Posts by Return To Sender

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Paperless office?

Ha, yes, that thing we've been told we'll have any day now for the last 40 years or so :-). As somebody remarked during the early hype cycle, "a paperless office is about as likely as a paperless toilet". Yet to be proven wrong...

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: When they (think they) know enough to be helpful

"With the power button on the top."

Yeah. I fairly recently bought a new (tower) PC case and didn't spot that the power switch was on top. Didn't worry too much as the PC lives under the home office desk. Subsequently discovered that the cat liked the warmth from the vents on the top of the case and had unerring aim when it came to paw on button..

When they (think they) know enough to be helpful

Back in the days of CRT monitors, persistent (actually) blank screens often turned out to be our users having moved something about on the desk and somehow managing to turn the brightness down. Or the so amusing colleagues who waited for someone to leave their desk and turn their monitor down.

Some of the most difficult customer support calls were with people who knew something about systems and were trying to be 'helpful' by interpreting what they were seeing rather than repeating it verbatim. For our safer regulars (i.e. had a decent working relationship, sense of humour etc.) the conversation often included "I want you to take your brain out, put it somewhere safe and just tell me word for word what you're seeing"

NASA pares back Boeing's Starliner deal after 2024 calamity

Re: Capsule might only manage three crewed missions to the ISS....

Technically, if they can get the damn things to the ISS, all of them can come back. Eventually. The real trick is doing it 1) without having to rely on orbital decay 'cos the thrusters are FUBAR again and 2) returning everything/everybody in one piece rather than millions of tiny ones, or vaporized...

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

> "Odd, I use TB with Gmail daily with no incidents."

Was going to comment similarly, been using TB with GMail for years, no problem. Although I use IMAP not POP3, fwiw

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Yep, had customers with exactly that. The most memorable being when roughly half the adapters in the batch had the same MAC. Oh how we laughed...

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Not so much over a dispatch system, but....

"Fox hunting is pretty immoral too..."

Just checking; is that a general observation or an in-context euphemism? Was (s)he a redhead?

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Burning the Earth's Oxygen

"to burn up earths O2 to put more junk in space"

Piqued my curiosity a little, so did a brief bit of search engine stuff for context numbers. Ballpark numbers, not rigorously accurate ofc, came up with:

Atmospheric oxygen: 1,080,000 gigatonnes or 1.08 million billion tonnes or 1.08 x 10^15 tonnes

Full load for a Falcon 9, c. 380,000 kg, call it 400 tonnes to allow for evaporation losses etc. and keep the maths simple.

Good news! We can launch 2.7x10^13 (27,000,000,000,000) Falcon 9s (or equivalent) before we run out of oxygen! Well, less than that 'cos everyone will have asphyxiated of course, but hey! Frankly couldn't be arsed to see if anybody's done any numbers on how much new oxygen gets added to the atmosphere, though. Left as an exercise for the reader

RTS

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Re: Follow these simple instructions...

At least they did follow the instructions...

I've posted this before, but anyway; back in the days of BBC Micros with Cumana 5 1/4" drives and DFS (the ROM, not the sofa company :-D) we had a good customer who periodically called us saying his diskettes wouldn't read. Not too unusual, these were the days when different media (Dysan, Verbatim etc.) could make a difference and drive calibrations could be a bit iffy. Did happen a bit more often than expected though.

Eventually, we asked him to bring a failing diskette to the store's so's we could try it on our own hardware. Didn't even get as far as inserting the diskette; after the "Hi Bob, got the diskette?" type pleasantries he said "yes, here it is", Then reached in to his shirt pocket, pulled out the diskette... and unfolded it.

"Bob, I know what the problem is...". One of the quicker fixes.

A short lesson on how diskettes work, why 'floppy' means just 'slightly flexible' and why a couple of creases will properly bugger it up ensued. Happy, if somewhat embarrassed, customer, much shared mirth.

Google DeepMind touts AI model for 'better' global weather forecasting

Re: Hang on a minute

If you've haven't seen them, go look up the (UK) Met Office YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@metoffice) and see their more detailed forecasts, long-range deep dives etc. Plenty of explanation, probabilities, alternate model results etc.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

For the greybeards...

For various reasons (mainly 'cos we could, I think) we had a couple of IBM 6150s running AIX 2.2.<something>, hard wired (probably RS422, not 232), one forwarding mail to the other (which was a gateway to places Beyond The Woods We Know). Using UUCP, as we were also delivering mail to selected customers via dial-up modem. Very occasionally we goofed the config a bit, resulting in basically a mail loop. Didn't slow the servers down as such, until the disk filled up...

