Re: Might be wrong
Correct, the one for talking to the phone drones is not your online password.
593 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2009
A few months ago I was in a fairly posh hotel in NYC. Anything bought from the mini bar (not that I'm stupid enough or rich enough) to buy anything from the mini bar) also had a "restocking fee" applied that was about 50% of the cost of the (already eye-wateringly expensive) item. Of course, this was written in very small print.
I can only assume the restocking fee covered the cost of sending someone down to CVS on the corner to purchase a new item and come and put it back on the shelf.
Its more complicated than that. MCAS was put in because without it the planes had some extremely nasty handling characteristics that are absolutely prohibited, and rightly so, as Electronics R us says above. That wasn't unreasonable, I very much doubt that its the only plane that has similar fixes in software,
Indeed, many fighter planes are also unstable.
They, however, are equipped with ejector seats.
But it's such a damn hassle.
First, I need to find one that is competent. I don't even know how to do that - how do I know they are any good?
Then, I need to get in contact. I hate phoning people, and they never answer the phone anyway, as they are always busy.
After that, I want some idea of how much I will need to pay. Naturally, the sparky will not want to commit to a price based on my vague telephone description of "The lights in my lounge stopped working. I want to replace them but there might be a wiring issue, or it might be the switch". Do I need £100 or £1000 spare in my bank account in order to get this done? I have no clue.
And after all that, we need to agree a time for them to come. This will involve either taking a day off work at the loss of precious annual leave - not always possible to arrange at short notice - or trying to work out a work-from-home day, which also isn't always possible depending on what project I'm working on at the time.
So, the lights in my lounge have been broken for about 18 months now. I've learned to live with just lamps.
A project I'd worked on for a long time was suddenly turned over to outsourcers, as they wanted to scale it out to a load of other regions. The work involved here was basically writing and running a shit-load of SQL scripts to generate all the required data for these new regions.
I had this down a fine art having done it several times already and, frankly, could have done the lot in a week. But nobody even bothered to ask me about it, and it got outsourced and I got moved onto other things. I spent over a week getting them involved, and because nobody quite trusted them they had to do every small SQL change (all the inserts/merges etc) in a pull request for me to review.
It was tediously slow as you'd expect. The funny thing was when after a few weeks the outsourced devs (who were actually pretty smart) realised this was a huge waste of their time and talent and all quit, leaving us with nobody at all to do the work. By this time I was on other projects and couldn't be spared, so the big roll-out just basically stopped. I left shortly after, too.
I spent hours waiting at a customer site for their contracted IT firm to remember the password to their firewall. Eventually a guy came onsite and managed to guess it.
I took a backup of the config, made my change and left.
Months later we get a letter demanding compensation because I'd changed the password and they'd had to rebuild the entire thing. I hadn't - obviously it was just that they'd forgotten it again - but they took the existance of the config backup with my name in the filename as proof.
We told them to go forth, if I remember corrrectly, and sent them a bill for my wasted time from months before. No idea if they paid it or not, sadly.
This. Just, absolutely this.
I was a massive fan as a child, but had no way to watch it (McCoy era) unless it happened to actually be on TV at that time.
The library had a huge collection of the books, and I pretty much read them all. Many of them multiple times.
BBC News made this comparison a while back:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48127919
Essentially, IWG has about 7 times the number of properties, close to double the revenue, and actually made £150m profit last year compared to a £1.5bn loss. As a result it is valued at £3bn compared to £36bn - a tenth of the value despite being very profitable and having many times the assets.
I despair. As, I expect, do the IWG board.
It was in our in-house "do-everything" system, which included sending emails out to customers.
CTO dictated that it must be done, and must NOT allow a message to go out to a customer unless the spell-check agreed there were NO mistakes. No exceptions, no overrides.
So I did it, QA signed it off, it went live, and within about 10 minutes the complaints came flooding in. Turns out there were a lot of things that we needed that weren't actually words and, unless they wrote ridiculously worded emails they basically couldn't send anything.
Luckily I had implemented an override anyway which I had just configured to be turned off... Naturally it took me all day to "get the emergency fix out".
