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Admin
As an employee/developer in Oregon for the State government (not the one who wrote the calculator though) I am bummed. Please accept my apologies and, rest assured, if I find the support person who responded to this, I will slap them!
Admin
universities IT departments are dumb, except the ones that let the students run the show.
Admin
That (the second email) Angers (an emotion) me (the person writing this reply).
Admin
I can beat all of these =)
My email provider is missing a help text in their webmail, which is evidenced by the string "[String Help.278.6}" in the middle of the page. When I mail them the first time, they reply that it's because I use Safari. When I reply that the error is there also in IE and Firefox on Windows, they ask if I've tried a different email client. Yeah, that'll work...
Admin
Silly. If you used Thunderbird, you'd know that it can detect mismatched braces like that and automatically fill them in with what the sender meant to say.
Those Mozilla guys are good!
Admin
"Ok, you rebooted your proxy and were still unable to get connectivity?"
"Well, we had a pretty heavy frost yesterday morning which can cause all sorts of problems ..."
I actually have used this excuse before (well kind of) Whenever it rains in a particular town where we have a location, the T1 always goes down, it is due to the moisture shorting out the circut.. So that is not that uncommon to have weather cause issues. (we have had the phone company out there more times than I can count and they still can not find the issue with the T1 line! [:(])
Admin
because its easier to roll the truck out there (and cheaper in the short-term) then it is to actually pay to replace the equipment
Admin
Why restrict yourself to the real problem, when Jeff Ballard has provided us a glorious font of ready made excuses: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl
Admin
You wouldn't happen to be in Louisiana, would you?
Admin
Is this in Louisiana?
Admin
I know of a gas station that uses a satellite linkup for (among other things) credit-card validation. Every time there's a heavy rain, something shorts out and the link goes down for hours--I've seen them have to do manual credit card slips for 100 customers.
Admin
That doesn't always help. At my university students run the show and it's a miracle things work at all. Windows login take 5+ minutes as the original post claimed too, and the linux boxes run slower than any linux box I've ever seen, my athlon 550 at home is faster for everyday work than those much more powerful boxes in university.
Admin
Damn that Microsoft and their annoying automatic messages...
Admin
Bad Company! No Biscuit!
Admin
We here have the same problem of long login times and it's caused by the user profile being transferred from the file server to the client each time the user logs in.
There must be a way to disable it and to directly work on the Z: share of the file server which already points to the user's profile directory, but how?
We found out how to get what we want for the "My documents" folder or any named folder... but not for the whole user profile. So currently when people use up 100M outside of their my documents but inside their profile folder, a login takes about half a minute up to a minute.
Admin
This isn't a solution, but often if you clean all the practically useless application settings and ad tracker cookies etc. from the profile, it speeds it up massively.
Other than that, you could probably try something clever with NTFS mountpoints (which I'm told exist) or changing the registry to think Documents and Settings is in z:
Admin
Why would there be a profile copied from the file server to the workstation? The user settings should come from the local Default User profile. If you want users to be able to access their documents from anywhere, create a network share for them that's always mapped to a drive by the login script. Am I missing something?
Admin
Yes, this is a computer pool with multiple users, so it needs roaming profiles.
The problem is that MS implements roaming profiles by copying the files to the local system every time and copying them back on logout. Some paths (like My Documents) can be mapped to somewhere else and exempt from copying, but not the whole profile. So if you for example login, your profile is copied to "C:\Documents and Settings\foo". "C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents" can be eliminated for example and redirected to Z:. But if you now download an ISO to "C:\Documents and Settings\foo\foo.iso", it will be copied to the file server on logout.
What we would like to have is NFS-like behaviour: the profiles are always used on the server, with the registry as exception since it would probably get badly corrupted by multi-logons.
Admin
I understand what is being done. I just still don't see the purpose of it. To me it looks like the only benefit of roaming profiles is that individual user's settings are preserved from machine to machine. Is there anything else?
Admin
I'm not sure I see a real WTF in any of these incidents.
Frost - Severe weather, rain (as mentioned above), can definitely intefere with connectivity. Frost, which you get when it's rather cold, causes metals to shrink quite a bit, and this can cause intemittent shorts and other weird electrical failures. Not WTF at all.
ASP Calculator - So what? He's telling you how to avoid the error. Whats the problem here... if you typed something stupid into the calculator its going to give you an error. Who cares what the error looks like?
Outlook messages - we have all seen those. Not sure what the beef is or why the reply is so out of hand?
Somebody please explain?
Admin
My address has a "1/2" in it (1234 1/2 XYZ Street). A while back I was trying to buy an airline ticket on Orbitz. I was filling out a form and got an error message stating that I could only use alpha-numerics and "-" in the address field. So I tried "1234 1-2". The form was accepted, however the sale was rejected because the address didn't match the address on file with the credit card I was trying to use. I should point out that I had used Orbitz before with no problem (and while living at the same address) so this new "feature" of rejecting the "/" character was part of an "upgrade".
So I called customer service at Orbitz and asked for their advice. First the person told me to try "1-2". I said I had done so with no luck and then the person suggested that I try "and one half". I asked why "and one half" would work any better than "1-2" if my credit card had "1/2" in their files. The gentleman then suggested that I should change my address on file with the credit card company to either "1-2" or "and one half". Oy vey. I guess I'll just have to change all of my on-line registrations to "and one half". Or maybe I'll just move...
Admin
The Outlook messages are a result of a 1D10T error at the user end.
