Posts by Prst. V.Jeltz

Indonesia bars financial institutions from offering crypto services

fourth most populous country,

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country,

wow, who'da thunk

'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government

Re: One thing guaranteed to make me break down in tears...

"knowing full well that all they're going to do is open the exported file in Excel and start adding new data to it instead of using the web app because that's the way they've always done it "

because that's the way they've always done it

AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH !

IKR?

Oftentimes they dont even know what they are doing , they just blindly following "what they always do"

I say to them things like "you could miss out steps 3 , 5 and 9 and it would not make a blind bit of difference" and they wont do it .

just from memory without re reading your kindly supplied url ,

wasnt that because they were using Excel 1972 or something?

hopefully in their quest to hunt down unsupported software they've pushed the boat out installed office 2017 or similar and now can do more than 256 rows !

good to go!

Davinson is also hoping to launch a "tool" to track legacy applications in detail.

This'll be a filtered column on her spreadsheet.

maybe it'll even change the colour of some of the cells.

Observers might wonder why the team, supposedly the leaders of Whitehall's thrust towards digital modernisation, is using spreadsheets to share data, as well as preferring a method (download) whereby multiple copies of data may be created – making them inconsistent and insecure if shared via email.

well 7 billion will only get you so far ....

BOFH: What a beautiful classic car. Shame if anything were to happen to it

Re: There are two things that set up a good weekend

They do comedy everyday! 18:30 - 19:00

with mixed results

The robots are coming! 12 million jobs lost to automation in Europe by 2040 – analyst

This time, the situation is different.

That is no different.

Its just more work machines can do for us that we dont have to do .

sadly we will not take advantage of this and find some other shit to do .

or just do more of the remaining shit and "grow" the economy ... like that was a good thing

What you mean is that you want communism

(12 hours ion tractor factory and queuing for bread?)

Of course thats not what i mean

.

Let me reiterate .

If we created a world where robots catered to our every whim and did all the work , including looking after themselves , and there was literally no work for anyone to do , then its bloody obvious that "the system" would have to change.

Whilst we arnt quite at that stage yet we should be looking to ease into it as automation gradually does more of the legwork"

sounds weird , but its true.

The whole "capitalist" system has to be redesigned if robots are doing all the work.

If there no work to do we cant all work all day . much as we apparently want to .

There'll be new jobs that haven't even been though of.

That not the point

The point of automation is to make less work for yourself

society doesent seem to realise this and as soon as one thing is automated we find new shit to do .

Now that we have tractors in the fields and robots in the factories we should be on about 2 days per week!

this is great news

12 million jobs will be lost by 2040 through automation technologies

.

Fantastic , the sooner we get every afternoon off , with the robot monkey butlers serving us cocktails the better.

Unfortunately this will require a massive societal shift away from the current system of

"if you're not working yourself into the grave 40 hours per week you dont deserve any money"

Software guy smashes through the Somebody Else's Problem field to save the day

Re: SEP became MP

You should write horror novels !

Re:I tried following Hitchhiker's

Sacrilege!

did you get to the bit with the poetry?

Re: It's a sad day for this IT rag...

It's a sad day for this IT rag...

...when the SEP field requires a footnote to explain it's origins.

On the plus side the managed to not write "for that was not his name" for the millionth time after reporting the output of the regonimiser

Re: Ultimate Jobsworth

I vowed to never take another public sector contract again.

In defence of the public sector , thats not typical.

In fact i would imagine you'd run across that kind of bloody mindedness more often in the private sector , especially when dealing with contracts between compaines

Re: What Derek needed to do...

What Derek needed to do...

... was point out to his Boss ...

His boss dosent sound 'grounded' enough for these kinds of practicalities

Ransomware puts New Mexico prison in lockdown: Cameras, doors go offline

confused article , whats the topic?

the 27 year old lawsuit?

the staff shortages?

the problems with medical records?

or the Ransomware?

LAPD cops who preferred playing Pokémon Go to tackling robbery can be fired, appeals court rules

I misread the headline as "cant be fired" and came here to rant , phew , all is well with the world again.

well not *all* is well , but ...

