Posts by Prst. V.Jeltz

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

My never ending (and barely started ) project

Install a decent inverter, plug in PC. Done. Not exactly rocket surgery.

There is in fact quite a bit more to this, stepping up to 240V and back is not the ideal way .You've also got to think about auto starting and shutdown. I concur however that a tower is obviously the absolute worst form to choose.

I've been on this project since the days mp3 was invented , I've saved retired laptops for when i get round to it , that have been replaced multiple times by better retired laptops , I've still got the 800x600 VGA touch screen i was going to mount , I've got a still boxed gps unit I was going to add . I've got the book "Geek my ride" .

There was quite the scene for this back in the day , a site called mp3car.com was the centre of it , hosted forums and things , and sold stuff like anti hard drive vibration gear and power supplies.

People had written car friendly GUIs for those that had got the pc installed , I tried out the "roadrunner" software .

I never really got started in earnest though.

Nowadays all this and so much more is done "out of the box" with a cheap android box

The fail icon is for me , not Jake ---->

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Facetime makes debugging so much simpler

i use google remote desktop to remote mothers pc .

other systems are availble no doubt

This is why when remote controlling the users PC became practicable it was a godsend to remove that language barrier.

When I say "barrier" i mean near impassable chasm given the average user's complete inability to describe what they are doing or follow instructions .

.

As a lowly desktop support 2nd class citizen We wernt allowed to have it at first ,we wernt responsible enough apparently, which *really* pissed me off

Massive fail

on the part of " level one support, level two support, "

Had the same myself once , after user had had a phone call with the help desk , who had done their best to fix the issue I was informed "User cant get email" , so after travelling to a neighbouring site to investigate this I found upon arrival a mostly blank screen with a small message on it .

"No boot sector on drive A"

And this wasnt the days of booting the os on your 286 from a floppy , these were the days of booting into winNT from C and putting your only copy of your work on a floppy , despite having a networked backed up home drive to store it on , and then expecting me to recover it when you've put said floppy through the wash ! :( ... dont get me started ....

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

650k is enough

for everyone , was a quote famously attributed to Bill Gates , still not sure if its tru or not.

so what the current thinking on what is enough memory?

Personally I think its what we've got now , and if you need more unbloat that software .

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

Dont service accounts need to have their passwords shared amongst a few people?

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

“knowledge shared is overtime lost”

“knowledge shared is overtime lost”

What a horrific mindset ,I dont care if your salaried , hourly or self employed. Thats no way to work , especially in I.T. where the entire ethos is to get computers to make our work more efficient.

or am i just being naive?

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Password rules make it IMPOSSIBLE

I worked at a place that provided I.T. for a bunch of smallish companies , I worked on the help desk .

My superiors and betters in the server department had managed to arrange a password policy that was IMPOSSIBLE to satisfy .

This took quite some proving - the fact I was getting many calls a day from people failing to set passwords and me doing it for them didnt seem to ring any alarm bells .

They were also very vague on what rules they claimed to have set ( something I've seem from server boys everywhere Ive worked )

I had to learn how to interrogate AD , look at policys etc until I unearthed what they had set up , which was something like

minimum 15

maximum 10

and even then it wasnt immediately addressed

IMPOSSIBLE pwd rules

I worked at a place that provided I.T. for a bunch of smallish companies , I worked on the help desk .

My superiors and betters in the server department had managed to arrange a password policy that was IMPOSSIBLE to satisfy .

This took quite some proving - the fact I was getting many calls a day from people failing to set passwords and me doing it for them didnt seem to ring any alarm bells .

They were also very vague on what rules they claimed to have set ( something I've seem from server boys everywhere Ive worked )

I had to learn how to interrogate AD , look at policys etc until I unearthed what they had set up , which was something like

minimum 15

maximum 10

and even then it wasnt immediately addressed

just "blue maxi"

just "blue maxi"

was it SBV813T by any chance ?

that one was my dads :)

at least one special character

I think I'm gonna start telling users they need a backspace in the password.

Cant do any harm

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Re: please America .....

Of course, the worst of all are those who wilfully encourage the verbal idiocy, usually spouting drivel about "language changes all the time" and that anybody who complains about these items "just doesn't understand how it works", wilfully ignoring the fact that we're not railing against new and interesting coinage, about anything that extends our language's ability to express new concepts or delight in greater diversity.

