* Posts by Boris the Cockroach

3404 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, health secretary Matt Hancock both test positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Lets hope

hes ok.

Partly because I'm not a complete bastard, but mostly because I have a huge stock of 'bozo the clown' jokes to use up...

Can we have a surgical mask icon please ?

London court tells Julian Assange: No, coronavirus is not a good reason for you to be let out of prison

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

No bail

Good

Whether hes guilty or not does not matter in the eyes of the bail application....

Is he at high risk of violating his bail terms? is the only question being asked and given his previous behaviour, the answer is YES

Therefore.. stay in jail until the case is heard

And to think.... he could have stayed in Sweden to answer charges, been found innocent and been on his merry way for the past 10 yrs.....

BT Openreach prepares to declare UK MBORCed* as all new phone line installations halted over coronavirus

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

How

can we tell the difference between openretches normal operations and this new one?

IT services sector faces armageddon as COVID-19 lockdown forces project cancellations – analysts

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Real Effect?

You've got a fat chance, for a lot of companies they'll be driving their supplier prices down in order to make up for the lack of cashflow right now.

However for the stronger suppliers who can ride out the storm, better times will be ahead as those suppliers who've gone to the wall will have shrunk the market somewhat enabling suppliers to push back on prices.

As the the effect on JIT methods... give it 18 months and the virus will be forgotten about and the tier 1 companies will be back to having no stock and 15 chasers chasing the suppliers all day.....

India's peak IT body tells outsourcers to check contract cancellation fine print while Coronavirus reigns

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Windows

Re: Contingency plans

You're Domonic Cummings and I claim my £5

Tech won't save you from lockdown disaster: How to manage family and free time while working from home

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

Add to the singing ban

Playing an electric guitar with the amp turned to 11

While very relaxing for yourself, very stressful for the neighbours especially if they, like mine, play the drums on the wall while screaming along...

At least thats what I think they are doing :)

Also you can go out away from the house, so long as you keep your distance from other people... that will help a lot with the stress (and get you away from that neighbour with the electric guitar too)

Looming ventilator shortage amid pandemic sparks rise of open-source DIY medical kit. Good thinking – but safe?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Flame

The manufacturing problems

are bollocks

I should know , I spend my life wrestling with CAD CAM, robots, CNC machines , large lumps of metal and the occasional luckless operator.

Get a manufacturing engineer in, say we are going to build XX model ventilator, then farm out the parts to a bunch of companies like the one I attend and we'll spend 2 or 3 days ... maybe 4 building fixtures, and programming robots and then punch out 100's of parts.

Then back to the original company for them to concentrate on assembling and testing the things.

Its not rocket science, its engineering to produce stuff asap, we did it before with with the merlin areo engine.... how many different aircraft did that thing power? because we had 1 design and then made 250 000 of them

But it takes political will to do... not some wishy washy touchy feely ineffective bunch of assholes we have in charge now

Apple bans COVID-19 games and restricts virus-related apps to authoritative souces

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Is this really any different to what Facebook etc are doing?

Quote

Fake News should always be suppressed

I got an interesting message on facebork today saying a post I made about covid-19 breeding in toilet paper was fake.

I was like WTF man.. I got the link from known spoof news site.....

Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Linux

Lets see

What has W. Gates given me.

2 virus (one of which walked straight through my PC by IE blithly running a system level call via javascript... arrgh , the other via outlooks 'preview' pane running whatever was sent there... gawd )

Trashed my system twice resulting in several days lost to re-installing everything

.Dll hell remember that good old one? especially when it would replace the .cab compression dll with another one resulting in not being able to even open the .cab files on the CD to get a decent copy out.... format C:/ time

Format change on MS office.... hey wow.... MS office cant open my old university files, open office sorted that one.. thanks for nothing billige

And the crowning turd in the toilet .. Win 10

Boss: Need the job out, valued customer, deadline deadline deadline

Me: sure thing, no problem, just fire up the win 10 machine with the CAD/CAM on it

THREE!!!!!! hours later

Updating updating updating........ and I cant even access the drawing files to program by hand

Boss: Written warning ... being lazy and idle and not doing anything all morning

And we'll not even go into the unethical and possibly illegal things such as spyglass software selling m$ the rights to internet explorer 1 for a % of each copy sold

Then m$ gives it away for free to avoid giving spyglass any cash......

