* Posts by Anonymous South African Coward

3212 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2010

How about a lovely processor thermal trip? Hot day in Italy brings out the banking bork

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Coat

Re: Where is the error displayed?

Why in a Window of course.

Which version of Window?

Looks like it's a luverly day outside, just super for some walkabouts...

China’s UK embassy calls for probe into 'hack of Ambassador’s Twitter account'

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

It's twatter, not twitter.

Adobe Illustrator's open source rival Inkscape delivers v1.0.1 - with experimental Scribus PDF export

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Coat

Hailing from a WordPerfect/SuperCalc5/AllyCad/Lotus1-2-3 (for DOS) world, I can say that the software was well thought out, so once you got good muscle memory for the / commands (in SC5 and Lotus) then you can get really up to serious speed, especially when doing fancy things.

AllyCad - once you memorized most of the keyboard shortcuts, you can churn out good drawings in very little time.

Compared the above to today's Windows stuff - there's a lot of clickety click stuff going on with the mouse, and a lot of pecking at ribbons and menus to get what you want... taking you longer in comparison to do documents/drawings/spreadsheets...

...or is it just me?

Going out for some deep ponderings at a pub ====>

Nintendo revives Game & Watch portable proto-console, adds color to 2.36-inch screen

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

A spring cleaning found my old Nintendo Game and Watch double-screen "Mario Bros" game out of deep hibernation.

Only need batteries to play... I'm happy.

Fond memories of these!

Now if only they can bring out the same, but in color flip screens. Donkey Kong flip screen FTW.

The Wrath of Amazon: JEDI wars rage on after US Department of Defense affirms Microsoft contract

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Coat

Is it a case of sour grapes, or is it a legitimate concern?

Only time will tell.

Packing up my stuff to go over to greener pastures. --->

There's gall – and then there's the security director who stole and resold 41 government-owned networking switches

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Horry County

I misread that as Horny County.

Techie studied ancient ways of iSeries machine, saved day when user unleashed eldritch powers, got £50 gift voucher

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: You get told "We're not renewing your contract anymore"

...the new manager wanted us contractors to go permanent and as an incentive proposed to give us a 30% pay cut.

Stuff that, I'll walk rather.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Obligatory Dilbert link coming up soon...

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: All software needs...

El-Ahrairah approves of a "bring forth the fluffy bunnies" option...

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Thumb Down

Seems as if 2020 is not done yet.

First it was the 'rona.

Then mass layoffs, and still more 'rona.

And mass lootings and burnings in Kenosha, and other diverse places, and yet more 'rona.

Now it's cruddy software, and still more 'rona.

Coronachan must love us.

Time to break out the time displacement device and travel back to 1960 when the world was a better place, and make The Silent Age* happen.

Point-and-click adventure game. Most Excellent.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Positives and negative experiences

- All the animations such as when a menu shows or tabs are shown are cute but rapidly become the cause of brain farts. Needs an option to turn them off

Animations are usually the first thing I turn off on any new device, because these suck CPU and battery, and things take a tad longer to finish.

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

We've put our suggestions to KFC so await their response eagerly. On the other hand, they may never speak to us again. ®

That's gonna be a clucking shame.

Outage: Faulty UPS at data centre housing London Internet Exchange causes grief for ISPs and telcos alike

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Coat

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

So... whether you host it on-prem or "in the cloud", you're stuck if this happen to a core router and you cannot access your data...

Ah, the joys of IT.

icon --> getting ready to get out of IT, had more than enough stress, BillyWindows brownstuff and just stuffups in general.

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Optimisation

...add more terror-bites

Terror-Daktil 4D on World of Spectrum has a lot of terror-bites :)

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Correlation does not equal cause

There is a BOFH episode dealing with just this situation. Best is to let the Boss do it before beer o'clock and skedaddle the hell out of Dodge City leaving the Bossly Unit to sort out that mess.

An irritating itch down the back of your neck? Searing midsummer heat? Of course, it can only be SysAdmin Day

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

BzzzzzzzzzzzZAT

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

And James, like all good BOFHs, "went back to charging the recently-used cattleprod".

