Posts by phuzz

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

We had high hopes that it'd become a world-wide movement and we'd be done with the useless things for good.

I think it might have worked, at least for a lot of people. The only job I've had where a tie was mandatory was a waiting/barstaff gig. My first IT job I had to wear a proper shirt, so I requestioned a bunch of the short-sleeved shirts the field engineers had, so that I wouldn't have to spend my own money on them. Since then, I've been able to wear what I like.

If you're not customer facing, why bother dressing up?

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: Not to cast doubt but...

Impact drivers hammer in a circular direction (which can eg. help break loose rusted fasteners). A hammer drill vibrates the drill bit into/out of the material, in a linear way.

Re: Not to cast doubt but...

They can survive that kind of drop just fine. In the few years I spent working at a PC builder I saw harddrives (and every other component) subjected to all kinds of drops, shocks, impacts, and intentional drop kicks, and a surprising number of them continued to work fine.

Or at least, they worked long enough to pass QC and get packaged up, we didn't care once they were on their way to the customer.

I learnt a lot there; like, did you know your motherboard doesn't need all those capacitors? One or two can break off and it'll still boot fine. Also, server fans spin fast enough to cut your finger down to the bone. SATA is 100% hot-swappable although your OS might disagree. RAM on the other hand is not.

You get to find out a lot when you have a very boring job, and an inquiring mind.

Re: I once had a disk kill another disk.

If you had to restore files from backup, then there was downtime. Maybe not a consequential one if you didn't need those files right then, but that was still downtime.

Re: Nothing like as traumatic

I'm going to have to disagree with you. Chucking hardrives into an industrial shredder is fun. Maybe not the most fun method, but definitely still fun.

Trump can bluster and bluff all he wants, but iPhone manufacturing isn't coming to the US

Re: Apple's new factory

I was wondering when someone would come up with the "just build a fake factory and tell Donald it's real" plan, and it turns out someone's done an entire comic of it.

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

83% of the UK live in urban areas.

Globally, 55% of the world live in cities.

FAA gives SpaceX the nod for Starship Flight 9 but doubles the danger zone

Re: "Hardware Failure"

Rocket science is complex, but mostly straight-forward, it's the rocket engineering that's the tricky part.

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

To add a bit more information to the above comments: Because the Amiga drove it's floppy drive with one of it's custom chips, it could (and did) do things with floppy discs that can't be read on a PC floppy drive.

So your two choices are to either: use an Amiga to read the discs and find a way of getting that data off the Amiga and onto your modern system (maybe a CompactFlash <> IDE board?)

Or, use something like a Greaseweazle V4 and a PC floppy drive to image the discs straight to a PC.

Whether you regard either of those options as 'straight forward' is up to you.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

USB-BNC cables do exist! However, they seem to be for either audio or surveillance cameras :(

Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple

Re: The explanation is simpler, and far less sinister

For a real example, my laptop has a "11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz" which is currently fluctuating between 1.49-2.04GHz (it's mostly idle right now).

Honestly, all the (R) and (TM) make it almost sound like a parody.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

That's a feature not a bug.

Re: Bluetooth needed

Clove oil works to stop puppies from chewing cables, I have yet to test it on my cat.

Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade

This certainly used to be the case, and a lot of that I'd put down to Adobe historically ignoring the widespread piracy of Photoshop, which meant it was freely available to young kids everywhere. Some of those kids would become designers, and when hired, they'd ask for a (fully legit and thus, pricey) copy of Photoshop, which the business would then buy for them.

I suspect Adobe's shift to subscription based software, has slowly choked off the supply of new designers who insist on Photoshop, but this will take a decade or two to work it's way through the industry.

"The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed"

As seen in the urinal of one of my local pubs, along with the addition below it:

"and when it does, there's sand in the vaseline"

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

The most difficult I've encountered was Turkish, because it had some of the letters I needed, but not all, and some looked like English(Latin) letters, but weren't.

Using it to type in a password was an exercise in frustration.

Wanted: A handy metric for gauging if GPUs are being used optimally

Just look out of the window, if the seas are boiling, then you know your AI is online.

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

I fear this will never become a successful text editor, because it lacks the one thing that all well known editors have: That is a feature which is beloved by some people, and roundly hated by everyone else. Without something memable like "being unable to exit vim", it's doomed to obscurity.

After more than half a century, the voyage of Kosmos 482 is over

Re: no mention of radiation

The satellite-bus itself was solar powered, because solar works even better in Venus orbit. Although the bus itself burned up in the Earth's atmosphere decades ago.

US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

Re: For the Saudis,maybe , maybe not

I'm sure they've convinced the US that there's no way that could possibly happen. Pinky-swear and everything.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: I have this Debian server at home...

Uptime is a measure of how long it's been since you last booted successfully.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: We had an issue with a rabbit

Wiping clove oil on the cables helped stop my mate's puppy from chewing everything in sight

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

Re: Hubble Telescope.......

As other's have pointed out, you can always just use an older kernel that does support your hardware, and that's the point really, there's no point in using a newer kernel on an old machine, because (eg) your 386 box won't need NVMe support.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Wait .... What?!

I worked at a PC builder during the windows XP era. Back then if you tried to put a harddrive with XP installed on one set of hardware, into a different machine, it mostly wouldn't boot.

