Posts by Anonymous IV

BOFH: Thermo-electric funeral

Re: as if owning IT antiquity was one of those positive character traits

My oldest USB flash drive is a portly silvery-metal thing with a capacity of 28 MB.

Not even a nominal 32 MB. Can anyone explain this?

Sysadmin given Licence To Perve shows why you always get it in writing

Re: SAID NO MANAGER EVER

> he realizes ex post facto that an apology is needed.

"Ex post facto" was certainly never said by any manager of my acquaintance!

Go nuts, brother: Ubuntu 16.04 beta – no more auto data-spaffing

Re: It's the server version that got my attention

> "My test system [...] with [...] only 8 GB RAM."

Just a mere 8 GB, eh? And there was me thinking that Ubuntu (desktop, admittedly) would run in half a Gig of RAM...

Tired of Windows 10 phoning home? Maybe the special Chinese govt version is for you

McAfee it to 'em!

> This version will be "a government-approved Windows 10 image, including Chinese capabilities such as government-selected antivirus software" ...

What irony and western amusement would result if the Chinese government selected McAfee antivirus. (They wouldn't, would they?)

Met police commissioner: Fraud victims should not be refunded by banks

Nobody seems to have mentioned Trust**r Rapp*rt

I haven't seen quite so many howls of abuse about slow running, inexplicable problems, unmitigated horror, and so on, over the last couple of years.

Is this because UK banks have stopped recommending/requiring it, or (gasp!) perhaps TR has fixed all its problems? (Compare Microsoft...)

Pothole campaigner sprays Surrey street with phallic paintings

Ideal use for a 3D printer

Just clean out the grit from the pothole, do a 3D scan of it, then use a trusty 3D printer to produce an exact-shaped filler in tarmac. Insert in pothole. Job done!

Off to Mars this summer? Don't forget your map

Re: Limited Edition

Less than infinity, I would imagine.

[or is it "fewer"?]

Telling your wife why you were fired is the only punishment

Re: If you don't want to be traumatised by people's pictures ...

@ Bronek Kozicki

> ...a seemingly normal person from marketing...

I think I have identified your misidentification...

Met Police cancels £90m 999 call command-and-control gig

Re: You have to wonder

> The simple answer is that this was a contract created by civil servants that have never been out working in the real world and as such are clew-less but just write what the contractor wants them to.

I think that's the best bit of creative homonym spelling I've seen for a long time!

Even more impressive is that "clew" is meaningful to sailors.

BOFH: This laptop has ceased to be. And it's pub o'clock soon

Quibblage

I hate to quibble, but is the BOFH not closer to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle than to Schrödinger's Cat?

But now I'm not so certain...

IT boss gets 30 months of porridge for trashing ex-employer's servers

Re: Dumb git cubed

> I'd like admin rights stripped from any staff the moment they hand their resignation in.

How would this help? If this is a known policy, then surely a nefarious individual would do all the naughty stuff before handing in their resignation?

(As you said in your first paragraph...)

Plane food sees pilot grounded by explosive undercarriage

Re: Bah!

If we're really doing to nit pick, why not object to "Pilots and first officers don't eat the same pre-flight meals"?

They did object, since each one only got half of the meal...

iPhones clock-blocked and crocked by setting date to Jan 1, 1970

Re: Microsoft a decade ahead of Apple

> MS-DOS had a time resolution of 2 seconds.

Well, the FAT file system certainly did, but not MS-DOS itself.

"A time resolution of two seconds should be enough for anyone..."

Microsoft a decade ahead of Apple

The beginning of time for the MS-DOS FAT file system was 1st January 1980.

Which clearly shows something or other...

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

IBM trainee programmer reduces 4-byte program to 2

Some time around MVT 18 on IBM mainframes, a trainee IBM programmer in the new version release team had a brainwave, and thought that he could reduce the size of the 4-byte IEFBR14 program used in JCL as a 'don't-do-very-much program' to just 2 bytes, so as to save 50% of the space it required, and have it run faster, too!

