back to article BOFH: CSI Haxploitation Cube Farm Apocalypse

“Can you just come here for a moment?” Ray - the brand spanking new Boss with the IQ of a pot plant - asks, ducking into Mission Control. The PFY and I follow – after all it’s a Friday morning and there’s an hour or so till the pub opens for lunch. “Can you tell me what happened here?” Ray asks, once he’s led us to the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Classic BOFH

    Someone else has noticed the infinite resolution CCTV and pointless shiny UIs that make these CSI style programmes unwatchable!

    Classic BOFH :)

    1. Annihilator
      Happy

      And X-Files before it

      I recall a similar X-Files spoof was written many many years ago, I think as part of a PC mag I read at the time but can't remember the specifics. It's hardly a new observation, shows have been bending the realms of IT possibilities for years! :-)

    2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Ahh

      but you forgot it is not an infinite resolution camera! They use "image enhancement" to sharpen the image. That's the magic!

      I keep asking why, when matching fingerprints, the computer shows each record on the screen. Just think how much faster it would be if it didn't have to do that, and say, just did a relational database search on a hash of the loci!

      Only topped by the real-time IR satellite images down to a resolution of about 5cm that appears in Behind Enemy Lines. I'll also swear that the first missile fired at the F/A 18 is in the air for nearly two minutes, whilst following highly evasive manoeuvres.

      1. Richard Taylor 2
        Facepalm

        you spoil sport

        ahhhhhh - but then...... it's probably the only indication they have that the contractors who set it up actually did the work. Think on it - you can have a lowly paid secretary sit in front and audit it :-)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Enhance.

        Super Troopers always nailed it for me:

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiqkclCJsZs

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Black Helicopters

        Even funnier ...

        .... when you know that they guys who produced the fake UI we see on the idio box are also the guys behind real AFIS s/w used by police forces around the world!

        Anon, 'cos I know how they deal with the evidence.

    3. ElReg!comments!Pierre

      Not to mention...

      ... that their machines are always beeping and tweeting away merrily like some sort of bluetit in a shrubbery.

    4. Alister

      enhance square echo two

      ...and why do they always use the keyboard when they're doing these things? If it's a GUI can't they do it with the mouse?

      "enhance square echo two..."

      clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-click.

      "and zoom in..."

      clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-clicka-clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-click.

      It's like a touch typist updating their CV, FFS.

      1. midcapwarrior

        because they are linux users

        CLI or die.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Printing

      The one that always really bugs me is that the output on the laser printers always comes out printed side up... Clearly they've just printed a blank page!

      Maybe I'm too much of a geek though!

      1. Dr. Mouse

        That's not as bad as...

        when they print on an inkjet and it just spits the page straight out. Highly irritating!

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Holmes

      Maybe Simon's been browsing TVTropes much

      Easily explains his sudden pickup of Tech tropes like EnhanceButton and ViewerFriendlyInterface. Could also explain why he's been putting off writing BOFHs a lot- TVTropes is known to be extremely addictive.

  2. Captain Underpants
    Happy

    There's only one thing that could've made this better...

    ...and that would be if Moss from The IT Crowd had featured somehow :D

  3. LesB
    Thumb Up

    Applause, etc

    One of the more entertaining boss destructions

  4. nichomach
    Holmes

    Really needs...

    the words "MATCH FOUND" in foot high letters to appear somewhere on a screen, but awesome nonetheless. Sherlock seemed appropriate...

  5. neb
    Go

    yay!

    that is all...

  6. Tony Batt
    Gimp

    Obviously never seen bladerunner

    “Yes, I think things started going downhill when my assistant pointed out that no one in the audience was retarded enough to believe that even the best image enhancing software could pull the license plate of a vehicle 27 blocks away from the reflection in a shop window caught by a 640 by 480 CCTV image in an off-licence.”

    1. Tony Barnes
      Thumb Up

      Funny

      That's the first thing I thought also!

      Though heavily deserved, can't stand CSI, utter, utter, shite...

      Top BOFH!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        FAIL

        Suspension of belief required

        When watching most TV series you are required to suspend belief. CSI is no different to the rest. How many cop dramas have you watched where the murder is solved by a single cop (or a pair of partner cops who don't quite get on) relying on intuition and some dodgy questioning? But they fail to show the hundred uniforms doing the door to door investigation, or the forensics teams in white overalls doing a painstaking fingertip search of somewhere over a number of days.

        What makes a TV show fun is not necessarily the accuracy, but the characters. Gil Grissom for example is a very compelling and interesting character which make CSI Vegas very much worth watching. I've never found as compelling a character in the other CSI series and therefore don't watch them.

        1. ElReg!comments!Pierre

          Dis...

          ...belief, surely?

          1. Dr. Mouse

            Yes, suspend disbelief

            But appart from that an accurate post.

            I have to say, in spite of the obvious inaccuracies, I love CSI (Vegas, not the spin offs). Grissom is a great character, his integrity and dedication to scientific process is an example to all of us. I know they "spice it up" but it's a great programme.

  7. Alan Ferris
    Boffin

    Epic

    That is all

  8. TheCynic
    Coat

    oh dear

    New Keyboard please - mine appears to be covered in Tea

  9. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    "reverse polarising the bit pattern"

    Trek-speak applied to (CSI-)IT!! Brilliant stuff!! I should try this here some time

    1. Real Ale is Best
      FAIL

      If you were refering to:

      "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow."

      Then that was Doctor Who, not Trek.

