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Search - "computer store"
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buzzword translations:
"cloud" -> someones computer
"big data" -> lots of somewhat irrelevant data
"ai" -> if if if if if if if if if if if if if else
"algorithm" -> something that works but you don't know why
"secure" -> https://
"cyber security" -> kali linux + black hoodie
"innovation" -> adding something completely irrelevant such as making a poop emoji talk
"blockchain" -> we make lots of backups
"privacy" -> we store your data, we just don't tell you about it40 -
Mac: Suddenly turns off
Me: Fuck my code..F***
Mac: No response at all
Me: reset SMC etc etc
Mac: I am dead (no battery detection, dies after 10 min on power adaptor)
Me: Skips a heart beat..(Git, oh yea git)
**Takes Mac to store, After diagnosis**
Apple Freaking Genius (AG): Your Mac has a mother board problem it needs to be replaced.
Me: Hmm what is the problem exactly??
AG: Issues in logic board and some other components.
Me: How much?
AG: Out of warranty so $$$ (60% of original amount)
Me: (wtf?) Really
AG: It's entire motherboard replacement .. bla bla
**Bring it home > open > everything seems ok on multimeter as per circuit diagram > finally finds a voltage drop that is not consistent > minute short circuit > remove > check further > nothing else > reassemble > hit power button > starts fine > freaking battery detected > works fine**
0 $ repair
Fixes two more devices @ 0 $ in friend circle
Builds a raspberry pi backup laptop with 3d printed body..Ubuntu.. you know can't live without a computer
#ThugLife #Engineer29 -
So, recently, a person in the US was arrested for stalking people.
The evidence was some data from google, a work computer and from a VPN provider.
Let's take a quick look at that VPN provider. It (PureVPN) says on their privacy policy page that they do NOT store logs.
Guess from what VPN provider the FBI got those logs? Yes, PureVPN!
Althouh I'm happy they got this creep off the street, it still means that PureVPN has been lying to its entire customer base.
I personally hope that their reputation will be destroyed now because this should never happen.
A screenshot I took from their privacy policy page is attached below.
Keep your eyes open when choosing a VPN provider!58 -
A couple of years ago, I was working in a computer shop as a "technician", I was 15, first job I ever had.
One day an elderly lady came into the shop, probably 50'ish, she and her whole family "suffered" from electromagnetic radiation, and the mother had the worst suffering. She complained about her TV box that just had died.
I accept the tuner and see it's wrapped with 10 layers of aluminium foil, with a tiny hole for the IR receiver.
The whole box smells like burnt electronics, and the foil gets darker for each layer I unwrap. I try explain to her that the box gets warm and overheated by wrapping it like this, and she's lucky that it didn't catch fire.
I further explain to her that she will not get a new box, because the warranty does not cover _this_. The mother tells me she has to wrap it like this, because she gets headaches when she's watching the news.
She then proceeds to go into a rage mode and gets her whole family into the shop, where all of them starts yelling at me, the younger kids start throwing stuff down from the shelves and touching the TVs with sticky fingers (literally, sticky, like yuck!).
Unsure what to do, boss is in a meeting, and my colleague is busy in the back.
So I calmly tell them that in this building there's 4 wireless networks, 3 wireless phones, high voltage cables run in the wall behind me, there's factory tracks 20 meters behind the building, next door business is an electrician, you're standing in front of wall with 30-40 TVs, 5 HDMI splitters, 3 TV boxes and a Blu-ray player. And they've all been standing in front of them for the last 10 minutes.
They all suddenly feel really sick and run out of the store, never to be seen again. From that day, I decided I'll never work in a shop again, and pursued my dreams to become a developer.
TL;DR: Family is "sensitive" to electromagnetic radiation, almost put burnt down their house because of stupidity, yelled at me. I decided to pursue my dream as a developer.16 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
Electronics store clerk: "Can I help you?"
Me: "Good afternoon sir. I'm a developer and lifelong PC gamer. I received a second hand PS4, and might buy a next gen console at the end of the year. People tell me that in front of this soft wide desk chair people call a "couch", you need some sort of large computer monitor to enjoy console gaming"
Clerk: "Yeah, we sell TVs. What TV do you have now?"
Me: "I don't own a TV. I just want a huge 4K computer display with a good response time, excellent refresh rate, and great contrast"
Clerk: "OK so this is an entry level 55" smart TV. It's 120hz, QLED, has full array local dimming. It's great for gaming. It's €1000. We also have this LG OLED smart TV for €1200, which is a step up in terms of contrast and response time..."
Me: "Wait... Smart TV? No, I don't want a TV with an operating system. I want a computer display."
Clerk: "There aren't a lot of big computer displays. We have this ASUS ROG 55" computer monitor. It's also 120hz. Very similar response time, but the brightness and contrast aren't as great, it's edge-lit"
Me, trying really hard to make out the contrast differences under ugly fluorescent lights of the store: "So it's a worse big couch display, without smart OS. How much is it?"
Clerk: "€3500"
Me: "So what you're saying is that while the displays are similar or even better, the operating system on all these TVs is so incredibly bad, you have to give €2500 discount for people to even buy it?"30 -
So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.
I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.
I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.
Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.
Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.
Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.
At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.
Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.11 -
I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.
One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.
Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.
I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.
I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.
He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.
Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.
So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.
He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.10 -
Old man's tale. It's true.
Like 12 years ago, I was working in a small town computer store.
One day, a really ugly woman came in and asked for data recovery since she could not boot up her PC anymore.
We recovered her data, and just to make sure it was all "working", we randomly checked a few directories for files.
We have found some photos of her.
Her and a bottle of Coke.
Let me put it this way: she loves coke bottles. A lot.
There are things that can't be unseen, and moments you still remember after 12 years. Like the moment she came in to get her stuff - and you need to pretend to be all business while you're almost pissing your pants.
Good days :)7 -
My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.
I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.
So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.
So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.
I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."
Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.
I quit by texting my boss.
He never replied.
I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.4 -
Rich CEO's are so out of touch with reality.
We outsourced part of our software development to a third world country. During hiring process I had pushed for us to hire the more expensive, more experienced devs in a second-world country, but nooo we must save up those bucks. The pay is so low you wouldn't be able to afford rent in *city where CEO lives*.