There, fixed it for ya.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Workmen

Mister Teh-ah-tim-eh was there!

Twitter hack latest: Up to 36 compromised accounts had their private messages read – including a Dutch politician's

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Twatterati gonna twatter

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

In motor engineering terms, you have a Master Brake Cylinder, and a Slave Brake Cylinder.

What'll they be called now?

Push-a Cylinder and Pull-a Cylinder?

I want to get off this planet.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: is this just round 1?

My black colleagues doesn't bat an eyelid at the use of "blacklist" and "whitelist". We all will get a good laugh out of this stupidity.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

1984 and Animal Farm must be declared mandatory reading for everybody.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: When rm -rf * is not what you meant

Well, it was a node, and it had brethren, so, why not just scp the java dir from one and "restore" this one? Worked a treat and never had to tell anyone.

A-ha... So this is what happened at Barclays then!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Way back in the 90's I did POS support for a couple of clients in Pretoria.

One difficult client had all the bells and whistles - shiny new Novell 3.12 plus a couple of DOS workstations and a Windows 3.1 workstation for himself. And 120Mb tape drive.

Laughably small in today's terms of Giga- and Terabytes. Anyway.

He made a backup for the day, put it in the safe with the other backup tapes, locked the safe and went home for the weekend.

Come Monday morning we received a frantic call from him - ne'er-do-wells happened during the weekend, they took the file server, workstations and safe (including the backup tapes). So he had nothing to fall back on, and he was due for a SARS (income tax) revenue. Ouch.

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Liability

An accidental delete star dot star?

"ach whoopsy, I dinna have any backup either..."

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

This actually belongs in "Who, Me?".... from the programmer/developer's perspective...

"so here we were, the Bossly Unit FUBAR'd our main Java store, and in a flash of inspiration, I checked on the Wayback Machine if they had a copy of our Java, and as luck would have it...."

The rest, as they usually say, is history.

Release the pressure: Win16 support arrives for version 3.2 of Free Pascal

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Granny pix

Love it!

I did some.programming in Pascal more than 20 years ago.

Definitely going to download this and compare it to Lazarus.

Ta for the headsup!

Overload: A one-way ticket to a madman's situation

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Testament to the solidness of OS/2...

Heard that some folks preferred to use OS/2 when they have to collect massive amounts of data over serial links as Windows could not keep up with the demand.

...still trying to find the article where OS/2 on a single CPU outperformed NT on a quadprocessor setup. Ah, those were the days.

The only way is bork for the UK's embattled rail travellers

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Not a titsup situation

baaaaah, pipped me to the post.

Somebody's gonna be PISsed off...

From off-prem to just off: IBM Cloud goes down planet-wide so hard even the status page didn't work

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Notes down globally

Bloated Goats still a thing?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

fnarrr fnarrr fnarrr

store it in the cloud they said

it will be always available they said

but "they said" did not take into account network outages (like this one) or a break in your local fibre preventing you from accessing your preciouses files...

naaaaah, old school with on-prem is still king for now.

Sure, use cloud for backup or data retention... and hope that it will be online when you need to restore a file or whatever....

Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

I sincerely hope it was not a rabid wombat. Rabies are not fun.

Was said wombat teleported from the Discworld just to "get rid of that pesky critter, buggrit millenium hand and shrimp!"?

If Daddy doesn't want me to touch the buttons, why did they make them so colourful?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Halon emergency release + curious fingers = big BOFH fun

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Press the button Max ...

Ahhh, the good old CRFH... the reboot was meh for me.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: When HP engineers were actually engineers!

Heh, group of us techs was clustered around a PC, wanting to copy data on (or off, can't quite remember). This was when coax and 10base was the rage.

The motherboard was not installed yet, but was on the workbench along with the hard drive etc. And an Accton NE2000 compatible NIC.

Along came somebody, hot unplugged the Accton NIC and as he was walking away, the copy process we were busy with, dieded.

