Posts by Prst. V.Jeltz

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: Outrageous

Thing is the gobshite who ordered him to be held wasnt even present until later.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

My cat found the "Load last saved game" shortcut once , that was quite annoying

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

So there may be consequences even for the not quite illegal racist shit

ok .

Well hows that different from not having "free speech" ?

Or to get back to basics what IS free speech? it seems to differe in a lot of people minds , which was my original point .

One definition is "The right to criticize the government without being thrown in a gulag"

Although they seem to have gotten around this one recently by declaring anyone protesting the genocide in Gaza as a "terrorist" - and indeed locking them up.

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

I find that well known and oft cited soundbite to be utterly meaningless and redundant

You're free to chop a policemans head off as long as you are prepared to deal with the consequences

Whats the difference?

You threaten ti kill somneone - you find yourself in court

you steal a car - you find yourself in court

whats the difference?

One has this god given "free speech" right, the other does not but the cause and effect are the same .

I'd just like to clarify for those not keeping up that I am all for prosecution of hate speech etc and NOT of the opinion i should be able to yell "Fire" in a theatre and be free from consequence

Re: Some hope

I dont think they mentioned which country this occurred in .

But the whole staff attitude to doing what the f they want with their work computers suggests it was a while back , so 15 years to go is surprising! Although the murder did happen an unspecified time after the story

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

Theres a large proportion of Americans who think they have their "Free speech" to say whatever the hell they want , and a growing number in the UK

You can identify these people in the comments under any story about police activity by their comment "too busy arresting people for hurty words"

Who's the bossware? Ransomware slingers like employee monitoring tools, too

Re: Delineating which may be malicious and benign

"never spent their whole workday on the tasks to which they were assigned"

If they did this venerable publication probably wouldnt be here

How Microsoft's legal eagles wrangled Happy Days for Windows 95

Re: How the Wheezer musicvideo was precieved in Germany first...

"Happy Days not really,"

Thats strange, I thought Happy days and the Fonz were famous even to people who had not seen the show

Certainly is in UK , although its a little earlier than those other series you mentioned ,

I wouldnt check to see if it aged well - it probably hasnt :)

what a coincidence!

I saw that concert on youtube earlier this week!

Re: How the Wheezer musicvideo was precieved in Germany first...

meaning you thought the Weezer song was original Happy Days footage?

Re: Those were the days

Baby Spice copied / covered one of Edie's songs too , bet she did alright out of that

Since clips from the show had been spliced into the video, Microsoft had to get permission from the actors featured.

Surely Weezer had already done that when making the video?

its not a change of circumstances to then distribute that video ?

Its not like someone who had rights to the make a Bluntman & Chronic comic book then made a movie without consulting the author/artist - that wouldbe a very actioanble position.

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Re: Sheer lunacy

I Hate Kate

https://youtu.be/hJtFioMVurI?t=62

Starlink speeds past terrestrial networks – and regulators

I feel this article and/or comment section is missing the el'Regs traditional "IN Spaaaaaaaaaace" motif

or did I imagine that ?

https://youtu.be/-GFgwkLrwPk

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: TV License - blind are eligible for a 50 percent discount

"and I suppose the license does also cover radio."

Well it funds the radio , but you dont need a licence to listen.

Re: A SInking Flagship?

And now they're looking at trying to enforce licence requirement for watching YouTube...

Never happen, they'll go after Netflix et al before that , and ITV / ch4 catchup before that. (which alos wont happen)

You can watch all the shit on itv /ch 4 /5 /dave etc on catcup WITHOUT a licence

You only need a licence if you need them to tell you what time to watch it .

They've really painted themselves into a corner with the "Live TV" rule , although theres not much else they could have done.

I stopped paying licence when i realized I could, and never felt better - for not being a slave to the channel flipping .

and I very rarely feel the need to watch what i gave up legally on the catch up channels - when i do look at them I think "Yep , nothings changed , still all the same shit "

I do feel a bit guily for not contributing anymore for all the reasons outlined ion the first couple replies

(Newsquiz mainly)

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: Many moons ago now

"I got tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fscking people."

I had to rewrite the logon.bat back in the pre windows days , to try try try and try again to get the NIC setup because the connection was so shit , due to incompetent cisco switch configuration which I was not allowed to look at , that the machine would fail to connect otherwise

4th comment I've posted with the "very angry" icon , I think I'd better take 5 ....

Re: Many moons ago now

"we were told "Don't waste time on it just re-image the machine".

omg been there , There comes a point VERY quickly where the time wasted by desktop techs reimaging machines massively outweighs the time a quick fix in config policy would have avoided it all , and MORE IMPORTANTLY thats not even counting the huge (cumulatively) inconvenience to the customers losing their machine for that time , and then have to "settle in" to their freshly rebuilt machine .

I'd forgotten about the Electric Monk.

I feel the technology is now finally advanced enough for his return

Re: Quite a rare sight

"reading logs. Who does that these days ?"

