Posts by Valerion

Even if it was "working", what use would it be?

It kind of assumes every boat is a migrant boat. Rather than just, say, a boat.

Scrambling the navy every time someone spots a boat wouldn't be particularly efficient.

My Inlaws

Used to run a business in Malaysia, selling printer ribbons to offices.

Theirs were not the cheapest (far from it), or the best, but they they made a fortune. The reason being they would send vouchers - redeemable at most local stores - to the low-paid office-workers buying the things for their company. The workers liked the vouchers a lot. So they bought a lot of ribbons, leading to many of them having enormous stockpiles of things.

DABBSY - THEY HAVE BEEN LISTENING!

I was unfortunate enough to visit one of their stores on the weekend, and witnessed a customer approach a member of staff, hand them a shoe, ask if they had it in a size 9, and then He scanned it with some form of device, and it told him they were in stock!! .

I was shocked.

Dabbsy - your reach is large and quick.

^^^ Not a euphamism.

I had the summer off once

They put about 20 of us "at risk" in the early noughties. That meant we were supposed to come to the office, but didn't have to do any work and were allowed time out for interviews etc. Due to a clause in my contract my place of employment was listed as my home, so I showed up in my lounge every day for 6 weeks.

Then I went in for my exit interview/form-signing/here's-your-payoff-meeting to be told that someone had resigned last night and they could keep one person and they wanted to keep me and move me to a proper software development role to fill the role that was now vacant. I said that all the jobs I'd been looking at were paying more than I was on. They said to give them a week and they'd get me an offer.

At the end of the week they came back with a £5k pay increase and told me to report back in in another week. All told I had about 2 months off on full pay, and then went back to a higher salary and a more interesting job.

Bandwith worries me

I'm doing one of these BYOD flights in a couple of months. What worries me (1st world problems) is the bandwidth.

Assuming that it's only SD not HD, that's still about 2Mb/s per stream. And assuming 300 passengers, that's 600Mb/s (I'm good at maths, me).

What kind of wifi can support that?? Or will, as I am wearily expecting, the experience be utterly shit resulting in 9 hours of Kevin Bacon-style "Buffer face"?

Ah the memories

I used to do phone support for a venerable ISP/Online Service back in the 90s. We had a 6-minute deadline and got hassled by supervisors if we went over. Eventually I became a supervisor and was able to do the hassling myself. Oh the power (at 18 years of age!).

The best trick was, when it was quite (which was rarely), if you flicked your phone into "I'm busy, don't give me any calls" mode (used for when typing up notes following a call) and then back to available you'd end up at the back of the available agents queue. So with no waiting calls, just do that every few minutes and hours would pass with no need to speak to a customer.

Went there a couple of years ago

I loved the tour, the wife and kids were not quite so impressed. Damn non-geeks.

The cafe served some very nice cake if I remember correctly.

Change in opinion?

Not too many months ago on here, it was like:

Taxi Firms? Boo!

Uber? Yay!

Seems to have reversed now.

The tale of 3 twats

1 - The person who did it (although there's a chance they were not on the plane, or where on the plane and one of their mates did it for a laugh without them knowing).

2 - The captain delaying the flight for it.

3 - The people who demanded to get off thus causing further delays.

Design

Looks like a standard light fitting:

http://www.stylewithin.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/pendant.jpg

Not suprising

Kind of a shame though.

I backed the original Pebble and the Pebble Time Steel, but neither have been great. They've been good, but just not great. The first Pebble had a very glitchy screen. The PTS I have now has a great screen, but frequently does not give me notifications - and that's what I mainly use it for (apart from telling the time, natch). The supposed Gorilla Glass has scratched a LOT (and I've been fairly careful). No other watch I have owned has scratched at all really. Also, it frequently has to be reset and re-paired and the firmware updated.

I like smartwatches, and I admire the way Pebble pretty much started the industry, but when the Apple Watch V2 comes out, I'll probably switch to that.

Load bearing breakpoint

Came across one today very similar to the VBA one above.

