Experiences with non-techies

[da na]

1 hour ago, starsmine said:

it’s not called x86 either. Why we did that initially baffles me. There are x86 chips only are 16 bit as well, as well as the weird 8088. 
 

and 64 is called AMD64, not x64.

IA 64 (or 86-64) isn’t used at all.

 

using x86 for 32 bit is far more confusing the x32 honestly 

At this point why not call all Intel 64-bit chips ia64...

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, da na said:

At this point why not call all Intel 64-bit chips ia64...

they... are?
Thats what itanium was, its dead. Only like two HP machines run it with depreciated hardware/software at this point. 

unless you mean that because its dead, we can just re use the name.... cause we do with almost do with x86-64. which is not confusing at all. 

honestly, x86/32bit getting drivers at all these days is kind of baffling. Who is running new software on machines older then the Athlon64?

[da na]

13 minutes ago, starsmine said:

they... are?
Thats what itanium was, its dead. Only like two HP machines run it with depreciated hardware/software at this point. 

unless you mean that because its dead, we can just re use the name.... cause we do with almost do with x86-64. which is not confusing at all. 

honestly, x86/32bit getting drivers at all these days is kind of baffling. Who is running new software on machines older then the Athlon64?

I mean AMD-licensed x64 on Intel CPUs.

 

And x86 getting drivers will probably vanish within the next year or two since Win11 has no 32-bit version; there have been a rare few occasions that I have installed Windows 10 32-bit because it is a bit lighter on RAM and disk usage.

There WERE a few mainstream x86 CPUs that came out post-Athlon 64 - most significantly the Core Duo but also there were a couple Celerons into the late 00s that were still hardware limited to x86.

[Middcore]

18 hours ago, TJ10 said:

My grandpa always seems to have a doubt on his phone and wants me to help him. I am very happy to help him with it.

But it has turned into a point where he expects me to do all the work on his phone when I'm around him, it gets annoying fast. 

 

What's more annoying? He always asks me the same doubts he had earlier and pretends like he does not know how things work but does the same things when I'm not around him. I don't get the psychology behind it???

 

I'm not sure I entirely follow what you're saying, but is it possible that your grandpa's memory is failing?

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Middcore said:

 

is it possible that your grandpa's memory is failing?

This is why Right to Repair is so important 

[djksm]

43 minutes ago, da na said:

This is why Right to Repair is so important 

the government does not allow us to replace memory in humans. worse than apple

[Average Nerd]

Today I learned that my mom was completely unaware of the 1TB HDD in her laptop that she has owned for 5 years.

She has just been filling the 256GB boot SSD up, and now there are only 31GB of free space left on it, while the HDD is completely empty.

I am actually amazed.

[da na]

3 minutes ago, Average Nerd said:

Today I learned that my mom was completely unaware of the 1TB HDD in her laptop that she has owned for 5 years.

She has just been filling the 256GB boot SSD up, and now there are only 31GB of free space left on it, while the HDD is completely empty.

I am actually amazed.

Eh, makes sense. User document, video, picture etc folders are on C: by default.

[Donut417]

I got one. My mom pays several of her bills thru the bill pay section of Huntington’s online banking. I generally pay companies directly. While my folks were out of state I was handling the bills. Well my mom is secondary on my bank account. I was paying multiple bills and managed the pay the gas/ electric out of my account. All because I’ve never used the banks site to pay bills. 

[Bitter]

2 hours ago, Donut417 said:

I got one. My mom pays several of her bills thru the bill pay section of Huntington’s online banking. I generally pay companies directly. While my folks were out of state I was handling the bills. Well my mom is secondary on my bank account. I was paying multiple bills and managed the pay the gas/ electric out of my account. All because I’ve never used the banks site to pay bills. 

I've almost selected the wrong account of joint accounts like that before. My mom did once. It was a good laugh.

[Avocado Diaboli]

We have an inkjet plotter at our office to print out large format documents up to A0 width. We use it both to print out plans as well as for internal coursework to hang up on walls. The problem is that nobody ever double checks if they have the correct printer selected when they print out documents. And some people have managed to set the plotter as their default printer for some reason.

 

Here's a list of things I've fished out of the output tray of that machine over the years:

• A4 sized documents on long strips of paper, with only the leftmost part printed and the rest of the paper left blank and therefore completely wasted.
• Random pictures and photos, sometimes private stuff, typically also in a size that wastes a ton of paper.
• Internal employee assessments. So, you know, confidential stuff.
• Every year we get a payroll document for tax purposes that lists our entire yearly salary and tax exempt deductions for the various retirement funds we have to pay into. Again, confidential stuff you really wouldn't want most people to see. Imagine my surprise when I walked in an saw one of the managers had printed out this document on A0 size. It's typically not easy to reconstruct who sent the print order without bothering our IT department, but since the that document lists the person's name on it, I rolled up the printout and walked over into that manager's office with a huge shit-eating grin on my face and reminded him to make sure he selects the correct printer in the future. Our regular printers only print out documents if you log in with your badge, so you never run the risk of just printing out confidential stuff by accident. But the plotter doesn't have that mechanism. Once you hit "print" on your PC, it prints out that document.

