* Posts by Anonymous South African Coward

3212 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2010

Cloudflare stops services to 'revolting' hate site

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Devil

Re: Eternal September

I hereby request formally that the BOFH give us a couple of pointers on killfiles and how to use/operate these.

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Thumb Up

Re: Just remember...

Schroedinger's backup.

Germany orders Sept 1 shutdown of digital ad displays to save gas

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Putin puttin in some choice Borkings.

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

"Oh, we spent that all on getting our SSL keys recut at the locksmith and then getting our hard drives hardened," I chip in.

Beautiful.

Add to it the expected violence at the end.

Classic BOFH. Or PFY? Anyway.

This eppysode'll mature well, and be one of the classics.

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Taking lessons from South Africa

Proudly exporting corruption and power failures the whole world over...

Maybe we should rename South Africa to SPECTRE...

the C stands for Corruption.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: a long drop into the inky blackness

The real inky blackness is where grues lurk.

Be careful where you install software, and who installs it

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

So now we know, that Bombastic Bob loves to do borked software installations and retreat to the safety, watching the resulting fallout with glee.

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Green energy

Greta Thunberg's very interested in your proposal.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Unhappy

Ah, cloudy stuff and software subscriptions... the stuff any company uses to milk their customers...

This is what to expect when a managed service provider gets popped

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

MSP = Ma Se Po*s... (only South Africans will understand...)

Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Comments to On-Call articles

Betcha the cattle prod went "ominous hummmKZERRRT"

Apologies to the carbosilicate amorph whose "ominous hummmm" line I stole

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Hot stuff

Touched a hot laptop once, never again.

Not worth the hassle and stress.

Much better to pay that bit extra and have peace of mind.

Unless the legit vendor is trying to get rid of hot stuff as well...

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Pint

make your minds up... why use color instead of colour, or license instead of licence?

Do you really need to be *that* different or subtle?

Or do the Brits need to grow stiff upper lips and start using the bastardized versions instead?

:)

peace out, let's all go to ye olde pubbe and have a good time, no good will come from fighting amongst ourselves...

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Happy times are here again. Yay.

Looking forward to the Boss and Director's frolicsome fun with the crypto upstart...

Baidu crashes the cost of robo-taxis by 75 percent

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Will we get the Johnnies from Total Recall soon?

Mars helicopter to take a breather, recharge batteries

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Nothing there....

Bilbo Baggins? Is that you?

Twitter claims Elon Musk bailed from sale with 'invalid and wrongful' reasons

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Chuckmate.

Chucky want to know if it also include him/her/it...

"Oh fuck, it's Chucky!" - Ready Player One.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Scottish Windows run on haggis and whisky

Large Hadron Collider experiment reveals three exotic particles

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Phobos Anomaly opening soon

Phobos Anomaly opening soon... DOOMguy will save us all!

BOFH: Press 1. Press 2. Press whatever you damn well LIKE

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Still pure gold after all these years.

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

7-zip user here... always will be ever since I discovered it.

Previously I used ZipGenius, but it lacked the feature of splitting 7z files into multiple files.

What is great about this feature is, if you want to transmit a 4Gb archive over an unstable link, you break it up in lots of smaller 7z files, then transfer those files. If one or two fails, you just retransmit the failed ones without having to retransmit the whole 4Gb file.

A trick I have learnt from dial-up days. Remember those, when your transfers are at whim of noise and scratches on the line...

Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Terminator

Going to be interested if Rise of the Machines(tm) really happens.

Montana bunker prepped and ready just in case?

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Excellent eppysode, and will get even better with age, like a good wine.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

Z80 uber alles.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

"Someone at the meeting seriously suggested that we add an extra button to the keyboard. One would be 'Delete, but I may want this back' and another would be 'Delete, now and forever'."

It's called the Deleted Items in Outlook.

Teslasuit demo: Taking a crack at force feedback with the 'Glove'

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

*ahem* the sex industry's very interested and would like a good demonstration.

Samsung fined $14 million for misleading smartphone water resistance claims

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Sagsmug doing Sagsmug things.

Microsoft pulls Windows 10/11 installation websites in Russia

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

404 - BillyWindows Not Found. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (L)aunch Linux?

This will most probably also include virus definitions for the baked-in Windows Defender.

Best would be to switch over to Linux, but that is easier said than done.

Wonder which tech company will be next on this particular sanctions bandwagon?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

The BOFH will re-introduce Windows to Russia.

