Posts by Valerion 593 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2009
Alas, most amateur guitarists seem to believe 'if it doesn't sound good acoustic, I need to add more distortion pedals'.
When I was younger, and reached the level of "still shit" as a guitarist, I very quickly realised that anything I played on acoustic sounded terrible, but by plugging in, and whacking up the overdrive things would sound a lot better!
Funny how many people will pay around a grand for a mobile phone, but then will fly with the cheapest crappest airline that Google can find them.
When I buy a phone, I expect it to last at least 2 years and be bloody good at everything it does.
When I fly to, say, Florida on holiday, it's an 8 hour flight and then I'm off the plane and it's forgotten. It simply isn't always worth paying loads more money just to get there a bit more comfortably. Usually, I'll just suck it up and complain a bit.
Had a horrid flight with Air Transat back from Montreal (would have been ok if they'd not given the extra legroom seats that I paid for to someone else). But at the end of the day it was bloody cheap so I could put up with the discomfort for a few hours.
Just because it has become easier to record something in good quality, does not mean that the music itself is actually good.
I'd rather listen to Petty/Young recorded on a 1970s portable mono tape recorder in terrible quality than much of today's garbage written and recorded on an iPad by someone who classifies their music as "grime".
[i]"Your car is old & the brakes worn way down, so in order to make it a more pleasant ride we're going to artificially limit the speed to only that of a one legged horse. Enjoy!"[/i]
Actually, reducing the allowed speed of cars with warn out brakes is a pretty good idea.
Well there were the BBC Dirk Gently TV series starring Stephen Mangan . Although loosely based, personally I think they are grossly under-rated and probably the best small/large screen representation of DNA's work
I enjoyed those, too. Stephen Mangan was a perfect Dirk - pretty much exactly how I imagined him when reading the books.
There's also a Netflix "Dirk Gently" that is nothing to do with anything DNA did. Still quite entertaining and a suitably odd plot, but only Dirk Gently by name.
Is all the good people leave. They take their payoff, and walk immediately into another job - probably on a higher salary, too. The other set who go are those who are close to retirement. They would have gone for free soon anyway, but might have actually shared their decades of knowledge before they left.
You are left with the dross who nobody wants to hire, but have saved a few quid.
Unfortunately, then company performance suffers because the remaining staff are shite, profits plummet even more and you repeat the cycle.
It's almost like if you kept the good people and rewarded them, that the company would do better. But that's crazy talk and I'm not a management consultant.
All you need to do, as a delivery driver, is call your thief friend after you leave and say "Number 22 Acacia Avenue - lots of nice stuff, camera is on the shelf in the hallway on the left, nobody is home".
Said thief can then break into the house (which is generally not that difficult) and be sure of nobody being there, and would know where the camera is to avoid it/break it.
My first ever job was doing telephone tech support at Compuserve, helping people who couldn't get online. You'd normally change a few things and then ask them to try again. Of course, they'd have to hang up in order to do so, and then it became somebody else's problem. Unless you got one of those people who said "Oh no need to hang up, I've got a second line!" I hated those people.
Some good times there. The day they released the new CIS3.0 software (that was completely different to the old WinCim) without either telling us call centre monkeys, or actually training us (or, for that matter, even showing it to us even once before hand) was a fun day.
Incidentally, I think Compuserve also ran the X25 network that Visa used for their worldwide card processing.
The problem in UBI is it can't be Universal. Housing costs vary so wildly from area to area that £200 per week UBI has you living in a 3-bed house in one place and in a cardboard box in another.
Also, a childless couple existing on UBI needs less space than a couple with 3 children.
Therefore there has to be an amount of Child and/or Housing Benefit for those who aren't working. And that will still have to be means tested, and removed when the recipient finds a job or has their children reach claimant age. Which kind of then negates the whole point of avoiding benefits and withdrawal of benefits when work is obtained.
But once I had to fly from London to Edinburgh at the crack of sparrows, whilst quite phenomenally unwell, hire a car, and drive a couple of hours north in order to install some software. Said software ONLY worked on Windows 2000. Not XP, not ME, not Linux, only Windows 2000.
The customer had to get a new PC to run this, so I checked three times with them that they had got Windows 2000 on it. They assured me their local specialist had indeed installed Windows 2000.
After a lovely short flight that I spent puking in the plane bathroom, and then a very lovely drive through some very nice scenery, punctuated by more puking, I arrived. You already know it wasn't running 2000. Instead it was running ME because "it's basically the same thing, but cheaper".
So I turned around and went home again. By this time I'd finished puking so it wasn't all bad.
When the 2014s came out (which I had been waiting for), they removed all the quad-core processors, and stopped the RAM being upgradable.
So I picked a 1TB 2012 quad-core from the refurb store (I think it was clearance of old stock rather than a refurb), bought 16GB of aftermarket RAM, and a 256GB SSD to boot it from.
