosarithmosform OCD?
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
It really depends on the user. My dad doesn't know a whole lot about computers. He want his internet, his email, his office and his Solitaire. If there are problems, he usually can't fix them by himself. However, he's still capable of learning new UIs to a degree. When his netbook's Win XP installation was becoming unbearably slow we replaced it with Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Since he was already using Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice everything he needed to relearn were the launcher, the file dialogs and the Solitaire game's UI. Within a week he was at home in his new OS.
Now it turns out that Network Manager has a weird bug that causes it to generate broken automatic settings for the wireless NIC. Since my dad is sick of having to delete those on every boot and my older brother has offered to turn the netbook into a Hackintosh (taking over the maintenance duties) that's what we'll do. I expect my dad to learn the new UI within a week or two. Well, after we found him a decent Solitaire.
I know that there are people who are afraid to move away from Windows 98 because they get confused when things aren't exactly the same in newer versions. Some could easily learn a new UI but simply refuse to. But not all non-technical and/or senior users are like that. Some just don't want to learn more than they need to in order to use their computer for their usual tasks but when presented with a new way of doing so (and some encouragement), they learn that new way and continue with their lives.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
On the other hand, horses are a good excuse for having hot grits in the house in case anyone asks.
How do you explain Natalie Portman?
Start telling people it'll cost them up front. I do a little side work in helping coworkers with their home computers (we're 99% mac at work, so a little PC on the side keeps me "fresh") I tell them up front that it'll cost them a bit to get me in the door. But I generally just charge a flat fee. Its way easier for them than working with the Geek Squad who will just take their money and load them down with "solutions" that just cost more money.
I also have started having them sign a waiver.
Female: GO SUCK A GIRLS NIPPLE!!!
This is sound advice, no matter what your opinion about pokemon is.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
I have steered some people with no interest in computers to Linux. Most distros have a very Windows like default desktop, and it works on their existing hardware, so its a much easier jump. The main thing they need to learn is how to install software, and that is not exactly complicated on Linux (assuming a GUI package installer like Synaptic).
You do land yourself with a Linux install, but that is one-off.
I spent the better part of a weekend rebuilding the inlaws old XP box while I drank all their beer.
Set them up with a regular user account and a secret admin password that only I knew. So life were good for a while.
So I gave them the admin password and now the box is a boat anchor. No way in hell I'm going to fix their shit again.
TCAP-Abort
I played MtG from Legends until Weatherlight, and I haven't the slightest clue wtf TaoPhoenix is on about. Maybe the later editions vacuum out players' prefrontal cortex. -shrug-
It's called "The Cloud". And is going to put all the little computer fixers out of business.
Deleted
I've been doing PC support for family and friends for over 20 years for free. Recently, I had to move house, I have a 5 yr old and there was just loads of other crap that ate my time for several months. Unfortunately, 3 different people (family/friends) decided that they needed help with their computer during the same period. That's when I started charging. I charge the same hourly rate as a baby sitter, and I still feel cheeky! The thing is, that if I was to charge the same rate as a electrician, or a fridge repair company, then the cost would be unreasonable. They usually charge ~1000 SEK / 100 GBP for services that take up to 1 hour. When I fix a PC, it usually takes a few hours of troubleshooting. Sometimes I've spent up to 20 hours rebuilding the OS, re-installing all programs and reconfiguring modems and printers. It would be unreasonable to charge 20.000 SEK / 200 GBP to re-install a PC: You could buy another PC for that money. And the ahem... 'professional' PC repair companies charge maybe ~2000 SEK for complete re-installs, but then they do't do any config, don't re-install any programs whatsoever.
I think a good approach is to have a reasonable base charge for the first hour, then an hourly rate thereafter, with a maximum ceiling for how much it will cost.
Of course, I would never consider charging my parents or siblings--if I had any--for PC repair, but every other relative, friend or acquintance is free game in my book.
And hey, if it means I get called less, because I started charging, then that's fine by me, because this is the kind of hassle that I really don't need.
And as for getting favours in return... I've been helping friends and family for the last 12 years, and i've never got a favour in return that was in any way equivalent in terms of how much hassle it was for the other party. The most I ever got was a crate of beer. I can honestly say that none of the people I have helped and spent upto 20 hours fixing their PC, would ever consider doing something for me for the same amount of time, and that's not even considering the money aspect.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
You want me to fix your computer?