.

Those people are just looking for an escape goat

So that their efforts are not graded as a damp squid.

Re: please America .....

Then he should learn to articulate these thoughts in a comprehensible manner!

please America .....

could not care less for the tetchy cat

FTFY

smh

https://youtu.be/om7O0MFkmpw

Sometimes words and expressions get redefined by popular usage , but if that happens in this case , where the misappropriation means almost the opposite of the intended meaning , that would be a little tragic . Although having come across this bastardisation in 1989's "Lethal weapon 2" the other day , I feel this may already have happened

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: 20 million cells?!

Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells

I feel sick

Not surprised though , finance departments steadfastly refuse to keep up with technology and change processes , like the Aerospace industry itself ( but they have good reason) , so a finance dept IN the Aerospace industry .....

I'm surprised theyre off paper

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

I threw a BNC connector away last week in a mass "This wire will come in one day" reality check

I had to be harsh! I Got 4 plastic crates down to one, amongst the ejected was my collection of every spare wall plug dc transformer thingies I ever owned with all voltages covered .

The BNC was an early VCR connector rather than networking

I'm just about old enough to remember BNC networking being a ring that could not be broken lest the whole network vanish.

Seems incredibly fragile way to operate through modern eyes. Then again giving each machine its own wire must have seemed like a ridiculous proposition back then.

Odd though , cars are going the opposite way these days with their CANBUS . Used to be everything had its own wiring , now all the bits hang off the one (or 2 or 3 ) network line , which seems simpler tbf .

When it breaks only one car stops though , not the entire workforce

Re: Not training related, but...

"Edited to fix a typo."

Very thorough of you to clarify that, I'd have just kept quiet about it unless the typo somehow completely reverses the meaning of the message , which *has* happened to me a couple of times

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

Re: re: I could probably knock something up in Excel

And just how scalable is that then? .... Excel is not one of those.

Yes that was my little jest .

I'm sure free version of SQLite will do a 70m record db

I would of course ,in reality , with my limited knowledge if big system architecture suggest a cluster of servers host whichever id the most robust OS and DB system .

what would that cost ? 50k 100k ?

or set up in cloud AWS for similar money .

... and those figures will somehow end up being about 0.1% of the actual cost , which will be in the billions no doubt

Thing with computer systems is , they are scalable , and this is just a database.

Theres lots of commercial programs that hold a database of information , perhaps for a company's customers for example . These are developed and sold to businesses , whop buy them at affordable prices .

But put the the words "national" or "Government I.T " in to it and those prices will multiply by thousands

There only 70 million people in the UK , so we're talking a database with only 70 million records .

I could probably knock something up in Excel if you dont want to pay for an Oracle license

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

or "We let a big orange moron with the IQ and social graces of a middle school bully and a narcism mental handicap run the country for 4 years "

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Uptime shmuptime

I do not have Peanut's "fanatical appetite for unbroken uptime."

I reboot a bunch of SQL servers that make up a Data Warehouse weekly , because they enjoy it , Its like a weekly treat for them

I know I shouldn't anthropomorphise the I.T. hardware though ... they hate that !

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: Top tip for writing instructions

The old method of putting the text below does not work

How could it possibly make any difference ? that my point .

does not work any more since documentation is written for computer screens and mobiles, not printing

huh? so picture with text above works on paper and on computer , but picture with text below only works on paper?

Top tip for writing instructions

If you are going to have pictures , with big red idiot proof arrows indicating "HERE! Click this" , which you should ...

... then put them at the side of the accompanying text , not above or below it , because if you lazily just put the text above or below people forget whether the text is talking about the picture above or below and have to spend time working that out at each stage .

just my 2c I thought I'd add with my absolute zero graphic design qualifications , but it seems obvious to me.

Re: Hmm

As someone who spent far too many years on base level desktop support , and occasionally writing idiot proof guides for the more repetitive tasks I found myself helping the muggles with, I feel I could have helped Gordon out .

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

"An early play of the Health and Safety wildcard."

"An early play of the Health and Safety wildcard."

Never a truer word spoken , that and "Data Protection" are the "catch all" jokers in the pack that can be used as a reason to do anything , or to not do something .

