Posts by Anonymous IV

Fighter pilot shot down laptops with a flick of his copper-plated wrist

Re: Random PC reboots

Amazing! What are the chances of an organisation having a rock-crushing machine down the corridor?

Boffins find evidence of strange uranium-producing bacteria lurking underground

Re: The usual baloney

> About a decade ago, I ran across an acquaintance I hadn't seen since 1970/71. Like me he had become bored every ten years and commenced a new career. One of them for him had been prawn farming in Queensland.

Since this sub-thread could clearly do with being lightened up a bit, might I suggest that the reason for your acquaintance's new career choice was that he wanted to come the raw prawn?

Amazon granted patent to put parachutes inside shipping labels

Bruce Springsteen

Didn't one of his songs have a deep and meaningful end section relevant to this situation?

Ah yes...

"I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, hey bopa d-d-down

I'm goin down, down, down, down

I'm goin down, hey bopa d-d-down

I'm goin down, down, down, yeah

I'm goin down, down, hey bopa hey bopa

Hey hey mmm bopa bopa well down

Hey babe mmm bopa bopa said down

Hey hey mmm bopa bopa well down

Hey hey mmm bopa bopa say

Hey unh say down, down, down, down, down

Hey down now, say down, down, down, down, down"

LastPass now supports 2FA auth, completely undermines 2FA auth

Date of birth

When, for no obvious reason, I am asked to give my birth date, I will usually put 01/01/1980 - the lowest possible date in the FAT file system. This is clearly when obesity started...

Comey was loathed by the left, reviled by the right – must have been doing something right

Re: "He's a showboat, he's a grandstander"

> They said that irony died when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

For "they" (always a weasel word in a quotation) read "Tom Lehrer"; for 'irony' read 'political satire'. The real factual quotation is:

"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

User loses half of a CD-ROM in his boss's PC

Re: Slot loaders

> I had one like that, except my one year old stuck a malted milk biscuit in the FDD of my old Mac 8600. That definitely needed a new drive..

And a new biscuit, I presume?

BOFH: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back

Re: Rutherford Advanced Computing Society.

Reminiscent of the old British Computer Society - now stealthed as "BCS — The Chartered Institute for IT".

Or am I thinking of that spectacularly pretentiously-named organisation "The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists"?

Linux 4.11 delayed for a week by NVMe glitches and 'oops fixes'

Re: Good lord, man, testing software?

> Do you mean the Microsoft way of writing code???

Good grief! You waited until two posts had already been made before saying something trite about Microsoft in a utterly Linux thread?

3/10 - should try harder...

Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard

Re: Back in the day...

> Many years ago I was working on the weekend shift when someone spilt a can of Fanta on to the keyboard of the main system console of our production mainframe...

Attempted fantacide, I would suggest!

(Ba-boom, tish)

Yee-hacked! Fired Texan sysadmin goes rogue, trashes boot business

"Given the boot"

Really disappointing that the author didn't manage to crowbar this into the piece somewhere.

An opportunity missed. 7/10

New plastic banknote plans now upsetting environmental campaigners

I always thought it was slightly odd that rape-seed oil came from oil-seed rape...

Bloke whose drone was blasted out of sky by angry dad loses another court battle for compo

Re: I had my Glock on me

"How are things in Glocka Morra?"

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

Re: Patch Tuesday

> 44 reboots per server on patch Tuesdays

For 44 read 1.

Unless you exist in a Trumpal environment...

Shine on, you crazy Eind minds: Boffins fire out 43Gbps infrared 'Wi-Fi'

Shine on, you crazy Eind minds

Kudos for this Pink Floyd-al reference!

User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work

Re: Same here

> ... a (female) supervisor, who also isn't averse to grabbing a cable or a keyboard and running off to keep a user happy...

Am I alone in thinking that this might be extremely dubious?

Road accident nuisance callers fined £270,000 for being absolute sh*tbags

Re: My policy is...

"Robots have feelings, too..."

