Posts by DropBear

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Yeah, about that - you try working while your boss is never more than five meters away from you, unerringly coming over to ask "are you about to finish?" half an hour after tasking you with anything (especially if "the thing" takes several days to do ANYWHERE sane), going "hey, I need you to do this other thing right now" ten minutes after the last "this is more urgent, get on it instead!" call (all of which you should push in a stack, because you're FULLY expected to return at every level from a call stack at least SEVERAL dozens deep). Well, if you ever wondered how mild-mannered shy folks get turned into full-blown homicidal maniacs - wonder no more...

Re: Oh really ?

Not really. The proper name would be something along the lines of "cult enforcers".

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

To be honest, every time I place a "this should never happen" comment in my source code, I'm still roughly 50% sure the damned thing will find some impossible way to happen anyway. Which is the entire point of me putting code in there that would justify such a comment in the first place.

Linus has had enough of links that point to 'stupid useless garbage'

Not necessary. You really don't remember the last story in Asimov's "I, Robot", do you... He even spelled it out explicitly in his "Foundation" series: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent..."

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

"And we never got an apology for being accused"

Surely, you jest. See, only YOU can make mistakes (for which you shall, without fail, be punished appropriately) - bosses, large or small, are exempt from making mistakes, by definition, so they have nothing to "apologize" for. Whatever they do, it can only be something that was supposed to be done exactly that way (also by definition). If it turns out to be in direct conflict with reality, well surely you can't blame them for reality refusing to play ball, when it really ought to.

Putting it more bluntly, the importance of their Face is always 100.0% and the importance of the Face of any sentient underling involved is 0.0% - your Face is something they just happen to own, bought and paid for, to occasionally use as a rag to polish theirs to a perfect shine. Conversely, you cannot possibly lose any Face because you've never been granted any. Very Important People don't "apologize" to nuts and bolts in a machine...

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Land of the Free - to be shot

...especially towards aliens. Louis de Funès taught me that!

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

I DO have a LOCAL copy of every email I ever sent or received (ehhh... sans spam and near-spam) in my Thunderbird and its backup. I use Gmail but I wouldn't trust it to not arbitrarily lock me out one day as far as I can throw them - the utter fucks at GMX did just that, and never even bothered to explain. But for me it would matter not one bit, other than having to find a replacement...

How about no. I'm still using a VERY old Thunderbird with its traditional UI, and I have zero plans to move on to a "fresh new and exciting" piece of crap.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

...so I suppose I shouldn't even try to ask where "the head" is...?

Kaspersky challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties

EXACTLY! We need to ban CrowdStrike NOW, OR ELSE!

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

Wait, what? No HTTPS? Or was it company-sanctionedly scuttled...?

Mozilla is trying to push me out because I have cancer, CPO says in bombshell lawsuit

I find it remarkable that someone fighting cancer still finds it a priority to squabble over holding a public office as opposed to, you know, worrying about staying alive and what they'll be remembered for...

There's no longer any such thing as "one of the". As far as engines go, there's Chrome/Chromium and Firefox. That's it. And I warn you, If you try to mention Goanna or somesuch other shenanigans, there will have to be fisticuffs between us...

Yes. I use that thing. Out of sheer stubbornness. It's borderline non-functional by now for viewing any actual websites, only not on the "almost" side, but on the other one...

From network security to nyet work in perpetuity: What's up with the Kaspersky US ban?

Bah, humbug! The only one I trust is Thunderbyte Antivirus - as I have personally verified it can restore even infected files to binary-identical originals. If it has a pre-infection database, it will even cut the file length back down to the original size - but the binary content is the same, either way...

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: Language

Only in English. For instance, there ISN'T any corresponding term to the verb "to experience" in either Hungarian or Romanian. Any translation of a sentence containing it is a kludge.

Re: "NASA wanted a specialized craft to make sure the job is done right first time."

Donnie Darko has entered the chat and started typing...

Re: It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission

No, wait, I know! Why not just ask Tessier-Ashpool whether they might be interested in buying it...?

Re: Can't help wondering

Sounds like the very first mistake is assuming to being able to tell what the outcome of any particular court case will be based on what "the law says". "Justice" is just another word for "Russian roulette, only much worse".

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

Re: I was the problem luser

Aaaah, "wellies". Right up there with "Tannoy", a word EVERYONE knows (as long as you're Bri'ish - or at least five-eyes, presumably) and absolutely nobody else has ever heard otherwise.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

Re: This is why we ALWAYS test new procedures on a COPY of the production database

No, BECAUSE we are old and experienced rightfully paranoid. FTFY....

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: There is an

Have you ever actually tried that...? There's no satisfaction in it whatsoever. It's a hollow victory. It's no fun unless you get to nuke that bridge from orbit, mad grin included, with maximum prejudice. Oh, and you can promise me the full worth of Elon for a single day of work and I'll STILL laugh in your face and say "no" if you pissed me off properly.

TRAITOR! On this side of the pond it's Do (a deer, a female deer), Re, Mi, Fa, Sol...

Re: Delivery Tracking

What miraculous land is this you live in...? Package marked "unable to deliver, nobody home" even though you spent your entire day glued to the door. Because couriers get assigned impossible targets nowadays, and when targets are impossible you stop even trying to fulfill them and just flat out fake, lie and cheat.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Re: Yeah

Wait, you worked on Toy Claw Machines...? SHAME...! SHAME...! SHAME...!

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Re: Ouch

You mean you DON'T have a moat around your garden...?

