• Jean (unregistered) in reply to Jim

    There are times, sir, when men of good conscience cannot blindly follow orders.

  • (cs) in reply to AGray
    AGray:
    The "Somebody set up us the bomb" bit is a reference to Zero Wing, a Sega Master Drive game that is known to be the best example of a poorly-localized Japanese game.

    Thus, it's not English. It's Engrish.

    Oh, I protest! It's a perfectly localized game!

    ... if your locale is Yokohama.

  • (cs) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    But hey, you have a difficult time with content suitable for 12 year-olds. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

    That made my day!

  • (cs) in reply to PiisAWheeL
    PiisAWheeL:
    Where's the love.

    Orchard Road, Singapore

  • (cs) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:

    Probably will happen eventually.

    Almost certainly is already happening with most hardware containing ICs made in China.

  • PsyWulf (unregistered)

    I want my money back,i've gotten very comfortable predicting who gets fired for trying to do the right thing.

    Stop messing with my mind and lulling me into a false sense of confidence with unrealistic endings

  • AGray (unregistered) in reply to oheso
    oheso:
    AGray:
    The "Somebody set up us the bomb" bit is a reference to Zero Wing, a Sega Master Drive game that is known to be the best example of a poorly-localized Japanese game.

    Thus, it's not English. It's Engrish.

    Oh, I protest! It's a perfectly localized game!

    ... if your locale is Yokohama.

    ...What about Nagasaki?

  • (cs) in reply to AGray
    AGray:

    ...What about Nagasaki?

    Nah, totally different dialect.

  • (cs) in reply to Unicorn #8157

    So it's like Schroedinger's virus...it doesn't exist until you look for it? And maybe simultaneously someone else's computer becomes uninfected?

  • dignissim (unregistered) in reply to Garrison Fiord
    Garrison Fiord:
    Remy:
    Those two boxes were so loaded with viruses it was time to call in a nuclear strike to keep the infection from spreading.

    Is there any damn, change that we could get an editor who can right at a 3rd grade level at least? What happen to that call-out for new writers? Did someone set us up the bomb?

    And yet I had to read what you wrote no less than 3 times before I got it.

  • Appalled (unregistered) in reply to Garrison Fiord
    Garrison Fiord:
    snoofle:
    Garrison Fiord:
    Remy:
    Those two boxes were so loaded with viruses it was time to call in a nuclear strike to keep the infection from spreading.

    Is there any damn, change that we could get an editor who can right at a 3rd grade level at least? What happen to that call-out for new writers? Did someone set us up the bomb?

    Ok, I've been at work since 4AM, so I'm a little groggy, but... an illiterate sentence critiquing a correct sentence?
    How about making your sentences readable? I don't care as much about grammar or spelling, but the point of writing is communication. ie, if your sentence is difficult to read, I don't care if you use "your" or "you're".

    Incidentally, what's up with a 4AM start time? Do you live on the west coast?

    I usually don't reply to these but Garrison, you can't even spell "write" (you spelled "right") and you have the gall to critique someone else's writing?

  • Gibbon1 (unregistered) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    In a flash of institutional intelligence, both of them were fired, and Nick was given a promotion.
    Oh, come on, it never works that way. Of course Nick was sacked. Right?

    The answer is one of three.

    A. Larry is really good at sucking cash out of the customer and management will fire Nick if they keeps Larry happy.

    B. Management doesn't care either way. Nick keeps his job and Larry then tries to screw him usually to no avail.

    C. Management is not happy with Larry and his boss and is looking for a good excuse to can them.

    Considering Larry and his boss seem unable to jack the customer for some upgrade fees, and who can't jack the customer for that?, I pick C.

  • Herr Otto Flick (unregistered) in reply to Decius
    Decius:
    What you say?

    Take off every 'ZIG'.

  • MechanicJay (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    foo:
    Ted:
    “There are two Windows boxes in the data-center,” Larry explained. “Those are mine. Do not touch them. Ever.
    those boxes actually need a hardware upgrade
    So he is supposed to upgrade the hardware without touching it? I guess that might be vaguely possible with Linux boxes, but Windows? The magic in this story is more powerful than unicorns.
    You mean Windows doesn't support Remote Hot Swap(tm) yet?
    I did hear the story of an IBM mainframe in Japan somewhere that was up for seven and a half years, and during that time, every part of the hardware was replaced at least once, including the racks, with no downtime. (Well, of course, you take individual CPU boards (etc) out of service, but one at a time, until you have replaced them all.)

    But even there, someone had to touch the hardware that was being changed...

    There are some VMS clusters out there that measure their uptime in decades.

  • AP (unregistered)

    F-16 is quiet. I once had the opportunity at CDG to be behind a Concorde taking off, with the window in the cockpit open on our plane. Now that was loud!

    Fully loaded B-52 came close!

    Never been near a Bear luckily.

  • (cs) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:
    Call the police who are better equipped to show up a few hours later and write a report and then say they can't return your unique property when it is found because you didn't report the serial numbers
    FTFY.

    Then report the serial numbers. You can't expect the police to be psychic!