As @GiddyNaya has ranted about, third world countries face impossibly slow internet and frequent blackouts. I also ranted about it in my last post. The "last straw" for the CEO was when our dev's computer started malfunctioning.
boss: When is that computer from?
dev: 2017
boss: 2017?! That's a dinosaur! Of course you're having battery problems!
me, trying to come up with an affordable solution for our dev: Well, you can have the battery switched.
boss: But 2017 is too old! Your computer should be *at most* 5 years old. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your work-related tools working. (last sentence is ad verbatim)
The boss, of course, recommended a Mac. Mind you, the closest Apple store to our dev is 500km away! And a month of their salary will not come close to paying a Macbook.
Providing them with the equipment? No! We're already paying them a "competitive" salary!
Like seriously, how out of touch with reality can you be? Does greed blind you that much?
(The dev seems to have fixed the computer problems on his own tho)14 -
My first AI program in the 1985 on Apple IIe (64kb ram computer) was answering simple questions with yes and no. Everyone were shocked with precision of about 100% when I was typing and 70-80% when others were typing. My parents were scared and skeptical. How it works? Store the time between the first key pressure and the following, when it is larger than 1 second the answer is yes, otherwise no. They say the question, you know the answer and type accordingly. When they want to write the question themselves, you try to force their typing speed if possible. I was 12 years old and it was very funny.3
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So... Just overheard a conversation at an Apple store...
tl;dr;
The customer gets furious for not getting to buy a mac pro for the price he wants and it doesn't even include the monitor there.....
C - customer, S - Sales person.
C: Hey, I've heard that apple released new home computers. May I get one?
S: Hello, they are not out yet.
C: WHAT?! How can they not be out yet? They released it like a week ago.
S: Well, they announced it, not officially released it for sale.
C: Ah, whatever. Can I pre-order it now?
S: Sure, we'll need your details and a deposit.
C: What? A deposit for what? That $1000 machine?
S: Sir, do you know the prices?
C: Of course. They have released a new machine and it will cost like previous ones - from $1000.
S: Then you might be talking about Macbook Air...
C: *Interrupts* No, I'm talking about the desktop computer, the whole box.
S: Ok... It starts at ~$6000.
C: WHAT?! It can't be... Oh well, I'll buy it. I hope it's the fully-specked one. Oh and does it come with a monitor?
S: No sir. It's the base model and it has no monitors.
C: WHAT?! How can this be?
S: You see, these are devices created for professionals. They are not for home users since our iMac line is....
C: *Interrupts again* Are you saying I'm not a professional?
S: I'm sorry but by the questions and lack of information - it seems to be true - you are not a professional.
C: FUCK YOU, I'm going to another store and they will sell it for me for $1000. What a piece of crap is this.
*Customer leaves furiously*
S: *to another S* - What is wrong with that dude? Is he high or what?
S2: *shrugs* and tells that it's the 5th time someone came to order that pc and was scared by the price.
---
So yeah... It's fun to see how idiots think that anything apple releases is for them... Once again I was made sure that apple fans are brainless fucks that will buy anything it produces and if that is not in the right price - they'll get furious.
ps. I own apple product, mac pro 2015. Would never buy a newer one NOR an iphone. I don't think that anyone is dumb just for buying it - people buy whatever fits their needs and that's ok but... More than we would like to admit - people buy it because it's an apple product....23 -
I got a used computer case in a second hand hardware store and it still has the sticker with the specs of the computer they wanted to sell it with on it. It was going to be a moderate to shity pc. I built an absolute computing monster in it (i7 6900k, 32GB ram, 23TB storage). I like having visitors over and telling them this is the primary computer I use to do my high particle count fluid simulations and little bigdata projects with.6
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Now I remember why I don't work from home.
It's 3pm and I've managed about an hour's work today -- most of which was debugging something really dumb. Lunch took me 2 freaking hours because I had help from a noisy smoke detector (EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! ad nauseam), and everything kept going wrong. Girlfriend went to the store to pick up groceries; they were order-online groceries from a store 6 minutes away, so idk why it's taken over an hour. Now the smoke detector is pretending to "go to work" by watching youtube, and when that gets boring, he fights with his baby brother and steals his toys.
Children are fun and all, but they require 98% of your attention. and fuck, nobody else in this house makes any money, why the hell am I stuck watching them? While working!?
asdfakshaslkgjasdg
Update: now the smoke detector is taking the computer apart with a random electric screwdriver i haven't seen in years, and the baby suddenly has no pants.9 -
How I discovered I was a developer:
The company had hired a pair of computer science graduates and we had been commissioned to build a magento store. Weeks went buy with limited progress, and missing functionality was met with protestations from the devs about unreasonable demands.
At this time I had been taken on as a designer / casual front end developer (though the focus was on design). I knew HTML, CSS and some very limited php and js.
We were severely over deadline, and seeing the desperation on people's faces I suggested looking into it.
I read the magento docs, got an install up an running, configured an installed plugins, integrated the theme using the complex multilevelled XML/phtml architecture magento uses and even got some of the more complex js functionality working using JavaScript.
In two weeks.
I'm now the lead developer4 -
My first Windows rant.
I use Spotify heavily. (After all, I am paying for it every fucking month.) In fact, it's safe to say I use it upwards of 12+ hours a day.
My birthday was a few weeks ago. I got a new mechanical keyboard using some money i received as a gift. This keyboard has a function key to launch your media player. Odd function in my opinion. But I figured I would try it out for a week or so.
My problem is: the default media center is that god forsaken piece of shit groove music (not only is it shit, I also have 0 mp3 files on my computer).
No problem, I'll just change the default media center. Fucking Windows doesn't let me change it to Spotify. Odd. Well, I did download it from Spotify's website. Let's try downloading it from the Windows store.
I download Spotify from the Windows store. It still cannot be set to the default media center.
For fuck sake, if Google can let me set Spotify as my default over their shitty YouTube Music that I know damn well they're trying to make as the default for all Android, then you can let me change it Windows.
Yes, I know Spotfiy isn't exactly a media center, but it's basically the same fucking thing.16 -
I worked at a computer store for almost 4 years, don’t really have any seniors since the first year and if I don’t understand something google are my only hope
So during 4th year it got worse, I got college final project also tons of work. That last year really burn me out like crap. No one’s complaining if I can’t troubleshoot something (even the boss or client) but I feel depressed if I failed to help them
I quite 3 months ago and currently on another city with a software company, first 2 months was great, tons of senior and I can finally rely on someone instead of pulling my hair by myself
P.S. The store working atmosphere was nice, but I just don’t wanna be last man when shit happens. Especially if it’s my 1st job -
One year for Christmas, my dad got me an old tower and installed Windows 98 on it. He also got two old-school PCI WiFi cards so that my "new" computer could access the Internet via his.
