Posts by Mine's a Large One

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

Re: Compiling a list of assets

I once requested additional licences for software used on our OS/2 estate. What arrived a couple of weeks later was a large box about 3ft x 2ft x 1ft.

"Bugger...", thinks I, "they've sent me physical media" - which was fine - but the box was rather light. It contained a smaller box, packaged with lots of packing noodles, within which was a smaller box, again surrounded by noodles, and inside that was an envelope containing documentation confirming the additional licences!!

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

Re: Too Big To Fail

Why no alternative to Boeing? Delta, American Airlines, Hawaiian and SkyBlue all have Airbus aircraft in their fleets. I believe Spirit is all-Airbus and Jetblue primarily Airbus (with some Embraer).

The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale

Re: Are you saying ....

Mainly the architects for us. And what they say generally goes.

Airbus auctions off bits from retired A380 superjumbo jet

Re: Subhead

What fake dog turd?

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

Re: An improvement ...

As a Newcastle fan I'd have happily accepted a consortium of Putin, Kim Jong Un and Musk if it meant Fat Cashley went!!

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Re: Out of date building plans

Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege?

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

Re: Blue flash

Not IT-related (other than us all working together in IT at the time) but myself and a bunch of colleagues went on an offroad driving day at Mallory Park years ago. On taking our places in some offroad gokarts, we were told to "be careful but have fun and go for it - these are perfectly safe and nobody has ever rolled one of these that we're aware of". One of our lot promptly did so within 5 years of the start...

Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has)

Re: I do hope that at some point the order is given to...

They still do.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint laid low. Not by malware, but by another buggy Windows patch

Re: "Days since we last shot ourselves in the foot"

Nobody knows, they've never managed it.

What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams

Re: Teams is popular

Agreed.

"Despite everything, Teams is popular because it integrates with Microsoft 365 and brings together virtual meetings and video calls, instant messaging and document collaboration."

I suspect it's "popular" only because companies take the approach of "we've already got it in O365" and then force everyone to use it.

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

Don't know who reads this so will need to be sketchy, but myself and a colleague wrote a report which - despite the scoring criteria, evidence and comments within it supporting the conclusion we came to - was certainly not what had been expected that we would write.

Another group were asked to do it, resulting (eventually) in a pretty half arsed report that fully supported doing what management wanted because it was going to be simple.

Over a year later and the simple things hadn't been so simple after all, and much of our original comments had borne true, but we were still tarred by that original report.

Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS

Re: Some extra info

Pilots can fly many different types, providing they've had the training and been awarded the type rating.

Provided you've had the training and hold a type rating for a Boeing 747 and and Airbus A320, you can fly both.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

I suppose M$ will rush a competitor to market... the TV ads will be appearing soon spouting about "Infinibork 365 is the only imaginary product that works like my team..."

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Re: "Well Analysis - New Knowledge"

In my first IT job, the mainframe IDs were first 2 letters to denote department, first 5 letters of surname and first initial. Ian Nisbet from Personnel must’ve been thrilled to know he was identified as PENISBEI.

Planespotters’ weekends turn traumatic as engine pieces fall from the sky in the Netherlands and the US

Re: RE: engine failure

That test (and the protective jacket) only applies to the large fan at the very front. The compressor and turbine disks witihin the actual engine core are very difficult to contain in the event of a failure due to their much higher rotational velocities and the forces involved - there have been several examples of a turbine disk exiting the engine casing upon failure and causing substantial damage to the aircraft, eg. Quantas A380 QF32 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

and United Airlines DC-10 UA232 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

DBA heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they just have a bunch of forgotten permissions

Was part of a project where I needed about a day's input from another team so I could finish my tasks, but their guy on the project had been grabbed for something else. I started emailing him and his team lead (and .cc-ing my manager and the project manager) about 6 weeks before the pilot was due to start, saying I either needed their resource back, or somone else asap. I did this at least twice a week, as well as speaking to the team lead whenever I saw him, until a fortnight before the pilot, when I started doing it daily.

Three days before the pilot, I was working away and got a call from my manager, the project manager, the other team lead, and a couple of the others involved in the pilot, angrily asking why I hadn't delivered yet. I politely pointed-out that I'd been asking/emailing for 6 weeks without getting anywhere so they needed for somewhere else to point the finger. I also forwarded them all of those emails whilst we were "discussing it". They allocated someone to work on it that day, and I did what I needed remotely the following day. Sorted.

