Posts by Anonymous IV

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.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Re: Engineering approximation

> I seem to recall a few years ago, that the French govt legalised the rounding up of pi to 3.2.

Maybe you are (also?) thinking of the so-called "Indiana Pi Bill" of 1897 (q.v.), which tried to legislate that the value of Pi was 3.2?

A rather more recent article in Forbes puts its foot in it in an alternative manner by stating:

Pi is a number that defines what a circle is. It's the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and it's the same for every circle: 3.141592 followed by a string of over 22 trillion other digits.

(My bolding)

Random numbers

Could they print out these 62.8 trillion digits and use them as a source of truly random numbers?

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Sumption is wrong

> And so for a while, poor Magna Carta had died in vein - it was just another historical incident in an ongoing conflict over power between elites.

If it "died in vein" obviously the blood-letting went too far...

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

Just how long has it been since we've had autosensing power supplies, which aren't worried if you plug the device into 230V (was 240V in UK)? or 110V? A decade or more?

Where's the boss? Ah right, thorough deep-dive audit. On the boardroom table. Gotcha

Re: "WE ARE NOT HAVING AN AFFAIRE"

Was either of them Frenche?!

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

Re: Surprised?

> Stupidity is uniformly distributed in any population, no matter how one slices it.

Alternatively...

Think how stupid the average person is, then realise that half of the population are stupider than that.

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Re: Dark Monitor

I feel sure that DEFCON has something to do with the USA...

Why not use the clear, obvious and straightforward British GCSE grading system [9 to 1, U] or the previous, even more clearer, [A*, A to G, U]?

No chance of confusion there!

</sarcasm>

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

Re: Hard cheese

Not a person of whom it could be said, "Cheese a Jolly Good Fellow"...

10.8 million UK homes now have access to gigabit-capable broadband, with much of the legwork done by Virgin Media

Re: I'm the other way around

I consistently get 112 Mbps / 10 Mbps day-in, day-out, as measured by the Sam Knows white box router.

If only one didn't have to ring them up every six months or so to get some discounts applied to the latest price increase...

US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day

Re: Lessons learnt? I doubt it.

> What more can you say about a scripting language that frequently requires a null operator and calls its null operator "IEFBR14"?

Years and years ago, in the days of OS/MVT 18.0 (or near offer), a new programmer was hired by IBM to work on MVT. This clever lad (for he was a non-female person) realised that IEFBR14 was a massive 4 bytes in size, and consisted of the two IBM Assembler instructions:

SR 15,15 ; clear register 15 to zero

BR 14 ; branch to the return address held in register 14

He thought that he would optimise the program by removing the first instruction, leaving only the two byte instruction:

BR 14

This he did, and put the 'optimised' version of IEFBR14 into the next MVT update. No testing or change-control was needed - "obviously" - since it was such a simple change.

However, he did not realise that register 15 was the return-code register, which would now contain an unspecified number, but not zero, and consequently all jobs which tested for a zero return code began to fail spectacularly.

I am not aware what happened to the hapless programmer.

Need 32-bit Linux to run past 2038? When version 5.6 of the kernel pops, you're in for a treat

Re: Again...

> "Those CASIO wristwatches built in the 70's with permanent calendars are likely candidates, for example."

Permanent calendars are most likely to fail in 2120 when if they have a simple divisible by four rule for determining leap years. You should have kept your receipt.

Those of us who have had many instances of the standard model of Casio wristwatch since the 1970s already know that, in a Leap Year, 28th February is followed by 1st March on their watch. Having to reset the date every four years is hardly a good reason to return the watch!

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Re: Obviously

> And solve the not-installed-here problem by distributing docs as PDF, not .doc!

That's not a solution, it's a restriction! What happens if the document needs to be further edited? Does the hapless recipient have to do a PDF-to-Word conversion, then sort out all the font and layout anomalies before editing?

