Posts by Anonymous IV

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

Power without responsibility

Shame on Fred - the office looked to him as the source of all IT wisdom, and he took advantage of their faith in him.

One might categorise him as not a nice human being.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Reverse polarity

My knowledge of electronics is quite minuscule but wouldn't one or two additional components (like a diode?) on the Raspberry Pi motherboard have been a pretty neat idea to protect from accidental 5V polarity reversal? Trivial additional cost for a degree of user-stupidity protection.

Microsoft actually does something useful, adds Sysmon to Windows

Re: The best

To add to the Sysinternals utilities, I would suggest those by Nir Sofer at nirsoft.net

A plethora of useful utilities which make any Windows techie's life much more easier...

Raspberry Pi flashes new branded USB drives that promise speedy performance

Flabbergasted!

> [...] the Raspberry Pi flash drive looks like it could serve you well while looking really nice on your desk or on your keychain.

What an amazing statement to appear on a technical website! The author might just well have complained that it didn't come in raspberry pink...

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Nobody has yet said that AI would solve the problem...

... of the variation in names described in the article and the comments - and also "Acronym/Initialism Duplication".

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Reduced notability

> A notable website aimed at this market, PCGamer.com...

You mean that 'notable' website which last week proclaimed confidently that Microsoft was rebranding Office as the "Microsoft 365 Copilot app"?!

</chortle>

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Re: Not Y2K but similar

I'm surprised they didn't ask him if he could please die immediately.

After all, it was an insurance company with which you were dealing...

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: Boulder, Colorado, Strata 0?

I'm surprised that nobody has yet pointed out that Boulder's NTP problems put it between a rock and a hard place...

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

The logical corollary to your pricing model (pay more for the tests, higher charges for more urgent bookings) is that grocery shopping could be means tested, with the richer paying more for groceries like a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. [Other examples are available...]

Just make the system fair, and safe from the wicked.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Does Trump consider '1984' as his aspiration or vision?

Assuming he can read such a lengthy work devoid of pictures and cartoons, I wonder whether Thought Crime will be next for a banning Executive Order?

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

Re: Be prepared!

> > Feeling around in my back pocket to see if I've got my Swiss Army gutting knife.

> Good thing. You never know when you're going to need to gut a Swiss Army.

It was for syntactic ambiguity reasons that the hyphen was invented.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: Some old tech might obviate the need to plug it in

How about making the USB flash drive slightly thicker by incorporating a lithium battery next to the memory chips?

Pressing the Magic Red Button could drive prongs into the battery, and the subsequent fire would obliterate all traces of data - and a whole lot else...

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

Re: Untested change

> It sounds like a very simple untested change was made.

Which is incredible. No basic change control?

Change control does not prevent errors from happening.

It is intended to make them less likely to happen.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

> I'll be honest, a bunch of typoes in your menu would have given me a bad impression of the place and would likely have turned me off coming back. If you can't even spell things properly, what else is wrong there?

"If you can't even spell things properly... "

Like "typos", perhaps?!

BOFH: Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Re: Indian cuisines

> I prefer fission cuisine

That would be Fission Chips with the option of Mushy Pies?

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Somewhat lacking in detail...

Possibly one of the least-informative and functionally-dubious Who, Me?s there has been.

What was this IBM mainframe "batch editor" of which Benedict speaks? And for which IBM operating system?

And what were the "simple commands [he typed] into the mainframe console to prepare it for real jobs"? I can't see any self-respecting computer operator of the time letting anyone do something like that to 'their' mainframe.

I detect the sound of the bottoms of barrels being scraped...

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Chocolate biscuit pedantry

I understand that the correct attribution for a biscuit totally covered in chocolate is "enrobed", not "encased".

[Biscuit-manufacturers' jargon is no better than IT jargon.

Apart from the biscuits, that is....]

Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS

Amazed!

I cannot believe there have been so many posts so far without someone having described Dave Plummer as the Pinball Wizard...!

Arch Linux takes a pounding as DDoS attack enters week two

Re: DDoS attacks are not always what they seem...

It just shows how necessary still are hyphens. The phrase should be "fine-tooth comb".

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

> NOBODY ever remembers the answers to those stupid "security questions" so bypassing them is ALWAYS a good thing.

Why not answer the question with the question information itself?

For example:

Q: "What is the name of your first pet?"

A: "First pet".

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

It follows...

It looks like the Boss has discovered that 2FA is Sweet FA...!

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Any Orion?

The instructions to shut down could have applied to "any, any, any Orion"...!

[Sadly, only the more elderly among us are likely to recognise the allusion.]

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Re: Pharmacists

> Isn't there a saying: in a carpenter's house, no shelve is straight?

Nope - it's "shelf"...

</pedantry> [as opposed to </carpentry> !]

A software-defined radio can derail a US train by slamming the brakes on remotely

Re: FRED only

> My understanding of this comes from being a model railroad fan, and so watching lots of YouTube videos.

