Posts by Antron Argaiv

BOFH: The Helldesk opens its third eye and ascends to a higher plane of troubleshooting

Re: I know

Mmmmmm...crystals!

I prefer the ones that resonate at 7.040 MHz...

Re: How doers it feel

Hi, I'm [your name] and I'm sorry to hear you are having difficulty with [product name]. I want to assure you that I will be able to take care of that for you very quickly to your complete satisfaction!

[three hours later]

Well, it appears that there's a problem with your machine and I suggest you wipe the disk and reinstall. Have I solved the problem to your satisfaction?

Project leader thought his team understood the plan, ended up fixing their 'interpretation' of it

Working for a huge multinational. Doing electrical engineering prototype builds. We order lots of components.

Accounts Payable is in some far away place. They have no concept of engineers purchasing parts from vendors, since most of their experience is software developers buying the occasional pencil or whatever. Consequently, invoices get paid (or not)...whenever. This causes our component vendor to get angry and lock us out of purchasing components until our balance is cleared. When AP is informed, they search and search for the invoice, finally ask for a copy and eventually pay it. Lather rinse and repeat.

SO glad I'm retired.

Swedish celebs campaign for public rudeness ... to prevent cyber scams

I'm waiting for the one where they pretend to be your kid and ask for bail money.

"Sucks to be you, eh?" [click]

Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on

Re: 1,250

You know, it happens often enough, that I don't think it's accidental.

Which is a shame, because some of the stuff might be useful, if only they'd remeber that people want dimensions and weight.

Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer

My late mother worked in OP-20G at Nebraska Av during The War, and often told us kids that it was so unpleasant (due to the humidity and heat from the equipment) in her secure room during the DC summers that she allowed her WAVES to strip down to their underwear during their shift. She had the authority as Watch Officer to keep Admirals out.

Terminated employee cost company hundreds of thousands of dollars because nobody revoked access

When I retired, I posted back my laptop, access badge and MFA device. Kept the delivery confirmation.

My final pay stub included an amount for unused time off. Before I left I had take the precaution of screenshotting the PTO balance as displayd by their system (I don't know why, just had a feeling).

Sure enough, when I did the math on the amount they paid...it was short. By a LOT. I sent an email to the HR person and included a copy of the pay stub, my screenshot, and my calculation. I got a very quick reply from someone higher up in HR and the missing amount was direct deposited in my account within a few days. In this state, the unused PTO balance must, by law, be included in the final paycheck. I knew this, and they did as well. I have no explanation for why it was only partially paid, and they provided none.

Trust, but verify.

Re: Better still...

Happened to me last week. Got my badge, got my laptop, started setting it up with the IT guy, and couldn't log in. "Account locked"

After about an hour, IT guy comes back and says it's some HR new hire paperwork that didn't get done. My manager was out that day, so nothing could be fixed. I went home and the next day they told me to try again, and it worked fine. Nice to know the system works, but it cost me a trip into town. At least I managed to set up the laptop at home the next day.

Re: Better still...

EEG, surely?

Time lords prepare to kick leap seconds into the next millennium

Re: An alternative approach

Back to Norway, surely? (and stop calling me Shirley)

My surname is Scottish/English, and I did one of theose DNA tests that showed the majority of my DNA is Norwegian. Apparenly, I'm descended from Viking invaders...

Re: No problem

They'll just whip out their Sonic Screwdrivers and put it all right.

Re: Every time the clocks change

They did an entire copy.

https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/bayeux-tapestry

Might as well blame AI for this giant Linux release candidate, says Linus Torvalds

Gotta hand it to Linus

He and his merry band of penguinistas have been producing a working operating system (plus extras) for what, 20 years? Something that the largest OS company on the planet is finding increasingly difficult to do.

Thanks penguinistas, for providing us with a reliable, open altenative. One that happens to be my daily driver.

Google engineer unplugged every fiber they could see and – surprise! – took down a chunk of the G-Cloud

Re: Reoccurring Traffic Failure Management

Who, Me?

User who handled life-or-death situations struggled with the SHIFT key

Re: related problem

"D like in Delta, T like in Tango..."

"...A like in assh*ole?"

Sorry...it's a mite difficult being a USAian right now. Not all of us voted for The Orange Menace...

Re: Locale dependent description too

You have not truly lived until you visit a country* that uses a slightly different key layout (for me, it was US->Quebec), and tries to type an email to your boss on one of their keyboards.

