Re: Downvote - really?
Not so. I have just been happily toggling you between 1-1 and 2-0.
Posts by Yes Me
1912 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2008
Page:
Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out
Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction
Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell
Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?
Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead
Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office
Tuesday 10th February 2026 06:50 GMT
Re: IT adjacent
Someone I know had a smart meter installed, which works fine except his house doesn't have cell coverage. A person comes to read the meter once in a while. Once in another while, a person comes to investigate why the meter isn't calling home, logs the absence of cell coverage, and goes away. It's the same person, since he's the tech assigned to both meter readings and meter repairs in that area.
Tuesday 10th February 2026 06:41 GMT
Re: Wiggle the mouse
> Indeed, having something moving to tell you it's working makes things feel quicker than "just nothing".
That is _exactly_ why cursors on alphanumeric terminals flashed continuously. If they didn't, users would complain that the mainframe was stuck. This goes back to the 1960s.
Oh look, Firefox's little | cursor is flashing as I type. If not, it's a sign that the Internet is stuck.
New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor
Saturday 7th February 2026 06:28 GMT
The Porlock Connection
"capture ideas that come to them in dreams or half-sleep"
I think Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have relied on that particular method of composition.
AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues
Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server
Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark
ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key
Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue
The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age
Tuesday 13th January 2026 20:14 GMT
Re: It's potentially worse than described here.
"an increasingly protectionist US" is not really so new; the USA has long had the mistaken belief that it's the only country that matters and that "fairness" means "beneficial to the USA". Trump is an outlier, and will be gone in a few years, but the underlying belief system hasn't changed.
However, a pause in the mad rush of technology for a few years, until China catches up (or captures and operates the Taiwan fabs) really wouldn't do any harm to society. A sudden shortfall of chips for crypto mining and AI would be a wonderful thing, in fact.
Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble
The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!
Monday 5th January 2026 21:24 GMT 
It was real back in Year 100...
"“Mark” told us he spent Y2K eve in New Zealand, and was supposed to inform his boss in Australia – where the time was two hours in the past – of any problems."
Hmm. If he'd been trying to check on a flight to Oz early on January 1st, the Auckland Airport web site at http://www.auckland-airport.co.nz would have told him it was "1 Jan 100". I have documentary proof but only on paper.
Similarly, http://www.hp.com/year2000/index.html said "January 1, *** DATE INVALID ***" just above "HP ready to Assist Customers Through Y2K Rollover"
It wasn't really a non-event. I'm looking forward to the Unix date rollover... only 12 years to go.
IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure
Monday 5th January 2026 20:01 GMT
Optional
For various reasons I didn't see this story sooner, so I expect nobody will ever read this comment, but:
1. IPv6 didn't turn 30 in 2025; the IPv6 decision was announced in July 1994 at the IETF in Toronto.
2. Since Google sees more than 49% of its users connecting via IPv6, and that doesn't include China, it's more of a success than a failure. We expected from the very beginning that v4 and v6 would coexist for many years. That's a feature, not a bug.
3. There is no grey market in IPv6 addresses. That in itself should be a pretty convincing argument. There are half as many IPv4 addresses as there are living people. How silly!
IPv6 rules.
Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner passes, aged 83
Wednesday 31st December 2025 06:22 GMT
Re: Do typographical 'letters' have carbon footprints?
It also carries the bizarre implication that he "passed" to somewhere else, whereas in fact his thought processes simply stopped, as did all his other biological processes. That is indeed called "dying" in English. But American is a different language.
Wednesday 31st December 2025 06:16 GMT
Humbug!
Gerstner didn't fail. The Chicago School economists won; the IBM Board became obsessed with "shareholder value" and picked a successor (Sam Palmisano) who was basically a glorified accountant rather than a technologist. Palmisano set IBM on course to the disaster that it has now become, and his successors have been even worse.
In reality, Gerstner did teach the elephant to dance, and even to pivot. But his successors blew it. A great pity.
IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project
UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again
Wednesday 24th December 2025 07:39 GMT
Re: Other legends of heritage
Ritchie wrote a paper "The Development of the C Language" if you want details.
China turns on a vast experimental network it says is an heir to ARPANET
Monday 22nd December 2025 06:51 GMT 
Eyes not opened
"His presentation about CENI is an eye-opener"
Not. It contains good advertising copy, but no actual technical information, except a passing reference to network coding and detnet (deterministic networking, an IETF work item). And network coding is not a recent Chinese invention, as a quick glance at Wikipedia will show you.
They built a high speed network. Good, but so did everybody else.
United Nations agrees to persist with multi-stakeholder internet governance
Monday 22nd December 2025 06:36 GMT 
Jaw-jaw
What Churchill actually said was "Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war" and despite being Churchill, he wasn't wrong.