You appear to be uniquely qualified to become an HS2 planner!

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

Re: MAGA Alert

> Ironic how that comment looks like an AI reply oozing with overconfidence.

"Ooze a clever boy, then?"

BOFH: The auditor is asking too many questions. We have just the laptop for that

Re: Cor blimey!

> > We're the ones at the coal face of the Company's IT purchasing policies

> Another Extremely British™ idiom, it seems, in the long history of Extremely British™ BOFH turns-of-phrase.

I suspect any country which has coal mines (e.g. USA, Australia) would be quite familiar with that expression.

Furthermore, categorising something as Extremely British could well be seen as Racist - if you're not careful you may become metastasised (to quote from a previous commentard)!

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

Implications for the UK?

Does it follow that if 'foreign tech' attracts swingeing Trump tariffs in the US, then the manufacturing countries will try to sell it cheaper in the UK and Europe?

Or is that inexpressibly-naive economic theory?

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: ... or some cosmetically waxed neanderthals

> "... cost more than a third-world dictator's embezzlement fund."

In the 1970s, the leased line between the University of Newcastle Computing Lab and that of Durham University was described to me as costing "a diplomat's ransom"...

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: At my last place....

> We had a 2mb (wow) infra red link...

2 millibits (per second, one presumes) is indeed a "wow", or maybe woe data rate!

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Please do not all power on at once

> Oooo - just spotted the VERY rare "lose" when it should be "loose". Usually it is the other way round :)

Hence the complaint by two French members of staff that it was a long walk to the toilets:

"Two Loos, Le Trek"

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

That lad was me!

> SysAdmin ==> IT management ==> vice president

So your working life was basically a downhill path?!

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: It's Been Done

"The Billion Dollar Bubble" was a "Horizon" drama-documentary about the rise and fall of "Equity Funding of America" shown by the BBC in November 1976, and there were many shots of a mainframe line printer putting out spurious data involving "company 99", the internal slush fund.

It can be found on YouTube... Well worth an hour of your time!

FreeDOS 1.4: Still DOS, still FOSS, more modern than ever

> Principal.

You're correct - that AC has no principal(s)...!

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Does Musk read these comments?

The number of comments which have all received a single down-vote is Deeply Suspicious.

About time for a conspiracy theory, methinks!

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: The order of the events sounds a bit odd

> Why would the dispatcher blush if the announcement was made that all communications would be in plain text from there on? She would have no idea previous comms had been seen....

Guilt about past ms-deeds is an on-going process, surely!

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: Ouch!!!

> Just a few weeks ago, I fumbled the keyboard and hit return when I'd typed "rm tmp *" instead of "rm tmp/*".

For a moment I read that as "rm trump *", which of course is a correct command...

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

Re: Please excuse my ignorance - a question

> And why a thumbs down for a question, not a statement, was given, too?

Another serious question: why are you even the slightest concerned about whether or not you get thumbs up or thumbs down (or neither)?

Does it make any difference to anything?

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Not just IT

> Gross misconduct? Your definition of that is ...

All together now: "Gross misconduct is 144 times worse than ordinary misconduct."

CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university

Staggered...

So what happened to the maxim the network problem is always DNS??

Meta blocked Distrowatch links on Facebook while running Linux servers

Linux considered to be Malware? (by Facebook)

It certainly makes a change from Windows being so regarded!

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Re: Why is it slow?

> There was a time when I regarded Norton as a more prevalent threat than the viruses it was supposed to combat.

Surely your statement is true for all time?

Re: Dear me

> "You hire two maids, but you only have one broom. They're going to fight over who gets the broom and, during that time, the cleaning doesn't get done."

Ah - the old scrubber argument...!

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

> Although for the almost same money I could get a hundred weight of carrots

If you do self-scan you could get a hundredweight of avocados...!

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: Micros~1 declares 2025

Each year following the current one is "the Year of Linux on the Desktop".

Re: Really?

> Nothing wrong with Win10, payed with mattress scanners and decent anti virus, and common sense.

I 'literally' have no idea what that sentence means.

More importantly, I have no idea what meaning it was intended to convey...

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Re: ======> Where are the printer drivers?

> one of the main single points of failure of OS/2 was its complete lack of printer support

Oh come on!

We were fortunate enough to have as an IT contractor the extremely pleasant chap who wrote the OS/2 printer driver 'system'.

Wish I could remember his name, but it was a Long Time Ago...

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: That reminds me of "The Plan"

Thank you for the information, but Firefox doesn't like that website:

Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead

Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.catb.org. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.

Re: That reminds me of "The Plan"

I've just looked this up in my File System, and my instance of "The Plan" is dated June 1996.

I wonder when it was actually written?

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

> If OpenSource was really written by communists every project would immediately split into fractions

Are you sure you didn't mean split into fractals?!