Fortunately we were a small company (at the time) so the end result was usually just a bit of name calling and taking the piss. Stopped using UUCP (in house at least) once we built a decent in-house network and had good TCP/IP tools for PC (anybody remember the Beame & Whiteside TCP stack for DOS/Windows?)

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

Re: Tartrazine is pretty awful stuff

"I raised an eyebrow at the "mostly harmless" description in the article"

The entry was updated, it used to say "Harmless".

If you know, you know...

Atomic clocks are so last epoch, it's time someone nailed down the nuclear clock

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so (thanks for that one, Douglas)

Do look up! NASA unfurls massive shiny solar sail in orbit

Re: - unless they crack cryogenics as well

but we have not yet cracked cryonics (freezing warm-blooded creatures without killing them)

Depends on what size you want your astronauts to be. (Guinea) "Piiggggs Iiiinnnn Ssspppaaaaaaceeee!!!" anybody? Tom Scott vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Yep, rush at your peril...

Every test plan bar one that I wrote for customer IBM HA/CMP clusters included a "get well away from the keyboard" (go get tea/coffee, walk around the building, whatever) step between test phases. Because without that there was a tendency to try and get through the tests as quickly as possible, which didn't always give the cluster time to settle properly (background processes completing etc.).

The 'bar one' that I didn't write this in for was the one where the customer's team demonstrated what happened if you didn't wait long enough.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

A certain amount of innocent (childish?) fun to had when recommending hotels in the area. "Try the Bodkin or the Manor House, they're in Petty France between Dunkirk and Pennsylvania" (all 4 on the A46...)

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

> "downwards, briefly, at an acceleration of 9.8m/s²"

No, everybody knows that those wee little screws have their own laws of physics and gravitation so they disappear in entirely different ways to anything else. Sometimes worth checking the ceiling...

Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why

Re: 2000 AD

Squaxx dek Thargo

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Karma

Working at a company hosting a reasonably significant online-only trader. Network design, servers etc all set up to be properly redundant for potentially zero application down time. Arse-covering know-nothing senior mangler refused to allow down time regardless, even for patches - didn't want to take the grief if anything actually went wrong.

Come the day when the DC had a massive power outage, taking down everything (I'd left the company by then, but still in touch with good friends made there so got the story). Once power was restored, a goodly proportion of the (Cisco) switches were basically bricked - an actual bug in the Cisco OS (whoulda thought) causing gear that hadn't been restarted for 'n' days (actually years, if I recall) to very permanently retire itself.

Never did find out what happened to the mangler, hope he got dumped on from a great height but suspect he weaselled his way out of it.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

Re: Awesome Bar

- Similarly, the word "fuck" can make up almost every word in a sentence. For example, "Fuck the fucking fucker!"

Or indeed, "Fucking fuck. Fucking fucker's fucking fucked"

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

The articles I've seen report that the signs were missing "due to vandalism". You'd have thought if the bridge has been out since 2013 something rather more substantial than signs that can be removed by vandals would be there. Like big lumps of concrete, or barriers bolted to the road. Like you, can't see how Google can be liable, but sueballs & lawyers, big target with lots of money...

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Re: Ear-vermicide

or this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEBwsE1QQE4

My ringtone for some time before the angry mod with pitchforks etc. caught up

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Beware the clued-up, not just the clueless...

It's not always the clueless users that are hard work. Dealing with people that do genuinely know their shit, just not necessarily the stuff we have the problem with right now can be tough. Mainly 'cos they tend to interpret what's going on and their responses are coloured by that. Genuinely trying to be helpful, most of the time, not just dick-waving "I am the supreme being in the universe" showing off. Something I always try to remember when escalating calls to vendors, if not always successfully :-)

Most of the competent people I deal with/ have dealt with are more than happy if I say something along the lines of "I know you know your shit[0], but just take your brain out and put it somewhere safe for a bit, I just need you to be my ears, eyes and hands so I can figure exactly what's going on".

RTS

[0] Grammar; the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Re: rm -r *

Had a colleague do something similar whilst dialled in (yep, modems) to a customer system, RS/6000, probably AIX 4.3 or 5.1. Fortunately he 1) spotted the mistake/killed the command pretty quickly and 2) called for help immediately instead of trying to cover up. He lost a small amount of weight very rapidly too...

Some judicious investigation ("for $deity's sake don't drop the line"), assistance from several of us and remote copying from customer's other AIX systems on their network followed by a 'fess up to customer and a reboot to make sure all was good and you've never seen anybody look so relieved. We took the piss for a while afterwards, you definitely don't do that whilst the poor bugger's looking terrified.

