Posts by Dave314159ggggdffsdds

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I find that in some social contracts the insecure ones are the arseholes, because they're worried people think of them as jumped up little people - and we do, but only because that's how they act.

In general, decent human beings tend to be decent regardless of wealth, and arseholes are arseholes whatever their bank balance. On the whole, though, decent human beings tend to get on ok in life and are more likely to be reasonably well off. Apart from a handful of scammers and crooks, everyone I've ever met with money has been nice to deal with , and that's clearly helped them make it to the level they had.

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Blind acceptance of "the normal"

I once had a job running a kitchen with a lovely girl who wasn't the sharpest spoon. She insisted on keeping a small piece of uncooked beef on a cling-film covered saucer in the bottom of the fridge at all times, because her food-hygiene training materials had included a line about 'raw meat must always be kept on the lowest shelf in the fridge'.

BOFH: Amnesty means never having to say you're sorry

Re: Reminds me of an actual civil war insurance claim that sent the beancounters weeping...

It's often an available add-on, and normally very cheap due to being unlikely to pay out. Probably not so much for people operating in a war zone, though. But I've added coverage for riot, war, acts of god, etc to a car insurance policy for a couple of quid a year.

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

You can't mention the Balmer peak without linking to the scientific evidence!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002

Re: "I can't remember the name of the wine we were drinking"

"after the fifth glass, quality didn't really matter much"

I'd have agreed at that age, but these days I'd say it very much does. All my worst hangovers in recent times have come from having an extra glass or two because I'm drinking something too tasty to leave.

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Re: The system is so broken, that we may as well just expect this and move on.

The far right always pushes PR, because it gets them more seats. No-one else thinks for a moment it's a good idea, for precisely the same reason.

Re: Brown Envelopes

I'm always baffled by people like you, who appear to think that people who can't even manage to buy in a service without cocking it up could successfully manage to build that service themselves.

If you knew someone who cocked up going to IKEA to buy furniture, would you think the problem could be solved by giving them tools and timber and letting them build it from scratch? It's obviously absurd.

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Re: Obvious from the start

Saying it'd be cheaper to do something else if it were done competently seems to be ignoring the bit where it'd be cheaper to do the same thing, we're it to be done competently.

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

Re: Always rather it too cold than too hot

Yes. Sitting still at a desk at 20c, there is no practical amount of clothing which will stop my digits losing feeling. Whereas the selfish bastards who complain we should layer up can just turn a fan on if they're too warm.

HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS after competition melts away

Re: taxes

So it fits with what you were told to believe by those facetok videos. It still isn't true. Just for example, the whole of Amazon EU had total sales of about 40bn in the year cited. AWS certainly didn't, and profits were obviously far lower, even before the investments the tax system is deliberately designed to promote.

Re: taxes

Fake numbers and lies. Typical of this kind of far right propaganda.

Re: The missing option

Lunatic conspiratorial fantasy.

Re: The missing option

If there's only one supplier that can actually give you what you need, then they deserve to make a reasonable profit; if they're unreasonable you can walk away, but I note that despite the insinuation in the article, there isn't any analysis of what a reasonable price should be, or if this is overpriced.

It's common in my line of work for there to only be a single provider that actually fits the requirements. Not a sign there is anything wrong with what we're asking for, just a sign that we're dealing with the right people. There are usually less suitable alternatives, mostly due to scale - we could deal with them if absolutely necessary, but better to work things out with the provider whose main business is working on our scale.

Re: The missing option

Ah yes, that famously goes well...

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Re: Only for the pension?

Ah, the classic far right effort to convince rich people they're actually poor, because that's the only way the far right gets any traction.

All your wibble ignores the bit where this role in the private sector pays at least £300k-400k.

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: The junior kept his job.

What a ridiculous take. Disciplinary action, sure. Sacking, over one minor incident? It's never hard to spot the commenters from the US...

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Re: "Security" bags

Because inadvertent security breaches are potentially more serious, definitely more likely. Bob the Idiot takes a seemingly innocent selfie, posts it on the internet, and gives away information that allows a social engineering attack to succeed, or provides building layout details, or has a list of employee names stuck to the wall in the background, or shows someone identifiable whose presence indicates the activity being carried out, or...

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Re: Downvote - really?

