Posts by ADJB

How to keep a support contract: Make the user think they solved the problem

How site visits work

Luser - My XXXX is broken it won't switch on

Helpdesk - Have you checked its plugged in and all switched on

Luser (about 1 second Later) Of course it is do you think I am a fool etc

Helpdesk - I'll get somebody out to look at it.

Arrive on site

What won't turn on then?

XXXXX

and its all plugged in?

Of course it is do you think ect ect

OK, let me take a look (seeing plug sitting on the floor and a new coffee machine plugged in)

Pass Luser said plug

Could you just hold that for me please

Could you just plug it into the wall please

Just try the XXXX now please

Oh, look it started working

All the above is said loud enough for the office to hear so when they plug it in you always get somebody who twigs it just needed plugging in ans says so. Luser id then mocked by fellow Lusers.

Next time a call comes from that office and they are asked to check they do check not wanting the humiliation doled out to the first Luser.

Nasty but efficient.

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Not all good

While I admire the skills involved in getting this all working again I am rather annoyed having just worked out how much I could have claimed in milage to do a site visit to fix it.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: Foot switch

Knowing some of our medical secretary's who use foot pedals when transcribing dictations I can't make my mind up if "strop" is a typo or not.

FCC forced by court to ask the public (again) if they think tearing up net neutrality was a really good idea or not

Plain English

Looks like the FCC press office has employed Sir Humphrey.

A few reasons why cops haven't immediately shot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Re: I say we ...

No, that's overkill.

Better we drop a big enough nuke on central London so the EMP gets the drone, after all the aim is to keep Gatwick working.

Bonus points for doing it when parliament is fully occupied.

Peak tech! Bacon vending machine signals apex of human invention

Faith in technology

Articles like this are what keep my faith in technology alive when your bring flooded with IOT devices and other worthless crap.

Microsoft readies the swatter as more bugs wriggle out of the Windows 10 woodwork

Re: Why is this even news?

Maybe not valuable or interesting as news items but comedy gold.

The Register to publish Mindful Sysadmin adult colouring book

Shame Really

I suspect this would have been one of the best selling lines in the long history of dodgy Reg merchandise.

There's an epidemic of idiots who can't find power switches

My usual response to the inevitable question of what was wrong with it is to answer in a load enough voice for all the office to hear "You have to switch it on / have it plugged in for it to work.

The making people look like idiots system works well for cutting down on repeat calls.

Further confusion at TalkTalk claims it was hit by 'sequential attack'

Plods waste millions keeping their arses covered and ears open

Poundland do some very nice leather belts in various sizes and styles. No doubt they make a profit on that price as well.

Ballmer's billion-dollar blunders: When he gambled Microsoft's money and lost

Kinnect and Rare

You always get more value for your cockups if you play them in pairs.

I don't know of anybody that uses or even has used the (lets copy the Nintendo Wii) Kinnect on the Xbox. It seems to have no real purpose that a gamer would want given the Xbox has always been pushed as having more "hardcore" (i.e. FPS) games than anything Nintendo would consider decent on it's consoles.

Now couple that with effectively destroying Rare as a credible Games producer by forcing them to make second rate games just to support the Kinnect.

Bingo - Two plagues on the bottom line for the price of one.

At least now Rare can, hopefully, get back to producing the quality games, of a type Nintendo would approve of and therefore attract the audience you just alienated.

Sorry, forgot, all the top talent got that pissed off by being forced to produce rubbish that they all left.

I would bet those pair of mismanagements have cost the best part of a billion.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Chopstick-collapsing Spam musubi

Re: I quite like Spam these days

"Although I've only introduced Spam into the equation in fairly recent years, after Plumrose Luncheon Meat [in a similarly sized and shaped, albeit green, tin] disappeared from the market."

