Posts by Anonymous IV

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?!

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: The boxes are labelled on the outside

> until it is opened, the contents are both known and unknown; the label makes a claim but is it true? Schrödinger's box contents!

Not Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

Re: cartoon

> The cartoon on p.77 of Hey & Pappay's "the computing universe" is appropriate here

Clearly not appropriate enough to post a link to the cartoon online, if it exists, for those who don't have the book!

And the second author is Pápay...

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Stop with the useless A better than B crap

I thought that it was compulsory in APL that all programs must occupy one line only?

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

> As the old saying goes, "Where there's a will, there's a relative"

My old saying goes: "Where there's a will, there's a solicitor who benefits..."

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Re: 6509 was a chassis switch not a router

What's "fun"?!

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Other ways of attracting attention

> The next morning we sent a (caller ID withheld) SMS to him "We have you on the pub cameras, groping me you drunk b******d!

[...]

To which we replied (with Caller ID) "Now that we know your phone does work, and that you have been ignoring me, please pay your bill today!"

"I will drop a cheque off within the hour."

I'm surprised you did not title your comment "The Gropes of Wrath" !

Re: Ways to encourage payment

The arithmetical pedant in me points out that if something is increased by 15% and that result is reduced by 10%, the end result is 3.5% greater than the original, not 5%!

For example 100 plus 15% is 115; 115 reduced by 10% is 103.5; thus end result is 3.5% greater than the original number.

</pedant>

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Re: Installing the same level

Next time - how someone took Even Longer to install software by toggling the front panel switches of the computer!

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: Company‑provided safety shoes and fit

"And did those feet

In ancient times..."

Tech upgrade broke the casino – took slots offline for days

Give-away

> The most recent inquiry came to The Register's attention after it discovered a software glitch saw Star's Sydney operations give away AU$3.2 million ($2.05 million) in cash – some of it to suspected criminal figures who learned of the easy-to-exploit method that saw the casino leak lucre.

Are there any more details available of this easy-to-exploit give-away? (Asking for a fiend...)

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: "Norman" who is an electrical engineer by trade and during one phase of his career

As we found out, it was a phase worse than death...!

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Excessive force

> As any fule kno, if it breaks it needed replacing anyway.

+n for the Molesworth reference!

Re: Re magnetic bowl

I love the fact that the Magnetic Bowl in the link has the part code MB-1...!

Clearly the Marketing Department were not involved in that choice of code.

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Re: 5 *

> Five-star hotels in Edinburgh

You are the notorious Fred Goodwin, and I claim his former knighthood...

Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash

Re: 5 hour boot

Ah! Those happy days where an IBM 360/65 mainframe plus a floor-full of DASD took getting on for two hours to do a complete power-up!

Plenty of time for the rest of the shift operators to drive into town for their McDonald's fixes...

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Re: "it was a common skill"

> I was at university before I really got the hang of undoing them by feel.

Oh! When first I read this, I presumed you were undoing them by feet, and was going to comment you for your feetal skills!

Re: Nothing on one...

"...using the tool that Bosnian Bill and I made."

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Assumptions

> He soon learned that the CTO [...] had assumed nobody would touch his code.

He can't have been a very good CTO if he assumed rather than investigated...

Rapid7 throws JetBrains under the bus for 'uncoordinated vulnerability disclosure'

Re: JetBrains Mono font

> Ugh. I loathe, loathe, loathe JetBrains Mono and its accurséd ligatures.

Whether you consider ligatures to be accursèd or not, my point was that they are available, but you do not have to use them...

JetBrains Mono font

Hitherto, my only knowledge of JetBrains has been its rather excellent Mono font, available from them and Google Fonts, and undoubtedly elsewhere.

It includes nearly 140 code ligatures, 8 weights each with italics, and support for 145 languages - whether you need these features or not!

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Re: So, continuing the follow-up of the disaster

> The customer thought they were paying for principled consultants but the supplier actually supplied principal consultants instead. So no wonder the council was screwed.

Back in the days when Managers had secretaries to do their typing, our dubious IT Manager advertised for a "Principle Secretary".

We minions were much amused by this, arguing that it would be a Good Thing, since demonstrably he had no principles of his own.