Re: UrtheCast
After reading their website it's probably both...
307 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
But Capita are relative geniuses compared to the fuckwit who programs the Collect web site for School Census data collection, and the system for requesting ULNs
That person obviously decided that every school pupil will have a UK address, forgetting all the boarding schools in the UK (yes, there are a number of state boarding schools, we have 120 students with foriegn addresses), neither the Collect site or the ULN requests will accept an address with a house number or UK format postcode.
How about not installing Windows 8?
Seriously though, there are so many problems with SIMS that a faulty What's New page is the least of anyone's worries.
A simple way to remotely log users out so we can install the many patches that have to be installed to fix the errors in each termly release would be a start...
Not all hard drives are the ideal for all jobs.
The WD Green drives are good in office PCs that do sporadic read / writes and are only active 8-10 hours a day, but a NAS will be running 24/7, especially if you have a torrent client running download err Linux distros for instance, for this you need a drive that's rated for 24/7 use, such as the WD Red drives, these also have a cache that is better tuned for large writing jobs like back-ups.
I used to deal with customers running large IP camera systems, with hundreds of cameras writing to multiple servers, and one customer baulked at the £200 we charged for server grade hard drives, so he bought some cheapo SATA drives from Ebuyer, and very quickly regretted it, the first of these drives he used to replace a failed drive in his 15 drive enclosure lasted less than a week
The best non-military quadracopters I've seen have about 25 minutes battery life, when coupled with an airspeed of around 10m/s (22.5mph, this seems to be the speed of the priciest models I've seen) you have a 4.6 mile range at best.
Now considering most Amazon warehouses are housed well away from populated areas, just how many of their "must have this NOW" hipster customers will live within the 30 minute delivery window.
I fall into the cynical "this is just Cyber Monday marketing hype" camp...
I notice that the UK is 29th in the press freddoms chart, down one on last year.
With rumours of certain ministers putting pressure on broadcasters and the press over the reporting of protests and the past misdemeanours of high ranking cabinet members then I fully expect a much lower position next year
A spider has to expend so much energy making venom that they only bite when threatened.
The Tarantula for instance usually just waves its front legs to scare off potential predators, and will bite as a last resort.
As this poor lady's foot shows multiple bites I'd guess either centipede or ants, or she was unlucky enough to be biten by several spiders, one of which then hid in the waste basket to take the rap whilst the rest of the family moved to cause havoc elsewhere.
When I worked for Index (like Argos but a bit shitter) I used to pick across two floors for up to 12 hours a day at christmas - yeah try running up & down a set of stairs for 12 hours, a set of stairs with 4 twists.
I did that for 13 years, I wonder why my knees are fucked?
It's a big pile of shit.
I remember when I worked in a certain large computer assembler in the North West, we used Notes and Smart Suite, Notes was appalling, especially at handling external email.
Parts of Smart Suite were OK though, as long as nobody sent you a Word document to amend...
The image isn't stored for longer than it takes the software (which I think is a part of Verint's Retail Intelligence package) to decide your gender & age.
This is just another reason to avoid Tesco, I drive past a couple of them to get to Asda, who somehow manage to keep their prices lower without the need to sell my purchasing habits to anyone who wants them...
Not sure why chain stores would need something like this for pricing updates, we used to manage OK with 4 bonded ISDN lines, which managed the overnight price updates and the offsite backup.
Even the bi-annual product file update for 10,000 product lines was only a 3mb CSV file, surely you could squirt a file like that to even the most remote places using existing technology...
"What's the point of shooting that calibre of gun to esplode* some bit of tech in super-slo-mo if it isn't frame-filling and from multiple angles"
Simple answer, the 50,000 fps super-slow motion camera they use is 192 x 96 resolution, so won't fill the frame, and costs around $50k, so even renting more than one would cost a fortune.
Same with voting slips, the code on the slip matches the code on the stub, your voter ID is written on the stub.
Both are kept, but in different locations, so theoretically it's possible to find out who you voted for, but it would be a complete ball-ache, so unless it's really really important nobody bothers...
I used to work for a small division of Honeywell, a company with a couple of hundred thousand employees worldwide.
Last year somebody managed to send an email newsletter to everyone in the company, the all users group address is limited access with only very senior IT personnel allow to use it, so how this message got out is anyone's guess. One person replied to all, asking to be removed from the email list, this prompted other people to do the same, then more and more, it took the best part of a week for the IT bods to finally remove the emails clogging up all the company's email servers worldwide...
T & A stands for Time & Attendance, usually an add-on package to the access control system that automatically clocks people in & out as they enter and leave the building.
They're very useful for roll calls during fire drills as they have a record of all the people in the building without having to decipher the clock cards that may have been entered upside down, back to front, clocked in twice and not clocked out etc....