I also used to work in a vehicle tracking firm (quite a while back). One of the services we offered was mobile phone tracking. We had an API link to a company that actually provided this, and there were supposed to be all sorts of checks to ensure you weren't tracking people without their knowledge (had to send automated texts reminding the phone-owner every 30 days etc), but as an operator of the system I could track any phone in the country to a cell-tower location (not GPS level) if I felt like it. That always unnerved me a bit.
We had some police customers too. One of them was a constabulary that had a few units of ours, would go and nick the cars of known/suspected crims (usually drug dealers), fit the unit and put the car back, so they could sit back and see where they went whilst putting their feet up and having a cuppa.
And as referenda are one-off events, there should never be a second referndum on the same question.
Why not? Sure, not immediately after, but after a few years it seems appropriate. Circumstances have changed. More detail is known. The population itself has changed. Many of the "facts" have proven to be lies (on both sides).
Many argue that the original 1970s referendum wsa the defining vote and should never be challenged.
I suppose the real problem is that we still don't know for sure what are facts and what are lies, and still have no idea what leaving might actually look like.
Once demanded that my boss get hold of me and make me come back from a family holiday to Orlando immediately to fix a problem they were having at the time.
My boss, who had been in contact with me a few times during the holiday to tell me he was jealous (and, incidentally, had not even asked me anything about the system problem as he was dealing with it himself) told him that he had no way of getting hold of me. Decent boss, that one.
You've never seen a car pass a red light? That must be a lie.
I meant at that specific junction - the one where cyclists never seem to obey it. I have seen plenty of cars go through red lights in general in my life, but still a tiny fraction of the number of cyclists that do it. However mostly this is due to not noticing/being distracted. Sure, that is absolutely not a excuse, but the cyclists do it on purpose.
"a new study from the Danish Road Directorate found that less than 5 per cent of cyclists break traffic laws compared to 66 per cent of motorists"
It may well be that cars in general break more traffic laws than cyclists, but in the specific case of red lights, cyclists win hands down. Literally every day on my drive to work in South London I see at least 10 cyclists go through red lights deliberately - mostly at major junctions. On more than one occasion I've seen that many go through a single set all together whilst I'm sitting there waiting. There really does seem to be weird sense of entitlement amongst them that red lights just don't apply to them*
I've never seen a car do the same (I'm sure it happens - I've just not seen it).
*I'm sure all commentard-cyclists here are fully law-abiding and would not even dream of it.
Autopilot sounds correct though.
On a plane, Autopilot is used to keep the plane following a particular heading. It's not a system to taxi the plane out onto the runway, take off, climb to correct altitude, follow the headings, descend, and then land and park up at a gate. It just does the job of keeping it going the correct way mid-flight.
Tesla's is the same, really.
In case you needed yet another reason to lock down your machine, do it lest your roommates be allegedly secretly committing crimes.
If you really are paedophillically-inclined* then not locking down your machine in any way seems a great way of ensuring plausible deniability.
*Substitute for other criminal acts as required.
That's a bad place to be in. Get out if you can. Ideally to a small firm who might appreciate your experience working for a big company.
I was at a job that I had no enthusiasm for until recently. Had no motivation at all. It was just corporate crap all day long. Bonuses and pay reviews were a thing of the past and HR ruled the roost. Then an opportunity to join my old boss at a new, small company came along. I jumped at it, and am so much happier for it.
Once did something similar. Was living on Haling Island at the time, went to Portsmouth for a rather boozy night out, and for some reason decided the best way to get home was to steal a rowing boat and row back across.
He got well and truly nicked when it sunk and he had to be rescued. I don't think he made it more than about 50 feet from shore.
Which does not alter the fact that the Prime Minister stated that the government would be bound by the decision, and Parliament raised no objection to this.
Ignoring the fact that it doesn't actually matter what he said as his word is not legally binding, the PM resigned the next day and we had a general election not long after. Why should the new government be bound by what the old one promised?
I recently left a nice job I'd held for several years due to the introduction of Disciplined Agile into the dev team by a new director of engineering.