* Yes, I realise Quebec is a province of Canada, not a separate country, but I'm enough of a diplomat not to bring that up with them

(nice people, great food, and somewhat colder than New England)

Windows 11 update sends some desktops into an unwanted goth phase

Re: Not an issue I'll notice

Nor is the one I just got from my employer...I had to uninstall a couple of Xbox apps...so definitely not the Enterprise version.

Am I the only user who wants the Daylight theme? Not a fan of black backgrounds.

The HP bloatware is still there, I'm a bit nervous about blowing that away, lest it somehow muck up Win11...

Back to my old employer for a temp gig

And that means...Win11! Yay!

So, after spending a couple of HOURS getting it set up and all the updates loaded, I'm not very impressed.

Oh, well...the pay's good and the work and coworkers are fun, so I'll put up with Windows once again. It'll make returning to my Linux system that much more fun.

Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

Just got an MFP

Brother brand, a few years old,for my daughter, who needed a printer, and got a scanner and copier as a bonus. TFM spends a good chunk of its length talking about the fax function. She will, of course never use the fax function...no POTS here any more. Works quite nicely as a printer, scanner and copier though!

Brother, as you may or may not know, sells a line of basic consumer printers which do not conform to the HP business model, and so, was my first choice when I went looking for a used printer for her. This one came from Goodwill ($75), and the counter said 300 pages. Toner was still there, and drum had some toner stuck to it, but cleaned up nicely with a few doses of isoprop.

Re: if fax are bad, what was telex like ?

REAL Telex machines don't have a buffer...and you cannot type any faster than the mechanism works.

Ancient ‘Who owns Linux?’ case now has one foot very deep in the grave

Correction

"...SCO had for years failed to produce strong any evidence to back its claims."

Well, Lionel Hutz would tell us that made up evidence and inapplicable evidence are kinds of evidence...

Last I remember, they were trying to argue something about APIs being similar proved infringement.

Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it

Re: Important life lesson: "Some things are best left alone"

I have recently discovered the German word: Verschlimbessern

To break something while trying to fix it. Literally, I think, to make something worse while trying to make it better.

ISS spacewalkers discover there's no such thing as a quick antenna job

Antenna work is always done in the cold, with a stiff breeze. Light mist optional.

de KA1AXY

Lego's supersized Hubble deserves a little more shine

...and a high powered shooter to give them the appropriate (scaled, one hopes) relative velocities?

Re: Fuck that

Got my first (long gone, sadly, prob. worth a bit now) LEGO set as a kid in Belgium in the late 50s. It was an ESSO station. Either in the kit or purchased to keep me from whining, were "lolipop" Euro road signs and blue-on-white single letter blocks. I had pieces of it through my teens, but they gradually got thrown away during clean-ups.

I agree about general vs built-for-purpose components, though I have seen some pretty clever re-use of the custom components. My latest LEGO build was "The Bin Chickens" which is an Internet user-created model. The build process involved special ordering the necessary components from brick resellers and probably ended up costing me more than a genuine LEGO set. Of course, if you have a bin full of old LEGO parts, and can find the necessary pieces, it would cost a lot less. Maybe I should build one of those AI optical brick sorting machines and start buying eBay unsorted brick lots?

Anyway, the grandkids (and their parents) love LEGO, so I have done my bit...

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

Re: Made up data ...

At my first (1978) employer, a detailed expense report was required for business trips. I wrote a spreadsheet that took the total amount expended and divided it up in proportion to the allowable breakfast, lunch and dinner "no receipt required" limits, then adjusted each amount by a small random number (say 10% of the maximum allowable) so that every expense was below the limits and no two were the same amount.

I was not going to spend any time worrying about how much I spent on meals considering that it was always below the limits. Much easier to take the total amount and satisfy the beancounters. Likewise, no need to justify a couple of snacks or a tube of toothpaste.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

How does one manage to get through college, and law school without encountering italics? Or varying typefaces in general? That seems to me to be a secondary school sort of thing.

I suppose the lesson here is that experts in one field can be totally ignorant in [any] other fields. Examples include Dr. Ben Carson, a brilliant pediatric brain surgeon, who demonstrated his ignorance as secretary of Housing and Urban Development during Trump's first term

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: It's a rare individual...

Made it to Senior Engineer (sometimes Principal and once, Chief, but I was neither) and that's where I wanted to stay. I really, really like designing things, solving technical problems and building sh*t. I have no interest whatsoever in getting roughly the same amount of money to act as an interface between upper manglement and the people who actually do something productive (or don't).