There's (at least) one commenter here who has a script that scans all the new comments and automatically votes down anything posted by anyone he's ever had a disagreement with (which is basically every long-standing commenter).

That aside, I suspect some fairly large proportion of otherwise inexplicable up or down votes on posts across the internet come down to people scrolling on touchscreen devices and accidentally tapping the button.

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

What a perfect example of the far right's tendency to criticise 'restricting mah free speech' every time they're stopped from supporting overtly racist terrorists, and pretend all they did was reasonably criticise something. Palestine Action are a violent neo-Nazi terror group. If you don't openly support them, you can get away with all but the most blatant incitement to antisemitic hatred in the guise of antizionism.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

The 'copying' seems to be overstated by a lot of sources. While the Soviets were apparently keen to steal designs for internal systems, the visual similarity of the two planes is largely because that's the shape SSTs needed to be, with the tech available; the proposed US designs are also generally very similarly shaped.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: WD40

We used to say ashtrays were a labour-saving invention - instead of dropping cigarette ash all over the floor, we'd collect it in a dish so we could drop it all on the floor in one go.

Re screws, magnetic trays seem like the kind of crap your mother in law buys you for Christmas, but are in fact surprisingly useful.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

"if they hadn't used the three years to make some changes, in January 2000 there would have been a total disaster."

No, there'd have been a fairly minor admin problem, growing over the months leading up to y2k, solvable by pencils and paper until the systems were fixed and the data could be entered.

There were two disjunct things, though. One was the small proportion of systems with potentially serious problems, where people got in ahead of time and fixed them. Then there was the vast majority of it, which was hype and scamming, aimed at businesses (and non-commercial enterprises) that could quite easily have dealt with any minor problems after they cropped up, if they ever did.

I worked for an it company a few years later where the extraordinarily cunty bosses boasted of having made over a million quid selling pointless 'y2k audits' to places that only used mass-market off the shelf software (which was obviously sorted by whoever published it), and kept a sucker list of the y2k marks they'd call whenever they had some new line of shit to peddle.

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

Dunno what your daughter has been telling you, but that wouldn't be a test fail on its own. It might be part of a totting up of minor faults, but she'd have had to have... IDK, these days, but at least a dozen.

Really, driving examiners seem to use their discretion quite well, on the whole. If someone plainly isn't ready to be out on the roads on their own, but doesn't commit any major faults, examiners will apply the letter of the law and find enough minors to fail the applicant. If someone is ready, the examiners will be more willing to let things slide.

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

Who said anything about the rich? People pay extra for urgent passport renewals, and so-on.

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

The failure is also that apparently people are willing to pay significantly more than £62 for their tests, but the government doesn't introduce a sensible pricing model, with higher charges for more urgent bookings, and use the proceeds to properly fund the testing system so they can attract more testers.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

TBF, it was the correct decision without the benefit of hindsight, and even with hindsight is arguably correct given how much of the tech (and even fibre itself) available at the time would have had to be replaced since.

Not doing a proper roll-out earlier than we did, but a decade or two after your example, is a whole different failure

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

Re: About a billion years ago in internet time (call it 1986) ...

It isn't a theory, it's one of the features of English being described. Google dis + intensifier. It's definitely less common than as a negator, but exists.

Re: About a billion years ago in internet time (call it 1986) ...

To gruntle is actually to complain - basically a variant of grumble. 'Dis' is an intensifier, rather than a negator, here.

Re: Has your tech team pranked colleagues?

I was once sent to 'ask the carpenter to give you a long weight'. Carpenter was repairing sash windows at the time.

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Re: You should never cooperate with the police

"I would like to see the evidence to that claim."

I have no idea what the tankie you're (apparently) talking to normally defends, but that's a batshit crazy request. Are you seriously unaware that this is the case? There's endless coverage of the issues. Just for example:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/05/head-of-britains-police-chiefs-says-force-is-institutionally-racist-gavin-stephens

Re: Shutting Up

"My understanding is that you should not voluntarily allow yourself to be interviewed by the police, if innocent"

No, this is drivel. You should not do so _without legal advice_. But, usually, the simplest way to clear up a misunderstanding is to explain.

