Posts by Aus Tech

In IT, no good deed ever goes unpunished

Re: Whatsup?

Nothing! It's all down.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: We all know the best Bond film

"You're forgetting the original Casino Royale. The one with David Niven in it."

Oh, you mean that hideous spoof. After seeing that, thinking in advance that it was the first of Fleming's books, I vowed that I would NEVER again watch David Niven in any TV show or movie. The movie was an outrageous spoof (for want of a better (or worse) term. I've never regretted the decision.

Et tu, Samsung? Electronics giant accused of quietly switching SSD components

Re: So, WD, Crucial and Adata, and now Samsung

"Hands up those who don't do that kind of shenanigans."

I think that you are right, they are all doing it, so we should hear from them soon. Question is when? Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, or never? Anyone care to place a bet?

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

Re: Concrete

"Ah - the Chernobyl technique...."

I saw the mini-series, and I also remember meeting some of the children from there, when they came out to Australia some time after the incident. The idea of using concrete to control the situation didn't work at all well.

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

Re: The engineer's careers

"Maybe, but on the other hand it's a good bet that they would never make that mistake again."

Maybe, but it depends on how dumb they are. As they (whoever they are) say: "Stupid is as stupid does".

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Re: Supply pipe location

"After about a year, the guy gave up trying to tell the company he was not being billed for the water they were using."

That probably means that his water supply is coming through another persons place, and they are paying for his water supply. Obviously, someone stuffed up big time with the plumbing.

FTC approves $61.7m settlement with Amazon for pocketing driver tips

I continue to refuse to buy Amazon

That's good enough for me, now that I know about them stealing wages.

Antivirus that mines Ethereum sounds a bit wrong, right? Norton has started selling it

Re: What we need

You don't need a video. There is a simple 4 step process to get rid of Norton Antivirus:

1. Throw out your Norton Antivirus installation CD or DVD.

2. Do a completely fresh Install of Windows.

3. Do a new install of some other antivirus software, such as Malwarebytes.

4. Reinstall all of your other software, remembering to not install cryptomining software.

Re: I didn't need any more reasons to avoid Norton

You wouldn't by any chance be implying that Cryptocurrency miners are also Electricity Thieves? How else could they make a profit if they have to pay a higher price for electricity than they earn from mining?

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

Re: "Mike learned an important lesson..."

"Either that, or it was the magic smoke release button."

Ah yes, we all know that all those electronic contraptions work by smoke. Along comes a newbie, and asks how do we know that, and the answer is have you ever seen one work once the smoke gets let out? Which is no.

Dam it: Beaver ate our internet, says tiny Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge

Re: Don't forget the smaller cousins....

"Idiot With Backhoe..."

We've had that problem here in Australia with the NBN, several times. The last time that it happened - less than 6 months ago, we had intermittent problems and slow data transfer speeds for almost 4 weeks, as the technicians had to repair the Optical Fibre lines, one at a time, as well as use redundant links just to get the towns on the lines a basic connection. Currently it's working great, thankfully. I just hope that we don't have any problems for the next couple of years.

Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity

Re: Covid 19 and hot desks

"BOFH solution = flamethrower."

Seems a bit on the extreme side, even though being effective. Not to mention being damn expensive.

If you can't log into Azure, Teams or Xbox Live right now: Microsoft cloud services in worldwide outage

Re: CURRENT STATUS: Microsoft rerouted traffic to our resilient DNS capabilities

"Because that means running TWO 486SX's at the same time."

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, please tell me when to stop laughing!

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: When turn off/turn on fails

"I didn't expect the drive to have its own switch"

I've only seen one external floppy drive with an external switch, many years ago now. Half of the time the owner of the computer would forget to turn the drive on, until it wouldn't read. He wasn't impressed. Just don't ask me what breed of PC it was, as I've long ago forgotten.

OVH reveals it's scrubbing servers – to get smoke residue off before rebooting

Re: This is very low-rent

"Although flip side, if they are cleaning so thoroughly.... is it a fire damaged server?"

It's still a fire damaged server. They won't know if it will boot until they try, and if it boots, they won't know how much data is accessible and/or recoverable until they try to access the drives. The servers might be okay, if they've done a thorough clean up of them, but I wouldn't bet a pound, let alone my life on them being operational for an extended period.

Re: Worth saying again......

"It's the same with backups to HDD. People use just one drive, instead of double cloning......."

Speak for yourself. I use 4 drives, deployed to 3 different locations on the LAN, and I still worry if I have enough redundancy, even with a small but essential lot of files backed up to the cloud, that cannot be replaced otherwise.

