Vaguely related - this reminded me of a support call I had where similarly the real world apparently merged into the digital world.
I was doing IT support for a small Australian company back in '98. A guy called me from a remote office, and after a few pleasantries he explained that the screen saver had fallen off the monitor of his dumb terminal, bounced on one of the keys on his keyboard, and now terminal was locked up. He wanted to know what key to press to unlock the terminal.
Eh?
I knew the guy, and although he wasn't trained in IT, he knew his way around the basics, he wasn't completely clueless.
I asked him to explain the problem again as I wasn't sure I'd understood. He repeated exactly what he'd said the first time.
I replied "What do you mean the screen saver fell off the monitor, that's impossible? Besides, it's a dumb terminal, they don't have screen savers."
After a little more fumbling around this weird upside-down world he was presenting me with, it suddenly clicked. He was talking about the physical CRT anti-glare screen filter [0] that used to be common around then, that literally hung in front of the screen. This has come unstuck and hit the scroll lock on the terminal. He called this a screen saver.
Since then the phrase "Screen saver" seems to have now morphed to mean what I used to call a desktop wallpaper, but that's a separate topic.
I love this kind of stuff. When you're sure the thing that seems to be happening couldn't possibly be happening, and then you find out that literally the speed of light is coming into play.
We had a similar problem at one of my first jobs where I was a programmer and backup network support guy. One employee was having a problem with his CRT monitor flickering. It was very subtle, but just enough to drive him nuts.
So we replaced the monitor with one that worked fine on another machine. Same problem. We tried replacing cables, power cords, and did a bunch of other troubleshooting things. Problem persisted. Eventually we replaced his entire computer. Same problem.
Finally I put his computer and monitor on a cart with an extension cord and wheeled it out into the hallway. The problem went away. It turned out to be bad electrical shielding in his office.
> The problem went away. It turned out to be bad electrical shielding in his office.
My Commodore 64 started "typing" of its own accord. We sent it to be repaired twice only for it to work perfectly when they tested it. Turned out after we got a bigger TV, we kept it too close to it, and the static electricity eventually caused the effect.
By the time the repair people got to it, it'd presumably discharged enough for it to stop, and it worked fine for a while.
Heh, reminds me of a cursed user I was trying to help in the mid 90s.
Sold a person a computer, they said it bluescreened when they used it. So we picked it up and tested it. No problems. Sent it back, bluescreening again. So they came to the office with the computer. I set it up and used it for 30 minutes with them there, not a single issue. The moment they touched the mouse the computer bluescreened. Replaced the mouse and the problem went away.
I once worked in a lab where all computers had its own electrical stabilizer, but they were so poor that probably they did more harm than good. When someone turned on a stabilizer, the nearest CRT monitors would distort for a second, then flicker and colors would be degraded.
Luckily, my place was by the wall, so the effect was diminished, but it gave me big headaches. I lasted only 6 months in that company this being the biggest reason.
The stabilizer was triggering the degausser on the CRT. Turning on speakers or putting cellphones where a call was coming in would sometimes do this too.
I knew this existed, and I was looking for it a few weeks ago; it's an interesting page to browse through every once in a while. But I just couldn't remember the name until now.
Having a "highlight" people can't find doesn't seem much of a "highlight" to me?
+1, After two years from joining HN I’m still learning about it. This is the first time I heard about highlights section! I couldn’t find it in lists nor on any other part of the site yet still interesting to read some comments there that do not show up in best comments section. How exactly this works?
The story would be better, if they had kept the real numbers, and not added fake numbers afterwards (maybe they didn't keep notes, and forgot the real numbers).
At the end of the story, that 3 millilightseconds is the one-way distance, and that can't be correct.
Yes, that part doesn't add up. The time from sending SYN to receiving SYN+ACK would be six milliseconds assuming lightspeed between the source and a destination 500 miles away.
