Posts by G7mzh

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

That sounds suspiciously like my spare room!

Virgin Media comes top of the flops for customer complaints

No line rental?

Who are you with? I bet they charge the earth for calls, though.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Sounds like the place I used to work.

There would be endless arguments about which department was responsible for some bit of sales commission, or the price of a mains lead.

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

Re: Money for nothing, it's the best

I once received invoices - in separate envelopes, on the same day - for a couple of years subscription to an ISP which I had left some time previously. Followed a few days later by reminders (one for each monthly invoice, again in separate envelopes), followed not long after by the same from a firm of debt collectors.

A phone call to the debt collectors elicited the response "we do as we're told, but we don't think they know what they're doing".

They only stopped after I provided them with the date the telephne line was ceased (which took some effort to extract from BT). Part of me wishes I'd just left it and let them take me to court, since I could prove I no longer lived there.

(Said ISP, after years of good service, changed hands several times and has since disappeared completely).

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

Re: Customer Service

When I sent Vodafone a cheque - for rather more than 23p - it simply disappeared into their system and they denied all knowledge of it. It became incredibly difficult to actually pay them; I waited until they phoned to chase and gave them a credit card (which they would pay so many percent on) and then cancelled the account.

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

The BBC's problem is not copetition, but the idea of competition.

For years, the quality of BBC programmes has been dropping, because it feels is "must compete" with ITV and subscription services. Hence, we have the current race to the bottom with the schedules filled with game shows, junk auction shows, light-hearted (and light on content) pseudo-documentaries presented by "celebrities" instead of experts, and so forth. Just like the commercial channels.

The BBC needs to return to its core function and its core audience - people who actually appreciate quality content and have an attention span greater than a goldfish. I suspect people who dislike paying a licence fee to watch more of the same would happily do so for more of something different. Trying to imitate ITV isn't the way to go. If people want to watch endless soap operas, game shows and adverts, they can watch ITV &c. If they want to watch quality serious drama, documentaries, current affairs, religious output and so on, then they should be able to watch the BBC. Less of better should be the watchword, not more of not much.

As for Mr Davie forgetting what "broadcasting" means and wanting to turn the organisation into an ISP, despite this being against the wishes or needs of the vast majority of his audience, this is simply insane. Listen/watch again (or whatever they call it this week) is excellent, but as an add-on to the broadcast, not instead of.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: Customer pushback

"Commercial customers get it immediately"

Not necessarily. I used to work for a large international equipment company. Once when moving a machine one of our peopole ran it over the mains lead and damaged it (standard 13A to IEC flex).

While the logical course of action would have been to go down the shop for a new one and taken the money out of petty cash (or the errant shifter's pocket), or just absorbed the cost and sent out a new one, the Company instead spent several weeks deciding who was responsible, which bit of the budget should pay for it, and so on, all the while the poor customer was waiting for a new lead.

They were funny like that is several areas.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

I used to know someone who looked like Charles Bronson (the criminal, not the actor). He was known by everyone as Charlie - which he hated, but his protestations fell on very deaf ears and eventually he accepted it.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Get everyone to use ENIGMA

Persuade everyone to install Enigma and use it for email, and see how long it takes for the government to try to ban it.

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

"arguably the first British personal computer"?

What about the Nascom or Transam Triton?

Why should I pay for that security option? Hijacking only happens to planes

Re: Ah, yes. The dreaded "fix it NOW!" call ...

My phone has an external battery - I just pull the battey off.

The phone is set to divert to voicemail if not available anyway, so callers wouldn't know the difference.

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

I used to know someone who could do this off the top of his head.

I've no idea how, as he was as think as two short planks otherwise!

Re: Wrong number

Or those of us who preferred the wireless to the television, 484 5255 (which was actually a high-capacity redirect to 388 1255) - as Cuddly Ken instructed us, "Just cram your finger in the dial"!

Re: 555

When multi-user chatlines first came out, one of the proposed adverts used a "dummy" number instead of whatever the actual one would be. Unfortunately the number chosen happened to that of a private subscriber, who was forced to have their calls intercepted by the operator.

The number was picked because it had several repeated digits and fitted well with the jingle. Apparently it didn't occur to anyone to actually check if it existed!

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

I know someone who used to work for a large public sector employer. As he was part of the "on call" staff, his mobile could be reached by dialling an internal number - which was also reachable by DDI from outside. Those in the know could thus call his mobile by making a local call.

In theory, these calls were logged and the employees billed for any personal calls, though it had never been known to happen.

He has since retired, and had the mobile number transferred to his own PAYG account. The company was privatised and changed ownership twice. Over ten years later, the short code still works.

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Re: Fax

Does Telex still exist? I thought it had all died out years ago (apart from RTTY).

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

Re: And again, SNAP

My mother was the same. Any clockwork watch she tried to wear would stop. She used to wear a nurse's watch (the sort that hangs from your lapel) which gave no trouble.

She eventually got a battery wristwatch which worked ok.

