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* Posts by Anonymous South African Coward

3211 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2010

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China's Mars rover assigned extended mission after exceeding life expectancy

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At this rate we can expect the Martians to take an unhealthy interest in our world and send some probes off in order to determine the feasibility of an invasion.

skedaddling off to the nearest well-stocked BOFH bunker -->

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Judge dismisses objections to spaceport in Scotland from billionaire who also wants to build spaceport in Scotland

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They must build the Mos Eisley Cantina first.

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WEB@30: The Register pokes around historical hardware of the WWW

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Can still recall the SKWERRRK SKWERRRRK of an Epson LX printer doing graphical dot-matrix printering.

Good memories. And had a lot of fun too.

Those days them purdy compootas was more personal. And hands-on, unlike today's Fisher-Price things. *sniff*

Today you can just plug it into power, start it up, give it an username and password for your account, and away you go.

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So the data centre's 'getting a little hot' – at 57°C, that's quite the understatement

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Re: That reminds me...

Baaaaah. Should've asked Simon for assistance with the windows...

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Pakistan's tax office services go dark after migration project goes awry

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Re: Please

Clap! Snap! the black crack!

Grip, grab! Pinch, nab!

And down down to Goblin-town

You go, my lad!

Clash, crash! Crush, smash!

Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!

Pound, pound, far underground!

Ho, ho! my lad!

Swish, smack! Whip crack!

Batter and beat! Yammer and bleat!

Work, work! Nor dare to shirk,

While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,

Round and round far underground

Below, my lad!

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I do hope Simon responds, and not with a >KZERRRRT<...

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Time passes. Thorin starts singing about gold.

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>KZERRRRRT<

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Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

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I AM DEMANDING FREE HAGGIS-BASED MEALS EVERY DAY FOR ALL CITIZENS, IN PERPETUITY, UNDER ARTICLE 61 OF THE MAGNA CARTA WHICH IS TOTALLY A REAL THING THAT GENUINELY APPLIES HERE

*shudder* if that happens, I'm off to Mars on the first available transport option...

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A Whopper of a bork for seekers of pre-flight nosh

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Anybody got a fresh and hot whopper?

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Re: How long is the flight?

Train should be the obvious choice, no chance of road rage.

Let the Uber driver handle the road rage for you, from the station to the final destination.

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Dallas cops lost 8TB of criminal case data during bungled migration, says the DA... four months later

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Budget constraints can also hinder successful migrations from one system to the other.

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Internet Explorer 3.0 turns 25. One of its devs recalls how it ended marriages – and launched amazing careers

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Tombstone for Internet Explorer on Reddit (posted by yours truly) :

https://www.reddit.com/r/Sysadminhumor/comments/nihkvo/tombstone_for_internet_explorer/

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Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

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I can remember my first mouse too - a Genius mouse, one of those square boxy mice.

It did the job jolly well. Including picking up crud as well.

I miss it. It had character.

Not sure where it wandered off to...

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Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

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Re: PC

There's a whole bunch of pictures/docs here for anyone interested: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/convergent/ngen/

Now *that* was a trip down memory lane! Thanks for preserving the images of some chippery and motherboards!

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Re: Progress?

TBH I will prefer using WordPerfect 5.x and SuperCalc 5 above today's glitzy GUI stuff.

They did the job, and they did it well. Plus you had no distractions from silly things like email popups, or IM messages popping up as well (should you have any IM chat apps running) or Firefox/Internet Exploiter/Chrome/Edge luring you with their siren song of the Wibbly Wobbly Web...

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Re: Edlin

Ahhhh... EDLIN... I had a shufty at it, was quite interesting.

n00bs of today won't know what they've been missing...

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Re: Memory

And juggling the contents of one's CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files in order to maximize RAM for DOS apps on a Novell Netware 2.x/3.x/4.x network (bootROM on NIC).

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Re: ah......I remember it well...

Indeed, those were happier days, when the PC was more "personal". Sussing out IRQ and DMA levels and getting that third LPT port to work without crashing anything was a mission in itself.

Today's stuff is just plug and play, nothing more personal.

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Re: PC

The magic word? Isn't it XYZZY?

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NASA blames the wrong kind of Martian rock for Perseverance sample failure

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Next time, pack an Electrolux.

To suck the dust up into a baggy.

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BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

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Re: Historically

But it was such fine material! Such soft and fine material!

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Excellent. Will mature with time too. :)

And with a financially-poorer Bossly Unit too.

And now, it's time for ---->

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See that last line in the access list? Yeah, that means you don't have an access list

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We once did the unforgivable and opened port 22 to * on a firewall... (a longish while ago)

...linux server got hacked and people was pissed off with us.

Luckily for us we caught it fairly quickly.

Suffice to say we now install fail2ban on every linux server we now deploy. Just in case.