Allright.
But you will have to cook a paella for me. Dressed like chicken. Even if it's late at night.
No, really. You own me a favor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3nNR_XALoQ
Wais, wais, wais!
"Umm, good question, not sure. But poke around in this menu and I'm sure you'll find it"
Indeed. Also, when this doesn't work, 90% of the time it's because they overlooked the "help" menu. Often, "Click on the help menu and type the thing you want to do" brings up an easy to read and follow list of instructions.
I think the infrequently used menus like help and window just tend to get psychologically associated with "scenery" and that's why they get overlooked so often.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
happy ending
Macs do that too these days? that might actually justify the price... I'll have to do some TCO analysis on Mac Vs girlfriend + linux box
People, what a bunch of bastards
I'd say evolution has favored redundancy, or there'd just be one human. If one fails, there's almost 7 billion more to pick up the slack. I think this goes for pretty much every species on earth.
Next step: more planets in case the one we're on breaks down.
I stopped buying PC Pro in 1992 because of its authoritarian ideas about software being 'stolen' or the object of 'theft'. I'm sorry to see that in the succeeding 19 years they have learnt nothing.
"Can you look at my PC?"
"Sure, I have a few minutes to spare" ... "Hm, this is completely busted. Do you have a backup?"
"No"
"Well then there is not much I can do for you, sorry."
Anyone agreeing emphatically with the sentiment and delivery
of TFA... needs to think about EQ.
[ http://ultimatelifestyleproject.com/emotional-quotient/ ]
[ http://psychology.about.com/library/quiz/bl_eq_quiz.htm ]
And your ability to interact with others. If a rant is the solution
then maybe having better methods and avenues of directing
pent-up rage should be sought.
"Because CBS Cares..."
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Dirty little secret: "rot" can happen to any OS if you add and remove enough things. Especially if you don't know or don't care exactly what you're adding and removing.
Have you ever heard of package managers? They seem to pretty much eliminate that rot.
And some of you still don't see a need for a cloud based OS that removes the possibility of these types of problems?!!?
No... I'm afraid they don't, still.
But I bet they were one (of the early adopters) when they
spin their tales later in life.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
You've never tried this, have you? The sort of person who is easily frustrated by technology but has been barely getting by on windows gets utterly enraged when presented with different UI paradigms. I know because I tried this "fix" a couple of times for people. The problem isn't that either UI is too difficult-- the problem is that you're dealing with somebody who is utterly refusing to learn anything, and handing them a new OS is asking them to learn quite a few things all at once.
You're mostly wrong. Couple years ago I gave all the family members whose PCs I support a clear choice after the Nth virus wave of the year: either I get you on Linux, or you get a Mac. My sister got the Mac and is happy about it (so happy indeed that she's now completely turned over to the iDarkside, iPhone, iPad, etc), the others chose Linux.
I installed KDE with the Redmond theme: some didn't notice for 3 weeks that it was different (while using it daily for mail, scans, web, office) ! There's only one family member I'm still dithering about: after 10+ years of use, she still can't understand the difference between left-click and right-click and goes in panic mode if the desktop picture changes... So I'm not eager to do ANY change unless the computer dies hard.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
> It's not impossible to remove an infection. It IS impossible to be sure you have removed ALL infections.
Which is exactly the problem. Some people want to do the job well, and there is no way of knowing whether you did or not.
And most people competent with computers have very little experience with malware infections, so they are indeed out of their comfort zone. I think it is perfectly fine to say so, maybe make a quick attempt at rescuing the situation (quick unfortunately means no full backup), and leave it at that.
Did you make a backup? :-)
Okay, so I missed twice in a row.
It's a figurative / allegorical comment about the unexpected synergies of individual parts. I'm a YRO guy getting nervous because colectively, the different countries are debuting the components of a total "Blue Deck" lock down of our rights. It's like telling a Blue player he can't have any particular piece - he'll go "okay, so you can ban Timetwister. I'll make my super-combo out of something else".
