Posts by Outski

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Monkeys

Those wings hurt when they were forced out of the monkeys' backs.

Re: Monkeys

Most monkeys, not that big. Apes on the other hand, different proposition

Re: Those were the innocent days...

I had a Domino 5 server on 460ish days on NT4, many years back, it only got rebooted because, after realising it was out of warranty, the client realised some maintenance and patching might be in order. Otherwise, the thing would just run and run (think Mo Farah, not Pheidippades)

Re: "I can understand why he wanted to maintain uptime on the mail server,"

Grey

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

The rest of the estate could've fallen like Dominos

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

Re: evolving into an agentic OS

Remember that, in the context of "survival of the fittest", fittest means most suited to prevailing conditions which, in the MS environment, means, does it squeeze maximum revenue for minimum input? If so, it's the fittest, so will survive.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Dutch lottery

A former colleague* announced with glee one morning that he'd received an email informing him he'd won some millions on the Dutch lottery, which he could claim by calling a number and giving some personal details.

Once the laughter had subsided, we finally convinced him that it was a hoax.

The beauty of this? Our team ran client email systems including anti-spam/anti-phish...

*Quote from the same bloke: "But cider's not alcohol, that's why kids drink it in the park..." Oh deary deary me

-------------> Not cider

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

Bloody hell, that sounds dangerously like well-thought out, comprehensive joined up strategic thinking. What the hell's it doing out in public?

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

now we have TV channels showing Xmas films from the begining of Sept!

Hallmark Channel run a "Christmas in July" season in the UK.

It's painful. Career woman suffers personal or professional loss, goes back to hometown to lick her wounds/comfort family/bury dead dog, stays, meets high school tormentor/crush/sweetheart, who's now a widower/teacher/spoon-whittler... you know the rest

Please give me a rusty spoon to stabby stabby stab my eyes

or copious --->

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Who knew that putting all your eggs...

It only takes one domino somewhere to fall over and the who lot goes down.

Oh I dunno, Domino's pretty resilient if configured properly...

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: Accuracy has improved then

your immediate cubicle mates

If you're referring again to toilet/smoke/coffee breaks, I'd wonder where the hell you've been working

College student went on a destructive rampage, then confessed to ChatGPT, cops say

Muphry strikes again!

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

One can always find an anecdote about certain individuals' poor performance and use it to denigrrate an entire class of people. Does Beverley Allitt represent all nurses? Paula Vennells all Post Office staff?

NHS administrators I've known have been ridiculously overworked, keeping clinicians free from paperwork burdens (purchasing, performance/outcome stats are not things a surgeon needs to be focusing on), and fighting for their particular Trust in the face of overwhelming demands.

The ire should be focused on that small percentage of corner office numpties who think their private sector genius applies equally to public sector, bringing inb consultants suffering from the same "private sector good, public sector bad" myopia that's been about as helpful to the NHS as MRSA.

Back when I was in DoH as a young appdev, we had a contractor on our team, fresh from being 'released' from a spell at, yep, Royal Mail. I and my boss had prepared a business case for a small piece of work and passed it to him for his thoughts. His first comment was "yes, but where do you make the profit?" In a central government department. After a substantial conversation, he still couldn't understand why our team wasn't charging another part of the same government department an overhead to bump up our "revenue". We didn't renew his contract (also, I ended up teaching him sttuff, which wass the opposite of why he was brought in in the first place).

My point is that the NHS relies on a vast number of people in all sorts of roles, and all of them understaffed and undermined. Yes, mistakes happen, some of them fatally, but none of them, or at least, barely enough to register statistically, driven by an attitude of "ah, fuck it, that'll do", can't be arsed, lack of effort.

Re: Fairly Minor but...

But employing people to ensure public sector bills are paid swiftly, and contracts are agreed frugally seems to attract ire from various gobshites bemoaning "useless bureaucrats". They're not, they hold external suppliers' feet to the fire to ensue value for the taxpayer. The stories of waste that make the press are the exceptions, or ones where there is actual malfeasance.

Re: As per the OP's story

In practice, there are dishonest people in the world who will withhold payment until forced to pay up

Not just people, global household name companies, as a former employer, a boutique consultancy, found out when screwed by a client ducking out on a £2mn bill; peanuts for them, layoffs for us, as we couldn't afford the legal fees.

Even delaying paying an invoice, say, taking 90 days instead of the contractual 30, can send a small firm under, but for the big boys, it's just standard practice.

