I work at the help desk on my campus. People lie because they don't want to do anything. They don't want to crawl underneath their desk. They don't want to read. They don't want to recollect what they were doing when the error happened.
They want you to "fix" it. They believe you have the magic powers to make all their problems go away with just a few keystrokes on your end but, like the malevolent demigod you are, you refuse. Who cares if the network cable is plugged in? Just fix it!
This is exacerbated because most of our help desk is staffed by students. Staff and faculty want you to run them and ignore the other 20 calls that will go to voicemail while you trek across campus to push the power button on their monitor for them.
So, they lie. "Of COURSE I checked the ethernet cable. Of COURSE the monitor's plugged in."
The only way to deal with liars is to lie, of course. Don't ask, "Is your network cable plugged in?" That's underneath their desk! They're not crawling down there - that's your job. The answer will always be "yes." Tell them simply: "Oh, it's plugged in BACKWARDS."
Of course that's horseshit. You can't plug an ethernet cable in backwards. But they don't know that - if they did, they wouldn't be calling. Flipping it around the "right" way forces them to check that both ends are plugged in.
Don't ask, "Is there an error message on your screen?" They already clicked through it; you will never get that message back. Have them reboot and try again, but tell them when they see a dialog saying "Error XYZ 123" they have to pick option "A." There is no such error, of course, but they'll read every dialog looking for it, and you'll know what they're doing.
If you don't know what's going on or can't work intelligible English out of them, lie. Make something up. "The network is down" works well. Then hang up and escalate it to somebody who might know. Follow up later - "Yeah, the network was down, but I fixed it." Meaning they had inbox quota again after IT emptied the gigabytes of PSD files out of their trash, but whatever. Close enough, and they'll think you moved heavens and earth.
The original poster is approaching this all wrong: People are illiterate, lying cretins. You will never get them to read the error message to you. But, you can trick them into doing what you want.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year
To be fair to Fred Brooks, the book is ancient and he was talking about machine language instructions. PL/I was a novelty, and it was a bit of a revelation that using such a "high level language" could increase programmer productivity.
But, that just supports your point - IDEs (and high-level languages) have dramatically increased programmer productivity.
I'm not the Anonymous Coward(s) above. But, it seems the good Lord sure was niggardly in handing out English comprehension.
You make a good point about effective communication, that whatever message the original poster had was lost in confusion over his choice of words. You assume, however, that his target audience included the chronically ignorant.
Time we all learn to speak the King's English. And by the King's English, I mean Noah Webster's.
If anyone reading my post finds the word "niggardly" offensive, know that I'm sniggering at you.
Now dammit, mod me and this entire thread off-topic.
I believe the alternative-medicine stuff is BS, but I believe spinal adjustment can be helpful. I had pinched nerves in my shoulders and wrists. Tingling in my fingers eventually turned into a complete numbness of my hands - it was hard to move my fingers unless I was looking at them so I knew where they were.
After spine snapping, my posture is better, the tingling has been gone for over a year, and X-rays show that my spine no longer looks like a hang-man's gallows.
I think whatever other remedies get peddled about "toxins" are greedy snake-oil value-adds/upsells.
It depends on what phone you have. Most of them won't let you upgrade to arbitrary versions of the "plain" Android OS; you have to wait for your carrier to push out their version. You also can't roll your own OS image for commercial phones; they check for digital signatures.
But, how many people not only want to upgrade their OS, let alone roll their own? It's still impressive.
If someone can live their life productively while not believing in a "God" figure, wouldn't that make them a better person than someone who's only motive not to kill their neighbour is fear?
Absolutely, but fear isn't one of the reasons I listed for believing in a religion. Pascal's Wager is a pretty poor reason to have faith in anything. What I meant by having an afterlife is that it's much nicer to believe you have a room in a fluffy cloud motel or 72 virgins or a better reincarnation than to believe that all you have waiting for you is rotting.
Since we have no way of knowing what awaits us after death, it's just as reasonable to believe good things happen than neutral or bad things. Might as well pick the happier option, if it doesn't blind you to day-to-day reality.
