Posts by The Oncoming Scorn

Microwaved fish could help scientists create sustainable LEDs

Douglas

Glow Long & Thanks To All The Fish!

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Re: Deliberate sabotage but necessary

I'd have done the Dean first, unless he was Linux evangelist.

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

Re: OG

I preferred The OA.

Microsoft asks staff to think twice before submitting expenses

Quirky Fare Deals

I've had similar, when booking a trip on a bank holiday weekend via train, that for some quirk of circumstances never duplicated the trainlline.com offered me a first class ticket from Paddington to home for 10 quid less than the regular quoted price.

I can only assume the cost reduction was down to having to share a carriage with Noel Edmonds*.

*In the continued absence of Paris, could we have a beardy icon (It could double up as Sir Pterry).

Former Colleagues & Bean Counters Cutting Expenses

Got moved to a company that underbid the existing MSP, one ended up on less but was able to work out of one office & later WFH during Covid, the other was given the same rate +$15K (Taxable) to cover his out of pocket expenses, in bigger cities, they expected field calls to be done using public transport.

In that situation & kinda under the gun to remain employed, any trips to the wilder regions of Southern Alberta, would be coordinated to do as many as possible calls in one day/region.

A different companies wizard cost cutting wheeze, was to move all but one of the former field staff in house (No relocation) to corporate to assume our duties (not in Corporate) & send one person out per week to one region across three Canadian provinces for field support.

Re: "think twice before submitting expenses"

I got sent to the US for training on a contract, I invoiced for the travel insurance, airport parking, mileage, temp phone sim with US number which was cheaper than them paying the roaming etc.

The first of these was rationalised & agreed with If I am injured or incapacited while on your watch, are you going to cover my medical expenses, they were extra-ordinary out of pocket (Icon) expenses that would not be covered under my normal working\operating enviroment.

The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15

Re: MS 365 Personal

Grey Market license for about $5CDN for Office Pro 2021 works for me on each machine that requires it.

Sign into my Microsoft account for extra features - No thanks.

While we are on the subject why does Autosave require......no demand it's stored in OneDrive.

Barclays inks multi-year deal with Microsoft, starts rolling out Teams

Re: first you work for barclays..

How long a list would you like?

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

I/We should each set up a domain, with a catchall address for email receipts & spam, then for every retailer give them a "custom" one that's caught by the catchall & something detrimental or negative to the retailer concerned & instantly proves if our details have been passed onto a third party....err valued partners & service providers.

[e-mail]

Re: Romaine calm

It's been scheduled for Friesday.

Northrop Grumman to use Firefly Aerospace tech in its de-Russianized Antares

It's A Shame Gerry Anderson Isn't With Us

He created a mashup ship with left over bits (& cast...errr crew) from Space:1999 called the Altares.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: You're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and be able to take over at any time.

if it drives into a chasm, it will (hopefully) only squish the occupants.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my father. Not screaming and terrified like his passengers! - Bob Monkhouse

Cruise Control - Long Journeys

I have a older, not exactly green truck which I actually enjoy driving as opposed to being in Robocar, I usually find a optimum speed\efficiency (Usually just above the limit), set CC, then just watch the road & steer.

Saves fuel, the accelerator creep & associated speeding tickets.

US Space Force deploys robot dogs at Cape Canaveral base

Should have called it......

Fied0209.

India’s latest rocket flies but payloads don't prosper

Re: Priorities

That has all the hallmarks of a Douglas or Pterry* style of writing.

*New Icon please as Paris has left us with a gaping hole.

Re: Caveated

Ghee!

It was the early AM for me when I wrote that, korma do better at that hour.

Caveated

It's late here but

Biriyani beware!

Major IT outage forces UK emergency call handlers to use 'pen and paper'

Re: BRING BACK PARIS!

He's right......

Now that there's a gaping hole in the icons available See - Ic.....Ohhh!

Can we have a TARDIS/DNA/Pterry one's?

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Ex Sister

Had this habit of turning off her cellphone at 8pm at night (if on as she leaves it off until she needs it. Email & FB are out due to paranoia).

This is incredibly annoying when you land at Gatwick on a Sunday Morning, try to tell her you will be late due to a missed train at 9.30am. having arrived in our home city station to find out where she & our father is, discover after a taxi to my hotel & walking into the two local bars, that they are in a bar that was 4 minutes away from the station, wondering where I am & why I haven't called.

Decided not to ring me at 4am (Local time) to tell me our father passed a year later, but did decide to finally make contact at 4pm (Just before she went to bed). Cancelled the sale of the family home, by stomping into the Estate Agents & verbally instructing us & then went dark for 36 hours. Agreed a price so she & her partner could buy it & 24 hours later went to the estate agent to put the house back on the market, thus concluding 50 hours of stress.

*Ex as the final straw was when she took legal action against me 9 years later.

Re: As an application developer ...

Would be nice if error messages popped up & said in large friendly letters.

