Posts by Alien8n

Re: PINs?!

I can remember PINs for my debit card, the wife's debit card, and my phone. I don't use the credit cards anywhere near often enough in order to remember the PINs for them.

Re: All 'religions' the same

@Mad Mike they don't preach from their library documents though, just the standard bible that anyone can pick up in any book shop. Interestingly it's said that the vatican holds the world's largest collection of medieval pornography. The real reason for secrecy is more likely to hide all the secret deals and financial information from years ago. The Vatican was a major contributor to the war efforts of many a medieval nation. During the middle ages you couldn't go to war without the blessing of the Pope and you can bet the Vatican benefitted after the war finished.

Re: it will not work

@anniemouse I think you'll find the poles still rotate, they just stay in a fixed position relative to the rotation of the rest of the planet.

At the end of the day this whole thing is a technology driver. It's not supposed to work, it's supposed to make people think about the obstacles to making it work. So they'll come up with new technologies while scratching their heads, which will feed back into civilian use. Expect novel ways of creating substances like graphene, new and cheaper superconductors etc. In much the same way the space race of the 1960's gave us non-stick frying pans and velcro.

@AC the issue is not the cost to us in prescription charges, but rather the cost to the NHS in rising drug prices. We ourselves won't see any real increase apart from the usual annual increase in the prescription fees. The NHS however will be forced into yet another round of "cost savings" as the cost of running the NHS will increase manyfold.

@ Marketing Hack We need Flash Gordon to save us from Ming The Merciless

Haven't used VMS in years. My first "IT" job was report writing from an AS400. I was actually an engineer so would go to the IT team to get queries written, until after a while I realised that I actually understood the system better than the IT guy who I was getting to write the queries.

After that had to support a VAX system (PROMIS, used for wafer fabs). That was the job where we bought a java based GUI for the system that was so incomprehensible (different buttons with random images that had no descriptive text) that I redesigned the entire GUI from scratch. The other flaw was it's "traffic light" warning system. Fine in a standard manufacturing room, but this was specifically for wafer fabs. Wafer fabs have at least 1 room (photo-lith) with orange lighting. You can't see the different colours.

Re: I predict the name will be

The RSS Stephen Fry?

Re: precedent

@The_Idiot

That looks remarkably like something Sir pTerry would say :)

Re: It's likely I'm missing something.

@Displacement Activity

Apple may very well already have software that will do this but they're not admitting this to the FBI and they have no intention of handing it over. It's more likely that they don't have this capability and don't want to add this capability given the fact that hackers will be all over any vulnerabilities given the popularity and capabilities of the iPhone with Apple Pay etc.

Re: GO! Teresa, GO!!...

At first I was afraid

I was petrified

Kept thinking I could never live

Without you by my side

But then I spent so many nights

Thinking how you did me wrong

And I grew strong

And I learned how to get along

And so you're back

From outer space

I just walked in to find you here

With that sad look upon your face

I should have changed that stupid lock

I should have made you leave your key

If I had known for just one second

You'd be back to bother me

Go on now go walk out the door

Just turn around now

'Cause you're not welcome anymore

Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye

Did you think I'd crumble

Did you think I'd lay down and die

Oh no, not I

I will survive

Oh as long as I know how to love

I know I'll stay alive

I've got all my life to live

I've got all my love to give

And I'll survive

I will survive (hey-hey)

It took all the strength I had

Not to fall apart

Kept trying hard to mend

The pieces of my broken heart

And I spent oh so many nights

Just feeling sorry for myself

I used to cry

But now I hold my head up high

And you see me

Somebody new

I'm not that chained up little person

Still in love with you

And so you felt like dropping in

And just expect me to be free

And now I'm saving all my loving

For someone who's loving me

Go on now go walk out the door

Just turn around now

'Cause you're not welcome anymore

Weren't you the one who tried to break me with goodbye

Did you think I'd crumble

Did you think I'd lay down and die

Oh no, not I

I will survive

Oh as long as I know how to love

I know I'll stay alive

I've got all my life to live

I've got all my love to give

And I'll survive

I will survive

[x2]

Re: Space..... the final frontier...

It's NASA, they've pretty much told the entire world to "watch this" :)

Re: Anyone else remember?

Reminds me of the early days of Demon Internet and their DOS news and email software.

