Posts by TonyJ

Re: that's the point where things start to go downhill.

Master / Minion !

Gru / Minion

I have kids. They love these films. Mind you so do I. :)

Re: FFS

"...Fly-tipping is a problem created entirely by the local councils. Simply restore weekly bin collections, and allow unlimited trips to the council tip, .."

Couldn't agree more. Also stop banning "commercial vehicles" or "businesses" from using them.

Did you folks know that Curry's / PCW will accept any electrical items at any store for free recycling? You don't need to have bought it from them or anything new from them, even:

https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/recycle-1042-theme.html#free-recycling

Re: snapshot versus screenshot of snapshot

I didn't say the clearance process is perfect. Believe me, I know - I've been through it many times all the way to DV, but it does give the parties that employ persons who have been through the process the confidence that the majority of the people they are employing are suitably trustworthy.

With enough links in any chain, there is always the possibility if not probability that one or more will be weak.

But the background checks, along with the necessary processes should at least be enough to give some confidence that things are handled properly.

And again...I am not suggesting the system is perfect or works without failure.

Re: left questioning their loyalty

"...Loyalty to TSB? - a strange notion, to be 'loyal' to such an incompetent business..."

Totally agree.

And even if the stories of this kind of incompetence we're enough to put me off, that story first outage round, about the poor sod sat watching his funds disappear whilst he was on hold to the TSB fraud team were more than enough to make me never want to bank with them.

Re: Ahhh, memories...

"...I thought Alt-F4 saved your work?.."

Nah...it activates the aimbot in Halo PC.

The number of times idiots fell for that. Repeatedly.

Re: " intellectual property lawyers "

"...Excuse me...my son has a Bearded Dragon. Whilst cold, scaly and not actually doing much or of being any real use for anything, I'd still value his worth, trustworthiness, usefulness to society and personality several shades higher than that of most lawyers..."

Just to reiterate...I am referring to the attributes of the lizard there, not my son... ;)

Re: Costly? No...

"... combined with the 'Stop sending me this shit!' messages they all contributed to for four days...."

And people still do this, like mindless sheep.

Re: Of course it has potential

"...they applied voltage to it..."

<cough> across it...

I'll get my coat now.

"...

"The product is said to perform better if it is installed in front of a home router, rather than behind it.".."

How would you put it "in front" of a home router given that most people use the shite their ISP give to them which will include some kind of xDSL / PPPoE connectivity, does this thing act as a xDSL router in its own right?

Re: The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with Jobs on ...

Also handy for signing docs.

One company I was in used an online document vault and you could sign right in a browser. The stylus made doing it on your phone so much easier.

Re: Actually back in the 1990s I was at a company...

"...you might have needed to order option.."

Anyone else repair HP printers in the 90's?

They (HP) seemed to have a mandate to single handedly destroy our forests. If you ordered a replacement spring that was, say, 8mm long by around 2mm diameter, it'd come in a small plastic bag. In a jiffy bag. In a box. In a larger box. In a MUCH larger box that could usually have accommodated the entire printer!

Along, of course, with a raft of printed compliance, warranty and other such documents. In 90 million languages, just in case the repair centre they shipped it to in the UK, from the UK might have used some ancient dialect of some long forgotten (and likely dead) language.

Re: can you get updates only yet?

"...or the ability to mute the ring tone instantly by a quick tap of the power button..."

I can do that on my S7.

Re: Supplier markup on new hardware

"... It looks like Dell put custom firmware on their own-branded SSDs. .."

Better than HP. Since their Gen8 ProLiants you need both a genuine HP carrier and genuine HP HDD/SSD.

Otherwise you get one of two issues: the first is a fairly benign warning in the logs. The second though, is to assume an overheat condition and spin every fan up to 100%.

It sounds like the entire server is trying for lift-off.

It's a crappy way to behave and does nothing to make me want to stick with a vendor that pulls that kind of stunt.

Fine - warn me but don't make the thing misbehave to such an extent.

Re: Amazon is in my good books

"...What Amazon has and I mean retail arm is an enormous amount of customer trust gained by experience. Its kinda sad that in eCommerce you great simply by delivering what you promised, when you promised and compensate customers without making them hop extra hoops when you failed either of the first two..."

This is where they win, in my personal opinion. When things go wrong they're there for the customer first in almost every case.

Re: Actually, this seems proportionate

@AndyS: I tend to agree with you.

In this case, it seems that all a custodial sentence would have done would be to help to turn them into hardcore criminals and ruin any prospect of a future away from crime.

It seems that too often we forget the idea of rehabilitation and prefer the concept of revenge.

Re: No Lockouts? Really???

The argument I've seen with lockouts usually revolves around one of two issues:

1 - it causes too many support calls (really...)

2 - we don't have enough support staff, especially if someone locks themselves out outside of normal working hours

Compounded with:

3 - there's no budget / lack of understanding for any kind of self-service password reset features

Re: Who is this person

Haha..have an upvote.

's what I studied many many many (sigh) years ago.

Although I moved out of the field many, ma...oh you get the idea - quite a while ago, I'm still very much interested.

Re: if you don't succeed...try, try, try, try, try, try try try again!

"..."doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"..."

