Posts by Coastal cutie

Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference

Four......

Who on earth has a slice so bad they need GPS in their golf balls!

Apple's return-to-office plan savaged by staff

Re: Where are the metrics?

The Passport Office and the DVLA have periodically ground to a halt every few years, long before remote working was a thing. And I hear rumours that in the case of the latter, the backlog is due to manglement demanding a full return to work whilst Covid was still rife and without proper precautions, thus creating a mass outbreak, which left a big gap in the workforce.

Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?

Even the real world is weird

My late partner had an aunt (also now sadly no longer with us) who worked as an Account Director in a major advertising agency in the 70s and 80s. One day, the MD decided on the spur of the moment that they should extend a meeting and take a new client to meet the creative team who would be handling their campaign. They walked into the office, to find that after a rather good (3 Martini) lunch, one of the creatives had been trussed up into a ball and was being rolled at makeshift skittles down a long table by his colleagues. The client looked dumbfounded, the MD, rooted to the spot, went white, then purple and it was down to her to save the day. She ushered both men out, whilst uttering soothing words about how the company encouraged new and innovative ways of freeing up creativity by the use of play. God only knows what they could have done with avatars, the mind boggles. Beer in lieu of a Martini emoji.

Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

Robots are creepy. Why trust AIs that are even creepier?

Re: Robot Barman

Upvote and beer for the HHGTTG reference

Re: Pitchforks

And the mad priest leading the mob waving a crucifix

AWS's Log4j patches blew holes in its own security

Whack-a-mole time...…..

AI models to detect how you're feeling in sales calls

Re: I have a special track for that...

I take my hat off to you for such a highbrow response to them - I'm afraid I'm an unsophisticated oik in such matters and just test the smoke alarm with the phone an inch away

When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue

Re: Opinion

You're quite right - they can't, possibly to stop them being sick when galloping at full speed, when the stomach comes under repeated pressure from the intestines, which would force the contents out if they were put together the same as other vertebrates including humans (apologies to anyone eating whilst reading this)

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

Re: Shelf by the window ...

Damn - you beat me to it - have a beer or beverage of choice, on the principle that it's 5 o'clock somewhere...

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Re: What I don't understand...

The ATMs were just the last stage of getting hold of the $1M+ that they'd stolen, providing nicely untraceable funds once withdrawn

UK arm of Sungard Availability Services goes into administration

Re: Ah the stupidity of greed at any cost

Exactly - in the large village where I live, a single landlord owns most of the shopping parade. When non-essential shops had to close, they did everything they could to keep the tenants afloat - rent holidays, lowering rents for a while when they did reopen, installing canopies over the pavements so queues could stay dry etc. The result is all of these shops are still thriving and not one has closed.

BOFH: Putting the gross in gross insubordination

So, Mutually Assured Destruction principles rule for now..... Perhaps it is time for the PFY to fly the coop to become the BOFH another IT department so desperately needs and for a new PFY to enter the den, to learn from a master.

UK Ministry of Defence takes recruitment system offline, confirms data leak

Re: "sources finger Capita-run system"

You can't put previous performance in as part of the requirements anywhere in the procurement process - much to the frustration of many in the public sector IT world. Even if you could, it still doesn't stop behemoths like Crapita et al buying up the decent company you did manage to give the contract to and running it into the ground

OVHcloud datacenter 'lacked' automatic fire extinguishers, electrical cutoff

How to break every basic rule of fire protection all at one go

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Re: Simon is on form, these days!

Gotta love a BOFH takedown - so elegant

Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

I had one that was partial to garlic & coriander naan bread but turned his nose up at the plain variety

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Never underestimate the ability of Plod to bend IT to make things "easier"

BOFH: What a beautiful classic car. Shame if anything were to happen to it

Ever alert

"The Boss provides the information, which will no doubt be used in the future by his insurance company to verify who'd purchased the primer cord and timer." Nice piece of forward thinking

COVID-19 was a generational opportunity for change at work – and corporate blew it

Depends on your home insurer - mine provides cover for employer's equipment, but only to reimburse me if my employer forces me to pay for a replacement because they think the damage/loss was my fault.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

The louder they yell.....

I've found that the likelihood of the problem being with something the user has done/not done/not checked even though they say they have is directly proportional to the volume with which they are yelling at you that "OF COURSE I'VE DONE THAT/NOT DONE THAT/CHECKED THAT, I'M NOT SOME SORT OF IDIOT" (excuse the shouting).

A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes

And because it's nigh on impossible to stop the ruddy things, whatever you do. Most of the ones my friends and I have suffered from come from anonymous accounts - once blocked, they simply morph into a new one. None of the social media platforms take it seriously - it's a helluva job to get Twitter to ban someone and then, you've guessed it, they get back on with another anonymous account (they're quick enough to put a photography site on the naughty step though, for too many retweets of pictures of beautiuful beaches). The police don't have the resources to chase all this down and can't do anything if the IP address leads to abroad or the phone number is a burner phone.

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Ah, Angry of Angmering - first cousin to Riled of Rustington, Grouchy of Goring and Fed Up of Ferring

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Re: He'll learn

It was nice knowing him..............

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

Upvote for the cactus, even though it did make me shower the keyboard with Diet Coke (other beverages are available)

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

Re: excellent

I'm not convinced - after all when angling, there's a lot of fun to had playing the fish on the line before you land and despatch it...……..

When you think of a unit of length, do you think of Antony Gormley's rusty anatomy?