Admin
and this is why there are so many badly written applications out there....!!
Admin
<FONT face=Verdana>Well, I have a perfectly reasonable explanation for all three support posts. You see, the logic behind the great work by the IT professionals is... oh no, here comes the frost... I'm losing my conn</FONT>
Admin
Lots of people, actually. Granted the user typed something stupid into the calculator, but you need to give an error message that looks like "you messed up", rather than one that looks like "the webmaster messed up".
Bonus points for getting the field to reject invalid input before the form is submitted. But not if you get it wrong.
Admin
Erm, you should always validate input. Chances are high that if they didn't bother with the calculator they didn't bother with their DB apps either, leading to potential for SQL injection attacks...
Ah, so that's why our CS department Windows machines are so ridiculously slow to log in? How silly. All three other OSs in common use in the department (Linux, Solaris, MacOSX) handle this far more gracefully, and log in instantly...
Admin
That's not a small benefit, from an admin's pov
Admin
Mea and such -- here's what it was supposed to look like:
That's not a small benefit, from an admin's pov
Admin
Well, 'being Windows and all that there's a whole slew of user-specific registry stuff that's needed if a user wants to keep their setup from workstation to workstation so a roaming profile includes that as well.
BTW, you can set it so that certain folders (Application Settings, Tempory Files) are excluded from a roaming profile and don't get copied to and fro. And there's another setting to restrict the size to stop users from bloating their profiles - means that they have to move foo.iso to their home drives before it'll let them log off. Tends to stop problems before they occur (and keeps my job easy!)
Admin
LOL I just got done using that Oregon child support calculater my self about 3 weeks ago. Fortunately, I didn't see that error, but it truely IS a small world after all... How terribly sad that the response from their state employeed IT person was "When entering numbers in the calculator, please be sure to not enter any commas, spaces, letters, or any character other than a number (0-9) or decimal point (.). Also, please be sure to fill in all of the required fields, all which are marked with a (*)."
Admin
Have you ever had to deal with a system whose error messages basically say "Sorry, some sort of error seems to have occured"? It's a lot of fun trying to guess the cause when you have 12 people breathing down your neck to resolve the situation.
So yeah, it definitely does matter what the error looks like. You might want to consider that if you are writing software.
Admin
I had a similar problem when I was trying to enter a Canadian postal code into tax preparation software. Only numbers were allowed.
Addresses should not be pre-validated. That just causes problems. In the case you give here, what would have been so bad if they allowed all ASCII characters (for example)?
Admin
Nope Massachusetts
Admin
Not making excuses, but frost can have an affect on power and data lines (outdoors, of course). The cold causes the cables to contract, so if an intermittent connection exists it will rear its ugly head during a cold snap. This is usually mitigated by adding sag into the overhead lines so they can contract under cold weather.
As for the moisture shorting out the wires during the rain, I'd also consider the added weight of the water on the line causing additional sag.
Admin
I heard one where some folks at IBM could not figure out why at 4:00 PM every day their network would go down.
Apparently, their LAN was connected to another building via a directional radio link.
When the sun hit their dish, it heated up and expanded, and threw off the direction by a tiny amt. That tiny amt though, amplified by distance was enough for the reciever on the other end to stop recieving the signals.
It could be an urban myth but it is a good story none the less [D]
Admin
I once wrote a program for to monitor a manufacturing machine. Theprogram worked perfectly in the office but for some reason kept on failing to work in the factory. We could not find the problem. While debugging the code we found a specifc integer variable kept on having a random value.
The problem??
Magnetic interferance caused by the huge amount of electricity. Weird it only affected the one varaible though...
Admin
There's group policy settings to mark specific folders as non-transferable. This way IE/FF caches and other random useless crud don't flood the network. FF could really use a delete-cache-on-exit/logoff option like IE. You can also set hard maximum profile settings, and 2003 may have a more intelligent local profile cache-compare loading (or it might be software we installed, I'm not sure).
I've seen huge network storms come from unix shops constantly broadcasting and retrieving files realtime from profiles on the central server, so that 'solution' only creates a new problem. Of course a competent admin can mitigate it or design a complex local/remote cache system, same as windows, but that's the OS's job as far as I'm concerned.
Admin
I used to have an email forwarding account at pobox.com (good service BTW). I remember once filling out an online form which included my street address and email. It returned an error saying 'Sorry, we can't deliver to PO Boxes'.
Admin
Wow! That one's right out of the BOFH excuse manual. [:D]
I'm beginning to wonder if thats the reason the hardware/software I'm working with now has these sorts of problems... (random values on occasion)
Admin
Yeah, the weather one is not a WTF and is very common. I use to have a phone line that would quit during the heat of the day. After about the 4th time (please call us when you are having the problem) they finally sent out someone to tighten the wires. The heat of the day was causing a poor connection to fail.
Admin
Ah, we have a similar problem between our main campus and the sattelite campus where I work. Thought you might be a co-worker of mine I didn't know.
Admin
You are all wrong. The reason your lines go down is because there is a group of malicious fanantical hackers out there using ultra-long wavelength radio waves to disrupt your connections, remember?
Admin
Tech support to the public can be a laugh sometimes, especially when the internet companies give the customers an excuse and politely suggest they toddle off back to the manufacturers...
Seems to be a large amount of machines referred from some ISPs which cannot connect to the internet due to the 'Flux capacitor needing replacement'.
Information Superhighway? Where we're going we don't need roads...