IEFBR14 consists of

SR R15,R15 ; set the return code register to zero

BR R14 ; branch to the return address in register 14

He removed the first instruction, so the contents of R15 were undefined, and could have any value. This caused considerable unhappiness to occur with all jobs.

It is not known whether the programmer's employment with IBM was continued...

How to help a user who can't find the Start button or the keyboard?

Re: Do organisations not use 360 feedback for support services?

> I wonder how you dealt with illiterates in high places.

They have PAs to do menial computing for them, surely.

<anecdote>We once had an IT manager who advertised for a 'Principle Secretary'. We thought this was a brilliant idea, for he had no principles of his own...</anecdote>

Re: Stop being a smartarse who makes things worse

Some of the cheaper mice make a clicking sound when their buttons are pressed.

One I encountered recently made a sort of wheezy squeak - bin job...

BOFH: I want no memory of this pointless conversation. Alcohol please

Nicely worded

...some slimy toe rag from HR (who's no doubt taken a break from making some single-income people redundant)...

RBS and Natwest online banking goes titsup

Re: Maybe they got the MARKETS confused with their SERVERS

It would seem that RBS was right about a "major market crash this year".

If only Fred Goodwin's pension was market-dependent....

Rejoice, Penguinistas, Linux 4.4 is upon us

"Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds"

Nobody commented on this.

I liked it!

Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too!

Re: Quick solutions/prototyping

> Yes, this used to be called Rapid Application Prototyping / Rapid Appication Development and has been re-invented as Aglie.

As in, "The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men gang aft agley...", by Mr R Burns?

Australian cops rush to stop 2AM murder of … a spider

Re: Yeah but

> I literally have over a dozen baby huntsman spiders in my bathroom. I have no idea what to do on account of the fact that I don't want to kill them but they are very skittish and their small size makes them difficult to corral.

So there is a new Australian simile, "like herding baby huntsman spiders", rather than 'cats'?

Lights, power, action! Smartplugs with a twist

Life's too short

Of even less use than a solution looking for a problem, and failing, is 2000 words about it.

Congratulations to the author...

Superfish 2.0: Dell ships laptops, PCs with huge internet security hole

Connection?

Perhaps someone more intelligent than me could explain the technical connection between a piece of spy software and a dodgy security certificate, apart from both being ungood.

It seems that here the author is comparing aardvarks* and anchovies*.

* apologies if either of these has been chosen for the name of a forthcoming release of Ubuntu...

BOFH: We're miracle workers. But you want us to fix THAT in 10 minutes?

Re: Turkeyshoot Mascara & Monarco Retardo

The Boss didn't realise that these were the names of the next two Ubuntu releases?

How in heaven's name did he get his job?

Exam board in 'send all' fail: Hands up who knows what the BCC button is for?

Re: Does anyone else wince when they see this phrase?

Indeed I did - it wasn't a 'phrase' but a couple of sentences.

The text is seen so often that it could be regarded as 'boiler-plate'...

Think Fortran, assembly language programming is boring and useless? Tell that to the NASA Voyager team

I wasn't aware that FORTRAN was used to 'code' trite sayings.

At least it isn't in my copy of McCracken...

Xiaomi preps Linux laptops for the post Christmas sales rush

At last!

The "Christmas of Linux"...!

El Reg revisits Battle of Agincourt on 600th anniversary

The Agincourt Carol

Amazed that nobody has mentioned this contemporary song.

Many examples on YouTube, such as this one...

Re: "We won the battle, but who won the war (not us)"

Olde literary joke:

"Dear Diary, Today the Hundred Years War started..."

Ruin your co-developers' life with Mimic, the Unicode substitution tool

Already done in posts to local newspaper's website

A troll, apparently with unfettered administrator access to our local newspaper's website comment columns, has regularly posted the following boilerplate for at least a year:

"And when it comes to Gloucester Rugby, what the club really should have done, whilst he graced the Kingsholm turf, was to ensure that Ruƿert Hαrden (our first choice, our most talented and our most complete tight head prop) started as many games for Gloucester as was possible."

Inquiring whether "most complete" means "ungelded" would draw a level of vituperation beyond which I would ever wish to experience...