That said: I know the ending, and by now the details about SunOS and sendmail aren't too interesting, but the "This is the chairman of statistics" line always gets me laughing out loud.
why would anybody want to do that? I thought karma points above a certain low number don't offer benefits and the number is not visible to anybody but you.
EDIT: I just realized it's visible in profiles :facepalm:
I'm pretty new to this community and this was my first exposure to this story. It's definitely going into my "anecdotes from the internet" mental repository.
Somewhat related but not really. Back in 2007 when I worked for a large ISP as a second line support technician for various services, ADSL was very much still in vogue. And the technology, over copper wire, had a max distance of where it would be stable. Some clients were on a special plan that tried to up this distance by a bit, maybe 2-3 more km but really it was still quite unreliable but still usable for browsing the internet, generally.
But during the summer I received a call from a client that had been unable to use his IPTV service during the day for almost a month without hickups and disturbances and his internet was slow as a glacier from time to time and as I was measuring the equipment, packet loss and all the usual stuff it struck me that he was very far away from his nearest telephone station. After some back and forth with a technician and lots of measuring we came to the conclusion that since it was so hot out during that summer the line just expanded over to a distance that was just far away enough that the line would become unstable during daytime when it became hotter outside.
We could not really do anything to help him. I do not miss the copper net.
Typically they wouldn't do these jobs, the copper net was already on it's way out by that time in favor of fiber optics and the entire landline system was on maintenance at that point.
I left shortly after and these days, now they have removed almost all of it already.
tangentially related: 15 or maybe 20 years ago i worked at a repair shop and someone brought in a TV that they said switched to spanish every night at 5pm.
they were watching over the air channels and there was only a setting in the tv for menu language. sure enough though, at 5pm that night we watched as the tv started speaking in spanish. we tried a few more channels and found that all but one or two were in spanish.
as it turns out, some stations broadcast audio in multiple languages and some tvs allow you to change the preference. sadly for this person, the used tv they bought came from a spanish speaking country and didn't have anyway to change that preference.
My Bluetooth speaker switched to Chinese after a few years of use. I have no idea of how it did it and no idea of how to revert it. There is no reference to it in the manuals.
A few days before, I brought a robot vacuum home. It was made and purchased in China. When I started it for the first time, it bumped into my server and unplugged it.
Therefore a state-sponsored cyberattack is not out of the question.
I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones that indexes through 3 languages (Mandarin, Korean, English) on startup when you also hold down some other button besides power (play/pause IIRC). I don't think it's documented. Maybe your speaker is similar.
At lunch today I was just talking about Sendmail, which I can assure you is a rather rare occurrence. I was talking about the first time I set up sendmail, back in '91 or '92. I was using the bat book and nearly tore my hair out over a week getting that first setup working. I eventually came to understand and appreciate the m4 config, but I ended up moving to qmail and postfix in the mid '90s and never looked back.
Readit News
I was doing IT support for a small Australian company back in '98. A guy called me from a remote office, and after a few pleasantries he explained that the screen saver had fallen off the monitor of his dumb terminal, bounced on one of the keys on his keyboard, and now terminal was locked up. He wanted to know what key to press to unlock the terminal.
Eh?
I knew the guy, and although he wasn't trained in IT, he knew his way around the basics, he wasn't completely clueless.
I asked him to explain the problem again as I wasn't sure I'd understood. He repeated exactly what he'd said the first time.
I replied "What do you mean the screen saver fell off the monitor, that's impossible? Besides, it's a dumb terminal, they don't have screen savers."
After a little more fumbling around this weird upside-down world he was presenting me with, it suddenly clicked. He was talking about the physical CRT anti-glare screen filter [0] that used to be common around then, that literally hung in front of the screen. This has come unstuck and hit the scroll lock on the terminal. He called this a screen saver.
Since then the phrase "Screen saver" seems to have now morphed to mean what I used to call a desktop wallpaper, but that's a separate topic.
