* Posts by A.P. Veening

4090 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2018

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: re: He can't be at the front of the room if he is that stupid

Because it's a write-only file. Everyone knows that.

O? Ever hear of printer feedback? Like low on ink?

A.P. Veening Silver badge
Joke

Re: "It's still maintained! But it's old,"

So, which came first: chicken or egg? (hot tip - there is no controversy)

Safety, safety always comes first.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Whatever point you think you're making, racism doesn't apply to C vs. Rust in the kernel. Lines of code aren't people.

You are correct that it isn't racism, it is something even worse, religious bigotry.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Extra points for the last successful full-scale DR exercise..

Within a given time frame like a half or full year.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

A.P. Veening Silver badge

My wife will have to ask her work's desktop service desk team for help from now on...

That is their job. I've long ago learned to leave problems where they belong. Work problems belong at work, not at home.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Mint FTW

Still haven't decided on an email client.

I would recommend Thunderbird as it is multiplatform.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Friends & Family are all Tech Illiterate

Wrong Windows version.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Not "Fixing", Exactly

4) If they refuse, escalate, escalate, escalate.

Wrong, after the first escalation, make sure the system crashes to a state needing the backups.

And make sure as many people as possible know, there are no backups and it is because of this person...

Elementary.

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Germany

Unfortunately, Germany is probably one of the very few countries where this can happen.

As a first estimate, there are at least 26 other countries where this can happen. And for those same 26 countries, it is now precedent.

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Excel can also be unhelpfully helpful...

Then save as Excel xlsx

So far I agree with you, is convenient for those tortured souls who have to use Excel.

and continue in Excel.

Why would you torture yourself when you already have LibreOffice.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: AND / OR

And depending on the region or country, the counting completely goes haywire around 4, 8 or 13 (other numbers available as well, but those are rarer).

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Biden's fault

Why do you think his cabinet will be any more loyal to Trump than he will be to them? Once they are in, their best long term interest is removing him before he can fire them.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

3: Most computers actually didn't store dates as 6 character strings. If you want to store them as efficiently as possible, that isn't the way to do it. That's why, for example, lots of computers ended up displaying the date as 1/1/19100, or 1/1/100, which looks a bit silly, but otherwise isn't a problem.

A six digit number can be stored in 4 bytes using BCD, already an improvement. The most efficient way to store a six digit date is in two bytes (16 bits) with 7 bits for the year (allowing for 127 years from an arbitrary base zero), 4 bits for the month and 5 bits for the day.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Biden's fault

Will be the Standard excuse for however long Trump 2.0 is in power. That could be 2 years or 20 years if he decides for become a real dictator.

I give him about 24 hours before Vance pulls 25A4.

LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

A.P. Veening Silver badge

I'd say Dave Plummer has some objections to the PDP11 being dropped in the river.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Benjamin Franklin

Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead...

Unless the third is a politician.

Report claims FAA ignores most whistleblower complaints

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Seems like EASA should open a hotline for Boeing and FAA whistleblowers.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

A.P. Veening Silver badge

One call out for under 3 minutes on site.

I hope you billed that client for at least half a day.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: There are no bones in ice cream. . .

It's a common mistake, but JCL was only used in IBM operating systems. There's no indication that this problem occurred on an IBM system.

I only have experience with IBM operating systems (at least where mainframes are concerned) and mainframe without other specifications usually (at least in my experience) means IBM.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Shouty people annoy me

Shouty people trigger my stubborn streak. I'm unlikely to go the extra bit for them. Ever.

I am likely to go the extra bit for them ... but not in the direction they expect. I am a programmer by trade, but I qualify as operator on some systems as well, so they will get the complete BOFH and BPFH treatment when I deem it is warranted.

No need for anonymous posting as those who recognize this fall into two categories:

Colleagues who completely agree and shouty people whose parents weren't even introduced to each other and who will still get screaming nightmares, leaving them unable to do anything about this.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: There are no bones in ice cream. . .

Probably in the JCL surrounding the FORTRAN program.

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Interesting stuff

Also, experience tells you that if it's one of those options you get on propitiatory pro-sumer gear says "automatically do magic fixes to my network and make things brilliant, with some mesh and stuff", treat the damn thing the same way you would a land mine.

I'd say with a lot more care, land mines are simple and easy to understand.

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

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: See...

I've lost count of the number of actual death threats I've encountered in IT help centres, when someone is asked to reboot their PC.

seriously..actual death threats.

"Enjoy your last couple of minutes in office, this conversation has been recorded and is now being forwarded to HR".

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: The other side....

* Bit of trivia: Being sacked referred to being handed your tools (in a sack) and told to go ply your trade elsewhere. Being fired referred to having your tools destroyed by fire so you couldn't continue working in that trade any longer without going back through apprenticeship to acquire the tools again.

