Posts by Boris the Cockroach

Now collapsed SVB's parent files for bankruptcy as Biden calls for stiffer penalties

De ja Vue

Have we not been here before?

And not learned the lessons?

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

Re: We have a few names - for people

Captain Chaos!!! He was my CO when I worked for the government.

He was the bloke who picked up a very expensive tool that I'd ground up for a precision job.... then dropped it on the floor after saying "this is a funny looking drill"

Needless to say I spent another 2 hrs grinding up another tool.

He was a prime example of the principle of that if someone is bloody useless and you cant fire him, promote him out of harm's way.

Reg fashion: Here's what the well-dressed astronaut will wear on the Moon in 2025

Re: Looks aren't everything

You're the burser and you need your dried frog pills

NASA spots first evidence of an active volcano on Venus – in a big pile of CD-ROMs

Re: In Vino Veritas

Its more likely its due to the slow rate of Venus' rotation thats doing it, even a slight difference in speed between the earth's inner core/outer core/rest of the planet is enough to cause a large amount of magnetic field to be generated, but since venus rotates every 243 days, then its a good bet that all the planet goes around at that speed and theres no speed difference to generate the field needed.

Workers don't want these humanoid robots telling them to be happy

I can just imagine

the scene.

Myself , stuck in cell #7 with a robot that does not want to play ball no matter how many times I restart it/reboot it/threaten it with a lump hammer , and its the PFY's day off and this robot comes trundling along saying "I hope you're having a nice day"......... at which point I go full BoFH mode.

After activating the vision and A.I. systems on all the rest of the robots, I point them in the direction of plating shop where our happy trundling robot's head is impaled on a spike and screaming, while I bad temperedly point out to them that piss me off and you'll be joining it. before stomping back to my lair to glare at the PC daring it to do anything wrong.

At which point the boss sticks his head around the door and says "You're looking more happy today".............................................................

The US would sooner see TSMC fabs burn than let China have them

Sounds a

good policy....

After all, in the event of someone invading this fair isle*, we'd be pulling the HDDs from the machinery and microwaving them.... no control programs and they'll be 2 and 5 ton pieces of scrap iron, even if the invader had the techs and the skills to set them up again.

But to kill a fab...... open the doors to the machines.... throw in a handfull of fine graphite dust and close the doors again. end of any chance of making another wafer.

*actually this would happen first rendering everything dead and gone ......except us cockroaches

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

Sacking

everyone with domain knowledge is a known thing in robotic manufacturing

I did tell the story ages ago of a rival company to ours paid a bunch of highly skilled folks to build their production line, then write all the documentation, then the company fired the lot and bought in min wagers to run the line.

Which they did... for some weeks

Until they misread the documents and blew up the line.

Cue a £250 000 repair bill and the pithy comment of

"Been cheaper to retain the skilled people"

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

What about the likes

of myself......

Still got the RSA algorithm written down somewhere, and the programming ability to use it.... even put it in a client-server messaging application written for my degree course(not really needed... but hey what the helll....)

Do I submit myself to the ministry of love to be re-programmed and erase all knowledge ... or what...

As for child pron, I know of a case of it where the plod siezed someones PC... traced the creators via their IP addresses, and nicked the people joining in with the abuse by reading up the perp's address book..... all good old fashioned plod work and no need for anyones messaging apps to have their encyrption broken.

perps got 16 and 18 yrs in clink, the joiner ins got 14 yrs and the original offender got 5....

Ps 95% of all child abuse occurs from either family members or someone close to the family.....

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

Reminds me of the time I pulled the chicken gag at a now closed down company

Every time a mangler there walked past, I made the noise of a chicken...... cluck cluck cluck.....

4 times in one day...... until he finally broke and demanded to know why I was making noises like a chicken

"Because I'm perfecting my chicken impression" I says

"Why do you want to be a chicken?" he asks.

"So I can have my head cut off and be promoted to manager"

That got me a written warning from someone with no sense of humour , then cancelled by HR on appeal on the basis it was "Fair comment"

Write down 100

times

I must not drink coffee and read BoFH articles

But I'm sure glad we dont have anything like that where I work, because they'd need to send me on the week course..

