I think one of my most simple - yet evil - prank was to LD_PRELOAD a modified `malloc()` on a colleague's computer. Except where the common practice was usually to have it blow up the memory or not return enough, I had mine to work mostly correctly: in most cases it would allocate as requested, and in occasional cases it would allocate slightly less than requested, and in rare cases it would blow up the memory.
You could think I shouldn't be proud of that one, considering some classmates probably went crazy wondering why their systems behaved erratically, and that it probably didn't help with some of their assignments. Generally our pranks were rather tame at school, and if I recall I had reserved that particular one to only 2 guys that were extremely d-ckish. Can't even recall their names now.
Other pranks were your usual stuff: switch keyboard mapping to Dvorak, swap LTR to RTL, randomly modified clocktime by a few minutes (also rather mean when you need to handover assignments, I suppose...), bind some keys to the most annoying shortcuts possible, unsecured xdisplay accesses, open cdroom on ssh-accessible machines... Basic stuff.
I also grabbed all the login/passwords for an entire promotion once. To my defence, I didn't exactly use the accounts for anything else but to change the default passwords (so, technically and legally, I did access the accounts, I suppose). I was just making a point to IT that assigning default passwords with guessable sequences (if I recall, major + year of promotion) was a bad idea and that for some students it could take weeks before they'd change it and leave some accounts open for abuse (e.g. for students who dropped, were sick on the first days, or would simply not use the labs that much). They weren't pleased by the surge of people contacting them to ask why their passwords didn't work.
When scientific distributed computing came rather prominent, I also clustered an entire classroom (didn't want to hit the whole school network, only rooms that were underutilized). That got noticed by an admin though, but he didn't know what it was and I just said this was one of my projets for graphics computing (which was indeed a real project for which distributed comp was authorized).
My reaction to this was "Oh hello Firebug, old friend" :)
It's not firebug, but it was nice that firebug at the time was installable as an extension or a simple bookmarklet, for just about any page, before "Dev Tools" became integral parts of our modern browsers.
It's already as far away as I possibly can. I'm afraid you overestimate the size of my housing.
It's a good tip, though. But with mobile phones now, people tend to start printing already on their way to the room and then stare at the printer and wonder if it's OFF, starting up, pending, or if for some reason it decided whatever PDF they were printing was a bit too annoying to print (I do have occasional buffering issues with some of these printers, as I suspect their available memory/disk storage isn't great).
Please do get started. This sound like an awesome story! (For HN, that is, maybe not so much for dinner parties).
Just thinking about the thought process you had is entertaining in my end, because my procrastinating self would have delayed the part about going into the ceiling as the last possible resort... So what evidence was strong enough that you figured there must have been something wrong with a particular cable, or all cables, and just a specific section?
I've had and installed only 5 home printers over my entire life (excluding professional printers at works)
One was an already refurbished dinosaur from Xerox.
1 was a canon (would have to look for the model).
The other 3 are HP LaserJet 100 Color MFP M175nw.
All 5 have lasted over 10 years, the MFPs being the youngest at 12 years.
That Xerox one was still going with after 20, it was just slow. And 1 of the HPs may be replaced for that reason, as apparently waiting 20s for a page is now too long for my family members, which I can't fathom for a single page of paper once in a while.
Not a single technical issue with any of these.
Not a huge test sample, but that makes me wonder:
1/ What do you people do with their printers?
During the most active period, I printed about 2000 pages / year, which was already too much, and was mostly because of the kids when they were younger and when someone I knew had to deal with a lot of paperwork with an administration, and maybe one year when finishing my studies where I printed a crap load of reports.
2/ What's the failure rate on these things??
3/ When did we decide that "over a decade" is an achievement to be noteworthy for any piece of equipment worth a decent amount of money?
EDIT: My only gripe was the disappearance of ChromePrint. That bugged me quite a bit. Unrelated to the printers, though. Those MFPs work fine with HP Print, default print drivers, CUPS, etc... on Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS.