So, this company had to have a different Windows install for every different configuration the sold. Machine B is identical to machine A, but with a soundcard? New image. Different motherboard? New image. Each build image was numbered, and once it had been built, a Ghost image was made, and stored on DVD-R. During my time they were into the 6000's.

So, when a new batch of PCs was being built, someone (often me) would have to go pick all the different hardrives from the warehouse, and then painstakingly write the correct Ghost image to each one. There was an IDE/PATA harddrive duplicator, but this was just as SATA drives were being introduced, so we had several PC's with SATA ports, and each drive was just stood upright on a shelf and plugged into the open PCs. I discovered that SATA was effectively hot-swappable, which saved boot time (Ghost was booted off a floppy disk in each machine), and also that a drive-to-drive clone was possible, which was much quicker than imaging from DVD.

I could of course then use that saved time to sit on my arse and do nothing :)

Ghost in the shell script: Boffins reckon they can catch bugs before programs run

Re: Shellcheck

I have a feeling the researchers weren't interested in existing solutions, instead they had AI to peddle. From TFA:

Using large language models to check shell command documentation against actual behavior

El Reg's essential guide to deploying LLMs in production

Re: Impressive

Why? Well, those oceans aren't going to boil themselves you know!

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Re: I was surprised Minecraft was still around (other than for gaming heritage buffs)

Don't forget they're (presumably) getting a chunk of money from the new Minecraft film too. Minecraft is still wildly popular amongst kids

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Re: Shocking experience

Too much currents was the cause of the problem.

The Reg translates the letter in which Oracle kinda-sorta tells customers it was pwned

Re: "Oracle completely destroyed their reputation this time"

I guess that depends on how many shares you have in Oracle.

Re: With the plummeting stock markets...

I wish I believed that would ever happen

Re: "Oracle completely destroyed their reputation this time"

I think we should add "bankrupted the UK's second biggest city" to their score sheet (see el Reg passim)

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Even and old BOfH can learn new tricks.

DOGE dilettantes 'didn't test' Social Security fraud detection tool at appropriate scale

This turned out to be an error, and checks were deposited on time.

Like, actual paper cheques? I'm not even sure when I last saw one of those, possibly back in the early 2000's, but that was very much an anachronism even then.

Tariff-ied Framework pulls laptops, Keyboardio warns of keystroke sticker shock

Re: Economic Responses

Maybe it's actually a genius plan to disrupt drug smugglers by making it more profitable to smuggle in things like Nintendo Switchs, or a mechanical keyboard.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Dubious tape economy

In their defence, they probably expected NASA to be back on the moon within a few years.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

"What's your day-to-day dress code" is one of the questions I ask at job interviews.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Ones Aurora

I've had people say to me "can you come and stand next to my computer please, it keeps going wrong". They'd noticed how often a problem would magically disappear when I turned up to investigate.

Nothing to do with, eg, their password being put in correctly because they tended to type slower and more carefully if I was there ;)

Re: Anglepoise Lamp

I was a student when I bought mine too, although this was in 2000. I found it in a charity shop for £10, just missing a cable.

Compared to how much they cost brand new, I got a massive bargain, and it's still on my desk right now.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: Weight?

I've got a modern "Das Keyboard" which is about 1.5kg, mostly coming from the solid aluminium base. It really does feel like you could fend off zombies with it.

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Hopefully you're somewhere with phone reception.

Re: Now that you mention it

FWIW I never had a single problem with the firmware upgrade process when I used to be responsible for a fleet of 40-odd 2832's. Even though some of them were at the other end of very poor ADSL connections.

Keeping up to date with security patches is heartily recommended.

Re: Remote management

Nope. It defaults to off (ie LAN only), but Drayteks are used by a lot of small businesses who might want remote management (we used to use them for just this purpose). You can set a list of allowed IPs, but there's always people who'll ignore that 'just to get it working' and forget to go back and turn it on later.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Well Done.

I feel like we should cut him some slack, given that up until that point his entire experience with computers was owning a BBC Micro.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: Confused Mouse

When I worked as a PC builder I discovered that if you try hard enough, it's possible to insert a RAM module in the wrong way around. The impressive part was that although the person that did it wasn't that technical, they'd been working there for years and had probably installed thousands of DIMMs, but never stopped to wonder why this particular DIMM required much more force than all the others.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Well, did you notice that Bob Howard's middle names are 'Francis Oliver'?

Free95 claims to be a GPL 3 Windows clone, but it's giving vaporware vibes

Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

Except Dave, and honestly, he seems way too excited about milking the cows, we should probably keep him away from them...

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Re: Don't do themselves any favours

You can root them and install a community ROM, and continue to use it as a small cheap ARM device.

Junior techie rushed off for fun weekend after making a terminal mistake that crashed a client

Re: And one closer to the story here...

Anyone who claims they've never done something similar is lying.

I should probably look at installing molly-guard by default on new servers.

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

I'm pretty sure you can do per-client settings via a Pi-hole. Or rather, you can add clients to 'groups', and customise the filtering per-group.

For example, I can put my work laptop into a group I imaginatively call "work stuff", and I can add a rule to whitelist my work domain which only applies to that group.

Moonshot goes sideways as Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander seemingly falls over

Re: I know it's not easy...

It didn't matter what the landing conditions were like, all of the Apollo pilots were, well, pilots. There was zero chance that any of them would have allowed the computer to land them, not when they had perfectly good manual controls.

Fortunately it was fly-by-wire, so the computer was in the loop all the time to make sure they didn't mess it up ;)