Chapeau to those public/non-profit sector orgs that pay up on time.

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

This all seems very Home Office. There's a large element at HO who've been after this for years and years. They know that they can never get it through with a Tory government, as it'll be seen as a right wing move that voters will baulk at. Instead, the policy hawks wait to float it until there's a Labour govt.

A lot depends on how quickly a Home Sec 'goes native' - obviously, Shabana Mahmood and her SpAds have turned pretty quickly.

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

Re: Reddit next

It does for certain elements deemed to be NSFM (M being minors), using facial age estimation.

Car giant Stellantis says customer data nicked after partner vendor pwned

Re: Govt support?

And you won't get much disagreement from me on that one. The companies lower down the food/supply chain presumably have contracts in place, so if JLR/$stricken_corp can't fulfill their side of the bargain, it would be on the side of the supplier to take action to enforce that contract.

However, bigger corps can usually ride out the cost of litigation, which the supplier can't.

A previous employer got fucked by this in the 00s, a boutique consultancy screwed to the tune of £2.5m, which is a lot for a company of 15 people, by a global telecomms company.

They could afford it, we couldn't, so a third of us were laid off.

Re: Govt support?

I realise now that I was conflating the two issues. Obviously, the call for covid-style support isn't related to the Stellantis issue, but JLR's, but my overall point stands.

Govt support?

I'm not quite sure of the rationale behind asking for "covid-style" government support, here. Covid was a pandemic affecting the entire world, so all governments stepped in, to some degree or another, as it was, for businesses, unforeseeable and unpreventable.

This is a single, albeit large, company, whose systems were compromised by a deliberate act, systems which arguably should have been more secure. That is, Stellantis have to shoulder some of the responsibility, and/or have contingency funding in place for mitigation and supporting employees and companies in the supply and distribution/sales chains. If that contingency is in the form of insurance so be it, and they should be able to prove all reasonable measures (plus some unreasonable ones) were taken to prevent such an event.

If that's not the case, and either the contingency isn't there or the insurers dispute the claim (and fight through the courts for 5+ years), than that could be seen as a breach of fiduciary duty on the part of the board. Shareholders should (but won't) also be required to put their hands in their pockets or, at the very least, give up on a dividend for the year(s).

At no point do I see a duty on the part of government, any government in whose jusrisdiction Stellantis has production facilities, to step in and cover for the company's, shall we say, current misfortunes.

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

Re: Conditions they would experience in space

Gah, Jake, I normally like and appreciate your posts, even if I disagree with you, but...

Starting a comment with 'methinks'?

The late lamented Clive James would not be impressed.

Tech troubles create aviation chaos on both sides of the Atlantic

Not only that, Simon, but RegTards normally are in a position to provide a much more detailed piece than mainstream rolling news outlets can afford - they don't have the bandwidth to go into detail in a half hour rolling news schedule, whereas El Reg can, and are much valued for it.

[reposted, first attempt got lost]

Re: The chickens

See also Stelantis' IT issues? Also Stelantis' (3rd party) airbag detonation issues?

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Re: Who even uses Notepad?

I use Notepad for exactly how it's named - scribbling down phone numbers, addresses, an editable clipboard, as, with a medical issue affecting my writing, it's quicker/more reliable.

If I need a text editor, it's Notepad++

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: My code doesn't compile

I had a senior colleague, a couple of decades in IT, make a similar mistake trying to do some work with a certificate. A quick screenshare, I switched off hide file extensions, and lo and behold, there was ourcert.pk5.txt

Correct solution? Carpet & lye?

Social Security admin denies DB data leak, DOGEs questions about a copy

They said it wasn't accessed in an unauthorised fashion. DOGE was (eventually) authorised.

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Re: Not the first time

Not to mention Outlook relying on timezone description rater than timezone rules for appointments, leading to appointments showing up offset by an hour

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: A technique I learnt in Japan

Step 0: Locate the written instruction and authorisation to make the change in question.

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

Re: Had a customer recently...

Which is a very wise and professional approach, one I wish more would take.

Re: Had a customer recently...

I can think of at least three reasons why that was a terrible configuration from a Domino pov off the top of my head: no site doc; no clustering; CNAME is dumbass in Domino... If I scratched my head a bit, I could probably think of more.

At the root of it, though, is that it looks like it was designed and configured by someone who should never have been let loose in the Domino Directory. If that was the deceased, well, I'm sorry for his family, but it doesn't excuse a terrible configuration.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: How did you get in here?

