Posts by Chris King 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009
Rory Cellan-Jones has obviously never encountered:
(a) Riots ;
(b) Political party conferences ;
(c) Chimpanzees flinging dung to make intruders run away.
The edit-wars I've encountered on Wikipedia mostly resemble (c).
I'm going to be brutal about this - if you don't sign those papers, I don't want you writing a whiny article lamenting that fact in five years time !
Competence IS in the eye of the beholder, but how can the beholder know you're competent unless you've proved it in some way ? Joining a professional body will help, but you have experience, which is also important.
Sign up, and see how you square up. The worst that will happen is they'll tell you what you need to do to progress.
"Several down votes - these will be the people who STILL believe that £1.99 a month can get you fast, unlimited broadband."
Or maybe they down-voted Jason 7 because he missed the point. The ISP's in the article have all been around for a while, and certainly more than "six months".
Zen started in 1996, AAISP in 1997, Xilo in 2007, ICUK and Merula have been around for a while too.
There are plenty of cheap ISP's that have started well and gone to crap in a matter of months, and there are plenty of "Elder God" ISP's out there that have turned into rebranded services (Demon, Pipex, Nildram ?) or seem to have gone nowhere (ClaraNet ?). None of the ISP's in this article belong in either of those categories.
I've been with AAISP for nearly ten years, and the service has been consistently good. I hear lots of good things from folks on Zen and Xilo too.
Yep, total bollocks on that "pound per second" thing. PhonePayPlus says:
Check a Number - Result
PhonepayPlus has the following information about number:
09136660010
Customer care number: 0203 455 0849
Customer care email: techandcommunication@gmail.com
Search result provided by: Technology and communication Limited
Service connected on: 01 December 2014
Service terminated on: This service is still operating
Name of service: Recorded Football Stars
Type of service: Entertainment - non-adult
Service description: A listening more funny sentences of European footballers.
How much does this service cost? £1.53 per call & £1.53 per minute
If you would like to find out more about this service or have a question about it then you should contact Technology and communication Limited
Unit H, 12/F, Legend Tower
7 Shing Yip Street
Kwun Tong
Kowloon
123
You can bet that the contact details are fake and the London number is a VoIP line, so how was this obviously fake overseas company allowed to operate a premium rate number ?
Where Merlin goes, Asus follows - he contributes a lot of enhancements and bugfixes back to Asus.
Powernumpty's post refers to the AsusWRT-Merlin Changelog, lo and behold:
376.49_5 (9-Jan-2015)
- FIXED: Vulnerability in infosvr (CVE-2014-9583) (Asus bug)
- FIXED: Additional security issue in infosvr (incorrect memcpy()
call) (Asus bug)
Yes, damn those homophones and their same-sounding words with differing meanings, taking over our dictionaries and our thesauruses, they're not as bad as the Synonyms but at least *they* make a decent curry !
(Coat, before Lenny Henry accuses me of ripping off "Go home Cone")
I bet there will be plenty of "botched aircon" stories in this thread, so here's another one...
Early on in my career, I worked for a company that took over a building and needed to keep a bunch of MicroVAXen cool.
Solution: Stick 'em in a broom cupboard and use a bathroom extractor fan with a thermostat to draw in air from the corridor.
Problem is, they wired up the thermostat so that it ran until a certain temperature was reached.
The MicroVAXen got nice and toasty, THEN the fan cut out - so they got even more toasty pretty quickly.
Oh, did I mention this was an ELECTRONICS company ?
Where they crying because they were sad for Danny, or just confused ?
I mean, they turned him into "OEM Iron Man" (no badges or paint job). blew him up and made him give up his last chance for survival. But oh no, this is Dr Who and we'll pull random acts of necromancy out of the hat for dead characters, just not for the ones everybody wants to bring back,
"Love and Monsters" - an episode so bad, the shooting location for the final scene with Peter Kay was smashed flat and turned into an open-air car park. 'nuff said.
Think I'm kidding ? Here's the scene...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZWGeidvrJw
...and this is what it looks like now:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Pellett+St,+Cardiff+CF24+2FN/@51.478469,-3.1703432,3a,52.5y,111.35h,80.94t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s1CPhZKtGXvDUqpBxswFMGQ!2e0!4m2!3m1!1s0x486e1cb611f5c3cd:0x18daefaa94113a20!6m1!1e1
(Beer icon, because this was also where The Vulcan pub used to stand)
Also, keep the *content* fresh and up-to-date, that makes you more relevant to search engines.
The other advice I give to people wanting to put up a website is "Pick ONE domain AND STICK TO IT". Buying up the same name in different TLD's doesn't protect you against domain squatting, and having the same content on different domains can actually hurt your search ranking.
I've ended up writing "Exit Procedures" for previous employers just because they didn't consider this.. and invariably used myself as the first example.
No matter what the reason for my departure **, I like to make sure that my now ex-employer can't claim I left back-doors into systems. and that everything will continue to run without the presence of my user account. If I'm gone, I'm TOTALLY gone, end of story.
(** I've never been sacked from an IT gig, only from a summer job as a waiter. One of my "mates" phoned up the restaurant and posed as an angry customer who claimed that I'd told him to f**k off)
As I said on the Internet Storm Center a few years back...
When I design or build a system, I make absolutely sure that it's designed to what I call the "V'Ger Rule". If you've seen "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", you'll understand.