To see the analogies, start with this latest craze over the Sony key. This is the *second* time little numbers are magically becoming "illegal".
13,256,278,887,989,50 plus a number of zeros equal to the number of cards in the Tarot Major Arcana.
Hey now, I can't even make a CCG deck out of the pieces of YRO, because Wizards patented it!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Articles of clothing that are too far from the bellybutton accumulate too much lint, and the clothes dryer tries to eat them. Think of it - how many socks does the average dryer consume, compared to shirts?
"it's an operating system designed for idiot^Wmommies and daddies" (I wish I could find that video again...)
http://www.deadtroll.com/index2.html?/video/livehelldesk.html~content
Internet Helpdesk, from deadtroll.com
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
they will fix it.
Yes, like many here, I too used to troubleshoot/repair friends/relatives computers and it got very old till I decided one day to tell the non-paying customer, "I'll troubleshoot for 15 minutes, and if I can't get it to a previously known good state, I'm going to wipe the hard drive and reload the OS, and ONLY the OS. Do you want me to continue?" Usually the answer was no. I'd recommend they take it to a computer repair shop.
The terminal?
most of the time i'll happily drop less important things i might be doing to help a friend, family member, or random person out with a technical problem, simply because i like (and / or am obsessed with) solving problems. i don't really know why, i just rarely find myself feeling annoyed by it. if i did, i'd just say it wasn't something i had the time or resources to fix and point them in the direction of a shop i thought could do it. i figure it keeps me sharp and more in touch with users, and that's important for me. i find rants like this funny and am not above making fun of a user afterward, but sincerely like helping people. is it related to being it manager of a tiny charity in southeast asia? well, it probably helps, but i was always like this. when the tsunami hit Indonesia I was at the UN headquarters cleaning malware off of the doctors' computers so they could do their work. as a Linux user i need this kind of thing to keep my Windows skills sharp, and often keep the malware for my personal collection and / or submission to efforts like ClamAV.
my point here is not to brag or talk about myself, i'm just baffled. i enjoy fixing stuff or i don't do it, and tend to feel appreciated (sometimes paid too, in money or food), and actually care that people who aren't geeks can get proper use out of their computers. am i the only one? if so, what the heck is wrong with me?
I am retired/disabled. I have 20 years experience fixing computers and networks.
I fix computers for free for anyone who is on public assistance or on a tight budget from being under employed. Anyone else can donate cash or defunct hardware or to a charity if they are fully employed.
I do it for fun. I miss the puzzles, and most of the computer users out there can no more clean up after a malware infection than they can remove their own tonsils.
Sure the tedious reloading and scanning is not as much fun as chasing down malfunctioning drivers and polymorphic trojans and rootkits but i get the bizarre puzzles the commercial shops can't invest the time to find and fix.
I have always done computer (and appliance, auto and electronic) repair because I love it. I hope some of you get as much enjoyment out of it as I do. Of course I still curse Bill Gates regularly as well as Steve Jobs (whenever I have to completely disassemble a mac laptop to replace the hard drive) but that (and knowing just how brilliant, demented and out of touch some programmers are) is part of the legacy of the industry. (Win 7 still crashes the copy command when it hits a too long filename)
An artist gotta paint even as he starves. I am grateful people bring their PC's to me to play with because ultimately, I win in the exchange.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
"And you, the team's geeky tech genius, have just failed...."
Failure is not an option.
Strategic retreat on the other hand...
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
People think they just can call without warning and I then am happy to spend the entire evening helping them. YES! that was just what I wanted to do, sit all evening with a remote console.
Even when i drive for half a day to visit family, they think i will want to spend the evening, alone, in their homeoffice fixing something.
Worst thing though is that they always expect that i want to do it for free.
Then days after, they call i and claim that something stopped working because i had "tampered" with their machine.
I stopped helping people some time ago. When people called, i just had no solution to their problem. It became easier when Vista came out since, i dropped windows at XP, so I can say without lying that I have never owned a Vista or windows 7 installation. (and at work we still use XP on our desktops with no sign of changing that)
What did I get out of it, all those days wasted helping people. Nothing at all.
"different UI paradigms"
That's funny. Monopoly ware subjects it's customers to this on a regular basis.