So I dont thank bill for his contribution to the world of computering, because he didnt.

and now I use linux for nearly everything as a result

When the world ends – coronavirus plague, WW3, whatever – all that will be left are cockroaches and Larry Ellison trash talking his rivals

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Alert

Because Ellison was expelled from our society for behaviour likely to bring us cockroaches into disrepute

Besides , we have bigger problems.. my 400 odd kids are stuck at home and they're climbing the walls with boredom....

Capita hops on UK's years-late, billions-over-budget Emergency Services Network to keep legacy system alive

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Crapita

... ok whch politician's best friend/wife/child/BDSM partner is on the board of crapita?

Post Office burned £100m in UK taxpayer cash on Horizon IT scandal legal fees, MPs told

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Flame

Disgusted of tonbridge wells

Quote

there is no suggestion at present that any Post Office manager will be prosecuted for their part in the Horizon scandal.

-

If the post office managers were aware of problems with the horizons system in that suddenly 550 people appeared to be on the fiddle, and they went "Must be the sub-postmasters" then that would seem to leave them open to criminal responsibilty as innocent people went bust, lost jobs and even went to jail for those decisions.

Further more, if they were aware of problems in that the postmasters were claiming horizons was causing the problem , then why the hell didn't they run tests against the software to see if it WAS causing the problems before accusing more postmasters of being on the fiddle....

After all the CPS doesn't look at a death by dangerous driving case and go.... "hell he didnt really know what he was doing... lets not bother with this case"

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

I caught

the end of the first series when broadcast on the radio... found the xmas special, but what really got me into it was this from the start of the 2nd series

When Arthur and Ford ask the guide what to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground beneath a giant boulder you cant move with no hope of rescue

"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far, however if life hasn't been good to you so far in that you are stuck in a crack in the ground beneath a giant boulder you cant move with no hope of rescue, consider how lucky you are that life isn't going to be bothering you for much longer"

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

This hurts too much

quote

Or I could tell the truth and say that the pursuit of professional excellence in IT will leave him a bitter and twisted husk of a man, trusting no one and with a cynical streak so wide they could land an A380 on it.

I'm another one saving that phrase for a rainy day

But I think it kinder that the youngster is led over to the window, while making sure the volvo is parked 4 floors down and sending him on his way so that he suffers as little as possible, it may sound harsh but its kinder in the long term.

Plus it avoids having to use the lift shaft to hide the body, because as we all know, the lift shaft is saved especially for the new general manager, an exciting go getter of a man keen to lead from the front and eager to take that small step for a man that leads to an eternity on the way down.

All you have to do then is return the lift to its usual function of actually having the lift there when the C level doors open......

MPs to grill Post Office and Fujitsu execs on Horizon IT scandal after workers jailed over accounting errors

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Surprise surprise

Quote

So far there has been no suggestion that any individual from the Post Office or Fujitsu will face criminal charges for their part in the scandal.

Well there you go, just as predicted from the last reg story about horizons and the post office.

Bet Fujitsu and the post office have been busy shredding / deleting anything that was internally critical of the software, whether it was a senior manager or a lowly dev, just to show they were 'unaware' that the software could be faulty.

In any case, I think those postmasters sent to jail have a good case for malicious prosecution, especially if the post office are forced to disclose anything currently being shredded/deleted

If you're writing code in Python, JavaScript, Java and PHP, relax. The hot trendy languages are still miles behind, this survey says

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

If he did the distributed/concurrent computing module, sneak up behind him and say "Jean bacon is the best tech writer ever"..... hopefully he'll still be your friend after the tears and the twitching stops...

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Angel

When I were a lad , we could'nt afford 1's , so we had to make do with 0's

Anyway you're not a real programmer if you have never programmed a multi-spindle mill/turn with intergrated robot loader/picker.

Get that wrong and its a little more expensive than "unknown exception at 1452:56" (and dangerous..... tear the arm off and having it spin round at 4000 rpm sure does make you change your pants ).....

BOFH: Gosh, IPv5? Why didn't I think of that? Say, how do you like the new windows in here? Take a look. Closer...

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

Brilliant idea!