I started learning basic web development. I would convince my mom (an English teacher) to buy me books on programming all the time when she was getting her own books at the store.
Eventually, I got a book on Blitz Basic and started making my own video games.
Then GameMaker, Java, C/C++, and more web development and design happened until all the sudden, out of nowhere, I'm a computer scientist 😁
It's crazy how much we owe to our parents. And neither us nor them even realized what they were doing at the time!1 -
I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.
In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.
Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."
In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.
We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.
As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.
Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.
It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.
But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?6 -
Odd things that non-technically-inclined people do, say, or believe:
"Back in my day we didn't have our faces planted in cell phones!" True, but they sure did love them some magazines and newspapers.
"I don't need internet! I need that 'wee-fee'" -- from my wife's stories about one of her clients, who wanted to set up WiFi.
A restaurant owner who, in 2017 mind you, refuses to upgrade his phone above a touch-tone with a handheld receiver.
When my wife, son, and I were visiting her aunt and uncle in Florida, her uncle kept asking her help on how to configure his smart phone. She's a saleswoman and I'm a computer engineer. Not complaining, just an observation. Actually I'm glad because I can avoid a million questions that I won't ever have time for.
When someone in line at the store causes a glitch in the chip reader because they don't know how to follow directions on-screen. Then they blame "those damn computers!" during a verybquick reboot.
People who enjoy sunshine. I don't understand this obsession that non-technical people have with sunny days. Maybe if I were on a tropical beach drinking whisky all day, but I live in NYS so...
When I'm describing a computer program I put a lot of effort into, only to have the conversation derailed adter thirty seconds by an hour-long family gossip section.2 -
So... After reading up on the theoretical stuff earlier, I decided to make a real AI that can identify handguns and decide whether it's a revolver or a semiautomatic with 95 percent accuracy...
Well, basically, I been browsing my local gun store's online store for four hours for training data, killed a Mac mini while first training the system and I think I ended on the domestic terrorism watch list... Was that black sedan always there?
Anyway... It's working fairly accurate, my monkey wrench is a revolver by the way.
Isn't AI development a wonderful excuse for all kinds of shit?
"why do you have 5000 pictures of guns on your computer?" - "AI development"
"why did you wave around a gun in front of your web cam" - "AI development"
"why is there a 50 gram bag in your desk?" - "AI development"
Hmm... yeah well... I think it might work. I could have picked a less weird testing project, but... No.7 -
I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.3
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I just want to share my very first companion. Haha... This is btw my laptop way back 2011, used it to store highschool memories and silly stuff, if you know what I mean. This is the laptop that I first used the labrynth of directories such as A folder contains A to z Folder and again inside one of those contains A to z again lowered and upper. This is also my partner in coding C++ back in the days, I usually write code in paper and when back to school I used our lab's computer. Ohh and I also have my anime addiction started on this too! One time I discovered the side VGA and connected it to our big LCD screen but by the time I plugged it in, it produce explosive sounds, and my grandpa said that that lcd tv is only for 110v not for 220v. I learned the importance of voltages that day. I just went back and open it to backup my highschool memories and stuff to my external hdd. Ahhhhh memories.3
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Fucking Apple... my MacBook Pro committed suicide upgrading from High Sierra to Mojave, had to wipe the drive. After much trouble resetting my Apple ID (put the password AND the two-factor code in the password field.. who the fuck thought that up), it tells me Mojave isn't compatible with this computer.
... fine, it's a 2012 machine I can respect that, but you blew away my system to upgrade THIS WAS YOUR IDEA NOT MINE...
...and so I just try to update to El Capitan or something because I'm on FUCKING OSX LION now (swirling galaxy, so sparkle, such stars)
...and the App Store won't let me. Why?
"Software Update Required"
"To make changes to your payment information, you need to upgrade your Mac to the latest version of macOS."
just.
wow. -
Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.
So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.
This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.
The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.
"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...
I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?
I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.
So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...
...
... "Something unexpected happened"
Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.
Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.
"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"
Finally unzipped Lua.4 -
If you can be locked out of it remotely, you don't own it.
On May 3rd, 2019, the Microsoft-resembling extension signature system of Mozilla malfunctioned, which locked out all Firefox users out of their browsing extensions for that day, without an override option. Obviously, it is claimed to be "for our own protection". Pretext-o-meter over 9000!
BMW has locked heated seats, a physical interior feature of their vehicles, behind a subscription wall. This both means one has to routinely spend time and effort renewing it, and it can be terminated remotely. Even if BMW promises never to do it, it is a technical possibility. You are in effect a tenant in a car you paid for. Now imagine your BMW refused to drive unless you install a software update. You are one rage-quitting employee at BMW headquarters away from getting stuck on a side of a road. Then you're stuck in an expensive BMW while watching others in their decade-old VW Golf's driving past you. Or perhaps not, since other stuck BMWs would cause traffic jams.
Perhaps this horror scenario needs to happen once so people finally realize what it means if they can be locked out of their product whenever the vendor feels like it.
Some software becomes inaccessible and forces the user to update, even though they could work perfectly well. An example is the pre-installed Samsung QuickConnect app. It's a system app like the Wi-Fi (WLAN) and Bluetooth settings. There is a pop-up that reads "Update Quick connect", "A new version is available. Update now?"; when declining, the app closes. Updating requires having a Samsung account to access the Galaxy app store, and creating such requires providing personally identifiable details.
Imagine the Bluetooth and WiFi configuration locking out the user because an update is available, then ask for personal details. Ugh.
The WhatsApp messenger also routinely locks out users until they update. Perhaps messaging would cease to work due to API changes made by the service provider (Meta, inc.), however, that still does not excuse locking users out of their existing offline messages. Telegram does it the right way: it still lets the user access the messages.
"A retailer cannot decide that you were licensing your clothes and come knocking at your door to collect them. So, why is it that when a product is digital there is such a double standard? The money you spend on these products is no less real than the money you spend on clothes." – Android Authority ( https://androidauthority.com/digita... ).
