* Posts by Evil_Goblin

106 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jan 2018

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First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

Evil_Goblin

Re: Microsoft recommended a reboot

It’s an ass-onance based pun, well done for realising…

https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/borrowers/article/view/2346/2361

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Evil_Goblin

In South Africa the highways team started installing new robots (traffic lights) with SIM cards in so the systems could phone home via a preset number to notify support team for a call out if there was a problem.

After a month or two the bills for this system started getting very expensive, upon investigation it turned out the commissioning engineers would clone the SIM cards and then sell them on the black market - as no one had envisaged the scenario the contracts were unlimited and unrestricted - truly the holy grail back in the noughties!

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

Evil_Goblin

Re: Some geezer with a boat

He was sailing off the Isle of Wight one year during Cowes Week when the skipper of another boat hailed him as ‘Stavros’ in reference to his Greek heritage and asked him to move out of the way.

‘It’s not Stavros,’ retorted Philip, ‘and it’s my wife’s f*****g water, so I’ll do what I f*****g well please.’

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Evil_Goblin

Re: Taiwan

@My-Handle

Yes if the 220V appliance was pulling well below max current, then yes, a drop in voltage would pull more current but the 110V cable could be fine.

However...

If the machine was already pulling significant current (lets say maximum to make the point clearer) at 220V, a cable spec'd for the same current but at 110V would have significantly more power going through than designed. 100V cable would obviously get then hot, and depending on spec and manufacture of the cable, failure would be through either insulation breakdown, or the wire itself would effectively act like a fuse and burn out.

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

Evil_Goblin

Re: wow, this is weird.

El Reg - give this bloke (assuming AdamWill is a bloke) a job, clearest explanation I've read in the last 48 hours.

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

Evil_Goblin

Re: Oh dear!

To disable my alarm without the fob, you had to enter a numeric code. How to enter the code? Why, by opening and closing the driver's door the appropriate number of times of course, with a 3 second pause between each digit.

The code was 2649..

Open slam open slam, tick tick tick,

Open slam open slam open slam open slam open slam open slam, tick tick tick,

Open slam open slam open slam open slam, tick tick tick,

9! FFS

Open slam open slam open slam open slam open slam open slam open slam open slam open slam

Hopefully at that point the alarm would stop blaring, but between the door slamming and the alarm, the entire village would now be wide awake and very angry.

Two wrongs don't make a right: They make a successful project sign-off

Evil_Goblin

Re: stationary supplies

Shirley it would be a problem if it was signposted Stationary rather Stationery? Or I'm I just having a whoosh...

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Evil_Goblin

Re: Doubtless with the assistance of a baseball bat peppered with rusty nails.

Non linear rulers can be used in education I think, I vaguely remember an enthusiastic lecturer getting all "philosophy of science" with one, illustrating importance of standards, they only work if we all stick to them, accumulation of errors etc.

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

Evil_Goblin

Re: charcoal and cellulose based record keeping

Yup and if you're really snazzy those bins are translucent with a "scale" down the side, (usually a big line in permanent marker) and once a week/month either the person responsible for the area or the supplier rep comes in, does a quick eyeball round all the bins and orders/delivers more for any that are below their line.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Evil_Goblin

Re: Relax...

Allegedly NHSX forbade the use of Excel "on their side" but once it got to PHE it was Excel all the way...

Burning down the house! Consumer champ Which? probes smart plugs to find a bunch of insecure fire-risk tat

Evil_Goblin

Re: Not just smart plugs!

Really? But how do you know it really does conform when almost everyone self-certifies these days. Yes there's BS1363 part 2 that pertains to USB, but various investigations by people like Electrical Safety First show that a lot of "compliant" sockets available for purchase don't even conform to Part 1 for the standard 13A bit, let alone the Part 2 for the USB stuff.

Fundamentally for me, until there is a socket available which gives the USB ports their own separate mechanical on/off switch, not going to be fitting any.

EDIT: For typos and to add that two others above clearly have the same concerns and got in before me!

It's 2020 so not only is your mouse config tool a Node.JS Electron app, it's also pwnable by an evil webpage

Evil_Goblin

Re: I like Electron but...

I haven't installed the "configuration apps" since I bought a Gravis gamepad in the 90s, and found it worked better without it.

For example I have a Logitech MX Master 2S here running perfectly with no utilities etc installed, all the buttons/features that I know about/need all work, what am I missing out on that merits the install?

Genuine question by the way, not an "ooooh look at me" post.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Evil_Goblin

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

Or for kit or bitsa cars.

Infor pays UK construction retailer Travis Perkins £4.2m settlement following cancelled upgrade of 'Sellotape and elastic bands' ERP system

Evil_Goblin

Re: It's there, on the shelf. There, right in front of you, you idiot!

The "funny" thing is that TP are/were in a group with other brands like Wickes etc who do ERP differently and better.