I use an EDM at work and have a boss whos a right pain in the bottom.... now... all I need is a distraction... say an urgent meeting at a customer (happily their robot wrangler and myself go back a long way.....) and about 2 hours on the EDM weakening the mounting plate... 5 mins reassembly work and note to myself reminding me not to take phone calls in that office.

Note : EDM is electro-discharge machining uses an electrode(sometimes thin brass wire, sometimes a solid shaped piece of copper or graphte) to 'spark' away metal in a very precise way.

Pope tells his followers to log off for Lent

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
IT Angle

Its

about this time I give up lent for drink

DRINK!

ARSE!

FEK!

Still my favourite episode when they finally sober up father jack

"Oh god I'm not still on that fekking island with those 2 fekking ejiots"

London's top cop dismisses 'highly inaccurate or ill informed' facial-recognition critics, possibly ironically

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Happy

I think

you'll find that was Constable Savage from not the nine o'clock news

"Being in possession of an offensive wife"

Samsung cops to data leak after unsolicited '1/1' Find my Mobile push notification

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: More weirdness

Thats what I saw too

1

1

Then it went out

From the 'find my phone" app.. the one thats turned off(though not uninstalled) on my phone and no samsung account on it either..

However on a quick straw poll of samsung mobile owners yesterday , all of them saw the notification.....

This is your last chance, HP. There's no turning back. You take blue poison pill, the story ends. You take the red Xerox pill, you stay in Wonderland

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: The PBS* always loses

You forgot part of eight.

Trash the R&D department to "increase profits" and to make sure the combined companies wont have any new products to sell for the next 10 years if the merger does go ahead

Ofcom measured UK's 5G radiation and found that, no, it won't give you cancer

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Glad

to see the idiots out in force today.

Time for a refresher on howto do science

Observation

Idea

Hypothisis

Testing <<< most things fail here

Theory

More testing << and even more here

Proof

Time for a refresher on fake science

Tech introduced

My neighbour's sister's best friend says her daughters hubby gets headaches since tech introduced

Proof

See the difference

Anyway I'm getting a new thicker toilfoil hat to protect me from 5G

Windows Dressing: Psst... Fast Ring folks, whispers Microsoft. You're in this for the cool icons, right?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Linux

lipstick

on a dead pig would be a better phrase

Perhaps we could come up with marketing phrases for windows update

"Just because your computer worked yesterday"

"What do you need fucked up today"

Hey, Brits. Your Google data is leaving the EU before you are: Hoard to be shipped from Ireland to US next month

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Big Brother

But google is building a huge

data center here...

Must be to store all the US citizens data.. that way with our data in the US, the spies in this country can mine US citizens data, and the spies in the US can mine ours (and everyone elses), and thus prevent the ebil terrorists from completing their dastardly plans

Although quit how you stop the lone wolf loons armed with a knife/gun/rifle/50 cal machine gun seems beyond either government....

All that Samsung users found on UK website after weird Find my Mobile push notification was... other people's details

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Mushroom

7.53

I got mine... bing bong.. just after crawling under a robot with my galaxy J3 in my pocket

crawl back out... WTF! I dont have find my phone enabled... or even a samsung account for that matter.

Google for details... Three's website has fallen over (as usual), finally get an answer out of google about 'find my phone'... can only assume someone has breached my google account and is trying to locate me for malign reasons.

Then find out its all a false alert.

Oh well stress over.....

Suppose it was lucky it wasn't an alert related to the icon >>>>

The European Commission digital strategy wants to, er, take back control of citizens' data

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
IT Angle

Elected!!!!!!!!

Sure..... selected by the member governments as the person least likely to offend anyone,

Submitted for election by the EU parliment ... in a field of one candidate

If she was elected I'm a cockroach.

Still it makes good copy for the EU bashers about overreach by unelected officials..... so they dont notice bozo the clown is leading them to the promised land.... to the sound of " highway to hell"

Xerox hopes wining and dining HP shareholders will convince them of takeover

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

If

it all goes TITSUP and the value of HP gets written down, will xerox be suing HP for wire fraud and dodgy accounting?

Can AI-enhanced virtual sports presenters do the job? It's a big ask

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Flame

Oh look

a smart thermostat, which enables you to use the internet, a phone app and someone else's cloud to turn your heating on.