DON'T PANIC - PLEASE SCREENSHOT THIS ERROR MESSAGE BEFORE YOU LOG A TICKET

China's Xiaomi teases tech to control smart homes with brain waves

Re: What's the breakthrough?

With Alexa you don't need to touch it.

That leads to very interesting arguments at home as to who fiddled with the AC temp again.

Bottom half of the house experiences a new ice-age, upstairs doesn't.

Icon - This works for me on the cooling stakes

Spent Chinese rocket booster splashes down over Southeast Asia

Re: Can you please stop using the word "slam"?

I for one say Criticise.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

No No Not The Mind Probe (Psychometric Testing)

My interest in a role falls to lower than whale shit when presented with a "short test" & being put through scenarios that resemble IELTs exam questions relating to shopping\retail (Customer handling\sales figures) roles for a IT role or ones that give you 50 Mensa type questions* that you must score x% in order to proceed to the next level (Of more testing), while stating it doesn't matter how many you do in the time allowed typically 35 minutes** but will fail you anyway.

*Saying that you can do it on smartphones, where you can barely see all the patterns in the sequence at one time.

**If I am ever in that position again, I'm going to answer just the first 1 after spending the whole time on the answer.

Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols closes hailing frequencies

Re: UK Born in 1966

I remember a teacher at school asking for our favorite actress, most of us chose a Hollywood name. One stated Elizabeth Adare, the teachers response of who the heck is that & his reply of "Shes one of the Tomorrow People" reduced the class to hysterics. He was a bit of a case however & it was no surprise when he was revealed to bat for the other side though.

Icon as he was a total Tomorrow People fanboy to such a extent, that he made us Doctor Who fans look positively normal.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

Re: Quite apart from online...

The major problem - one of the major problems - for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it. Or, rather, of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarise: it is a well-known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should, on no account, be allowed to do the job.

To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. And so this is the situation we find. A succession of Galactic Presidents who so much enjoy the fun and palaver of being in power that they never really notice that they’re not.

And somewhere in the shadows behind them, who?

Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to, can be allowed to?

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Wow

As my father the carpenter used to say it stood for Made For Idiots.

Re: Ebay

I usually buy a lot of my second hand IT kit from a disposal center that lists on eBay or the Grubberment place 7 mins drive away from the first place, every time I visit the big smoke.

They used to have a front shop\collection type area, but thanks to Covid that's been closed & we now have to pay $5 local pick up fee instead per sale item..

Re: Comments to On-Call articles

I recall a OEM (back in the days of yore) I think it was actually Evesham Micros, if not Dell or Gateway, received a phone call needing & asking for fresh copies of the install media, serial number was given & a undertaking to ship to the provided address.

What they got was Plod turning up instead, the system had been sold about about 5 weeks earlier & & stolen two weeks later. The sales rep had noted that the serial number was too new for the purchaser to have misplaced the install media & the name & address did not match the original invoice.

Re: Hot stuff

...especially when 240\110V is a constant supply.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: Dubbed Content

I was thinking The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe actually (& not that much dubbing really required, except for the flashback scenes). I can hear the music now.

Robert Hoffman sadly passed 2 days ago.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2022/07/27/robert-hoffmann-actor-who-starred-classic-tv-series-adventures/

Re: You know you're old when...

....to the teasmaid?

Sinderella - Pissed

Are you a goblin?

Well I was last night, but what I do in my own time is my business.

*Ex Mrs Oncoming Scorn was related to the diminutive one in the NSFW video.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Or the things been plugged/unplugged so many times its basically fucked & now it's time if you're very lucky to start doing the same to the second USB-C port if you are lucky enough to have one on board..

Hot toast, heavily buttered (& melting) & then the Marmite is spread.

With a hot cuppa tea to follow.

If you want to do something correctly, you have to do it yourself.......

There is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter

Re: Translation.

Somewhere in the bowels of El Reg (Who Me\On-Call?) there is a story of updating a printer driver on a remote users PC & printer over some issue. The remote tech had tried every driver without resolving the issue to the users satisfaction, as he reached the end of his tether he tried a different driver from the norm & said "OK lets see how this one is!" prior to hitting apply.

It's still the same!

I haven't sent the page yet..........Are you still looking at the first printout?

Yes - Why?

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Re: Hmmm...Bouncing

Remember the moon mobiles used in Captain Scarlet?

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gerryanderson/images/f/f7/Moon_mobile_%28crater_101%29.png/revision/latest?cb=20181114234528

James Webb, Halley's Comet may be set for cosmic dust-up

Re: Danger Will Robinson!

Only one?

Lightweight!

I Wish This Was A Joke.

but a certain MSP partly named after mountain in Japan having won a certain contract for Tier 2 local support here in Canadaland, bid so low (So they could have both T1 & T2) wanted its support techs to travel to site by bus\c-train with parts & tools.

One of my former colleagues was given $15K a year extra just to cover the Southern Alberta Area with his car* as there wasn't any public transport that would reach some of the Governmental offices & meeting SLA.. I keep getting recruiters on the phone telling me I would be ideal for a role & would I be interested, the rate is laughable & my response is usually along the line.