But...this is a company making US$110 BILLION...why, in their eyes, do they need to do something that is that different?

(Note..I said in their view)

Same with my Tag.

10 years old and the sapphire glass looks as good as the day I first put the watch on.

Re: Great, just great

"...I think another factor is poor service from IT departments that might be driving companies to the cloud, particularly for software as a service.

A competent IT department can deliver great service, but building and keeping a team of competent staff is a non-trivial exercise. Compounding this are consultants who deliver crap and rarely stick around long enough to learn the business...."

Yeah but as others have pointed out, this move rarely negates the need for local IT staff to anything like the extent that managers seem to believe it can.

There were so many things wrong with the idea of the submarine in that cave (notwithstanding the divers in the video were atrocious - bits like their SPG dangling all over the place, poor time, crawling along the bottom of the pool etc - all of which are bad enough in a recreational diver, but in a technical and/or cave diver are unforgivable).

Given that the cave wasn't flooded for its entire length, it meant that people would have had to carry it as well as get it up and down near vertical sections.

It looked like it was too big - by which I mean too long in this case.

Bear in mind the smallest section of cave was a 70cm diameter. Again to put that into some context, the divers were forced to use sidemount equipment: when you think of a traditional scuba diver image, the cylinder(s) are on the back. Sidemount is just that - one on each side of the diver. This is necessary in this case so the diver could unhook each cylinder and pass them through the gap before they themselves wriggle through.

How would the sub have coped with that?

What was he trying to actually achieve with it? To my mind it was always going to make sense to bring them out pretty much the way they did (cave diver hat on). It just seemed to be an ego thing.

Now no one likes their hard work looked down on but to call the rescue diver a paedo the way he did was just incredibly obnoxious and in this case, I hope he gets the hell sued out of him, because equally when someone answers the call to help like these divers did, that kind of behaviour is unconscionable.

Underwater rescue is hard - ask any diver that has done, e.g., the PADI rescue diver course. Doing this in more technical environments is even harder and underground harder again.

"...Why are we outsourcing to Crapita? Can someone explain it to me?.."

Because it works out cheaper in the long run

Because Capita have such an outstanding record of delivering robust solutions on time, under budget and that perform exactly as required

Oh yeah - because it lines the pockets of various ministers with their pudgy fingers in the pies of these companies?

Re: Tech Training has lost all credibility

"...Thankfully in Game-Dev certification is pretty much shunned. So its portfolio work or nothing. Therefore outright cheating / fraud is rare!.."

You'd think that would follow as a general rule but last year I had to review a CV for a chap that had applied for a role at the gov. institution I was working at.

Now said place had c22,000 users globally and we were a good way down the route of various upgrades and migrations part of which was to move some users to Office 365 where security levels allowed it.

Imagine my surprise when the CV boasted front and centre that this person had successfully migrated over 50,000 users to O365...at the exact place I was working.

Embellishment is one thing but to outright lie so outrageously is another entirely.

Re: Well, with all of NATO being either personal foes or parts of the "greatest Foe"

"...

Well, when Canada is a personal enemy and European Union is the greatest foe, you have to look for "friends" somewhere...."

And the crazy thing there is you're NOT talking about Russia!

"...

$5 million in lost wages? I'd work for Huawei for that kind of money..."

I'd even consider the subterfuge being asked ;)

Re: 1.6 litre!

Yup...always amazes me that US vehicles can have a 92 litre engine and still only produce 12bhp and are only good in a straight line...

Yes, I poke fun, but Europe and well most of the rest of the world can produce excellent engines these days, emissions cheating aside, that are both low-capacity (by traditional standards) and high power.

I recently had a Honda Civic - it was either a 1.0 or 1.2l petrol turbo engine and it went like the proverbial brown stuff off of a digging implement.

"...I think the concept that people actually used to be able to get something repaired is more of a stick poked at a dusty synapse..."

It was the early 90's, so yeah...you're right. :(

Re: cutting

"...But say it costs an extra $5 to prevent the device from catching fire, and the EU says "product must not catch fire", then you don't really want the cheaper version from outside the EU ....."

That's a relevant point.

I've mentioned before that I scuba dive on a rebreather. My particular one is made by a company called JJ.

In Europe you have to buy the CE version. Outside of Europe you can buy the non-CE version.

On the face of it they look identical. But the CE version, for example, has to comply to certain criteria such as the "work of breath" - how hard it is to breathe on the unit at various depths, in various positions.

But also, the CE version won't allow you to build the unit up incorrectly - the gas in a rebreather is in a closed loop and never leaves said loop. In order to keep you breathing, the unit analyses the oxygen content and tops it up as required, as well as scrubbing out the waste CO2.

On the non-CE units, there's nothing to stop you connecting the breathing loop on backwards*. This would lead to a build up of CO2 and hpoxia. It's bad.

The non CE units are considerably cheaper as they never have to be put through the same destructive tests that CE calls for (5 units, I believe, are all tested all the way to destruction).

In Europe at least, you can't buy one from the manufacturer unless you can prove you are trained on the unit - this may also be true outside of Europe but I am not sure.

*This may have changed since I got mine, but certainly was always the case.

So...I guess to contradict my own earlier posting, you are right to say that sometimes all is not actually equal, globally.