We had a good laugh on that one, most impressive was that there were no component damage or failure.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Load?

The reactor at Chernobyl - at the instant before it went critical, was its output high enough to boil a lake?

We need some sort of standard here - size of lake, temperature, water density etc etc...

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

cmd = quick to load and quick to do something

power(s)hell = takes a while to load, you have to faff around with arcane commands until you get the desired result... but it may be worth the faffing around, especially if you can use the same commands over and over again (eg fdisk /mbr).

IBM's sacking spree reaches Australia – and as staff wait to exit, they're offered AU$4k to find new workers

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Greyhair = experience, knows how to resolve issues in as little time as possible, does not bill the client with lots of $$$ - but employing greyhair costs company a bit of $$$

New guy = no experience of greyhair, will waffle and faffle around trying to resolve issues, billing the client lots of $$$$$ - employing new guy = cheap as peanuts

guess which one they'll choose

and new contracts can be written to stipulate that if no agreeable performance levels is reached, company have the right to terminate contract with new guy and hire another new guy...

no wonder why the natural enemy of the BOFH is the beancounter

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Funny that

Or setting someone's VMS prompt to "Help ?" and seeing how long they persevere trying to get out of "Help".

A good one was to set the DOS prompt to C:\DOS> and leave the user wondering just what the heck's going on, especially when a DIR shows no DOS files.

Or to change said prompt to something else like C:> ... leaving them in limbo just where the heck they are.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Funny that

That's a hoary old one, points deducted for lack of originality.

I'm sure world+dog still thinks it is an original one, and it still is getting pulled off on unsuspecting victims.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Teardropping a Win95 PC of a colleague who's fond of browsing news sites instead of working. Its HDD died before I could teardrop it more, sadly.

I also did the wallpaper-icon trick.

As the I and l is most often similar, I retyped an user's login name , replacing I (Uppercase i) with lowercase L

He swore a blue streak until he jabbed the reset button.

Dude, where's my laser?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Darth Vader deflected the laser to destroy Alderaan...

Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Joke

Encircle Heathrow (and others) with a 25kV line - will stop those pesky drones from flying!

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: 8.3

by gum, it shows the abbreviated filenames in 8.3 format....

flashbacks to a bygone era where you struggled to make sense of micros~1 and micros~2 when trying to recover documents etc from a FUBAR'd Win95/98 install....

Multi-part Android spyware lurked on Google Play Store for 4 years, posing as a bunch of legit-looking apps

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Not truly paranoid but truly realistic

Speaking of banks, how's TSB doing these days?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Yay, more fun and games...

For the truly paranoid the idea is to have two cellphones, one for general, daily usage.

The second with only the necessary banking apps, and is used only for online banking, nothing else.

I'm planning to obtain a second device, and use that for general use, whilst the first device is used only for banking and nothing else.

The truly paranoid will most probably do regular factory resets on their device(s).

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Started to program in Turbo Pascal in the early 1990's - and did Turbo C, and Assembly Language as well.

Then I switched over to a Network Engineer course, and is now a BOFH.

Sadly, programming skillz is not much anymore. Maybe it is time for a refresher and revival...

The end really is nigh – for 32-bit Windows 10 on new PCs

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

First time I've heard of a 32-bit Win10....

...for obvious reasons I'd rather go with 64-bit everything to make better use of memory of 8Gb and higher....

Xiaomi Mi 9 owners furious after dodgy Vodafone software patch bricked their mobes

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

And this is why South African telcos are loath to push out updates to their customers as they will be left with the proverbial hot potato should things Bork.

And it seems as if somebody did not do a thorough testing of said update etc before peddling it off to the masses...

'We're changing shift, and no one can log on!' It was at this moment our hero knew server-lugging chap had screwed up

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Had an DHCP issue this morning myself.

For some reason ClearOS's DHCP function decided to disable itself after a reboot following a power failure. Enabled it after users bleated about loss of wifi and network access....

Now all is well.

Strange how such a small thing can cause big issues...