Prepare for the next painful years of your life dying your hair black, listening to My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park, wallowing aimlessly in existentialist anxiety until you give up on life and become a nihilistic professional troll.
There are professional trolls? I think I could get paid handsomely for the following post:
If you believe that about all believers, it may help you to think about it pragmatically. Belief in a particular sky-wizard lets an live life in a richer reality - the seemingly chaotic has order, life has purpose, the end is known. Depending on the religion/sect, this is entirely conformant with an individual's observable reality - you don't have to worship Lenin's stuffed corpse or believe Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church 5000 years ago.
In other words, belief can provide real benefits to daily living without cognitive dissonance - it is a pragmatically reasonable choice. Unless you are sure that belief could provide no benefits - say, an afterlife beyond vermicular feces - disbelief rejects an option that could be beneficial.
If you are contented, belief may not be a "live" choice for you. That's fine; belief couldn't give you anything you don't already have. Otherwise, don't mock those who found a sky-wizard that suits their needs; you can prove them wrong after you die.
(Wow, I dragged you out to reply to my humble post? Sorry!;) )
Also a 'sconsinite. In rural parts the internet is often located outdoors, so during the winter months it's quite a trek to have our slashdot posts delivered.
I got my hands on an early Office 2007 beta, so I wasn't quite as shocked by the ribbon. In my opinion, Office 2007 is the first version worth buying since version 6.0 for Windows 3.11
I sat down with Word and said, "Woooow! Look at all the new stuff you can do!" It had citations management! Bibliography generators! A few other things that I can't remember at all, but was wowed by!
There's also a few nice-to-haves like built-in PDF generation. It's also much nicer on my netbook display because the ribbon can minimize to just the tab headings - word 2003 requires you to have ALL of the toolbars up to be useful, and they take up extra vertical rows on the narrower screen.
Then I noticed that pretty much all the things I was wowed by were also present in 2003, and probably earlier. However, most of it was buried in menus; I just never saw it until a feature was given its own prominent position on a ribbon tab.
So, that makes me probably the only person that likes the new ribbon. Anybody who dislikes the ribbon on Word, however, is clinically retarded. The "home" tab looks EXACTLY the same as the default toolbars on Word 2003. You'll rarely go to the other tabs unless you're a "power user," in which case you should be capable of appreciating the removal of a few layers of disappearing menus.
I work for a campus help desk, and very few people called when we rolled out 2007. The only program that was substantially different was Excel, and the heavy Excel users are generally smart enough to figure out their own problems. We did save a lot of phone calls after they got rid of the disappearing menus - Office 2003's habit of hiding infrequently used items proved befuddling to our users.
A Windows PE disc (meaning any Server 2008/Vista or newer Windows disc) is very nice for this. Shift+F10 will bring a command prompt; bootsect will let you restore an XP or Vista boot sector.
Chkdsk breaks a lot of rootkits - they break the file system and chkdsk removes them.
Another fun trick: Make an image of the disk with ImageX from the Windows AIK. Then immediately restore the image onto your disk. ImageX is file based, and the rootkits do their best to hide, so they're missed when the image is gathered.
But by that point, it's faster/safter to do a clean install Q.Q
(Of course, the rootkit will have the opportunity to hide itself or destroy your tool.)
In my experience at my campus' help desk, the TDSS rootkit hasn't been sophisticated enough to hide from RootkitRevealer, ComboFix, or MalwareBytes.
We generally find it with one of the "XP Antivirus 2010" variants, and when they come together TDSS seems to reinstall the scareware payload. In those cases, it's especially obvious when it's been removed - the "you've been infected" pop-ups go away.
I don't disagree with you, but 90% of the time a 10 minute ComboFix scan removes it. The only way to be sure is diskpart clean all (or dd/dev/zero/dev/hda) from a WinPE or Linux boot disc.
You're assuming your tool can detect the rootkit in any case.
If it can detect it during an offline scan, it can probably detect it during an online scan too. (Of course, the rootkit will have the opportunity to hide itself or destroy your tool.) ComboFix and MalwareBytes are especially good at removing TDSS.
Given that Microsoft were the ones to issue the problematic update in the first place, I don't think saying the NTFS drivers in a Windows live CD come from Microsoft is really any sort of recommendation.