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

Re: I remember those monsters

My home printer is an HP LaserJet 5. Got it for free (because dead fuser & stripped gears), repaired it during COVID, and it sits on my network, drawing 7 watts until it is required to print something, which it does quietly and without fail. The firmware date is 1993 and I have enough toner to last the rest of my life. 300k pages on the counter and I am informed that 1 million is a fair expectation.

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

Trying...

...to shed a tear for poor Microsoft, whose strategy has been "upgrade" after "upgrade", always seeming to make something incompatible, so you'd be forced into using the latest and "greatest".

At the end of the day, it was a desktop operating system and an office suite. And they can't even get that part right. But rearranging the menus? That's their superpower, now hand over the dosh!

At my previous employer (AMPE), we once tried to use Embedded XP (really just stripped down XP) on a product. None of us could quite believe the licensing terms document. Better than Intel's though, when we tried to use their processors -- Intel won't even show you the datasheets without an NDA and you need an purchase agreement in place to even get samples! We went elsewhere in both cases; Linux for the OS and ARM SOCs for the hardware.

LisaFPGA brings Apple's magnificent misfire back in programmable logic

Re: Lisas were expensive AF

When we cleared out a lab at Data General, I was offered a Lisa (minus kb and mouse). Uncharachteristically for me, I declined. Would have been worth a bit now, if I had saved it and even purchased the kb and mouse new.

Oh, well. I still have an Audrey somewhere.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

"And this whole thing really exists because Microsoft OS's sucked so much a Finnish guy started writing his own OS for personal computers"

That, in fact, is how I ended up becoming a Linux user.

We in Data General engineering had just been given Sun workstations, running ViewLogic, to replace the in-house schematic capture tools, which ran only on DG systems. This would have been around 1990. We taught ourselves Solaris, and I was so impressed with UNIX, I began to look for a version that would run on the PC, and came across comp.os.linux. The rest is history, except for this example, which convinced me that Linux made more of the PCs capability than Windows ever would.

It was 1994, and I was at a new job. I was given a 486 machine running Win3.1, QEMM, and a copy of the PC version of ViewLogic. Which crashed whenever I tried to have more than 2 pages of the schematic open at the same time. We did have a Sun machine in the (noisy) lab, running the UNIX version of ViewLogic, and it did not crash when I opened multiple schematic pages. Being someone who is intolerant of tools that don't work well, I did some investigation into the X Windowing System, and discovered that I could run an X terminal on my PC (as part of a Linux install) and connect it over the Ethernet to the Sun. In that way, I could (and did) sit at my desk, using ViewLogic on the Sun. I bought myself a second HDD, installed Linux on it, and set up my PC to dual boot. So, there I was, able to open as many schematic pages as I wanted, using my PC as an X terminal, thanks to software written by some grad student in Finland and a bunch of his fellow hackers. And being FAR more productive than I was when using Windows (which I realised, was not fit for purpose as an operating system).

The rest, as they say, is history. It's been Linux on and off since then, and now (Mint 22.3) 100% Linux.

Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

Re: I like to automate

The online "badge" *is* your reward. Display it with pride!

The last company I worked for before I retired did this...silliness. You'd get a little online badge for doing all the annual compliance videos, for being there another year, at the end of every year, and at the whim of HR. I was a Principal EE at that place, and I have never felt more like a third-grader. However the work was challenging, and my coworkers were wonderful, as was my management. It was the "corporate overhead" that encouraged me to retire.

Re: Some clarifications

While following procedure regarding code (V41 HP calculator emulator) I wished to run on my PC at work, I discovered that our "Information Security" department validated code by running it through some random online "malware detection" website. I was told I could not use V41 on my machine as it had failed their malware testing. I pointed out that it was an open source program, and invited them to check the sources for malware. Some intern volunteered to do that and my request was approved when he found no malware.

After that episode, I stopped asking permission.

C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

Re: it was had just been

...and more to the point, hope it wasn't your "pint" arm...that would really be a problem!

GWS!

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Been there, inserted new DRAM stick while simultaneously failing to note the little green LED still glowing. Impressive sparkage, resulting in e-waste m-board and DRAM.

The best learned lessons are the expensive ones, as this was one of my personal systems.

Health board apologizes for phishing staff with with bogus vacation day

Re: I did something similar

Assuming that everything is logged, an email like that would be immediately deleted. How stupid...

Never mind.

Outsourced

When my company got bought by a megacorp, said megacorp started doing these "tests". They were usually presented as HR type emails, so I opened one, and apparently it sends a nasty note to your manager.

So as not to ever see them again, I did a little digging into the headers of the offending email, and identified the domain it came from, "phishingcompany.com" and immediately wrote a rule to delete any emails with that domain in the header.