Big problem: Nominet members won't know how many votes they're casting in decision to oust CEO, chair

Now, now, we are not in Mos Eisley on Tattoine, in a Galaxy far, far away . . .

PSA: If you're still giving users admin rights, maybe try not doing that. Would've helped dampen 100+ Microsoft vulns last year – report

""Because I have to have Administrator rights because I'm a director of the company!""

Well then, more fool you for granting them to the person. Directors of a company don't have to have Administrator privileges, at any time. They are not in charge of Administrating all of the computers deployed throughout the business. If you were stupid enough to give them Administrator rights, then it is no surprise to me that the company went bust, even if you were otherwise directed to do just that. If, on the other hand, it was some other person who went and did that, then they ought to have been terminated on the spot, regardless of their ranking within the business. Even the MD isn't exempt from that. My experience is that the louder people shout that they NEED Administrator privileges, is that they should under NO circumstances be granted them. End of rant!

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

Re: We Just Can't Have Nice Things

"One way would be to levy a carbon tax on cryptocurrencies."

There's only one problem with that, how do you arrive at a Dollar or Euro value of something that changes from day to day, and then levy the taxation on the number of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, and then receive the tax levied. It will be extremely difficult, to put it mildly.

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

Re: When you say "pants",

"No offence, but I hate you"

Then you'll hate me even more, because over the past 12 months, my waist has shrunk by 2 inches, so now I'm back into 36 inch waists on my suits, trousers and jeans and underwear, and I'm aiming to stay there.

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

Re: Just imagine if...

"Once is happenstance.

Twice is coincidence.

Three times is enemy action!"

Said Goldfinger to James Bond.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

"When electricity leaks, it doesn't make as much mess as when water leaks". True, true, but when electricity leaks, you are in danger of receiving shocking news, as in it being FATAL.

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

Re: Printers attached to PC's

"she broke EVERY OTHER toy with it :o)"

Would that toy perhaps look something like a hammer?

BTW, I nearly choked, laughing at the quote.

Re: Printers attached to PC's

Speak for yourself, AC. If I can avoid using Wi-Fi networking, then I do so, even if it means jumping through hoops to get updates for our tablets and smart phones using USB to get updates to them. As for the printer connected to my computer, I only use USB now.

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Re: Low IQ or low volition?

The first time that happens, you just switch the printer back on, and leave. The second time it happens, you look to see what is going on around the printer, and a quick check reveals that the user has re-arranged their furniture to suit their requirements. Result: the first time that they open their drawer, the printer gets switched off, accidentally and unnoticed, until they want to print something. If it happens again, you threaten them with disemboweling, or a dawn execution by firing squad, NOT, even if you would like to do that to them. The world is full of users who don't think that they need to learn to do some basic checks when simple things don't work.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: Perhaps

Good point. Now that I'm retired from the full time work scene I only check my email once a day. If anyone needs to urgently contact me, then they can call my home or mobile number. Some of the items that come in via email are sometimes important, such as Family History research messages, but they are never urgent enough to require an IMMEDIATE response. Tomorrow will be soon enough.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Re: There is no problem

Ammonium Nitrate on it's own isn't a high explosive, but if there is diesel present with it, it will explode in the presence of a spark, or if another explosive device happens to detonate, such as gelignite.

There are DDoS attacks, then there's this 809 million packet-per-second tsunami Akamai says it just caught

Re: And the next step...

Really? They just need to secure their computer. Sure, I know that can be difficult in this connected age, but it isn't impossible, just time consuming.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Re: DIMM Slots

Ah, I remember the saying well. "All this electronic stuff works on smoke!" "Works on smoke?" "Yep, works on smoke!. Have you ever seen anything work once the smoke gets let out?" " Can't say that I do." "There you go, that's proof that it all works on smoke."

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Re: How to get Colossal Cave installed

You don't need a linux based machine to play Adventure. There has been a MS-DOS and/or Windows command prompt version available for many years. I seem to remember tuning the settings for a single floppy version, something like 25 years ago. It ran much better if it was installed on the C: drive of DOS 3.3, preferably in the C:\Games directory.

Hello, support? What do I click if I want some cash?

RE: thinks she has me on a diet

Show me a dieter, and I'll show you someone who belittles themselves. I'm supposed to be on a diet, but I love my chocolate too much.

I can't believe you've done this: Cisco.com asks visitors to explain to IT why they have broken the website

Re: The Executive Summary will be fun reading ...

Well, if they still had access, that is wholly Cisco's fault, for leaving live accounts on their servers, after the services of said employees were terminated. I'm only a lowly sysadmin, but I know better than leaving defunct accounts on active servers. Ideally, they should have been removed before the people were told that they were no longer required. That way they can't go back to their desk, and leave assorted nastiness that will cause outages at some indefinite time in the future. It's not as if it takes long to get rid of the accounts.

