Me: "Sorry sir, there was a power outage and the machine you need to dial in to is down."
Caller: "But I'm a tenured professor !"
Obviously not a rocket scientist. In three months on helldesk for a major West Coast medical university (take the "N" line) I heard "But I'm a tenured professor" four times. I do not have a magic button that I couldn't be bothered to press, unless you're a tenured professor in which case everything will be made All Right immediately. This is also the position where I had to explain the right mouse button; 20 minutes - my boss listened to half of it and gave me an extra break when I was done. One fellow, doctor or student I'm not sure which now, actually returned his new PC to the store (Gateway) after the preinstalled AOL setup popped up and he thought he had been hacked and given them his password - his university password. Gaaaghh. That was his second call, and not his last... I'm honestly surprised he got it plugged in and a little sorry he didn't autodarwinate. Come to think of it, I'm also surprised about that last.
Part of the secuity on the patient records we had was that they were remotely accessible only via the modem pool. Fifteen minutes into one call I finally established that this woman, an RN, had her computer hosed by an AOL 5.0 install. That's a reinstall. That version of AOL would overwrite system DLLs and leave you with only AOL for dialup connections - which wouldn't talk to our terminal emulators nor our RADIUS setup. Since her kids installed it (those damn free disks do work !) the EULA would not apply so I gleefully mentioned the class action suit to her. Then I directed her towards getting Windows reinstalled.
That IT organization made the cover of Computerworld while I was there. Their merger with Stanford Health Care failed miserably due to a lack of due diligence and sheer incompetence. Let me just say that the Axe belongs in Berkeley.
Lastly, I would like to say that the helpdesk manager was probably the best possible manager for such a job. She treated the employees like people and that's all it took. Well, that and Boomtime salaries - I'm running an office solo and making a lot less now. Sigh.
It's not really "certain chips", but you are on to something. The manufacturers in the cheap brackets will do all sorts of thing to move the product they need to move. I've seen chips relabelled, I've seen underclocked chips; my dual 1.25s wouldn't even recognize these even after multiple replacmeents). My main point is that the reputable manufacturers won't sell you a chip with enough of the same specs to be the part you ordered, but still not be a Mac-compatible part.
Starting with the first G4s I've had many bosses purchase bare units from Apple to save money - which is ok - then try to save more money by buying the cheapest RAM that would fit the specs. Most (65%-ish) of these machines became unstable - system freezes. I pointed out that several people working on things that made us money were missing deadlines. We went with the good stuff, Kingston in my opinion and experience, and the machines became stable.
I've been dealing with RAM issues in modern Powermacs (G4/G5) and they're all amazingly sensitive to RAM. Use either quality third-party memory, Apple RAM, or risk regular core dumps. I just had a 1GB DIMM fail the hardware tests out of the box, Apple did overnight me a new one after some prodding (new guy, the senior sales rep got back from a conference and overnighted me the RAM). Every manufacturer ships the occasional bad chip, but in a professional environment you have to maximize reliability.
You probably thought they were all OS problems you couldn't fix and blamed Apple for anyway.
Apple's hardware has been getting more and more sensitive to RAM issues as time goes by. Third-party RAM that is technically within specifications can make a Mac horribly unstable.
It must have been in Verbose mode when he restarted it. That'll put lots of lines of white text on a black background on the display. Handy to see exactly what's going on at startup - but you Unix types knew that.
Worse, you lose the ability to make custom mp3 soundtracks. Any new material for a game will have to be accessed anew every time, and possibly during play if it won't fit in local volatile storage.
Ico had better be one of the 30. It's a work of art as well as a *very* well crafted game.
I'll apologise to the Gamefly customers waiting patiently, I'm not *quite* done with it yet. I'm not finishing everything I rent, but I'm finishing Ico.
Civ 3 is far more involved strategically than Civ 2 was. Just the addition of the Culture rating makes it a significantly deeper game. And with Luxuries and Resources, Civ3 becomes a very different game - trade with the AI is much richer. The strategic thinking required for Civ3 is closely akin to Go in how you have to plan out your expansion. You have to cast your net widely, but not leave gaps where an AI could snag a luxury or resource from you.
Many, many moons ago I took an Intro to Engineering class in high school. We had a bunch of speakers from the professional world as well as from schools. Including Heald. The brochure the Heald guy passed out included a *complete* list of recent graduates and the jobs they had. Somebody spotted the "Sanitation Engineer" so we pored over the list and found, among others, two car park attendants. I don't think Heald is giving the full list to HS students anymore:-)
Yeah, I'm warning people at the office when they get set up with iTunes for the first time. One guy had the CD player in his laptop break and blew $150 before it got fixed (not from my office, not mine to fix).