I was using Plumrose Luncheon meat this morning and had a few nice Barbel, Chub and a couple of Eels using it. If you really want to actually eat the stuff then my normal stockist is Home Bargains where it goes for 99p a tin. There are without a doubt other stockists who don't care enough about their brand to stock the stuff.

http://www.tulipltd.co.uk/about-us/brands/plumrose

Indiana Jones whips Bond in greatest movie character poll

What about Tom?...... and for that matter Jerry.

IN YOUR FACE, Linux and Apple fans! Oculus is Windows-only for now

Re: Serious question ...

Yes.

If the quality is good enough I can see a lot of opportunities for non gaming uses especially when used with high end CAD kit (which has more or less the same hardware requirements) in training and general design work.

There isn't a massive difference between running round the industrial level in Mega Blaster XXX and using the same ideas to train people on a plant layout.

Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election

It's still true.....

Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Oh and Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.

NERDS KICK PUPPY 'bot in brutal attack

Re: Best of all...

It probably just squats down and leaves a pile of AAA's behind.

Care.data's a good thing? Tell us WHY, thunders watchdog

Re: Not to worry

To be fair at least that will be quicker, cheaper, more efficient, more reliable than the government will manage.

Microsoft to bring back beloved 1990s super-hit BATTLETOADS!?*

Being as even Microsoft have now admitted that gamers (and to be fair, everybody's) interest in kinnect is zero or slightly less they might actually allow Rare to start producing good games again. Shame that all the talent got that fed up of overbearing management that they left so now the company is just a shell of the company it once was.

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

Clouds.....

Clouds do seem to have this habit of raining on people.

Newly spawned Dixons Carphone leaps onto LSE as £12bn sales org

Now the staff will know nothing about twice as many product lines as before.

Elite Systems promises to order ZX Spectrum revival in two weeks

Re: Elite's Steve Wilcox later promised to set things right.

A number of Dev's have been paid and had the contracts with Elite cancelled.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/30/5668382/elite-systems-kickstarter-pays-royalities

This does not of course mean all outstanding debts are paid but the above article gives quite a bit of detail on who has settled and the games involved.

This does leave a few questions.

How many people are still owed money?

What "Classic Games" will be available on launch?

Will it actually work as advertised?

........

TalkTalk talks itself into trouble with budget broadband package fibs

A better solution might be that the infringing company is forced to provide whatever they have offered in the headline print of the advert.

For example - UNLIMITED Broadband for 99p a month.

Should mean the ISP has to provide exactly that, not 99p for the first month and then £25 p/m afterwards plus you must take your telephone line @ £14.99 a month and we charge a one off £75 for "installation" and a £2.50 router. Not of course forgetting that we charge £5 a month to allow you to pay with a credit card and £7.50 a month to send you an email invoice. ....and you must take out a 60 month contract.I wont even comment on the unlimited bit.

Coulson GUILTY of conspiring to hack phones between 2000 and 2006

At least he should be able to pick up some good stories from any of the expense fiddling MP's that are still partaking of board and lodging at her majesty's pleasure.

Dutch firm passes the world's first e-spliff to the left hand side

Re: A dark day for reggae

You could still get away with...

Pass the dutch-e from the left hand side

WORLD CUP SHOCK: England declared winner in 2-1 defeat to Italy

Re: "Spud-faced footie ace..."

It's normally "Spud-faced granny botherer" which is much more factually correct.

Women are too expensive to draw and code – Ubisoft

Re: PC stupidity again

Correct, we demand equal opportunity assassins.

'CAPTAIN CYBORG': The wild-eyed prof behind 'machines have become human' claims

"And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractable's, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make fools of themselves in public.”

Douglas Adams

A truly gifted futurologist who foresaw the coming of Kevin Warwick and his ilk.

Ukrainian teen created in lab passes Turing Test – famous nutty prof

Pot - Kettle

Has Kevin Warwick ever managed to pass a Turing test?.

London officials declare cabbie-bothering Uber is legal – for now

Congestion?

"The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) is planning a demonstration against Uber on 11 June, which it expects to cause severe congestion and traffic chaos in central London"

and we will be able to tell the difference how exactly?