My god it was awful. Hours and hours spent every week in utterly, utterly pointless meetings. Each task had about 10 individual Jiras allocated to it. Everything had to have "estimates" (in quotes because if you overran due to it being more complex then there was hell to pay). The only thing that mattered was the burndown chart. Not whether it was valulable to the business. Not whether it was done to acceptable quality. Not whether it would scale or was done in appropriate technology. Not even if it actually worked.
As long as the burndown chart looked good, all was well in the world. Just fix it in a future iteration.
And don't get me started on the non-jobs people. A good business analyst I can accept. But we had more project managers, delivery managers and programme managers than developers in the end. And I have no idea what they actually did, and what value they added. They existed purely to put stuff into Jira and badger people as to why something wasn't done yet. Before we had these people we just did it, were productive and delivered loads and loads of stuff. Nobody complained. We just talked to end-users and figured out what needed to be done. Now nothing gets done really because it can't get through "the process" to even get started.
I wasn't the only one to go. About 50% of the dev department have now left within about 6 months - taking years of tacit knowledge with them.
Now I'm in a small team in a small startup (with some of the same people who also left...) and all is good again.
In my yoof I used to hang around a lot at the legendary Cartoon club in Croydon. Always full of rockers, metallers, big scary looking guys covered in tattoos and everyone getting hammered.
2 doors down was a "normal" club playing dance music. There were always fights outside and the police were pretty much guaranteed to be there every weekend.
But in the Cartoon there was never - ever - any trouble. Partly due to the self-policing attitude. If anyone did anything out of line, Animal the bouncer (I suspect not his real name...) would sling em' out as he was bigger (and nicer) than anyone else.
Happy days back then.
40+ years here, legs (and other parts) still intact.
My dad was the same. 40 years, no major problems (barring a black cab ignoring a give way and knocking him off resulting in a fractured shoulder).
It was at about 43 years when a car came out of a side turning, straight into the side of him, crushing his ankle against the engine of the bike and breaking his leg in 2 places. After a month in hospital and a year or so with an agonising metal frame screwed around, and into, his leg and several operations to rebuild his ankle which had pretty much disintegrated, then another 6 months or so with a big boot thing, he could almost walk normally. Several years later he still can't walk for that long, or bend it properly.
The surgeon said that had it happened 20 years earlier they just would have amputated it as it was only more modern techniques and equipment that allowed them to save it.
My uncle was a police bike rider for 25 years with a faultless record, and then retired to Cornwall and bought a Harley. One day he woke up underneath a lorry with an air ambulance parked in the field next to him. He was ok, fortunately.
Don't count your chickens...
You're not wrong, but I was young, naieve, and flat-broke with a young family and a wife out on maternity leave.
Leaving a job, voluntarily or not, would have been a very bad move then. Several hours of 1.5x overtime was actually very welcome in the end, as was the meal out given I couldn't afford one!
One was flying London to Edinburgh, then driving to Dundee, only to find out that instead of Windows 2000 it has Windows ME, as it was "basically the same thing" according to their IT expert. Despite me calling twice beforehand to check it had 2000 on it and pointing out, repeatedly, that it absolutely needed it. To make it even better I was sick as a dog and spent the entire flight throwing up in the bathroom. So after discovering that, I went home again.
The other one was when the incredibly dimwitted bimbo who was the MD's PA (hired for one specific reason. Well, technically a pair of specific reasons). Gave her the flight details of the one I wanted from Gatwick (25 mins from my house) to Glasgow, departing at 10am and the return flight departing at 7pm. So instead she booked one from 6am - from Stanstead, which is about 2 hours from my house - and returning at 10pm, because it was £20 cheaper. To say I got a little cross was an understatement. I had a new boss start that day - and I was out of the office - so my first dealings with him were me flatly refusing to go, and him then threatening to suspend me. In the end I went as I didn't want to get fired, but when he found out the full details and spoke to his boss - who basically said - we can't lose him, keep him sweet - I got overtime for the extra hours and the company paid for a meal out for me and my family as a thank-you. Turned out to be a good boss in the end.
An old colleague of mine once got asked to clear out an old storeroom. He found a couple of large boxes of expensive batteries that looked valuable and asked what to do with them. He got told to chuck them. He asked if he could have them, they said sure, and he made about 2 grand flogging them on ebay.