Problems solved, better living through technology.

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

Re: T-Shirt Model

I had one of these made (our engineering group designed a group logo). The quality and resolution were good and the shirt held up well under multiple washings. We also did a group coffee mug. It was about $10 each for two dozen, and they, too, have held up well. I must say, I wasn't expecting great things, but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality.

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: Lucky the text didn't default to Chinese

Must have been one of those fancy "Linux" systems :-)

Color blind here (red/green) and the older "yellow-green" type LEDs are a problem for me. I can't distinguish them from yellow LEDs. The newer "traffic light green" LEDs are fine, but I have trouble with older equipment.

So, I much prefer blink codes or multiple LEDs. We all have our crosses to bear.

Serious ISS air leak forces NASA astronauts to temporarily take shelter in Dragon capsule

A bit like the radiators in some of my older cars

Can't they just empty a can of Stop-Leak into the affected module and come back in an hour?

// think I might have a partial container somewhere in the garage...

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

Re: "working for a county sheriff's office"

Massachusetts USA here. Counties are important, because...reasons. Said reasons mainly having to do with finding cushy phoney-baloney jobs for political assosciates and family members. Oh, yes, and the counties run the courts and the jails. That's pretty much it, except that one of the county sheriffs has been asked to explain why their accounting methods appear to be...non-standard. Things like private bank accounts tend to attract the attention of the inspector general.

No, there's no reason it all couldn't be handled by the state. Except that would take food (and alcohol, and entertainment) away from deserving county employees...

Russian spy agency says foreign spies turned officials' smartphones into surveillance devices

Not a chance you'll miss the first page. Capability is degraded after that first one, though.

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

I feel your pain. My last job was pretty much the same situation: small operation working by trust with seldom an issue, with all approval and finance on site. We were taken over by a multinational megacorp where *everything* had a process, and multiple approvers in foreign lands. Our two tremendoulsly competent and helpful local IT folks were stripped of their powers, and IT HQ was now overseas, support was by Teams, and located literally half a world away, which made real time chat rather hit or miss, and round trip messages were frequently "next day" instead of a few hours.

We in Engineering, who made multiple orders to vendors daily, were a foreign idea to a company whose main business was software development. Their PO system was complex, and very much oriented towards ordering of office supplies, done once a month. Approval now required the input of a project manager (located overseas) and who had absolutely no sense of urgency. Unpaid invoices skyrocketed, along with the consequent blocking of new orders. This, as you might expect, negatively impacted our ability to respond to customer requests.

It was at this point that I retired. I cannot believe that life has gotten better since then, but it is no longer my problem.

At the first company I worked for we had the same "under $10, no receipt needed" rule. I couldn't be bothered to keep track of everything, so after a 2 week trip, I wrote a spreadsheet. Total expenses minus total receipts amount equals undocumented expenses. I divided the undocumented amount by the days I was there and randomised the amounts, assigned them to breakfast and lunch, job done! Never tried to get away with anything, just wanted to make the whole process less annoying.

Never had any issues with it, and filing expense reports ceased to become such a burden.

Russian oligarch's financial network crashed thanks to a crank and a cleaner

Re: Alternative

They were clearly the installers of the cables...

Re: Being Pedantic

Modernised buildings would have Ethernet cables installed by competent installers, who would have used zip ties to keep them where they belonged.

Perhaps the installer of those cables had been on a three-vodka lunch? Anyway, Nathan got an opportunity to do it the right way.

Many a suspended ceiling has collapsed from the weight of (generations of) cables using the ceiling grid as their only support.

InPost locker caught shipping unactivated Windows

Re: KMS

aka "backhoe fade"

As a former embedded systems engineer, I have to ask, WHY they aren't using Linux?

At my former place of employment, we did product development for clients. We *did* try to use Windows for embedded systems (and for that matter, Intel processors). The problem with both companies was that they were heavily biased towards their main customers (those who made and sold desktop and laptop PCs to the mass market).

Microsoft's "embedded" XP product (actually, regular XP with the games and user apps stripped out) had the autorun "feature" enabled by default on USB ports, and the obvious consequences of that took little time to appear. When that level of attention to detail was combined with their absolutely incomprehensible licensing arrangements, Linux became the obvious first choice.

Intel, on the other hand, pretty much refused to talk to us without having NDAs and volume purchase commitments. Certainly the few hundred parts we might eventually buy for our clients were not over Intel's "threshold of interest".

Our Polish friends are probably buying cheap tablets or panel PCs and installing from ISO images.