Put simply, the "V'Ger Rule" states:
"A System must continue to operate in a correct and safe manner in the absence of its Creator".
Or, put another way:
1. No blowing up any spaceships ;
2. No joyriding in Carbon Units ;
3. Fat, balding starship captains are to be shot on sight, especially ones that follow the "If you can't eat it, drink it, steal it, spend it or have sex with it, blow it up" mantra.
A thought just occurred to me - not that this happens very often, so bear with me...
Clara's wildly changing behaviour - have we got some sort of "Seven Deadly Sins" thing going on here, to go with the "Promised Land" story arc ?
Lust - "PE". 'nuff said (that, and Strax seeing "lots of young men doing sport" during the brain scan in "Deep Breath". At least he thought it was sport...)
;
Gluttony - eating a Chinese meal on the TARDIS then realising she's about to go out for another one ("Time Heist")
Greed - wanting her cake and eating it. Running off with the Doctor, but stringing Danny along
Sloth - leaving the kids exercise books in the TARDIS, probably in the hope the Doctor would file them away and lose them forever
Wrath - "I'll slap you so hard, you'll regenerate !"
Pride - well, she's been smug for most of her existence on the show !
I haven't worked out anything for Envy yet, but there's probably a reference in there somewhere...
Like most folks, I feel that Capaldi was a good choice to replace Matt Smith, but they've lumbered him with some seriously bad scripts. Jenna Coleman has gone from "Little Miss Smug Deus Ex Machina" (how many times did she have to save Smith ?) to "Little Miss What The HELL Am I This Week ?" - and in the middle of this we've got Mr Pink as the lamest "Tin Dog" yet.
The whole thing seems to revolve round a compulsive liar, a 2,000-year-old cradle-snatcher and a passive-aggressive whiner. Sounds like a great mix for a US-style sitcom. Maybe that's the market Moffat's aiming for now, I don't know.
The bit at the end annoyed me too. I think they *might* have got away with bringing Maebh's big sister home as a thank-you for helping the trees do their job - because lets face it, the Pudding Brains In Charge would have killed everybody by breaking out the Agent Orange.
Maybe they need someone to come up with better scripts, someone like (say) Dan Freeman. Check out "The Minister of Chance" - imagine a Time Lord with no TARDIS, no sonic screwdriver and a bad-tempered companion who frequently refers to him as "Tosser!" and you get the idea. The title character doesn't have any convenient plot holes to get him out of trouble, he has to THINK his way out of peril - more like the Classic Doctors.
They're trying to raise money for a movie version, but it looks like their KickStarter is going to fall badly short of its target. Shame really, because the "podcast" version was rather good.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/934034666/the-minister-of-chance-movie-episode-1
Cases for the B+ are a bit limited at the moment anyway - ModMyPi and Cyntech have got a new one coming along in a couple of weeks that looks fairly neat, and it can be fitted with shims to make the case taller:
https://www.modmypi.com/shop/modmypi-model-b-plus-raspberry-pi-case-black
"That would be NT only, and while it was ported from x86 to PPC and Alpha, those were parallel ports, not serial, like VMS (VAX->Alpha->IA64)."
VMS wasn't ported serially. VAX and Alpha overlapped (with "functional equivalence") from 6.1 to 7.3, Alpha and Itanium were built from a common code base starting from 8.0, with 8.2 being the first stable Itanium release.
I'm guessing that 8.4 will be the final Alpha release, unless HP have something waiting in the wings.
AAISP's issues were self-inflicted, but as is usual for them, they provided a no-bullshit explanation, and apologised. Their MD even publicly apologised to his own staff for messing them about out-of-hours.
The only other ISP that ever came close to that standard of openness and transparency was Nildram, before Pipex absorbed them. BT Wholesale bollixed up my line on a Saturday evening, and I was expecting nothing to happen until Monday morning. On the Sunday afternoon, BT Wholesale rang me directly (and remember, they don't normally acknowledge the existence of end-users) with a grovelling apology and a promise to fix the line ASAP.
(Ironically, the first thing that clued me into Nildram imploding was broken DNS...!)
Walking in to work a few years back, I overheard a couple of students bemoaning the fact that their NTL connections were screwed.
"Nah, you're probably fine, but their DNS is fucked. Just use the Uni's, they're brilliant !"
That's the kind of "appreciation" I (and the DNS servers I run) could do without. When I checked the query logs, I found several thousand NTL IP addresses - not to mention some Uni in the Far East that was using us as a forwarder for all of their queries.
I decided enough was enough, and locked the DNS servers down nice and tight. It was as if a million voices screamed out and were suddenly silenced...
The timing seems to tie in with the Sourceforge password reset thing last week - and I don't buy that horse-crap about them doing that to "improve security", NOBODY forces a mass password reset on their users unless something is very badly broken or they're truly incompetent.
Sourceforge was the main distribution point for Truecrypt - I wonder if the Truecrypt Foundation lost control of their assets at Sourceforge during the password reset ? If they can't prove their identities due to their anonymous nature, it's possible that they can't persuade Sourceforge that they're the real deal, and someone else has taken advantage.
Oh, and with everybody running around playing the "NSA Bogeyman Card", let's not forget there are plenty of other "players" who would benefit from mass decryption of data in a blind panic. The other TLA spying agencies in other countries haven't gone away, and don't forget that criminals love sensitive data too.
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