[Bitter]

My mother knows the value of a printer that just works every time.

God bless, she's going to fix her printer.

[DoctorNick]

51 minutes ago, Bitter said:

My mother knows the value of a printer that just works every time.

 

God bless, she's going to fix her printer.

You have taught her well. 

[DoctorNick]

On 3/12/2024 at 7:19 PM, Average Nerd said:

Today I learned that my mom was completely unaware of the 1TB HDD in her laptop that she has owned for 5 years.

She has just been filling the 256GB boot SSD up, and now there are only 31GB of free space left on it, while the HDD is completely empty.

I am actually amazed.

You know that one is on you right? Why didn't you change the default location for user folders

[Average Nerd]

5 minutes ago, DoctorNick said:

You know that one is on you right? Why didn't you change the default location for user folders

I have literally never used that laptop in my life, it predates my computer hobby by several years, so don't bash me too hard for it.

[DoctorNick]

1 minute ago, Average Nerd said:

I have literally never used that laptop in my life, it predates my computer hobby by several years, so don't bash me too hard for it.

I see, then you must come to the rescue, now that you've escaped from pure savagery  

[Bitter]

58 minutes ago, DoctorNick said:

You have taught her well. 

Actually she did this 100% on her own. She can just sort of look at things and see how they come apart and go together. I think I inherited that from her. She turns 73 this year and has been using computers since the 80's. Linux for almost 20yrs casually.

[da na]

It's funny when people are surprised to learn that a computer is mostly an empty box.

This has happened a few times now where I pop off a side panel in front of someone and they're like "wait... where is everything?", expecting every inch of a desktop case to be filled. I recently had to explain to someone that I did not steal most of their computer, their ATX Inspiron just didn't have a lot in there to begin with.

 

I guess they expect every computer to look like the z8 workstation line, where the case is so packed with fan shrouds and mounts that you can't see an inch of circuit board with the panel off. 

Spoiler

Sometimes it surprises me a little as well to find a particularly empty case - why even sell ATX computers anymore with no PCI cards, optical drive, or 3.5" HDD? Why have such a giant box if storage, WiFi, and all the I/O fit within the footprint of the board lmao

 

PS nice page number! 

[Bitter]

Boss: Hey, how come when I play YouTube at home it's all ads and keeps pausing?

Me: oh I run an ad blocker and no pause plugin on the work PCs.

Boss: can I put those on my phone?

Me: no. No plugins on apps.

Boss: what if I play it on the browser on my phone?

Me: it stops playing when the screen sleeps.

Boss: why would they do that??

Me: so you pay to unlock no ads and play with screen off.

[da na]

32 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Boss: Hey, how come when I play YouTube at home it's all ads and keeps pausing?

Me: oh I run an ad blocker and no pause plugin on the work PCs.

Boss: can I put those on my phone?

Me: no. No plugins on apps.

Boss: what if I play it on the browser on my phone?

Me: it stops playing when the screen sleeps.

Boss: why would they do that??

Me: so you pay to unlock no ads and play with screen off.

Well to be fair, Firefox for Android (and I think Edge too?) do have plugin support

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, da na said:

Well to be fair, Firefox for Android (and I think Edge too?) do have plugin support

Yes, but that's too complicated for him and it still pauses play when the screen turns off.

[TJ10]

On 3/12/2024 at 3:27 AM, Middcore said:

 

I'm not sure I entirely follow what you're saying, but is it possible that your grandpa's memory is failing?

Ah no no, his memory is completely fine lol. 

I guess he feels some sort of comfort offloading his tech-work to me knowing i'd do a better job than him.

[Donut417]

38 minutes ago, TJ10 said:

Ah no no, his memory is completely fine lol. 

I guess he feels some sort of comfort offloading his tech-work to me knowing i'd do a better job than him.

A lot of older people just dont have the confidence when it comes to tech.

[Bitter]

43 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

A lot of older people just dont have the confidence when it comes to tech.

100%

But then there's my mother, her printer control board repair was a complete success, works like new.

One time an update broke something to do with Pulse Audio, she called me to tell me about it and that she googled it, found the command to run in terminal to fix it, and wondered if I had ran into the same problem.

And on the exact opposite end of the spectrum is my boss who just takes everything working correctly for granted and then flies off the handle when he can't copy/paste something.

[dcgreen2k]

A while back I was helping a coworker fix some build errors he was having on a software project we were working on. We eventually got it working, but his method of debugging was to just look on StackOverflow and copy/paste random commands into his terminal until the errors were resolved. He was doing it all so fast that there was NO way he actually read what he was copying. Needless to say, that was... concerning to watch.