Avira also mines imaginary internet money on customers' PCs

There are no "spare" cpu cycles.

using them burns more energy and pollutes the planet.

and if you're doing that for bullshit pretend money reasons is doubly {adjective}

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

I experienced a brief and luckily harmless fireworks display the other day while changing the alternator on my car without disconnecting the battery.

Not quite the same stakes as the machine in the story.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

with an old DVD/PVR system.

PVR

worst. acronym . ever.

P= Personal.

huh?

It may as well be for "platypuss" and it'd make as much sense

Re: Several times...

You can tell when a user is doing that if they're doing it while you're on the phone by the speed.

If they are just claiming they did it earlier , and it not pinging etc ... decision time

To be fair it sounds like an easy , bloody obvious thing ,but is also something you'd never guess over the phone because its ... too obvious / simple / easy

Maybe if its a "user" you'd check there wasnt a powercut in progress , but this was some kind of "tech lead ".

Maybe I'll get replies along the lines of "never underestimate idiocy " etc

But you simply cannot treat all comers like morons all the time .

There is a science to asking idiot proof questions without embarrassing the customer / higher up

Sometimes you just have to "assume" some things as a given

This will doubtless lead to a very specific reply:

“assumption is the mother of all fuckups"

well let me say in advance "fuck off 50/50 hindsight wielding bastards"

Fugitive mafioso evaded cops for two decades until he was spotted on Google Street View

Image search can easily find these images

Image search can easily find these images and give the bad guys[1] a location.

Can it?

How would that work exactly?

I know how image search works , ive used it .

I cant see it being helpful in the scenario of:

Badguy (somhow ) has picture of witness's kid in the past , eg at school play

Badguy uses Image Search to find kid in new picture taken by new neighbours at recent 4th july bbq

Is that possible?

caveat : I get that facial recognition software exists, but it is my understnading you'd need a lot of hardware to scrape the net of all the pictures and google hasnt made a "click here" for the average joe to do that

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Pronouncing...

and how do those smart people pronounce:

gift

gigabyte

gigantic

giveaway

gingerly

gigawatt

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

and games!

The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC

bah humbug

pfft !

bunch of obsessive hardware freaks

I have 2x 27" at 1080p

done

all that other bullshit is just showing off!

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

Thanks , I always wondered why there was sometimes a column of inane bullshit like "Why is my belly fluff blue?" on the right under the banner "Key network issues"

.

shame they didnt start with "Stack Exchange" and move onto overflow for the fluff , that way both names would be more appropriate

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

or is it stackoverflow . always get those mixed up

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

Actually, the first thing to do would have been to read the manual of the machine.

I disagree. This may get me some downvotes but imho:

RTFM is no longer a thing , at least not the first thing.

My elderly father had a habit of printing the manual out for ,say, a new smartphone .

He'd then complain 500 pages of A4 was too much to read and none of it was about the bit he wanted to know about etc .

Even getting the manual in pdf which might have "linked" table of contents or whatever , and a ctrl-F function is not my first goto.

The correct thing to do , like in the article , is google it and find a discussion about the same issue.

there are caveats , and tips tricks and a knack to learn obvs , but this is the easiest path.

A really good tip is go straight to the one with the URL stackexchange , and then remember to go to the "accepted answer" and not try to emulate the first post , which is "how not to do it" , as described by the OP.

crikey , I'd forgotton about those buttons .

Totally didnt see that coming . Thrown by the Linux i guess.

Not to brag but back then I would have .

I remember it being on my mental checklist of things to ask users , right after , "is there a powercut there?"

And when it became clear that users were incapable of establishing where their wifi switch was , let alone if it was on or off I collected a series of photos of the models we were using with big red lines , circles and arrows indicating THIS! HERE ! should be in THIS position.

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: millipede

Negative powers of 10 - Latin derived prefixes centi, milli

So a true millipede has 1 thousandth of a leg?

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

3?

web 3.0 ?

never heard of it .