TalkTalk attack: 'No legal obligation to encrypt customer bank details', says chief

Re: MBA "Qualification"

@Warm Braw:

+1 for quoting from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

There aren't enough references to Early Music in El Reg...

Chaos at TalkTalk: Data was 'secure', not all encrypted, we took site down, were DDoSed

Re: Expect more....

You didn't work for RBS, did you?

Experts ponder improbable size of Cleopatra's asp

"The biggest asp disaster in the world"

Those with a taste for Victorian music hall or for reviews of Anthony and Cleopatra films or plays will undoubtedly be familiar with the above quotation.

TalkTalk website hit by outage, broadband customers also KO'd

Re: Working here 17:49

Working in Liverpool?

I'm sorry to hear that...

Here are the God-mode holes that gave TrueCrypt audit the slip

Re: There are no flaws in TrueCrypt

You mean you actually believe all that Steve Gibson says?

He's always struck me* as the coder implementation of Steve Ballmer. lashing out in all directions, somewhat randomly.

(They even have the same forename.)

* pun was accidental!

Microsoft starts to fix Start Menu in new Windows 10 preview

Re: Serious Question

> Just curious: are you the type of person who asks, "Why do you need 150 Mbps broadband?"

The best answer I've ever heard (it may well have been invented by me) is that

"You need 'superfast' broadband so you can download all the Windows Updates rapidly."

Ouch! Microsoft sues recycling firm over 70K stolen Office licenses

Re: But why?

> I would also like to know how they got the licence keys because they are generally not visible after installation. I know that Jelly Bean used to be a method but I am unaware if it still works..

There are several products which can extract Office licence keys, among which Belarc Advisor and Produkey. Ask any BOFH or PFY!

US military says it will discipline Ashley Madison users

We should be told...

Were any El Reg email addresses found on the Lists of Shame?!

How many pre-loaded Win 10 PCs did disties have 7 days after release?

Re: Software

"I'm trying to work out how to get rid of things, like the stupid boxes that are on the right of the start menu."

For each tile, right click, choose Uninstall.

Drag the right-hand vertical line as far to the left as it will go.

2015 Fiat 500 fashionista, complete with facelift

Units

> It would have been nice if the speed was in km/h and fuel consumption in litres per 100km, as the normal world is used to.

Can anyone explain why the unit "litres per 100 km" was chosen, rather than the far more logical "kilometres per litre"? There's at least the analogy with "kilometres per hour".

China's best phone yet: Huawei P8 5.2-inch money-saving Android smartie

@ cegueira

So not just a matter of taking it out of the box, then!

DEATH by VEGETABLES: Woman charged with killing boyf using carrots. And peas

I suspect that the lady, in an instant ...

... put an end to all the boyfriend's canoodling!

(Those readers under fifty, look it up!)

Future Range Rovers will report pot-holes directly to councils

Re: What a great idea

> When nobody's around, stick a bag of post-mix concrete in the hole. ...

> Phone the council ...

This would appear to work only for a single pothole, since on attempt #2 some suspicion may be engendered in even the most unintelligent member of the local Highways Department.

My Passport Grip Pack blooms with new colours … and more storage

Fetching Grip Packs - Chris Mellor getting carried away?

"Grip Packs — colourful edge protective bands providing a big jump from 2TB to 3TB max capacity."

Are you seriously saying that these bands provide a disk capacity increase?

Or is this merely coincidental?

Chill, luvvies. The ‘unsustainable’ BBC Telly Tax stays – for now

Re: Am I the only person...

"It's terrible value if you don't use it."

Indeed. So is the cost of schools, since I don't have any children...

Oxford chaps solve problem in 1982 Sinclair Spectrum manual

Dr Johnson

A rare chance to offend several disparate areas of society in one quotation - religious people, women, dog-owners, Mahler aficionados, and Sinclair Spectrum enthusiasts!

Boswell: I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach.

Johnson: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." [my bolding]

Australia mulls dumping the .com from .com.au – so you can bake URLs like chocolate.gate.au

Re: Dot Oz?

Soon be time to look up whether .en, .sc, .wa and .ni are still available for use...