Posts by Alien8n 1014 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2007
Had issues all morning with our IP Phones, so inevitably it's my fault that they don't work. As soon as I mention what's happened it's "call BT now and find out when it'll be fixed, we can't work without phones". Except it's not actually a BT issue and we aren't a BT customer? Now if only I could have changed jobs 2 weeks earlier... (still here for another 2 weeks)
Japan is notorious for xenophobia. It's exceedingly rare to find anyone not of a Japanese origin in charge at a Japanese company. And by that I mean anywhere that's not Japan. When I grew up in the North East of England my dad worked for a Japanese company. All the senior management were Japanese. I wasn't going to complain though, I was 7 and grew up eating Japanese food as I went to school with my dad's boss's kids (even now I seem to be the only one in the restaurant actually using chopsticks properly)
There's a reason no one tries phoning O2, it's because it takes over an hour to get through to someone, regardless of whether you're trying to order a phone or asking for help. I have to support over 50 users all on O2 contracts and they rank alongside BT as one of the worst companies I have to deal with. It took 3 years before we finally got O2 to set us up with a dedicated account manager who we now email direct and for any support and activations we deal direct online. I simply refuse to call them now.
Not one of mine (unless you can count 6 months of playing Black Hawk Down on the company's servers while waiting for the redundancy package to kick in. All sanctioned by the management as well, I played on the same team as the R&D manager), but the boss of one of our suppliers took a 6 month sabbatical to hike to the South Pole.
"Pokemon Go is used by such a minuscule proportion of the population"
In the UK maybe, but even here I can go out in town at midnight and you'll see a dozen people with their phones out clearly playing Pokemon GO. And that's in a country where officially you can't play the game. In the US I'd hazard a guess that's it's the most popular mobile game amongst teenagers and young adults.
If you want to rob someone of something that's easily transferrable and worth a considerable amount of money (say, a smart phone) I'd say it's actually quite a smart idea on the robber's part. Rather than trying to rob any old person and have a chance that the phone they use is a Nokia brick this method guarantees a relatively new smart phone, and you don't even have to run around trying to find people to rob.
"Smartphone GO, gotta rob them all" (tm)
@Fonant once you take out the militant green policies they actually have some excellent ideas, it would be interesting to see another party actually look at some of their policies and actually try and implement some of them. Would never happen though as all the main parties are only interested in maintaining the status quo.
Time for a complete change in Westminster, remove everyone and start again, have Labour MPs with truly socialist ideals, Tories that are true capitalists and Lib Dems that are truly moderate. I think this may be one of the reasons why the Tories are swinging so far to the right now, the fact that pretty much every MP now seems to be trying to claim the centre ground. The only way to show themselves to be different is to try and out-Thatcher Thatcher.
Don't be so sure, if they succeed in pushing out Corbyn they're left with another Blairite in charge of Labour and Blair was actually more right wing than the previous conservative government. Politics in the UK is getting more and more like America with 2 parties dominating that you really can't tell the difference between unless they have a leader at one or other extreme end. The Lib Dems had an excellent chance of proving themselves to be a moderating force in politics until Nick Clegg showed everyone that actually all three parties were just slightly different shades of blue
@AC as stated, back when I got my first DAB car radio sometime around 2003 I had no issues with reception or station choice. This is something I've noticed since getting another car with DAB in the last few months, but I can't say if the issue is a lower signal strength or with the quality of the car radio.
@Hans pretty much exactly the same for me, DAB came as standard on the car when I bought it, but is pretty much unusable due to poor reception. My experience with DAB is very much that it is much worse now than it was 10 years ago. I don't know if that's due to reduced signal strength or inferior car radios.
@allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
A large chunk of their losses are from the sales of Pure DAB radios, hence my comment. They'd probably be able to save even more by simply shutting down their DAB radio business.
(I do know at least one person with a DAB radio, but I don't think they ever actually use any of the DAB stations due to issues with reception)
Does anyone still buy DAB radios? I remember when DAB first came out I had a DAB radio in the car and it got a good selection of high quality stations (high quality in reception sense, not necessarily content). My current car also has DAB but I find today that both the number of decent stations has diminished and the reception quality is absolutely appalling. Most of the stations are copies of the FM stations and the FM stations are much better reception wise as they don't constantly try to retune every 100 yards. For this simple reason I couldn't justify buying a DAB radio for the home, especially as I can stream to my surround sound from my phone and just get the apps for the stations that I like and stream them over the internet.
