Posts by Anonymous IV

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.

OSIRIS-REx probe sucked up more asteroid crumbs than hoped

There might be an interesting comparison...

... between the cost per g or ml of the asteroid dust and that of HP's inkjet printer ink.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

What happened to the server?

Is it fair to presume that the drug dealers did not return it to the company, like the good upstanding citizens they aren't?

OSIRIS-REx's stuck asteroid sample canister finally cracked open by NASA

Re: Just wondering....

> I'd be interested to read the report on the stuck canister. What caused the issues preventing it from being opened?

Probably the result of the cosmic glue which keeps the universe together...

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85

Father Time?

Sadly, tempus fugit

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Satellite repairs

> I sometimes see vans with ‘Sattelite Repairs’ written on the side. Couldn’t they just send one of those to fix it?

First they should fix their van signing...

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Dontcha love the US court system?

Where someone gets charged with a whole heap of crimes, but plea bargains them all down to a single charge of littering...

We challenged you to come up with tech predictions for 2024 (wrong answers only) – here are some favorites so far

Re: Optional

> I predicted that Web 3.0 would be when everyone writes and nobody reads

You are probably thinking of Write-only-Memory - WoM...

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: Trinary Storage

> he went on a lot longer than this, and much funnier

Undoubtedly...

> not sure what the relevance is of either?

That was surely the whole point!

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: It just seems that way.

I always liked to describe my job title as Trainee Expert.

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

Re: Great. We're getting there

> Now we just need the US to use the proper date format - you know, the one every other country on earth uses - and it will be paradise.

I appreciate your sentiment - but not your accuracy. "Every other country" does not use dd/mm/yyyy, although many do.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: No corruption here.

> Only the metre readers, I think mine is read by a metre reader once a year.

That must be the most height-discriminatory comment made on El Reg for quite some time...!

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Re: Surely the problem was obvious?

> I mean, it was Mal-ware.

I had to go through all the comments available at the time of reading to discover that the last one was the one I would otherwise have typed...

Grrrh.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: I guess they have been rebranded...

> ...because their customers are calling them "Punity" now.

Surely ImPunity?

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Data exception

Pretty clearly there must have been an S0C7 abend, which required the NATS technical staff to look at a core dump for several hours.

[Oh, the 1970s are over now?]

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Where's the "Outlook" feature in LibreOffice?

> LibreOffice is the only open source office suite for personal productivity which can be compared feature-by-feature with the market leader.

The absence of an Outlook equivalent is the major reason why I don't convert to LibreOffice.

Anyone else agree?

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Nominative determinism

Which Tyler was the leader of the Pedants' Revolt.

[Ba-boom, tish!]

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Talk it up

> the Voyagers are over 20 light hours from Earth, and communication crawls along at a tedious 160 bits per second.

Let BT marketers get at that information and it will be described as Stunningly-Fast Broadband at the Speed of Light...

Cisco buys SamKnows to give ThousandEyes a look at millions of endpoints

Will this be the end of the Sam Knows "white box"?

Over very many years, many people in the UK have cheerfully donated desk space and electricity to host a Sam Knows "white box" router, interposed between their ordinary router and the rest of their home network. All they have received in return is the ability to look up online all those useful network stats mentioned in the article.

Are people likely to continue with this now that Cisco has taken over Sam Knows?

Will Cisco provide any form of adequate compensation, if they want to continue the same arrangement?

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Dumb Data Systems

> I would have no chance there. Both my sort code and account number have leading zeros.

Noughty, noughty!

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: Bloated

> It's like we are trying to meet some kind of inverse Moore's law by making everything slower and bigger the faster the systems get.

Welcome to the world of Windows...!

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Re: Bridge technologies

> He wouldn't, however, touch SCSI 2 or higher for the eloquent reason of "the pins are so damn tiny that I keep burning my fingers, and I don't like doing that"

I don't suppose he ever had to work with USB-C plugs, then...

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Kicking, clawing and scratching

<pedant>

The "IBM 3278 communications controller" of which you speak would have been a 3276, a terminal so stuffed with additional cards that it nearly burst...

</pedant>

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Re: Electrostatic bracer... err watch

> I lost mine one day in Gare du Nord

Reminiscent of the olde French joke, said by someone standing in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral:

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le Gare...

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: Supreme Head of Information Technology

Less scatological was the (apocryphal?) Civil Service post with the title Engineering Industries Export Intelligence Officer.

There was also supposed to be a similarly-initialised BBC job: Engineering Information and Electrical Installation Officer.

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

Re: Agreed!

It all went downhill when the Moderatrix left...

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Re: Clicked the error away...

I remember a secondary-school teacher looking at an advert in the Times Education Supplement which asked:

"Could you put together a Youth Offending Team?"

His answer was, "Of course! Give me about ten minutes..."

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

My guess would be that wherever you go, it's a case of "different employer, same shit".

The Who put it more musically as:

"Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss..."

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: This sounds familiar....

Obviously a case of history repeating itself!

But you could have made the link clickable...

School laptop auction devolves into extortion allegation

Re: Never should have been possible.

<pedant>Darik's Boot and Nuke</pedant>, actually...

And do check that you're attempting to wipe the correct drive!