In my experience Infor are bloody horrendous though, presented with a "cake on a plate" - all business units within group had fully mapped processes, existing ERP that worked fine and could have been directly "ported", the only reason for change was ending of support and group HQ wanting a "harmonised" system, Infor took 3 years and then bottled it at 75% done...

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

Evil_Goblin

Re: State Aid? Trump??!

Close, Farage/Bank's infamous campaign was "If you hate Turks then vote Leave"

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Evil_Goblin

Re: Now that's a title

Or someone capable of reformatting and re-installing Windows for Battlegroups while under fire...

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

Evil_Goblin

Yeah defo 3210 was the common one - before that I remember having a motorola - the M3788 or something, the one where if the batteries died you could pop out the rechargeable battery pack and put AAs in to keep you going.

Those things were unbelievable, I dropped it off a bridge onto a busy dual carriageway once, it gone run over by a couple of cars before I could safely retrieve it, and still worked...

UK national debt hits 1.46 Apples – and weighs as much as 2 billion adult badgers

Evil_Goblin

Re: To put that in context

Sorry, realised you were working out how long to accrue, and I was working out how long to pay off...

Evil_Goblin

Re: To put that in context

I would suggest you've done something wrong on your spreadsheet then...

Even ignoring interest, £2,000,000,000,000 divided by £365,000,000 gives 5479.5 years

Evil_Goblin

Re: So it goes

But NZ only has a population of 5m and most of it is in relatively low density accommodation compared to Europe / UK etc - all much easier to deal with.

Not denying that Ms Arden has certainly made a great fist of it and showed more leadership that most of the rest of the world, but circumstances have definitely helped.

Evil_Goblin

Having seen the amount of incompetent people who have been safely "employed" on HS2 already, I think that if that £110bn is keeping them out of the wider world of work for the next decade then that is money well spent.

Ultimately all these big infrastructure projects are just ways of getting around state aid rules and funnel public money to the private sector. The (non)delivery or success of the final output is somewhat irrelevant.

Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing ... and Victory!

Evil_Goblin

Re: Cambridge

Ah yes, one of the three great Universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Hull...

A volt from the blue: Samsung reportedly ditches wall-wart from future phones

Evil_Goblin

Yes but then how many people unplug their wall warts when not in use?

The only concern with them I have is that heat management is more of an issue, and there is no quick means of isolation if it all starts getting a bit warm, whereas if things start getting a bit melty with a wall wart you can switch it off / whip it out.

We'll pay £400k for a depth charge-proof robot submarine, says UK's Ministry of Defence

Evil_Goblin

Re: You won't get many moneies for those peanuts

£400k would fund a 2 year PhD program rather handsomely though

High-flying Microsoft exec jumps to Magic Leap as CEO. No, we haven't got that the wrong way round

Evil_Goblin

Elop MkII - what is the 2020s equivalent of burning platforms, collapsing clouds?

A bad day in New Zealand: Rocket Lab's 13th mission ends in failure

Evil_Goblin

I didn't catch sight of the altitudes involved when the stage starts flinging spent batteries everywhere, is that high enough to be a good idea?

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Evil_Goblin

Re: Radio 4 LW?

For "home" series TMS is usually available on R4 LW.

Many car radios do still have LW these days, they just don't break it out as a separate selection to AM/MW anymore, so you just hit AM, and keep scrolling on down to 198.

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

Evil_Goblin

Re: "We were pissed at the bought of being merely bid fodder."

For quite a while UK govt had more faith in Germans (particularly) but to a lesser extent French and Italians actually delivering the thing that was procured, hence not using the minimum local content stuff

Evil_Goblin

Re: It was ever thus

I would argue that there was a slight failing on behalf of your bid teamm not to understand the situation here.

Having been on both sides of that situation before in past lives, our bid teams were very good at researching our competitors and picking out if any of the unique features that only our competitors had appeared into a tender spec. If they were there, then that tender had been "got" by a competitor, so we would just stick in a token effort so we stay on the framework rather than go all out.

If not then go all out to win. We also worked hard to improve our market and business intelligence to try and get in ahead of tender in the future.

Segway to Heaven: Mega-hyped wonder-scooter that was going to remake city transport to cease production

Evil_Goblin

Re: I look forward to the time.

I was asked recently if my use of segue rather than Segway was an autocorrect error...

845GB of racy dating app records exposed to entire internet via leaky AWS buckets

Evil_Goblin

Re: Herpes Dating?

These days it'd be courier, sad times...

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Evil_Goblin

Re: Next great idea

Kyocera do a decent colour laser/scanner/copier with pretty much all the bells and whistles for under £300 these days, comes with enough toner for 1200 pages straight out the box as well.

EU aviation wonks give all-electric training aeroplane the green light – but noob pilots only have 50 mins before they have to land it

Evil_Goblin

Re: Boost from Solar?

