You're doing it wrong

Oooh, scary

30 billion teevees

[source at ITWeb]

Television viewers of the 2010 Soccer World Cup are expected to outnumber physical spectators by a ratio of 1:10 000

multiplied by

three million visitors

= 30 BILLION epic fails.

[Usual caveats apply: visitors vs spectators, etc]

Let there be light

[thanks jwz]

DNS fail

I saw this host in a traceroute and had to be sure:

> server jupiter.is.co.za
Default server: jupiter.is.co.za
[snip]

> set type=ptr
> 218.115.209.168.in-addr.arpa
[snip]

218.115.209.168.in-addr.arpa name = mail.amorphous.net.

> set type=a
> mail.amorphous.net
[snip]

Name: mail.amorphous.net
Address: 196.211.13.115

168.209.115.218 != 196.211.13.115

It looks like Internet Solutions forgot some old reverse DNS records when updating things, and re-used the address for infrastructure.

Slashfail

This is from a lengthy discussion about Roland Piquepaille and his huge number of accepted Slashdot posts. In a /. retrospective/homage, we present:

Re:Good Grief! (Score:5, Funny)

by Frosty Piss (770223) on Wednesday June 11, @04:42AM (#23744179)

I for one welcome our new Roland Overlord. May he pour hit grits down Natalie Portman's shorts, I'll take a Beowulf cluster of that! I'll bet in Soviet Russia they can't even get Roland. But one thing is for sure, he does run Linux. And all these stories of his on Slashdot almost certainly result in Profit!

out of ones reach

OGC logo fail

from jack yan's blog:

The Office of Government Commerce, part of HM Treasury in the UK, unveiled its new logo, which cost British taxpayers £14,000. And it didn’t take long after the unveiling for employees to see the problem:

FAIL.

Fail maths fail

The competition

Our competitors ;)

Another UCT water feature

Apparently UCT can stop making [unintentional] water features anytime they like. It's not like someone's addicted...

Shackles + capsizing = FAIL

No Robben Island boat trip is complete without, apparently, being shackled like a slave [Cape Times article for subscribers only - boo hiss!].

Let's hope the ferries don't leak.

Otherwise, we can expect a repeat of the failboat incident.

*Yes yes, they have said that the passengers won't be shackled to the boat itself, but how many people do you know that can swim with shackles on?

Re-en-try

If at first you don't succeed, malapropisms may not be for you:

In Parliament on Wednesday, Erwin warned that load-shedding was designed to prevent a catastrophe.

"We cannot envisage [sic] any possibility of the system going down. This is absolutely critical."

[SAPA, via the Sunday Independent]

Now this is oxymoronic, to say the least. Obviously he could envisage the "possbility of the system going down" - otherwise how would he know he had to prevent something?

Perhaps Mr Erwin was so busy being entertained by his fellow Parliamentarians to properly entertain the notion that he might need to use a different, less incorrect, word. I'll leave you to guess which one. How entertaining this whole post has been.

Epoch Fail

Thank you xkcd, for coming to the fail-party...

All aboard the failboat

Reminds me of the skeleton coast.

Epic-sode V

Mmmm, AT-AT

Religious control

[ via ]

Exams failure

Not failing at an exam itself, but more a sort of meta-failure:

IVR system for exam results abandoned by Comp Sci, taken over by systems. Reclaimed by CS, systems resisting reclamation. Need to get a number to registrar ASAP and inform CS they should get over it. Sorting out hand off of old CS number to IT service.

Thank you Rhodes Uni's IT lists...

CTHULHU FHTAGN CHEEZBURGER

Tired of cutesy image macros?

Voila! LOLTHULHU


I IS CAN BE CTHULHU NOW PLZ?

Wait! Come back!

The largest [and fastest?] re-boot

[ The Register calls it Reno 911 ]

Reno 911: World's largest reboot underway

The sound of 10,000 OSes clapping

By Ashlee Vance in Reno

Published Tuesday 13th November 2007 22:03 GMT

You were up all night writing those last lines of code to ensure mega-demonstration success. And this code is a real pain in the ass to deal with because it has to spread across a 72-processor cluster. But, with a bit of perseverance, you nail it, pop open a beer and wait for the glories to follow when show attendees see your genius on the conference floor.

Cut to the actual demo, and you're screwed to all hell when the power goes out.

Yes, Supercomputing 07 went through what could be the world's largest, collective reboot of all time. At about noon today, the immense amount of hardware here in Reno killed the power system and then killed it again a few seconds later. Lights went out. The machines stopped humming. And a few claps scattered throughout the crowd - a machismo kind of thing no doubt: my cluster is too big for your power station.

As the power returned, machines of all shapes and sizes rebooted. There were Windows log-in screens everywhere. Versions of Linux going through their routines. There were also the frantic types pulling off their chassis casings when their systems failed to come back to life.

Er, this was a kick ass protein folding demo

Every year, the machines present at Supercomputing combine to form the equivalent of one of the world's largest machines. Some of the machines here make an HP Superdome look like a tinkertoy.

Breath deep. It'll all be okay

Sanity seemed to hold though as these folks temporarily lost their precious machines, which as an encouraging sign. Now, the electricity collapse can be enjoyed as a point of pride. ®

Update:

As we understand it, the power outage occurred after some renegade plugged in a four-socket Itanium server using the new Montvale chips. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)