Posts by TonyJ 1599 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2010
"I know it's a hobby..."
Here's a thing. He wasn't posing with firearms he was posing with what is effectively a toy. For his hobby.
There are pictures of my in diving or climbing gear I've posed for.
One of my friends races cars for a hobby...guess what...?
Context is key.
"...In my experience that's often not the case, at least in the regions we work in. Our interviews are very real-world, and of course still many people don't make the grade..."
This isn't always fair.
I have 20 years of experience across various roles. Asking me to recall things ad-hoc that may be obscure or esoteric proves memory not experience.
Mind you then there's the interviews where the person interviewing you has a networking background (I don't) then wants to drill down into network architecture.
And says stupid things like "well wouldn't you use BitLocker as a start to securing your Office 365 implementations...?"
And we're not talking the application suite here.
Testing memory ain't the same as testing knowledge and is why so many "professional" certifications aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
"...Once again El Reg likes to post incomplete information.
For all you people people blaming lack of testing, the combination that bricks the NIC is when you use a brand new driver with firmware that is like 2+ years old.
If you follow the DOCUMENTED Recipe for Drivers and Firmware, you'd be fine.
Image and SPP was pulled to prevent customers who don't RTDM from hurting themselves.."
It doesn't matter. This should NOT be possible.
If that particular combination is known to cause a problem then why doesn't the update stop and warn you before quitting?
The simple fact that it's a know, documented, issue just shows sloppy programming.
"No you don't..."
Oh really?
"A TV Licence is a legal permission to install or use television receiving equipment to watch or record television programmes as they are being shown on TV or live on an online TV service, and to download or watch BBC programmes on demand, including catch up TV, on BBC iPlayer. This could be on any device, including TVs, desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, games consoles, digital boxes, DVD, Blu-ray and VHS recorders. This applies regardless of which television channels a person receives or how those channels are received. The licence fee is not a payment for BBC services (or any other television service), although licence fee revenue is used to fund the BBC."
Taken from: https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/foi-legal-framework-AB16
It then continues:
"It is an offence to watch or record television programmes as they are being shown on any channel and on any broadcast platform (terrestrial, satellite, cable and the internet) or download or watch BBC programmes on demand, including catch up TV, on BBC iPlayer without a valid TV Licence."
I am pretty sure they updated this to catch people in your exact case.
"I find it bizarre that people are willing to pay Sky a minimum of £25 a month (and still have to watch adverts) yet complain about paying the BBC less than half that. I also have a hard job of believing that across the TV channels, iplayer, the website and radio there isn't some content to suit absolutely everyone.
It wouldn't just be a case of scrapping the license fee, allowing advertising and everything else continuing as now. There's only so much adversiting money to go round and the BBC would be likely to hoover up most of it. ITV and C4's revenues would plummet with a corresponding drop in quality of programming. Several of the smaller channels would likely disappear altogether.
Those campaigning to scrap the license fee should be careful what they wish for. Whilst the BBC is far from perfect the entire entertainment landscape of this country would be worse off without it."
Here's the thing though - with something like Sky you can record future episodes and watch them, at your leisure, skipping the adverts.
I can series link so they all download in future.
I can watch almost all of their offerings on a number of device types - not just for a few days or weeks after they broadcast and once I've recorded something to my box, I can actually (should I so desire) keep it ad infinitum.
Now perhaps I am being unfair to the iPlayer and it can do all of that but I rarely use it.
I love the comedy half hour on R4 between 6:30 and 7:00pm - not everything (some of it is utter shite, to be honest, but most of it is worthy of a chuckle) but you try and find something over about 30 days old on average. Nope. Not usually happening.
You're paying Sky or Virgin (or if you prefer a LOT less to Amazon or Netflix) for a much wider choice of channels than you get from the BBC, even taking radio into account. And some of the quality on them is truly outstanding (Halt and Catch Fire, on Amazon or Rick and Morty on NetFlix anyone? Just two outstanding examples)
And let's not forget that, like all of the other channels, the BBC do have some utter race-to-the-bottom crap on there as well.
"..I'd like an intelligent signature function, ie if the email is being sent internally then I'd put my phone number and link to the SharePoint "mysite", external then I'd put my LinkedIn profile link instead..."
Pretty sure you can (or could, at least) use transport rules to achieve this. Not graceful, but do-able.
Now...give me a version of Skype for Business where I can add multiple accounts / logins please, such as I can with frigging Outlook.
See now I had the exact opposite with Zen.
I moved my ADSL as it was then from O2 business to Zen business.
It went from my already poor 4.5Mbits to c56kbps and was truly dreadful.
After a week of being onto them with them basically repeatedly telling me it was fine despite screenshots showing the problems I ended up having to cancel and moved to BeThere who were another superb ISP.
Interestingly they never provided fibre or any kind and when I called for my MAK they offered me two years free...that was literally about three weeks before they announced the Sky buy so I guess that was why.