When stepping through the code it worked, when run normally it didn't. Took me a while to track down that it was reading a DB value that was updated in one scope that hadn't quite updated fully, and due to the read uncommitted isolation level, I was still picking up the old value.

Better than Barclays

We tried to change the phone number on my wife's Natwest account the other day, but it won't let you without a card-reader.

Compare this to Barclays, who allow it to be changed at will. This happened to my daughter a couple of months ago. Account hacked, £3000 taken. Barclay's were hopelessly incompetent at sorting it out. No communication and they never gave us any details on how it happened. They tried to blame her of course saying we must have a virus on the computer. We all use Macs with AV installed. I ran multiple Malware scans - nothing. No phishing either.

Because they changed the phone number, she got no alerts. And after reporting it and giving them the correct number, the fraud team kept trying to reach her on the number belonging to the thieving scum! Beggars belief...

Eventually she got it back, but she's leaving Barclay's obviously...

GovtOS?

Surely FBiOS would be a more suitable name?

Eh?

Sounds to me like they've invented C#

Wake me up

When a C64 equivalent arrives. :)

Metallica

Now I'm going to have Master of Puppets stuck in my head all day.

Not a breach

Someone retrieved a record and selected the "also retrieve records of relatives" box. Bingo - every single record returned.

Disclaimer - my family hails from Lincolnshire.

So glad this is coming back

Flicking through the upper echelons of TV channels the other day with my 10 year old boy and came across a re-run. He was instantly hooked and when I said it was coming back he asked if we could go. A quick Google revealed the on-going tour (I had no idea that was a thing!) would be visiting somewhere not too far away from us in the summer. 2 minutes later and tickets were booked.

Can't wait!

IMHO

You can use microservices instead of components.

Microservices may well use components.

Forced to share...

Got sent a nice hamper one year by our parent company, as a thanks for a ton of work I'd done for them that just happened to go live shortly beforehand. Emphatically NOT a Xmas pressie, but a "thanks for getting the site live" pressie.

But of course because it was just before Xmas my boss didn't want it to look like I was getting stuff that nobody else was, so made me share it out.

I missed my OWN funeral

Yep, dropped dead Monday evening, but got an urgent call from the boss demanding I come in anyway to fix a problem.

Three years later and I'm still undead.

When I were a lad

I used to look forward to when Zzap 64 had a free game demo on a cassette on the magazine.

As a young teenager I looked forward to the floppy disk on Computer Shopper, and as an older teenager, the CD-ROM on the cover of PCW.

Today you can get a magazine with an entire computer included.

<shakes head incredulously>

Remind me why cold is good and warm is bad?

If our choice is things warming up and some low-level land getting flooded - with the side effect of excellent plant growth for food, or things going freezing putting much of the entire planet under ice - with the side effect of being unable to grow food and humanity starving to death, I know which I'd choose.

Also need to say that "deniers" and "believers" are not scientific words, so I don't know why they get used in scientific debate.

Ah, the 90s

Used to do tech support at Compuserve as my first job out of school. Everyone's favourite line when they couldn't fix it was: "Right, well that should be ok now. If you can just hang up and try again.", thus forcing the poor customer to get off the line, find out it still didn't work and then call back back and sit in another 45 minute queue to get through to someone else. Hopefully someone else in a different call centre.

Then of course the worst line to hear in reply was: "No need, I've got a second line for the modem." as dreams of getting a lunch break and keeping your call time under the allocated 6 minutes disappeared...

Was this a hack or a DDOS

I'm confused by the reports of what's happened. Was this a DDOS or a hack?

Frankly, it sounds like a DDOS. Quite possibly one of those ransom attempts that seem popular these days. That would not result in data being taken, just in the site being offline.

If you are hacking to actually steal customer data, you do not flood the site with traffic*, but rather would try and sneak in undetected. If the data is exposed by the front end (which is unlikely but possible if there was some kind of SQL Injection vuln or something) then flooding the front-end with traffic is just going to make it unavailable for the hack, also.

So I'm a bit puzzled.

*I admit there is a chance it was a diversion.

The software must be 100% reliable and never crash!

Maldonado on the other hand...