* Posts by Anonymous IV

781 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011

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

Anonymous IV

Re: "it was a common skill"

> I was at university before I really got the hang of undoing them by feel.

Oh! When first I read this, I presumed you were undoing them by feet, and was going to comment you for your feetal skills!

Anonymous IV

Re: Nothing on one...

"...using the tool that Bosnian Bill and I made."

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

Anonymous IV
FAIL

Assumptions

> He soon learned that the CTO [...] had assumed nobody would touch his code.

He can't have been a very good CTO if he assumed rather than investigated...

Rapid7 throws JetBrains under the bus for 'uncoordinated vulnerability disclosure'

Anonymous IV

Re: JetBrains Mono font

> Ugh. I loathe, loathe, loathe JetBrains Mono and its accurséd ligatures.

Whether you consider ligatures to be accursèd or not, my point was that they are available, but you do not have to use them...

Anonymous IV

JetBrains Mono font

Hitherto, my only knowledge of JetBrains has been its rather excellent Mono font, available from them and Google Fonts, and undoubtedly elsewhere.

It includes nearly 140 code ligatures, 8 weights each with italics, and support for 145 languages - whether you need these features or not!

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Anonymous IV
Happy

Re: So, continuing the follow-up of the disaster

> The customer thought they were paying for principled consultants but the supplier actually supplied principal consultants instead. So no wonder the council was screwed.

Back in the days when Managers had secretaries to do their typing, our dubious IT Manager advertised for a "Principle Secretary".

We minions were much amused by this, arguing that it would be a Good Thing, since demonstrably he had no principles of his own.

OSIRIS-REx probe sucked up more asteroid crumbs than hoped

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

There might be an interesting comparison...

... between the cost per g or ml of the asteroid dust and that of HP's inkjet printer ink.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Anonymous IV

What happened to the server?

Is it fair to presume that the drug dealers did not return it to the company, like the good upstanding citizens they aren't?

OSIRIS-REx's stuck asteroid sample canister finally cracked open by NASA

Anonymous IV

Re: Just wondering....

> I'd be interested to read the report on the stuck canister. What caused the issues preventing it from being opened?

Probably the result of the cosmic glue which keeps the universe together...

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

Father Time?

Sadly, tempus fugit

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Anonymous IV

Re: Satellite repairs

> I sometimes see vans with ‘Sattelite Repairs’ written on the side. Couldn’t they just send one of those to fix it?

First they should fix their van signing...

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Anonymous IV
Facepalm

Dontcha love the US court system?

Where someone gets charged with a whole heap of crimes, but plea bargains them all down to a single charge of littering...

We challenged you to come up with tech predictions for 2024 (wrong answers only) – here are some favorites so far

Anonymous IV

Re: Optional

> I predicted that Web 3.0 would be when everyone writes and nobody reads

You are probably thinking of Write-only-Memory - WoM...

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Anonymous IV

Re: Trinary Storage

> he went on a lot longer than this, and much funnier

Undoubtedly...

Anonymous IV
Facepalm

> not sure what the relevance is of either?

That was surely the whole point!

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

Anonymous IV

Re: It just seems that way.

I always liked to describe my job title as Trainee Expert.

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

Anonymous IV

Re: Great. We're getting there

> Now we just need the US to use the proper date format - you know, the one every other country on earth uses - and it will be paradise.

I appreciate your sentiment - but not your accuracy. "Every other country" does not use dd/mm/yyyy, although many do.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Anonymous IV

Re: No corruption here.

> Only the metre readers, I think mine is read by a metre reader once a year.

That must be the most height-discriminatory comment made on El Reg for quite some time...!

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

Re: Surely the problem was obvious?

> I mean, it was Mal-ware.

I had to go through all the comments available at the time of reading to discover that the last one was the one I would otherwise have typed...

Grrrh.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Anonymous IV

Re: I guess they have been rebranded...

> ...because their customers are calling them "Punity" now.

Surely ImPunity?

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Anonymous IV
Happy

Data exception

Pretty clearly there must have been an S0C7 abend, which required the NATS technical staff to look at a core dump for several hours.

[Oh, the 1970s are over now?]

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

Where's the "Outlook" feature in LibreOffice?

> LibreOffice is the only open source office suite for personal productivity which can be compared feature-by-feature with the market leader.

The absence of an Outlook equivalent is the major reason why I don't convert to LibreOffice.

Anyone else agree?

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Anonymous IV
Facepalm

Re: Nominative determinism

Which Tyler was the leader of the Pedants' Revolt.

[Ba-boom, tish!]

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Anonymous IV
Happy

Talk it up

> the Voyagers are over 20 light hours from Earth, and communication crawls along at a tedious 160 bits per second.

Let BT marketers get at that information and it will be described as Stunningly-Fast Broadband at the Speed of Light...

Cisco buys SamKnows to give ThousandEyes a look at millions of endpoints

Anonymous IV

Will this be the end of the Sam Knows "white box"?

Over very many years, many people in the UK have cheerfully donated desk space and electricity to host a Sam Knows "white box" router, interposed between their ordinary router and the rest of their home network. All they have received in return is the ability to look up online all those useful network stats mentioned in the article.

Are people likely to continue with this now that Cisco has taken over Sam Knows?

Will Cisco provide any form of adequate compensation, if they want to continue the same arrangement?

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Anonymous IV
Happy

Re: Dumb Data Systems

> I would have no chance there. Both my sort code and account number have leading zeros.

Noughty, noughty!

