Posts by Anonymous John 2418 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2007
"the two-person support team had gone on holiday, at the same time and together, and wouldn't be back for a fortnight!"
Reminds me of the rather useless IT team I've mentioned before. Firm believers in POETS Day, they apparently assumed the repairman they'd called was too. He wasn't, and IT hadn't bothered to tell Reception they'd called one out.
So I had to search a half empty office to find the one faulty PC out of two hundred.
"The first Apollo crew was launched into orbit with Apollo 7, followed by a mission around the Moon with Apollo 8. Apollo 9 checked out the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, and Apollo 10 did pretty much everything except land. The first lunar landing happened with Apollo 11. "
All that was done in less than a year as the hardware had already been built (or largely built in the case of the lunar landers). Artemis will never achieve that flight rate.
I read somewhere of someone dropping a spanner on the terminals of a car battery. When everything had cooled down, he was able to pick up the battery by the spanner.
I had to bale out of car once when it caught fire. The molten carburettor dropped onto the starter motor and shorted out the solenoid. As the car was still in gear, I had to watch it, now a mass of flames, making its last (20 yardsl journey. Luckily on a country road with no parked cars.
"About a year ago, I was called out to do field service. When I got to the lady's house and was let in, the first thing I noticed was the smell of gunpowder. The second, the double barreled 12-gauge shotgun lying on the couch. Third, the big gaping hole in the side of her computer."
www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_abuse.shtml
There's also Ethical Hacking when used against scammers. Technically illegal but the BBC Scam Interceptors programme openly admits to using one. I'm not aware of any being prosecuted. Or of any scammer complaining to the police about being hacked. Although I have baited a couple stupid enough that I wouldn't have put it past 5hem.
I would have expected anyone using both to know the difference.
I saw a colleague's spreadsheet once where the negative values were coloured red. I was really impressed that he understood conditional formatting. Until I took a closer look. He'd gone though it and manually changed the colours.
Besides being technically almost impossible to block VPNs, to paraphrase a popular American saying, "If VPNs are outlawed, only outlaws will have VPNs." You really don't want to go down that rabbit hole. ®
Similar problem with "controlled" drugs. The war on drugs means that popular products can only be bought from criminals.
The IT team of an office I worked in 20+ years ago were chosen because they weren't much good at performing the office's core activities. Unfortunately their IT skills were equally poor, so I was part of an unofficial IT team that the staff preferred to use.
Once I saw one "graybeard" backing up a database on a Windows 95 PC ( 20+ years ago remember) with the intention of transferring it to a Windows 98 machine. Took him a couple of hours doing something I knew wouldn't work. I transferred the database the next day in a few minutes via a serial cable I'd brought from home.
Another time all four were discussing an error message they didn't seem to understand as I happened to be passing. I ejected the floppy disk and pressed the any key without breaking step (20+years ago remember).