20 Fenchurch Street, aka the Walkie Talkie, is like that, with the wind against whichever direction you're wealking (or so it seems, going to and from buying lunch)

Re: Indiana National Guard not very guardy in comparison

...commuting between Reading & Newbury. That used to have convoys carrying <something> to a site along the route

You really don't want to be doing anything untoward within half a mile of those convoys

Re: American superstition (apocryphal)

My old block in KL had 12, 12A and 12B, 14 being unwelcome in Chinese culture, as 13 is in western culture

Re: How did you get in here?

There are also houses that don't exist

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Re: Obligatory Microsoft Version

I've always heard it as:

Teach a woman to fish, feed a generation.

Teach a man to fish, lose him to riverbanks and bad hats.

Re: Blame the dates

I've seen a best before date on table salt. A preservative (not a préservatif, for francophones). Without anti-caking agents, just straightforward NaCl.

It's not going to go bad.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Re: Manuals

the kind doctors or athletes buy if they want to fly themselves around for fun

If you're Bruce Dickinson, that's a 747

Microsoft eventually realized the world isn't just the Northern Hemisphere

Re: unconscious bias

Well, to be fair I did say some parts between the tropics, but generally, East Africa aside, it does get quite soggy in that zone. When we were still living in KL, some parts of the year I could guarantee that, picking my daughter up from school, we'd be wading across the road to get into our block, end of the school day so nicely coinciding with the afternoon cloudburst.

Re: unconscious bias

Windows Server 20whatever does that as well

Going back to the main point, it obviously escaped there notice that in some parts of the world, ie between the tropics, the seasons beginning with an equinox don't really mean much at all, there being only two seasons: hot & wet, and hot & wetter.

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Re: It's not just login accounts

one extra week of paid unannounced holiday per week

And wouldn't we all like that :o)

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: Manual?

F9 for Refresh - originated in Notes, quickly adopted by Outlook, but no other MS products (eg, recalculating tables in Word).

Cue Jane User:"Oh, why doesn't F5 get me new email in Notes, must be rubbish"

er, it doesn't in anything

(Sh+F5 is session lock in Notes)

Re: doing so yielded "no coherent feedback at all."

My documentation used to start:

"This document is for the $COMPANY Messaging team. If you are attempting this operation and not part of the Messaging team, STOP NOW, and contact your supervisor or the Messaging team. Do not go further."

I felt that that was a) enough warning and b) clear enough to save my arse had someone not on my team fucked things up.

no such thing as "child-proof"

How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Re: Yes but

MoD has had problems with procurement for decades, mostly in that has been mostly captured by the defence industry. They, on secondment to MoD from parent companies, write the specs, and set the procurement rules, with little input from actual military.

With other programmes, it's a case of hidebound Treasury thinking. For example, HS2: it's wildly expensive for one reason only. Treasury refused to accept any financial risk as part of the very many tenders, so have a guess what happened.

Every bidding company frontloaded the potential cost of the risk into the bids, and, hey ho, the risk doesn't materialise, but it's already paid for. Triples all round.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

Fire the doctor

With a glitter cannon? (ISC reference)

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

referencing a comment above, goths in the 80s knew the difference between a red-based and a blue-based black hair dye

See also the Guardian Style Guide:

Goths

uc: Germanic tribe that invaded the Roman empire

goths

lc: Sisters of Mercy fans who invaded the Shepherd’s Bush Empire

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

I still believe in God, but God no longer believes in me

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

Surely octarine should be a candidate, being the colour you see in the split second after running head first into a brick wall but just before you pass out, otherwise visble only to wizards (and witches, Hermione, Cho, Luna, Lily, we salute you) and cats

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Re: Far be it from me approve whatever the orange baboon decides

A solution was put forward about twenty years ago by respected and, sadly, much lamented economist and drugs policy academic Mark Kleiman:

1. There is a shortage of medical grade opium, particularly in the global South, leading to unnecessary high morbidity.

2. The various factions in Afghanistan have always grown opium poppies, sometimes with, sometimes without approval of whoever is in regional control.

3. The US pays to farmers to not grow poppy, so the Taliban says "grow it, and we'll take the profits".

Solution:

The US pays the farmers to grow it on behalf of Pharma, ensuring a regular supply, and ensures its safe transport, and the local warlords/Taliban get their cut.

Side benefit: there is a legitinate market for Afghan opium, denying it to the narco gangs.