Posts by Blofeld's Cat

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

Futureproof ...

I worked on a site where the company had half a racking bay in their warehouse filled with old, still boxed, 386SX PCs, which had been bought by a technologically-challenged PHB and his purchasing manager despite the protests of everyone involved in IT.

The story was that the salesman had taken the PHB out to lunch and had persuaded him the hopelessly underpowered systems were "state of the art", and could easily be updated to meet "any future requirements".

The deal had apparently been clinched when the salesman offered a discount for bulk purchases.

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

Er ...

"I waited for days to be called into HR"

Probably HR had a chain of paperclips hanging over their monitor as well.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

A screwdriver I was using rolled off the back of a desk and into a rats' nest of cables. Leaning over the desk I could just touch the handle but not get hold of it.

So I leaned a bit further and ... >CRACK< ... broke a rib.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

I worked on a site where the switch room key had a 20kg collection of steel plates as the "tag". The key was attached by a metre of equally impressive chain, so you could put the tag on the floor while working the lock.

Apparently they added another 1kg to the tag every time somebody took it off site.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: "Unless one is scribbling in the margin of one's pudding"

Fermat's Cuisine?

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

High-stakes poker scam used rigged card shufflers, X-ray tables, and special glasses

Hmm ...

There is only one way to end up with a small fortune by playing poker - Start with a large fortune.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Er ...

I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story of the UK company that ordered some mechanical components from Japan. In their order they stated that they would accept 5% of out-of-spec components.

A few weeks later the parts arrived accompanied by a note from QC. The note read: "We do not understand your business methods, but the out-of-spec components you ordered are wrapped in red tissue paper in the top layer of the first box."

Pigs will fly: Uber Eats to trial drone delivery

Pull!

I can't help feeling that using a drone for local pizza delivery is a solution looking for a problem.

I mean it's already possible to deliver pizzas over quite a wide area with the technology used for launching clay pigeons ...

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

Slightly Foxed ...

I suspect that kit looked badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

Cf The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Stolen drinks ...

A medical technician friend of mine once tracked down who was stealing the tea pool's soft drinks by adding a small amount of a harmless diagnostic chemical to each bottle.

Completely harmless, but with the side effect of turning the patient's urine bright red.

Apparently the screams from the gents' toilet could be heard for some distance.

Doesn't "Wagon Wheel Reduction" need to be declared before that gambit is in play?

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Ah yes, I added code to our trial software to try and prevent that sort of thing.

Fiddling with the local clock produced a "Error HGW1895: Temporal anomaly" message.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

An aunt of mine had some interesting* results when a keen DIY person installed a Saniflo toilet for her - using push-fit waste plumbing.

^{*As in "May you live in interesting times."}

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Much sought after destination ...

A former colleague used to have to maintain some communication antennas and associated gear for people who do not exist, at places that didn't appear on an Ordnance Survey map.

Not being on the map used to lead to some difficulty in actually finding the transmitter sites.

Fortunately one of the senior technicians had bought a set of old Soviet maps while at a conference in Moscow, and these showed the installations in some detail.

Caught a vibe that this coding trend might cause problems

Here we go again ...

In 1981 a British company called D.J. "AI" Systems produced a program called "The Last One".

The company claimed it was the last program that would ever need to be written, as all future software would be produced by it.

The software is no longer available ...

Amazon built a massive AI supercluster for Anthropic called Project Rainier – here's what we know so far

"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and you ask me if I can make tea."

"It's no wonder I'm feeling very depressed."

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Followed by ...

A flame war* between influencers who state that green bananas contain the most magic, and pseudoscientists who claim that they need to ripen to yellow, before their full potential is reached.

Both sides will consider the brown banana faction as being unredeemable heretics.

^{* Or possibly the more traditional type of war.}

Glazed and confused: Hole lotta highly sensitive data nicked from Krispy Kreme

Re: Same old story

No, that would not be fair to the hundreds and thousands affected.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Ring, ring ...

A colleague and his wife have tattoos where the wedding ring would normally sit, as they both have jobs where jewellery would be a safety/hygiene risk.