A really bad scenario would be if your "smart" home refused to heat up in winter due to "a firmware update is available!" or "unable to verify your subscription". Then all you can do is hope that any "dumb" device like an oven heats up without asking itself whether it should or not. And if that is not available, one might have to fall back on a portable space heater, a hair dryer or a toaster. Sounds fun, huh? Not.
Cloud services (Google, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) can, by design, lock out the user, since they run on the computers of the service provider. However, remotely taking away things one paid for or has installed on ones own computer/smartphone violates a sacred consumer right.
This is yet another benefit of open-source software: someone with programming and compiling experience can free the code from locks.
I don't care for which "good purpose" these kill switches exist. The fact that something you paid for or installed locally on your device can be remotely disabled is dystopian and inexcuseable.16 -
"So you're like... A computer guy right? So you like work at the Apple Store or something?"
Just nod. It's easier that way.3 -
Storytime!
I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.
The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.
I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.
Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.
I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.
The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.
About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.
Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."
Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.
I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!
I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.
$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.
$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.
$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*
tl;dr - I hate printers -
I'm pretty sure that the technical tests for FAANG are just to prove that you'll bust your ass doing trivial bullshit for them / and that you're a sucker -- instead of actual meaningful skill checks. Is this guy a total sucker who will drink our Koolaid when it's time? Are they wearing Nike? Yes. This is going to be a good investment.
I was down and out once and got a job a Micheal's Art and Crafts store. The application was clearly a mindfuck test. It asked, "If your boss was stealing - would you report them?" BTW - the answer is "No." You only report people below you. I answered in the way I knew the computer wanted me to - and I got the job. Same shit.
Are you subordinate? You're hired.2 -
Today I went to a computer store to buy laptop with my friend. When we were waiting for the store technicians to check the laptop for my friend, we found out that nearly all technicians (about 4, 5) of the computer store don't know how to enter BIOS setup for the laptop :/ How the fuck they become the store technicians if they don't fucking know how to access BIOS setup of a laptop? (one of them even suggested to use a screwdriver (wtf?) to access the BIOS the new laptop o.O)
Don't know what will they do with my friend's new laptop if I didn't tell them how to enter BIOS
(It's a Lenovo laptop, the combination to enter BIOS is fn+f2 and the store we bought the laptop is a large store in our city)3 -
Not much of a story but about 2 years ago, I had just got to the mall (at its opening time so many shops were still closed). While walking through to find a place to eat while my mother went grocery shopping, my phone started buzzing. Upon checking; it had hundreds of notifications and emails. Our production server was malfunctioning.
Not much that I had to do, but I ran around to find a computer store to use their model computers to see what was happening.
However, while the problem was fixed, I did notice how friendly Mac stores were as opposed to windows dealers that day. Windows dealers did not allow me to use the computers while the Mac store connected me to wifi and allowed me all the time needed to fix my issue. 👀 -
Prior post on this story: https://devrant.com/rants/1635258/...
Apparently my dad decided to adopt the Windows file system hierarchy for his business.
He has managed to store his video, picture, and music folder INSIDE the DOCUMENTS folder. And there are seperate video, picture, and music folders outside of this folder. The business information is in all of these folders adding up to about 600GB of data in 10 different folders and 4 trees. Nothing has been deleted since 2010. WHAT IN THE EVER LOVING CHRIST ON A FUCKING POGO-STICK IS THIS ABOMINATION. I AM GOING TO JUMP OFF A CLIFF NAKED AND ON FIRE BEFORE I TRY TO SORT THIS SHIT.13 -
I've kinda ghosted DevRant so here's an update:
VueJS is pretty good and I'm happy using it, but it seems I need to start with React soon to gain more business partnerships :( I'm down to learn React, but I'd rather jump into Typescript or stick with Vue.
Webpack is cool and I like it more than my previous Gulp implementation.
Docker has become much more usable in the last 2 years, but it's still garbage on Windows/Mac when running an application that runs on Symfony...without docker-sync. File interactions are just too slow for some of my enterprise apps. docker-sync was a life-saver.
I wish I had swapped ALL links to XHR requests long ago. This pseudo-SPA architecture that I've got now (still server-side rendered) is pretty good. It allows my server to do what servers do best, while eliminating the overhead of reloading CSS/JS on every request. I wrote an ES6 component for this: https://github.com/HTMLGuyLLC/... - Frankly, I could give a shit if you think it's dumb or hate it or think I'm dumb, but I'd love to hear any ideas for improving it (it's open source for a reason). I've been told my script is super helpful for people who have Shopify sites and can't change the backend. I use it to modernize older apps.
ContentBuilder.js has improved a ton in the last year and they're having a sale that ends today if you have a need for something like that, take a look: https://innovastudio.com/content-bu...
I bought and returned a 2019 Macbook pro with i9. I'll stick with my 2015 until we see what's in store for 2020. Apple has really stopped making great products ever since Jobs died, and I can't imagine that he was THAT important to the company. Any idiot on the street can you tell you several ways they could improve the latest models...for instance, how about feedback when you click buttons in the touchbar? How about a skinnier trackpad so your wrists aren't constantly on it? How about always-available audio and brightness buttons? How about better ports...How about a bezel-less screen? How about better arrow keys so you can easily click the up arrow without hitting shift all the time? How about a keyboard that doesn't suck? I did love touch ID though, and the laptop was much lighter.
The Logitech MX Master 3 mouse was just released. I love my 2s, so I just ordered it. We'll see how it is!
PHPStorm still hasn't fixed a couple things that are bothering me with the terminal: can't reorder tabs with drag and drop, tabs are saved but don't reconnect to the server so the title is wrong if you reopen a project and forget that the terminal tabs are from your last session and no longer connected. I've accidentally tried to run scripts locally that were meant for the server more than once...
I just found out this exists: https://caniuse.email/
I'm going to be looking into Kubernetes soon. I keep seeing the name (docker for mac, digitalocean) so I'm curious.
AWS S3 Glacier is still a bitch to work with in 2019...wtf? Having to setup a Python script with a bunch of dependencies in order to remove all items in a vault before you can delete it is dumb. It's like they said "how can we make it difficult for people to remove shit so we can keep charging them forever?". I finally removed almost 2TB of data, but my computer had to run that script for a day....so dumb...6 -
One thing I hate about WinForms:
"do not modify the contents of this method with the code editor."
How the phook do I add eventhandlers without adding them in the code? By some mysterious ways in the so called "designer"? Click and drag? Wearing a tie and talking to the computer? Making a phone call to Microsoft? Immersing into VR and ordering an event handler from a virtual store?
