Posts by Prst. V.Jeltz

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: Gamification

Would probably reduce the traffic here at el'Reg considerably

Pointless apps

money on apps, one of the only useful ones was the cafeteria menu

That there is a great example of the "Could this app just a simple web page?" debate

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: Cats and keyboards

My cat whilst being a master of finding new kbd shortcuts at work , also managed at home to find "Load previous saved game" hotkey (F5) , which was quite annoying .

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Candid error message

I wrote a script that the desktop support staff would use to remotely query a machine via WMI and it would return lots of useful info: whose on it, the phone number of whose on it , uptime, OS ver , where it is , IP address , etc etc .

.

...UNLESS there was some kind of DNS error / conflict , when the script would establish that it had been routed to the wrong machine , apologise to the user and suggest they go and berate the server team responsible for the DNS tables.

Captain of server team was less than impressed when they themselves were using the script for something and this occurred .

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Easily done . once .

Sounds like he was treating the symptom ( the Match table) and not the cause (the PERL script) ,and then forgot the WHERE clause

I have a toolkit addon for SSMS that warns when I'm about to do that , which can be annoying at times.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

well y'know nine out of ten times turning up in jeans and t shirt would get you sacked

You could have explained the no suit policy on day1 . Most people would be delighted.

I've had to work in places where the dirty cabling under desks and in ceilings drill has to be done in shirt and tie

£1,000 bounty if someone stayed for six months!

shame he couldnt get a competent person to earn him the 1k

Depends if the 1k is for finding someone with the rare skills and attitude needed , or as i suspect in this case the 1k is a reward for finding someone prepared to be treated like an overworked cog in machine.

I guess if the latter the bounty is a sign the job is to be avoided.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: I'll never forget this one

That always half the battle , just finding the starting line .

"My morning report didnt run"

which one ?

"My after breakfast one "

whats it called

" yesterdays take"

is that what its actually called ?

"it comes in an email"

*deep breath* ok , are we talking powerBI or SSRS ?

"dont know"

"ok can you forward me yesterdays email then I might have a hope in hell of finding some actual server / report / job names with which I can get to square one and start looking at the actual problem?

I'll never forget this one

I had a call once which , had the servicedesk relayed the problem in any sort of useful way could have been solved in record time with a phone call simply saying "remove the floppy disk from the machine" . As it was it it took a 15 minute walk to another site to get to the machine and appraise the situation.

They managed did a masterful job of interpreting the users dilemma and gathering the symptoms to aid support guys diagnosis and logged what should have been "machine wont boot , screen says no command.com on A"

as

"User cannot get their email"

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: Who the hell runs production on Linux

You walked into that one Jou!

Re: Not a very bright boy...

Should there be an overall "god" account whose password has never changed these days?

A personal elevated privileges admin account should be getting changed monthly, making it pointless to use it for "quick fixes"

The server processes should be running on documented system accounts.

Re: Not a very bright boy...

You got that right. I'm no legal expert but I reckon if you're going to plead not guilty dont also admit you did it.

Lu admitted to federal investigators he was behind the computer problems at his previous employer, but still decided to fight his case by pleading not guilty to a charge of intentionally damaging a protected computer.

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Not so much over a dispatch system, but....

Somehow they both kept their jobs.

Well , i mean , why wouldnt they?

Its pretty unsavoury and immoral , but not illegal .

Fox hunting is pretty immoral too but you cant fire people for having that hobby

Re: Hilarious

She left the lab to become a doctor, I hope she's got better at typing...

Doubtful.

Hospitals have entire teams called coders , that do "medical coding" which basically means filling in the gaps on doctors historical inability to write legibly and modern inability to interact with technology with any degree of competence.

FBI officially fingers North Korea for $1.5B Bybit crypto-burglary

Re: Does cryptocurrency have ANY social value?

"in the hope that it can keep growing"

Exactly nobody uses the stuff as currency , just an "investment" in the latest ponzi scheme .

They may as well just make some sort of "non fungible" token and buy and sell that at each other .... but I guess "currency" sounds more exciting and proper Wall St and stuff

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Bringing flashbacks of countless students asking me he help get their homework from mangled 3.5" disks.

The cause of this was I.T lecturers telling them to store their data that way. When I quizzed them on why these so called experts were telling their pupils to store precious data solely on the single most unreliable media around (and not the it dept provided safe secure backed up network home drives ) they replied:

"its on the syllabus"

.

My poster campaign advising against this did little to stem the flow.

General failure was reading his disk

I'm pretty sure everybody here has had a friend ask to have their computer fixed and you've run across swinger party photos.

or is that just me?

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

thats the epitome of a blinkered corporate suit who sees nothing more than the profit margin and the allmighty dollar right there .

even if its at the expense of literally everything else , including out lives and our planet.

UK government using AI tools to check up on roadworthy testing centers

"statutory fee " ?

Whats that , the max ? the min ?

seems to be around £40 where i live

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Here are the copies

Cmon ,

I have heard nearly every dumb IT support story going but that is just cartoon level dumb

I've heard of the cleaning lady pulling the plug out

I've heard of the home user ringing the shop only to reveal theres a powercut

I've heard about 5.25 disk stuck to filing cabinets with fridge magnets

I've heard of same disks being hole punched for a ring binder

these are all "user" issues

.

An actual "I.T. professional" , a mainframe operator , photocopying a platter ??