A standard punch card clock machine runs to about £500 these days, but that's only the start of the costs.
You need to add on the cost of clock cards, the cost to collect them from the hundreds of LU sites, then the time to check and cross check them for staff that work multiple sites and I think you can see that a £300 fingerprint scanner at each site, networked to a central T&A database starts to make sense, escpecially when you consider what others have already said regarding the ease of abuse of older style systems.
btw the good quality fingerprint scanners actually read below the surface of the skin, so are not suceptable to misreads caused by cuts and muck on the scanner, and many now even have a little spray attached to squirt the reader with antibacterial foam
Reminds me of my student days when I worked in a video library in the evenings, the top row of adult movies where seriously crap, featuring titles such as "Waves of Lust", these movies were simply taped from German satellite channels with all the interesting parts edited out, some even had the channel logos.
Nowadays I think these films would sail through with a 15 certificate
The bubbling mud effect is handled well in my Mini, as soon as the error rate reaches a certain level it just cuts out, but it's happening less & less as the transmitter power is being pumped up.
As for them not being supplied in cars, this is a real issue. I was at Carfest over the weekend and each car I checked had no DAB as standard, this applies across the range from Kia to Bentley (there was no Rolls stand, so I couldn't check them).
If you want one as standard it's just Mini and some Fords, the rest range from £150 to £7500 options. Yep, if you want DAB in a Bentley you have to opt for the NAIM audio pack which costs more than a new Dacia Sandero...
It's not so limited at home any more, digital; listening at home is increasing rapidly.
Where it is limited though is in cars, there's still too few cars with DAB as standard, they only seem to come as massively overpriced options.
I sat in many, many expensive cars at the weekend and hardly any had a DAB radio fitted as standard kit, as far as I'm aware it seems to be just Mini, who've been fitting them as standard since 08 reg, and Ford who are leading the way.
DAB in cars is mostly OK, I live in the arse end of Lancashire, and my DAB equipped Mini copes pretty well in most areas I drive, although it always drops out as I drive past Lancaster Uni on the M6, I don't know if it's caused by the thick stand of trees by the side of the road, or some dodgy kit they're running in the Uni
I remember once at college, we decided to race a Epson FX80 dot matrix printer and an IBM golf ball printer. Very techincal, just ran this little bit of code on the RM 480z computers they were connected to
10 For X = 1 to 1000000
20 Print X
30 Next X
Everyone reckoned the FX80 would win by miles, but it didn't, the IBM was so violent it actually shook the Epson off the desk, it didn't break the printer, but it did rip the serial cable out, so we declared the IBM the winner
"I bet he wouldn't have said a word if Jobs had been alive....."
A very brave judge if he's male and goes by the name of Denise...
"District Judge Denise Cote stayed true to her initial impressions of the case, and ruled that Apple had colluded with Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster on digital …"
You sure about that?
Thermal cameras show differences in temperature, the wall will be pretty hot due to the fire, and the stream of water will be cold, leading to a huge difference in temperature, which will show through the wall, it won't be a high resolution image, but it will show if the water is hitting in the right place.
Disaster recovery teams use thermal cameras to find survivors after earthquakes and building collapses, a living person will show through a fairly big pile of rubble when using a cooled sensor thermal camera...
There are many problems with the construction of tall towers that people just don't consider, and many of them are down to Pointy Haired Boss.
A few years ago I was working on a project in a tower in London, planning the CCTV installation, there were 1000 cameras in and around the building, needing to store 60 days standard def footage at a mixture of 12.5 and 25fps, we're talking over 1pb of capacity here, around 16tb a day, with RAID 6 redundancy it's a lot of storage.
Then the CEO of the building's owners decides he'd like a mirror of the live feeds in his office close to the top floor, and he'd also like mirrored storage up there as well.
Problem #1 there was absolutely no capacity in the cable ducts for a new fibre for the amount of data that would need to be zoomed up the the top floors, so we had to run an 8-core armoured fibre down the lift shafts and hope for the best, and #2 the system that we'd just spent almost £100k on didn't allow for mirrored recording, and he was insistant, so we ripped that out, spent £250k on a new system and my boss had £100k worth of CCTV recording kit he could sell to someone else...
You need a proper lock with a physical key on all outside doors of a property or your insurance won't pay out.
Even office buildings with electrionic locks also have to have a keyed locked.
If you do go the electronic lock route and to hell with insurance you need to make the decision whether to have your lock as fail safe, so if the power goes the lock springs open, or fail secure so the lock is fastened when the power goes (this is what would have happened in the real world to the vault in Die Hard). One way all your valuables disappear during a powercut, the other way you die when fire breaks out and your fuses blow.