You could update the mail headers to spoof certain things, but the main thing was that it included the computer and drive name within the header. So my C:Drive was renamed Hell and the computer was called Hades

Re: The purpose of reports is not what you think it is.

My first Excel report. Ran on a 486 laptop and took 20 minutes to run. The manager resisted all attempts to shift the report onto one of the (then) brand new pentium machines. Reason being, once the report was kicked off it gave him just enough time to sneak a full english breakfast with the production shift in the canteen. I eventually moved the report onto the new PC, but continued with the traditional breakfast break on the grounds I got to chat with the production staff and hear what issues they were having in an informal setting prior to the main engineering meeting (that the report was being run for).

Re: Which one is it?

Never mind the movies, I'm playing Saints Row IV at the moment, I swear I'm going to be scarred for life by that game...

Re: Rag Week?

Same thing happened at my old school as an end of year prank. One of the students had a mini and it was "transported" bit by bit onto the music hall roof by some of the upper 6th form. A few years after that someone broke into the art block and bricked up the doorway to the art teacher's office. Best bit was even the teachers knew who did it but the art teacher was so disliked by everyone that no one would tell him who the culprit was :)

Re: History repeats itself

I recall being told when I was an engineer that a certain aviation company had an automated test. When auditing the test software it was found that one of the parameters being tested had a random number generator creating a number within spec as they didn't actually know how to measure the parameter, but as it had been measured previously it had been carried on with the new tests.

The point was, once you start measuring CPK data there's no procedure for stopping measurements, regardless of how useless the measurement is. At the time we were measuring the temperature of plastic moulding compound. All well and good, until you realise it was being stored in a shed on the south wall of the building with a tin roof. There was no point in measuring the temperature as there was no way you could control the temperature within the shed.

Re: I will worry

Watch the TV series Continuum. In that you get implanted if you can't repay your debt to whichever company owns you turning you into a slave making more implants to enslave the next people who can't repay their debts. It's actually a very good satire of capitalism hiding as a science fiction show.

Re: RIGHT!

My first foray into asp resulted in the following conversation:

My boss : "Can we get some software for one of our engineers"

IT boss : "Why?"

My boss : "So he can code the department's intranet page, he's writing the pages in asp"

- to explain, the code was checking a particular folder and creating on the fly an indexed and searchable list of engineering reports. It was quicker than adding the new reports to a static page *every single day*.

IT boss : "WE HAVEN'T AUTHORISED ANY CODING SOFTWARE! WHAT"S HE WRITING IT IN!"

My boss : "He wants to know what you're using to write the intranet in"

Me : "Tell him I'm writing it in Notepad"

IT boss : "... oh"

I still have my 2nd edition books, used to love the little cartoons in it.

"Well, either it allows a magic-user to throw the various Bigby's hand spells, or it's a +2 backscratcher. So far we're not sure which . . . ."

I'd say that's reasonably close. I run DNN which is a .net portal and over the years I've seen modules for DNN that were written in C# and some written in VB. The only thing each version of DNN had in common (until DNN6 iirc) was the same bug concerning null point errors as the code would check the cache for data, go off and do something and then read the cache again by which time the cache had cleared and resulted in the error. To my mind this was sloppy coding as the cache should have been read to a variable and then the variable called which would get around the cache clearing issue on slower servers. The C# code looked to be better written as I don't recall the same bug in those modules.

Re: Lets just hope ...

The only good thing about the whole mess is that eventually the regime will either collapse (like Russia) or power will shift to a more moderate style of Communism (like Vietnam, Cuba and China).

Re: Let me get this right,...

All honesty at that point I just wanted out of there by any means possible. When the IT Director handed me a months wages and the opportunity to called my manager an idiot to his face I took it (and moved to a job that paid considerably more with considerably less stress). Unfortunately it was to the company with the FD that used to work for Enron... After that I went to a company that made GPS mapping tools and manufacturing systems for the timber industry (don't believe a word of the US when they say they're trying to stop illegal logging, the system they built was all about taxation). That company soon realised that if you have 2 support people it's a bad idea to make the Crystal Reports developer redundant just so you can keep the cheaper employee. I made their eyes water when I told them how much it would cost to hire me as a contractor (they paid it though :) )