Experiences with non-techies

[da na]

Another one.

"the vpn number"

[Bitter]

Me: I wish vehicle history had a word search.

Boss: It would be fine if there was a page down button.

Me: You mean the page down button?

Boss: Yeah....

[da na]

Not mine, from r/hardwaregore. Big brain time

[CT854]

20 minutes ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

Not mine, from r/hardwaregore. Big brain time

I see your dipshit, and I raise you Hayastan Shakarian, a copper-scavenging old lady in Georgia (the country) who snapped a fiber-optic cable running along a railway, and consequently cut off internet to 90% of the country of Armenia:

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-13158351

[da na]

3 minutes ago, CT854 said:

I see your dipshit, and I raise you Hayastan Shakarian, a copper-scavenging old lady in Georgia (the country who snapped a fiber-optic cable running along a railway, and consequently cut off internet to 90% of the country of Armenia:

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-13158351

Damn. That's a whole other level of stupid...

[Bitter]

I mean it was orange and copper is kind of orange.

 

In Canada most of a town lost internet because a beaver thought the fiberoptic cables would style up their dam, chewed through them like they were roots!

[CT854]

3 hours ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

Damn. That's a whole other level of stupid...

Meh.

 

I actually feel bad for her. She claims to not even know what the internet is, which, her being of advanced age in a quite impoverished part of the sorta-developed-but-also-quite-underdeveloped-especially-in-rural-regions* world, is actually quite likely true. Yeah, what she did was horrifically consequential and should have been (and was, AFAIK) punished, but "stupid" isn't exactly the word I'd use.

[da na]

15 minutes ago, CT854 said:

Meh.

 

I actually feel bad for her. She claims to not even know what the internet is, which, her being of advanced age in a quite impoverished part of the sorta-developed-but-also-quite-underdeveloped-especially-in-rural-regions* world, is actually quite likely true. Yeah, what she did was horrifically consequential and should have been (and was, AFAIK) punished, but "stupid" isn't exactly the word I'd use.

Well I also mean the fact they ran the fibre line right next to the railroad... that seems pretty dumb

[CT854]

5 minutes ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

Well I also mean the fact they ran the fibre line right next to the railroad... that seems pretty dumb

The reason they ran the fiber line next to the railroad was because it was a workaround solution without having to invoke some kind of eminent domain solution to lay down the wiring around the country. The railway company is a state entity, so the government just had the railroad lease a strip of land next to the tracks to the state telecom agency, which then laid down the cables.

 

Probably not ideal, but probably a better and easier solution than burying wire through peoples' houses and potentially having to take over the property.

[Heufneutje]

Once had a conversation with someone who claimed a new computer doesn't need to be fast at all if you have enough patience.

[da na]

Just now, Heufneutje said:

a new computer doesn't need to be fast at all if you have enough patience

-AMD, 2004

[Bitter]

13 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

Well I also mean the fact they ran the fibre line right next to the railroad... that seems pretty dumb

That's actually super common a lot of places for a lot of things. US for example, super common to not only run telecoms but also buried fuel pipelines along rail right of ways.

[Drama Lama]

5 hours ago, Eviljuche said:

You know, it's so funny to see how non tech people nowadays buying the VPN because they think that VPN is a thing that "saves from hackers". Like, they literally think that their Internet Connection is some sort of magical rift in which all the planetary hackers and ISPs want to get into, and there is this thing called VPN that protects this rift like an antivirus (yet another stupid thing they use). These people might literally think that with VPN it would be impossible to hack their e-mails, facebook accounts, etc. 

This probably has to do with many VPN companies doing sponsorships for every YouTuber and their dog.

[agatong55]

They call and say there laptop is plugged in and still wont turn on, so you go to that person and find out they never plugged it into the wall.... happens a lot of my work..

[da na]

This bothers me. One of the less gorey examples, I've seen some on sweaters, fuzzy blankets, etc.

[AbydosOne]

21 hours ago, CT854 said:

The reason they ran the fiber line next to the railroad was because it was a workaround solution without having to invoke some kind of eminent domain solution to lay down the wiring around the country. The railway company is a state entity, so the government just had the railroad lease a strip of land next to the tracks to the state telecom agency, which then laid down the cables.