PS... anyone know where my boss can get a new wireless keyboard.. his one seems to have gone missing

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Yeah

this all sounds like the litany delivered by our former production engineer before he left last year

Any failure was due to my crappy code and certainly not due to him buying the wrong size grippers for the robot so it drops the part every time its supposed to take it in/out of the machine.

One of the reasons I hated him so much

UK Prime Minister wants £800M to spend on big British iron

Re: who remembers ICL?

If its built by fujitsu, someone will have to reset it all the time to show the correct values when it calculates..... after all would be a shame if it was used in some form of criminal case with fuckitsu execs saying "this machine never lies"..........

The Moon or bust, says NASA, after successful SLS/Orion test flight

Re: Genuine Question.

Quote

"In the 70s people got fed up with the costs and it became a non-event."

Its more like Nixon wanted to blow the money on bombing Vietnam instead of more Apollo missions...

Japan's next-gen H3 satellite launch vehicle fails on debut

Re: Sad

Been there... watched our bits plunge into the ocean instead of soaring into orbit.

We made 10... 8 for testing, 1 for backup and 1 for the fish to play with :(

IDC gets even more pessimistic about PC sales

Re: I, for one...

Dont throw out your win10 hardware.

It will run linux mint ... hell if my old box of a i7 , 8 gig of RAM and an ancient nvidia GFX can run mint well (certainly better than win10 can), then anything more recent will fly.

And never had a driver problem on it... not even with the 20 odd year old HP all in 1 prunter... printer d/l HP driver for linux... print test sheet... and its done.

Only things now that need bleedin edge hardware is games.... even then.... only a few

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Muscle memory is a

bugger

Take 6 robotic machine tools all exactly the same. all the switches and buttons in the same place and everyone knows about them.

Manglement then buy a new robotic tool......... sadly the buttons are NOT in the same place or even order........ hence why a £2000 probing tool got fired off a chuck because the setter relied on muscle memory when jogging the arm to the pick point...... spindle start is where the jog button was on the old machines..........

They had a collection of broken probes......

Pushers of insecure software in Biden's crosshairs

Quote

"Wasn't there a report recently that estimated the loss to the US economy due to dodgy unreliable software was $3trillion a year, including time lost just trying to make it work?"

And just how many el-reg contributors have spent time getting software from one company in particular working as it should and securing it from threats. and thats from the company itself before any external threats get near it.

My own view is that the current EULAs should be thrown out and a new one forced into their place

"Any time used to correct faults within this product are billable to the supplying company at $100/hour"

Maybe that will concetrate minds when for some mad reason our win11 box will not print to the HP printer in the office, but all the win10 machines will. while all the time if you use the web admin function on the printer , you can see the printer on the network and admin it from every box on the network........

(and yes... we have installed the official HP drivers for win 11 on the win11 box....)

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

Going above and beyond

does not lead to riches and rewards......

What it does lead to is being expected to fix stuff as well as your normal job... and indeed filling in for 3 other people who should be fixing stuff, but due to their inability , are fixing burgers/unemployed...

Oh and it is never a typo when crapita is spelt crapita.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

Quote

"It is a language statistical model that strings sentences together in ways it has been trained to do. It doesn't understand context. It doesn't understand truth." It does'nt feel pity or remorse and it absolutely will not stop until you are dead.

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

Coming soon

A country music song where its the truck that leaves him.....

Admit it.. you're humming the tune already....

BOFH: The PFY has won an award … for outstanding service?

Re: Oh happy day

Sadly after THAT tuesday, the boss does not allow machine guns on site.

even in robotic hands......

Oh happy day

friday

BOFH in top form

Excellent ideas for the future............I'm thinking one of those Boston dynamics robots with a ChatGPT system trained on how I interact with the staff and then set loose to solve the various production problems during the day....... although I may have to tell the staff to stay away from open windows and lift shafts when they interact with it..........

And its 1 hour to beer time too (I'm supposed to be tidying my office for an important customer visit on Monday.... sadly I've run out of desk drawers to hide all my crap in)

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

If OFcom is going to be as effective as OFgen, then its going to enforce exactly 0.00 % of the bill.

Next week... making tea in chocolate teapots.....

Will this cover

the chat app MI6 agents use in the field to securely communicate with head office? if not... why not?

