Posts by Ozumo

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

I'd have come in an hour late for every call I'd had.

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

The Hu.

Re: Opinions are like arseholes…

No, opinions are like orgasms - mine is important and I don't really care whether you have one or not.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

" I was in was a fileter lane"

Sounds fishy to me.

Virgin Galactic celebrates flight hiatus with a reverse stock split

"Reverse stock split"!

Taking a parallel from ornithological taxonomy, a "reverse split" is a "lump".

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Re: Golly

Did you get me my cheese whiz, boy?

Musk axes two more senior Tesla leaders, guts public policy team – report

Shooting messengers

Straight out of the autocrat playbook - dismiss the competent in favour of yes-men if they show any sign of dissent.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: "and people can add their private Teslas to the available pool"

Angela Chao already tried that.

Tesla slashes vehicle and self-driving-ish software prices as shares plummet

Imagine how annoyed current owners must be as their residual values drop. Especially leasing companies - how can they set a price if the manufacturer pulls tricks like this?

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: What happened to the truck or its driver?

Faraday cage.

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Re: Ouch

A "revue" -what, with singing, dancing and comedy sketches?

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

At least it was oveur quickly.

NASA pushes back timing of ISS deorbit vehicle contract

Re: Can't we just use Cavorite(tm)?

Paint it pink and install a cheap and simple SEP field.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: Imagine the meetings

Why is it done by single men - too dangerous to risk the married ones?

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Re: Are you sure

Unfortunately you have phrased that so that the answer "Y" could lead to either outcome...

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: coccyx-centered comforts in cold climes

They weren't refusing him banking services - just moving him from Coutts to Natwest with the hoi polloi.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: But surely

Resistance is useless!

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Not a lift but…..

The trick is to give the pole a little twist as you pull it up to break the suction.

Fnarr, fnarr, etc

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: Training?

The BMA is a trade union. Perfectly acceptable to practise without membership.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

But was the diet successful?

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Re: Not just in IT

Was once accosted by a woman in a car park who couldn't get the ignition key to release. The car nerd in me took over - "It's a Saab, you have to put it in reverse". Yup.

Ex-eBay execs jailed for cyberstalking web critics

I'm confused, is the guy's name Bough or Baugh? It changes several times in the article.

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

Re: Government procurement

It is entirely possible that there was absolutely no fraud or corruption on the government side.

It's also entirely possible that bears don't defeacate in the woods, but it isn't where the smart money bets.

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

Nonsense. To properly IMITATE BB, it WOULD have TO capitalize random WORDS.

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

Re: Waste of money

You forgot cooking shows...

Re: The trick is to be the one who buys for the former and resells for the latter...

But which does deteriorate a little, every time you play it.

Elasticsearch server with no password or encryption leaks a million records

So, their POS system was a POS?

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: stupid is as stupid does

What was she pouring over the pages - syrup, cream?

The word is "poring".

The title of your post is most apposite.

No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust

Re: Why Nuke Plants Are A FAIL

You seem obsessed with the Isle of Wight.

Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?

Re: Self-replicating Mikes

Would that be a Mike drop moment?

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: You were lucky

We once ran out of holes. Caused a hell of a kerfuffle until someone found a box of them in the filing cabinet.

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Re: To be fair on BMW

I find a chisel-tip Sharpie works just fine.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Re: But, she did do one good thing

TBF, when you read Carreyrou's book, Murdoch declined to kill the story even though it was clear he would lose a substantial amount of money as a result of its publication.

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

An even more extreme example of what a faulty bulb can lead to is Eastern Airlines flight 401:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

Re: I wait for the statue erected for Ron Jeremy.That one should be exciting ^^

Could be a handy toilet roll holder.

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

Re: Discount Aisle/Cardboard Racking at the supermarket

For gripping very small moles, obvs.

Woman sues McDonald's for $14 after cheeseburger ad did exactly what it's designed to

Cheap advertising

Ronald should pay up - $14 for the amount of publicity they've received seems like a bargain.

Wouldn't be totally surprised to find the whole thing is a put-up job by their marketing people TBH.

Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

Clearly the "can of beer" leaves a lot to be desired as a standardised unit of volume.

How many of these things would fit inside a London Bus?

AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn’t fix for hours due to ‘environmental conditions’ on data centre floor

Re: [citation needed]

And the withdrawal syndrome is invariably fatal.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

I expect we'll get a "Who,me?" in due course.

Watchdog 'enables Tesla Autopilot' with string, some weight, a seat belt ... and no actual human at the wheel

Re: Hmm ...

I remember that. IIRC, the control panel was sited such that the oven was out of sight when was operated. Also the man who got cooked was the father of the operator's fiancee.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

Re: 11 stone..

Makes you wonder who's employing all the averagely dumb software developers, doesn't it?

Re: Not necessarily.

Disappointed that the London Bus doesn't make an appearance there.

'No' does not mean 'yes'... unless you are a scriptwriter for software user interfaces

Re: Pedantry

Coming from a medical (operating theatre) background, I'm very twitchy about using "right" when the meaning is "correct".

"We're amputating the left leg, yes?"

"Right"

"If you say so"

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

Re: Seriously odd

Antelope was not hit by an Exocet but by aircraft-delivered bombs, and was sunk as a result of an explosion caused during an attempt to defuse one of the unexploded bombs.

I was a schoolfriend of the steward killed by the initial bomb impact.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Re: Had a call...

There's a typo in your last line. "email" should read "invoice".

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

What would happen if your name really was Mary Jones-Deceased?

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

0.0197 Waleses.

That's about 22 cricket balls falling from a height of about 5 London buses.

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

Re: Not a high bar.

Might I point out that "Dan" seems oblivious that he was in fact part of that IT prowess?