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: sad mac

That's one of the oldest chestnuts around. Someone once tried it on me, and it took me all of 5 seconds to work it out, and fix it. Our whole class had been shown that when we were doing our PC Technicians course, back in the early 90's.

Re: We once...

Comes from "2001: A Space Odyssey" when Dave Bowman asked the HAL9000 onboard computer to "Open the Pod Bay Door" in the movie, I think.

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Re: Let's face it, who amongst us hasn't lost a tie to the...

We had to wear an apron in my 3 years of doing Metalwork at my High School, back in the mid to late 60's. It didn't matter what work we were doing, soldering, using any machinery at all, including the lathes, or the bench drill press, or the shaping machine. Personally, I think that it was a good safety measure, which was the idea behind it.

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

Re: its like the leads at the back of my desk at work.

Don't you know that power, Ethernet, USB and other cables all have a life of their own? They seem to love to get all tangled up, despite all the care that a person takes when connecting the computer and associated peripherals.

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

Re: Mini - not really

The Prof must have been a good sport then.

Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email

Re: Where Do I Find These Lawyers

JamesPond, "I am pretty sure I invented the web", "I think you'll find that neither you or Tim Berners-Lee invented the net". Come on, get your definitions correct. The World Wide Web is not The Internet, it is only one part of the Internet.

Re: Re: Only the best will do

"and the guy who invented the Internet!". Now, now, no pork pies (lies). The original project that started what is now known as the Internet was invented by the US Department of Defense, with the establishment of the DARPA network, over 50 years ago. It included places like the Goddard Space Center, and many of the then most powerful known computers in the world.

In other words, nobody voted for Trump, so he's just a figment of your imagination. Not my problem, as I don't live anywhere within the boundaries of the USA, I hope.

Re: Just imagine the next case ...

Jason Bloomberg, you're missing the point that even if it was the first email program, doesn't mean that it is the most commonly adopted version of those that are currently available, around the world.

User thanked IT department for fast new server, but it had never left its box

Re: Praise or accusations of work not done?

Sounds like one of the old classic ID10T ERROR, or PEBKAC situations, but we can't tell the clients that is the real problem. I dare say that we could invent/build a foolproof PC, but that won't help, as the fools won't be able to use one.

El Reg gets schooled on why SSDs will NOT kill off the trusty hard drive

Re: However, it is hard to find a CRT display now

I have just what you are looking for, sitting in my back shed, an old 21 inch CRT monitor, still in working order, AFAIK. I haven't used it in over a year, and it is heavy. It has a VGA connector, not sure if there is any other more recent than that. Last time that I moved it, it took a good 15 minutes to go less than 50 meters. I had to stop something like 12 times before getting it into the shed. At a guess, it would probably cost more to ship it somewhere than what it is worth??? There's also an old Dell 15 inch monitor down there, that was last used with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. I think that donating them to a Museum would be better than trying to sell them.

Hell desk to user: 'I know you're wrong. I wrote the software. And the protocol it runs on'

Re: Re: Possible or easy?

Are you sure that is a Windows bug, and not an iPhone feature?

ICO seizes phones and computers in nuisance call scam raids

RE: the accident in the last three years

Probably some other scammer trying to trick you into a scam about some other scammer. IOW, a recursive scam.

BA CEO blames messaging and networks for grounding

RE: There is now.

It's too late now, the disaster has already happened. Very much like the old story "shut the gate, the horse has bolted."

Just delete the internet – pr0n-blocking legislation receives Royal Assent

Re: It never stops to amaze me...

"Nudity is not."

Since when? I was thoroughly used to seeing it by my mid teens, and that was many years ago.

Re: William Wallace

"Amber Rudd sounds like it should be a porn name."

Maybe it is already.

That apple.com link you clicked on? Yeah, it's actually Russian

I wonder what happens...

when the browser is updated to a new version?

Of course, if we ALWAYS type the url into the address bar, we aren't going to have the problem, but when there is a long string of other text after the '/', that's going to be awkward.

Prisoners built two PCs from parts, hid them in ceiling, connected to the state's network and did cybershenanigans

Re: Hats off to them...

It does take some balls. It only takes one person with the knowledge to build the computers. All that is needed is the Case, M/B, CPU, RAM, a network cable, a hard drive, and the means to install the O/S. Everything else is already available on the M/B.

Given that the prisoners were already disassembling computers, reversing the process to build them is simple. Getting access to the network switch to do the deed is about the hardest part, or it should have been. That suggests that there was a network physical security failure, and that somebody's posterior should have been very sore from the punishment inflicted.