No, I've always just typed whatever I want to achieve and I'm going to do so whatever those know-it-all comments say in the auto-generated code.
You can call me a conservative old fart, but nothing beats writing my own code.6 -
Just drove to the store to buy a 40 foot long Ethernet cord so I could directly connect my computer to the router because Visual Studio is taking too long to download...4
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Longest I've worked without rest + why?
Over 24 hours. Why?
In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).
Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.
One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.
January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"
At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)
One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...
VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow." -
For the last 20 years, there's one thing I've not been able to do reliably:
Share a folder on a windows computer.
Why the fuck can I write /etc/smb.conf from scratch with a blindfold on and make it securely work from all client devices including auth & acl, but when I rightclick and share on windows it's either playing hide and seek on the network (is it hiding behind //hostname/share? No? Maybe in the bushes behind the IP addresses?), or it's protected by mysterious logins requiring you to sacrifice two kittens a day.
Yes, finally it works! One windows update later... aaaand it's gone.
JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING CONF AND A MAN PAGE, MICROSOFT. I DON'T CARE THAT YOU'RE ORALLY PLEASING ALL THESE MALWARE RIDDEN GUISLUTS ON THE SIDE, JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING TEXT FILE TO STORE AND EDIT.4 -
Windows file system is a slow piece of shit.
The update regime on most applications for Windows desktop is an unmanageable piece of shit.
Windows Store is a broken piece of shit.
The login process on a Windows computer is a tedious piece of shit.
The Windows Hello authentication is a half-baked piece of shit.
Microsoft MFA is a hostile piece of shit.
Windows Update is a destructive piece of shit.
Windows Defender is a resource-hogging piece of shit.
Windows system fonts are ugly as a piece of shit.4 -
A year ago I was hired as a Jr dev to assist the senior dev because he was so busy. Within 2 months he was pushed out and I replaced him. I thought maybe he just got busy with other things or found a new job.
After working alone this past year, I was told last week that since I am so busy with things outside the job, they were hiring someone to help me finish the project I'm currently on.
(for context : I work as a contracted dev for a small dev company of 5 or so people. One for each language/os.)
I can't help but think that I'm probably being pushed out and replaced. I flat out asked that, but never got a reply. Now I'm 70% through a project and disgruntled with everything. Not sure how I'm supposed to feel really.
If they want to replace me for one reason or another that's fine, I just wish they weren't shady about it.
I should probably be working right now, but I'm going to take my kids to the pet store to clear my head. I'll enjoy a little time away from my computer.2 -
Ugggg!
I am about fed up with Windows.
I leave app/programs open at night because I have a bad memory, and they were important to what I was doing.
I wake up: Windows Login Screen. Apparentally windows decided to restart my computer during the night.
Ohh what joy.~
Now I have to rememeber what the fuck I had open - and it was mostly work related.
I would have left for Linux ages ago, but I'm a gamer.. And most of my games are for windows.. Some are even Windows Store Apps..
Windows.. Why don't you give a shit about us..
And before you ask..
I have Auto Updates Disabled (Not that that really fucking matters with windows..)
I have all sleep and power saver settings disabled.13 -
Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.
Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.
Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.
A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.
The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.
Consider this example.
Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..
As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.
But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.
One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.
But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.
So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.
As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.
If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.
Thanks for reading.8 -
Today I went to a computer store,
I ran dir /s C:\ ( "ls -r /" equivalent for Linux, sorry GNU/Linux)
left it there
Hoping someone will panic thinking that computer has been hacked5 -
I learned basic, Visual Basic and java in high school, then one year of college studying c++. I really hate c++ and swore I would never become a programmer. After that one year of college, I spent two years out of the country with no computer usage at all. Then 4 years working at a grocery store.
Then my friend told me about an opening at his work place for a java programmer. This was 7 years since doing java and 6 years since I had programmed anything at all. But I applied and interviewed. When asked about databases, I said “I know a little Microsoft Access.” Had no idea what relational databases were, never heard of php, but by some miracle they hired me anyways. Still working for them 6 years later, now an experienced java, php, MySQL, front end developer.
Still have no idea why they saw fit to hire me.5 -
I can't be the only one with a parent so inept with technology...
My father was an architect. He doesn't do well with any tech device, computer or mobile - all my attempts to teach / explain to him how to do one thing or another (concept of an account in app store, for starters, or how to find the app store icon on his iPhone) are viciously blocked out, and his defense -
"Listen, you know I don't understand, these things, I'm not a pro. If you'd asked me about how to mix I'd answer because there I'm a pro"
We live in different countries, btw, so have to teach him by phone.
After each unsuccessful attempt from my side he proceeds to ridicule me saying "Well and I thought you were a pro at these things"
Sigh.7 -
My mouses right button kept double clicking. This makes it really hard to play minecraft. It was a cheap logitech mouse from a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. So I went to the store to find a new one. Almost all the wireless mice were gone. Apparently WFH people hit walmart. I didn't want another single wireless mouse. This would mean I need the adapter for the keyboard (for keyboard mouse combo) and the new mouse plugged in. My computer is a laptop so there are not a lot of those slots. So I looked for a bluetooth mouse. Only one there and it was a sucky Razer. I have not liked Razer since they required people to register their software with an account before using their drivers. This really made me avoid this brand like the plague. So I finally settled on a wired gaming mouse. It has a nice long 6ft cord so it works with my setup. It is a G502 Hero. It works really nicely without drivers. I will be testing with drivers tonight. I usually buy el cheapo mice so this is new to me. So far so good.16
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This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:
In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.
If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.
For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.
Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.
It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.
I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.
All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.
Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.
The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.
#wk171 -
I forgot my password to my mindfactory account, one of Germany's biggest online vendor for computer components. So I go through the resetting process, which is:
- apply for password reset
- get a mail
- confirm the mail
(So far, so good)
- get a mail with a new CLEAR TEXT PASSWORD
Is this the stone age!?
You never send an email containing the cleartext! You never even store the password as is!
You, as the provider, should never be able to know what the actual password was.
All you are supposed to do is to generate a random salt, and hash the user's password with the salt, and then you only store the salt and the hash. And whenever a user inputs their password, all you do is to check if the you can recreate the hash with the help of the salt and your hash algorithm. (There are libraries for that!)