Woohooo great.. if I'm late back from robot wrestling I can delay my heating coming on thus saving ... hold on 'no connection' hmmm check emails

"Dear subscriber, due to security problems , we have had to switch off our cloud server and as a result , your expensive web based thermostat no longer works. due to the design there is no fall back manual mode and thus your heating system cannot be turned on until you update our app and thermostats with supper whizzy thermostat 2. does everything that thermostat 1 did but with a cool blue logo

Needs 24/7 internet and maybe go offline when we finally go bust due to selling insecure tat under the guise of essential heating controls"

Icon.... needs no flipping remote control, cloud server, app, smartphone or wires.....

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
IT Angle

Re: Agree, Larry & Trump are quite a good fit, actually.

Quote:

I don't think Donald Trump is that bad.

He wouldn't be if his gutless party stood up to him instead of lying on the floor kissing his feet.

And I can understand the likes of larry and thesouthern rednecks voting for him.... but the christian right?

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Coat

Well.. I'm a

criminal

Uses Linux (ok its mint, fedora, centOS, and whatever the hell it is that Heidenhain use on thier TNC series controls(but they're german so thats doubley dangerous))

Uses discord .. oh dear

Uses VMs on my linux box... mostly to run a windows XP snapshot to watch film 4

As for the other tools not had much call for them.

However I'll be bidding you all farewell as I'm off to hand myself in for punishment (mostly likely,... 4 yrs hard labour trying to get win 10 to talk to our machine tools using our old winxp/win 7 software (current project status: about to kick the win 10 laptop to bits))

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Maybe

the F-35 program manglement saw the word "agile" and thought "Hey thats just what the F-35 needs to be"

We need a cynical bastard icon

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

I've

got an idiot canceling hammer if thats any help...

<<<<currently wanting to cancel "loose nuts" the apprentice

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Keyboards

My keyboards lifetimes can be measured in BOFH publication dates.....

3 foot beancounters heh

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

How does m$ keep getting away with this nonsense : easy vendor lock in

And your answers are

1. because m$ hired the cheapest devs they could find

2. because m$ hired the cheapest devs

3. because m$ hired the cheap... you get the idea

4... see the above points

He’s a pain in the ASCII to everybody. Now please acquit my sysadmin client over these CIA Vault 7 leaking charges

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Fired

and yet still has an account on a super secret CIA computer?

Did I read that right?

yet my account at work would be locked down 5 secs after I leave the building with P45 in hand... gone over and then deleted within a week.....

Something smells here...... and it aint the content of my underpants

Former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'submits himself' for arrest in central London

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Trade deal - test for the UK government

Cant see the US agreeing to that one.

More like there'll be a clause saying "If a US company takes over a UK company and loses money as a result, we reserve the right to imprison the guys in charge of the british company"

And as further above... where the hell were HP's auditors when they were supposed to be checking this company over?

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Turn the UK on and off again

But dont worry, you've got a king again

After all... whatever he does , the senate will find him not guilty

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

With all these

stories of hitting stuff to get it moving... please remember the number 1 rule of hitting stuff with a hammer to get it working

never ever tell the crayon eaters what you are doing, how you a doing it and why you are doing it.

Because a light tap to free up a stuck bearing becomes a 3 day job to remove said part after the crayon muncher has twatted the thing with a 5lb lump hammer "because he saw you use a small plastic mallet to give it a light tap"

Icon.... for your expression when you see the wreckage.....

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Enjoy your self-inflicted wound Brits!

The germans bombed pearl harbour?

And theres me thinking it was an inside job in order to attack Italy

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Flame

Re: Conservatism

Quote:

British design and manufacturing has *always* been unmitigatedly shit, its just that we were first (arguable even there).

I'd suggest you go fsck yourself :)

I happen to work in manufacturing, and while it may have been crap years ago (rooms and rooms of horrid manual machines tended by some skilled folks and a bunch of time serving idiots), nowadays its ALL computer controlled with extra robots (the robots are stupider than the time serving idiots but at least they dont spend 30 mins in the bog and/or 3 days on strike every week)

In fact if you try running a engineering place now without a bunch of PCs, CNC machines and the skilled staff to do it, you'll go bust faster than a high street store... unless you are into bespoke hand crafted widgets with the clients that will pay 40 times over the odds for them.