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

Re: Thank $deity, lowered shimmering

Ta for that. So it is basically the bleeding obvious, even though I still say I hadn't spotted it as such. Silly me, there had to be a way of soaking up all those spare CPU/GPU cycles just lying around. Presumably reducing it is one of the ways MS have managed to ostensibly get Teams using "half the system resources".

Usual moan, stop giving me pointless 'features' and just give me something that lets me do the job in hand quickly, effectively and without faff. Don't get me wrong, I actually quite like Teams when it's working properly, I just hate having to re-learn application interfaces every time some sodding UI design team comes up with a new 'philosophy'

Thank $deity, lowered shimmering

What the hell is shimmering (apart from the obvious naturally occurring optical effect)? Can anybody remember sitting in front of Teams saying "Bloody shimmering, it's destroying my user experience! Bastards!"? I mean, lots of other things screw the user experience and are the cause of invective, but shimmering? Last time I thought about that, I was using CRT monitors, fercrhissakes.

I must be getting too old for this, losing track of the latest buzzwords, obviously.

2023: The year SK Hynix expects profit-whacking dip to end, and 238 layer RAM to debut

Re: "Our plan is to mass produce 238 layer by 2023."

238 it is.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17525/sk-hynix-announces-238-layer-nand-mass-production-to-start-in-h12023

Microsoft finds critical hole in operating system that for once isn't Windows

"Article suggests that MS submitted the finding with a bit of giddiness"

Oh dear. Reading what you want to read, I guess.

I saw this as a complimentary article describing how MS researchers responsibly reported a flaw in a widely used platform and Google's timely and effective response. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody played the game that way. Which they often do...

The suggestion that MS might be being triumphal about this is 1) yours and 2) a sub-ed's crack at titling the article in true Reg style, i.e. somewhat tabloidy and tongue in cheek playing on the traditional perceived antipathy between the two sides.

(edit: I try not to play Corp A vs. Corp B / Platform X is better than Platform Y games, it's counter productive. Just give me something that works safely, please)

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

The (relative) lack of atmosphere on the moon means you get roughly 1/3 extra energy density per square metre (around 1.36 kW/sq metre vs 1kW/sq metre). Which is a handy little boost in itself.

Halfords suffers a puncture in the customer details department

Re: Is this the same Halford....

--> It's also lifetime-guaranteed.

Yep, and they don't piss about when you need to use the guarantee either (at least at my local store). Only ever had to replace one thing, a T40 bit socket where the shaft broke. Straight up to the store, showed the lass on the counter, 2 minutes later walking out with the replacement.

Definitely worth watching out for the discounts, although they seem to have shifted to a paid-for loyalty scheme now to get the best discounts

Toyota battles Tesla, Ford with own residential energy storage battery

Re: Fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

Re: "At 1.97kg and 33.6mm x 340mm x 220mm it is heavy and bulky."

We've come a long way from the 13kg Compaq Portable (luggable) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable). You could even get a carry case with a shoulder strap. One particular example proved to be robust enough (Compaq made a bit of a thing about how tough the case was) to survive bouncing down a flight of concrete stairs after the clasp on the aforementioned strap broke...

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Such memories...

Ah, the joy of the diskette. Figuring out which manufacturer's media worked most reliably in which manufacturer's drives. Explaining to users why diskettes shouldn't be used as coffee cup mats. Carefully extracting the (usually 5.25") diskette from its jacket, rinsing it under a tap, drying off and replacing the diskette in the jacket of another sacrificial one, because the user (accountant's secretary) ignored the bit about cup mats. Explaining to a customer who was having trouble with reading diskettes that folding them in 4 to fit your shirt pocket really isn't a good idea. Turning single-sided diskettes in to dodgy double-sided by cutting the notch on the other edge of the jacket (it was an emergency, game state needed saving). Trying to get some sort of recognisable tune out of ACT Sirius (Victor 9000) diskette drives - which had variable speed zones across the disk. Attaching 8" drives ("Big D", I think?) to PCs for data transfer (EBCDIC to ASCII, anybody?).

Them were the days :-)

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: Floppy solution

Our misdeed, if such it was, was using the Norton hex editor (this was when you could actually meet the guy and the utilities were genuinely useful) to change the internal commands in command.com. No checksums or anything awkward like that so you just overtyped the characters and wrote back to disk. Handy number of 4-letter commands to work with...

One of our corporate customers' support guys (good drinking buddy) got wind of what we were up to and did a rather more SFW version to defend against some of their more curiosity-driven/careless end users.

NASA signs $1bn deal with Northrop Grumman to build studio apartment in lunar orbit with room for 3 vehicles

Astronaut taxi service?

I can hear it now...

