Recent Feature Articles

Jul 2015

What's The Password?

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DigitalUNIX

"So, first day, huh?"


We're All Admins Here

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Ciberlinux-desktop-screenshot

Will, his boss Rita, and Nick from HR huddled around a conference room speakerphone, listening to their new marching orders from the giant company that’d just bought out their small 100-person shop. Big changes would be avalanching down from Corporate over the next several months. For the moment, they were going over the modifications required to be compliant with their new overlords’ IT policies.


Finding Closure

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Jim’s mail client dinged and announced a new message with the subject, “Assigned to you: TICKET #8271”. “Not this again,” he muttered.

Ticket #8271 was ancient. For over a year now, Initech’s employees had tossed the ticket around like kids playing hot potato. Due to general incompetence and rigid management policies, it never got fixed.


Brillance is in the Eye of the Beholder

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“E-commerce” just doesn’t have the ring it once did. The best-qualified hackers in the world used to fall all over themselves to work on the next Amazon or eBay, but now? A job maintaining the back-end of an online store isn’t likely to lure this generation’s rockstar ninja coderz, which explains why Inicart ended up hiring Jay.

As far as Colleen could tell, her boss had been trying to add a developer to their team for at least a year. Scott was always on his way to interviews, second interviews, phone screens, and follow-up Skype calls… but summer turned to autumn turned to Christmas, and Inicart’s dev team returned from the holidays to find only their waistbands had increased in size. But then came the day Colleen walked in to find the long-empty cubicle next to hers brimming with a brand-new task chair and workstation. She ran down the hall.


Bonus WTF: 5:22

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No, it isn't an extended cut of a John Cage song, it's a new feature article that we put together- but you can't read it here, you can only read it over at our sponsor site: 5:22.


The Batman

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    Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, 
    Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, 
    Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, 
    Batman!

We've all heard it. Some of us even grew up when it was first aired on TV. Be honest, who among us, hasn't experienced just a little bump in cardiac rate when the Batmobile fired up?


Loafing Around

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Sliced bread bag2

Dateline: Friday, 1:00pm


Classic WTF: A Temporary Problem

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This classic is a perfect example of what happens when you outsource IT functions. You get some short-term, temporary gains, but you'll always lose in the long run.

This one originally ran back in 2014, but it's already a classic. - Remy

Andy Dahl had suffered his share of delays at the hands of the NonLocal HelpDesk, but usually they were simply a matter of insurmountable language barriers or inexplicable delays. Today the threat was somewhat more sinister...

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:13]: 
regarding your computer slowness issue
share the screen

**SCREEN SHARING INITIATED BY Dahl, Andy** [14:14]

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:17]: 
give me control 

**SCREEN CONTROL INITIATED BY Dahl, Andy** [14:18] 

Dahl, Andy [14:23]: 
S%Topt
S%TOP
%

**SCREEN CONTROL TERMINATED BY Dahl, Andy** [14:23]

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:24]: 
do shift+ delete
i am unable to do it form here

Dahl, Andy [14:25]: 
what are you trying to delete?

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:25]: 
its a temporary files

Dahl, Andy [14:25]: 
You can't delete all those files you selected.
They are not all temp files.

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:26]: 
they are

Dahl, Andy [14:26]: 
No. They are not all temp files. Just because something has the letters 'temp' in it does NOT mean it is a temp file.
MasterOrderTemplate.xml, CoreTemperatureController.cpp, and UpdateTemporaryJobPostings.SQL are resource that I NEED. They are NOT temp files.

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:27]: 
while we run this search
(.*temp.*)
we will get only the temp files

Dahl, Andy [14:27]: 
No. You will get every file that has the letters 'temp' in the file name. Not all of those are temp files.

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:27]: 
No
not like that
what happens is temp files are system generated it should not be the original file that you have on the folders in order to resolve the issue i need to delete it even the next level will do the same

Dahl, Andy [14:30]: 
With all due respect, I'm sorry but I can't allow you to delete those files. Not all of them are temp files.

HelpDesk, NonLocal [14:30]: 
alright
i will assign this ticket to next level


Classic WTF: Long Distance DATE$ing

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The Fourth of July was this weekend, and this is the perfect time for us to have our little Summer Vacation. For this week, sit back, enjoy some nice weather along with some Classic WTFs (nice weather not guaranteed, definitions of "nice" may vary from user to user).

This story originally ran in 2006, and is one of those examples where we let the submitter speak for themselves. - Remy


Mot did a pretty good job in telling this tale of Long Distance DATE$ing, so I'll just turn it on over to him ...