Posts by hopkinse

Oracle outage hits US Federal health records systems

You've been DOGEd!

Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout mess

Re: The customer is always (maybe) right

There's only so much you can fit on the back of a fag packet

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Too good is bad

And then there was Hotblack Desiato...

Now that's wafer thin: Some manufacturers had less than five days of chip supplies, says Uncle Sam

CHiPs act

Poncherello to the rescue....

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

In the 80s, as a Sea Cadet going to Rosyth Dockyard every week, I couldn't help noticing that the Izal tracing paper bog roll had 'property of HMSO' stamped on every sheet :-)

Italian researchers' silver nano-spaghetti promises to help solve power-hungry neural net problems

Re: Bistromathics!

For the really difficult problems, a pan-galactic gargle blaster always helps oil the wheels :-)

Maker of ATM bombing tutorials blew himself up – Euro cops

Re: History repeating itself.

I fart in your general direction :-)

Relics from the early days of the Sinclair software scene rediscovered at museum during lockdown sort-out

My Dad wrote Hunter Killer and Airliner for the Spectrum around 1982 I think, published by Protek

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

Re: Bargle nawdle zouss

They changed the recipe for Black Bottle a few years ago and ruined it. Much harsher now :-(

One good deed leads to a storm in an Exchange Server

Beware the Groupwise * of doom..

A colleague once managed to send an email, complaining about how things within the organisation were a shambles, as he put it, to the entire organisation rather than the couple of people it was intended for. We used Novell Groupwise at the time and he accidentally put a * in the recipient list, which automatically causes your email to be sent to every address in the global address list. Oops!

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

Re: "laid the blame on IBM CFO James Kavanaugh"

"That makes it hard to stay on the merry-go-round that is corporate executive hiring. It is much better to say nothing, be a pleasant personality and parachute out of the ball of fail only to land in another cushy post."

This is what is wrong with the Public Sector ( local govt./civil service) - constant merry-go-round of decision makers who bail out to their next gig before the sh*t hits the fan

Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

Re: Custom ribbon?

Some Vogon poetry would be more appropriate - slow and painful death!

UK's competition watchdog gives £31bn Virgin Media and O2 merger the seal of approval

Re: Too confusing

I'm still on a contract that started life as a BT Cellnet one 20 odd years ago. Better the devil you know and all that.

Internet Explorer downgraded to 'Walking Dead' status as Microsoft sets date for demise

Re: Still Prevalent Within the NHS

Edge with IE-requiring URLs whitelisted is the way forward, then they will still effectively be running in IE 11

Fibre Channel is still around. And now it's end-to-end at a sizzling-ish 64Gbit/s

FCoE is gaining traction in bigger enterprises and iSCSI at the other end of the scale.

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Re: Follow the money

"Microsoft attacking Linux would be shooting itself in the financial foot. This is a thing MS has never been accused of..."

One word - Nokia :-)

MPs slam UK's £22bn Test and Trace programme for failing to provide evidence that it slows COVID pandemic

NHS Test & Trace??

As far as I'm aware, it's nothing to do with the NHS as such, was outsourced to everyone's favourite, Serco.

Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale

Re: Why????

"The issue is the US population is too smart to fall for that a second time."

Evidence? ;-)

Vinyl sales top CDs for the first time in decades in America, streaming rules

Re: You are all thieves

You obviously weren't using Memorex :-P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS2nq2w09I8

Go Huawei, Android: Chinese telco biz claims it will spread Harmony OS for smartphone to devs come December

Re: Maybe

And money in the pockets of Bezos, Cook, etc, etc is better how? They are all as bad as each other

Intel screams Tiger Lake is 'world's best processor' (then quietly into its sleeve: for thin Windows, ChromeOS laptops)

Re: What's wrong with "times"?

usually accompanied by "eugh that tastes like p*ss" :-)

Japanese airline ANA spins out telepresence-bot startup for virus-avoiding medicos and fearful tourists

Re: As is usual Scott Adams has already been there ....

