Posts by Anonymous IV

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

> 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!

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Re: These guys' newsletter?

It also says that "This site is kept up to honour her work, but is otherwise moribound. [sic]"

Which curiously reminds me of the ropey novel cliché: "With one moribound he was free!"...

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

Re: We interrupt these comments to bring you this commercial message

Does anyone know what is the name of the phenomenon which causes the prices of Dunning-Kruger tee-shirts to be identical for sizes XXS thru' 5XL?

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

Re: Missed opportunity

If you were an American you would have called the product "C" "I" "C" "S" (four letters, sounded separately). They tended to get Very Cross when we Britishers pronounced it as one word, "Kicks".

Similarly with "D" "O" "S" and "Doss"...

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

Re: Oh, we know the value.

> I'm pretty sure they could add a separate subscription level where you pay $x/mth not to bug you with adverts etc

What are these adverts of which you speak? Using a decent advert blocker restricts adverts to those deliberately inserted by the content-creator in a YouTube video, for example. (In fact the only example, since I can't think of anywhere else...)

You've heard of the cost-of-living crisis, now get ready for the cost-of-working crisis

Re: Email remains the most used communication method for work

> Nowadays I just tell such peeps that I can't discuss whatever they want to talk about for security reasons!

You could always add (or substitute) GDPR as one of your non-talking reasons?

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

Re: Chrome?

> Yeah, nah.

You are Ozzy Man and I claim my A$5...

Ex-HP finance manager jailed after going on $5m spending spree using company plastic

Re: Addiction?

> How come that dopamine rush never happens when I shop in Lidl or Poundland?

The way things are going at the moment you will soon get that dopamine rush being able to shop anywhere...

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Re: Leg pull, surely?

Just someone putting the boot in...

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

The BK email contains no link to opt out of marketing communications, or even just all communications...

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

> I've also not long finished a jar of crunchy peanut butter with Marmite. Very moorish.

That's "Moorish" as in Othello, the Moor of Venice?

I suppose 'crunchy peanut butter with Marmite' beats 'a surfeit of lampreys' as a medieval cause of death...

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: Measurement creep

> In the early eighties my TI-82 calculated pi instantly, 3.1416926.

You read it wrong! It would be 3.1415926...

</pedant>

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

I arrived at the start of a narrow one-way street in Beverley during what passes for its rush hour, looking for my B&B. [The one-way system in Beverley can easily mean a ten-minute drive back to where you began, should you make a mistake.]

Half-way down the street there were two signs proclaiming <Guest House>, but with no obvious entrance.

Having squeezed the car onto the pavement, I got out and phoned the owner of the B&B, only to find that it was located another 50 metres down the one-way street, and was identically labelled <Guest House>.

Clearly neither of the two house owners wished to give up the prestigious name, and presumably all the delivery-persons knew of this duplication.

And also those who had been once before...

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Re: Ahh, Team building/break the ice exercises....

> A company having two teams working on the same thing without being aware of each other's existence?

Indeed - this happened to me when I was part of the Network Team of $Fred'sLargeBankPLC, which team covered mainly the southern and middle part of England. Quite by chance, we suddenly became aware of a parallel team which covered the more northern part of the UK, and of whom we had never previously heard!

Perhaps we should have been more inquisitive, but we had a lot of work to do, and thinking outside the job was frowned upon...

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Re: it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it

[sings]

I O, I O,

It's on and off we go...

Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling

Re: Theory and practice

> `But as Yogi Berra said: "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

Neither Yogi Berra nor Albert Einstein.

Quote Investigator puts it down to Benjamin Brewster (1882).

Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer

Re: "Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer"

May I be the first to suggest that this would be a Hammer Horror?

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Customer management objection to offensive code comment...

Some very-many years ago, when IBM used to release the source code of their various operating systems on microfiche, a customer hailing from the mid-West of the US (yes, yee-haw...) had complained to "IBM Management" that one comment in a 360-Assembler comms code module read:

"Retry 10000 times, for the hell of it".

The hapless originating IBM programmer was required to change the comment, so that next time round the source code line bore the revised text:

"Retry 10000 times"...

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: I think I have the problem

What they should really do is write one called D. Then it would rule the world for 50 years and our successors could argue for the creation of a new language - E.

'E' is already in existence in Yorkshire, as in "E bai goom".

Ba-boom, tish!

Chromium-adjacent Otter browser targets OS/2

Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

What happened then when you said "Microphone on"?

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Incredible

> Well, who can forget John Scholes' code for "Conway's Game of Life" in a single line of Dyalog APL...

To forget it, one has first to remember it!

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

> Perhaps YourSQL would have been better?

Really it should have been called the non-possessive-pronoun-specific One'sSQL, with a special dispensation for avoiding the apostrophe but not the esses...

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

More BST than GMT

Nobody has commented that we get more British Summer Time (April thru' October, seven calendar months) than Greenwich Mean Time (November thru' March, five calendar months). I'm sure there must be a reason for this...

Mobile mobile museum looks to chart the history of portable phones

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...

Ample scope also for an outbreak of anniversaryitis.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: I did the same by accident...

> Name me one Linux admin who hasn't done "rm -rf * " in the wrong directory. It is a right of passage...

Homonym failure! "Right" should have been "rite", right? Write on...

Google's newest cloud region taken out by 'transient voltage' that rebooted network kit

Both Sides Now

Joni Mitchell's song seems oh so prophetic:

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

Hacking the computer with wirewraps and soldering irons: Just fix the issues as they come up, right?

Re: PL/I … "think C with even crappier aesthetics"

> Probably one of the kinder descriptions of PL/I, a language "designed" by taking Fortran and COBOL, banging a six inch nail through them and spraying the result with Algol-ish syntax paint.

Rather harsh, if somewhat true. PL/I was notable for routines which handled the historic British currency of pounds, shillings and pence rather well. IBM must have put a lot of effort into the compiler for just this feature, and undoubtedly were mightily miffed when the British currency went decimal in Feb 1971...!

Using 'AI-based software like Proctorio and ProctorU' to monitor online exams is a really bad idea, says uni panel

Proctology

On first (mis-)reading the headline, I assumed that the article was going to be about some magic method of performing a non-invasive colonoscopy (which itself is a sort of online examination). How disappointing that it referred to academic examinations.