Posts by Coastal cutie

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

There's no escaping the inevitable fate of those who would cross the BOFH.....

NASA to silence Voyager's social media accounts

Re: Much more damaging that is initially apparent

Very true - I believe Arthur C Clark once pointed out that the cost of the Vietnam War would have paid for everything in "2001 - A Space Odyssey" and more

Meta to feed Europe's public posts into AI brains again

Re: Does anyone know...

According to our security team, the answer is no. They've issued a direct order that no user is to access it under any circumstances and compliance will be monitored (I've no idea how tbh). They never wanted it on installed on work devices in the first place but got overruled by idiot senior management.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Thank you

Serious question - can you recommend a good starting point, either online or old fashioned print for someone like me who has never installed an operating system or worked outside the MS ecosystem? I've seriously had enough of MS and want to switch to some form of Linux but don't have the vaguest idea of how to start or what version of it to choose.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

Re: I could only wish my work lasted that long

Wimpey were actually decent until the mid 70s - I live on a close where the majority of the houses are 1970-72 vintage Wimpey and when I bought mine, the local surveyor I used told me they virtually never found any serious faults with them, unless the house had been totally neglected by its current owner. It may be a brick box but it's a light and airy one with bedroom dimensions new builds can only dream of.

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

Here we go again

What a trio of pillocks - it's not as though the issues around case hallucination aren't already well known and lawyers backsides been kicked https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/22/lawyers_fake_cases/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/05/ai_in_brief/

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Around a bunch of miserable people

Much of this (apart from the suit) is currently playing out all across London in overcrowded Met Police buildings - with the addition of exploding toilets that can't cope with the increased volume due to the numbers forced back into the office for no good reason and in the face of all the evidence that shows it confers no advantage.

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

And there was I expecting Brian to get defenestrated - the BOFH must have been in a kindly mood

Google Cloud burst by 12-hour power outage in German region

Re: Google engineers implemented a fix

Or finally got around to paying the electricity bill?

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

On the connectors or on the owners of the idle fingers?

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Re: not again

We've always been at work - out of interest, I'm on a break, were you on one when when you posted?

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

And there's more......

Phase 2 incoming - all major news outlets now reporting a second wave of explosions which appear to be connected to handheld radios purchased at the same time as the pagers (source - Reuters)

Re: Technology question

Latest report on CNN is that the Taiwanese company had licenced the trade mark to a Hungarian partner - wherever they came from, this is the mother and father of all supply chain attacks

Pokémon GO was an intelligence tool, claims Belarus military official

Re: etc.

Anyone with any sense banned Furbys from their premises before their babbling sent the occupants round the bend - hideously annoying little things

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

The best shot at my school was the RE Teacher - who was also the school Chaplain. Puts the wrath of God into a whole new context

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Re: My worse ones….

A former colleague of mine did the same trick of putting laptop in rucksack and forgetting to do it up. In his case, he boarded a train, swung it round to sit down.... - the flying laptop shot over an elderly lady's head, narrowly missing said bonce and instead, dented the teenager standing behind her.

Downvoted on the basis of the unrealistic last sentence

Britain's Ministry of Defence accused of wasting £174M on 'external advice'

Re: Sounds like

Someone's been sleeping on the job

Meta won't train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws down

Re: Does it cover the UK or not?

It seems to - I'm a UK resident and was able to object

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: It begs the obvious question...

Exactly - I cannot think of one use case for this feature

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

I doubt your average middle and upper manglement are capable of applying that level of logic to the situation - they can't raise their gaze over bums on seats

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

Just when you think this whole thing can't get even more bizarrely incompetent, along comes another jaw dropper

BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now

Give it time, Aiman has only been there a few days......

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Skullduggery of the highest order - BOFH I salute you

Anthropic unlocks Claude 3, claims it's better than ChatGPT and Gemini

"exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks" Is that near-human pre or post 7 pints in the pub on a Friday night?