Linux or MacOS is much more likely to be a stable target.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Backup, Reformat, Reinstall, F**k off
That's the one, thanks!
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Over 90% of the world would rather stick with a PC, despite its occasional troubles, than switch to a Mac.
Similarly, I'd rather have the occasional aching balls than a castration.
Capisce?
Are you threatening the previous poster like some sort of Microsoft-affiliated mobster, or implying that moving from a Windows PC to a Mac is somehow a downgrade?
The Mac I'm using is far more powerful than the Windows PC it replaced. I only have to restart it when I want to, not when it wants to, it has an operating system that was designed from the ground up for security, and I haven't had a hardware failure in at least seven years on any of our Apple machines - in the meantime I have a stack of dead or unusable Windows machines of various brands. I do have Apple machines that are no longer used, but that's because things like a G3 are obsolete by today's standards - they will still work though.
Not similar to having your balls removed at all.
P.S. you might want to get those things looked at. They're not supposed to ache.
Putting moderation advice in your
That is, the resistance the transformer sees, not the resistance looking into the transformer.
Before humans became overpopulated and created agriculture, societies, cities, etc., these things weren't major problems. It wasn't until humans reproduced so much that they had to live in communities and farm their food, instead of being hunter-gatherers, that these things became problems.
Farming led to higher populations, not the other way round. And disease, exposure to the elements, starvation, war, and accidents (and simple murder) were all problems for hunter-gatherers, though war was mostly your farming neighbors taking your land and killing you, thanks to their higher population density.
which shows why everyone having a car and there not being any decent public transit in this country isn't working out too well.
It's working out quite well: freedom is more valuable than safety, and cars == individual freedom in a very real way (also, public transport outside of dense population centers is a joke, but that's a different discussion). Safety is not and should not be the highest goal a society aims for - that way lies slavery for all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's very true to say "The development of agriculture was a giant leap backwards for humans, and they were better off as hunters and gatherers - at first". Early agriculture led to many, many problems, including more starvation than hunter-gatherers faced (because the bad years for farmers were very bad indeed). The only reason agriculture took off is that the higher population densities it supported (in the good years), and community organization it forced, allowed farmers to conquer their neighbors.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, first, although the quote from The Jargon File is unattributed, most of the contents of that document are from MIT or CalTech lore, and edited (and commented on) by Eric S. Raymond. If I were to consider whom I'd trust more to general matters of technology, I would have to weigh in their favor, rather than some random slashdotter who has to borrow the name of a minor Tolkien character. Therefore, I think we can dismiss the validity of the entire "Anyone who argues this way is a moron" argument.
Ok. I've gotten the ad hominem part of the discussion out of the way. Now for the part where I tell you what you're clearly not understanding.
Redundancy for robustness is terrific. But it doesn't change the fact: increase the number of participating components you are automatically increasing the number of possible component failures. High-availability design masks the overall system impact of component failure by allowing non-failed components to carry on and preserve system function, but not every system has the right kind of redundancy for that. In the airplane example, if the twin-engine aircraft is heavily (but permissibly) loaded, it will be within performance specifications with both engines functioning, but fall outside the envelope if one engine fails. That's a redundancy design not for reliability, but performance; if your system functional behavior is dependent on all redundant components simultaneously (A "and" B), redundancy isn't for reliability, and the "better basket" argument applies.
So yeah, you're definitely thinking about the "redundancy for robustness" thing, and you're right as far as you go. But.... not every redundancy design is for robustness (think multiple CPU cores on a single chip... where's the robustness redundancy there?)... and also, designs that start with high-availability redundancy often cannibalize the redundancy reserve for performance (bad management decisions, but that's what management is for).
On balance, it's still better to have a single super basket.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Go back and read the rest of the comment before you complain about it.
I just stopped identifying myself at the computer guy in my social life. Once I leave the office (and even at the office), I don't know or care about anyone's computer. My roomate has some kind of laptop. I don't know or care what kind or what the specs are. We drink beer, go to bars, hang out with people and watch TV instead of play with computers. Ditto with my friends. My girlfriend has some kind of laptop too. Same deal. We spend out time going out to places and screwing, not playing with computers.
