Posts by KarMann

Showing the Windows 10 desktop was the yeast they could do

It goes against the grain to stoop to these things that could barley be called puns.

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

High-level get-there-itis?

"They're ready to move faster... we're ready to shortcut wherever we can in order to get a module up there."

Yeah, certainly, nothing's ever gone badly in spaceflight just because they cut a few corners to get things up in time, right? What's the worst that could happen? -->

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Did somebody say #1974Cortina$$?

Using a coveted old car in one's account info? Why, I never!

(I may have some accompanying complementary domain names, as well.)

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Re: Ha ha ha ha ha

At least they can still produce their own projectors!

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Re: The story of my life

I am glad I had just set down my coffee before the implicit context of that clicked for me. Crisis averted. -->

You keep using that word…

"Today is real progress in our mission to bring Discovery home, and I look forward to welcoming the shuttle home to Space City soon."

This must be some strange new definition of the word 'home' with which I wasn't previously familiar.

Iran war wreaking havoc on shipping and air cargo, could create global delays

Re: "four to five weeks"

I'm assuming it's on the same time scale as 'we'll have a big, beautiful health plan to replace the ACA ObamaCare *spits* in just two weeks.'

Hardly anybody bought Samsung's last smartphones for AI. It hopes this year's models change that

Re: So if the privacy display

Reading between the lines, I think the 'narrow' and 'wide' pixels refers to the beam emitted by them, rather than the actual linear or area size of the pixels, and wouldn't affect the resolution or PPI (but very possibly the brightness, but I suppose that's sort of the point). I may be wrong about that, though.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

"I'll have Argument From Incredulity Fallacy for 600, Alex."

"Alex, I'd like to take the Fallacy Fallacy for 800."

Alex: "You guys know I'm dead, right?"

Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle

Re: Criminals 'Lie' ... Politicians 'Mis-speak' !!!

Toe-mah-toe.

Toe-may-toe.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Hilarious!

It's less hypothetical than that, even. There was the recent emergency patch of the Airbus 320 family in December (or maybe November?) to make them more resilient in the event of such a bit flip, after it was suspected that just such a thing had caused a sudden loss of altitude whilst otherwise peacefully cruising along at speed.

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

2a) One of the screws to dismantle that half of the machine will only be accessible after that first screw has been removed.

Or one could wear a bow tie. Ask me how I know.

(Although mine was more for motorbike reasons than printer, to be honest, but the same principle applies.)

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: 280-350g seems far off for a nipple pastie

Most pasties have negligible weight, the biggest I could find were 60g (per pair, I think. It wasn’t clear).

I don't see what their opacity (or lack thereof) has to do with either their weight or their mass.

Re: Proper Pasty

Am I to understand that you are one of those poor benighted souls who doesn't know their silicon from their silicone? Or are you under the impression that the Merkins' knockers are augmented with microchip implants rather than the usual kind?

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: Workig for a Dialup ISP in the 90's...

ExecPC, by any chance? Sounds about right, especially with the selling to Voyager.net in 2000.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: KDE

I think I started with FVWM or similar, then went Enlightenment for a while, and then maybe 5 years of Gnome, until something in my user config go so bloated or crufty that it didn't work anymore after an upgrade, and I decided to give the KDE a try, rather than immediately try to isolate the config problem. Still on KDE now, 20-ish years later.

Re: Hipsters indeed

You're so cruel. I accidentally failed to pack my MX Anywhere on my current trip, and have to choose between laptop's trackpad or a wired Dell mouse that just isn't doing it for me, and makes a horribly scrapy noise on the desk when I move it. I miss my mouse. But, we should be reunited in just around 30 hours, at long last!

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: TSR

Yeah, things just haven't been the same since WotC took over.

Tunnels and -->

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

Re: 44 gallon drums

The US inch used to be thousands of a mm longer than the british inch…

I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed if the inch were metres shorter than it used to be, or if it used to be metres longer than it is, whichever way you want to look at it.

Re: 44 gallon drums

I very much memorised 2.54000504 cm back in secondary school, enough so that *mumble* years later, I'm not even going to double-check. That's what the old inch was.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

No, Kindles are even worse.

Re: "an electrician will trust that you've turned the switch off"

I realise 'attempted manslaughter' is a contradiction in terms, but sometimes, I do think there should be a place for it as a criminal charge.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Eventually, I inadvertently pruned the wire outside instead of the climbing rose.