And besides ... as has been pointed out lots of times.

If I'm a child pornographer... I'd be hosting my services on a secure FTP server, rather than sending cp via farcebook messaging

And if I was a terrorist, There would be innocent sounding messages posted in a forum somewhere... trainspotting+timetables.com for example(dunno if this is a real site)

"I'll be at Paddington at 3pm to see the King off, bring camera" takes on a whole new meaning......

I wonder what messaging app MPs will be using and will they be aware the government can read ALL their messages as a result....

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Only use

I found for edge was downloading firefox

Just like every other mshit browser I've had the misfortune to use.....

Stir in uBlock origin and FF becomes a nice browser ..... especially on youtube

And it works/looks the same on linux as it does on winblows....

Titanic mass grave site to be pillaged for NFTs

Coming soon

Your very own Auschwitz NFT, complete with certificate

Is there no low these people wont stoop to?

Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it

4 days? 5 days? 6 days?

Just make up your minds (our customers) how many days you lot want to work.....

Just wish they could all collectively decide so we could alter our times to match.....

As for meeetings..... just tie the accountant to a chair and gag him... and our meetings are about 66% faster

Although not as fast as the ones I'd run..... Agree with me and leave via the door... argue and you can leave via the window "PFY!!! start the wood chipper!"

<wakes up from a doze to find the latest dribblings from our customer's designer on my CAD station........

The second dust bowl cometh for America, supercomputer warns

Re: All I can see

Oh come on... Basingstoke isnt THAT bad..

But then again.... what is it about post WW2 planned cities that make them so lifeless and forgettable?

<we once met a prospective customer in Swindon...... be buggered if we can remember anything about that trip :)

Tesla fires gigafactory staff after someone made the mistake of mentioning unions

What you'll find

here is a bunch of commentators who are extremely smart, been at the sharp end of business for god knows how long and have observed what works in the workforce and what doesn't

They are also bitter and resentful because they cannot be promoted beyond a technical grade because of the amount of knowledge and skill they bring to bear on solving their employer's problems.(remember kids.. if you cant be replaced , you'll never be promoted)

And what works with employess is that you treat them with respect and a degree of freedom(within limits), and suddenly the production problems seem to melt away because they'll help you out if you help them out.

The public sector is different because theres 2 classes of employees there... those that deliver the service and those that administer the service/build themselves little empires/always get promoted to senior manglement because we cant afford to lose any frontline staff who actually know what we do.

Happy Valentine's Day: Here's the final nail in Internet Explorer's coffin

Kill it with

Fire.

only way to be sure?

Chipmakers threaten to defect to US, EU if UK doesn't get its semiconductor plans sorted

Just sounds like the usual threats

applied to the government (or whatever type and whatever western country they rule)

"Give us some money or we'll clear off somewhere else taking the jobs with us"

Of course , it could be a sound investment by the government,,,, or not as the case maybe , but most likely will be the follow up from the self same company............

"We buy the IP from our Cayman islands based sub-contractor, and we book the european profits via Ireland to the Virgin islands company thats contralled by a shareholding in Jersey that technically makes no profit so there fore we;'re entitled to a tax rebate based on the fact we're losing money with our UK operation."

All said after announcing record profits of eleventy billion dollars on a declared taxable turnover of £6

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

This is not

news

Especially to us down in robot corner where the following is fairly typical...............

The QA dept call me and say "this new drawing issue is missing the 2 hold down bolts from the previous issue"

So muggins here calls the customer and says "drawing issue 15 is missing the 2 hold down bolts that were on issue 14"

And gets chewn out by customer "MAKE IT TO THE DRAWING!!"......... followed by my boss because the customer called him to call me an idiot for asking.

Made the parts, sent them in..... got the next order and about to stick them on the line

"WHY ARE THEY MISSING THE HOLD DOWN BOLTS?!!!!!" comes the phone call from the customer whos just lost the first batch overboard because the hold down bolts were missing.....

why do I do this job?

SpaceX cuts off Ukraine's 'offensive' Starlink use

Re: Appeasement

The difference is because Challengers and Leopard 2s can cut through a division of T-72s like it was'nt there

Check out what happened to an Iraqi republican guard division armed with T-72s and supporting equipment when it ran into a US division armed with Abrams. and that was a western tank a generation behind our currrent main battle tanks....