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Anonymous IV
Thumb Up

Re: Bloated

> It's like we are trying to meet some kind of inverse Moore's law by making everything slower and bigger the faster the systems get.

Welcome to the world of Windows...!

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Anonymous IV

Re: Bridge technologies

> He wouldn't, however, touch SCSI 2 or higher for the eloquent reason of "the pins are so damn tiny that I keep burning my fingers, and I don't like doing that"

I don't suppose he ever had to work with USB-C plugs, then...

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Anonymous IV

Re: Kicking, clawing and scratching

<pedant>

The "IBM 3278 communications controller" of which you speak would have been a 3276, a terminal so stuffed with additional cards that it nearly burst...

</pedant>

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Anonymous IV
Happy

Re: Electrostatic bracer... err watch

> I lost mine one day in Gare du Nord

Reminiscent of the olde French joke, said by someone standing in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral:

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le Gare...

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Anonymous IV
Happy

Re: Supreme Head of Information Technology

Less scatological was the (apocryphal?) Civil Service post with the title Engineering Industries Export Intelligence Officer.

There was also supposed to be a similarly-initialised BBC job: Engineering Information and Electrical Installation Officer.

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

Re: Agreed!

It all went downhill when the Moderatrix left...

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Anonymous IV
Headmaster

Re: Clicked the error away...

I remember a secondary-school teacher looking at an advert in the Times Education Supplement which asked:

"Could you put together a Youth Offending Team?"

His answer was, "Of course! Give me about ten minutes..."

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

Anonymous IV
Facepalm

My guess would be that wherever you go, it's a case of "different employer, same shit".

The Who put it more musically as:

"Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss..."

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Anonymous IV

Re: This sounds familiar....

Obviously a case of history repeating itself!

But you could have made the link clickable...

School laptop auction devolves into extortion allegation

Anonymous IV
Mushroom

Re: Never should have been possible.

<pedant>Darik's Boot and Nuke</pedant>, actually...

And do check that you're attempting to wipe the correct drive!

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Anonymous IV

Re: These guys' newsletter?

It also says that "This site is kept up to honour her work, but is otherwise moribound. [sic]"

Which curiously reminds me of the ropey novel cliché: "With one moribound he was free!"...

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

Anonymous IV

Re: We interrupt these comments to bring you this commercial message

Does anyone know what is the name of the phenomenon which causes the prices of Dunning-Kruger tee-shirts to be identical for sizes XXS thru' 5XL?

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

Anonymous IV
Alert

Re: Missed opportunity

If you were an American you would have called the product "C" "I" "C" "S" (four letters, sounded separately). They tended to get Very Cross when we Britishers pronounced it as one word, "Kicks".

Similarly with "D" "O" "S" and "Doss"...

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

Anonymous IV

Re: Oh, we know the value.

> I'm pretty sure they could add a separate subscription level where you pay $x/mth not to bug you with adverts etc

What are these adverts of which you speak? Using a decent advert blocker restricts adverts to those deliberately inserted by the content-creator in a YouTube video, for example. (In fact the only example, since I can't think of anywhere else...)

You've heard of the cost-of-living crisis, now get ready for the cost-of-working crisis

Anonymous IV
Thumb Up

Re: Email remains the most used communication method for work

> Nowadays I just tell such peeps that I can't discuss whatever they want to talk about for security reasons!

You could always add (or substitute) GDPR as one of your non-talking reasons?

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

Anonymous IV
Happy

Re: Chrome?

> Yeah, nah.

You are Ozzy Man and I claim my A$5...

Ex-HP finance manager jailed after going on $5m spending spree using company plastic

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

Re: Addiction?

> How come that dopamine rush never happens when I shop in Lidl or Poundland?

The way things are going at the moment you will soon get that dopamine rush being able to shop anywhere...

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Anonymous IV
FAIL

Re: Leg pull, surely?

Just someone putting the boot in...

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

The BK email contains no link to opt out of marketing communications, or even just all communications...

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Anonymous IV
Alert

> I've also not long finished a jar of crunchy peanut butter with Marmite. Very moorish.

That's "Moorish" as in Othello, the Moor of Venice?

I suppose 'crunchy peanut butter with Marmite' beats 'a surfeit of lampreys' as a medieval cause of death...

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Anonymous IV
Headmaster

Re: Measurement creep

> In the early eighties my TI-82 calculated pi instantly, 3.1416926.

You read it wrong! It would be 3.1415926...

</pedant>

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Anonymous IV
Facepalm

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

I arrived at the start of a narrow one-way street in Beverley during what passes for its rush hour, looking for my B&B. [The one-way system in Beverley can easily mean a ten-minute drive back to where you began, should you make a mistake.]

Half-way down the street there were two signs proclaiming <Guest House>, but with no obvious entrance.

Having squeezed the car onto the pavement, I got out and phoned the owner of the B&B, only to find that it was located another 50 metres down the one-way street, and was identically labelled <Guest House>.

Clearly neither of the two house owners wished to give up the prestigious name, and presumably all the delivery-persons knew of this duplication.

And also those who had been once before...

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Anonymous IV
Alert

Re: Ahh, Team building/break the ice exercises....

> A company having two teams working on the same thing without being aware of each other's existence?

Indeed - this happened to me when I was part of the Network Team of $Fred'sLargeBankPLC, which team covered mainly the southern and middle part of England. Quite by chance, we suddenly became aware of a parallel team which covered the more northern part of the UK, and of whom we had never previously heard!

Perhaps we should have been more inquisitive, but we had a lot of work to do, and thinking outside the job was frowned upon...

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