05-06-2003 04:14									#1
	Dumb computer mistakes. Suffering from ads?

Apart from thinking upgrading to Windows 95 was a good idea, I've never managed to do anything really dumb on a computer.

Any stories of extreme stupidity? You know, like the guy who trashed his system folder, or changed his monitor settings so that all he had was a blank screen (I know someone who did this with his new laptop).

Here's one: my friend and I shared an office and a computer back when we first started as philosophy tutors. My friend wasn't computer illiterate but some things were a bit new to him, like email (this was 96).

He wrote an impassioned letter to the student newspaper on some topic which I can't remember. Saving it as a Word document he attempted to attach it to an email. After about 5 minutes he said to me, "this is taking a long time". Well it would - he'd sent his entire copy of Word to them, thus tying up their slow computer for ages. Needless to say they weren't pleased and threatened to publish an account of his incompetence for the whole university to read.

	05-06-2003 04:22									#2
	Inflate your Upload Space

My son formatted C drive once.

	05-06-2003 05:35									#3
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Go to DOS promt

"format C:"

Good way of getting rid of windows bugs!

The most stupid thing I did (intentionally) was try to install windowsXP on my old 486 33Mhz!!!

	05-06-2003 05:41									#4
	Tired of ads?

I was once working in our corporations database folder for a particular application (in DOS, so this was a while ago) and I, being Mr. Speedy as usual, somehow typed in del *.dbf

	05-06-2003 05:49									#5
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I've never done anything too stupid (i.e. nothing that I couldn't fix myself), but one time my dad managed to change the access settings on his work computer so that nobody could log onto it, including himself. The IT people weren't so much pissed off as they were dumbfounded -- "Why would you do something like that? Why? You must have thought that you had a good reason, but for the life of us we can't conceive of what it might have been..."

	05-06-2003 06:16									#6
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I spent an hour DLing drivers, patches etc. trying to intstall a new a soundcard and speakers without realizing the later must be plugged in before the former will produce any effect!

	05-06-2003 06:21									#7
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http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

	05-06-2003 06:23									#8
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quote: You know, like the guy who trashed his system folder

Do a search on CG for "config.sys". The thread will be from about 4 months ago, IIRC.

	05-06-2003 06:33									#9
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quote: Originally posted by Frogger quote: You know, like the guy who trashed his system folder Do a search on CG for "config.sys". The thread will be from about 4 months ago, IIRC.

The Godel-man returns, as if from the dead. LTNS.

	05-06-2003 06:35									#10
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Actually here's a good comedy sketch. I really like the 12 o'clock flasher thing.

http://asp.cis.pitt.edu/mov/internethelpdesk.mov

	05-06-2003 06:49									#11
	Inflate your Upload Space

One of my classmates dropped his iBook. The plastic broke pretty damn quickly, and they charged him $1000 to repair it.

That's pretty dumb.

	05-06-2003 06:52									#12
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

On my school CS account, I was in BASH but needed to do a typescript (and hence needed to ditch the ANSI colored prompt), so I typed EXIT.

So my screen was replaced with a little:

code:
zone44a> 

code:
rm -rf *

code:
zone44a> pwd
/home/ug/milfordd

	05-06-2003 07:03									#13
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

Partitioning my drive was a pretty dumb mistake...

	05-06-2003 07:04									#14
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Nice site St Leo. I really liked this clown.

quote: A friend just got his new Aptiva/Win98 system and bought a bunch of software to go along with it. He installed everything, then complained that when he started his computer up, the screen was so cluttered he was having a hard time finding his desktop. I talked him through the process of making his desktop a more simple place by turning off fancy wallpaper, toolbars, and so on. He rebooted and said it was just as bad as it ever was. Sighing, I took a quick trip over to look at it. Somewhat to my amazement, I discovered that every time the computer booted up, a half dozen or so program groups opened up on the desktop, and all sorts of programs were spilling their menu contents onto the screen. After some poking around, I discovered that he had installed everything -- everything -- into his StartUp folder. I asked him why he installed all his programs in there. He said, "Well, I wanted to be sure they'd start up when I needed them, so...."

	05-06-2003 07:04									#15
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Why, what happened?

	05-06-2003 07:10									#16
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I did something to screw up my CS account recently, but for the life of me I have no idea what it was. I was just re-compiling my pattern recognition assignment, and my machine crashed on me. No big deal, I think, I must have used up the working memory, and I'd saved backups of everything. So I go to log back on: "The home directory for that account does not exist." What the hell, thinks I?

So I figured that the problem might just be on that particular machine, and went to another machine in the lab. The previous machine had a single login screen (type in your username and password, hit enter), but the machine I moved to had two screens (type in your username, hit enter, you go to another screen where you type in your password). So I type in my username, and the machine immediately crashes. ****.

So I go to a different lab -- same deal, the machine crashes as soon as I type in my login. This being 4:30 on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, the entire CS support staff was gone, and the regular University support staff was clueless ("Your CS account? Those are Unix machines, right? Sorry, can't help you, talk to the CS support staff"). At this point I figured that I'd somehow wiped my account, but hey, that just gave me a decent excuse to go home and get drunk. I sure as hell wasn't going to get any work done, now that I had the Midas Touch...

Forty hours later my account was back to normal, as if nothing had ever happened. I've still got no clue what I did to crash my account. Oh well...

	05-06-2003 07:11									#17
	Enter the AD-FREE zone

The dumbest thing I did was plugging in a 120 V power supply into a 220 V plug socket here in Argentina.. room was filled with smoke..