Still remember how chilled the guy on the call was about my leaving. Having explained that I was getting fibre and they simply didn't do it or have any plans to he took a big deep breath and said "you'd be crazy to accept this man but if you want we will give you two free years...but go get your fibre" :)
"...Plus, Vodamoan insist on you using their absolutely crap router .."
http://www.vodafone.co.uk/cs/groups/public/documents/assets/bus-broadband-alt-router-guide.pdf
And in my case they emailed me a few days before with all the static IP and user information including, if ncessary, the VLAN ID to be able to use my own equipment - I didn't even need to ask!
Like most they ISP's if you have a problem they insist you plug their modem in prior to calling for support which is fair enough.
...for close to 5 years and it was superb to be honest. I went with them because as the first fibre customer on the estate when it was made available, they were the only ones supplying it.
I always got close to the speeds they'd initially said I would and with very few problems.
When I did have to call them it was to a UK based team that were helpful, knew their stuff and did a good job.
But then a couple of months ago a colleague mentioned Vodafone business fibre and their offer of no line rental so after a few enquiries both online and on the phone I made the switch.
It was painless to switch - didn't even require a MAK code - and all went smoothly. Yet again, the few times I've called them it's been UK based and they've been both knowledgeable and helpful.
The main reason I made the switch was price - the broadband alone was almost half that of BT and then throw in the no line rental charged it was too good to turn away.
Still not a cheap option and that's part of the issue here I feel. When you're rushing to be the cheapest provider of anything, something has to give somewhere and the likes of Talk Talk cut so many corners I am surprised anyone would ever use them.
"...Strictly speaking, BBC Master machines also had a SHIFT+BREAK combination that performed a hard reset. A tap of the BREAK key on its own was essentially a soft reset that still kept data in memory..."
Actually I seem to recall that SHIFT+BREAK would try to load from disc if one was present and bootable.
CTRL+BREAK was the hard reset.
Same on all BBC's.
"...I believe that is being slightly unfair on Microsoft..."
Some very good points made - Ferrari in 2016 were paid around 3x that of Renault, including an additional $70m that no other team got due to being the "long standing team".
The graphic is here: http://damcdn.autosport.com/editorial/0c8e80ce668b13dee752e8fc724f51c9.jpg
With the full story behind it here: https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/123649/formula-1-team-payments-for-2016-revealed
Also I believe there were actually power plant changes this season as well as the cars being bigger and faster - that is a lot for some teams to pay for and play catch up on and as you say it tends to lag a year anyway.
"..We have a website, it was designed and specified by an internal tech team. It is updated by the internal tech team and it draws in over 90% of our business (many millions per year). Even the 10% that it doesn't draw in is mainly displacement (and no sold by a 'sales person')
In fact I can think of loads of companies that don't requires sales people (at least no tin the traditional sense) to sell their products. This isn't even including the NGOs, schools, charities, and plenty of others that are a company without a product or service as such to sell..."
Name them. If you were so sure of yourself why hide behind anonymous commenting? Nope...thought not.
Even the public sector have sales.
"...On the other hand, who can't get behind bad things happening to salesmen :).."
WTF are you smoking?
1 - Show me a company, any company, that doesn't rely on sales people to bring in revenue and keep you in a job.
2 - Having done only pre-sales, let me tell you that the 80's car salesmen days are for the huge majority, long gone.
3 - You show a complete and utter lack of understanding that sometimes, often in fact, these high earners in sales are on a pittance of a wage and may have worked for months or even years before they get a "big win"
4 - On what planet can it be right and proper to do this kind of practice? Would you like it? Nope...thought not
Oxygen toxicity is all down to the ppo2 - partial pressure of oxygen.
It's important to understand this if you do technical diving as you tend to accelerate decompression with ever higher percentages of oxygen, up to 100%.
We generally accept that a ppo2 of 1.6 whilst stationary on decompression is safe.
At 1bar, ppo2 is .21 so you can use a bit of maths to calculate you cannot use 100% O2 safely below 6m.
Pure O2 of course is explosive in any manner of interesting ways, such as if it comes into contact with silicon hence the need for "O2 clean" diving kit.
<sigh> Depressing reading.
You can't tax fairly as it'll put companies out of business plus who gets to determine fair yada yada.
It isn't fair that corporations avoid paying taxes.
I like the fact so many of you chose to ignore the fact I admitted up front I couldn't recall at which point in the cycle the taxes should be taken but hey ho, let's not let facts get in the way of a bit of Friday flaming, eh?
Did I, at any point, suggest I'd be the arbiter of what is or is not fair? Slunts.
Cake. Eat. Can't.
"...Then you would be very hungry as retailers like Walmart make about 3-5% profit..."
False logic.
1 - what a USA retailer has to do with UK tax law...? And yes, I know they are the parent company of Asda, but still.
2 - Let's just take food since you brought it up. In the race to bottom, we've seen the introduction of some of the least healthy foodstuffs I can remember in my lifetime. You can have cheap, convenient or healthy but not all three and rarely any combination of two where one is healthy.
3 - Staying with food, we're terribly, terribly wasteful - see here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/10/uk-throwing-away-13bn-of-food-each-year-latest-figures-show
13bn of food thrown away whilst we have families who work needing to attend food banks.