When my manager called me 15 minutes later to apologise "for putting me on the spot, but they'd come to his office on the warpath", I told him in no uncertain terms that he should be eternally thankful I was 250 miles away, otherwise I'd be taking him outside and punching him in the fucking mouth - career-ending or not - and that went for any future occasions also. Never had that problem again...

It's just a pair of arrows. What could be more innocent than that?

My favourite logo fail is still the logo for the Office of Government Commerce...

https://www.fastprint.co.uk/blog/16-worst-logo-designs-in-the-history-of-the-world.html

UK coronavirus tier postcode-searching tool yanked offline as desperate Britons hunt for latest lockdown details

Re: A coloured map perhaps would have been just as good

And Cornwall too, if you don’t mind.

Tech support scammer dialed random number and Australian Police’s cybercrime squad answered

Re: “Police recommend that you do not engage with scammers,”

After I told one guy that "my wife deals with technical calls, I'll go and get her" and put the handset down, I had one guy on the line for ages. Every now and again we'd creep up to the handset and he'd be saying "Hello? Are you there?". Last time we heard him it had been 17 minutes then the nerxt time he'd hung up.

It's happened: AWS signs Memorandum of Understanding for fluffy white services with UK.gov

I agree, but Government departments are already using Azure and other cloud platforms. There's no difference to me other than being locked-in to multiple providers.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Had a user testing some new kit alongside his existing device. Called to say he was trying out the main app they used and was trying to load something but "only half the files are showing compared to the old kit" (they opened one file, but the software opened an additional 6 or 7 files). Checked several times that he was doing things exactly the same way on both kits, so when the answer was in the affirmative, I spoke with my boss, arranged a hire car then drove the 140-odd miles to his office.

On the walk from the lift he said he'd left both kits side-by-side and not touched them since we spoke, and as we walked through the door of his office, there they were and I immediately pointed-out that one was looking at the files in File Explorer whilst the other was looking at them via the File/Open dialog of the app...

2.5 hour drive for literally three minurtes to get from the car to his desk and then 5 seconds actual work. Followed by another 2.5 hour drive back in a worse mood than on the way up.

From 'Queen of the Skies' to Queen of the Scrapheap: British Airways chops 747 fleet as folk stay at home

Re: Bloody awful

Unless they're roll spoilers used to assist/replace the ailerons for banking.

Yo, Imma let you finish, but for the 6,000 people still using that app on a daily basis ... we have a question: why?

Millenium Hand and Shrimp

For the reference to Foul Ole Ron -->

Microsoft Teams starts February with a good, old-fashioned TITSUP*

Re: Executive Hubris

It was IT execs in our case.

Same outcome.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

Re: Be careful what you wish for

It'd be like having a teenager in the house again...

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: AKA Libertarians

Or this one:

Three engineers were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints."

Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections."

The last said, "Actually it was a civil engineer. Who else would put a toxic waste pipeline right next to a playground?"

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Re: From Experience (and In Hindsight)...

Can't remember if they were Compaq, IBM or Toshiba laptops we rolled out years ago where the sliding power switch was in just the right spot on the side so that anyone moving the laptop closer to them or going to pick it up from the desk slid the switch and shut it down.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

Years back, our IT building (and the rest of the Regional HQ it was tacked-onto) was backed by a couple of fairly substatial diesel generators, which could apparently power everything "almost indefinitely" should the need arise.One day everything in the office suddenly went dark and very quiet, then before anyone could say anything, bright & noisy again. Yay. About 5 minutes later, we're dark and quiet again but this time it stayed like that. I looked-up to say something to a colleague and noticed the thick plume of smoke from the generator house... We were sent home later when it was clear the power wasn't coming back!!

Talking to the maintenance guys next day, I was told that workmen had killed a local transformer up the road, which had triggered the first gennie to start. When it wasn't fully delivering power a few minutes later (although it was running), that triggered the second gennie to start which promptly started spewing fuel over everything in sight, including the exhaust of the first, which was now quite hot causing lots of smoke (they never said if it started a fire but the general consensus was it had),

Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing

Re: Conference Theme Tune

Or even the Beatles' original...

Microsoft hikes cost of licensing its software on rival public clouds, introduces Azure 'Dedicated' Hosts

Re: $106k over three years

Totally agree, however when the powers that be have their strategy to move to the cloud, it's hard convincing them otherwise. They've read the whitepapers, swallowed the marketing and donned the free rose-coloured specs and come back with the usual "Ah, but it costs money to have a datacentre, power it, cool it, fire-protect it, secure it..." and my favourite "and it's OPEX not CAPEX so Financel love it...".