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

I agree with you on the bacon fat, much better than butter in this context - however I have to disagree on the sauce, no bacon sandwich/butty is complete without ketchup (Heinz, not designer or cheap crap)

Whatever you're making with that, a bacon butty it ain't

Infosys enjoyed a boom in UK government invoices in 2023

Re: Ethics & Conflict of Interest Training

Correct - and a source of huge frustration to those working in the public sector

Return-to-office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Exactly - wfh proves that good indeed often better work can be produced without the constant fussing and interfering of middle manglement, wedded to interfering in everything to justify their continued employment

'Exemplar' digital hospitals trust hit by multiple tech-related traumas

You're never going to get anywhere when even within the same hospital, wards and clinics are allowed to follow widely diverging processes around how information is stored. My aunt was in hospital last year - it regularly took staff 10 or more minutes to find relevant information as they didn't know where to look for it - because the ward they normally worked on filed or recorded things differently across both paper and the hospital IT systems. Even the simple process of booking a porter to get her to a previously arranged outpatient clinic appointment had 5 different flavours - after she missed one because the "proper process" for her ward wasn't followed and thus the request wasn't sent to the porters, my cousin and I started taking her down to them ourselves.

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Classic start to 2024

Motorola loses appeal to kill price cap on UK Airwave emergency services contract

It's not fair

"But, but...... we wined and dined all those people, we paid a fortune for consultants, we hired expensive lawyers and still we can't do as we please.... Waaaaah, it's not fair!"

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Fiendishly brilliant

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Oh what a gloriously tangled web by the BOFH and PFY - and still the beancounters never learn

Down and out: Barclays Bank takes unplanned digital detox, customers not invited

I wish it was enough to get it to stop - been in my house 5 years, still returning banking mail for the previous occupant including cards (I can tell it's banking by searching the return address online) and the banks concerned (Barclays and Lloyds I'm looking at you) don't shut down the accounts, claim they can't and keep sending. I've even told them to look at the Companies House website as she's a director and so it's publicly available.

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

Re: I dunno

Of course they don't - they're cats

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

I once got stuck on a train where one of my fellow passengers had that as the ring tone. Unfortunately, despite her desperate rummagings, the phone had lodged itself into a unreachable corner of her bag and whoever was ringing did not have the brains to leave a voicemail, just kept on redialling. We finally crawled into Clapham Junction where she managed to shove her way off before someone found enough room to do her a serious mischief (the train was overcrowded to Tokyo levels due to signal failures), as the entire carriage had endured over 20 minutes of this.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

A classic episode

Thank heavens I had put my tea down before I spilt it all over the keyboard laughing out loud - but was the desk anywhere near a window......

Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation

Re: IMHO...

Upvote and beverage of choice for the HHGTTG reference

£214m effort to modernize SAP ERP in UK govt systems marked Code Red

Is there anything IT related that HMRC are involved in that is actually on track to deliver?

Thames Water to datacenters: Cut water use or we will

Usual rip off

Because it's so much easier to bill users to make more money than it is to pay out to fix the leaks wasting far more water

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: COP/EOD

Close of play - same as close of business

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: That's the way to do it

Definitely the cream of the crop

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

Re: They're takin arr jerbs

My late Uncle, who arrived in France at about D-Day +5 had a variation on that. "We didn't worry about British artillery because they hit the target. We didn't worry about French artillery because they couldn't hit anything. When the American guns started up, we ran like hell for cover."

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Southampton Airport (Hampshire UK) has one - that's a small regional airport so I'd imagine some of the bigger ones have them too.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Useful idiot?

Perhaps he keeps him on for entertainment value?

Up to £895M up for grabs in UK Emergency Services procurement

I reckon I've got more chance of seeing a unicorn galloping down the beach than I have of seeing this delivered

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Re: Static

Yep had a colleague in my banking days who could do the self same thing to the mainframe terminals

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Re: God (i.e. the CEO)

Perhaps they already have - the BOFH is very knowledgeable about staff movements.....