Well said. Excellent proof that no Windows CD can read NTFS because of a patch released years later.
Get out in the world and learn a bit about the Middle East - Its an intensely fascinating place that has been the center of so many things and events in our world, and deserves better then "Uncivilized Savages".
Science, math, medicine, art, architecture, literature, I'll give you. But then they got kicked out of Spain.
What have they done for me lately? Congress, on the other hand, is always hard at work!
I'm an IT monkey on campus, and we have a lot of liberty in dealing with this kind of problem, barring departmental politics. We say, "your machine is infected" and take their hard drive. Until we retrieve their files they get a disk with a clean image on it. We suggest they change their passwords for the network, any banking sites, e-mail, Facebook, etc.
But, in places where you don't have unquestioned authority over the machine, the best you can do is try to convince them to clean their machine, and there's no good way to do that. My friend's family continued to do online banking, Facebook, and everything else on a PC that even Norton screamed about.
"Y'know, you just gave your credit card number to the Russian mob."
(laughs) "Pfft. I don't have any money."
And that's about the best you can hope for. You did the right thing, and you know what happens to moneyed fools.
If you really want to scare people, don't talk about infections or identity theft or keyloggers or passwords. Tell them that those pop-ups mean that they're being watched.. People don't seem to care that there computer is stealing their soul, but nobody likes the idea of somebody watching from behind their screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Right you are; how silly of me.
Would you mind telling me what yesterday's powerball numbers were? >_>
Naw. Maybe that was the batch file that kept Chile from having earthquakes... way to go.
I work at the help desk on my campus. People lie because they don't want to do anything. They don't want to crawl underneath their desk. They don't want to read. They don't want to recollect what they were doing when the error happened.
They want you to "fix" it. They believe you have the magic powers to make all their problems go away with just a few keystrokes on your end but, like the malevolent demigod you are, you refuse. Who cares if the network cable is plugged in? Just fix it!
This is exacerbated because most of our help desk is staffed by students. Staff and faculty want you to run them and ignore the other 20 calls that will go to voicemail while you trek across campus to push the power button on their monitor for them.
So, they lie. "Of COURSE I checked the ethernet cable. Of COURSE the monitor's plugged in."
The only way to deal with liars is to lie, of course. Don't ask, "Is your network cable plugged in?" That's underneath their desk! They're not crawling down there - that's your job. The answer will always be "yes." Tell them simply: "Oh, it's plugged in BACKWARDS."
Of course that's horseshit. You can't plug an ethernet cable in backwards. But they don't know that - if they did, they wouldn't be calling. Flipping it around the "right" way forces them to check that both ends are plugged in.
Don't ask, "Is there an error message on your screen?" They already clicked through it; you will never get that message back. Have them reboot and try again, but tell them when they see a dialog saying "Error XYZ 123" they have to pick option "A." There is no such error, of course, but they'll read every dialog looking for it, and you'll know what they're doing.
If you don't know what's going on or can't work intelligible English out of them, lie. Make something up. "The network is down" works well. Then hang up and escalate it to somebody who might know. Follow up later - "Yeah, the network was down, but I fixed it." Meaning they had inbox quota again after IT emptied the gigabytes of PSD files out of their trash, but whatever. Close enough, and they'll think you moved heavens and earth.
The original poster is approaching this all wrong: People are illiterate, lying cretins. You will never get them to read the error message to you. But, you can trick them into doing what you want.
TEOTWAWKI.bat ... every 108 minutes
LIAR! That has 9 characters before the extension!
calls the 8.3 police
Simply because windows is not free. And I don't want to reboot my computer as frequent as I change my underwear.
My desktop PC running Windows Server 2008 R2 has months of uptime. It'd be longer, but I tinker and reboot it on whim.
Where does your underwear say about your uptime?! :P
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year
To be fair to Fred Brooks, the book is ancient and he was talking about machine language instructions. PL/I was a novelty, and it was a bit of a revelation that using such a "high level language" could increase programmer productivity.
But, that just supports your point - IDEs (and high-level languages) have dramatically increased programmer productivity.