That bit of trivia in and of itself deserves way more than the single upvote I can give you.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

I'm not sure I want to go down that rabbit warren...

I'm completely sure I don't want to go down that rabbit warren...

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Oh dear, what a shame...

....looks like it won't be "accidentally" downgraded to Windows 11 without my never forthcoming consent.

FTFY ;)

And I feel the same way about it.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: I think it is an excellent requirement

Thanks, that makes two of us.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Wow serious stuff

Please don't insult shit, that still has use as rose fertilizer.

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Telephone Systems

Carpet & Lime is far too good

But the carpet and lime isn't for them, it is for the traceless removal of them.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Many solutions are "Common Sense"

Or as my dad would say "Common sense: rare enough to be a superpower"

The problem with common sense is that sense never ain't common - From the notebooks of Lazarus Long

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Ah. The 20th hole.

And the 21st and 22nd.

Senator accuses sloppy domain registrars of aiding Russian disinfo campaigns

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Domain names are the wild west

If so many individuals are that gullible to fake news, what or how do you address that glaringly obvious issue?

The correct answer is to improve education, something severely lacking in the USA, judging by the article even at governmental level.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: .us / .com

The real difficulties would be getting people to notice the difference between .us and .ru and at this point, some US citizens would decide .ru increases credibility.

That problem is even worse with .su (Soviet Union), which is still active.

Windows 11 24H2 disk space hoarding a 'reporting error'

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Just another reason

To avoid Windows 11. Either it is reporting inaccurately, which leaves one to wonder what else it is reporting wrong, or it is hoarding the space, which is also not acceptable.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

A.P. Veening Silver badge

into a power socket with the switch in the off position.

Only possible in the UK.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Regomized as "Clark"?

There must be a joke there, but I Kent understand it.

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: He should have offered him

At least until he missed the holiday party and the CEO started getting suspicious!

You are overlooking the minor detail that at that time the CEO would also have been replaced by an AI (and Simon also collecting that salary while running it on company resources).

After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: It's the TPM that kills it for me

I killed the TPM to avoid W11.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

Generally takes me a week or so, when visiting, to get back in the groove. But I still read it on a daily basis and can generally insta-context switch.

It takes me about the same amount of time too for German and insta-context switching takes about the same time. I am for all practical purposes completely bilingual Dutch-English, but I don't have enough opportunity to keep fluent in German.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

I never said there weren't, just that they were (and still are) pretty rare. Most are concentrated in linguistics and IT.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

I was cheap when I did that. Once I was done with it, I got a lot less cheap (and worth every last penny according to the guy who re-hired me after a two year absence to broaden my horizons).

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

<IBM ... well documented</i>

I've always found the IBM documentation to be top notch, learned a lot from it. When I started as a programmer (a long time ago) on my first job, I would have some of the IBM documentation on my desk to leave through before starting the workday, during breaks and at the end of the workday before catching the bus.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

barrelling down an autobahn at some insane speed ... entirely from memory and a second language. Much impressed!

The first two I can believe, the third on top of the first two requires sufficient command of that second language to be classified as completely bi-lingual, pretty rare for Germans. If true, I am extremely impressed.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Translated : I've helped a number of people through the window on the 30th floor, but they just keep on falling...

I first read that last word with an "i" for the first "l".

However, upon consideration, there should be some of them that don't fail and rise to Heaven. The others will keep falling for a while longer.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Never for rudeness, but..

Another nice one, based on an old commercial, is I3O for Intel Inside, Idiot Outside.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Lovely.

I had more or less the same problem. I used a label writer to create a label "Any Key" and stuck it on his space bar.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Looking at the personality traits and skills of the “young coder” with today’s understanding would lead one to think about Neurodivergence.

All top coders I ever met were (and most still are) neurodivergent with most of them somewhere on the ASD scale.

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Never for rudeness, but..

(the ban also did very little to prevent me from frequently pointing out that the root cause of any particular problem could typically be found weighing the requester's chair down; a trait which has served me very well after naturally drifting into my current career in IT Security Manglement)

So the standard ID-ten-T error with the usual code of either PEBKAC or PICNIC.

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

A.P. Veening Silver badge

The only downside is one needs to take bets as to when the next round of stupid will happen. It's almost time for the big harvesters to bring in the maize......

Just point a (hidden) cam at it.

Once the bills start hurting, they will mend their ways.

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

A.P. Veening Silver badge

Re: Cameras, Too

Somebody who was 16 when the ribbon came out is now halfway through their life expectancy.

That would be true for the USA, less so for the civilized world with a somewhat higher life expectancy (and a slightly later introduction of the aforementioned and accursed ribbon).