Posts by Outski

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Re: Could be worse, of course

I actually have the opening bars (less triangle) of YYZ as my ringtone, edited to repeat rather than go into the main theme

Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

Back in the day, the CLP (Certified Lotus Professional) certification had both tracks, SysAdmin and AppDev. To get either, there were three exams, one of them being from the other track. Seemed like a good approach to me.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Re: spaghetti

You weigh spaghetti?

I've always used the "hmm four of us, two are teenagers, that seems about right" method

But you can tell the difference between the types of guitar, LP, Strat, Tele, PRS, Ricky... My beloved RS sounds nothing like my Squier Strat, even on the same amp settings.

And you can tell the difference between players as well - Dave Gilmour and Steve Rothery sound different playing the same piece of music, for example.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Re: Reminds me of an old (early '80s) AI koan ...

Ah, the old IT professional Proximity Field

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Security 101.

Try Thai, you get a different charset, plus an entirely new calendar (although I'm sure Steve Bong would be able to navigate it)

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

"chord" is actually the correct spelling for that phrase

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Re: What are the odds?

What are the odds it would have an event in the 6 hours we had it disabled?

Isn't it Captain Carrot who's the expert at precisely calculating million-to-one odd?

Re: death trap

I smoke like a beagle, but wouldn't spark up anywhere near a server room

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

Re: Why all the cheering before the last 10 seconds?

I think that was when they restarted the countdown - it had been on pause at around the thirty second mark for a while (not sure, I skipped forward rather than watch the whole thing)

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

Nomen es omen

The Register feels the pain of anyone injured in the line of duty to bring us artery-clogging treats

Well, with a name like this particular Vulture writer's, he would say that wouldn't he :o)

Bottle of Kingfisher over here, please

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Peak China?

Bullshit. China has been trying to bully countries around South East Asia for well over a decade, this has got nothing to do with US foreign policy.

There are vast swathes of what's known as the the South China sea where countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines have territory and accompanying territorial waters, yet China seeks to claim sole rights to said territories and waters, and to bar international maritime traffic.

This is more of the same.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

I managed to rack up a 1k ringgit bill during just one week in China from my colleague calling me to see how a job was going. Reimbursement came out of his budget within an hour of me getting back to the KL office...

Needed a few of these --->

Activist investor tells Airbus to end Atos Evidian talks now

They're the ones that remove any sense of perspective, and chirp "Implement Layoffs" at random intervals during the day...

while unsurprisingly calling for increased dividends and share buybacks...

No more rockstars, say Billy Idol, Joan Jett in Workday Super Bowl ad

Re: Rock star

It's interesting how besuited, Gucci-wearing so-called high-level executives want to be associated with what is commonly known as a depraved, drug and alcohol-filled lifestyle.

There's almost as much nose candy consumed in the marketing world as there is in rock and roll

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

Re: But still

A ban on unaccompanied minors carrying guns has just been defeated in the Missouri state senate.

Words fail me

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Losing face

I was engaged to run an audit of Notes/Domino for a Chinese company. On the admin side they were good, but their appdev side had jerry-built a system to update names in the directory and all names fields in applications whenever a change was detected in AD, despite the fact that ND has a wonderful built in process to do this (Pascal Monett will back me here). When I pointed this out to the head of appdev, he didn't take it well, and I was gently steered by our contact (head of systems admin) to say that we could set up a test system to prove that a ten year old process actually worked, and that this would free up appdev time without losing face.

We secured that year long maintenance contract (until our guy, a native Mandarin speaker chose to come home to Malaysia).

Beer for our contact, who sent me back to KL with a lovely couple of gifts for the Outskits.

Shag pile PC earned techies a carpeting from HR

Re: Spoof

I tend to use random lyrics from about the third verse of an album track from some obscure prog band, with some letter/number swaps - have fun with that, my ITSec colleagues and your multiple GPUs :o)

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: I'm pro SI

1 chain x 1 furlong = 1 acre

1 chain = 1 wicket

and a quarter of a mile (2 furlongs) is 440 yards. Furlongs are pretty easy if you follow horse-racing

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Wine bottles are 75cl because that's the accepted standard size internationally. In the UK, and most of Europe as well, I think, boxes are 225cl, as that makes three bottles.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Oracle? Sun? Java?

Oopsie - someone obviously forgot to remind the lawyer that the coffee Java was named after comes from the island :o)

FD: Bahasa Java is one of the working languages chez Outski, MrsO being from there

Re: Oracle? Sun? Java?

News just in: Zorastrian extremists have called in a bomb threat again a UK newspaper accusing it of shameless blasphemy /endit

(jk, all the Zoroastrians I've met have been really lovely and kind people. And also refugees.)

Tributes flow as Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo - the mind behind Sound Blaster - passes aged 68

Still using Creative

I had a Zen for about ten years, bought when I moved overseas and didn't want to take 100+ CDs with me, it was great, and Creative's after-care service was top notch, despatching a new charger gratis to my UK office on a short work trip back to Blighty to cover for the one I'd forgotten to bring with me from Malaysia. When I was on the look out for some PC speakers last year they were my first port of call, and didn't let me down.

Thank you, Mr Sim.

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Windows

Many years ago, I was shown the server room of the central govt department I worked for (at a satellite office): lovely, huge racks, great aircon, big halon fire system (it did say it was many years ago, mid 90s to be closer) and a back wall of toughened glass.