[0] https://dylbs6e8mhm2w.cloudfront.net/productimages/500x500/E...
We had a similar problem at one of my first jobs where I was a programmer and backup network support guy. One employee was having a problem with his CRT monitor flickering. It was very subtle, but just enough to drive him nuts.
So we replaced the monitor with one that worked fine on another machine. Same problem. We tried replacing cables, power cords, and did a bunch of other troubleshooting things. Problem persisted. Eventually we replaced his entire computer. Same problem.
Finally I put his computer and monitor on a cart with an extension cord and wheeled it out into the hallway. The problem went away. It turned out to be bad electrical shielding in his office.
My Commodore 64 started "typing" of its own accord. We sent it to be repaired twice only for it to work perfectly when they tested it. Turned out after we got a bigger TV, we kept it too close to it, and the static electricity eventually caused the effect.
By the time the repair people got to it, it'd presumably discharged enough for it to stop, and it worked fine for a while.
Sold a person a computer, they said it bluescreened when they used it. So we picked it up and tested it. No problems. Sent it back, bluescreening again. So they came to the office with the computer. I set it up and used it for 30 minutes with them there, not a single issue. The moment they touched the mouse the computer bluescreened. Replaced the mouse and the problem went away.
Luckily, my place was by the wall, so the effect was diminished, but it gave me big headaches. I lasted only 6 months in that company this being the biggest reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404
We put it in /highlights which may be of interest to people: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
I knew this existed, and I was looking for it a few weeks ago; it's an interesting page to browse through every once in a while. But I just couldn't remember the name until now.
Having a "highlight" people can't find doesn't seem much of a "highlight" to me?
+1, After two years from joining HN I’m still learning about it. This is the first time I heard about highlights section! I couldn’t find it in lists nor on any other part of the site yet still interesting to read some comments there that do not show up in best comments section. How exactly this works?
>Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system.
But the comment
>Since my preference to wipe and reload was unacceptable - too much downtime and too many billable hours - the obvious thing to do was update sendmail
Must be the part where
>The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty
At the end of the story, that 3 millilightseconds is the one-way distance, and that can't be correct.
That said: I know the ending, and by now the details about SunOS and sendmail aren't too interesting, but the "This is the chairman of statistics" line always gets me laughing out loud.
EDIT: I just realized it's visible in profiles :facepalm:
But during the summer I received a call from a client that had been unable to use his IPTV service during the day for almost a month without hickups and disturbances and his internet was slow as a glacier from time to time and as I was measuring the equipment, packet loss and all the usual stuff it struck me that he was very far away from his nearest telephone station. After some back and forth with a technician and lots of measuring we came to the conclusion that since it was so hot out during that summer the line just expanded over to a distance that was just far away enough that the line would become unstable during daytime when it became hotter outside.
We could not really do anything to help him. I do not miss the copper net.
I left shortly after and these days, now they have removed almost all of it already.
they were watching over the air channels and there was only a setting in the tv for menu language. sure enough though, at 5pm that night we watched as the tv started speaking in spanish. we tried a few more channels and found that all but one or two were in spanish.
as it turns out, some stations broadcast audio in multiple languages and some tvs allow you to change the preference. sadly for this person, the used tv they bought came from a spanish speaking country and didn't have anyway to change that preference.
A few days before, I brought a robot vacuum home. It was made and purchased in China. When I started it for the first time, it bumped into my server and unplugged it.
Therefore a state-sponsored cyberattack is not out of the question.
Dead Comment
The actual underlying transmission protocol of the relativistic universe shining through when trying to send an email.
At lunch today I was just talking about Sendmail, which I can assure you is a rather rare occurrence. I was talking about the first time I set up sendmail, back in '91 or '92. I was using the bat book and nearly tore my hair out over a week getting that first setup working. I eventually came to understand and appreciate the m4 config, but I ended up moving to qmail and postfix in the mid '90s and never looked back.