My old workplace had nylon carpets. Getting a shock off the desks was commonplace.

We had the caretaker come round every few days to spray the floor with water - I'm not convinced it made much of an improvement though.

How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players

I've long thought ...

... that the people who write these filters have dirty minds and are bigger perverts than the content they're trying to filter.

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

My former employer had them in the toilets, but only by the door - what you were supposed to do if you spent too long in the cubicle I'm not sure!

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Lost or broke your mains lead or charger/external power supply? Here you are or we'll stick one in a Jiffy bag and Post or Fedex it to you.

On the other hand, one previous employer, on getting a call from a customer who needed a new mains lead, tied itself in all sorts of knots trying to work out which department was responsible, which budget it would be taken from, and so on. Taking one off the shelf and posting it - or even getting it sent round in a van, as in central London we had "roaming" emgineers - was beyond their capability.

Toyota reveals its work on an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility

Of course, it would be easier simply to put the pillars where they're not in the driver's line of sight. Like cars used to be made!

After Cummings' Barnard Castle trip, cheeky Britons started using the word 'vision' in their passwords

Re: Forced changes

Same system at the place I worked at. We had two, which would interrupt your work at random times during the working day. After we'd exhausted all the obscenities telling the machine what we thought of it, everyone went to the Month-year system.

I doubt if management cared that nearly everyone in the place used the same password; it wasn't a security-sensitive system anyway. Especially as it wasn't unknown for people to log in as other people on occasion if there was some server problem.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

You do. With the new system, it is not uncommon to have the two adjacent. For example, GO 08 (Golf Oscar zero eight) ABC is a valid number, and since the O and 0 are the same, it's easy to read it as Golf zero zero 8 (which is the format of the old system, although an impossible number).

I have never heard of someone being penalised for confusing the two though.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

We had a few customers like that. When they found out how much it would cost to recover, somehow their data always became less important!

Where I used to work, every employee had their own storage area on the network, mapped as "Drive N:" on their PCs. It also had a shared directory used for things like software updates, so people couid run the update when they weren't otherwise busy.

Despite it being frequently mentioned, I think only two or three of us actually used it for personal data.

It liiives! Sorta. Gentle azure glow of Windows XP clocked in Tesco's self-checkouts, no less

Not long ago I happened upon a faulty cash dispenser that was in the throes of rebooting. It was running OS/2.

And a surprising number of shops still use DOS for stock control and ordering. Most Chinese take-aways do, as does a well-known chain of bookshops.

Potato, potato. Toma6to, I'm going to kill you... How a typo can turn an AI translator against us

Re: Spelling check?

Just watch the subtitles on a popular news program to see daily demonstrations of this failure mode.

I remember one instance on "Question Time" where, in the subject of legalisation of cannabis, the subtitling machine decided to produce "can of piss". I've got a photograph of it somewhere.

I've always thoufght it a bit odd that the misprint is invariably a word or phrase less common than the corect one.

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

Book-cookery

Yet again, this is the BBC being economical with the truth. The 50.9% is not digotal radio listening, it is DAB+TV+internet.

If you refer to the RAJAR document, it's quite clear that digital radio listening is just under 37%.

User jams up PC. Literally. No, we don't know which flavour

Re: Good design my a***

The laptop is useless without wifi! I can see there would be the odd use-case for turning off wifi, but to make it a key that's prominent, or even not prominent but easily accidentally pressed

I raely use my laptop for the internet (the one on my desk does that), but frequently use it for the church Powerpoint and recording meetings. In neither of those do I want it connected - or trying to connect - to the outside world.

It's an HP, and the wifi switch is a dedicated button, with associated pilot light (light on = wifi on) well away from anything else.

Microsoft sued by staff traumatized by child sex abuse vids stashed on OneDrive accounts

If they're going to look

They shouldn't be upset if they find what they've been loooking for. And some of those quotes (regarding content) I simply don't believe.

Christmas Eve ERP migration derailed by silly spreadsheet sort

Re: Ah, Excel sorting

Of course, a lot of this wold be avoided if people didn't insist on using spreadsheets when they should be using databases.

It's round and wobbles, but madam, it's a mouse pad, not a floppy disk

Re: Insert a new disk and press Return

"May contain nuts" - this includes the possibility that it does not contain nuts. I'd love to ask the makers what the probability is.

Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

I used to do TV and VCR repairs, and had a regular customer whose children would post toys, sandwiches and other artifacts into the VCR. (It didn't seem to have occurred to her to put it on a higher shelf).

That machine finally ceased to be viable (and ceased to be a source of income) when the dear child decided that the machine needed a drink and poured haf a tin of cola down it.

Re: Not Snopes

> Staples are evil - just ask the person who has to the fix the photocopier!

I had a customer who cost himself a lot of money after buying a new laser printer. After a few days, he complained all the prints had nasty black marks on. We investigated, and discovered he's put some pages through with staples in. Now required, new drum and rollers.

Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

Have they thought?