I'm not the Anonymous Coward(s) above. But, it seems the good Lord sure was niggardly in handing out English comprehension.
You make a good point about effective communication, that whatever message the original poster had was lost in confusion over his choice of words. You assume, however, that his target audience included the chronically ignorant.
Time we all learn to speak the King's English. And by the King's English, I mean Noah Webster's.
If anyone reading my post finds the word "niggardly" offensive, know that I'm sniggering at you.
Now dammit, mod me and this entire thread off-topic.
I believe the alternative-medicine stuff is BS, but I believe spinal adjustment can be helpful. I had pinched nerves in my shoulders and wrists. Tingling in my fingers eventually turned into a complete numbness of my hands - it was hard to move my fingers unless I was looking at them so I knew where they were.
After spine snapping, my posture is better, the tingling has been gone for over a year, and X-rays show that my spine no longer looks like a hang-man's gallows.
I think whatever other remedies get peddled about "toxins" are greedy snake-oil value-adds/upsells.
It depends on what phone you have. Most of them won't let you upgrade to arbitrary versions of the "plain" Android OS; you have to wait for your carrier to push out their version. You also can't roll your own OS image for commercial phones; they check for digital signatures.
But, how many people not only want to upgrade their OS, let alone roll their own? It's still impressive.
I've managed to get it by having office installed in a folder on the drive root rather than in program files.
Well, don't manually force Office to install in a privileged location, and then whine that you need privileges to run it.
Status: Closed, wontfix
If someone can live their life productively while not believing in a "God" figure, wouldn't that make them a better person than someone who's only motive not to kill their neighbour is fear?
Absolutely, but fear isn't one of the reasons I listed for believing in a religion. Pascal's Wager is a pretty poor reason to have faith in anything. What I meant by having an afterlife is that it's much nicer to believe you have a room in a fluffy cloud motel or 72 virgins or a better reincarnation than to believe that all you have waiting for you is rotting.
Since we have no way of knowing what awaits us after death, it's just as reasonable to believe good things happen than neutral or bad things. Might as well pick the happier option, if it doesn't blind you to day-to-day reality.
Prepare for the next painful years of your life dying your hair black, listening to My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park, wallowing aimlessly in existentialist anxiety until you give up on life and become a nihilistic professional troll.
There are professional trolls? I think I could get paid handsomely for the following post:
If you believe that about all believers, it may help you to think about it pragmatically. Belief in a particular sky-wizard lets an live life in a richer reality - the seemingly chaotic has order, life has purpose, the end is known. Depending on the religion/sect, this is entirely conformant with an individual's observable reality - you don't have to worship Lenin's stuffed corpse or believe Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church 5000 years ago.
In other words, belief can provide real benefits to daily living without cognitive dissonance - it is a pragmatically reasonable choice. Unless you are sure that belief could provide no benefits - say, an afterlife beyond vermicular feces - disbelief rejects an option that could be beneficial.
If you are contented, belief may not be a "live" choice for you. That's fine; belief couldn't give you anything you don't already have. Otherwise, don't mock those who found a sky-wizard that suits their needs; you can prove them wrong after you die.
(Wow, I dragged you out to reply to my humble post? Sorry! ;) )
Also a 'sconsinite. In rural parts the internet is often located outdoors, so during the winter months it's quite a trek to have our slashdot posts delivered.
You most certainly can get rid of that monster. Go get Sumatra PDF. 1.2 MB of joy.
That's an interesting point - I assumed diskpart supporting it meant it could boot from it.
However, Vista and 7 (and the server editions) can boot from a GPT partition, but only the x64 bit versions. source
I got my hands on an early Office 2007 beta, so I wasn't quite as shocked by the ribbon. In my opinion, Office 2007 is the first version worth buying since version 6.0 for Windows 3.11
I sat down with Word and said, "Woooow! Look at all the new stuff you can do!" It had citations management! Bibliography generators! A few other things that I can't remember at all, but was wowed by!
There's also a few nice-to-haves like built-in PDF generation. It's also much nicer on my netbook display because the ribbon can minimize to just the tab headings - word 2003 requires you to have ALL of the toolbars up to be useful, and they take up extra vertical rows on the narrower screen.