I've heard those mainframes things were pretty expensive , only to be maintained by people with some idea what they are doing surely !?

"A friend who used to work ..." is how all urban myth stories start.

Trump 'waved a white flag to Chinese hackers' as Homeland Security axed cyber advisory boards

I thought that name sounded familiar , just checked my bookshelf and found "Without Warning" by John Birmingham

I have a vague memory of it being a good read but details fade after 10 years or so

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

Re: Tainted evidence?

I dont see that as an issue either . Its not as if the only evidence of his crimes came from these two.

Re: sentenced to two life sentences, plus an additional 40 years,

tomayto tomahto

Re: Why Now?

Well sometimes they write it down in the parlimental bribery log book - like Starma and his concert tickets

Its embarrassing in this case .

I'm really surprised about this cash plea , makes the family look like grifters . I wonder if Ross U is ok with it - you'd think he'd just be happy to be out. I'm sure his middle class parents can cover the bus journey home and new shirt.

Re: Why Now?

For some inexplicable reason its not called bribery when you lobby politicians.

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: > What happened?

Yeah that "producing energy now that we've dug up and used all the ancient sunlight" issue is going to be a real tricky nut , especially given the population at large's inability to even see the scale amd immediacy of the problem.

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

Re: This isn't about today's propaganda.

Donald already built his own social media echo chamber , I'm surprised he's helping the chinese be his compettion rather than just inviting all the homeless tiktokkers over to his "Truth" house

Re: Hey all you republicans

and add an army of tiktok zombies to his cult.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

The whole story lies in the balance of whatever the hell " Transactions made using the test accounts weren’t ever processed as real orders." means , and how the customer not surprisingly interpreted them as real.

Our sysadmin has a fanatical aversion to "accounts that arnt real people"

Machine accounts have to be rigorously documented and applied for with lots of TLA forms that amount to "massive deal"

A test account acting like a person has little to no chance of surviving the purge.

This can make testing some things rather tricky .

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Not "Fixing", Exactly

Read 100 comments from the top of the page for clues to why you downvoted that perfectly fitting xkcd ????

Why not just tell us , like this:

"I down voted your 'Read the comments' comment because nobody has the time or inclination to search for your point which may or may not even exist"

Just a wild shot in the dark but i bet this could also have been fixed by taking the switches off 10T half duplex.

(based on my own college I.T. employment)

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

user interface that relied on some decidedly odd syntax that he wasn’t entirely across.

Thats some decidedly odd syntax right there

Looming energy crunch makes future uncertain for datacenters

quaint faith in technology means you believe that AI is going to solve the very issues it is causing.

Well, why not?

just because power needs are a problem relevant to AI does not have a bearing on its ability to solve it, if anything it would help because motivation, although thats more of a meatbag thing.

#humanbatteries!

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

Laziness is my primary driver to innovate and ,mainly , automate

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Close enough

^ Finance departments right there , always a couple of decades behind the rest.

Re: Close enough

I was once asked to look at a model (I'm not a modeller) that ran on modelling software (that I had never seen)

That could mean literally anything . "Model" is a wide ranging term

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Defects appearing like magic

but ... why ? What was the benefit of these shenanigans to the developer?

Backup failed, but the boss didn't slam IT – because his son was to blame

Re: Oh yes, the famous "additional router from the boss's son"

is that what happend ? its not quite how I interpreted the story but thats by the by.

I've certainly come across what you describe, I've found a router someone ahs brought in from home presumably to use an adapter to turn on cat5 socket into many. It was busy trying to allocate IP addresses

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

Seems like Cisco ios was about as intuitive as an 8 bit text adventure

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

I dont get this militant , "I will go out of my way to not be contacted " ethos.

If they are taking the piss , sure , employ those measures and quote your contract etc , or change jobs.

But for people in jobs not having the piss taken , whats the problem at least answering the phone, it could be a five second response that saves someone on site hours , like "whats the combo to the key cabinet" ?

A bit of an overreaction to wrong number.

"No, it is not," Warren replied, explaining that he had changed jobs but had the number of someone who could help.

I guess he could have employed this strategy before leaving the job, rather than stumbling around London in the small hours like an idiot.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Sometimes...

At least they try and unjam it rather than ring I.T.

why ring me?

I'm not a mechanic!

why should I have to learn how to dismantle this machine? its not a computer .

Printer jams should be a user fix . just like changing a car tyre should be on the driving test.

Re: Thermostats

"does not warm up faster if you set the thermostat to 35 Celsius,"

I've just had this conversation earlier today. Apparently it featured in TV show "Peep Show" too

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Dont Panic,

there are measures in place to make sure nobody competent gets in, or at least into an area they could be competent at - its called a "Cabinet Reshuffle"

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: "the excitement of installing Windows 95 for the first time"

Yup , same for w2000 , XP ,

The mindboggling tedium is exacerbated by all the happy clappy messages saying shit like "Loading windows (new ver) for the first time!!" , "you're going to love it!" , "you'll be amazed at the new productivity tools"

Meanwhile I'm thinking "I'd be amazed if you got the usb bus to work properly"

I wasnt a fan of the new fangled GUIs at first - not when you'd been in a constant battle with config.sys autoexec , himem.sys etc to try to keep the extremely limited resources un clogged.

It was nice you could just "quit to dos" in w95 if you wanted to run something that needed all the hardware.

... and how comes DOS Doom ran better in win95 that win95 doom?