@POS No, the rebate is applied immediately so we don't send £350m per week, we send the lower £250m per week and then get subsidies back. This was made very clear in the Remain campaign. Please stop with the misleading figures.
For more see here https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/ with nice graphics
@AC actually the rebate is applied *before* we pay the EU. With subsidies that £350m is then further reduced to approx £69m per week. As the UK is one of the richest countries in the EU I actually have no issue with this, for the same reason I have no issues with my taxes paid in Oxfordshire going towards regeneration programs in Liverpool, or Wales.
I've actually made this analogy before. There's a lot of my music collection that exists now (in legal form) due to some form of piracy in the past. My entire Iron Maiden collection (I own every album legally) came about as a result of being handed a copied tape on a school trip in the 1980's. I also now own a reasonably large collection of symphonic metal (think Nightwish) as a direct result of someone providing me a copy of an album many years ago that was only available in the USA at the time. Once it became available in the UK I bought the deluxe CD. Then add to that all the ticket sales for gigs and merchandise sales and they've probably made more money off me than any album sales they could have potentially lost.
True, but it could influence HOW we exit. Although judging from comments from the EU any chance we had of remaining in the EEA as part of our exit may be slim to none. It would appear the EU has decided that the UK has thrown one petulant tantrum too many and has been relegated to the role of that friend you never invite to parties because they get drunk and start a fight.
It would be interesting to see them do a follow up poll now the referendum is over to see exactly what the swing *after* the referendum has been given the lies that both sides have told have come to light. My guess would be a slight swing back to Remain, but probably not enough to change the result. The alternative is an elective that will believe anything even after proven to be false. Mind you, considering how many people believe in UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, that politicians keep promises...
Seems to me they also used a fair amount of knowledge to produce unbiased results. Recognising that their polling skewed the results due to education and social status seems to be the key factor here, whereas other polling companies have assumed that sentiment would be the same regardless.
"We polled 2000 degree educated people and came to result X"
You clearly didn't own property in the 1990s. Negative equity was the result of many people going bankrupt as houses they bought suddenly lost half their value almost overnight. Banks were foreclosing on loans as people lost jobs leaving them without a house and still owing hundreds of thousands of pounds due to the selling price of the house being so much lower than the mortgage price. It was the negative equity in the US housing market that was one of the driving forces behind the 2008 banking crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_equity
In my case I have many friends (and family members) who voted leave and who I can still have reasonable and polite discussions with. Mainly because their reason to leave are all pretty much the same, they want controlled immigration, not to stop "immigrants stealing jobs/benefits" but to release the pressure on housing that this and the previous government's lack of action has caused, and to regain a certain sense of control over our own laws. I then have friends who are quite simply racists who's FB timelines are a stream of Islamophobia and Britain First hate rhetoric. Needless to say which I prefer drinking with...
The most likely result of Brexit is this:
We'll leave the EU, thereby making several overpaid MEPs redundant and no longer having any say in what actually happens in Europe.
We'll sign new trade deals that will contain clauses, such as free trade and free movement. Meaning economically nothing changes. We'll still give £350m a week to the EU for this trade agreement. If we're lucky this will also get us access to EU subsidy funding. Immigration from EU countries will still continue. We'll no longer be able to veto expansion of the EU to countries such as Turkey.
Non-EU immigration will become more difficult to control as we'll now have to process them in Dover rather than Calais.
So nothing really changes except we'll no longer have ANY say in how the EU progresses. That does not look like a victory for Great Britain.
And does anyone else find the whole "Let's make Britain GREAT again" rhetoric disturbing? It has all the connotations of Empire building and 1930's jingoism. Let's face it, a couple of small islands full of sheep farmers and accountants do not make an Empire. No matter how much we might like to think that way we no longer control half the globe and we never will again. Accept we're one of many economic powerhouses on the global scale and we must work together globally, not in isolation as many seem to think we're capable of doing.
Rule 1, I cannot up vote this comment as much as it deserves. I have one particular "friend" who seems to only post how much she hates every single job she's ever had. That and her current load of utter nonsense about the EU referendum. I don't care how anyone else votes, we do live in a democracy, but please, Britain First is NOT a credible source for statistics to base your vote on. Accept that the official information from both sides is pretty much made up bollocks and do your own research and then make your own decision based on actual facts.
My first car was an F reg Ford Escort (automatic, petrol). Had to take it over the flooded A3 to get to work back in about 2000/2001 when the south of England was flooded. Drove straight through a flooded roundabout past a big 4x4 that had stalled in the middle. I swear that car was part amphibious.