Then I noticed that pretty much all the things I was wowed by were also present in 2003, and probably earlier. However, most of it was buried in menus; I just never saw it until a feature was given its own prominent position on a ribbon tab.
So, that makes me probably the only person that likes the new ribbon. Anybody who dislikes the ribbon on Word, however, is clinically retarded. The "home" tab looks EXACTLY the same as the default toolbars on Word 2003. You'll rarely go to the other tabs unless you're a "power user," in which case you should be capable of appreciating the removal of a few layers of disappearing menus.
I work for a campus help desk, and very few people called when we rolled out 2007. The only program that was substantially different was Excel, and the heavy Excel users are generally smart enough to figure out their own problems. We did save a lot of phone calls after they got rid of the disappearing menus - Office 2003's habit of hiding infrequently used items proved befuddling to our users.
Even if you are using Windows, Vista and up support GPT. It's handy for servers where you expect to have partitions larger than 2 TB.
But I guess if one were using a modern version of Windows, you wouldn't have the 4K alignment problems to begin with.
A Windows PE disc (meaning any Server 2008/Vista or newer Windows disc) is very nice for this. Shift+F10 will bring a command prompt; bootsect will let you restore an XP or Vista boot sector.
Chkdsk breaks a lot of rootkits - they break the file system and chkdsk removes them.
Another fun trick: Make an image of the disk with ImageX from the Windows AIK. Then immediately restore the image onto your disk. ImageX is file based, and the rootkits do their best to hide, so they're missed when the image is gathered.
But by that point, it's faster/safter to do a clean install Q.Q
My sentence immediately following your quote:
In my experience at my campus' help desk, the TDSS rootkit hasn't been sophisticated enough to hide from RootkitRevealer, ComboFix, or MalwareBytes.
We generally find it with one of the "XP Antivirus 2010" variants, and when they come together TDSS seems to reinstall the scareware payload. In those cases, it's especially obvious when it's been removed - the "you've been infected" pop-ups go away.
I don't disagree with you, but 90% of the time a 10 minute ComboFix scan removes it. The only way to be sure is diskpart clean all (or dd /dev/zero /dev/hda) from a WinPE or Linux boot disc.
You're assuming your tool can detect the rootkit in any case.
If it can detect it during an offline scan, it can probably detect it during an online scan too. (Of course, the rootkit will have the opportunity to hide itself or destroy your tool.) ComboFix and MalwareBytes are especially good at removing TDSS.
How hard is it to extract this data, Do you need a special tool or can i see it all in photoshop
It's not hard at all. On Vista and 7, right-click on the file, select properties, and go to "details." It might work on XP as well.
Depending on your folder view, all you might have to do is select the file.
A handy guide:
Given that Microsoft were the ones to issue the problematic update in the first place, I don't think saying the NTFS drivers in a Windows live CD come from Microsoft is really any sort of recommendation.
Well said. Excellent proof that no Windows CD can read NTFS because of a patch released years later.
Get out in the world and learn a bit about the Middle East - Its an intensely fascinating place that has been the center of so many things and events in our world, and deserves better then "Uncivilized Savages".
Science, math, medicine, art, architecture, literature, I'll give you. But then they got kicked out of Spain.
What have they done for me lately? Congress, on the other hand, is always hard at work!
I'm an IT monkey on campus, and we have a lot of liberty in dealing with this kind of problem, barring departmental politics. We say, "your machine is infected" and take their hard drive. Until we retrieve their files they get a disk with a clean image on it. We suggest they change their passwords for the network, any banking sites, e-mail, Facebook, etc.
But, in places where you don't have unquestioned authority over the machine, the best you can do is try to convince them to clean their machine, and there's no good way to do that. My friend's family continued to do online banking, Facebook, and everything else on a PC that even Norton screamed about.
And that's about the best you can hope for. You did the right thing, and you know what happens to moneyed fools.
If you really want to scare people, don't talk about infections or identity theft or keyloggers or passwords. Tell them that those pop-ups mean that they're being watched.. People don't seem to care that there computer is stealing their soul, but nobody likes the idea of somebody watching from behind their screen.