Not toughened enough, apparently, to stop a Transit at 20 mph, into which was loaded a few tons of govt kit...

Re: standing upright and keeping still

"They go through bone like butter"

https://youtu.be/kDKiQfBs9lo?t=294

Twitter staffer turned Saudi spy jailed for 3.5 years

The Beeb can't report from Donetsk because their crews will be killed. Reports of Ukraine military activity in Donetsk are made, with caveats that those reports are unverified.

Your mention of 'Antifa', as if that's a thing, mark you out as a Trumpian and Putinesque troll.

End of an era as the last 747 rolls off the production line

Re: My first flight

And Emirates too, come to that

The A380 always looks like it has a massive smile on its 'face', I love them :o)

Re: My first flight

Same on MAS

It was Russia wot did it: SolarWinds hack was done by Kremlin's APT29 crew, say UK and US

El Reg cited by MS Security Honcho

Gareth, it might interest you to know that this article was screenshot in a presentation by Alexx Weinert, MS VP Identity Security, alongside pieces from NYT and WSJ

Woman fakes pregnancy to smuggle hundreds of CPUs, iPhones into China

Easiest way with telly is to write the pregnancy into the script, particularly with soaps; plot the character going away whenever the actor's baby is due, give them a prosthetic once they've had it, and you can write in a very realistic delivery scene.

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Re: You could really have an entire website devoted to this phrase in the UK:

But they can point to investing millions into the project... on the countless meetings, project boards, discussion papers, consultants' reports, repeat ad nauseum

Re: British innovation

Oooh, never a big fan of fish and chips, but I could go for a battered sausage (fnarr) right now

Re: British innovation

Champagne, or at least the champenoise method, with its secondary fermentation, was invented by an Englishman, several years before Dom Perignon. It was also the English who worked out how to bottle it without the bottles exploding under pressure. Yay for us.

No champagne icon, so closest thing --->

Spooky entanglement revealed between quantum AI and the BBC

Re: And when IT works, what would/could you have IT do? Do You Think IT Would Listen and Comply?

I actually understood that more than the article

Maybe I need more ----->

How not to test a new system: push a button and wait to see what happens

Re: And if it isn't in the manual it ought not to happen.

Also known as knowing where to put the chalk-mark

Waiting for speedy broadband? UK's Openreach prioritizing existing work over fiber expansion

See me after class

It's FIBRE, it's spelled that way in the press release, so stick to it.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Re: You get what you order

Kuala Lumpur

Re: Receptionist on the phone

Any receptionist on the phone when you arrive is doing their job. It's really that simple.

CEO's friend couldn't do that job, probably not any other either, apart from maybe Tory whip

Re: Once upon a time...

Probably still better than Comcast though - I remember back in the noughties, they started rate-limiting port 1352 (NRPC, ie, Notes) for domestic customers. Now, Notes is designed for remote working. People complained. Serious technical people who knew how to use Wireshark, amongst other tools.

Comcast denied it. IBM did some tests, as some of the people complaining were major technical contributors to IBM's conferences, business partners, BIG customers.

Comcast stopped limiting 1352.

Re: Now ask me why ...

I can't remember whether it was Peter Firmin or Oliver Postgate, but one of them recounted meeting a German who said "of course we love the Clangers, they speak perfect German"

Re: You get what you order

I witnessed a rear-ending (titter ye not) living in KL on my way to the pub. The rear-ender had four or five young blokes from the Gulf (it was Gulf holiday season when loads of people from there rock up in KL, it being nominally Muslim, but they can party and get pissed). The rear-endee was local.

I said I'd seen it and agreed it it was the lads' fault. They disagreed, quite vehemently, when I noted that a rear-end shunt is always the car behind's fault (unless it's been shunted itself, or it's a scam by the front car, which this wasn't). I suggested we get the police, at which point the lads got back in their car and made a hasty exit.

Re: You get what you order

Name & fame - given how poor/dodgy so many insurers are, we need to know about even the half-decent ones

Re: You get what you order

Also, take photos of any nicks and dings to the bodywork, plus the fuel and oil gauges, as that's another a favourite - just read the Graun's consumer columns

Re: reputation?

Blacks (outdoor-wear firm) were very good a couple of years ago with an order of mine - I ordered a pair of boots that turned out to be a size too small. They agreed to collect & replace them, at no extra cost. The replacements turned out to have been mislabelled so were, again, a size too small, so round the mulberry bush again.

All sorted inside ten days, and this from a subsidiary firm of JD Sports, who are shit.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Joke icon not needed :o)

My procedural documentation always has, after the "this is what this procedure covers" line, a warning "This document is intended for team X. If you are attempting this procedure and NOT a member of team X, STOP NOW, and contact a member of team X".

Minimum necessary permissioning is a good principle, but isn't always applied, so if someone's using my procedure and buggers things up, they can't say they weren't warned.

Parody Elon Musk Twitter accounts will be suspended immediately, says Elon Musk

Oh, I don't know, most of the people I see driving Teslas are utter RW arseholes, going by their personalised number plates, one near me advertising that he's [PII redacted]

Re: Typical.

Yes, Jake, because you're such a special snowflake ;o)

Actually that's very t-i-c, because you're one of the most valued commentards, and if you ever found your way to Durovernum, I'd be very happy to share some of these with you.

------>

Yep, think you've scored a home run but you were born on third base.