BONG! Lasers crack Big Ben frequency riddle BONG! No idea what to do with this info BONG!

What is it called when you do the same thing again and expect different results?

It's probably called 'voting'.

Re: Other uses?

Agnus dei, please - does nobody know Latin any more?

Linux on Windows 10: Will penguin treats in Creators Update be enough to lure you?

Re: I can run Linux and bash and ...

> on Linux, I can also compile Linux binaries directly

Thank heaven, Microsoft has already done this one time only - and it applies to every Windows user!

Think of all those electrons being saved...

Licence-fee outsourcer Capita caught wringing BBC tax from vulnerable

Re: Capita.

Dead Wringers!

Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

Re: Tech for the Ex

> I gave her manager my card and contract pricing information in case they needed a support consultant in the future, but never heard back from them.

Nor, presumably, from her, either...

Re: Had been together with a barrister myself

That ever-so-witty company Amber Taverns recently renamed a pub in Gloucester "The Doctors".

"Where do you want to go today?"

BOFH: Elf of Safety? Orc of Admin. Pleased to meet you

Re: Right Royal Softly, Softly, ...... Catchee GCHQ and Assorted Monkeys ....

Puts me in mind of the olde saying:

Parsing is such sweet sorrow...

Ad men hope blocking has stalled as sites guilt users into switching off

Re: For a wider viewpoint:

> Ad blocker use rises 30% worldwide in the last year, reported by NY Times Dec 31 2017.

Looks like Trump has some justification for complaining about fake news.

Especially when it happened ten months into the future...

PS to El Reg headline writer - "guilt" is not a verb.

Radioactive leak riddle: Now Team America sniffs Europe's skies for iodine isotope source

Re: You forgot to add the mandatory

Possibly because he has not been brainwashed by an exceptionally stupid advertisement?

Unlucky WD Ultrastar drives are knackered, need replacing ASAP

Re: Antipodean?

Since Wikipedia says "Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art" I suspect the answer is "No".

On the other hand, I may have missed the extremely obvious and amazingly funny joke...

Chap scripts remote Linux takeover for sysadmins

"There's lots of headless uses of Linux"

As in chickens, do you mean?

Ex-NSA contractor Harold Martin indicted: He spent 'up to 20 years stealing top-secret files'

Re: Data Protection

He is getting a lifetime achievement award!

Ever so many years in prison...

The best of Reg readers' David Hockney-style logo redesigns

Re: Drawing

You are not familiar with Hockney's iPad drawing/colouring-in from 2012?

See, for example, How David Hockney Became the World’s Foremost iPad Painter.

If Linus Torvalds works well in airports, Linux 4.10 will land next week

Kernel Bogey

Why is there such feverish interest in minor alterations to an obscure and largely hidden piece of software, and its shouty perpetrator?

FYI: Ticking time-bomb fault will brick Cisco gear after 18 months

Re: MTBF, meet unavoidable entropy

MTBF?

That initialism surely means Maximum Time Before Failure...

Chinese investors gobble up owner of PCWorld, Macworld etc

Re: Are we being asset stripped post referendum result?

Interesting that someone describes [Currys/]PC World as an 'asset'!

College fires IT admin, loses access to Google email, successfully sues IT admin for $250,000

Re: Lax Procedures

> Some places really don't have a clue when it comes to proper IT policies. I should have been locked out of everything on the network no later than midnight that evening, and probably no later than the time I walked out the door after my "goodbye everyone" email.

And you are saying that in this circumstance, with known policies in place, a wicked system administrator would have not taken nefarious actions before being shown the door?

BT installs phone 'spam filter', says it'll strain out mass cold-callers

Re: 100% success record

> I've been rudely reminded how the other half lives with calls selling me conservatories

In the days when I had a land-line I spent quite a number of happy minutes showing mild interest in buying a conservatory to a pushy salesman thereof who had cold-called. I was (apparently) just about to purchase their finest and most expensive model when I told the salesman that there might be a minor difficulty with the installation - I lived on the third floor of a block of flats...

