An OS for punishment?

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burritoincognito

Gawd
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Sep 17, 2012
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We recently had our intern go on vacation for a week, after he'd only been here 9 days.

That's not ok for the rest of us not enjoying a nice vacation in Florida.

So, we're looking to mess with his PC. (We are the IT apartment). I'm going to throw in another old drive, and have him use it for a while.

Unfortunately, Hannah Montana Linux doesn't seem to play nice on his Dell, just leaving us at a BASH prompt.

Any other suggestions? We have a policy of not logging into their PCs, but beyond that, it just needs to fit on a 40GB hdd and work on an Optiplex 390.


(And I have thought of Vista SP0)
 
Put Tails OS and put the Windows XP skin on. Or maybe Windows ME.
 
I thought this was a Windows 8 bash thread :)

You guys seem like a fun bunch good luck with the prank. He may enjoy linux though and become the head of sysadmin there.
 
I was going to suggest VMS, it will work on an optiplex, but you might have to play with it some.
 
EagleMDB said:
That would be mean too, I like that idea, but I dont think it would work on an optiplex 330
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It would work fine. I put it on a 780 last xmas when somebody went on vacation. Hilarity ensued when he got back.

"Did I get hacked? OMG, did they steal my bank accounts?"

He is not very bright or tech saavy. lol
 
Entilza said:
I thought this was a Windows 8 bash thread :)

You guys seem like a fun bunch good luck with the prank. He may enjoy linux though and become the head of sysadmin there.
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Nah.

1. I'm the only one of the group of 8 guys that actually likes Windows 8 (I'm also the only one actively using it). I wouldn't consider it a punishment.
2. Given what I know about the Sysadmins, the intern is nowhere near that level. Hell, I'm not. But, it's the track I'm going down.


I'd thought about Red Star Linux, and had heard of Bebian. I'll give Bebian a shot first.

I'd also thought about just reinstalling Windows 7 in the Arabic font, and saying that he screwed his PC up when he accidentally installed Jabber with the first language option, rather than English.
 
EagleMDB said:
That would be mean too, I like that idea, but I dont think it would work on an optiplex 330
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Solaris is actually as friendly as any Linux, once you turn off that scary NWAM monster. :eek:


Red Star Linux or Ubuntu Satanic might really upset whatever economic or religious sensibilities his young mind holds.
DSL or Linux From Scratch. Or just a standard install of Gentoo, Arch, or BSD, so he has to spend hours compiling X11 before he can install a desktop.

BSD might be just the thing - goofy ports, the real chance of dependency hells and C-22s, lots of compiling, lots of real computer stuffs going on...
 
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You could just make it so he gets access denied messages no matter what he tries to do besides login.

Set the screensaver to come on every minute - it has to be a realy lame screen saver.. like teletubbies or power-rangers.. have the computer shut down after 2 minutes. Remove all the RAM except for 1GB.

Flip the screen 180.

Install UltraVNC or TightVNC server on it and then use the client to annoy him endlessly.

Lots of fun stuff you can do.
 
Windows ME, hahaha oh man that would suck

or gentoo...compiling from a stage1 or X11 the morning he's scheduled to walk through the door :O
 
Will windows 8 run on that? That's kind of mean though, I would probably do ME instead.

Or do a standard XP install or w/e the corporate standard is but just put lot of annoyances.

also, put "pskill winlogon" on a timer somewhere, like scheduled tasks or something.

I once wrote a quick little app for a coworker as a prank. Basically, it ran in the background and was called svchost.exe or something standard that it's normal to have more than one running, so it's hard to spot. At random, it would randomly do one of these things:

1: play a random windows sound
2: play a random PC speaker beep frequency
3: eject the cdrom drive
4: start to eat up lot of memory and cpu for a short interval

The randomness ranged from a minute to 4 hours, so in average it did something maybe twice a day.

He never left his sound on so I don't think he ever even heard a random windows sound. The beep he heard and wondered what it was, but eventually just disabled the pc speaker. The cdrom he could not figure out though. He knew that we used to login and do it so he thought it was just us again, but then he noticed it did it even when he brought his laptop home.

This went on for YEARS. Was pretty funny. I wonder if I still have that app somewhere.

Though, I think just putting windows ME is the quickest and funniest. Find a hello kitty theme for it or something, just to make it worse. Also install some kind of program like deep freeze so even if he tries to install something else it will just revert back.


Oh, another fun thing to do is to change keyboard keys. Like change the z and x. Something that's not used that often.
 
Quartz-1 said:
I'll actually vote for being professional and doing nothing.
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That ship has long since sailed.

the boss went to China to pick up an adopted baby. This cubicle was wrapped in pink paper, magnets were put everywhere, the "intel inside" chime that comes in the NUC boxes were strategically hidden everywhere, etc.

one of the guys here left for a week, and stickers were put everywhere over his desk, on each key, etc.

rubber band fights are Friday past time.
 
Set up something like basilisk to run at boot, fullscreen. Mac OS 6! Alternately, go weird. BeOS, AmigaOS, etc. I think Haiku is a BeOS clone that supports modern hardware. Might be worth looking in to. (God, I miss BeOS's tabs!)

burritoincognito said:
rubber band fights are Friday past time.
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Sounds like a fun place to work. If you're in CO, I've got a resume to forward ya!
 
Remap some of the letters on the keyboard. But only some of them. That way as he types he can't figure out what is going wrong.
 
If the guy is married, put a picture of his wife as the desktop background. That's it.
 
cyclone3d said:
You could just make it so he gets access denied messages no matter what he tries to do besides login.

Set the screensaver to come on every minute - it has to be a realy lame screen saver.. like teletubbies or power-rangers.. have the computer shut down after 2 minutes. Remove all the RAM except for 1GB.

Flip the screen 180.

Install UltraVNC or TightVNC server on it and then use the client to annoy him endlessly.

Lots of fun stuff you can do.
Click to expand...

Winexit.scr (part of Windows 2000 Resource Kit), set for 1 minute and no warning time. It will auto logoff after one minute of inactivity.

The removing RAM sounds like an awesome idea. Leave his current setup, but only at 512MB/1GB of RAM. Underclock CPU. That way, it's not immediately noticeable. He's just using a very slow computer.
 
burritoincognito said:
That ship has long since sailed.

the boss went to China to pick up an adopted baby. This cubicle was wrapped in pink paper, magnets were put everywhere, the "intel inside" chime that comes in the NUC boxes were strategically hidden everywhere, etc.

one of the guys here left for a week, and stickers were put everywhere over his desk, on each key, etc.

rubber band fights are Friday past time.
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Haha sounds like a fun place to work.

We put balloons in my boss's office once. I totally underestimated just how much you actually need. There was just a bunch of baloons on the ground, not even on top of each other. Was still funny though because every now and then we'd hear one pop. He opens the door and sees all these balloons everywhere.

The poor cleaning lady though, she has a phobia of balloons and almost had a heart attack when she opened that door. :D We told her to not worry about cleaning it that day.

You have to have fun at work, it increases morale.
 
B00nie said:
If the guy is married, put a picture of his wife as the desktop background. That's it.
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Jeez. What an asshole. :D

My wife says I get my 'break' from life by going to work. :/ What a break.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Jeez. What an asshole. :D

My wife says I get my 'break' from life by going to work. :/ What a break.
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Have you reached the 20+ year marriage mark yet? After that point death is your break :p
 
Mad[H]atter;1040905831 said:
Have you reached the 20+ year marriage mark yet? After that point death is your break :p
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16 this year. Getting close.
 
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