We dont employ masses of people, 19 people attend where I loaf my day through(yesteryear is more like 55-60) but we still make a hell of a lot of stuff (my current project is medical parts that end up in the NHS)

Everyone loves our new desktop web search design so much – the one with ads that look like links – that we're tweaking it, says Google

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

Try looking for

technical manuals.

ww.manuals-r-us.com

ww.download-manuals.ru

ww.try-finding-a-manual-here.com

ww.we-have-not-got-any-real-links-to-manuals-but-have-a-virus-on-us.com

And all you're after is a link to a TNC 620 control version 23111445(which is on their website, but you cant remember the website name..or where they hid it on their website)

Free Software Foundation suggests Microsoft 'upcycles' Windows 7... as open source

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

It wont happen

Sorry to burst your dreams and smash you back down to reality

It wont happen for 2 reasons

1. How much of "other company's" licenced code is inside windows

and more importantly

2. How much open source code has been shoveled in while ignoring the various GPL documents that come with it...

And while us linux types may dream, you'll never get rid of m$/windows because of vendor lock in, and "no one ever gets fired for buying IBM.. sorry m$"

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

My late father

belonged to an old car club..... and I get dragged along to the meeting(mostly because he was driving, paying and it was in a pub)

Got one of the old duffers come upto me and say "You make stuff right?" , "err yes "(not wishing to admit to robot/CNC wrangling).

"Can you make me one of these?" and he holds up some well worn piece of metal

"Sure... how many do you need?"

"2"

"Ok that will be about 500 quid each"

"WHAT!!!!!!"

"I can knock them out for £5 each if you order 5000 per month"

And that was the last time anyone asked me to make anything... or get invited back to that old car club

Lucky they had one of those automated de-fib machines there.. a real life saver..

We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Trollface

Ideal password

I'm not telling you

There that will keep the police at bay, pass a lie detector test and make the CPS look utter chumps when the case gets to court

Mind you, the judge will double the sentence because he has not got a sense a humour....

Hospital hacker spared prison after plod find almost 9,000 cardiac images at his home

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: But why?

Well he could post mine on the internet with the title of "How the fsck is this guy still alive?"

To which myself and the docs will answer "fscked if we know either"

Maybe he was looking for the manager involved with his firing and change that heart scan for a healthy one....

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

Re: Sorry I'm late, my doctors claimed I'd died...

HMRC: Sorry you are dead and we have the forms to prove it

Client: well if I'm dead I guess that lets me off paying you any tax

HMRC: you dont get off that easily..........

Bad news: Windows security cert SNAFU exploits are all over the web now. Also bad: Citrix gateway hole mitigations don't work for older kit

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Hullo, NSA? Microsoft here...

Quote

They* really fucked up that one.

* they, and everyone who's job it was to check the code

CHECK the code? we cant afford to have a QA department, shove the code out the door and patch it if its got a flaw.. sheesh

Every QA person is 30 grand off my bonus ffs

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: "the ECJ has made clear that national security concerns do not override citizens’ data privacy"

Quote

"The lack of mass activism in the UK isn't apathy, it's a recognition that it's not the right way to do things. You get lasting change through talking and agreement, not by bottles through shop windows."

Why is why the hated poll tax got binned after the riots and attempting to burn down most of London....

Although closer to the mark was the people like me who did their level best to avoid paying the thing in the first place... change of address.. yupp... every 4-6 months and told the council where I was going... if they could'nt address the bill to the right house its not my fault if I cant pay it.

We made a huge hole in council finances doing that, a hole the government could not ignore.

Hence the poll tax was binned and we went back to a tax on properties(much harder to hide those)

I did end up paying... after they finally caught up and summons me , but by then it was 20 months later and the poll tax was dead :)

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
FAIL

Dont use

windows 7 for online banking

Hang on... why dont we just drop the 7 from that

Dont use windows for online banking... there that reads a whole lot better.

Heck I'm so paranoid I dont HAVE online banking.... not until the banks implement 2 factor properly and they dont even do that when phoning up for a friendly chat about your finances

"Hello Boris , this is Sharon at FDUFYU bank, can you answer your security question so we know we are talking to the correct customer."

"Not until I know I'm talking to FDUFYU bank... goodbye"