Posts by Korev

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

I had something the other way round. Someone had been given the task of making a database dump available and had done so - the problem was that it hadn't occurred to him to make it usable!

I wrote some frankenmonster code to parse this monstrosity data into a format that a data scientist could use that took hours and hours to run on HPC. I dreaded the next team meeting as what I'd written was so horrid. My colleague just looked at the problem I'd solved and just said "I'm sorry you had to write this".

Eventually, the team behind the data started providing sane dumps and my work of the devil is still living in Bitbucket somewhere...

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Re: So that's where it ended up

Tell Sid!

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: "when many phones still had removable batteries"

About this time I was first on scene at a car accident, I had two phones with me, a work iPhone and a personal Android. I couldn't get reception on either phone, a pensioner handed me her Nokia brick which of course had reception so I could get the poor driver some help...

Re: "when many phones still had removable batteries"

And battery life that could be measured in days, not hours

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: Have to wait in UK...

There are still some railway lines here in Switzerland with that "system"

Reichenbach Falls icon -->

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Sounds like he Rogered the network

Sounds like he completely Rogered the network

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Re: Value-less prizes

That'd trump a voucher

Re: Close call

in less than four minutes, with the windy conditions, the fire had engulfed the whole stand. In the panic that ensued, fleeing crowds escaped on to the pitch but others at the back of the stand tried to break down locked exit doors to escape. Many were burnt to death at the turnstile gates, which had been locked after the match had begun

I once did a mandatory fire training course where the presenter showed the Bradford fire in real time to show us how we should get the hell out if there's a fire. He was a bit too enthusiastic about it though to the point that more than one person wondered if he was enjoying himself.

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

Re: building PA system.

An upvote for the Drop the Dead Donkey reference

Tech divorce from Walmart cost Brit retail giant Asda £1.22B

Re: A mere tin of beans

He Asda be certain about that

Re: Maximally lousy

I struggle to think of an example of when doing this went well, but doing it mid-migration seems like a good way to make it end even more badly than it needed to

AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo makes local AI look easy, but at $4K, easy doesn't come cheap

Re: $$$

And the SGI boxes look great, this, less so

Moody Bible Institute breach leaves 2.3M accounts needing salvation, says cyber expert

Re: missionary

Only if you like Alter people

Pacemaker manufacturer Medtronic warns patients cybercrooks may have swiped health data

Too bloody right!

Connect, disconnect, or just have a lovely beer

Re: It does look like the Disney castle

Unlikely, they're a Micky Mouse outfit

Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

Or a tulip?

Or a bubble in the south sea?

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: Imagine the outcry if the long-running drama The Archers was to come to an abrupt end.

Was is conditional, ie might happen

Were is subjunctive, ie can't happen

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which is correct in this case

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

Sounds like a bit of a hanker to me...

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

You forgot the icon -->

Ordering a trip back to 2009, with a side of nostalgia

Re: A time when Windows 7 was Microsoft's latest and greatest

You've got it

21,000 Oracle jobs vanish amid Big Red's big bets on AI

Re: Digital ID

If you don't want to sleep then read Jared Diamond's Collapse, it documents many civilisations that have destroyed themselves through over-consumption

Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled

Re: SNAFU

The long distance trains do often tend to be late, but they do have a decent restaurant car with beer proper glasses, so you can be delayed in comfort...

Maybe their DBa needs better training

They probably have a clause in their contract that Bahn people from talking

I bet it was a network buffering problem

Datacenters dip a toe back into waterborne computing despite obvious challenges

Re: Ocean cooling ?

> Could Clacton become a center of AI ?

Well, not having Farage around would be a big advantage

Digital indigestion: Fizzy Coca-Cola display chokes on full storage

Coke is IT?

See icon...

Health board apologizes for phishing staff with with bogus vacation day

Re: to stop you thinking logically

> Fatigue, overwork and stress typically in a healthcare environment aren't universally recognised as condusive to consistent logical thinking. /s

At Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services the staff are dog tired...

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Re: Clocking In and Out

I used to work somewhere where they implemented "one over one" approvals for travel and it had to be done by 16.00 UK time or else the travel company would cancel it (charging fees of course...).

At that point my manager's boss was in America, so often wouldn't see the email until after the travel had already been cancelled and the Company had been charged...

Re: Many a year ago ....

> I played with a cow-orkers machine

Did you do the udder colleague's machine too?

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

People like this shouldn't aloud to use a computer

Re: Don't check that, check this

Having it in Word would be dangerous though - we all know that Bill Gates is using 5G to activate the covid vaccines

How could we trust any Microsoft product to tell the truth? WAKE UP SHEEPIES!!!!

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

Re: False economy?

I remember at uni we had some DEC Alpha boxen that got slower after a network upgrade as they couldn't handle doing stuff at gigabit very well. Some of the students were trying to get the IT dept to overclock the servers - it was pointed out that having slow servers was better than them crashing. IIRC some DEC consultants worked some magic until they couldn't handle doing buy some more powerful machines.

Greybeard icon -->

Re: Lucky the text didn't default to Chinese

When I tested software, having it in Asian locales wasn't too much of a problem, but customers trying to load CSV files with semi-colons for separators broke pretty much everything. In the end I just switched the locale to French and caught the bugs early.

I assume (hope!) they've now got unit tests etc to pick this up

Yeah, something felt fishy to me too

I'll let you know in the POST

Re: Lucky the text didn't default to Chinese

In a past life I was a software tester. One of the supported languages was Japanese, I used to be able to do Oracle installs by remembering which the right buttons and dialogues were in the installer.

So you're giving us the boot?

That's well Jackson

I don't think I like the anti-Chinese Bios in this story

Apple version of Office 2019 becomes useless in a month

Re: Entitled to a full refund in some jurisdictions

I don't know why you go downvoted, this seems like a likely line of defence for MS if it reaches court

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: USBKill ?

I USB-C what you did there

Re: USBKill ?

He's already (kind of) been there...

Re: Beware of BOFHs bearing "gifts"

I'd be more worried about a fire than a firewall in that scenario...

Anthropic recruits army to sell Claude to nonprofits

Re: The "King" is in the altogether

My local supermarket now has about twice the number of manned checkouts to the self-service ones (the latter being supervised by a single very bored person). It's funny how many people think this is AI, when in reality it needs to be just simple programming ie database work and a bit of primary school maths.

Plymouth council exposes hundreds in latest local government email gaffe

I think of all the demographics to expose the data of, homeschooling parents is pretty near the top of the list!

Good luck to the council employees having to clean up the mess created by their colleague...

Graviton 5 impresses, but please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them 'AI chips'

Re: Amazon AI ?

The last few times I've spoken to AWS people they just want to push Sagemaker and/or Bedrock.

Vendor lock in icon -->

Angry bug hunter with Microsoft beef drops new Windows 0-day

Revenge is a dish best served code

Superb Ms Lyons

Next stop, C:\ ... Paris Metro screen goes off the tracks

Please could we have the Paris icon back, it'd be perfect for this story