The worst part is, now there's a $0.99 tax on getting a song stuck in your head.
A quibble on point one. Mach was indeed written at Carnegie Mellon by Avie Tevanian. He went on to be VP of Software Engineering at NeXT and is now Chief Software Technical Officer at Apple.
So everyone who hates Mach can resign themselves, Apple isn't switching anytime soon.
I'll agree with that. And forget the Clark Kent soap opera, there's a lovely dark and brooding drama with the Luthor family going on. John Glover is *perfect* as Lionel Luthor - even better than he was in Brimstone.
Re:Oh, you had to do it....
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 4, Funny
It's a Joss Whedon project, you'll wake up the goram Firefly fans !
I've used Xkeys to make hotkeys for AppleScripts. If you want to go whole hog for the function-key automation, there's QuickKeys. You can automate pretty much anything since QK can automate more of the GUI than AppleScript can, which is saying something.
Xkeys is freeware (Beer, no source as I recall), QuickKeys is commercial.
As for hiding the mouse pointer, I can't help ya there - I didn't see anything on Versiontracker, maybe try sourceforge.
Being able to edit the shortcuts for menu commands is a pretty nifty feature in its own right.
I've started playing CoD recently, and the killcam is a great way to spot aimbots. I haven't seen many on clan servers, but they're out there in numbers.
Number five might just be false advertising. IBM has patent claims against them, and patents are the only sort of IP liability that can be passed along to the end user. So SCO Unix is MORE encumbered than Linux is.
Slashdot Mirror
Me: "Sorry sir, there was a power outage and the machine you need to dial in to is down."
Caller: "But I'm a tenured professor !"
Obviously not a rocket scientist. In three months on helldesk for a major West Coast medical university (take the "N" line) I heard "But I'm a tenured professor" four times. I do not have a magic button that I couldn't be bothered to press, unless you're a tenured professor in which case everything will be made All Right immediately. This is also the position where I had to explain the right mouse button; 20 minutes - my boss listened to half of it and gave me an extra break when I was done. One fellow, doctor or student I'm not sure which now, actually returned his new PC to the store (Gateway) after the preinstalled AOL setup popped up and he thought he had been hacked and given them his password - his university password . Gaaaghh. That was his second call, and not his last... I'm honestly surprised he got it plugged in and a little sorry he didn't autodarwinate. Come to think of it, I'm also surprised about that last.
Part of the secuity on the patient records we had was that they were remotely accessible only via the modem pool. Fifteen minutes into one call I finally established that this woman, an RN, had her computer hosed by an AOL 5.0 install. That's a reinstall. That version of AOL would overwrite system DLLs and leave you with only AOL for dialup connections - which wouldn't talk to our terminal emulators nor our RADIUS setup. Since her kids installed it (those damn free disks do work !) the EULA would not apply so I gleefully mentioned the class action suit to her. Then I directed her towards getting Windows reinstalled.
That IT organization made the cover of Computerworld while I was there. Their merger with Stanford Health Care failed miserably due to a lack of due diligence and sheer incompetence. Let me just say that the Axe belongs in Berkeley.
Lastly, I would like to say that the helpdesk manager was probably the best possible manager for such a job. She treated the employees like people and that's all it took. Well, that and Boomtime salaries - I'm running an office solo and making a lot less now. Sigh.
Disable Fast Saves in all of your MS Office preferences. Problem solved.
But keep a Mac and a copy fo Keynote around to rescue corrupted PowerPoint presentations.
Should be Chapter 7 - that's Liquidation.
As a newmade fan of Need for Speed:Underground I can't say that's a completely bad thing, gotta love Grape Neon.
Oh, you mean in Real Life ?
I"m gonna watch their WebCams and look for smoke. Looks like Data Center 3 is off the air.
Pshaw.
It's not really "certain chips", but you are on to something. The manufacturers in the cheap brackets will do all sorts of thing to move the product they need to move. I've seen chips relabelled, I've seen underclocked chips; my dual 1.25s wouldn't even recognize these even after multiple replacmeents). My main point is that the reputable manufacturers won't sell you a chip with enough of the same specs to be the part you ordered, but still not be a Mac-compatible part.
Starting with the first G4s I've had many bosses purchase bare units from Apple to save money - which is ok - then try to save more money by buying the cheapest RAM that would fit the specs. Most (65%-ish) of these machines became unstable - system freezes. I pointed out that several people working on things that made us money were missing deadlines. We went with the good stuff, Kingston in my opinion and experience, and the machines became stable.