	05-06-2003 07:17									#18
	Got spare money?

The classic Unix mistake would be typing "rm * .cpp" instead of "rm *.cpp".

	05-06-2003 07:19									#19
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quote: Originally posted by St Leo The classic Unix mistake would be typing "rm * .cpp" instead of "rm *.cpp".

What would that do?

	05-06-2003 07:23									#20
	Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

the first one deletes everything, the second deletes all files ending in .cpp

	05-06-2003 07:36									#21
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I read somewhere that a relly bright fellow thought the CD drive was a coffee cup holder, then be broke it one day

	05-06-2003 07:39									#22
	Suffering from ads?

My using one of those "unwise.exe" uninstall programs, choosing a custom uninstallation setup, and then sit idly by while all the files not in use under c:\program files\ were sent to oblivion.

Oops.

Spent at least a month or so before I managed to get substitutes for the preinstalled software that made the CD-R drive and Windows Media Player work....Ahh, the wonders of filesharing.

	05-06-2003 08:08									#23
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

When I was a wee lad (that is, something like four years ago...) I decided in a fit of complete stupidity to lock down the computer through the BIOS with a password. My idea, as I recall it, was to just to be a little nuisance to my little sister who usually got home from school before me and thus occupied the computer.

And what do you know, I go and forget this crucial password. Luckily there was this guy my father knew who at the time helped us out with the computer - taught me how to reinstall Windows, how to get the soundcard drivers and the modem working, that sort of stuff - and he twiddled around with the motherboard's jumpers and managed to get the BIOS to stop asking for the password.

That's the stupidest thing I'll admit to doing.

	05-06-2003 08:27									#24
	Increase the size of your Attachments

Oh and I deleted autoexec.bat before.. oops.. When I had windows 98.. now that was dumb

	05-06-2003 12:35									#25
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quote: Back in the good old pre-PC days we sold a system that required the user to hit Ctrl-A in order to sign on. We sold one to some outfit in Canada. Well, trying to get them going over the phone took an hour. We'd say, "Hit Ctrl-A," and they'd say, "Ok, we hit Ctrl, eh? And nothing happened, eh?"

A Canadian classic.

	05-06-2003 14:03									#26
	Increase the size of your Attachments

The stupidest thing I ever did was to read through the entire Debian Potato package list (over 3000 packages), and track dependencies for a working installation on a piece of paper (I was totally new to Linux at the time). I worked out a list of packages I would need, and gave it to my dad for him to download at his work, where he had access to a fast connection and a CD burner. It didn't work, of course (although I think I would be able to get it to work with what I know now), so I gave up and bought Debian on CD. I learned a hell of a lot while reading it, though. For one, I realised half-way through what the package descriptions which mentioned 'X11' were referring to (I had thought that X was equivalent to Debian, from the context in some early packages).

SP

	05-06-2003 14:13									#27
	Suffering from ads?

A very long time ago, when I was in high school, the computer lab got it's first 286 PCs with harddrives, a real wonder back then. A few friends and I were already into computer games so we decided to see what we could play on this machine (we were already exchanging tapes for the Z80). We managed to get a floppy from somewhere and when we put in into the drive, it was filled with zipped files. We asked the teacher for help and she showed us how to unzip them and left us alone. What she didn't tell us was to create a temporary directory and unzip there, so we unzipped all the games into the root of C:\. After playing around for a while, we decided the games weren't interesting and erased all the files, including the system files. The teacher had also forgotten to set up Norton Commander to hide OS files. Gone were command.com, msdos.sys and io.sys. Soon enough, some bright spark in the lab hit the power off switch and, of course, nothing worked. It turned out there was a system floppy, but it was safely locked away and the only person with the key was on holyday. No more computer classes for a week!
Another thing happened when I went to university, but this time it wasn't me. They had a policy of keeping 1st year students on cheap old 286 diskless machines networked to a server with a harddisk. The professors thought it would minimise losses. The problem was that the server looked like any other work station. One day, every workstation in the lab was occupied and someone walked in and sat down at the only available "station". He turned on the monitor, saw a lot of strange looking things there, realised the keyboard was locked and decided the workstation had crashed. Before anyone realised what he was doing, he turn the power off to the server. On restart, the server truncated to zero every file that was open. Fortunately for him, only 1st year students were using this network and all the work lost could be recovered in week.
But the most stupid thing I have ever done was about 2 years ago, when I moved to another country and decided to ship my (desktop) computer as well, by mail, with 2 (two) hard disks still inside. The romanian postal services blissfully ignore "handle with care" signs, so you do the math.

	05-06-2003 18:28									#28
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Weell... once when I was playing around with stuff I didn't really know about much in Gentoo, I think I set the variable that set the temporary directory used for building packages to something it shouldn't be in one ebuild... trying to use that ebuild resulted in my /bin getting completely deleted and some stuff in /lib being destroyed (fortunately no critical libraries were deleted). After thinking for a while (and asking for Ignorance to share a /bin directory for me over ftp) I noticed I still had scp so I just copied my school's server's /bin over to my computer . I wouldn't really call it an act of stupidity, it was really caused by lack of discretion and knowledge...

quote: I forgot that when you exit bash, it sends you back to your home directory.

Was the instance of bash with the nice colours a subshell of the shell that you were going to write the the script in? AFAIK bash doesn't send you anywhere when you exit from it, but it would be pretty logical to assume that the login shell (the one without colours) would be in your home directory regardless of where the subshell is... and obviously, if you want to use UNIX, you should just learn to remember things like this .