If a user wants to reset their password? Send them to a mail with link on where they can assign a new password.
At no point should the password ever be stored or transmitted in any other medium.5 -
Just saw an advert for a macbook Air in a local computer store. They called it "power. To. The tenth power"1
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Had a buy a salesperson a desktop to replace the one he has that has a bad HDD. I discovered he uses no storage on the thing and that buying a computer with 12 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD, was cheaper than 8 GB with any size HDD I could find at the store so we got that.
Now I'm jealous of his 10 seconds or less boot time while I have to struggle every morning waiting at least a full minute for my computer to get to login, and another one once I put in my password.6 -
Microsoft is always at it.
Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.
So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.
Windows 10 users, do this:
Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....
How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?
I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.
Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?
But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)
So needless to say she needs help. All the time.
So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.
I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.
Wanna know why?
Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:
- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer
Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe
And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.
So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!
So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.
I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.
I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!
However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.20 -
Back when I was my first year of computer science me and a fellow classmate went to the IT store to buy a hard drive. We walked past an iMac and my friend (who was top of our class at the time) looked at it and said: "That is a nice screen! But where is the computer". Laughed my ass off, and we are supposed to be cs undergrads...1
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Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.
We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.
I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.
My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.
I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left. -
Acer vs MSI Laptops.
Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...8 -
markdown is not good enough! the tools aren't there for non-devs and there's no concordance on moving forward *compatibly* for anything other than headers and __possibly__ lists.
md has been around for years and still no consensus on comments, meta data, css, data imports, etc.
i could never in good faith recommend to a non-dev to use markdown, even though every academic and professional writer from legal to journalism should exclusively be using markdown to write and store their documents. the data portability and ease of search, retrieval, collection, distribution, etc of markdown compared to pdf or docx is enormous. markdown is the hex format of text, the perfect layer of data and visual so that the user and the computer can both operate on text as blocks of data rather than weirdly styled paragraphs that need to be reformatted BY HAND for citation-style or journal format, or paper size. FOR EACH SUBMISSION. Academics literally rewrite their 100-page papers to accommodate up to 10 different submission requirements.
They could be clicking MLA vs Chicago and/or using a journal's stylesheet to recompile for its styles.
Today there is some support from zotero et al to take away some of the pain, but it makes ZERO SENSE for writers to have to keep and store and keep up to date, multiple versions of the same document. Git pull does not exist for them. But the worst part is that git isnt the solution to their problem. They need a compiler more than they need version control. But they also desperately need vcs. They ALL literally have a million files named "dumdum.dumFINAL-3084_lastversion \2020, this one.dum".
They dont have git or anything like it, because they need a line-by-line solution like markdown for git to become effective.
All of writing is basically mired in the fact that people cant even roll up their paragraphs and see what the fuck it is theyre saying. Most writing reads like a long scroll through some nonsense that goes nowhere. Like this rant. but the point is that markdown and line-by line editing actually produces more logically sound writing. You start to think in terms of defining ideas in blocks, ... like code.9 -
Sometimes I like to see how the other side live and just watch people in a computer store.
There are the nervous tip-toers who don't want to attract attention. The point and lookers, who read the sign and nod and show they understood.
There are the ones who just wander aimlessly trying to look like they know what they want.
Finally there are the 'expert helpers' who know enough 'techie' words to convince anyone around that they know what they're talking about.
It's like a people zoo.1 -
After waiting for almost a month, yesterday I went to check on how my computer was doing, since I hadn't got any messages or calls ever since.
I go to the store and ask one of the workers about how my laptop is doing, and that I'd left it there almost a month ago and that they'd tell me when it was time to get the papers and then the laptop itself. The girl asks me for my phone number and then my name, and found nothing on the computer. She goes somewhere inside the store and comes back with a colleague, who tells me that I need a process paper. I pull out the receipt the technician photocopied and signed because that was the only thing I had. I hadn't touched that part of my paste for the whole time after I left the computer there and I was 100% sure I didn't have the process paper with me until he started pressing me for it. I kept repeating that the technician told me that they'd call or message me when said process paper was ready, which I hadn't got any of those to go pick it up. The guy asks me if that were the number and name I'd given the tech guy and I said yes. Both of them disappear into the store again. They come back with a cardboard box and say that the surname written there was wrong by a char (as I've said before my name is unusual, and my surname is also unusual where I'm studying, but where I'm from there's like 5 or 6 families with that surname), so that's why they couldn't find it in the computer. After that they went through all the details I gave on the time of handing the PC and the number they told me was there was off by miles. I think I may have said a wrong digit but that number was way off. There should be some person who got calls or messages about a computer they don't even own LoL
They told me to try it and see if it was running OK and that I had 15d to go back if something was wrong
When I got home I turned it on, afraid it would start dying on me again LoL
I pass the login screen and the fan just starts working really hard and I'm worried. The ASUS guys reinstalled Win8 and the CPU is running wild already, going at about 3,5 GHz (2,5 max) and over 30% usage on nothing
After some minor inconveniences (making the USB with Win10 took longer than expected) I finally installed Win10 and the CPU usage drops to < 10% and runs at way below the 2,5 GHz max. It constantly uses <= 10-15% CPU and the fan makes no noise unless I put in a heavier game (like Oxygen Not Included - it asks for 4GB RAM minimum 8I), in which case it goes up a bit and runs at around 3 GHz, but it doesn't make as much noise as before, thank jesus. I'm gonna keep trying to see how it does and hope I don't have to go back to the store after the next 15d 8I
I can finally work and not be a leech on my friends because my old toshiba - which I forgot I'd brought with me to uni - is really old and it makes a lot of noise (the fan is constantly working too much but it's so old I don't bother anymore) and it heats my room a lot, so it's gonna be a nice change of pace HaHa4 -
I just wanted to develop a cool webapp-controlled lighting for my bar.
Next things I know, there is electronics scattered everywhere, 2 multimeters to find what the fck is wrong with a PSU not outputting 1/100 of the current it's supposed to, said PSU opened on my desk, and I'm trying to find a capacitor online because there isn't any fcking electronics store selling spare parts anymore in my city.
Context:
- PSU means Power Supply Unit, in this case a computer one.
- PSU was given by a friend and is out of warranty
- the total consumption for all LEDs is 24A @ 5V consumption. A refurbished PSU is ideal for that
- that PSU is rated 2A @ 5V on the stand-by, which is perfect to power a Raspberry Pi. The issue is that there is a sharp voltage drop as soon as you try to use more than 20mA.9 -
The importance of not using static salt / IVs.
