This has nothing to do with seti, boinc, or the mating habits of the South American swamp rabbit, but I thought it was just too good not to share.
This morning I was dispatched on a service call to a company that had recently purchased 5 new 'generic' PC's. High end stuff, P4's, gig of memory, etc, but no-names. The complaint was that 3 of the 5 that had been hooked up had a bad floppy drive. They could not get a diskette into the drives. The report said it felt like 'something was jamming the insides of the drives'. Upon arrival on site I discovered that it was in fact impossible to insert a diskette into the drive. The problem being that the company that built these computers had used a 'dummy knockout' plate that was molded to look like the face of a 1.44" floppy drive to fill in the top bay on all 5 computers. The real floppy drive was 2 bays lower and worked fine. Granted that 3 of the machines I looked at were tucked away under desks and not real easy to see, I would have thought that somebody in the office would have picked up on the real problem. Oh well, it was a fairly nice day for a drive.

Non the less it was an interesting story:)

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Scorpions - Wind Of Change

Reminds of a true story, I heard, when I took my computer science education at the business academy here:

The network and hardware managing department at the academy also service the business school, and some of the teachers there was computer illeterate, to put it mildly. One day a teacher called and complained that the floppy drive was broken as she couldn't make it work. A person from the managing department went there and he came back, shocked, because she hadn't only pressed the disk in reversed, but there was a small crack between the cabinet and the floppy drive, so she had squeezed the disk, reversed, in there!

That story became a legend!

Another stories: Computer Stupidities

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

I had to perform several interventions because of users inadvertantly inserting CDs between the drive and the next bezel/faceplate/plastic placeholder/youknowwhatImean.

I can hear you say " but thats an easy mistake to make with a slot-in drive ", and I would agree, but those drives are tray loaders :).

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mambo

I would say, "wow a real floppy drive", but damn if they still don't use the things to install raid drivers.

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IAS - Where Space Is Golden!

I would say, "wow a real floppy drive", but damn if they still don't use the things to install raid drivers.

You'd love this office. They still use Lotus Symphony and several other DOS based apps that just don't play nice under XP. The floppy diskettes are an integeral part of their sneaker-net system of sharing files. They just HAD to have XP, but don't want to change any of the older apps. I don't think I've ever seen anyone, or any company, so resistant to change or upgrading than this office is. Maybe it's a midwestern thing, but there are a LOT of dinosaurs around here that no one wants to part with despite the increasing costs to keep them ticking. I'm lovingly known as 'McGyver' to a printing company who's Wang VS75 and 4 external 413mb drives (the 70 pound apiece kind), and 2 DataProducts 600 lpm printers have many special scarecrow-built bubblegum and bailing wire fixes keeping them trudging along. You bet Jurassic it's fun! :)

.... I don't think I've ever seen anyone, or any company, so resistant to change or upgrading than this office is.

Just to interject some SETI into this... I bet they're still crunching CLASSIC wu wu's and won't change to SETI/BOINC (or is that Bionic?).

-Mrs. anon

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Just to interject some SETI into this... I bet they're still crunching CLASSIC wu wu's and won't change to SETI/BOINC (or is that Bionic?).

Heh, I don't know if they're seti-fied there, but if they are you're absolutely right. No joke, the head guy, a pretty colorful old gent, has original Nixon election posters hanging in his office... the office with no PC and an old Smith/Corona typewriter on the desk.

I would say, "wow a real floppy drive", but damn if they still don't use the things to install raid drivers.

You'd love this office.

You can tell them they can borrow my TRS-80 model IV if they need it. I also have a model 12 as well. Hell why don't I throw in my TI994a, I have all the extra goodies that go with it too.

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IAS - Where Space Is Golden!

I would say, "wow a real floppy drive", but damn if they still don't use the things to install raid drivers.

You'd love this office.

You can tell them they can borrow my TRS-80 model IV if they need it. I also have a model 12 as well. Hell why don't I throw in my TI994a, I have all the extra goodies that go with it too.

A TI 99/4 was my first computer. I remember it fondly, sadly it went insane. My son loved to play "Hunt the Wumpus" on it before I bought him a ColecoVision.

Later,

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David Stites
Pullman, WA USA

A TI 99/4 was my first computer. I remember it fondly, sadly it went insane. My son loved to play "Hunt the Wumpus" on it before I bought him a ColecoVision.

I still have my Atari 800 hooked up over in the corner. Even have managed to port many of the old Atari 810 diskettes to dcm and atr files that run on the Linux Atari 800 emulator.
Sometimes I'm so geeky I scare myself. :)

A TI 99/4 was my first computer. I remember it fondly, sadly it went insane. My son loved to play "Hunt the Wumpus" on it before I bought him a ColecoVision.

I still have my Atari 800 hooked up over in the corner. Even have managed to port many of the old Atari 810 diskettes to dcm and atr files that run on the Linux Atari 800 emulator.
Sometimes I'm so geeky I scare myself. :)

I used to use vi to read USENET but luckily I got over it.

Have fun,

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David Stites
Pullman, WA USA