"South Carolina will still be able to get their grumble flicks on demand, so long as they pay a $20 charge"

In other words, the state government will be selling pornography.

Local TV presenter shouted 'f*cking hell' to open news bulletin

They realised the mistake "immediately" but it took them three days to apologise? Should have done so in the first ad break - or even before if there was a suitable point in the programme.

Sloppy.

Lessons from the Mini: Before revamping or rebooting anything, please read this

Re: Impressive???

My father had the original Mini (when it was still called an Austin Seven). Eevert year, it carried me, my parents and my grandmother away on holiday to various far-flung parts of the country, together with enough luggage for a fortnight. To this day, I can't work out how we got everything in!

Hell desk thought PC fire report was a first-day-on-the-job prank

Re: so..

If the customer is expecting a technician, they will not be happy with someone who turns up looking like a bank clerk. The reason being, he won't be wanting to do any "proper" work - such as scrabbling on the floor or rummaging in dusty cupboards - for fear of getting his suit dirty.

The possible exception to this is where the company supplies overalls, but I haven't seen that for a long time.

It's finally happened: Hackers are coming for home routers en masse

"admin" left as the username

with "admin" left as the username

I've come across more than one router - Netgear for example - where the username "admin" is hard-coded and can't be changed.

You call it 'hacking.' I call it 'investigation'

Re: HSBC

I used to work for a large credit company in their call centre; when we called people we were supposed to just ask for a couple of details to confirm that the person who answered the phone was who we wanted to speak to, but in practice we generally (unofficially) used a similar system - "I see you live in NW1, what's the rest of the postcode?" and so forth. If the person at the other end wasn't who we wanted, we hadn't given anything away.

If they insisted, we asked them to call the number on their card.

Is there paper in the printer? Yes and it's so neatly wrapped!

Re: Locked in? BTDT.

The place I used to work in had one of these "air lock" doors which frequently broke down. If someone got stuck in it there was no way to open the door until someone came along and let you out. How it was legal I don't know; I'm sure a H&S case could have been brought.

Password strength meters promote piss-poor paswords

Re: Passwords need to be rethought

The company I used to work for had two systems, both of which demanded you changed your password every few weeks- usually at random times during the day when you were in the middle of something more important (like speaking to a customer), and which couldn't be anything you had used before or something similar (So if you had used Password1, then Password<n> was verboten).

Several of us got into the habit of changing the password on the first of the month (which reset the timer) and instead of trying to think of something secure we just used the date. March2015 was sufficiently different from April2015 etc, and of course wouldn't be used again! Since it ended up with half the office using the same password, the system obviously didn't recognise that this was going on!

Why thay did this is unknown, it wasn't an environment where operator security was relevant.

Harrison Ford's leg, in the Star Wars film, with the Millennium Falcon door

Re: Eh? What?

Wonder how long a door that could crush somebody without safety features would last in an office building.

Not quite the same, but the place I worked at had a rotating "air lock" door which - supposedly - detected when someone had passed through one door, closed that and opened the other. When it failed to do so, which it did frequently, you got trapped in it because there were no controls on the inside. Fortunately it was a high traffic area, but more than once a victim had to use their mobile to telephone the switchboard for help!

Oh dear, Vodafone: Sales dip in UK

Doesn't surprise me. I use them for landline indirect service (that is to say, the account still exists but is rarely used). Paying them is impossible. They don't take payment in the shops (a sealed envelope marked "billing" left on the counter followed by a hasty retreat is invarably lost), a cheque in the post takes weeks, and over the phone, although theoretically possible, involves so many transfers and instructions to ring a different (chargeable) number it's rediculous. Once they charged ny credit card without permission (and for an amount that bore no relation to the amount owing) and I got it reversed by the card company. My last payment was left with the shop and I'm not going to do it again, it's up to them to sort out. Never any communication from them.

I was at one looking at them for landline, but never in a million years!

Maplin Electronics demands cash with menaces

Re: Cheeky bastards.

Maybe I'll take my Honda there - to change the bulb you have to take the wheel off! (You can just do it without, but it's a complete pain).

Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things

More reliable?

Modern TVs are not more reliable, if the number of the relatively new ones I've fixed is anything to go by. Granted, we no longer have to worry about PL509s flashing over, or the dreaded Sony SCS's going short, but the power supply modules of many current sets (all bought in on the cheap) are unrelaiable in the extreme, due to a combination of bad design and sub-standard components. Most shops aren't interetsed in fixing them, preferring the customer to send it to landfill and spend more money on a new one (and repeat the process in three or four years), but usually a repair can be done quickly and cheaply.

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware storms live TV weather forecast

Use XP

No pop-ups, no nag screens, no problem. It just works.

Cinema boss gives up making kids turn off phones: 'That's not how they live their life'

Don't bother telling them, they'll ignore you. Just line the walls with chicken wire and earth it. If they don't get a signal, they can't play!

Reminder: iPhones commit suicide if you repair them on the cheap

Save money

And buy a Chinese imitation instead. Probably more reliable.