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

Re: air CON

I would, but for some reason having my whole body covered in a thin insulator being the only thing separating it from a bunch of wiring at mains voltage genuinely scares the shit out of me.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Re: A lot of El Reg Readers really are very old

I once wrote TSRs. Now I feel terminally exhausted at the mere thought of looking at one up close. But I swear I'm not old, nawww, not at all - it all happened a mere few years ago. Yes, in the nineties, a few years ago, that's what I said, did I not...? Those new bullet-time effects in this recent Matrix movie are pretty slick though - I've heard they plan to make it a trilogy...

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

Are there official training flowcharts for that...? Because if I have to use my multiple-decades-powered experience of thinking outside the box to find and fix the problem then "HP & Lenovo" can go eat shit and I'll fully claim any resulting success and any proceeds of it as my own.

Re: The hell that

I am greatly puzzled - if the interlocks held, why was there anything to replace...?

EDIT: for that matter, even if the interlocks FAILED, why was there anything to replace...?

Re: Audi electrics, oof

One evening I parked my VW B4 Passat just fine, only to have it crank but completely refuse to start the next morning. Turns out it's an openly known secret that the relay supplying the ECU (109 I think...?) has a bulk fabrication defect that WILL fail on you at some point, no exceptions. Replaced the relay, car started right up. Opened the old relay - there's this massive cold solder joint that failed to solder properly due to an obvious proximity to a larger metal bit soaking away all the heat. Jolly well done (and covered up), you VW fuckers...

Re: had a printer with the same fault

Now, I would be inclined to take this as a personal affront if only were I not aware that (completely useless) checklist-reading tech support was equally bad regardless of physical location.

Re: It is a fine idea

At some point, my old CRT TV suddenly just stopped turning on - investigation revealed that a large transistor in the PSU simply crater-exploded for some reason. I replaced it (and any suspicious passives around it), but I was the whole while scared shitless of working around an (even unplugged) CRT, for fear of touching something still charged. TV works just fine to this day, btw.

I have that reminder permanently engraved on an old set of tailpipes (and my leather jacket). I'm still amazed that there appeared to be precisely zero nanoseconds between riding normally and sliding on the asphalt behind my bike throwing off sparks like crazy. The human brain is a funny thing, and apparently impact sensitive, even in a full-face helmet.

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

Re: Well it's clearly working as designed....

Okay, admit it - it is YOU, little Bobby Tables, isn't it...

NASA's Mars InSight uploads its (probably) final image, shares it in a tweet

Re: Obligatory XKCD

Dang... last seen that movie as a kid somewhere in the eighties, still left its mark on me... gotta re-watch it one of these days for sure.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

I'm still using the keyboard I got with my first 386. Still works perfectly. Zero signs of wear on the keys. It's a Mitsumi with a DIN-5 plug...

Re: If I have to look in the manual (absolute last resort of course) it's a really bad design!

Extremely questionable reliability. What you want instead is a DCF77 receiver.

Re: Press the button

Was the allocated IP 127.0.0.1 perchance...?

Re: Manual is optional,

Indeed, some people very obviously flat-out refuse to learn anything they don't want to, no matter how idiotically simple, insisting the entire time that they "can't". It doesn't matter that were that actually true they should absolutely not be allowed to get out of bed in the morning - they just are these special snowflakes who "can't" learn this one simple thing.

PayPal ditches passwords, at least on Apple devices

Yeah, well, no thanks. I have no interest in accessing anything that needs to be secured on a goddamned mobile device. Some hatchlings might find this hard to grasp, but some folks still insist on using desktop hardware for ALL their computing needs, which thankfully tends not to have any "biometric" hardware at all (much like my current smartphone, actually - it's a FEATURE).

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

Re: For about 10 years or so now...

Better yet, don't agree to BE available outside business hours, no matter on who's hardware. Getting a company-supplied phone to be bothered on instead of my own would give me less than zero comfort for ruining my day in the first place.

I currently use a second hand Thinkcentre M90 ultra-small form factor as my media server. By "NUC standards" it doesn't even qualify, but it DOES have room for a full-sized 3.5" many-tera HDD, and by desktop standards it's astonishingly small (and quiet). It even accommodates my PCI (sic) TV grabber card, which is a major plus for me...

SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter

Re: Shut up and do your job!

There's a place and time where to mock the whole "woke" thing, fully deservingly. THIS IS NOT IT.

Lightweight Linux distribution Slax rides again with v11.2

Please do excuse my late reply - sorting this out was nowhere near the top of my list of priorities. However, new developments suggest the problem (as usual) wasn't on my end - there is aparently a closed bug on the Slax bug tracker attributing this problem to, uh, "blkid" simply not noticing nvme partitions (until pointed out to it by explicitly running it with those as arguments (!!!)) in spite of the rest of the distro/kernel having zero problems with nvme on any level. It's as nice a demonstration of "only use any Linux variant if you LIKE having problems all the time" as I've ever needed or have seen.

Semiconductor average lead time breaks half-year barrier

"Grew"?!? WTF? We've been getting year-plus delivery terms on some fairly common ICs even back in January...

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: LibreOffice, for example, is every bit as good as Microsoft Office

...and more often than you'd like - it's ONLY available as source. And frankly, screw that.

Re: LibreOffice, for example, is every bit as good as Microsoft Office

Except MS doesn't control or own most of the apps REAL LIFE FOLKS use.

FYI

Loophole: Windows AME.

Re: Simple? My arse!

XnviewMP. With absolute authority. It's so well established, it's one of the few image viewers that already has plugin support for the brand new QOI image format...