I've been working on a project that encrypts files using a user-provided password as key. This is done on the local machine which presents some challenges which aren't present on a hosted environment. I can't generate random salt / IVs and store them securely in my database. There's no secure way to store them - they would always end up on the client machine in plain text.
A naive approach would be to use static data as salt and IV. This is horrendously harmful to your security for the reason of rainbow tables.
If your encryption system is deterministic in the sense that encrypting / hashing the same string results in the same output each time, you can just compile a massive data set of input -> output and search it in no time flat, making it trivial to reverse engineer whatever password the user input so long as it's in the table.
For this reason, the IVs and salt are paramount. Because even if you generate and store the IVs and salt on the user's computer in plaintext, it doesn't reveal your key, but *does* make sure that your hashing / encryption isn't able to be looked up in a table1 -
Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?
( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)
How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.
Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.
Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?
Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.
Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B
On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)
Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.
The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.
My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?
2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.
Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(14 -
So, I'm starting cross platform mobile app development with NativeScript. Just side projects at the moment, nothing "business-related".
Well, as for the Android part, I'm free to choose whether I'd like to develop on Windows 10- or on my Linux machine. I can compile the project on either system. As for publishing it to Google Play, I might do it, I might not do it, since it is possible to install an app by providing the apk file.
As for the Apple part: I'd either have to buy an completely overpriced Apple computer (iMac, MacBook, etc.) or subscribe to a pricey online CI/CD service... just to be able to compile the fucking project. And if that wouldn't be enough, Apple wants to charge me 99 $ a year so I may have a chance to publish the app to their App Store... of course without any guarantees that my app will be published, because it might be revoked by them. WHAT THE FUCK?5 -
It's 2022 and mobile web browsers still lack basic export options.
Without root access, the bookmarks, session, history, and possibly saved pages are locked in. There is no way to create an external backup or search them using external tools such as grep.
Sure, it is possible to manually copy and paste individual bookmarks and tabs into a text file. However, obviously, that takes lots of annoying repetitive effort.
Exporting is a basic feature. One might want to clean up the bookmarks or start a new session, but have a snapshot of the previous state so anything needed in future can be retrieved from there.
Without the ability to export these things, it becomes difficult to find web resources one might need in future. Due to the abundance of new incoming Internet posts and videos, the existing ones tend to drown in the search results and become very difficult to find after some time. Or they might be taken down and one might end up spending time searching for something that does not exist anymore. It's better to find out immediately it is no longer available than a futile search.
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Some mobile web browsers such as Chrome (to Google's credit) thankfully store saved pages as MHTML files into the common Download folder, where they can be backed up and moved elsewhere using a file manager or an external computer. However, other browsers like Kiwi browser and Samsung Internet incorrectly store saved pages into their respective locked directories inside "/data/". Without root access, those files are locked in there and can only be accessed through that one web browser for the lifespan of that one device.
For tabs, there are some services like Firefox Sync. However, in order to create a text file of the opened tabs, one needs an external computer and needs to create an account on the service. For something that is technically possible in one second directly on the phone. The service can also have outages or be discontinued. This is the danger of vendor lock-in: if something is no longer supported, it can lead to data loss.
For Chrome, there is a "remote debugging" feature on the developer tools of the desktop edition that is supposedly able to get a list of the tabs ( https://android.stackexchange.com/q... ). However, I tried it and it did not work. No connection could be established. And it should not be necessary in first place.7 -
So a bit ago I posted a rant saying that I would be getting ElementaryOS onto my computer and trying it out, buckle up kiddos because this goes to shit in just a moment.
I did everything right, used Rufus correctly and didn't destroy my computer nor my installer, good! I set it up, get everything going and everything is running smoothly. One problem... I couldn't download **any** programs that weren't from the Ubuntu Store, which really annoyed me because I like to use Brackets, and I couldn't find it in the UStore...
So I messed up **really** bad here... I didn't *format* my Elementary Installer, but tried to delete the files like a pleb and stick an Ubuntu ISO in it's place, I didn't even think on going through Rufus again, I just slapped that shit in there without a thought.
I restart my computer, I read a forum stating that I would get an option that allows Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) to take over the partition of a previous distro. Neat! Another bloody problem is that I decided to use "Win + R" and manually delete the Elementary partition **myself**... What is even wrong with me...
So I restarted it, and before my father left to go shopping, he said I should go into the BIOS to change the boot order (Now this is where I **really fucked up**. Thought what I said before was bad?).
Cool, so I boot my PC and go into the BIOS, now I couldn't figure out on my computer where the boot order was, when it was right in my face the whole damn time... I managed to almost destroy my entire BIOS with the fucking file in my USB stick, because I was being an idiot...
I restart, GRUB opens up with a black screen and white text in the top left corner, know what the most important line is in that small block of words? "unknown filesystem"... Of fucking course I fucked it that bad, GRUB didn't even give me the option of just using Windows 10 instead, just quietly gave me the middle finger since I basically nearly fucked everything.
What's funny is that I had someone (who lives with us, let's call him Jeff) look at my computer because I was done being a dumbass.
He told me that I still had my BIOS (which was a bloody relief, because I thought I basically destroyed my computer doing what I did) and that all I need to do is fix the installer I tried to use.
I gave him the USB and just started to play on my phone.
Then I remembered something maybe an hour or so ago... I had an older installer that I used on my shitty laptop awhile back, if I can find it again I could just use that instead of waiting on Jeff. I dug around my room and found the USB that had a working Ubuntu ISO on, correctly placed inside this time.
I basically walked up to my computer, plugged it in and started it up, and it worked. I got Ubuntu and Windows 10 back, and I was basically laughing like I just saved a man's life.
Moral of this story: Don't be like me and do something stupid, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're attempting at... -
So they're working on a way to store data in DNA. That means next generation computer science students have biology as a core course!
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grrrr
last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure
my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks
so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao
walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt
got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.
walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe
so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator
yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?
... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...
fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT
I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch2 -
Context: at my current job I work as a product photographer as well as studio admin. On side I go online to different brands websites in search for product images (if we haven't the product in store yet).