The fitting of the SSD was a real pain (by far the hardest and fiddliest computer surgery I've done in 20+ years of fiddling), but the result was a stonkingly good machine, but it's now a few years old. It's still running fine, but what do I do when it isn't? A current Mini is out of the question, and I won't buy an iMac as I don't like All In One devices. Sure, they look nice, but I don't want to chuck an entire PC away because the monitor broke. And, of course, they are expensive.
I want to stay with Mac because I like the OS, so my options are build my own Hackintosh, or ditch Mac altogether.
Sort it out Tim!
I remember back in the 90s when I were a lad, writing a VB program to mimic exactly the network logon screen on the RM Nimbus PCs we had at school.
Left it running on the computer the teacher normally sat it, told her I'd forgotten my password. In order to reset it, she logs onto my fake screen which gives her a cunningly programmed "Network error, please restart your computer" error and stores her details in a text file. I then handily remember my password, grab the text file from that computer, deleting it to cover my tracks, and then I had admin access over the whole school network.
I'm not such a l33t haxx0r any more, sadly.
Most people will measure their speed by running a speed test over wifi. This is just as dependent on their wifi speed rather than just the broadband speed.
You can deliver a constant 100Mbs to the modem, but if the wifi access point is in an area full of interference on a congested channel, and you are sitting 40 feet away through various brick walls and ceilings, you aren't gonna get it. And that isn't the fault of the ISP.
Not trying to excuse the ISPs from responsibility as they are generally lying shitbags, just sayin' that it's not always their fault.
I used to only get between 8-20Mbps upstairs from my 100Mb Virgin line (downstairs). I changed the router from an Apple Airport Express (I only use the Virgin one in modem mode) for a better Asus one and now get 100Mb everywhere.
This smacks of a developer deliberately storing the password in the hint field on purpose, so that he (or she) can test it as she (or he) goes along and not worry have to worry about remembering the password.
The intention would have been to remove that bit before committing it, but (s)he forgot, and nobody noticed it in the pull request.
In the early hours of this morning the power went out in my house (ok, more accurately it came back on - I've no idea if it was out for 2 seconds or 4 hours).
Because the Amazon Echo that sits on my bedside table restarts quicker than the cable modem and router it kindly yelled "SORRY I'M HAVING TROUBLE CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET AT THE MOMENT" into my right ear'ole at a very loud volume at 4am.
Of course it wasn't alone. It yelled it simultaneously in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room and my son's bedroom (I seem to have accumulated quite a few Echos). A lovely morning chorus to be woken to.
To add insult to injury when the internet had come back online a few minutes later - as I was drifting off to sleep again - they all shouted "Hello".
Wasting battery capacity and holding it to ransom like that is a cheap trick. I'm amazed they do this.
I'm amazed anyone has a problem with it and can't see the actual situation.
Customers were after cheaper cars with a smaller range and smaller battery. Rather than develop the smaller battery, tool up to provide it, and then have to worry about 2 production lines, it is much cheaper and more efficient for them to provide the larger battery and not worry about the smaller one at all.
Customer pays for a 60kw car and they get one. Other customers pay for a 75kw car and they get one.
Added bonus (for Tesla) - they don't have to worry about adjusting production for demand.
Added bonus (for the customer) - they can unlock the rest of the range if they decide to pay extra, rather than having to buy an entire new car.
This is in pretty much the same way as how car manufacturers produce identical engines with different power outputs. My wife's car, for example, had 110BHP and 135BHP options (IIRC). The 135 is more expensive by a couple of grand, but the engines are identical - just tuned differently and with the ECU programmed differently.
Tesla are not ripping anyone off.
Here in NY if you try and use the Official Website to pay off your totally bogus fit-up job red light violation* you get charged a grubbing and usurious surcharge for making it easier for the state government.
I got a parking ticket on Long Island a couple of weeks ago. The only means of payment are via things like "certified check". As a tourist there is no way I could actually pay the thing - there's no go online and pay option*
So I'll have to wait for the fine to be doubled for not paying early, then be passed to the car rental firm, who will then pass it on to me, no doubt with a hefty admin fee added on. My only slim hope rests on the fact the car was a Canadian rental that I had bought over the border.
*Shouldn't be too surprised given even Chip and Pin is a recent phenomenon over there.
I'm more concerned about how many they didn't find.
Someone I know quite well was part of the security implementation at Heathrow. They would frequently put things through as tests and not all were picked up by operators.
And that wasn't the TSA who by most accounts are really rather incompetent.
That was entirely normal behaviour for professional British officers. They didn't duck under enemy fire.
As proved by Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones in 1982.
And, indeed, one Corporal Jones, who refused to panic under any circumstance, and insisted - often loudly - that those in his presence also should not panic.
The cost has come from changing usernames for everyone. If they are a security-conscious organisation <cough> then if the usernames are exposed then that is potentially serious, as that's half of what you need in order to gain access. It's just the password left to crack. So the answer would be to invalidate the usernames to re-secure the system.
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