4 - At what point does enough become too much? How can it be right that some of these large companies would prefer to put employees on zero-hours contracts to maximise profits? Profits that are then offset against loopholes to minimise taxes that directly impacts everyone?
So tell me again how you can equate fairer tax to going hungry...
This! Have an upvote!
I read somewhere, some time ago that if everyone who earned over £x,000 paid tax at 22% and corporations were taxed at 22% of all sales* and that both these stupid loopholes and our ridiculous tax laws** were abolished then the government would bring in something like double what they were at the time.
In essence, simplify it and make it fairer.
*It was a fair while ago so I am vague from memory if it was sales, revenue, profit, turnover etc but it did make sense at the time.
**Two examples - we apparently went from two A4 binders of tax law in 1997 to seventeen by 2005. We even have several pages prescribing what makes a boot as opposed to a shoe because boots, being classed as PPE aren't subject to VAT whereas shoes (even steel toecapped ones) are not PPE therefore are subject to VAT...now isn't that bonkers?
I'm in that age bracket that started working when we had personnel departments but saw the change over to HR departments.
I have fond memories of those personnel peeps - they usually had the best interests of the staff at the company at their hearts.
Whereas HR departments seem to solely exist to ensure that a company can get away with the absolute bare minimum and treat their staff like cattle.
I have laptops here at home with both Pro and Enterprise on.
I allow them to get updates automatically, 'cos they're connected to the web (yes, not directly but still).
Honestly, I don't recognise this reboot, update, reboot, update...cycle.
Once a month I get a bunch of updates. My machines either reboot at 3am give or take or I can do it manually. Yeah if there's been a bunch of updates, it can be a bit of a PITA waiting for the whole boot cycle to finish but it does it once and then on wtih working.
Some updates - defender, for example, don't need reboots at all.
Just updated a Debian desktop I have in a VM and a Kali install on another laptop and both required reboots - granted they were much faster, but they still needed reboots.
Honestly a reboot once a month that takes a bit longer is hardly a royal PITA to most people.
And frankly, given the shite I've had to dig neighbours out of in the past because they'd either turned off updates or had a hooky copy of say XP that didn't get them, I'd say any home system shouldn't have the option to defer or turn off updates.
..."How come, if the NSA, GCHQ etc are able to monitor all phone calls in the world, nobody can shut these people down?..."
For the very same reason German U-boat "wolf packs" were allowed to continue to target merchant shipping during WWII, after the British cracked the codes used by Enigma - once you reveal your hand, you're holding no cards.
By not getting involved in the petty low-end criminality, it still makes the world uncertain of what the various agencies around the world are, or are not, capable of.
@ Threlkeld
"In the UK and Republic of Ireland, the Samaritans maintain a free-to-call helpline number on 116 123. Hotlines in other countries can be found here." (with a link)
It's good for people to understand and to know that someone, somewhere will listen and not judge. They do a tremendous thing for a lot of people.
@ Anonymous Coward
"Who would want to sit and listen to these people? That takes a particular form of bravery and compassion."
My mum. She did it for quite some time, especially over Christmas. And yes, it takes a tremendous amount of mental courage to do it.
"...That being said she was also a minor at the time and provably not at all responsible, yet responsible for his death..."
Sorry but at 15 years old she was plenty mature enough to understand her actions.
She wanted the attention and sympathy after the event.
Cold, calculated and with full intent and understanding.
Vile creature. He needed help not pushing over the edge like that.
"...I've got the barclaycard app on my OP5 and it works OK with 2 sims in..."
Perhaps Barclays have finally got around to understanding that dual SIM phones are a thing.
I'd be interested to know how long you've had it for though...mine would work for weeks on end then suddenly throw me to the new device registration screen.
In fairness the OPO only remained in my hands long enough to list it on eBay as I'd had to replace my phone between ordering and delivery and it took many weeks.
The OP2...it started off as a decent phone. One of the reasons I purchased it was the promised regular security updates but they were few and far between coming roughly every 4 months.
No...my view of OP is that they're a massively successful marketing machine that just happens to produce a few phones.
Let it go, 45RPM - these fora do seem to attract Mr/Miss/<insert your own title> Angry.
I got downvoted for pointing out that LIbreOffice now includes the option to have a ribbon bar.
I can only assume that, despite the fact I was simply pointing out an actual, factual, truth, that the ones who are still (ten years+) down the line foaming at the mouth of the temerity of MS to have added it with the release of Office 2007 - usually the same ones espousing the virtues of choice - hadn't noticed and will now have to turn that anger onto LibreOffice.
Me, personally, could see it actually helping the adoption of LibreOffice as I said earlier.
Anyway...let 'em vent and downvote mate. Life's too short.
"...I can't believe anyone spent time creating that, but vive la differance, I guess..."
I can. If you take users of MS Office now - ones that have used it for the last decade (or longer in many cases) and plump any version prior to 2007 in front of them and they would ask where anything was.
I've tried it.
Other comments along the lines of being ugly are also mentioned.
If you want LibreOffice to really be taken up then it has to be compatible with* and even mirror newer versions of MS Office.
*Yeah I know...even MS can't guarantee compatibility at times.
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