If you like that sort of look back at tech history, and at things that came out from the PARC, I highly recommend "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik. It's a very well-written book with a ton of insights about how a lot of the things we took for granted came to be, from our printers and scanners, tablets, programming languages, and more.
If my memory serves right, it details a bunch of things on the development of laser printers, which gave Xerox a huge edge, the creation of the PARC and the giants that joined it, and many of the things they worked on: the Alto, Smalltalk, the Dynabook, and, indeed, the Ethernet.
It's also pretty funny to read how some administrative red-tape was sometimes being circumvented.
And also a bit sad to read how things went a bit south.
OP here. I just realized that it may seem like I'm trying to drive traffic to the post on StackExchange. I was more trying to get some discussion going here as well and see what people might think, as I suspect many people have an opinion on that around HN. I didn't want to duplicate the question, though, and wanted a single point of reference.
But obviously I'm looking forward to comments and thoughts from people who may not be able or wouldn't want to answer on SE.
My memories are that Google Video worked fine without additional plugins, but I primarily used it to consume Google content (primarily their tech talks), documentaries, etc... YouTube really was all about short home-made videos.
The UX on Youtube was generally better.
One thing I did like in Google Video though, was that it allowed to download copies of the videos easily to save local copies. That appealed to the data-hoarder in me, I suppose.
As former resident of several European countries, I find your statement, while not entirely incorrect, a bit too "blanketing".
All this may be quite dependent on where you live (the mention of the "church tax" makes me suppose Germany, as they have a Kirchensteuer, but I'm sure other countries must have a similar tax). In any case, there are European countries without church tax, beyond normal taxes that could be used for preservation of historical sites, religious or otherwise (which I agree may be somewhat biased in what religious sites can pretend to be considered historical).
Similarly, many countries do not have "religion" classes in "publicly funded schools", especially in countries that are (supposedly or admittedly) laic. That being said, there's also often a bias there as a lot of holidays are tied to religion and Christianity in particular, and it'd be quite common to explain in class the origin and nature of these holidays. I'd hardly think it counts as "religion" class, though, but that'd depend on what the teachers do.
I think one of my most simple - yet evil - prank was to LD_PRELOAD a modified `malloc()` on a colleague's computer. Except where the common practice was usually to have it blow up the memory or not return enough, I had mine to work mostly correctly: in most cases it would allocate as requested, and in occasional cases it would allocate slightly less than requested, and in rare cases it would blow up the memory.
You could think I shouldn't be proud of that one, considering some classmates probably went crazy wondering why their systems behaved erratically, and that it probably didn't help with some of their assignments. Generally our pranks were rather tame at school, and if I recall I had reserved that particular one to only 2 guys that were extremely d-ckish. Can't even recall their names now.
Other pranks were your usual stuff: switch keyboard mapping to Dvorak, swap LTR to RTL, randomly modified clocktime by a few minutes (also rather mean when you need to handover assignments, I suppose...), bind some keys to the most annoying shortcuts possible, unsecured xdisplay accesses, open cdroom on ssh-accessible machines... Basic stuff.
I also grabbed all the login/passwords for an entire promotion once. To my defence, I didn't exactly use the accounts for anything else but to change the default passwords (so, technically and legally, I did access the accounts, I suppose). I was just making a point to IT that assigning default passwords with guessable sequences (if I recall, major + year of promotion) was a bad idea and that for some students it could take weeks before they'd change it and leave some accounts open for abuse (e.g. for students who dropped, were sick on the first days, or would simply not use the labs that much). They weren't pleased by the surge of people contacting them to ask why their passwords didn't work.
When scientific distributed computing came rather prominent, I also clustered an entire classroom (didn't want to hit the whole school network, only rooms that were underutilized). That got noticed by an admin though, but he didn't know what it was and I just said this was one of my projets for graphics computing (which was indeed a real project for which distributed comp was authorized).
I miss these lab setups.