Next car was a Rover 400, with the manual gearbox it inevitably stalled in less than a foot of water and had to be towed out. No damage to electrics, started up again straight away once on the dry.
Check your nearest city, most cities will have an established boot maker or gentleman's outfitters that seems to hang on despite the supermarket onslaught (usually by supplying bespoke or good quality shoes to the local elite). Failing that look at some of the alternative manufacturers. New Rock are more famous for their boots for goths and metalheads, but do a remarkably good range of exceedingly high quality, hand stitched Spanish leather shoes.
Strangely enough Primark (yes I know, surprised me as well) do a remarkably good selection of Jeans. Plenty in the 32" - 34" range. Seem to be "reasonable" quality (so far) but for a tenner each pair you can't really complain. My other jeans cost me over 100 quid (imported from the US) and even they have quality issues, not to mention a pair of 34" waist jeans having to be adjusted as they expect the average person to have giraffe legs.
There is a similar affliction among some of the metalhead community. Quite a few have fairly slim builds, but with the neck muscles of an ox. Try finding a slim fit shirt with a 20 inch neck...
(also it takes at least an extr a20 minutes to get dressed as you try to find the specific black shirt that you want to wear amongst the pile of equally black clothing in the corner of the room...)
Used to buy relatively cheap shoes at £20 to £30 a pair, but found I was replacing them every 3 months due to a job that entailed a lot of walking. Decided to get a pair of New Rock shoes for £73 (reduced from £184). In over 2 years the shoes are still going strong. had new soles once and protect the heels with the metal protectors that you can buy for a few quid. Have to replace them every few months, but they've already paid for themselves no end of times since buying them. I'll never buy cheap shoes ever again.
Are you sure you didn't work for the same company as me? I remember having almost the exact same conversation with a colleague when they had a network issue in their office.
They also had an IT policy that stated that it was a sackable offence to be sent a virus. I could understand sending one being a sackable offence, but receiving one?
There's a good argument for not trying to fix stuff that works...
Old company of mine ran some software written in MUMPS. Software worked for all but one client, turned out the IT manager (who claimed to be vastly more intelligent than anyone else, friends with Richard Branson, was once an Olympic archer, etc) had written some client specific code for handling billing. Turned out he hadn't tested it and it had been running for about 3 years when I arrived there. The bug? Customer makes a partial payment, instead of allocating against the bill and generating a new balance it tries to reallocate against all bills. Result is a random error, plus or minus pennies to thousands of pounds (sometimes tens of thousands). The "fix" wasn't to look at the code generating the error but to manually adjust out the errors in the billing export file as the code clearly couldn't be wrong. I finally found out where the error was occurring and got the vendor to fix the code, which promptly resulted in me leaving the company as the IT manager blamed me for all the fixed bills that hadn't been called due to his code. Needless to say the company doesn't exist anymore.
Once I read your comment I was thinking that myself, short of freezing the droplet to near absolute zero the lack of air pressure should convert the water into gas. However, reading the article carefully it states that the laser and microscope are in a vacuum, but it's possible the water droplets are not. Would be interesting to see the full setup to confirm.
I once had a job interview at a satellite systems company in London. The interviewer explained I wasn't getting the job due to being married and having children. Something to do with the high probability of having to catch the last flight out of a country under gunfire (this had happened to the guy interviewing me, where they'd had to crash through the fence of the airport to get to the plane that was about to take off while being shot at by a rebel army).
The job was installing satellite communications into war zones for news teams.
I believe you're right. Not sure where I picked up Will I Am holding a stake from, but it wouldn't surprise me, he has enough money he could buy Endemol if he wanted to. May just be a small stake in the UK production side of things, or some memory of an article that had some misleading "facts" about the show.
This is exactly what happened with The Voice. From memory the format is owned by an independent company that Will I Am has a very large stake in. From next year the show will air on ITV.
The only hope is that with the shift to ITV the X Factor will finally get dropped...
@Captain Badmouth
There was an article not that long ago that suggested the best way to remember a password was to use song lyrics.
So if you really liked Iron Maiden you could pick a verse from a song and transpose that into a password like this:
"Bring your daughter, bring your daughter, to the slaughter"
Becomes "BYDBYDTTS"
Then you add some variable capitalisation:
"ByDbYdTtS"
Followed by some number replacement:
"ByD8YdTt5"
And then add some symbols:
"ByD8YdTt5?"
Hey presto, instant random password that's easy to remember.
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