Now that's a Blue Screen of Death: Windows 10 told me to jump off a cliff

Inspirational messages should take account of region

If we've gone to all the trouble of specifying United Kingdom for our Windows 10 "Home location", we should not be exposed to North American informal words of unknown origin.

We have adequate quantities of our own Noble British Slang terminology...

Smart fingerprint padlock startup to $320k backers: Sorry for the radio silence

Perhaps they had heard about this research?

Peace sign selfies could let hackers copy your fingerprints.

"Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Informatics have found that fingerprints can be easily recreated from photos taken up to three metres away without the need for advanced technology. So long as the picture is clear and well-lit, prints can be mimicked."

Drone company fails to take off, tells pre-orderers: You can have your $34m back

Re: Something fishy here

> The whole infomercial industry works on the business model that you pre-sell your product and use the cash from the pre-sales to fund the manufacturing.

Do I hear the words "Ponzi Scheme"?

Trump's cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient 'easily hackable website'

Re: Guru?

No doubt El Reg locating their computer security guru in Australia was simply to throw people off the scent.

Obviously she lives in New Zealand!

Customer: BT admitted it had 'mis-sold' me fibre broadband

Re: 18Mbps?

I always argue that the only reason for "super-ultra-hyper-fast broadband" is so that the Windows 10 Updates can download faster...

Man jailed for 3 days after Texas cops confuse cat litter for meth

Re: Beware the dogs.

"He passed away two weeks later"

Phew! For a moment I thought he might have died...

Top cop: Strap Wi-Fi jammers to teen web crims as punishment

Re: It should be considered...

"As any fule kno"

+1 for the Molesworth reference!

Fake History Alert: Sorry BBC, but Apple really did invent the iPhone

Re: Impartiality

@luminous

That's the second post you've made on this matter - with the same text!

If you're attempting to restrict the word 'Google' to being a noun, I'm afraid that train left many years ago.

From SearchEngineWatch: "29 Jun 2006 - “Google” is now officially a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. Google already is a verb in some other dictionaries, but the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is considered the most authoritative dictionary of the English language."

Hapless scouser scours streets for lost Crimble drone

Re: Flyer

... which is probably why the author cleverly included the word in the first place, for you to spot!

Ruh-roh! Rick Ruhl rolled out of Ham Radio Deluxe in software kill-switch aftermath

Re: Diabetes?

It's really rather pathetic for someone to ascribe his incompetence to his diabetes - an eminently self-controllable condition in most circumstances.

Christmas Eve ERP migration derailed by silly spreadsheet sort

Re: AST Premium 386

> Certain parts of the site were receiving mains peaking at almost 270V AC ! Once this was corrected, the workshop boys complained that their furnaces took longer to warm up of a morning

Chance for some clever IT so-and-so to implement Wake-on-LAN for the furnaces, so that they were on and hot by the time the "workshop boys" (isn't this both sexist and ageist?) got into work...

Peace comes to troubled embedded-Linux-for-routers community

Second Law of Thermodynamics confounded!

Will this be the only example of two Linux distros re-combining (should it happen)?

Whatever happened to entropy?

Support chap's Sonic Screwdriver fixes PC as user fumes in disbelief

Re: Clothing related malfunction

> They eventually traced it to static charge from her nylon stockings...

You just can't end your anecdote there! HOW?

Why does Skype only show me from the chin down?

Re: Username funnies

Similarly our user-naming convention was to take the first three letters of the surname and add the first letter of the forename, then a sequencing pair of digits.

An exception had to be made for Tracey Cunningham, and a few others which provided unfortunate results...

Google turns on free public NTP servers that SMEAR TIME

Re: Frustration

There's got to be some sort of pun somewhere about Second Guessing...

Hull surfers cut off by router attack

Better article on the BBC website...

TalkTalk and Post Office routers hit by cyber-attack