 

Probably not ideal, but probably a better and easier solution than burying wire through peoples' houses and potentially having to take over the property.

So my day job tangentially involves dealing with fiber parallel to railroad tracks. They do this all over the place. Many railroads (in the US/CA at least) have their own telecom branches/subsidiaries that lease fiber to other users. Railroads use a small amount of the bandwidth for internal communications to remote sections, and sell off the remainder for profit.

 

One of the most mind-bending alternative uses of the fiber is for finding equipment problems (excessive vibrations/hammering) because it actually effects the signal in the fiber. They can watch where trains are along the line based on how the signal in the fiber changes. I still don't entirely believe it, but I saw the proof of concept slides, so it must work at some level.

</tangent>

[WhitetailAni]

2 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

This bothers me. One of the less gorey examples, I've seen some on sweaters, fuzzy blankets, etc.

Ooh, AGP Pro.

Fancy.

[CT854]

3 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

They can watch where trains are along the line based on how the signal in the fiber changes.

So, here in NYC, the subway agency has claimed for a while that they can't have accurate real-time data for certain lines because of how the century-old signaling system deals with where trains are positions, and that it's only accurate down to the signal block (which can be a fairly expansive stretch of track). How accurate is this fiber location, really? Never mind that this is probably on the scale of miles-long freight trains where the margins of error can be relatively large, but I am curious.

[AbydosOne]

6 minutes ago, CT854 said:

So, here in NYC, the subway agency has claimed for a while that they can't have accurate real-time data for certain lines because of how the century-old signaling system deals with where trains are positions, and that it's only accurate down to the signal block (which can be a fairly expansive stretch of track). How accurate is this fiber location, really? Never mind that this is probably on the scale of miles-long freight trains where the margins of error can be relatively large, but I am curious.

Without digging too far into it, the signal system is considered a "vital" system (meaning it fails safely) whereas pulling train location from fiber is very "non-vital". For the sake of preventing train collisions and whatnot, it won't be able to replace the system they currently have. That said, supposedly it was good enough to be able to isolate individual train cars (but that might have been in conjunction with other systems).

 

There are vital systems being tested in real-world scenarios of using signals in the track itself to locate trains in blocks, with the eventual goal being the removal of fixed block and have everything be software-defined rolling blocks in front of trains.

(Incidentally, railroad signaling is the day job I alluded to; I can go on for a while about how it all works )

[CT854]

3 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Without digging too far into it, the signal system is considered a "vital" system (meaning it fails safely) whereas pulling train location from fiber is very "non-vital". For the sake of preventing train collisions and whatnot, it won't be able to replace the system they currently have. That said, supposedly it was good enough to be able to isolate individual train cars (but that might have been in conjunction with other systems).

 

There are vital systems being tested in real-world scenarios of using signals in the track itself to locate trains in blocks, with the eventual goal being the removal of fixed block and have everything be software-defined rolling blocks in front of trains.

(Incidentally, railroad signaling is the day job I alluded to; I can go on for a while about how it all works )

Makes sense. Still, burying fiber optic cable next to subway tracks as a backup tracking method is a fun idea, before it inevitably gets chewed through by rats.

[da na]

Every now and then you see something like this...

[The_Machine125]

7 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

Every now and then you see something like this...

What in the absolute fuck..?

[Redsneth]

So, there was this one guy on my electronics class who was on my workteam, the country where i live in is low on technological resources so we've had to use a little old computers, some of them were broken and some of them worked when they felt like working, this one wasn't working so my teacher told him to fix it while the other part of the team (including me) were working in other thing, then my teacher gave him like 5 hard drives and 2 of them were absolutely old, i can't even tell what connection those had. However, the guy was afraid and nervous so he called me telling me that he never opened a computer before (in my mind that was just hillarious), and when i had a look to what he was doing, he was trying to connect a SATA port to whatever the hell that connection was after taping it literally on top of the power supply. In my mind sounds funnier

[da na]

no

someone make it stop

[WhitetailAni]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

no

someone make it stop

I was looking at NVidia's first "GPU", the NV1, and this came up...

 

Oh, but it gets worse...