      1. G C M Roberts
        Coat

        As my memory serves me

        it was the Ghostbusters cartoon series, where everything was fixed by reversing the polarity :)

    2. Paul 129
      Facepalm

      I rember this quote

      Yes I can suspend belief.

      It would be nice if sci fi script writers understood science.

      "Reverse the polarity" OMG dont they rectify anything, yes you can phase shift that by 180 degrees but it wont do anything, wow to achieve that they would have to reverse the polarity of everthing in the ship.

      Normally thats fine on TV show but then one day the following happened

      Turn on TV

      -old CSI rerun on (only partially pay attention to it cause its normally pretty lame pap)

      "So you want me to run up a GUI interface using visual basic to track the killer’s IP Address?”

      -Jaw drops, ROFL. worst technoable ever!

      Wife doesnt understand why I just go to pieces whenever the show is on now.

      Damn you CSI!!!!! I can't get that line out of my head!!!!

      1. B4PJS
        Stop

        RE: I rember this quote

        I'm sure I saw that line on 24, not CSI...

        24, the TV series sponsored by Dell..

  10. Elron
    Thumb Up

    Genius

    Grisson...eat your heart out!

    1. Chris007
      Coat

      pedants corner

      Grissom

  11. advocate
    Pint

    Ahhhh

    Happy fridays

  12. Scott Gower
    Devil

    Another boss gone

    BOFH bosses have the lifespan of a mosquito in a flyswatter factory.

  13. b b
    Go

    Classic CSI reference

    “So you want me to run up a GUI interface using visual basic to track the killer’s IP Address?”

    I still twitch when I remember that scene.

    1. Bill B
      IT Angle

      What??

      I'm sorry, I've never watched CSI. Are you seriously saying that this was actually in the program???

      1. Jhokur
        Facepalm

        Indeed it has

        CSI: NY - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

        1. sisk

          That did it...

          I'll never be in the room while my wife watches her crime dramas without busting up laughing again.

          A GUI to track an IP....Do these people know NOTHING about IT???

      2. Daniel Evans

        @Bill B

        Said with all seriousness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

  14. Sid_the_Kid
    Boffin

    Oooh! Don't you just love...

    ...techie obfuscation?

    I wish I could ad-lib it to that level. :-)

    Excellent work, Mr. Travaglia

  15. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    I just cut and paste that entire story...

    ...to be used the next time my boss asks me to work late on the weekend.

  16. brimful
    Coat

    Copy 1Tb data to 2Gb

    "Or that you can copy the entire contents of a 1 Terabyte hard drive to a USB stick with 2GB stamped prominently on the side in 14 seconds.".

    Yes you could. you could convert it to a Jpeg with maximum loss and zip it. On the other side, unzip the file, and convert to maximum gain jpeg, and the convert to 1Tb data.

    Mathematically it can be represented by

    data -> jpeg mximum loss -> zip............ unzip -> jpeg maximum gain -> data

    voila

    Mine's the one with the super compression algorithm in the pocket.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Headmaster

      @brimful

      Just to be pedantic:

      1) USB 2.0 has a max data speed of 60 MB/s (480Mb/s). This means to fill a 2GB memory stick running at the maximum possible speed requires 33s.

      2) I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on hard drive speeds and assume this 1TB drive is on SATA 3. That gives you 6Gb/s (including protocol overhead) which amounts to about 600MB/s of raw data. That is over 1600s just to read the contents of the drive, which is almost half an hour.

      3) If you use lossless compression, then depending on the entropy of the data, there is a very very good chance that a 1TB drive will not compress down to 2GB.

      4) If you use lossy compression as you suggest, then the transformation needs to be represented as: data -> jpeg mximum loss -> zip............ unzip -> jpeg maximum gain -> horribly corrupted data. The data corruption will be worse if it isn't image data since jpeg is specifically designed to compress images in a way that the loss doesn't look bad to the human eye.

      Next time you try to be pedantic and claim that the BOFH has made a mistake, please think carefully, the mistake is most likely yours.

      1. Ian K
        Boffin

        @AC 16:04

        <taps on AC's shoulder>

        <points upwards>

        See that thing there?

        That's the joke.

      2. Decius

        @anon

        You aren't taking full advantage of read-caching from the hard drive, nor overclocking the USB slot. As for the corruption, that's why you use .jpeg compression: You run it through the image enhancement software back at the lab, and get more detailed evidence than was originally present!

        I can't explain why the .zip step, though. I recommend .lha instead.

        1. Stuart Gepp
          Coat

          King of the pedants

          Where in the story did it say the disk was full. Maybe there was only 20kB on the 2TB drive.

          If this was the case you could copy the entire contents of the drive to the USB stick quicker than you could troll a joke response to a parody of a fictional farce.

        2. Alexander Vollmer
          Boffin

          Why zip?

          If you don't use zip your fly might be open and lha is underperforming last week, they should expel some redundant parts and strengthen service on the long distance flights.

          1. Mike Smith
            Coat

            Depends on the error message

            That could only happen under a certain set of conditions. Only do that if you see this error message:

            ERROR OPENING TROUSER.ZIP - (A)BORT OR (E)XIT TO WARM BOOT.

            S'OK, I'm going...

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Meh

        Sarcasm...

        ...seems to be lost on you. Unless you're being sarcastic about sarcasm. I'm so lost!

  17. TrixyB
    Angel

    Fupping brilliant!

    That is all :)

  18. Richard Jukes

    Like a vegetarian sausage

    Mediocre like a vegetarian sausage, but nevertheless it is still a sausage. Just what I needed on a Friday afternoon. Cheers!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Typical.....

    ..... IT department manager.

    AC, because my IT manager reads these..

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