Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: DIY

And watch it follow the same fate as soon as $Vendor can't be arsed to support $Version any more.

Re: Junior Customer Engineer

"it was just a beautifully architect 3 mm allen key"

I remember the HP engineers turning up to remove a transit bar from a tape drive. It had been fixed with the then supposedly rare-as-hen's-teeth Torx headed bolt. Except I had a set of Torx bits in my really quite cheap screwdriver set and the tape drive was already in use.

Re: About the same time that ...

And Little Venice is in London.

Re: About the same time that ...

It can also be a stream. But hereabouts a stream can also be a sike or syke, giving rise to the surname.

I guess it is too late to stop calling ourselves "admin" or "administrators", a pity as it makes it sound like we're doing minimum wage work

The trouble is that if your title is system manager they want to know where are all the people you manage. The manglement mind is unable to grasp that there are major responsibilities that don't involve budget or head-count.

Re: Once upon a time in Brighton...

It's so long ago that that I had to think about it. When I started to write it up that was my recollection but it seemed so unlikely that back then we'd have bothered with mixed case passwords...

Re: From Experience (and In Hindsight)...

"could've had some investment if there was catastrophic failure tbh."

It never happens like that. Inverse sod's law.

Re: Once upon a time in Brighton...

Over telnet (them were t'days) it was reasonably common for the various characters in vt100 escape sequences to get separated and in vi the tilde would flip case. And in those days it was normal to edit passwd directly. So root became Root.

No problem, just log in as Root. Except also back then Unix had a built-in assumption that you might well be working on a teletype which only had upper case so if the first character entered on login was upper case it would obligingly switch to doing everything in upper case. Root, root and ROOT were all one and the same so the user name wasn't a problem. But when you're in upper case only you can't enter the lower case characters of a password and get them hashed to the correct value.

Fortunately there was an already logged in root session on the console.

Re: Know your people

Take the laptop with you and you actually regain cubicle working. Winning all round.

Re: What a surprise

Yes. I can think of one person.

Re: Typical Chinese

Well played, sir.

Re: Legacy still all over the place

How often is it the legacy that fails?

Re: SMS

"or watch Digging For Britain"

What really makes you feel old is seeing archaeologists you remember as students (when you yourself were post-grad) and who have now freelancing as retirement jobs.

Slowly.

Some first time rounders will have learned. Some will be on their second or third time round and will now have learned. Some will go round the loop again. And meanwhile some of us will just have seen all this stuff and worked it out for ourselves.

Just why?

About the only extra tech I'd like to see on a battery operated drill is something that warns me that it's going to need a recharge before it actually goes eeeeeaaaaaarrrruuuugh.

Re: Ooohhh ! We're back to sneakily dreadful.

For a BOFH Boss that's 70 days. And the parachute's ripped paper.

Re: Ooohhh ! We're back to sneakily dreadful.

Yup. Another Boss being lined up for defenestration. I think he's already exceeded previous longevity records by some margin.

Re: @adam

"He is literally ONLY concerned with the shareholders"

Not shareholders in the plural. Just one shareholder. Himself.

I really hope both lots of shareholders turn him down. Preferably with both boards then suing him for their costs.

Re: As any fule kno

ORS in Britain is much later than that, Devonian. Maybe it's re-sedimentation of material from that era?

Re: Unusual Change -- Just take a look around......

"He was worth serious money and he RETIRED at thirty three."

The National Trust could have done with some of that serious money or wished it had been spent a little more carefully. Castle Drogo must have cost them a fortune fixing its leaks.

"Update: I found the story I was talking about."

Did you google it?

Re: Few legitimate uses of VPN?

"I dare to disagree. I use VPN to read many US news web pages which show a finger to Europeans."

It sounds as if you're agreeing. You're using the VPN as a proxy which is what he says VPNs are no better than.

Re: Wrong argument

"You should not be allowed to charge for branding at all"

What about franchises? The branding, and IP as a whole, might be the main or even only thing that the franchisor charges for?

I doubt it would be an insuperable problem but needs to be taken into consideration.

Re: Wrong argument

In that case the US has identical interests to all the other countries.

Re: Wrong argument

"A company in one EU/EEA country can sell into any other with the profits taxed in the home (normally Ireland or Luxembourg) country."

That's corporation tax. Other taxes such as VAT are locally collected and determined. Presumably that's the mechanism that the French use.