Especially if the jawing keeps the politicians and their acolytes busy and away from the actual physical real world. Fortunately that is the exact effect of the self-named "Internet Governance Forum" to date, and in that sense it has been an indisputable success and has achieved absolutely nothing, despite some incremental climate damage due to pointless travel to pointless meetings.
Sir Humphrey would be proud.
User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't
Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours
ICANN distances itself from radical proposal – which it funded – to give nations a role in internet governance
Sunday 30th November 2025 03:21 GMT
Re: governments like the EU often just impose policy without really considering the implicatons
"The European Commission is setting up a Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Internet Standards Deployment"
What a horrible idea. At least it's only a Forum, i.e. another talking shop, so it will mainly contribute hot air to global warming.
Sunday 30th November 2025 03:18 GMT
Re: RIR behavour/control
"Downside is Internet governance is kinda split"
No, that's an important upside. It's one of the reasons why transborder and international regulation of the Internet has repeatedly failed to happen over the last 30 years or so. Long may this remain the case!
Unfortunately nation states do have the ability to restrict or stop Internet usage in their countries, and we can't ever stop that, whether it's North Korea, Sudan, Russia, Ukraine, or wherever you happen to live.
The real surprise in this story is that ICANN started this effort in the first place. Just another of their political blunders, I guess.
Eleven years after Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server biz, profits are still elusive
Saturday 22nd November 2025 03:06 GMT
Re: Lenovo makes servers?
Exactly. IBM isn't stupid, whatever else it may be.
Problem: ThinkPad future profitability looks terrible?
Solution: Sell the ThinkPad brand to China.
Problem: x86 server future profitability looks terrible?
Solution: Sell the x86 server line to the same idiots in China.
Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold
Tuesday 18th November 2025 19:52 GMT
Re: How do you create a single point of failure for a chunk of the net?
When you happen to be pointed by a search engine to a far distant site that doesn't pay for a CDN, you soon know it. So the question isn't why sites pay for CDN service, it's why Cloudflare has such a large share of the CDN market. And the answer to that question is simple: unregulated capitalism. I believe that Dr Marx and Mr Engels pointed this out some years ago.
Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver
Tuesday 11th November 2025 21:35 GMT
Re: Implausible to say the least.
Andy learned that at CERN, where "Bicycle on line" and "Jumbo jet on line" were the modes of moving mag tapes around (on site and off site, respectively).
Earlier than that, apparently the local customs post was fine with people driving between the Swiss and French CERN sites transporting used punch cards (ones with holes in them), but balked at unused punch cards, which had commercial value.
Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke
Saturday 8th November 2025 07:07 GMT
Re: Not a work prank...
Worth noting that when I grew up in England many yonks ago (before there was Windows, before there was DOS, long before...) I never saw a St George flag. It just wasn't a thing. Its gradual rise to become a political emblem is definitely unhealthy. Funny thing is that St George actually came from... Georgia, and not the one glued onto Florida.
Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support
Thursday 6th November 2025 06:20 GMT
Re: No need or rush to upgrade
No need or rush to upgrade
Neither of my Win10 capable PCs are signed up for the free ESU, so I'm doing nothing. Everything is fine. The machines are getting a bit elderly, so I do face the dilemma of either taming the Win11 machine that is sitting idle, or planning a complete switch to Linux Mint.
I do feel sorry for corporate IT managers who have no way to thumb their noses at MS.
ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare
Tuesday 4th November 2025 07:23 GMT
Re: IPv6 solution...
"The definition of a wide adoption of IPv6 seems to be when all popular website have AAAA records."
Not really. The Google measurement, for example, is how many users actually use IPv6 to reach Google servers.
Anyway, the new game in town now, given the general progress, is running your enterprise network as an IPv6-mostly network, where IPv6 is used except when it really can't be, because the remote host only has an A record, in which case you use 464LAT. Then the local infrastructure can be 100% IPv6-only and the OPEX goes down.
Tuesday 4th November 2025 07:03 GMT
Re: IPv6 solution...
Sorry mate, your world view is OBE. Yes, IPv6 took a lot longer to reach critical mass than it should have done. (If TimBL had invented the web a few years later, large scale NAT would never have happened, and the Web would have been deployed over IPv6 from day one.) But now v6 is way past critical mass and IPv4 is rapidly being pushed into a legacy role. Fifteen years too late, which is a highly unfortunate reality.
Tuesday 4th November 2025 06:56 GMT
Re: IPv6 solution...
I think that the global IPv6 adoption (as measured by Google) will exceed 50% in the last week of 2025, if not before. The reason is that IPv6 usage peaks at weekends (because more private subscribers use IPv6 than workplace subscribers) and because private usage peaks during the end-of-year holidays.
Also the Google estimate for China is meaningless; actual usage in China is 77% (China Daily, 2025-10-31). So if Google could measure China properly, they would already show more than 50% worldwide adoption.
It's about time for the IPv6 naysayers to shut up.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