Well in my case , like in the story , it was the poor bastard taking the flak from the users .

I managed to work out that my superiors and betters had managed to set a password policy that was literally impossible to fulfill.

I got my coat shortly after that.

just after covid hit , and i set up home office and never went back , I decided the same thing , bought proper up n down desk - not the bogus desk-top type , out of my own funds , and then never used it

got there in the end

worked at a university and made the move from the desktop support team to the network management group.

Same ( even down to the Novell NetWare), except that move never happened . I thought the informal environment of a uk educational establishment would be the perfect place to learn skills and climb the ladder . Also no , there was no interest in helping the desktop monkeys graduate to server work , no matter how much they knew about the setup and effort and good will they put in . It took me 7 years to realise that and bail .

FUCK them and their "Investors in people badge"

The next place was better (big private contrator) , and the current place (NHS) was where my career finally got off the ground

The moral of that off topic story? Dont be afraid to resign and move on .

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Re: Or

amazing they can come up with and pour money into these plans when thay have no fucking idea what it is

.

"Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: "If we are going to get Magic Beans to work for Britain, we need Britons and British public services that can work with Magic Beans . That is why Barnsley's ambitions are crucial, because if we can show that Magic Beans help young people learn, supports local businesses to be more productive, and improves public services, then we can show what's possible for the whole country.""

all the AI bumf from non techy politicians and decision makers makes more sense if you replace the term "AI" for "Magic Sauce"

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

"living in browser"

Its only a link though isnt it ?

its not "Living in the browser" its just an offer to pass the search result to ai for translation or something ?

thats all well and good but when are they going to sort out the basic shit ... and I mean basic

"choose a home page"

something the first browser no doubt got right in version 0.0.0.01

In Firefox it has always been a constant losing battle to control what happens when 1) you open it 2) click "home" 3) click new tab - which should all be the same setting and easily set !

its still my browser of choice but by god its a bitch about default pages .

I guess showing the "annoying page of crap" earns it money somehow

top tip - there are 3rd party extensions available to combat this stubborn behavior

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

"five-figure leased-line connection to the support vendor"

so minimum £10,000 ( pa presumably)

Thats amazing , times have changed eh ?

and thats just for the support vendor to ping it every 5 mins? not the main architecture ?

It doesent say when this is , but "sun server" gives an indication , thats a probably a years salary

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Sounds awful

We really do NEED to stop applying the term AI to things which are quite clearly no such thing.

That ship has sailed , people ( salesdroids mainly ) were calling any kind of software "AI" for years before LLM arrived and does ... what it does ....

So the chances of putting genie back in bottle now are nil

You got more chance of restoring "Hacker" to its original meaning

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Re: It's All Down To The Romans or What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?

It's no loss. Snopes has been fake news for a long time now.

Trump supporter eh?

Yes maga are furious with Snopes ( as well as countless other outlets ) for reporting facts about the amazing buffoonery , to put it nicely , conducted by the great orange shit stain on the world stage, and thus have to brand such reporting as "fake news Libtard commie lies paid for by the deep state"

.

So many news agencies , as well as any other form of media that dares suggest the emperor has no clothes are now on this playground level "Mu Enumees" list that if you ask a maga which sources *can* be relied upon or are not bought off by the secret commie conspiracy , there is no answer .

/politirant_sry

Re: It's All Down To The Romans or What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?

You posted what is at best coincidence (concluded by the same source you got it) as fact !

Re: It's All Down To The Romans or What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?

It seems to get on well with my adblocker

What's True

The standard U.S. railroad gauge is similar in width to the wheel spacing of Roman chariots.

What's False

That similarity is based much more on coincidence and inherent physical limitations than a direct line of imitation.

The temperature at launch was 36°F (15° colder than any previous launch).

English man ! English!

ie metric

Givent this measurememt is the crux of the whole story cant we have it not in stoneage meaningless flibbety gibbet language?

I bet NASA read in C , or if they didnt maybe they should have and it would indicate better how cold it was

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

Thats going to depend highly on what your xyz is, if its some consumer product like a microwave the results may be places offering to sell you one - and odds are thats what you're looking for.

I tried xyz == "Sailing tips" and got 3 or 4 free to watch youtube videos then a free to read article in yachtingworld . com

So whats the problem?

what you you searching for ?

Ofcom did find that young adults are more likely than older groups to manage their internet use by disabling notifications, using Do Not Disturb settings, pausing use of services, and deleting apps.

This is probably more down to technical ability

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: Blame the computer

The most incomprehensible message I ever got was on the LCD screen of a fax machine .

After much googling and PDF user manual crawling I finally deciphered it :

"out of paper"

This was leagues more cryptic than the old "PC Load Letter" , it may well have been in hex.

Office Space

Re: Idiots are not always wrong

"One on't cross beams gone owt askew on't treddle"

If I just stick to that, one day I'll be right

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

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