Readers' choice: What every small-business sysadmin needs

Information as a tool

One of the most helpful tools I carry round is a Kindle.

Manuals for all the "odd" software we use, reference books for everything, more or less a full copy of our helpdesk knowledge-base and most importantly, a few novels for when I am waiting for things to happen.

Yes, I know most of this is online somewhere either internally or externally but being as the "online" thing is frequently the problem and I tend to work in a lot of places with no wi-fi / phone signal it has proved it's worth many times.

Authorities swoop on illicit Wolverhampton SPAM FARM

Can we apply this to printed bollocks as well as electronic bollocks?

So the ICO can give a good kick in the profit margins to a company sending out 350k electronic spam messages, how come OFCOM (or somebody else) can't do the same to BT / Virgin / Sky etc for posting about the same amount of unwanted marketing material through my front door. If anything the fine should be larger because at least electronic spam is more environmentally friendly, ask a forest near you. I assume the electronic "marketing material" is no more inaccurate than the printed "marketing material" or if it is they should at least recoup some of the fine when the next Booker prize is given out.

Surprise! Google chairman blasts EU's privacy ruling

And this is a problem why?

If this ruling applies to the EU why don't Google et al just stop using there, for example, .uk and .de domains and run everything through the .com (which I assume is based in the US) where the ruling doesn't apply?.

At the very least they could put a disclaimer up saying EU based domains will give censored results and for full results use the .com. I would assume they could also give more precedence to the fact a take down notice has been requested and refer people to chilling effects for further details.

Beware the Streisand effect.

Gigabyte Brix Pro: You don't need no steenkin' Xbox... when you have 4K-ing amazing graphics

I would assume you need some room for the games as well.

Boffins brew graphene in kitchen blender

Dangerous Stuff

The misses is going to kill me.....

US biz spaffed more dosh on internet ads than TV spots in 2013

25% wasted

"Retail firms continue to be the big spenders on web ads, buying a fifth of the year's total, while financial services companies bought 13 per cent of the ads and the auto industry ran a close third with 12 per cent."

I might buy a DVD off the t'internet but no way would I consider banking with Bank of Uganda or buying a car from a website advert.Those are the sort of things that need a bit more than a sidebar ad before I look at them. That means 25% of the adverts I don't see are wasted on me.

Home Office terminates order for 16,000 PCs from Dell

Re: Do Dell still hate the environment?

Most Dell kit is that ugly it needs double bagging.

NSA plans to FREE YOUR DATA with range of cloud services, analytics

Giveaway

"They trawl through a load of old rubbish and say they'll come up with, I don't know, sales leads - and do they? No. 'Data Scientists', my arse."

That's the giveaway line, no American NSA insider would ever use the word "arse".

Facebook Oculus VR buyout: IT WANTS your EYEBALLS

Faceholes?

Am I the only person that sees this as a quick route for facebook to get a product to market which is (roughly) the equivalent of Google Glass?.

Are we soon to faced with hordes of faceholes?.

No Notch niche: Minecraft man in rift with Oculus after Facebook gobble

Interesting way to boost your business.

Buy an exciting new* technology that a lot of gamers and gaming companies are really interested in.

Because of who you are alienate the whole of the same gamer client base.

Because of how you do business alienate all the gaming studios.

Build a new client base from people who don't even know what the product is or what it does.

Result - VR Candy Crush

*I know it's not at all new or original but you know what I mean

Microsoft DirectX 12 pushes gaming code closer to GPU bare metal

I think a point is being missed here.

MS don't really care about gaming on the PC, witness the gradual closing of studios and abandonment of IP's, but they do care about Xbone gaming a little bit more. At this moment it is obvious from the games released that the PS4 is the better gaming (and selling) machine and even showcase exclusives like Titanfall can't manage full HD on the Xbone. By allowing developers closer to bare metal performance will help to close this gap and help to justify more general gamers (as opposed to fanboi must have that exclusive gamers) buying the Xbone. This of course then gives MS a much better chance of making it's "Xbone as an entertainment centre" vision happen with the associated money rolling in from third party media sales.