Their actual wedding rings only get worn on special occasions as they were made for them by a relative, who crafted them from meteorite iron.

When asked, "Are those rings antique?" their usual reply is, "Yes, they're just slightly older than the solar system."

TeleMessage security SNAFU worsens as 60 government staffers exposed

"Transglobal Hacking Empire" - normally abbreviated to "The THE" to frustrate people using search engines and spellcheckers ...

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Re: I know it's an old joke but on the topic of office signs...

My business cards have had "Electrical Engineer (Q Branch)" on them for years.

I also have some that say "Wile E. Coyote - Super Genius" for trade shows and exhibitions.

Icon: "Yes, I do have a card somewhere ..."

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: In denial

My mother used to have her TV volume set so high that I could hear it while I was parking my car, and she lived in a second floor flat.

We bought her some cordless headphones.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

<Waves hand>

Yes, I can remember when a half-crown was 2'6 or 2/6 or 2s 6d. I also remember the farthing, but we won't go there ...

The local bus company took some weeks to change over their ticket machines when the new decimal coins came in, so you used to tender fifteen new pence and be given two and a half new pence back for a half-crown fare.

Incidently until just a few years ago the UK railway infrastructure still used miles and chains.

Re: a Perl programmer who tended to write obscure (even for Perl) code

"He got fired instead, but his code stayed."

I got landed with trying to sort out some code that had been hacked together by such a consultant.

Developed using the Borland C IDE (remember that?), his masterpiece mixed bad C code with blocks of embedded assembler "for performance". Comments were of the "you shouldn't get here" variety.

I wasted half a day going through something that couldn't possibly compile, let alone work, only to find that the genius had excluded that particular source file from the Make with an obscure command line switch.

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all – at least for consumers

Re: Trust M$ with my biometric data????

Er, alphabetic order would be: "Amazon"," Apple", "Facebook", "Google"

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

Re: "because the warranty had expired and the recall didn't apply to him."

"With modern poor road maintenance, bushes tend to get a bit of a hard time.

Oh, you mean mechanical bushes - it all makes sense now.

For a moment I had a picture in my mind of a car bouncing off the pot-holes and disappearing into the undergrowth.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: misdirection going on here, i think

Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?"

Dr Benjamin Franklin: "A republic - if you can keep it."

Conversation recorded by James McHenry in his Journal on the last day of the Constitutional Convention, 18 September 1787.

UK government using AI tools to check up on roadworthy testing centers

SELECT ... WHERE pass_rate_percent > 95;

I suspect that in this case the "AI solution" will be a database query as you suggest. Possibly one that is already being done under a different name.

Don't forget that "We implemented an AI solution" sounds much better than "We ran a database query", and scores more points on the buzzword bingo card.

If, however, the powers that be bring in one of the consultancy friends, then we can expect to see a multi-billion plan wrapped around the same query.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Just a cotton-pickin' minute there Muskie ...

I don't suppose Elon has the time to read biographies.

Which is a pity because reading an account of the lives of Leon Trotsky and/or Ernst Röhm might be informative. Especially their later years ...

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Pythonesque ...

"I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

A new dark age ...

One of the fears of historians at the moment is that we are entering a new "Dark Age" where it is soon going to be almost impossible to research anything that happened after the middle years of the 20th century, from primary sources.

A friend was commissioned to write the history of a company that had been founded in Victorian days. The firm still had the minutes of every meeting written down in huge ledgers which lined the walls of their boardroom. Apparently she had so much material that writing the firm's history was very easy, with the hardest part being deciding what to omit.

These days most firms hold such records electronically and almost certainly delete them after a certain time. Quite often they are legally required to delete records that are no longer needed. To produce a similar history of contemporary firms you would often have to use potentially inaccurate secondary sources.

Obviously not every record survived when they were held in physical form, but it is a lot easier to casually wipe a hard drive than it is to dispose of a cellar full of filing cabinets and folders.

13 days into the outage, will Kaseya's Traverse trip back to life today?

Re: "they just put the clock on the round table" ...