I had that bloke Bezos in the back the other week, wanted to know if I thought it'd be worth setting up a Martian doorstep delivery service. So I says to him "Nah mate, won't get a look in there, bloody Martians have got it all sewn up. You should see what they want for a cabbie licence, criminal I calls it. And they gets preferential use of the saucer lanes anyway so there's yer profit margin straight out the airlock. And that bugger Musk got in first with delivering a vehicle for type approval so all the cabs have to come from Tesla, looks ok but you try finding a charging point that's working this side of Phobos..."

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Yeah, sure...

> Microsoft focused "on our customer, and not politics or litigation,"

Amazing how virtuous you can be when you won the damn contract. Bet you many $ that had the contract gone the other way there'd still be the litigation, just with a different name attached. sed 's/Amazon and Oracle/Microsoft/g'

Roger Waters tells Facebook CEO to Zuck off after 'huge' song rights request

Re: Worth ?

I'd happily start by kicking him

EE and Three mobe mast surveyors might 'upload some virus' to London Tube control centre, TfL told judge

Re: Does this not happen in the UK? Building owners aren't compensated at all?

Most likely it'd be a wayleave. This is probably the relevant bit of info:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/guidance-on-access-agreements

FCC urges Americans to run internet speed app to counter Big Cable's broadband data fudging

Re: Excuse my ignorance but...

Won't downvote, but will comment that the speedcheckers I use (speedtest, broadbandspeedchecker et al) all report in Mbits.

Broadband providers just can't get out of the habit of bending truth in to a pretzel.

Spotify to introduce lossless audio streaming: Better sound or inefficient gimmick?

Re: nobody needs to spend £100 per metre of cable

13A UK mains flex (not solid core) does the trick. Saw it used (carefully hidden from the eyes of the great unwashed) at an audio event for some pretty serious (read expensive) kit. Had a bit of a chuckle with the guys behind the stand about it, their professional take was that cable thickness/no. of cores was the important bit unless you run unfeasibly long lengths...

Yahoo! Groups! to! shut! down! completely! on! December! 15!... Tens! mourn!

Re: I wonder

Y! made it pretty difficult to get info out of the groups even when you owned the group. As mentioned elsewhere a lot of active Y! groups migrated to groups.io, in our case mainly because it's one of the few that still support email-only operation and we (still) have some very web-averse members...

There was a lot of traffic on the groups.io forum around Y! groups whose owners had either disappeared, or weren't interested. Y! were completely unhelpful so there will be a lot of active groups whose archive will basically be lost.

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Re: stupidity out of ignorance or avarice

Never come across the expression 'rich beyond the dreams of avarice?'

Even better, call them venally avaricious and I suspect you're close to the truth... Aren't obscure words fun?

RetroPie 4.6 brings forth an answer to 'What do I do with this Pi 4 I bought last year?'

Ta for reminding me about the TI99 - sold a fair few of those back in the day, along with the likes of the Commodores (VIC20, C64), BBC Micro (A & B), Dragon 32/64, Oric, NewBrain... Much tinkering needed, probably in part why I have a fair few rPi hanging about in case I feel the need...

5G signals won't make men infertile, sighs UK ad watchdog as it bans bonkers scary poster

Re: Infertility - maybe not such a real problem in this day and age

Surely you'd need two bricks to cause male infertility? One in each hand and bring 'em together rapidly...

BOFH: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and the ransomware struck

Re: A what USB stick?

A useful piece of plausible jargonese guaranteeing that the director won't have just any old USB stick, thus allowing BOFH to slip in the key logger.

AFAIK 'class' does indeed only exist in the world of SD cards

Who knew? Fabric access NVMe arrays can work with Spectrum Scale

Re: "lossless Mellanox Ethernet"

Sigh. Yes, regular Ethernet is potentially lossy. No, gold plated cables won't help 'cos there are so many other funky ways and places that frames could go missing (like cheap switches that can't support all ports flat out at wire speed).

Lossless Ethernet is intended to guarantee frame delivery so's you don't have to add in things like error checking and retransmission further up the stack. Different animals.

Los Alamos National Lab fires up 750-node RPi cluster

Re: Pi flavour?

Full sized Pi:

http://www.bitscope.com/product/blade/?p=about

Intel raises memory deflector shields in Xeon E7 processor refresh

Where's my S/360?

Old farts corner. TSX; my first reaction - it's a variation on Storage Protection Keys. There ain't nuthin' new under the sun, son...

And SPK has been there ever since.

Google's new scribble-tab-ulous handwriting interface for Android

Handwriting in schools

I'd be curious to see if there's any research comparing the (rate of) development of fine motor skills in young children between handwriting and using a keyboard. It's at least partly the lack of those that produces the 'spider on acid' effect, so maybe there;s a spin-off benefit?