* Posts by Anonymous Custard

2781 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: "They have that kind of money"

Likewise

How many boxes with blinkenlights have ever been wrapped around a tree or lamp-post when the ego outstrips the control skills...?

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Aaron?

I was probably aiming to go into The Tyburn Tree

A good place to hang out...

Microsoft Copilot for Security prepares for April liftoff

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Papering over the cracks

So in short they're trying to use artificial intelligence to overcome the real stupidity of how their products are designed (?) in relation to security...

Anonymous Custard
Alien

Re: chit chow

All your bases PCs are belong to us

NASA's FY2025 budget request means tough times ahead for Chandra and Hubble

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

And had boldly gone somewhere...

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

Looks like mission accomplished... *evil grin*

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

OK, so I'm now going to have the Mission Impossible theme stuck in my head all day after reading that...

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

Re: Yet another similar experience

I had something along similar lines, but more mechanical.

Coming out of uni, did the usual milk round which included an interview with Rolls Royce in Derby (aerospace engines).

Turned up and the morning was a tour followed by an "engineering test" due to last an hour. So I sits down and looks at this, and it's stuff like here is a train of gears, if i turn the first one clockwise, which way will various others in the sequence turn? They did try to throw a curve-ball or two in there (for example 3 gears meshed together in a triangle - the answer being none of them can turn).

So I'm there thinking "these guys make the engines that keep planes flying and they give tests like this?", but I look around at my fellow candidates and they all seem to be struggling or just looking dazed and confused. it was the weirdest experience I've had in such a situation. Especially given I think I finished the test in 20 minutes, then had the invigilator sit there looking at me and wondering what to do with me for the next half hour or so.

Anyway I finish the day up and a few days later I get a letter starting "Congratulations. When you start with Rolls Royce...".

As in I've passed the interview, and they seem to be just assuming I'm going to take the job because they'd offered it to me.

In fact they were one of four possibilities I had, and that letter combined with that test immediately put them at the bottom of the heap.

I ended up with offers from all four, and the chosen one is still my employer to this day, over a quarter century later...

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: "They add great value when the time comes to lay people off."

In my quarter-century here I've seen at least 3 HR managers/directors depart, and at least two of those were during rounds of redundancy (the third being announced around 3 days after she departed, with no prior warning or announcement to the rest of us).

Make of these what you will...

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Microsoft wasn't really committed

Doesn’t bode well for CoPilot …

You say that like it's a bad thing...

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

Anonymous Custard

Re: And I want it why?

Or a way to create its own problem to "solve"...

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: @Yankee Doodle Doofus - Hover and Pause

Pardon my ignorance but, where is that edge copilot ?

That kind of ignorance should be cherished, not pardoned...

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

Yet another solution looking for a problem.

So either they throw it at so much stuff that my pure (bad?) luck at some point something will stick, or they use it to create their own problem...

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

Anonymous Custard
Boffin

Re: If the navy has an admiral ...

The end of Air Force One also springs to mind, for those who prefer aircraft to boats...

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Anonymous Custard

Re: Revenge

Although I find cold hard cash also quite acceptable...

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Catgacating

Didn't that get released in 2019?

Husqvarna ports Doom to a robot lawnmower – not, thankfully, its chainsaws

Anonymous Custard
Devil

As long as they don't learn IDDQD, IDKFA and most appropriately IDCLIP...

Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell

Anonymous Custard
Boffin

Robot Wars?

Should we lend these guys some old VHS tapes of Robot Wars, and highlight the srimech?

RIP Rex Garrod...

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Fuses?

Some Boeings might benefit from being bolted to the ground and maybe shaken about a bit too...

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Fuses?

I would personally use the space reserved for cup-holders.

At which point someone will put down his or her coffee and everything will go dark and quiet...?

Anonymous Custard
Thumb Up

Re: Shirley?

If you want a follow-up (aside from Airplane II of course) then I can recommend Top Secret.

Not as well known nor quite as good, but still great fun.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Anonymous Custard
Pint

Re: A successful failure?

Well played sir, I think you just won this week's comments.

Anonymous Custard
Coat

Re: Hillary-ous

Yeah these puns are truly mountain up...

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Nice day for a trip to Scotland

That'll be Schrodinger's Cat, where the mere act of looking attracts its attention so it stops playing around with the cables and connections...

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

Re: Had a similar thing happen

Yup, as I often say when I'm teaching some of our new recruits on troubleshooting, there's never been an investigative tool or procedure produced which is better than the mk 1 eyeball.

It's amazing how often we get called in by customers to downed machines that have been that way for days (or even weeks) and they've done all their meetings, model based problem solving, devising of tests to run and analysis of data etc in nice cosy meeting rooms and have never actually ventured into the cleanroom (for background, I work for a semiconductor equipment maker) and looked at the damn thing.

Then you walk in there, take one look and have a "there's your problem" moment (to quote Adam Savage) when you see something on the floor or hanging off that shouldn't be...

Anonymous Custard
Boffin

Indeed, or the classic "dust in the power connection", where the only cure is to power down, pull the cable out, blow into the end of it and then reconnect it and test...

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Anonymous Custard
Mushroom

We have something very similar here, although in our case with travel.