Running games better on Windows, no matter which version, is just a bonus.

Planes fail to find 'credible' candidate for flight MH370 wreckage

Pilots disable passengers and crew with knockout gas.

Pilots, knowing about and by now having purloined uber expensive cargo, bail out having set auto pilot to send plane to the most remote place possible.

Pilots quietly disappear and live life of luxury.

Now was that a conspiracy theory I heard or just a film / TV script I half remember. Maybe it was just a repeat of the D B Cooper episode.....

Eight hour cleansing to get all the 'faggots' and 'bitches' OUT of Github

Re: That's my code knackered then.....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/10511413/Beef-faggots-are-back-as-Waitrose-records-a-boom-in-sales-of-forgotten-cuts-of-meat.html

http://www.uptonsbutchers.com/faggots.asp

http://www.farmerschoice.co.uk/meat/buyfaggots

and many many more.....

If you ask a neutral question in the Midlands like "What do you think of faggots?" I would bet that the majority answer would be "lovely with mash, peas and a bit of gravy" and at most 1 in every 100 might even consider it to be a question about homosexuals. Like many words that have been hi-jacked over the years (Hacking for example) some people believe that the new, agenda led meaning is the only meaning and anybody who happens to use the word in it's older (or normal for many people) context is all of a sudden sexist, racist, homophobic, whatever.

However don't worry that your not being marginalised enough because not enough Midland people understand your narrow meaning of a self perceived insult, Midlanders have plenty of terms of abuse and ridicule that can and are used to insult uphill gardeners who pay with nine bob notes to travel on the other bus, just not the word "faggot".

That's my code knackered then.....

I suppose I can expect a takedown notice for my "Faggot Finder" app which so many foodies have found useful on visits to the Midlands in search of this great delicacy.

And this is news why?

I had always sort of assumed that Github was a hub for Gits anyway.

French novel falls foul of Apple's breast inspectors

And this is censored......

At the moment I am playing through the "South Park - Stick of Truth" game which is censored in Europe but not in the US (on the consoles but not on the PC apparently). I have come across three censored scenes, one regarding anal probing by aliens and two in the local abortion clinic. All the missing material is fully described with an apology to "Europe". Given the American sensitivities around abortion especially I an surprised that this censorship wasn't the other way round - i.e. allowed in Europe and blocked in the US. As I have just taken part in a battle which ends up with my opponent being crushed by a giant breast and myself being crushed by a giant pair of testicles with the battle taking place under the heaving sweaty bodies of a couple making love I find this type of censorship laughable by Apple. Is it a case of chronic bad language, graphic violence, gratuitous sex and outright all round offensiveness is fine so long as its a game but if a real women is displayed in quite an artistic way then its banning material?

Roll up, roll up for the Reg Readers' Ball

Re: Or even...

Fair comment :)

I suspect that the only people who will bother to turn up in London will be employed at the silicon traffic calming measure or whatever it's called and may not be representative of real life.

Get thee out to the sticks and you will save more than the rail fair in reduced ale prices.

Ill communication delays NHS England's GP data grab for six months

Before this latest burst of interest from the popular press I had already done a "I do not consent, sod off" letter for my GP. When I took it down to the surgery I expected blank looks from the desk staff along the lines of what are you talking about?

To my very pleasant surprise about half way through my first sentence the lady handed me an opt out form pre-printed by the surgery just requiring my name, address and signature. My trust in the practice went up no end especially when a few weeks later my other half was there and her doctor actually raised the issue and offered her an opt out form.

With that level of open defiance from the shop floor it makes you wonder who actually wants the data and what its really for? (rhetorical)

Barclays Bank probes 'client data sold to rogue City traders' breach

"I can't wait to see what knighthoods and directorships people get for this, surely they will both be large numbers"

Just put that right for you.