Posts by beaker_72

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Reminds me of when I was a nipper working on a helldesk which didn't have a dedicated email address (this was back in the 90s). There was just me and one other guy working on it at the time and users would email us directly for help.

I thought it would be a jolly jape to set up a forward so that every email that came to me got forwarded to him for him to deal with. Once he realised what I'd done, he thought it would be even jollier if he reciprocated and sent them right back to me. It only took a few minutes for the mail server to fall over after we created our loop. In our defence we realised straight away that it was our fault, removed the forwards and once the dust had settled we owned up. Our long suffering boss took it in her stride and just told us not to do it again. Lesson learned.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: But what about fixing what people want?

You're not the only one, it's worked well for us for at least the past couple of years now since we ironed out some early bugs. But people who are happy with things are less likely to make noise about it.

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

Ignoring his very next tweet

When asked in the ensuing twitter thread if he was serious, his reply was:

"No, this is a long-running joke on Twitter. I'm not buying any sports teams"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1559760618537848832

El Reg creating click-bait articles based on nothing??

UK minister tries to intervene after Government Digital Service migration mangles Ministry of Justice webpages

Re: Working for GDS

> It must be crap working for GDS - whenever you do some work, people cry foul

You don't understand the mentality of the people working for these departments. Crying foul doesn't bother them in the slightest, the people crying foul clearly don't understand that GDS know best and that the foul-criers are just demonstrating their ignorance.

I've worked with these people, the levels of self-delusion are off the charts.

Scottish Environment Protection Agency refuses to pay ransomware crooks over 1.2GB of stolen data

Re: cynical

If a publicly funded body pays out money for anything, it is by defintion "public" money. It's very common for such bodies to emphasise this in these kind of statements so as to be seen to be doing the right thing and not squandering the funds they've received from the public.

Not sure what else the use of the word could relate to.

Onwards! To the airport and adventure! And this rather lachrymose Linux screen

Re: "A Scottish airport"?

Because they may have a very good reason for not doing so.

"A Scottish airport"?

As someone who was a frequent flyer until Covid (thankfully) put an end to that, I can tell from the photo which airport it is. Just curious as to why El Reg is being coy about naming it?

Infor pays UK construction retailer Travis Perkins £4.2m settlement following cancelled upgrade of 'Sellotape and elastic bands' ERP system

Re: Barely any input from the IT department

Hard to believe that they would have signed off on that size of project without speaking to the techs, or that Infor wouldn't have flagged doing so as a massive risk.

I'm sure that the in-house tech folk and Infor would be happy to point the finger at the business being the problem though. I suspect the reality is a little more nuanced.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: Rudest, Dumbest - same thing no?

My favourite variation on that one was when one of the drones on the helldesk I had the misfortune of managing sent an email to a user to let them know he'd fixed their email.

You've think you've heard it all about automation in technology? Get a load of this robot that plugs in cables

It's been done

Glasgow University produced a robot that could sort and fold clothes 5 years ago:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-32612928

A message to our friends across the pond - do keep up!

What do we want? A proper review of IR35! When do we want it? Last year! Bunch of IT contractors protest outside UK Parliament

Not really...

Even the companies they've worked with for years and years and years, are afraid to take them on

Not in my experience, what we're actually seeing is the "contractors" who have effectively worked as employees for years are leaving in droves because they know that if their current roles are deemed to be inside IR35 then they're opening themselves up to HMRC coming looking for all the tax they should have been paying for all of those years.

Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy: Run Huawei, Google Play, turns away, from Huawei... turns away

Chapeau

That's an outstanding headline for a Monday morning

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Been there

Back in the very early days of my career when I was still a phone monkey on a "help" desk, before we'd hit on the concept of having a single email address to contact the help desk on, our customers would contact each of us individually depending on who their pet help desk operator was (there were only two of us). One day, for a laugh, I decided to set up an autoforward rule so that any email that came in to me got forwarded on to my colleague for them to deal with.

It didn't take them long to realise what was going on, so in a moment of brilliance they decided to set up a similar rule to forward any email they received to me. It doesn't require a genius to work out what would happen next, and we certainly weren't geniuses. Within only a few minutes the exchange server fell over and our phones started ringing off the wall as our users started phoning in to complain that email was down. Of course we immediately escalated the issue to our second line support and in a flash of brilliance decided it might be best to delete those autoforward rules.

In our defence we did come clean to the manager of the team that looked after the server, but we waited until everything was back up and running and the fuss had died down. Luckily she saw the funny side....

Overheard at a Brit mobe network: On the count of Three UK, smile and say, er... we lost how many customers?

Leaving Three

Agreed - the only way I was eventually able to extricate myself from their clutches was by filing a complaint with the Ombudsman. That resulted in me being contacted by a very helpful and friendly lady from an office in Glasgow who got me sorted out and a lot of money refunded.

Three have call centres / offices in the UK - who knew.....?

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

Tape loading

I remember going along to our after school computer club, run by enthusiastic parents who all brought in their ZX81s and Spectrums. After watching one parent plugging in an earpiece to listen to the tape loading noises and nodding knowledgeably, I decided never to go back as even at that tender age I could tell that the sky in my world was a different colour from theirs!

I did spend many happy hours at home teaching myself BASIC on our family's Sharp MZ-80A

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

The new munchy box

Take out that pizza filling nonsense and replace it with the contents of a typical munchy box. Job done!

For those of you who have no idea what a munchy box is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchy_box

Linux-loving lecturer 'lost' email, was actually confused by Outlook

I call bulls**t

"The lecturer apologised for his behaviour a week later."

I worked in academia for 5 years, these people are never wrong and never apologise even when they are.

Have we got a new, hip compound IT phrase for you! Enter... UserDev

Re: Reminds me of Pete

Yeah we had one of them, his name might even have been Pete too. The highlight (if you can call it that) of Pete's career with us was when he copied the registry from his home PC onto a disk, brought it into work and overwrote the registry on his work machine.

He never adequately explained what he hoped to gain from that.

May blocked plans to bring in more Indian IT workers – Vince Cable

Not sure I see the problem with this...

Surely anything that makes it harder for TCS to do business in the UK can only mean an improvement in the quality of the industry's offering

Three outsources staff to Capita

Re: Currently a 3 customer

Good luck with that! The only way I was able to get "Steve" in Mumbai and his mates to cancel my contract was by raising a complaint with the ombudsman.

When I finally got to speak to someone who wasn't sticking rigidly to the script or putting me on hold for up to 30 minutes (after the ombudsman cracked some heads together), they were based in Glasgow and their service was excellent. I dare say that will be going down the pan shortly....

PC World's cloudy backup failed when exposed to ransomware

Re: There are two options here...

There is a third option which is that she isn't giving us the full truth either.

The sentence "Yesterday an email came through which i opened (it was from what looked like a completely standard email address) a virus flooded my laptop instantly corrupting all my files"

Seems to be missing the words "...email address) after I opened the attachment a virus..."

Post-pub nosh neckfillers: Reader suggestions invited

Greek Gyros?

What's the difference between those and a doner kebab? I think we might already know about them...