If someone was to point-out to Finance just how much we spend on cloud, to run a fraction of our services there, and then added how much more we'd be paying if we moved everything out and closed the datacentre, I suspect they may not be loving it quite so much.

Red flag: Verify to be marked 'undeliverable' by gov projects watchdog

"Simple: ignore all the hidden and generated costs et voilà, remains de savings only."

I've seen that a lot. "We moved from legacy Product X to shiny-shiny Product Y and saved £20K over the duration of the contract". Yes, but it cost £200K to do that...

300,000 edgy folk pledge themselves on Facebook to storming supposedly UFO-tastic Area 51

Janet - sometimes referred to as Janet Airlines.

Apparently the name came from "Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation", but the USAF guy that told me that years ago admitted he wasn't used to "Briddish ales" but had drank rather a lot of them...

Apple fakes intimacy in our dead-eyed digital world with software fix

Re: Just what I don't want

It does say that it can be turned off, so hopefully it'll stay like that in the final release.

Re: Always made effort

So turn it off and carry on as before. (Me too by the way)

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

Re: For what it's worth

The Shuttles were built by Rockwell (bought by Boeing in 1996)

One man went to mow a meadow, hoping Trump would spot giant grass snake under flightpath

I read that as ... "leaving home before 'finishing school'..." and thought "bloody hell, how posh are you?!?!

Then I re-read it again properly and went for a coffee to wake myself up!!

Honey, hive had it with this drone: Couple lived for years with thousands of bees in bedroom wall

It's no good. Cardinal BEEgles, you'll have to say it...

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Then there is the "send me a copy"

You made me think of the old Gary Larson cartoon:

It's a fax from your dog Mr Dansworth. It looks like your cat.

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Re: Fiscal responsibility.

Guy I worked with had his VCR trashed by his 2yo son pushing toast/marmalade & biscuits in the slot. The lad had asked how it worked and he'd answered there was a little man inside the machine who read what was on the tape and made the actors on the screen do and say the right things. The lad thought the little man might be hungry so had been pushing food in for the last few days!!

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

Re: More than 300 dead is largely worth an abundance of caution

I'm not aware that the A380 has had any fatal crashes after more than a decade in service...

UK joins growing list of territories to ban Boeing 737 Max flights as firm says patch incoming

Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS

Was AF296 caused by Airbus? The pilots flew their aircraft on a low flypast at high-alpha (ie. nose up) with the engines at flight idle, gear/flaps down, and then selected TO/GA too late for them to spool-up to full power and start to climb away from the trees they were heading towards and therefore hit.

Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS

Sully landed in the Hudson in an Airbus A320 complete with standard Airbus automation. If I recall, the only criticism Sully had was that they system imposed limits on his flare before touchdown (probably because the system wasn't in landing mode) meaning touchdown was harder than it could have been.

Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS

"The pilot cannot bypass the technology, that capability no longer exists, and that has to be explicitly part of the design"

That's not strictly true for Airbus. Simply put, the systems operate in various "Laws" or modes whereby the systems will attempt to protect the aircraft from being flown outside its envelope. They range from Normal Law attempting to protect the aircraft in pitch, roll, speed, load factor and angle-of-attack, through Alternate Law 1 or 2, down to Direct Law which allows the pilot to completely hand-fly the aeroplane in the event of systems failures.

Airlines in Asia, Africa ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after second death crash in four-ish months

Re: Except that clearly isn't true

I don't think Lion Air ended as it did because the pilots "did not do the right thing" - MCAS was happily trimming the nose nose down to the point it couldn't go further whilst the pilots were unable to apply enough force to pull the yokes back and stop the dive.

Customer: We fancy changing a 25-year-old installation. C'mon, it's just one extra valve... Only wafer thin...

Re: The dirtiest four-letter word...

Agreed. Same goes when visiting a friend/family member and they say "you know about computers - can you just take a look at..." which usually results in 3 hours of un-fun in the spare room disinfecting, reinstalling and updating a PC so rabid it should have been taken behind the shed and shot, whilst everyone else is downstairs merrily drinking tea & scoffing biscuits.

Amazon Prime Air flight crashes in Texas after 6,000ft nosedive

Re: Weather-related? Microburst????

If it were closer to the ground (eg. after takeoff or coming in to land) my thoughts would be the same at this point, but from 6000' I wouldn't have expected a nosedive into the ground.

Whatever the cause, thoughts with the crew and family/friends.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

They do that already!!