quote:

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Originally posted by Steen:
Selling my old Amiga 1000 was the stupidest thing I ever did with a computer. I miss some of those programs way more than I ever thought I would

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Yeah, my dad still uses the A3000. Even though my parents have a new G4 tower, he refuses to learn how to use it.

(Fortunately, I know enough to be able to mount the root filesystem after booting off the rescue floppies and edit the password file to recover myself.)

(I was young. Or younger, at any rate. Certainly stupider.)

The perfect excuse, given that you worked for a web design firm, was that you were studying the pornsites' web designs, since they must have really good designs to be able to turn a profit on the internet.

I was young. Or younger, at any rate. Certainly stupider.

Don't sweat it -- there are even stupider (or more careless) people. In the U.S. military, you can get jailtime for surfing porn on a government computer. Though, more typically a few years ago, a more "rehabilitative approach" is taken, where the punishment involves confinement to quarters, reduction in rank, a fine (measured against the person's wages), and extra duty. Also typically with some of that "suspended" so that the full punishment doesn't take effect if good behavior is maintained. Today, with all the attention that's been brought to "don't do it!", the punishments are more strict, and may even result in a less-than-honorable discharge (though jailtime is still rare unless it's something like kiddie-porn).

I've only personally run into the problem three times. Once I hit the wrong hyperlink from Slashdot and went to a site that sold realdolls or something like that. CYA, I closed the browser and told my boss what happened so when the inquisition came along, he could say that I made no effort to hide the incident, ergo am not likely deliberately surfing porn. Another time I was doing a websearch for an algorithm to compute Pi, and a promising website turned out to be a pornsite. CYA, again tell the boss. The other time was actually a few years ago, 1996 or '97. The logs showed several pages accessed at bettersex.com over a couple hours during a midshift from the computer on the command post's console. By the process of elimination, we determined it was one of my airmen. She explained her story, and it checked out -- the site was a Reader's Digest site about happy marriages, not a pornsite, and she was doing research for a sociology class; we'd previously given her permission to do research on the internet for her class from the console computer when it was quiet.

As for the stupidest thing I've done regarding computers, I'd say it has to be letting coworkers know that I know how to make MS Office hum. Years ago (1993), when I was a squadron adjutant, I got tired of trying to figure out how to get Office to do something at the moment I needed it done (since I was usually pushing a deadline). So for two weeks, three hours a day, I "played" with Office and with Windows to figure out how to get them to do just about anything I wanted. I soon became the "goto guy" when someone had problems with the Windows or Office. Since then, every time I get reassigned, I'm usually able to avoid being the "goto guy" for four or five months before I'd slip. Someone would ask for help with something almost trivial (along the lines of "how do I select a printer?" or "how do I center the title on the page"?), and when they notice how fast I fly through getting to where I can show them, rather than making 153 mouseclicks, it's all over -- I'm suddenly the "goto guy".

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cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?

About 15 years ago we used these giant "super-mini" computers. My customer had a few of them, ranging in size from a single 19" rack cabinet to a huge beast about 4' deep, 8' wide and 5' tall. The CPU was not a microprocessor, but rather a set of boards which plugged into a backplane in the rack. Now these weren't some sissy PCI cards, these were big-ass things around 18" square.

There was some folklore that you could sometimes clear up problems by reseating the boards in the machine. Empircally, this seemed true - sometimes a memory board would fail, and it would work again after you pulled it out and put it back in.

I heard a rumour later that week that the repair cost was in five figures.

quote:

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Originally posted by tomsci:
Finding the 'use little-endian?' setting in my firmware and deciding to change it. That was fun to change back, when you can't even boot into the firmware...

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Only problem... I typed in < ZA.

quote:

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Originally posted by zooz:
Oh, I have smashed keyboards when I
really got angry <:}

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The only thing was that we were requested not to:
A) Throw the keyboard across the room
B) Throw the keyboard at another person (even if we wanted too)
C) Throw the keyboard out the window
D) Smash the keyboard on any part of the CPU or Screen.

Stupid me used a screwdriver to get the heat sink off the '040. Hey look at that nice big trench I just dug across the motherboard. Must have cut a couple dozen traces leading to the CPU socket. Sorry sir, I can't sell you that computer; I wrecked it

quote:

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Originally posted by baker_nat:
What is the most stupid thing you have ever done concerning the computer?

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quote:

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Originally posted by baker_nat:
What is the most stupid thing you have ever done concerning the computer?

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Well, i once was moving files around, and decided to delete the folder i was using to put the things i wanted to get rid of. But i was kinda tired, and in that kind of "autopilot mode", so i just typed the famous "rm -rf directory/", just that i used the tab-autocomplete and ended deleting the one that had the stuff i wanted to save. Scripts, downloaded files, good information. When i went back a little bit later to look for it and i realized what i had done...

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Originally posted by jherazob:
Well, i once was moving files around, and decided to delete the folder i was using to put the things i wanted to get rid of. But i was kinda tired, and in that kind of "autopilot mode", so i just typed the famous "rm -rf directory/", just that i used the tab-autocomplete and ended deleting the one that had the stuff i wanted to save. Scripts, downloaded files, good information. When i went back a little bit later to look for it and i realized what i had done...

Since then, i can assure you that i'm A LOT more careful

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Along these lines, I've found it most helpful to build wildcard expressions that I plan to use with "rm -rf" as an argument to "ls". Better to find out that your shell is going to make ".[a-z]*" match capital letters as well by seeing a directory listing than by losing data!

The computer got freaky, I figured the motherboard had bitten the dust (it identified the chip as a 700 P3) so I replaced the motherboard.

The dumb part was moving the same processor to another new m/b and the computer not booting properly, replacing the new m/b but not the processor. When the old board identified that chip as a P3 700, it must have overclocked that sucker and fried it.
I spent $200 addressing the wrong problem. I like to think I'd know better than that, but--Sheesh!

Well, now I have two functional m/bs and am ordering two new processors...I guess I'm going to put a third machine together, but I learned that lesson well. More than likely that machine will be donated to a friend.

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-Charisma

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Hacking is not a
crime... no wait, it is.