Re: Rust Anatomy

Absent - though that didn't stop it being dubbed locally the Gateshead Flasher

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Have a Friday beer (or beverage of choice) for making me laugh out loud with that one

A smarter alternative to password recognition could be right in front of us: Unique, invisible, maybe even deadly

Re: Identity Verification

I think he's worked at one of our sites as well

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

"It's SQL Jim, but not as we know it" I'll get my coat...…..

From the studio that brought you 'Mortal Wombat' comes 'Pernicious Possum'

There's a monster in the garden

Apparently New Scotland Yard once got a call from a very distressed gentleman who had been chased round his garden by fearsome spiky monsters. Despite wondering if the gent was entirely the full ticket, a unit was despatched to assist (that was when there were enough officers to do such a thing). They found an utterly terrified chap - and a family of hedgehogs. Turned out he'd never seen one before and thought they either bit you or shot quills at you, as it was once believed porcupines could do. The previous owner of the house used to feed them so all they were doing was trying to remind the new owner that it was dinner time. It was explained they were harmless and just needed dog food putting out nightly - result, one relieved human and a family of happy furze pigs.

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

Those who lurk behind can also be effectively deal with by taking a step backwards in stilettos and accidentally standing on their foot with full body weight

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Re: Training cats and dogs

Clocks going forward have no effect on my cat but now she's middle aged, she objects violently to waiting an extra hour for dinner in the evening when they go back (I keep to a set hour so things aren't disrupted when I do actually have to go into an office).

Judging by the way your face lit up, my inbox just got more attractive

I think the BOFH could get quite a lot of mileage out of making the PFY run up and down bus lanes with various annoying bean counter registrations on his back (those that don't qualify for the whole BOFH carpet, window or lift shaft experience) ..…..

Weeks after Red Bee Media's broadcast centre fell over, Channel 4 is still struggling with subtitles

Re: Audio level change?

I thought it was just me - I was watching Bake Off last night with the volume turned up to a number that would usually ensure the whole road could hear, just to get the sound to reach the sofa.

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

Don't think it was intended as such but I shall be nicking it forthwith

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

Re: And again, SNAP

I've told the full story before so I won't bore folks with all of it again but in my far off banking days, I worked with someone who carried enough static charge to trip the mainframe - and make all of us yelp when she got within a couple of inches

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

To err is human - to really screw things up, you need human designed automation. Icon as that's what a lot of peoples brains seem to have done yesterday

Amazon delivery staff 'denied bonus' pay by AI cameras misjudging their driving

Mirror, signal, manoeuvre

I presume by side mirror El Reg means wing mirror - so if I understand this correctly, a driver checks their mirrors to make sure they don't squash something overtaking or a foolhardy vehicle/cyclist/pedestrian coming up on the inside just as they are about to turn right (this is the USA remember) and gets penalised for it? What are they supposed to do, stare rigidly straight ahead and stuff anything else around them!

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Toaster Smoke Alarm

In those far off days of going into offices, we never needed an unauthorised toaster to set off the fire alarm - the canteen staff used to do it quite well enough with the authorised ones.

Nothing works any more. Who decided that redundant systems should become redundant?

Re: Chuddies (sort of)

Not just bras - all women's clothing is supposed to be standard sizes but is anything but. I have clothing items in my wardrobe from underwear upwards in six different sizes and they all fit. Oh and just when you think you've cracked one shop's sizing, it changes.

Hellfire and damnation: Two French monks charged over 5G mast arson attack

The 17th century called......

They'd like their Inquisition trainees back please, there's a bloke called Galileo to be dealt with

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

Re: Thunderbird............

The real reason pro and really serious cyclists wax/shave their legs etc. is so that injuries like gravel rash from the inevitable high speed crashes are easier to treat and dress. Plus when the dressings are being changed, it's a lot less painful pulling tape off smooth skin rather than hair bear legs or other bits.

Ghosts in the machine learning pipeline will be impossible to exorcise

Paul, I'm so sorry for your loss. My partner died suddenly 5 years ago and I was going to post something similar about how this idea makes me feel but your thoughts sum this up so perfectly there's nothing to add. I'd upvote you more than once if I could.

Flushing roulette: Southern Water installing digital sewer monitors to prevent blockages

And they're still at it - just fouled (literally) up Bulverhythe Beach at Hastings, making the sea unsafe to swim in, damaging a load of paths and dumping raw sewage in beach huts.

UK chancellor: Getting back to the altar of corporate dreams (the office) will boost young folks' careers

Re: The Office

Agreed - our Directors have commented that one of the benefits to remote working is that they are actually interacting with a wider range of staff than they were previously because of geographic separation. There's a wider range of views and thoughts in meetings because people aren't being squeezed out by windbags/rank pullers plus no problems with getting rooms. The informal socials online have been attended by people who would never have gone to the pub (which was the usual venue), either because they didn't drink or just didn't feel comfortable in that environment, thus increasing their networking. Eventually we are returning to blended working when the infection rates drop further and all of us who can be are vaxxed but our organisation is keen to hang on to the benefits we've gained.

Somebody is destined for somewhere hot, and definitely not Coventry

Re: Oops!

Years ago, I was doing some risk management exams and an essay scenario was fire protection for a furniture factory. I naively put "sprinklers" into a well known search engine and the first 20 entries were definitely NSFW

BOFH: Oh for Pete’s sake. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself

But what about any non-idiot colleagues you have, they'll need a gas mask

I soooo need this kit ready for when we get dragged back into the office. I don't need it at the moment because a "temporary connection problem" on Teams (aka hitting the Quit option when the idiocy in a meeting becomes too much to bear) is currently sorting such issues out.

Brit IT firms wound up by court order after fooling folk into paying for 'support' over fake computer errors

Re: Hold Music

I just decide it's time to test the smoke alarm