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Xiaomi builds a robot dog out of smartphone cameras and an Nvidia edge AI board

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Just add some Terminator-looking fangs and things that can rip and tear.

Will be great to keep ne'er-do-wells away.

And if you do purchase such an abomination, pray that it do not go rogue on you.

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BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

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>KZERRRRRRRT<

You touched my machine, did you?

All I did was...

>KZERRRRRT<

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Re: Deja vu!

Heh, I used to run Thunderbird on OS/2 - somebody from a previous employer got infected with something and said something forwarded itself via email to me.

I jus laughed at the offending executable and deleted it.

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Microsoft has a workaround for 'HiveNightmare' flaw: Nuke your shadow copies from orbit

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Imagine the first fix they rush out borks world+dog (even Azure) authentication 100% solid.

Now that will be a nuclear solution to a problem.

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AWS gave Parler a chance, won't say if it talked to NSO before axing spyware biz's backend systems

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...and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa

Caused a bit of a buzz... El Presidente is not happy about that.

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Gloom-dwelling subterranean robots battle for million-dollar DARPA prize

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A hollow voice says 'Fool'.

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Terminator

Calling Simon.... calling Simon...

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In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

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Still using plain-vanilla FTP for telemetry.

Will have to upgrade it to SFTP eventually.

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Impromptu game of Robot Wars sparks fire in warehouse at UK e-tailer Ocado

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All right, who downvoted this excellent piece?

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Not only is Hubble back online after outage, it's already taking photos of the cosmos

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Re: Made my day

A good old-fashioned rülpsten never harmed anybody.

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Re: NASA Engineers are classic Engineers

Beancounters are the natural enemy of the BOFH...

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BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

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Next iteration - get the heat to be diffused away unevenly so as not to give up the game.

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LibreOffice 7.2 release candidate reveals effort to be Microsoft-compatible

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A heartfelt and sincere thanks to StarOffice, and later, Sun Microsystems, who made StarOffice/OpenOffice available for free.

I can remember the long nights spend downloading it on a dinky 33.6 modem, and getting it to run under OS/2...

And, yes, it also enabled me to rescue a corrupted Word document. Kudos to the team.

Well done.

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Ah, I see you found my PowerShell script called 'SiteReview' – that does not mean what you think it means

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Way back when Smoothwall was the bees' knees, I installed it as our office firewall, and also added a couple of other things (like SARG etc).

Got a bit curious one day to see what sort of sites was visited...

...to this day I wish I haven't done that.

Nowadays I prefer the "set it and forget it" option which will block pr0nz, but I will never, ever take a shufty at any sort of web filtering log again.

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Western Approaches Museum: WRENs, wargames, and victory in the Atlantic

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History need to be set down lest it be forgotten.

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Ex-IBM whistleblower's suit back in court, 8 years after he alleged irregularities in $265m IRS software deal

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Probably stuck in the internals of Bloated Goats somewhere...

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11-year-old graduate announces plans to achieve immortality by 'replacing body parts with mechanical parts'

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I'm sure the Grigari will be happy to drop in and say hi...

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Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums

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Now if only Simon (the resident BOFH) can get his hands on one and "modify" it with assistance from the PFY...

...then we'll have a winner.

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IBM insiders say CEO Arvind Krishna downplayed impact of email troubles, asked for a week to sort things out

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Bloated Goats says it best.

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Re: Monkeys!

Lovely. Got to start compiling all these in one location for our pleasure.

IBM stands for....

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Re: IBM

Heyup, another one to add to the list of "just what does IBM stand for"...

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The failure of the email migration, this person said, is the result of incompetent people.

And why do you have incompetent people? Hmmmm... maybe it has something to do with Manglement wanting to get rid of older, more experienced employees?

Almost pub time, gonna read On Call, then BOFH... then kick back and relax.

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Age discrimination case against IBM leaks emails, docs via bad redaction

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Employment laws differ from state to state...

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Kaseya says it's seen no sign of supply chain attack, sets SaaS restoration target of Tuesday afternoon, on-prem fix to follow

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/me goes off to reddit to look for rants from sysadmins whose 4th was ruined

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Radioactive hybrid terror pigs break out of nuclear hellscape home and into people's hearts

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The Register for the win... love articles such as these, it's an escape from the daily humdrum of live (and COVID).

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Re: Asterix in Japan?

I have allured as much in a post in the original terror pig article.

Obelix versus radioactive terror piggies... now THAT will be worth a saga to tell on a cold winter's night.

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Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

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Now we see the results of getting rid of expensive and knowledgeable workers with cheaper, younger people with less knowledge.

Typical Beancounter behaviour. Thintelligence.

Any tech company need workers with knowledge, because hey, knowledge is power. Not everything that go wrong can be fixed with book knowledge, you need practical knowledge, like just where to hit it, and how hard to hit it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm on my way to do some percussive maintenance on a client's purdy compoota.

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