Most definitely above expensive cars or rubbish skips full of pointy steel bits.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Coat

Anybody had the infamous "Bad or missing Command Interpreter" on DOS V3.00 systems, after accidentally renaming/moving/deleting COMMAND.COM?

need to get out of IT now -->

Microsoft readies Windows Autopatch to free admins from dealing with its fixes

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Thumb Up

AutoPatch should be called AutoBork

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Pint

Qualitay.

And with the lawyery type gone walkabouts too... 107% success rate.

Time for an early Friday and something refreshing...

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Mr. Fix-It, Mr. Restore-It, and Mr. Teach-It

These days it is far cheaper to toss a broken something than to try and fix it.

Most consumer items are also assembled without any means of disassembling it.

The older items of kitchen equipment can still be disassembled, fixed, and returned to working operation, but the latest and newest... not quite, since it now mostly have lots of electronics in, and not everybody have the expertise or means to troubleshoot electronical issues - easier just to toss and replace.

Mentality need to change, and it will not be easy.

End-of-life smartphone? Penguins at postmarketOS aim to revive it

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste

Agreed wrt the battery.

If only there was an easy way to replace the battery without stripping or disassembling the phone completely...

Older phones had removable batteries. Some batteries (like blackberries etc) are standalone, meaning they do not form part of the battery compartment cover.

Some phones' batteries was actually a part of the battery compartment (some older Nokia phones, like the venerable 5110, 6310 and 3310) etc.

Unfortunately, in order to maximize assembly speed, minimize component cost and the such, most manufacturers started to place the battery into the phone casing, and in some extreme cases, hot glue everything together. This lead to smaller designs, but also have its drawbacks, such as when the battery turn into a spicy pillow. (There is a subreddit dedicated to this, called r/spicypillows)

It will not be easy to go back to the oldstyle phone with removable batteries, since most people are programmed to believe that thin phones are the in thing.

I'm prepared to have a thicker phone with a removable battery so that I can use it for a longer-than-designed lifespan.

But I may just be pissing into the hurricane at this stage.

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Not really novel

Lovely spaghetti, how about some meatballs with a nice sauce to go with it?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Most notworking issues with networks are caused by Layer 1 issues - not plugged in properly, cable fault, cable break etc.

Sharing layer 1 infra may save some money, but will cause some issues later on, should Mr Murphy decide to take a poke at Layer 1. Yet most telcos will gladly take that risk as having redundant infra will affect their bottom line.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Terminator

Any bets on when this bot will become self-aware and start taking over the world?

Or will something like Colossus : The Forbin Project happen when a Google bot will shack up with an Amazon bot, and so repress the world?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Terminator

Re: I'll Be Back

Wondering when it will become self-aware.

openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Downloading it, will have the PFY try it out.

And, yes, will warn him about BTRFS, and to use that only for the Beancounter servers.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Inquiring minds now want to know how many tabs can Wordstar take.

And WordPerfect as well.

Alibaba sued for selling a 3D printer that overheated, caught fire, and killed a man

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Ali Baba and his 40 thieves...

We had a Sagsmug laser printer in the office. When you switched it on, and left it for a while, you can smell it is definitely overheating.

So we scrapped and binned it. Better safe than sorry.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Re: meanwhile in Russia...

In Russia russian OS books you gulag accommodation

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: composed of Transputer chips.

Transputin's a nice name, too.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

The law bill, previously green-lit by the state senate in a 49-14 vote, now awaits the expected signature of New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D).

The weakest link and can be attacked with a good dose of lobbying, bribes and the such.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Holmes

Rockets...

I will rather leave the planning, design and launching of rockets over to experts.

Or rednecks who tend to try and use their butt as a launching platform for small fireworks which is launched like a rocket.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Was it South Africa where a 3.5" floppy disk was known as a stiffie?

Yes.

And only now do I realize the sexual innuendo when asking the office ladies for a stiffy in Afrikaans...

Time to go into the long night? Bah, not yet.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Everybody knows...

Just call them Test Manglers.

There *is* a difference.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Devil

Was that same user also involved in the recent BA IT systems meltdown at Heathrow?

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

I'm glad El Reg is sanitizing their inputs, otherwise the :(){:|:&};: fork bomb would have hosed the entire site...

They do sanitize user inputs, do they?

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: US Legal?

time to toddle off to ye olde pubbe and have a good onne?

most definitely! With some pub grub.

'ere, who gots the Boss's credit card?