'Inadvertently'. It's OK. We've all been there.

Re: Go, Look, See

I see what you did there. Have my upvote.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: Hopefully...

Do they make handcuffs small enough, though?

US extradites Ukrainian woman accused of hacking meat processing plant for Russia

Replacement windows expenses add up over time.

Hegseth needs to go to secure messaging school, report says

Re: When this administration fails

Thing is, this being Florida, I'm really not sure whether 'boas' was a typo or not.

The icing on the cake

I believe Hegseth is characterising this as 'total exoneration'. He has learnt from his master.

Pension portal launch fail sends Capita running to Microsoft for help

Dept. of Redundancy Department

They really want you to know that they had a backlog to deal with, but they really, REALLY want you to know that it was "the largest ever on-time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK."

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

Re: Cruise Missile

For certain values of 'land'.

Re: US space ambitions shrinking

No, I don't think we're there anymore.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

It's been a while, but my main intro to getting really into the computer tech stuff was back around 1997, when I had added some RHL dual-boot to a Windows 3.11 system (on that great big whopping 540 MB HDD), and then set about upgrading to Windows 95. In a very similar vein to Groo's, that upgrade somehow reset the partition tables. I was stuck running off of floppies until I managed to find enough information about partition tables online to go in and edit the binary data (and dd it back into place, etc.) and actually managed to recover all the partitions (as a first-time Linux installer, I had put in way too many partitions for every purpose, even a separate /lib partition if you can believe that, and I'm still not entirely sure how that worked).

Doubly appropriate icon is appropriate -->

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Pretty sure they're talking about B&N, given the 'sounds like a law firm' footnote.

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

Well, by two o'clock, it's no longer breakfast, it's lunch or tea, anyway. But you could probably have had five breakfasts by then if you really put your head down and get to it.

Be prepared!

[F]eeling around in my back pocket to see if I've got my Swiss Army gutting knife.

Good thing. You never know when you're going to need to gut a Swiss Army.

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

Re: I have one question

I'm pretty sure Headley had left out the '/s' tag as being too obvious.

Dev's last-day-of-contract code helped to crash app used by 350,000 people

Re: Reading between the lines ...

"This might seem harsh, but remember this would, amongst everything else, be a GDPR violation."

"Could" not "should". There's no mention in the article regarding what data was contained in the database nor what country it occurred in and so may not be covered by GDPR anyway. [emphasis added]

"Would" not "should".

Re: As a long time consultant/contractor

Oh, PLEASE.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Who, me?

I wish I could give you a bonus upvote for use of 'thagomi[sz]e'.

Icon: The only dinosaur left amongst the icons.

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

Re: Prankers

It just came up again for me a day or two ago, and I was referencing the All Your Base XKCD, and I realised that the retro-return-date predicted in the hovertext was 4 years ago, going on 5. Which in turn led me to think of yet another classic, see icon.

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

Re: Outside a very specific computing context

Oh, are we still doing phrasing?

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: I'm Not THAT Guy!

…if you're in then that's for life.

Death will not release you.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Re: Imagine there is a complete outage of a region

Or you should read Jou's comment a bit more closely. Yes, it could be taken as meaning that no one in Europe might be affected, but it can also be read as meaning that one (or you, if you must), in particular, is not affected in Europe. Unless you're just the sort of contrarian who wants to take things the worst way they can be interpreted, which I can appreciate… when there's some comedic value in it.

On a side note, I regret the losses in English of both a meaningful singular/plural second person distinction, and the regular use of 'one' rather than 'you' when one doesn't actually mean the person they're addressing.

Re: Cancer

…for some light bulbs have gone off…

Not sure whether pun intended or unintended.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: 5 year old database?

To be fair, HD didn't specify AD, BC, CE, or BCE.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Re: Feh

By coincidence or not, every time I see your username, I think of Steve Barnes. If you're the type to be re-reading Footfall, I suspect you know whom I mean.

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: "Even a wrong answer is right some of the time"

"even a broken watch is right twice a day"

Technically, no. A watch (or clock, as I've more often heard the phrases) can be broken in many ways, up to and beyond the hands being sheared clean off, where it will never be right. The correct phrase ought to be, 'a stopped {watch,clock} is right twice a day.'