    The thing with unique things are that they are unique, and thus do not have a serial number.
  • John Hensley (unregistered)

    After Nick reported him Larry had a conversation that went something like this:

    "That there's Boss Kean's data-center. And those are your boxes in it. Now boy, what are your boxes doin' in Boss Kean's data-center?

    "Better get in there and get 'em out, boy."

  • John (unregistered) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:

    On a slightly off-topic, but related note, I always strongly advise people not to chase thieves. Instinctively people want to but you have no idea if the thief is armed or even has accomplices. Without the proper training civilians are apt to seriously injure themselves, the suspect, or an innocent bystander. Besides taking the law into your own hands is frowned upon by law enforcement.

    Fact: Your property is never as valuable as a life.

    Call, don't run. Call the police who are better equipped to confront criminals. I always say once you are 70 and shuffling round with a zimmerframe you won't be able to go chasing criminals anyway so you might as well get used to not running after thieves now.

    Which while eminently sensible from a personal point of view is a classic tragedy of the commons. By lowering the risk of being chased immediately by untrained and possibly unreasonably violent members of the public you directly increase the attractiveness and safety of theft - which is disadvantageous to all of us by making it more likely that we will be the victim of theft.

    This also applies to violent crime, when the public 'walks on by' because they are (understandably) scared, or advised by the police to not get involved because they are not professional.

  • The Queens English (unregistered) in reply to Garrison Fiord
    Garrison Fiord:
    Is there any damn, change that we could get an editor who can right at a 3rd grade level at least? What happen to that call-out for new writers? Did someone set us up the bomb?

    Seriously. I hope this is simply an ironic joke...

  • (cs)

    He was probably lucky that the boss was actually engaging in fraud, selling the "faulty" servers and pocketing the money - otherwise, I'm sure the alternative scenario where he gets all the blame for 'interfering' with the plague-ridden machines and both money and customer data keep leaking away.

    All too common, with over-funded empire-building lone-wolf sysadmins in their locked lairs with fully loaded quad-head Mac Pros to do very little work on!

  • larelogio (unregistered) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:

    Everyone has a right to life, the law is very clear on that. You have no right to take someone's life for material gain or material retention*. Besides whatever government you [/b]belong to[/b] (UK? US?) you should let them deal with the situation as they are better equipped. I've seen it countless times civilians getting into bad situations because they thought they could do the police's job. You can't, just don't.

    Emphasis mine.

    From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/belong

    3. To have in one's possession. Often used with to: "The earth belongs to the living" (Thomas Jefferson).

    Do you belong to a government? Are you a subject to its police? You talk and advocate acting like one.

    Captcha: ingenium. Or lack of it.

  • Lucius (unregistered)

    Remy, stop acting like a spoiled child. Modifying other people's comments is not OK. It lessens your integrity, and makes you and this site look bad.

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to n9ds

    Schroedinger's Cat is a duality problem (if you ignore the obvious flaw*), not a quantum one.

    Let me (try to) explain: With the cat sealed in a box, along with a radio source, geiger counter, hammer and vial of poison, the expected state of the cat at the end of a given time period is either dead or alive. Until the box is opened and an outside observer*(!) measures the state of the cat, it is both dead and alive - a quantum 1 and zero at the same time. Heisenberg had a lot of fun with this as well.

    *The obvious flaw is this: there is not only a measuring device in the box (the geiger counter!), there is also an observer (the cat!), both of which remove doubt as to the state of the cat at any and all points during the experiment.

    As for the [whatever] not existing until you look for it: loosely connected with the above experiment, and intimately connected with Heisenberg's experiment, which postulated that the more accurately you measure a particles position the less accurately you can measure its momentum. Following on from that, a ways down the line, the palm of your hand exists everywhere as a tenuous field of energy until you perceive it... at which point it becomes a solid object on the end of your arm.

  • Matthew (unregistered)

    Remy,

    Modifying a commenter's post is one of the most dishonest things a web author can do. I actually lost respect for you and for The Daily WTF after seeing this exchange. I don't care if the commenter was being a jerk; responding like this makes you look even worse.

    In the future, please ignore or calmly respond to nit pickers, jerks, etc.

  • Erewhon (unregistered)

    Finally a WTF with a happy ending. I no longer feel the need to rinse my brain in bleach after 10 WTF articles....

  • slapdash (unregistered) in reply to Moonraquel

    Of course they promoted him- got to keep him quiet about the massive security breach in a banking system.

  • VeryFunny (unregistered) in reply to Moonraquel

    I did the same thing(with evidence which prove they are doing many things wrong), but I was the one punished by the company, they say I did not respect my superior, too arrogant and no one would like to work with me in this way.

  • Deus ex-machina (unregistered)

    Came here to comment on exactly that. Just seems incredible that guys were so badly prepared that some newbie was able to figure everything out AND win in the ensuing fallout without doing anything on his part. Except of report itself that is. How did he even get the access to admin panel? Who gave the passwords to him? Who authorized to do the ad hoc inspection of the machines? Did he not have any pressing urgent tasks waiting for his attention? Did he lawyer up? Did he call the newspapers? Did he come into workplace holding a machine gun to keep everyone hostage or was he just a pawn in a bigger game of secret mastermind?

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