My view is that the Ukrainian government should be allowed to buy whatever it wants, and if the russians dont like that, best they declare a ceasefire and get their army out of Ukraine

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

Well this week's

BOFH has given me a cunning plan.

Use AI to generate the code I need to write, and use AI to generate the documentation I need to write.

I cant see this one failing... not like the last one where that bug got into robot #7 just as the HR droid that denied me a pay rise walked past it.......

do not worry gentle readers...... the arm missed..... damnit....

beer.. because its 2 minutes past when I should be in the pub

Windows November update trips up some Intel graphics drivers

Re: A lot of filler text here

Well, yes, they could shorten it to simply "Windows update causes problems"

...Then schedule a reprint of the same headline pretty much on a monthly basis. There. FIFY!

Although the second line should read

"Then schedule a reprint of the same headline pretty much on a weekly basis. There. FIFY!"

UK PM splits govt department in 4, creates dedicated 'Science and Tech' bit

Department of

energy security????????

Excuse me while I fall off my perch laughing

Bit rich coming from the party that SHUT DOWN OUR 90 DAY GAS RESERVES so that british gas(or whatever they call themselves these days) could make money by selling off the gas in the reserve and then save money by not having to mantain said reserve tanks

And I promise not to mention that the self same government was warned 12 years ago that our power stations were coming to their end of lives in 12 yrs or so and did FUCK ALL about it... oops I did mention it..

Shuffling deckchairs on the titanic did something useful.... I doubt this bunch of idiots are even capable of that..

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

Re: Gwynne Shotwell

Bananas for lunch then

According to a RAF Tornado pilot they taste the same going down as they do coming up.....

Oh and spacex have done the full wet dress rehersal (filling the full stack with fuel, pressurising the tanks and then aborting the launch) with star ship.... next next is lighting 33 raptors , and then ramping them upto full power for 3 seconds(I've seen the vids of the 14 raptor test fire.... and its LOUD! ) and shutting them off..... then put the full stack together and wheeeeeeeee... my money is on a RUD on re-entry.....

Private company set up to oversee UK's prototype fusion reactor

The skills gap is bigger than you think.

Many of the old pharts like me were involved in a bigger or smaller way with the JET project, we made the bits that assembled into the torus.. complete with high accuracy demanded by the scientists

Sadly a lot of the older pharts have now retired...... I'm 6 yrs away give or take a couple of months. and do we have the skills needed to make the parts for the project.?.. doubt it.... anyone sane with the skills needed ends up in Formula one manufacture or aerospace

Having the guys able to design the thing in one hurdle... having the people like me to build it is another

And those capable of either thing dont go into a messy dead end job that pays badly when they can sit in an office in a bank and make a shed load more cash.

Semiconductor world in for a rough ride as chip bubble bursts at the high end

Re: Messing with markets has consequences

The markets want their pound of flesh NOW , if there is'nt a pound of flesh to be had, they'll want a plan to get 2 pounds of flesh in 6 months time.

So they'll gut the company's workforce to get it.

The long lead time on getting a return from investment(in any manufacturing really) means that the markets only invest in companies liable to give a return next week and not in 5 years time....

And we wonder why our manufacturing base continues to slide downhill despite governments best(hah! token) efforts

British government torched over lack of chips strategy

Re: Perhaps once burned?

I do aerospace bits that run at 5um... 8um is huge

Beer .... wonder what size that goes down to....

Hi, Pakistan? You do know anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? You don't have to ask

Yes

Smut: other people finding pleasure in doing things that you dont like, therefore they should be stopped from doing it.

See also 'free speech' and 'hypocrisy'

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Had something

like this years ago

"The employee agree to not use any tools, technology, or manufacturing techniques learned while employed at $company in any future employment"

Showed it to my lawyer who laughed and said "This should be fun in court.."

we black lined it.

Was rather disappointed when their HR did'nt even mention that..... was rather looking forward to appearing in court pointing out I'd learned to use a hammer while at $company and be banned from any job where I'd be using a hammer.

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

Will it inject

AI into the meeting?