For that matter, I don't care about them much at the office either. We have a desktop support staff that can take care of problems like that so I can do my actual job. So pretty much nobody asks me to mess with their computers, and I didn't even have to be a jerk to anyone.
I don't reply to ACs
What specifically do you think I missed? I don't disagree with his larger claims, just the one that agriculture was a step backward and people got shorter because agriculture led to society being malnourished rather then shorter/frailer people having more survivability.
I guess I can see it in that context, but I feel that's like saying the automobile was a giant step backwards because now when people had a bad accident between two cars it was a much worse accident then when horses were involved when clearly the benefits to society far outweighed the "step back" of increased danger when things went wrong.
I used to work as a pc technician, which automatically caused friends, family, acquaintainces, wandering gypsies and anyone else who came across me to think that meant they could contact me to get free (and immediate) services for their computers. So after I stopped being a professional technician, I made a point to never reveal that I could actually fix a computer, or any other computer component. As someone who can actually take apart and fix a printer (something most techs generally can't do, even though they say they can), I found myself one day at the computer lab for the graduate department where I was a grad assistant. Needing a paper printed before class started, I was faced with a printer that was on the fritz. Making sure no one else was around, I opened up the printer, fixed it, and then printed what I needed. What I didn't realize was that some random girl in the grad department was hovering around outside the door, upset that she couldn't print her journal or whatever. When I went to class, she then told everyone I had fixed the printer, and for the rest of my time in grad school, I was known as the guy who fixed the printer, so I couldn't stop people from contacting me over and over about the damn thing. NEVER reveal you're a tech, or people will constantly try to get free work out of you, even when you completely ignore and turn them down over and over again.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
Except MTBF is a statistic, not a counter.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Second, I never said that this was like ABS - I was writing about how there are vehicles that already have individual wheel brake control (which the OP mistakenly said didn't exist).
Third, heart problems still kill only a minority of the population - and the #1 cause of heart disease is smoking. Stop smoking and both heart disease and cancer rates drop. Duh!
Disease, exposure to the elements, starvation, war, accidents ... these all killed humans in great numbers.
Wrong again. Before humans became overpopulated and created agriculture, societies, cities, etc., these things weren't major problems
Well, nice way to try to slip in an outright lie. So what killed humans before we started living in cities? Or did they just live forever, never breaking a leg, immune from drought, storms, cold, never having an accident, never fighting with another tribe ...
Gee, imagine that - there were no diseases before we invented cities! Nobody ever slipped on a wet rock while crossing a stream. The weather was always perfect. And there were not enough people in the world to fight. Sorry, but the Garden of Eden and similar "creation myths" are just that - myths.
And BTW, ABS sucks if you really know how to drive on ice.
Yeah, right, because if they're too cheap to pay for someone to repair their PC in the first place they'll be more than happy to buy all new hardware so they can run a totally new OS.
I've personally seen client receipts that show over $500 worth on new utility software and labor combined that either matches or exceeds the cost of the laptop in the first pace. So YES, replacing a computer can be less costly and provide an upgrade in hardware specs at the same time.
In fact, check out this new Compaq notebook for $329.99. If you get a nasty virus that hoses the OS, it can CHEAPER to throw the fucker in the dumper vs hiring a PC tech to setup the machine, export/import data, and reinstall 3rd party applications.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Compaq+-+Presario+Laptop+/+AMD+V-Series+Processor+/+15.6%22+Display+/+2GB+Memory+/+250GB+Hard+Drive+-+Basic+Black/1271897.p?skuId=1271897&id=1218245812097
Life is not for the lazy.
Yeah, the transition to farming was a really counter-intuitive step backwards (execpt in terms of military might, which turns out to be the one thing that mattered). It just shows how hard it is for an economy to move past a local maximum, even if that local maximum is pretty low compared to the alternatives.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You can do the same thing for $500 with a generic white-box, or probably a little less if you assemble it yourself. Why pay extra for commodity parts if you aren't going to use the one thing that differentiates it from it's competitors?
And for the matter, why use BSD? It died, haven't you heard?
A statistic tied to time, such that as time passes, the probability of failure approaches certainty asymptotically.
I dare coin another phrase: "Imminency approaches certainty."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?