Before there were a couple of part time ladies who handled it all for us, we just told them what we want and they valiantly fought with Concur and various travel sites and got it done.

Both more than worth their weight in gold for what they did, but certainly not paid that much or indeed anywhere near what they were worth.

Then bean-counter central (who never travel anywhere) decided it would be a good idea to get rid of them and make us all do our own travel arrangements etc.

So now we all have to spend 3-5x as long as our former travel gurus did as we don't know the systems as well as they did (and we're really getting to loath them as well), not to mention our hourly pay rate is probably also somewhere between 2-10x what they were originally on I would estimate (given this rule applies all the way up to director and VP level for self-booking).

Now quite where is the economy or the job satisfaction here again, especially given I spent more time travelling and out of the country last year than in it?

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: "...never put anything on there that you don't want a user to see."

Haven't we all...?

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Anonymous Custard
Alien

Re: The inspiration for Oolite

I was going to post the exact same thing (given I've submitted many OXPs and OXZs to expand it over the years), so have an upvote instead...

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Anonymous Custard
Flame

Amstrad was sold to Sinclair

I think Lord Yer-Fired might have something to say about that?

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Anonymous Custard
Holmes

Re: Hot backup servers?

...or that they were solely for hosting the remote backup for the company, and had no other usage?

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

Anonymous Custard
Flame

Re: ransomware

Or something like "want to turn your heated seats off now it's summer? Send £1 per minute, otherwise they go back on at full blast..."

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Anonymous Custard
Pirate

Out in the fields

Not only the lowest common denominator of hardware, but also in the range of common usage scenarios.

We had something recently here which when rolled out royally screwed up everyone working in the field.

Everything had been "tested" of course before roll-out, but always from the comfort and safety of the company LAN when sat in a cosy office.

But when run on-site with the customer breathing down your neck and access only via VPN into the mothership network, the less than optimal speed and other under-the-hood differences between the connection methods were enough to completely screw up the remote users.

And given all this was actually aimed primarily at field usage, there were some interesting questions asked at the post mortem as to why it hadn't actually been field-tried before release...

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Anonymous Custard
Boffin

Re: Priorities

It was doubly frustrating when I couldn't turn the mobile phone off because I needed its meagre light to see inside a server, the building's lights being on a timer and it being "after hours".

Flight mode is your friend and wingman in many such situations...

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Priorities

I just want an arrangement in which the callers can wander around getting more and more frustrated.

And for bonus geek points, include reference to pale bulbous eyes watching them in there at random intervals.

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

Re: Priorities

1. In person. "What are you doing to get this fixed ?" Reply: "Talking to you"

The better answer is: "What are you doing to get this fixed ?" Reply: "Currently nothing, because I'm having to talk to you instead"

It semi-subtly gets the point across, without the aid of a clue-by-four to the cranium.

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

Re: Priorities

Doubly so when they insist on PowerPoint presentations, pretty graphs and all the other nonsense required to prettify the data enough that their brains can parse it.

Or perhaps not even then, and you have to spend extra time explaining the basics, and then when another manager joins half way through then doing it all again from the beginning.

Leading to the oft repeated mantra of "Do you want me to do this update, or just waste my time actually fixing the issue?"

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

Re: C-Suite

As usual the workers suffer for C-Suite errors, but the C-Suite take credit for workers achievements/

There being the succinct definition of management in general...

Stratolaunch takes ready-to-fly hypersonic craft skyward, but still no launch

Anonymous Custard
Joke

N. Korean Weapon

The North Korean weapon being a rock thrown by Kim Jong-un himself, which easily broke the Mach 5 barrier?

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: bullshit detected

Based on my experience with some engineers, any two items can be made to fit...if they don't, then you just need to use your hammer some more.

I was going to say something similar, except normally it's manglement rather than engineers, and they will be made to fit by use of increasingly excessive force to jam one into t'other.

And of course, once they are "fitted", normally they will neither be removable ever again without breakage, nor will they work either as they now are or when actually put into their correct orifice.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Solar flare

China finally takes over the world with the aid of an abacus.

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft et all all agree on a single universal cable and connector design that will work for all devices and applications for data, power and communications.

A handful of such cables are included for free with every new device sold.

All such new devices sold will be easily openable and repairable by anybody, with parts available at a sensible price and availability.

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

The UK realizes the error of its ways and rejoins the EU, just as all the other member states follow the Netherlands and leave...

Google, Amazon, Apple et al all pay their taxes in all member states.

FAA stays grounded in reality as SpaceX preps for takeoff

Anonymous Custard
Headmaster

The trick is building your next castle on top of your previous ones, thus making use of your failures...

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Anonymous Custard
Pirate

Re: Some places do get it right

*sigh* if only we could do that with computers.

If only we could still do it with the bloody photocopiers too.

Either that or employ the paper and toner loading pixies.

Anonymous Custard

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

I make no comment....

Anonymous Custard
Coat

A 230 error sounds more like something for the dentist to fix....

Mine's the one with the terrible 80's pun jokebook in the pocket.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Anonymous Custard
Boffin

the main tech (no longer with them)

Quit, fired or vapourised?

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Anonymous Custard
Trollface

Re: Literally (computer) illiterate

Did you ever have to tell him where the any key was?