I've only just worked out what the web 2.0 buzzword was all about thanks to a recent Tom Scott video on APIs

..and it wasnt the same as the definition given in this article

I thought the pyramid scheme was the best analogy in the article.

People thing virtual currencies are "those things you buy to make money"

No one seems want to actually use them as money.

Re: Brilliant!

very close to being something without actually being it. (my emphasis)

Virtual servers come pretty close to "actually being it" though

I mean they're as good if not better than real servers , as opposed to being a load of overhyped bullshit like virtual currencies

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

Re: When will I be able to ...

"it's been decades since I wanted or needed to login through a serial port."

Not a systems administrator, then?

If you are wanting to do that because the GIU has crashed , wouldnt you just use the network connection for that?

RDP? or even WMI?

It'd save you a walk too

Re: When will I be able to ...

"You do backups of your Windblows workstations, being a good sysadmin, right? :) "

we dont .

Why would we?

Theres nothing on them but an OS and some apps.

The users store their shit on servers, that are backed up.

.

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

damn i just wrote the same thing! (see below)

In response to something that some coward has now deleted .

Although i may have landed the other side of the fence on the technical vs common definition of decimate

I don't think he did use it correctly .

Whilst the "down" part may be optional, the sentence indicates that 40k is a more than 50% reduction , therefore "decimate" was not used correctly *

.

.

* meaning 10%

but as it virtually never is used correctly "My crops were decimated!" the language changes by popular vote and abominations such as "I could care less" become the accepted default.

What if we said you could turn any disk into a multi-boot OS installer for free without touching a single config file?

multi ISO yeah yeah good good , i used to use grub

But can we talk about the use of the word "key" in this article?

Those USB mass storage devices have never had a proper name , but "KEY" is a new on on me!

Memory stick seems most common.

"Pendrive" ??? urrrrgh!

Bloke breaking his back on 'commute' from bed to desk deemed a workplace accident

reading this story , and the comments about how insurance companies operate , and about where and when people try to claim ..

just makes me weep for mankind .

If your a stuntman , underwater welder , soldier , coal miner .

Yes insurance might need to be a thing .

If someone cant sit at a desk in an office , or make their way to it , without hurting themsleves , and then feeling the need that someone else should pay for it .. well

see icion

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

Re: Brilliant!

Bonus points if said application is ridiculously bloated

To be fair the boss is on the right trail (just a bad choice of that particular app) ,

as any third party PDF reader will have its work cut out to be more of an unintuitive, bloaty, security threat than the official Adobe version.

excellent

Christ , I thought it was carpet&lime time for the boss that time!

They must be mellowing .

I think they even let keep his " bullshit degree whose academic prerequisite involves paying a lot of cash " Thesis

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Re: The power consumption thing

"transportation/storage issues of energy."

it is o problem , but bitcoining it is about the same use as pissing it away by burning it off

there should be usefull jobs on standy for the excess energy

Re: The power consumption thing

Free-range hens are much, much more likely to die from being dismembered alive by predators than battery hens.

uh hu ,

and lifers in prison are less likely to get run over than you or I

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Anyone got any suggestions what the purpose of the "Pre wet" button might be , aside from ruining test equipment?

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

say whatnow? !!!

This is just like Father Christmas all over again :(

true dat .

It sounds like one of those "truly fucked up over time to mean the exact opposite" sayings such as "I could care less" (which really grinds my gears) but it looks like Sherlock homes said it that way from the start.

Embarrassing for a man of with such legendary logic skills.

Re: Hey Rob!

I've push started a Cortina solo.

less chance of that toppling on top of me though.

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

brilliant

as always.

some excellent turns of phrase in this one:

"5G?" the PFY asks – at which point I feel the urge to object that he's leading the witness.

OK. So Big Data's manufacturing these nanobots which are very tiny. And what, they distribute them to all the vaccine companies for inclusion in their vaccines? Or do they just do it at the doctor level?

I fear we may be drifting into the PFY's own personal minefield of paranoia. However, it's important to push forward.

I'd love to have this conversation with one of these loonies, although i fear patience would wear thin fairly quickly