Posts by KillStuffMount

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

"two slaves attached over RS-232 with no internal storage"

Not much point offering them a cup of tea then.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: A good boss

Not so sure about beer, but I've done the occasional Costco run to bring back goodies for the team.

Dutch insurers demand nudes from breast cancer patients despite ban

A constant stream of boobs.

In every sense.

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Re: My favorite new article

There's an inherent contradiction in the arguments across two posts you've made in the same thread. You denigrate the value of fiat currencies while ignoring or discounting the fact that it's the backing of a national government or the international monetary system that gives fiat currencies their value, while at the same time blaming politicians/governments/monetary systems for letting people lose money on this thing that was supposed to be outside the system and better for it.

You can't have it both ways. Regulation means legitimacy, which was why that was argued against in the case of crypto by serious academics (https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/11/18/dont-regulate-crypto-allow-it-to-implode-says-brandeis-professor-stephen-cecchetti.html). Crypto was always a valueless proposition because it's nothing but a blockchain ledger entry. NFTs themselves weren't even basing their value on the individual piece of "art" to which they were attached, it was the blockchain entry that was the record of, and token for, the supposed value. Now it's all coming tumbling down and there are people such as yourself blaming governments for lack of oversight towards a product whose very proponents didn't want government anywhere near.

Plus crypto has been a pain in the arse for gamers for a few years now, through two bubbles and the ensuing crash. Good riddance.

How to stop a content filter becoming a career-shortening network component

Re: Not an IT issue.

Reasonably certain the evidence would have been further along Moh's scale than simply "firm".

Ahem.

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Re: Tea

If you're taking a witness statement or something and not there to arrest them, usually. Plus each copper will know their tea stops during a night shift and I was warned, under dire sentence, not to mump a colleague's tea stops. The stern advice was to "find your own", so as not to piss off the various security stations dotted around the patch at factories and the like by making them feed and water every random probationer and special who might just be bored/cold/thirsty at 3am.

We were especially told not to take marked vehicles around the circuit at *redacted*, or if we couldn't resist, don't rag road tyres on racing tarmac and leave a vehicle unusable.

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

Re: Social media

Not yet, but sooooooooon [tm]

Three rips up call centre outsourcing contract with Capita 2+ years early

Inclined to agree. Used to work in financial services, Three were responsible for more DD indemnities than the rest. Had it not been for Vodafone being about half as shite, Three would've been more than the others put together.

None of them ever plumbed the depths that TalkTalk did of course, but then there are creatures that live in the deepest part of the Marianas Trench that talk fearfully of the crushing depths in which TalkTalk's customer service dwells.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Re: There is no problem

Depends where the light detector comes to rest.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: It sometimes works the other way

Given I've been with Andrews and Arnold for in excess of 12 years now, no way on this earth am I subjecting myself to TalkTalk to make that comparison. I suppose I could substitute less painful activity instead *drops trousers and reaches for hammer*.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Re: I called the cops

A friend's Dad had placed a padlock on the rotary dial of the home phone to stop my mate, we'll call him Ben because I don't have a Regonymiser, racking up the phone bill. The same trick worked on the home phone meaning the padlock was a complete waste of time.

Another friend, we'll call him Paul, had a strange and evil artefact known as the "Hate Fax". Back in the day of thermal fax printing, leaving the lid up on the photocopier, pressing for 2 copies resulted in a pair of inky black sheets. With a couple of lengths of sellotape these 2 sheets could, if fed through a fax machine and deftly sealed together into a loop, be left to destroy the destination fax machine of your choice.

I was never able to get him to confirm a successful use of the artefact, but the smirk on his face during repeated attempts to ambush with the question when we'd had a few would suggest the nuclear option had been deployed on at least one occasion to a firm of fax-spam marketers.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: with respect to the UK app

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: To my shame ..

Well, this is the country with more Admirals than ships.

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: NMNMN

Had that one completely fizzle when the intended victim turned out to be a touch typer who probably hadn't looked at their keyboard in years.

Taylor drift: Finally, a use for AI emerges? Cyber-smut star films fsck-flick in Tesla with Autopilot, warns: 'I wouldn't recommend it'

Don't know you're born! Try keeping your rhythm up when you've got to pump a rail trolley and your other half at the same time.

Lose my stroke? I nearly 'ad one!

Sinister secret backdoor found in networking gear perfect for government espionage: The Chinese are – oh no, wait, it's Cisco again

Re: Keys

Well, there are the "Two world wars and one world cup" brigade who seem to consider having their skull cracked by another nation's riot police a badge of honour.

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Re: So nobody spotted it?

That was precisely my thought. I'm not even remotely technical, my background is languages then politics degree followed by working in the finance sector, but even I could see that the robot was making perfect 90 to 180 degree arcs in the exact same manner every time, not inserting a thumb into the bottom of the phone and opening it with uneven pressure at the nearest edge.

If an arty-farty duffer like ME can spot it, why the bleedin' 'ell didn't Samsung?

Raiding party! UK's ICO drops in unannounced on couple of dodgy-dialling dirtbag outfits

Maybe if the ICO was allowed to liquidate the directors themselves.

Publicly.

On free to air telly.

Hold horror stories: Chief, we've got a f*cking idiot on line 1. Oh, you heard all that

Re: Hold button - The glue that makes IT work

Our workplace phones record what you say while on hold. Everyone learns very quickly to use the mute button (which does work), even if a call is on hold.

Belt and braces :)

El Reg talks to PornHub sister biz AgeID – and an indie pornographer – about age verification

Re: Strumming that retro vibe...

Bah, how to feel old. Had to explain to a lad in work why I was giggling quietly to myself, this generation that's grown up with pr0n on tap will now have to learn about the joy of a lucky hedgerow find. By the time he was just starting to feel the sap rising, I was on to University and as I put it "chasing the real thing".

Him: "no more hedges for you then?"

Me: "Nope, just bushes".

Human StarCraft II e-athletes crushed by neural net ace – DeepMind's AlphaStar

Re: professional

Entertainment sells. If you have an audience, you can make money off it by selling advertising/tickets and so on, which means prize money.

Half the world enjoys watching 22 men kick an inflated sheep's bladder around a rectangle of grass for 90 minutes at a time, there's quite the industry built up around that too :)

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Why haven't they thought of.....

Trampolines, big men and women with sodding enormous hammers. Think of the hilarity.