Re-generative props? :D

Climb up to altitude, throw a suitable hefty switch to switch your electric drivetrain into charge mode, then dive for all your worth, pull up into zoom, throw switch again to get power back up to altitude. Rinse and repeat... Sick bags provided...

joke obvs, just in case...

Microsoft tweaks its 'New Outlook' for Mac – but no support for Exchange on-premises yet

Evil_Goblin

"like Exchange pubic folders"

YAY! It's Friday!

Booo - it got corrected :(

If Daddy doesn't want me to touch the buttons, why did they make them so colourful?

Evil_Goblin

Re: Many years ago...

Poor tradesman, must have been rather sore... fnarr fnarr....

Latest NHS IT revolution is failing to learn lessons from the last £10bn car crash

Evil_Goblin

Re: There are simpler ways to transfer public money to private companies

Giving it directly breaks EU state aid rules...

Evil_Goblin

Re: No one seems to understand who is responsible for what ...

Precisely, you can't "digitise" business processes until those processes are fit for purpose, and clearly understood, documented, and accepted by all

Dude, where's my laser?

Evil_Goblin

Re: Not unbelievable

"A good friend of mine has a brain the size of a planet and does some very sciency stuff for a government, he often misses the mundane in pursuit of the arcane.

I think it is because the bleedin' obvious is so obvious its ignored right to the point where it buggers something up."

It's also invariably because the bleeding obvious isn't interesting enough to be considered, that's left for the applications team afterwards :)

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

Evil_Goblin

Re: Massive invasion of privacy

Hitler never won enough votes to get elected into power, Nazi vote was in fact starting to fall in November 1932 (lost 35 seats), compared to 1930 and the earlier 1932 election.

No party had enough votes to form a government, so it was backroom dealings with Papen and Hindenburg that gave Hitler the chancellorship as part of a coalition with DNVP. Hitler then outmaneuvered Papen and started taking control. Despite all this (election tampering, state violence, terror campaign etc) Nazis still only secured ~44% of the vote in March 1933 so had to maintain the coalition.

Hitler then required a 2/3rds majority for the legislation to become a dictator so used emergency powers to arrest all 81 Communist Party representatives, and bar opponents from entering, and thus pass the Enabling Act, which made him a dictator..

The factory workers, the railwaymen, the labourers, the ship-builders, they were not enough...

Microsoft attempts to up its Teams game with new features while locked-down folk flock to rival Zoom... warts and all

Evil_Goblin

Re: Neither one thing nor t'other

Chat window does that because it is useful for recurring meetings that use the same "instance" you can see when new team members join, temporary presenters leave etc. Agree could be handled better though.

Browsery bit will invariably be due to bad set up as you suggest, or using on prem Exchange, rather than an O365 cloudy one, which integrates and plays a lot more nicely.

Evil_Goblin

Re: More than four concurrent videos

What sort of gauche nouveau riche allows their children to ride ponies on the terrace?

Pony club is strictly paddock darling, and preferably someone else's to provide some peace and quiet away from the entitled heirs and heiresses...

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Evil_Goblin

I wish, seeing that thundering into the blue yonder would cheer me right up...

Rocket Lab wants to break free, hopes next mission is more 'A Kind Of Magic' than 'Another One Bites The Dust'

Evil_Goblin

Re: Ring any bells?

An old university colleague is now a structural engineer in "Persia" - whenever a new bridge is built, the chief engineer has to be the first to drive across it.

Obviously not as risky these days as it used to be, but still a laudable ambition.

Post Office burned £100m in UK taxpayer cash on Horizon IT scandal legal fees, MPs told

Evil_Goblin

As an IT rag, a bit of back ground on Horizon and what it was originally procured for and intended to do, and then how and why it wasn't used for that, and ended up being foisted on the Post Office at all would be a good article...

It is 50 years since Blighty began a homegrown and all-too-brief foray into space

Evil_Goblin

Re: Black arrow is red and silver?

Quiet you with your sensible explanations...

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

Evil_Goblin

Re: Maybe the FBU shouldn't have sabotaged FiReControl then

Because they aim to build enough inertia so that no-one can contemplate cancelling it...

Private equity ponies up £2m to help launch satellites from sunny Shetland by next year

Evil_Goblin

Re: Ideal

Come friendly malfunctioning vertically launched rockets and fall on Slough?

Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim

Evil_Goblin

Re: Judgement

Who said that?

Smartwatch owners love their calorie-counting gadgets, but they are verrry expensive

Evil_Goblin

I'm waiting for a smart pocket watch or a smart fob watch...

Parks and recreation escalate efforts to take back control of field terrorised by thug geese

Evil_Goblin

Re: "if there's something winged in your neighbourhood, who you gonna call?"

Paw Patrol downvoted as I'm convinced that my toddler uses it as a form of anti-parent psychological warfare

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