Now the banger, I searched for some peacoat colored pants but the brand didn't put it out yet. Pulling out some Super AI hacks I changed some stuff and things in the URL (color ID + small amount of ?doThisAndThatPhP) and... BOOM result! Right color, high Res image. The Color isn't searchable or shown via Google or the brands page, but the image is already on their server 🤔*yoinking the image*
Just wanted to share it with you guys 👌 none at my coworkers speak computer 😔
cheers ☕1 -
It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.
About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)
I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)
Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.
TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.6 -
I'm working at a big furniture store on the weekends to earn a little bit of extra money during my computer science bachelors.
The only annoyance is that the job has absolutely nothing to do with programming...
Should I quit to try get an internship as a developer? What holds me back is a real lack of confidence & experience. I wanna get more into programming but I'm also scared I would suck ass in a real company, although I have already worked with a lot of differnt languages & paradigms during my studies.
What to do devrant?1 -
some reflections on "reports"...
Many of our customers are asking us to summarize the information in weekly or monthly reports, send them through email to the relevant members of the organization, and store them. Managers want to promote it as one of our most important featues and place many work hours into it. I get the utility of periodic reports in a pre-computer world... but we have the ability to show the whole history, and then seprate them into weekly or monthly averages. You can see the data in real time without having to wait until the next report. We could just give them a link and say "hey, if you ever want to see how your company is doing / history of your progress, here's the data." I feel like the only utility of reports is for people who don't have the initiative to look at the state of the company more than once a month (like investors)3 -
Any idea to get around the cluster storage limitation?
I have to train a model on a large dataset, but the limit I have is about 39GB. There is space on my local disk but I don't know if I can store the data on my computer and have the model train on the cluster resources.1 -
Stupid windows update. You really want to update at the most inconvenient time.
I do manual update on my current computer but I boot up the old computer which I have store away. Remind me the reasons why I hate windows update and to disable automatic update.3 -
Twitter disclosed a bug on its platform that impacted users who accessed their platform using Firefox browsers.
According to the report of ZDNet: Twitter stored private files inside the Firefox browser's cache (a folder where websites store information and files temporarily). Twitter said that once users left their platform or logged off, the files would remain in the browser cache, allowing anyone to retrieve it. The company is now warning users who share systems or used a public computer that some of their private files may still be present in the Firefox cache. Malware could be used to scrape and steal this data.2 -
Wonder why people mistake knowledge for intelligence!
You can store info on a machine or worse a paper! You cant expect intelligence of a human from a computer :/ -
Fathers computer store..
I was working there since I was little and got whole hardware perspective and initial user knowledge.. Hell, I even cracked my first game there! -
Alright, I'm gonna need some help from more experienced devs.
tldr: how does my sister test my website if she can't run it?
I'm making a site (for myself, I've talked about this in other rants, most likely won't go online so I don't want to spend money on this), and my sister is helping me with the sales part of the project. It's basicaly a web store.
In a couple of months, she is going to have a baby, and will stay at home for 5 months. Since she helped me with it, and I don't really know all of the steps that go into online purchasing (she kind of works with this, and makes a lot of online purchases, from everyone I know she was the best person to go to), we want her to test it while she's at home with the baby, just in case I missed or didn't understand something.
The problem is: she doesn't understant anything about programing and probably never seen a command line, and since this is laravel, I will need to install a lot of things in her computer, which will be useless for her after she is done, and teach her some commands to run the site.
Also, like I said, i don't want to spend money on this, since she will only make a few tests and that's it, it would go offline after.
She is smart, she could probably do this, so if there is no way of doing this is ok, but if there is it would save her a lot of time while testing and with the baby, and save me my time at work.
I would want something like git, but where I could run the site without a lot of steps.
Does anyone know how she can test it? Is there even a way?
Thank you in advance 😁5 -
You know
When I first saw etherum talking about am distributed state machine i thought wow. Not very practical but NEAT. I envisioned being able to make a byte code that could be stored in transactions and run by individual clients in an async function and each step of the resulting execution and the values of managed ram would be stored at intervals so other clients could take over and execute a few more statements and compare what should always be expected results that are identical
A grand incredibly inefficient system however really neato from the theoretical computer nerd standpoint !
Boy was I disappointed lol all it is a basic contracts language but yet they state it could be like a word computer ! How ? I thought maybe if you had enough nodes participating maybe you could store registers and the like in transaction values ? Wouldn’t that be the way ?
Seems like as a word computer they’re stuck somewhere between very simplistic js and something prior to amptron in usability yet they advertised as a world computer
Am i missing something ? I mean you could create something that would translate higher level code into smal numeric statements and then send it additions values but what would it be useful for and how would you actually. Store anything ? -
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What are the parts of the CNC Wire Bending Machine?
A CNC wire bending machine is a complex piece of equipment used to bend the wire into various shapes and configurations with precision. It consists of several key parts and operates based on the instructions provided by a computer program. Here are the main parts of a CNC wire-bending machine and an overview of how it works:
1. Wire Feeding Mechanism:
This part of the machine is responsible for feeding the wire from a coil or spool into the bending area.
Wire feeding mechanisms can include rollers, pulleys, or servo-driven motors that control the wire's movement.
2. Straightening Unit:
- Before bending, the wire may pass through a straightening unit, which ensures that the wire is free from kinks and bends.
- This step helps produce precise bends by starting with a straight wire.
3. Bending Head and Tooling:
- The bending head contains the tools and dies needed to shape the wire.
- Tooling includes various components such as clamps, rollers, and mandrels that hold and shape the wire according to the desired design.
4. Guide Rollers and Pulleys:
- These components help guide the wire through the bending process, ensuring it follows the correct path and angles.
5. Control Panel or Interface:
- CNC wire bending machines are typically equipped with a control panel or computer interface.
- Operators input the design specifications, such as bend angles, lengths, and shapes, through this interface.
6. Computer Control System:
- The heart of the CNC wire bending machine is its computer control system.
- It interprets the design specifications and converts them into precise movements and commands for the machine.
- CNC software programs are used to create and store the bending instructions.
7. Servo Motors and Actuators:
- These components are responsible for moving the bending head, tooling, and other parts of the machine with high precision.
- Servo motors and actuators receive commands from the control system to carry out specific movements.
8. Sensors and Feedback Mechanisms:
- Sensors placed throughout the machine monitor various parameters, such as wire position, tension, and tooling alignment.
- Feedback from these sensors allows the machine to make real-time adjustments, ensuring accuracy and quality in the final product.