You had sand? We used to dream of sand.

We just had an urn with water dripping out of it. - And we had to take turns counting the drips...

Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership

Re: Because Science!

“I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggy’s heart away and I got Sidney’s leg.” — Douglas Adams

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: Motorola brick

I did some testing for a hand-held test equipment manufacturer in the mid '80s.

One of their sales reps had turned up at a potential customer's factory to demonstrate an instrument to a very disinterested manager. Part of his sales pitch emphasized the robustness of the instrument, which was one of its main selling points.

The manager stopped him at that point, "What do you mean by robust?"

Their rep led the manager to an adjacent loading bay and threw the unit across the factory yard, where it bounced off a wall and landed in a puddle, without noticeable effect.

He said afterwards that he had half expected the unit to shatter into a million pieces, but it was the only way he could think of to get the order.

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

Re: Murphy's law:

"Murphy was an optimist" - O’Toole’s Commentary

Re: Understatement there.

Zounds?

Julian Assange pleads guilty, leaves courtroom a free man

Hmm ...

Usually at the end of a long, drawn-out case like this, there is a request from the defendant's legal team to respect the privacy of those involved, and to allow them to get on with their lives away from the glare of publicity.

Hopefully everyone will honour this principle ...

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: Quiet ICE

I find your lack of "Tufty the squirrel" disturbing ...

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

It's deja-vu all over again ...

"The databases have no version control systems. Important fields for identifying individuals were used inconsistently – for example, containing junk data, test data, or null data ..."

Sounds like just about every corporate database I've ever been asked to merge, convert, transfer, etc.

"Well not all our customers have a VAT number, so we use that field for their nickname. If they do have a VAT number then we put that in the Fax field, as we don't want to confuse anyone ..."

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Hmm ...

While I was working on a large corporate site, there was a medical emergency - first-aider, paramedics, ambulance, trip to A&E - in one of the training rooms.

Their employee giving the presentation, in order to connect the ceiling-mounted projector to his laptop, had climbed on an office chair (with castors) that he placed on a folding table, with predictable results.

The front-desk mounted connectors, next to his laptop, were all found to be working correctly as was the IR remote. He had just failed to use any of them.

Ironically the presentation was about health and safety at work, and the presenter ran that department.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Raising the baa ...

"rammed through the law" ... "Probably feeling a bit sheepish now"

I see what ewe did there.

Air National Guardsman Teixeira to admit he was Pentagon files leaker

Re: "National Security"

"... Death Star ... Hayne's Manual ..."

Chapter 5 - Servicing the reactor.

...

5.04 Replace the covering grate on the exhaust port.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Got to love an optimist ...

Just this week I had a former employer who stiffed me about £2k on a project, ask me if I would do some modifications to the project for him. Price to be agreed later.

I politely explained that unfortunately I was now retired and busy doing other things.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

Re: They wouldn't have done this 60 years ago

Nowadays the perpetrators would simply be interviewed to find out what their motives were, and who they were working with.

Following those discussions, concrete proposals would be set out on how the persons involved could become useful members of society.

A supporting role in highway development might well be suggested at this point ...

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: Brave new wrodl!

The Rolls-Royce Silver Mist had to be renamed in German-speaking countries.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Hmm ...

Alphabet announces that it is selling off its advertising operation, so it can concentrate on defeating attempts to track its customers.

UK signals legal changes to self-driving vehicle liabilities

Er ...

"But a report from Parliament's Transport Committee highlights a number of obstacles in the vehicles' path."

Which is rather more than the vehicle's sensors did in at least a couple of cases ...

DoJ: Ex-soldier tried to pass secrets to China after seeking a 'subreddit about spy stuff'

Re: team leader and sergeant

Tom Lehrer in his introduction to "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier", states that the US Army has eliminated discrimination: "by race, creed, colour and also ability".

NASA taking its time unboxing asteroid sample because it grabbed too much stuff

Re: They are doing it right.

"... Who Me and On Call ..."

Unfortunately in their excitement, nobody had mentioned the capsule to the cleaners, and during the night ...