I've been dealing with RAM issues in modern Powermacs (G4/G5) and they're all amazingly sensitive to RAM. Use either quality third-party memory, Apple RAM, or risk regular core dumps. I just had a 1GB DIMM fail the hardware tests out of the box, Apple did overnight me a new one after some prodding (new guy, the senior sales rep got back from a conference and overnighted me the RAM). Every manufacturer ships the occasional bad chip, but in a professional environment you have to maximize reliability.
You probably thought they were all OS problems you couldn't fix and blamed Apple for anyway.
Well, XP Reloaded won't be a sequel to something as good as the original Matrix film, so the expectations won't be quite as high.
Apple's hardware has been getting more and more sensitive to RAM issues as time goes by. Third-party RAM that is technically within specifications can make a Mac horribly unstable.
http://www.macintouch.com/badram01.html
It must have been in Verbose mode when he restarted it. That'll put lots of lines of white text on a black background on the display. Handy to see exactly what's going on at startup - but you Unix types knew that.
Worse, you lose the ability to make custom mp3 soundtracks. Any new material for a game will have to be accessed anew every time, and possibly during play if it won't fit in local volatile storage.
Ico had better be one of the 30. It's a work of art as well as a *very* well crafted game.
I'll apologise to the Gamefly customers waiting patiently, I'm not *quite* done with it yet. I'm not finishing everything I rent, but I'm finishing Ico.
Civ 3 is far more involved strategically than Civ 2 was. Just the addition of the Culture rating makes it a significantly deeper game. And with Luxuries and Resources, Civ3 becomes a very different game - trade with the AI is much richer. The strategic thinking required for Civ3 is closely akin to Go in how you have to plan out your expansion. You have to cast your net widely, but not leave gaps where an AI could snag a luxury or resource from you.
I played a lot of Civ2. For Civ3...
"Hi, my name is Maserati and I play Civ3"
Many, many moons ago I took an Intro to Engineering class in high school. We had a bunch of speakers from the professional world as well as from schools. Including Heald. The brochure the Heald guy passed out included a *complete* list of recent graduates and the jobs they had. Somebody spotted the "Sanitation Engineer" so we pored over the list and found, among others, two car park attendants. I don't think Heald is giving the full list to HS students anymore :-)
Yeah, I'm warning people at the office when they get set up with iTunes for the first time. One guy had the CD player in his laptop break and blew $150 before it got fixed (not from my office, not mine to fix).
The worst part is, now there's a $0.99 tax on getting a song stuck in your head.
"The Computer: No. PARANOIA is fun. D20 games are not fun. The Computer says so."
Any questions ?
I don't do spelling flames often, but I will for a Farscape quote in a .sig.
"guarantee"
A new word has been coined, "ghey" that they might have used instead. It's a little less of a 5th-grade insult anyway.
.bmp is pretty bad.
That said, call it what you will - but being able to execute arbitrary code by massing a malformed
A quibble on point one. Mach was indeed written at Carnegie Mellon by Avie Tevanian. He went on to be VP of Software Engineering at NeXT and is now Chief Software Technical Officer at Apple.
So everyone who hates Mach can resign themselves, Apple isn't switching anytime soon.
I'll agree with that. And forget the Clark Kent soap opera, there's a lovely dark and brooding drama with the Luthor family going on. John Glover is *perfect* as Lionel Luthor - even better than he was in Brimstone.
It's a Joss Whedon project, you'll wake up the goram Firefly fans !
I've used Xkeys to make hotkeys for AppleScripts. If you want to go whole hog for the function-key automation, there's QuickKeys. You can automate pretty much anything since QK can automate more of the GUI than AppleScript can, which is saying something.
Xkeys is freeware (Beer, no source as I recall), QuickKeys is commercial.
As for hiding the mouse pointer, I can't help ya there - I didn't see anything on Versiontracker, maybe try sourceforge.
Being able to edit the shortcuts for menu commands is a pretty nifty feature in its own right.
I've started playing CoD recently, and the killcam is a great way to spot aimbots. I haven't seen many on clan servers, but they're out there in numbers.
SCO doesn't get to keep 5%, they turn it all over to Novell, who in turn cuts them a check.
Number five might just be false advertising. IBM has patent claims against them, and patents are the only sort of IP liability that can be passed along to the end user. So SCO Unix is MORE encumbered than Linux is.
Thank you for your input Dr. Ikari.