I'm just wondering what colour t-shirt to put on mine... https://images.app.goo.gl/KEMPbPvUPnLTFL128

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

Re: Poo tickets in short supply here in Oz

I think you'll find that Rylan Clark-Neal got there before you :-)

School's out as ransomware attack downs IT systems at Scotland's Dundee and Angus College

Re: Oh, the irony

I'm sure they will make it onto the syllabus of every other College/Uni in Scotland later in the year :-)

The Nokia 3.2 is a phone your nan will love: One camera's more than enough, darling

Re: Wow, *two* years?

Soon to be available on escobarinc.com :-)

Go champion retires after losing to AI, Richard Nixon deepfake gives a different kind of Moon-landing speech...

Re: Nixon speech

It's the mice, I tell you, it's the mice...

Frankie: Hey Benjy, this is getting pretty boring. The Humans don't seem to be any closer to the Answer. Shall we have some fun?

Benjy: How paranoid can we make them?

Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room

Over-zealous office cleaners...

many moons ago I worked in an office where I used to have to hide my coffee cup every night because the cleaners thought it was a good idea to periodically dump any cups they could lay their hands into a bucket of bleach, presumably to get the tannin stains off the tea-drinkers' cups. Took a good couple of days to get rid of the hint of bleach taste drinking coffee so god knows how bad it must have tasted drinking tea out of them!

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

Database woes...

A long(ish) time ago, in the late 90s/early 00s I was working for a company where I had spent a fair few years doing coding on a PC based Retail Point of Sale system.

We also provided servicedesk services for a variety of retail chains in the UK and used a fairly low-to-mid-range system, called Heat, to log calls for all the different customers.

I was given the task of seeing if we could make it multi-tenant so that calls could be easily logged and managed for each customer using categories, SLAs, and stuff like that tailored for each customer and to make it easy to switch between different customers within the system when taking calls.

After a bit of time playing with the out of the box customisation options, which were mostly around tweaking fields on forms and setting-up system wide categories,SLAs,escalation routes, I ended-up implementing a whole load of functionality using triggers and stored procedures on the back end database, which was SQL Server 7.0.

I had never even clapped eyes on SQL Server before this - The PoS system I had worked on used a flat file back end database and I had no SQL Server training (of course!) so I pretty much learned on the hoof and had no support from the people who had originally installed the system.

To cut a long story short, I accidentally truncated the core call reference table that everything else hung off pretty much at the busiest time of the day! There were no Pk/Fk relationships within the database to stop that happening - all the relationships were handled within the software itself.

I couldn't just restore the database without kicking everyone out of the system and causing a fair amount of TITSUP* so, after about 30 seconds of wild panic, I ended up restoring to another database everything up to the last transaction log backup, which I had thankfully enabled a couple of weeks previously after discovering the woeful backup strategy that had been left by the original installers, and copied the restored data back over to the live database.

All done in 15 minutes flat! Hardly anyone even noticed there had been a problem and I found a dark corner to go and recover my sanity!

Needless to say, I was much more careful about using the truncate command after that....

On the plus side, I moved to a better paid DBA job in the finance sector a year or so later off the back of that project!

* Total Inability To Support Usual PoSProblems

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

Re: Azure still only has 4 multi-AZ regions, compared to AWS' 18 3-region AZs...

You can bet your bottom dollar that the DOD Azure deployment won't be running on any of the public cloud kit, will have extra layers of redundancy and will be much more strictly controlled, in terms of patching/updates.

Is your name Dr Evil? :-P

HMRC slaps Getronics with winding-up petition: It'll be sorted out today, blurts tech services firm

Re: The long and winding road...

For me, the rot had set in during the Computeraid days - I was in an office outside Glasgow and head office/sales was Farnborough. Sales didn't have a clue about using our product ( till software) as a way in to then sell other nicely profitable services off the back of it. They were only interested in stuff you could throw over the wall and forget about

UK Civil Service/Forces tracing paper bog roll used to have 'property of HMSO' stamped in green on every sheet. Made me laugh at the time, just before I winced trying to wipe my *rse with the horrible stuff. Beer icon to numb the pain!

The long and winding road...