<<spent 90 mins today sitting in on a teleconference with the boss, the beancounter and our 2nd best customer..... zzzzzzzzzzz<jog> wassat? no we cant make 20 000 by tommorrow ... zzzzzzzz

Labyrinth of 371 legacy systems hindered hospital's IT meltdown recovery

Re: IT is a cost to be minimised

Its not just the NHS that thinks this, its everywhere

But then a lot of people dont think "How much of our business depends on the computers working correctly?"

which is how I can get chewn out for asking to book a machine tech to come in and swap out a failing HDD at a planned time, and get the answer "It has not failed yet, so we're not paying for 2 hrs of the tech's time swapping out a working HDD"............... "So we wait for an unplanned outage right when we need to use the machine urgently... then have to wait 4-6 days before the tech can come in?"

And people wonder why theres a bit of plywood in my office that says "Stress reliving tool... please punch freely"

(notes for the questing: the machines have a lot of vibration when running.... the HDDs are mounted on carriers designed to isolate them.... it doesn't always work.... and yes we're testing SSDs at the moment....)

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

I swear

that the BoFH has done a week coping with the folks I work with (see on call comments for more)

But while grinning my way through his tale I never lost it until "I make an mental note to change our meeting rooms so they have external windows." thats when the keyboard died.

But on the plus side, I'm ahead of el-reg's very own BoFH because our meeting room does have external windows(with a very dodgy catch)... sadly the plunge from 2 floors up is rarely fatal. Unless the PFY parks the woodchipper right below and leaves it running...

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

No surprise here

Ever since painting the work trays with an arrow and putting a sign on them saying 'load this way round'... then having to retrieve said work tray because the numpty loaded it the wrong way round....

Anyway... on the subject of turning stuff off.... I needed to back up a machine's HDD so plug the network patch lead into the network port... start the d/l on the laptop and hang a sign saying "Do not power down this machine until I give the OK"

Said user did not power that machine down... good for him.... nope he pressed the main power breaker switch for that factory unit and powered everything down.....

Techies ask PM to 'prepare UK chip strategy as a matter of urgency'

Re: Boondoggle

You're forgetting that by the time it becomes a massive failure/cock-up, the tories will have been booted from power and replaced by labour...

So the daily wails headline will lead something along the lines of

"Labour cocks up Rishi's great plan" followed by 14 pages saying how badly labour sucks in comparsion to the glorious patriotic tory party that puts britains interests first

Although lets face it... if the tory party came up with a policy of shooting everyone unemployed , the daily wail would be printing how wonderful this new policy is

Google institutional investor calls for wider cuts: 30k jobs

Re: 50% not needed...

Quote

Most productive developers I know would be seen as "slacking" whole day. Browsing el Reg, Reddit, Instagram, reading random articles, even playing games while their brain is piecing all the work together in the background, typically in non linear fashion. When they are ready, they stop what they are doing and type stuff in.

Yeah we know all about the slacking off and playing games... shop floor cricket is our current favourite.

You get a big ball of brown sticky parcel tape off some of the supplier's boxes, then someone bowls it at the batter, if it makes it to the far end of the main gangway, thats 4 runs, over cell #7, thats 6 runs, and through the boss's window is known as an own goal. at which point the command is 'scatter' and the slowest is declared 'loser' (also has a fair chance of being fired).

World of Warcraft Classic lead dev resigns to protest 'stack ranking'

ahhh stack rankings

or a variant thereof

The gentle art of fucking your business up so badly only the dire and the power hungry end up working for you....... neither of which are particually good.

If you're above average in an excellent team you'll get the boot(or 'training' then the boot)

If you're below average in a dire team, you'll get a bonus.

That works wonders for employee morale.... and the job search people... so all you'll end up with is the dire teams where someone can look good for being below average.

And then when the smelly stuff hits the fan, your employees dont have the skills or talent to respond and your company goes ka-boom.

While across the street, where all your good employees have gone, is booming , while the staff lean out of the windows pointing and going 'ha-ha'

Been there , done that, glad I work somewhere that does'nt use stack ranking

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Driving on the right

sorry the rest of the world barring a few sensible countries drive on the wrong side of the road.

And some its still pick your own side at the time type roads......