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: Why?

indeed

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#EmailCheck') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #EmailCheck

me too

team must always use the BEGIN TRANSACTION , ROLLBACK TRANSACTION, and COMMIT TRANSACTION commands!

I need to start doing that more before something bad happens

Do we need a "who me?" icon now Paris has left the building?

Metropolitan Police hails facial recognition tech after record year for arrests

well , given that your figures are national , and the articles figures are London , your results are not surprising

ldn 9m

uk 69 m

so your 0.02 * ( 69 / 9) = 0.15 . so , er , point proven

apples & oranges

there was no "pre-face-rec" situation where meatbag plods manually scanned a million faces from cctv cameras , and if there was you can bet the fail rate would be much higher

... cue the downvotes

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

So what do we all understand by the term "nonprofit" ?

Re: Agreed

Came here to say same , look -I've still got the quote on the clipboard:

he logged into the organization's server virtualization platform, saw a list of VMs not mentioned in the pile of notes, and deleted them.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Every time I had that it turned out they had misspelled the email address , or were just guessing at it , and had no way of confirming it .

The $100B memory war: Inside the battle for AI's future

Re: the real chokepoint isn't processing speed – it's memory bandwidth.

I'd say the real choke point is the amount of fossil fuel left in the ground , which these monsters are consuming at ever increasing rates that make a mockery of every attempt to "go green" made int last 50 years

Trouble is it wont just choke those machines , it will end civilisation .

thats if the AI doesn't do it for us first , Skynet style .

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Seriously?

I'll have to assume "Cole" will be reading this and moderate my thoughts

YOU COULDNT FIGURE THAT OUT ?? JEEZ !

We arnt actually told Cole's role , just

Cole eventually figured out the problem: The switch that controlled power to the company's servers was the same switch that powered his workshop.

So perhaps he was a mechanic for the factory floor , and went into I.T. later , possibly due to this incredible diagnosis he pulled out of the bag , without admitting he was the cause of it : )

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

its monday!

this is from friday!

wheres the monday funny?

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

Re: Locked room exam

I remember being enamored with Amiga demos spinning thigs around and attempted my own crude versions in Pascal with sine plotting etc

Re: Locked room exam

When i was at college , calculators had *just* evolved into simple computers that could hold formulas , of which there were plenty to remember in electronics theory ,

we got away with it as a sort of "zero day hardware hack"

Re: Locked room exam

Easy: Faraday cage.

also signal blockers and removal of all electronics with airport style metal detectors.

Of course , all thats out of the window with online games of any sort and that really is an arms race.

Re: Empowerment

A return to the old system of "Now its time for your exams , in this room , with us watching you , and your calculator removed" would fix this.

I'm not sure why we moved off this system to the "Yeah you can do you exams in your own time unsupervised at home with whoever you want helping you, we'll call it coursework"

Good honest work avoidance is a skill

also good honest skill avoidance is work

Oracle will have to borrow at least $25B a year to fund AI fantasy, says analyst

I used to think a $1000 graphics card used purely to make sure every blade of grass is waving around while people play FarCry was a total waste of computing resources and the planets sort-of-finite energy supply .

.

Now we have datacentres with millions of GPUs being used to draw inane doodles the general publics imagination has spunked up , somehow due to the ecosystem of internet economics , at no cost to them , as yet.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

So , mans does job , sends email saying "I'm finished , test it out" , is sacked for the wording of the email . amazing

I'm still trying to get my head around why internal emails had to be "approved" !

Re: Oh really ?

stop using the term "resources"

spot on , I've always been vaguely insulted by that

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

murphys law

About 4 years ago a took a car for an MOT test with a brake pad inserted into the caliper (by my own hand) much the same way this chip was mounted .

oh how me and the boys at the test station laughed ...

Re: Conspiracy Theory

buyer wants less inspections??

"What's in it for him?" definitely springs to mind.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: Many moons ago, when I was gone for a week ...

Computer science? Software engineering?

Excellent examples the the previous posters point

Re: When Life Gives You Lemons...

Thats stuffs made a comeback recently, popular with da kids, its trying to reclaim its alcopop throne

ChatGPT: Why do most of your users ask for help writing – prose, not code?

Re: Beats Google

If they don't know they'll make something up*, or go off at a tangent.

Theres a sort of "config file" where you can specify a bunch of rules and stuff , to prevent that , at least there is for copilot