I worked for Getronics briefly in the early noughties, having started my job working for Alcatel in the mid 90s, then our unit was sold to Computeraid, a spin-off from Thorn EMI. After losing their shirt on Autonomy they were bought out by PinkRoccade, which was the privatised Dutch Civil Service IT and one of the largest employers in Holland, behind Phillips. Then Getronics bought out PinkRoccade.

Each move brought further disconnect from the business so I took a sideways step elsewhere...

IBM cuts ribbon on quantum computing centre wherein a 53-qubit monster lurks

Re: Forgive my ignorance

If you can't play DOOM on it, then what's the point?

Scott McNealy gets touchy feely with Trump: Sun cofounder hosts hush-hush reelection fundraiser for President

Makes a change from the usual Dr Evil impersonation. Close your eyes and it would be difficult to tell them apart...

Big bang theory: Was mystery explosion over New York caused by a meteor? Dunno. By a military jet? Maybe...

Re: Don't panic

It's Vogon Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz warming up for his latest poetry reading

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Eh?

Those were the days. When Jimmy Saville was just an irritating tw*t with a poor taste in tracksuits. I never got a Blue Peter badge....

All roads in US cable biz GTT's Brit network seem to lead to Menwith Hill

Re: As I only live a few miles from The Hill...

There are a whole bunch of newcomers. In Central Scotland Cityfibre are filling the gaps where NTL/Virgin gave up in the 90s.

Our sales were to genuine customers, Autonomy ex-CEO Mike Lynch insists in court

Re: Ahh, it's Friday...

I wonder if one of the HP legal team said at some point "I have a plan.. a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a fox"

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

Re: Can someone explain...

How dare you! Viz is an order of magnitude further up the journalistic ladder than the Sport

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

Re: been using bing for about 18 months

Altavista - another fine example of the pitfalls of unending quest for growth by expanding outside your core competency and trying to be everything for everybody. It was my friend for years until they screwed it and google came along.

Honey, hive had it with this drone: Couple lived for years with thousands of bees in bedroom wall

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency...

Your FREE end-of-the-world guide: What happens when a sun like ours runs out of fuel

Re: Perhaps

Welcome to the Brexit at the End of the Universe. Watch Theresa May implode while dining on Ameglian Major Cow and sipping a particularly fine Pan Galactic Gargleblaster. With guest speaker

Max Quordlepleen.

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

errr I'm still using my 6 year old nokia 1020 WP8.1 :-P

Sinister secret backdoor found in networking gear perfect for government espionage: The Chinese are – oh no, wait, it's Cisco again

"Didn't GCHQ essentially told parliament that they don't trust any networking gear from anybody or that any network could be deemed secure? An everything should be encrypted before it sent across any network?"

Is that not essentially paragraph 1 of any discussion on security that's worth its salt?!

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Re: "Pholdable"

All this talk of 'pholdables' is making me frasmotic. I feel a bout of anaspepsia coming on!

HP crashed Autonomy because US tech titan's top brass 'lost their nerve', says lawyer for ex-CEO Mike Lynch

Re: Creepy 'Maths qualified' Salespeople

The USP was supposedly that the software was more than just a search engine and would analyze/mine and give context to data and could do supposedly 'intelligent' search.

The company I worked for in the late 90s/early 2000s sunk a shitload of cash into a datacentre built in their head office in Farnborough ( go figure??? First mistake - it was prime office estate not nice and cheap industrial unit) to sell Autonomy as an early SaaS offering.

Like everything else that we were doing at the time that didn't involve box shifting or other throw it over the wall and forget business, our sales people didn't have a clue and it went nowhere. Pretty much broke the company and the net result was that we were bought out by a Dutch outfit called PinkRoccade.

Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

Re: $80,000?

That's for the Hotblack Airlines version :-)

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Re: All too late

We had a reputation to diminish? I think you'll find that fuckwitts like Gavin Williamson et al have already destroyed what was left of it.

Re: Bots or scripts or sunnink.

You need to confirm by email by clicking on a link before your vote will be registered. Presumably only one vote per email address. I'd imagine it would be more than trivial to spam that significantly with bots.

I voted several hours ago but haven't had the email to be able to confirm. The total has only crept up by 100,000 odd in the last three hours. Wonder how many other people are still waiting for an email? Seems like a good way to knobble the process :-)