This wouldn't be for Fu******* & GOA would it?

Errr yes

& the rate is still laughable I presume?

Errr yes

Please call me back when the rate is worthy of me.

*That was it no further reimbursement

Is the Apple car real? These patents suggest yes

& The Inevitable

when it brakes* down Apples response will be "You're driving it wrong!"

*Pun intended.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Wibbly Wobbly

I took a job\contract closer to home with a pay cut, which cut down on my expenses of working in London, so the status quo was maintained.

Around the same time, the Met Office relocated from Reading & the local rag ran another of its infamous misjudged articles*.

They focused on a family that claimed since relocating they could barely afford to live in Devon & that the wife had to have taken on a part time job to make ends meet, while mentioning the husbands salary which was about 7 times higher than the average employee in the area, that they had sold their house in Reading (When the housing market was booming), while seemingly oblivious to the fact they had bought the biggest house they could afford in a affluent area a few miles out of the already expensive small market town.

*Another infamous one was plying for the sympathy for a group of teenage girls (Photographed In school uniform, despite being in the middle of the summer holidays - I'd loved to have been a fly on the headmaster's wall on the first day back in September), that were caught vandalising a local park at around 11.30 at night by the cops, while still in cells at 2am awaiting for parents to sober up\get taxi's to collect them. They could hear the sounds of other detainees & claimed they were scared they would be raped & assaulted in their (locked) cells. It's funny how the inevitable backlash in the letters stated funny that they weren't scared of the same happening in a unlit park late at night when 6 local pubs would be kicking out it's customers & that they were in the wrong & should stop trying to wriggle out of the charges (One girl at least had the good sense not to be interviewed or photographed).

Re: We outsourced to India

Final rule: You're not paid to think ( ie make decisions ), you're paid to do. Just get on with it.

Some years back, I had a conversation with a engineer on a series of boards I was testing & failing & he told me to think about the issue & I quoted "I was told I'm not paid to think, shortly after I started here".

Who told you that?

You did actually!

He had the grace to apologise, by which time I was ready to icon (About 15 months before the factory did the same to its employee's).

Re: B.I.T.A. & Twisted

It might explain a lot about the ex Mrs Oncoming Scorn literacy difficulties to be honest.

I'm starting to wonder if there was a increase in dyslexia type symptoms, over the years it was in use.

B.I.T.A. & Twisted

When I went to primary school, we were taught to read through i.t.a. (Initial Teaching Alphabet), which was great. /sarcasm

Except for the fact I'd already been taught to read basic words from the newspaper by my father & was confused why what I was previously reading correctly was now not correct at school, consequently I was held back, I think by the second year where the teacher was writing everything twice on the board, with one stream copying "normal" from the board & those still "stuck" & not advancing on the i.t.a version.

One day I simply decided I'd had enough, viewed i.t.a as too hard to copy\complex\beneath me & advanced myself, the teacher called me up to do one of those spot checks at her desk on what we were doing, told me I was naughty & shouldn't change over like that without her telling me to do so, to which I responded I can read what's on both lines, she sent me back to my desk I don't recall if she told me to use one over the other or left it open ended (She was of the older variety of school teacher & was probably glad there was one less to migrate).

I think I completely wiped everything of i.ta. from my mind the moment I migrated & started walking away from her desk. Not another word was said on the matter & I don't recall when i.t.a dropped off the blackboard completely (Sneaking suspicion it was Year 3).

While I consider myself unaffected by the whole debacle & had developed a love of reading*, I have encountered others who were more severely handicapped by it.

*Helped a lot by a certain range of novelised TV scripts by the publisher Target.

This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

Re: Conversion One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.

The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.

Icon for Sir Pterry.

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

Re: I'd say that ....

"Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time."

Which is hardly surprising, when you live in a desert hut by yourself.

Re: Nothing so severe

Paddington Station, there was a young lady station announcer, whose voice just dripped honey with a blend of UK\US accents, asking politely if passengers waiting to board would wait to allow disembarking passengers off first, I saw people (Including me) stop & stand still just to listen to her.

The other station announcer on the First Great Western Routes had a voice that was partly natural sounding, partly artificial, I always felt he was the voice artist understudy for Zen in Blakes 7.

Outlook email users alerted to suspicious activity from Microsoft-owned IP address

Re: Dumbf***ery abound

Not too many ads here, despite the fact I'm at work & can't add UBlock etc.

Just because you failed doesn't mean you weren't right

Re: " including the country they were in had it been 1945 or earlier!!"

The Italian Equivalent of the SAS's motto is "Who Cares Who Wins!".

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Re: Extinction!

So do I.

A colleague of mine on the HNC course back in the 80's had already seen that trend happening with his employer (A local old school TV Shop) equipping his "younger techs" with the boards required & if that failed to work bring the set back to him. He was the last of the old style apprentices.