Re: You should never cooperate with the police

There is no implication here that anyone spoke to the police without legal advice. They will have been advised to be completely open, and give the police every assistance in determining that it was an error.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Solicitors

Whatever that solicitor might have mistakenly believed, the actual reason they hung on so long in that realm was that there was case-law proving that faxes were acceptable as a matter of law for various purposes, but none proving email was. The situation has changed, obviously - quite a long time ago, as far as I remember.

https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/contact-or-visit-us/helplines/practice-advice-service/q-and-as/what-is-an-electronic-signature

So, it must have been some time after 2000 that it was actually tested in court.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

The main reason surgeons don't operate on people they know, and, if wise, no-one works for people they know, is that sometimes stuff goes wrong (and disagreements arise) for reasons outside anyone's control, and it's better not to have an ongoing relationship outside the business at hand.

It's far less important in my line of business, but I have made that mistake in the past: I agreed to work for people I knew, the scope of the work turned out to be far greater than anticipated, leading to much bigger costs to them than expected, and even though I did a bit of a mates'-rates thing, they weren't happy and the whole thing left a nasty taste.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: On oilfields

I think if we're being really pedantic, there have been some canard jets which could be counted as fore-and-aft biplanes. There are also at least two one-off jet-converted biplanes used for aerobatics: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hereford-worcester-64788578

https://eaavintage.org/the-screamin-sasquatch/

Re: On oilfields

Good to see this here. I was just about to post the same thing, he deserves more viewers and seems just the kind of thing people would like.

This one by him is also quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlyO9cJ8hiQ

"PZL Mielec M-15: One of the Aircraft of All Time"

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: Virginia, Texas ?

The type of tape is backed with duck cloth, which is why it's called duck tape. The brand 'duck tape' came along much later. Duct tape, which is something very different, is much more recent than duck tape, but basically as soon as it appeared people started confusing the two.

That site you've linked is 100% wrong. Wikipedia gets it about right, though ironically the page is for 'duct' tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape

Re: Virginia, Texas ?

Duck tape, for fuck's sake. Duct tape is a totally different thing, which won't hold anything together.

Re: I think the word "space" is a bit poorly defined

The Karman line is just another arbitrary definition. It's a perfectly reasonable one, but it's unreasonable to suggest it's the only one.

To quote the fount of all knowledge: "the later established Kármán line is more general and has no distinct physical significance, in that there is a rather gradual difference between the characteristics of the atmosphere at the line, and experts disagree on defining a distinct boundary where the atmosphere ends and space begins".

Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

Re: Speed vs multipath equalisation

You also see slow speeds in big detached houses, where there is little interference from neighbouring properties. Combination of sheer distance (e.g. at the bottom of the garden) and lots of walls in the way. Generally it doesn't get slow enough to be noticeable, until you are trying to watch a high-quality stream on a laptop in the wrong part of the property, or some such, but it's not uncommon to see connections below 10mbps if you actually check.

Re: Cats too are wave blockers

I once met a feline known by humans as 'cat 5' due to his propensity for napping on the router.

Re: Speed vs multipath equalisation

"Hide your microwave-frequency WiFi router among a shedload of well-watered plant pots, and as long as enough actually gets past to be detectable at all, the tech /ought/ to deal with it."

This doesn't seem right. SNR matters a lot. Weaken the signal, SNR drops, and you end up on a slower connection. This absolutely happens in the wild, all the time. I have even, once, seen it with plants being the (apparent) main culprit; moving the plants, but not the router or receiving device, saw speed improvements. (Someone had tried to hide the router with a wall of greenery, but I didn't check whether it was the pots full of damp soil or the greenery which caused the signal attenuation - I imagine they'd have objected to pulling the plants out of the soil to satisfy my curiosity.)

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Hows that!

Ob SIGBOVIK paper, "The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search": https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Blame the vendor

Sounds like the kind of phrase we get when someone translates too literally. A little googling and... Apparently the French for hot water tank is 'ballon d'eau chaude'.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

"Would you mind if a native Spanish speaker referred to you as "Uno" ?"

Wouldn't a native Spanish speaker call him Juan?

Re: Vaccines

Iirc his email inbox is dot - so it's dot at dot at dot at.

If someone wants me to call them a taxi, I'll call them a taxi, so I'm not going to quibble about mere names. But this chap is a rancid far right cunt, so I'm going to call him a cunt rather than Mr anything.

Re: Vaccines

Well done, but don't expect any sane response from a lying anti-vaxxer.