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Re: "Well Analysis - New Knowledge"

Our mainframe user-name convention was to take the first three characters of the surname, the first character of the forename, and add a two-digit incrementing 'sequence number' to prevent clashes.

This usually worked fine; Fiona Smith became SMIF05; Ian Jameson became JAMI02.

However the convention had to be modified in certain edge(y!) cases, such as for Tracey Cunningham...

Guilty: Sister and brother who over-ordered hundreds of MacBooks for university and sold the kit for millions

Johnny Cash was here

> that includes the 800 MacBooks worth $2.3m Eric flogged to his guy in Folsom

How convenient that, after conviction, he can be incarcerated in his local prison.

Microsoft fixes the thing it broke via another dose of out-of-band patching to deal with BSOD printing problems

Re: Does the same bug/patch/KBxxxxx

> Does the same bug/patch/KBxxxxx also cause a white band to be printed over bitmap prints from paint.net when using the "type 3" printer-drivers?

Ah, the "White Print of Death" (WPOD). Fortunately only a problem with the white-ink cartridge you put at the back of the computer desk drawer...

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Re: One thing people tend to forget about FOSS.

Basically you're saying that All Things Must Pass.

Don't forget the 639 dormant and discontinued distros (70%) of the total 916 Linux distros included on the DistroWatch database...

After 11 years, Australia declares its national broadband network is ‘built and fully operational’

Re: Politicans Logic

The Indiana Pi Bill (1897) attempted to get in before Malcolm Turnbull!

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Re: Cold breeze

Sandals are simply shoes with a little extra ventilation.

Socks with shoes are entirely acceptable.

So should be socks with sandals.

Surely it's a bigger crime for Australians to call beach sandals "thongs".

And New Zealanders to call them "jandals" (supposedly short for Japanese sandals).

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Re: Inside joke?

I'm sure I've told this one before, but in a previous century our company had a department which existed quite happily for a long time as "Organisation and Methods" (O&M).

A new and rather dubious Chief Exec then joined the company, and for no obvious or logical reason decided to change this department's name to "Systems and Methods".

After this rename, the members of the department delighted in answering the telephone with "S&M, how can I help you?"!

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

Re: Is the QR code check part of the app in a legal requirement for venues?

Couple of useful quotes from "Official Sources":

https://covid19.nhs.uk/pdf/how-to-guide.pdf

The app currently supports Apple iOS versions 11 and higher, and Android versions 8 and higher. If you have an older smartphone whose hardware is incompatible or uses an older version of the iOS or Android operating system, you may be asked to update your operating system.

Ho-ho - update my smartphone's Android v5.1 to v8? How?!

https://faq.covid19.nhs.uk/article/KA-01137/en-us?parentid=CAT-01035&rootid=

If I do not want to check in to a venue with the NHS COVID-19 app, am I still allowed to enter?

If you do not want to check in to a venue using the NHS COVID-19 app, you should be able to provide your contact details as an alternative. You have the right to choose to provide your contact details if you prefer this to using the NHS COVID-19 app.

Customers or visitors to hospitality venues must do at least one of the following:

* scan the official NHS QR code poster

* provide their name and contact details

* be in a group for which one other member has provided name and contact details

Hospitality venues must refuse entry to those who do none of the above. If you choose to check in with the NHS QR code you do not need to provide your contact details as well.

Funny, that: Handy script for wiping directories is capable of wreaking havoc beyond a miscreant's wildest dreams

Re: My contribution...

> one of those huge juggernauts that we all love to eviscerate with vitriol at every opportunity

I'm all for colourful phraseology, but in the interests of factual accuracy I would point out that evisceration = disembowelling cannot commonly be done with vitriol = sulphuric acid...

(I leave the matter of monkies in feisty knickers for the attention of another commentard.)

'My wife tried to order some clothes tonight. When she logged in, she was in someone else's account ... Now someone's charged her card'

Re: Methinks

Bah-boom. Tish!