Posts by AbortRetryFail 320 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Feb 2011
As I often point out to Y2K naysayers, it's like moving into an old house with really dodgy wiring, paying an electrician to rewire your house, and then later on saying it was a waste of money because your house has never burned down due to an electrical fire.
I seem to recall Mythbusters (or similar) seeing if you could get drunk by inhaling alcohol vapour, and I seem to recall a small sauna and pouring bottles of vodka directly onto the coals/rocks to vaporise it and, whilst their blood alcohol level did rise, it was not by a massive amount.
So I'm with you on this; sounds highly implausible.
Just like with cars, the trouble is that the more you take everyday control away from the human, the less capable the human becomes in taking over when the automated systems can't cope.
Granted, with pilots then they can put in the hours on the simulator to keep sharp on handling an emergency, but even so. Plus, you just know that some airlines are bound to scrimp on simulator time.
Maybe it was a renewals thing, or timing, or the direction the wind was blowing, but TSO were pestering me as far back as May to migrate away from Gridhost ("Cloud Web Hosting") and onto one of their cPanel offerings (I eventually settled on cPanel Deluxe)
My renewal for Gridhost was in August so maybe that's why they were pestering me so much. Who knows? But they were pressuring me to migrate way before the August renewal date (if it had been up to me I would have happily waited until August and then migrated)
So I'm kind of confused that some people appear to have heard nothing about this as TSO positively spammed me with emails about Gridhost being retired.
edit: Looks like I am very much in the minority though!
I have one of the aforementioned Zalmann enclosures and the biggest issue is that the selected ISO is not retained on power loss, so if the PC you plug it into and try to boot from interrupts power to the USB port then tough luck - you'll be booting the first ISO on the list rather than the one you selected.
I've tried other multi-boot USB solutions in the past but without much success and ended up with a small keyring of USB sticks with one ISO per stick. Usually written with Rufus these days.
Ventoy actually seems to just work. And it is as easy to use as the Zalmann drive inasumuch as you just copy the ISOs across and that's it. And, unlike the Zalmann, it presents you with a menu on bootup and pauses boot until you make a selection.
Really impressive.
[Update: Only downside is that on one of my older PCs it doesn't detect the USB3 card so I have to plug an extra keyboard into one of the on-board USB2 ports. But that's a minor thing]
> "So after a while the sparky went in removed tube, disappeared for a few minutes went back and replaced the tube with the one he had just removed. "
I had a flat mate who often played his music too loud and when you asked him to turn it down he would always, and I mean always, turn it up louder first as a "joke" (yeah, right) and then back down again to roughly where it was before to try to fool you into thinking he had turned it down. We got wise to that pretty quickly.
It's always the way. When young and hungry, the service is amazing. Then as each time they get bought out, the service gets worse until it is a shadow of its former self (I am talking about Pipex primarily but also tsoHost)
Currently I still have several websites with tso and also my primary email, but for the latter I'm strongly considering a migration to either Office365 or Google, simply for the fact that I can never totally rely on tso's mailservers.
To their credit, though, their ticket support is excellent and they do try very hard.
But as Paul Herber says, websites can be up and down like a tart's knickers sometimes.
"It just stopped working. There's obviously a bug in your code."
"Did you change anything?"
"No, absolutely nothing. It just stopped working. Your code is at fault"
(clickerty)
"Ok, well I am looking at the logs and I can see that you have swapped out the <piece of discrete hardware> for another, that has a different serial number, different firmware version, different configuration, and I'm seeing error messages saying that you haven't connected it up properly."
"Oh, yes, we did do that"
I have several websites hosted with them, mostly WordPress sites, and they all run sluggishly and sometimes I get Jetpack reports that the site is down. I also use TSO as my primary mailserver on the domains.
They've been going downhill for years. If they don't sort this out I may have to shift my lazy arse and switch hosts.
In fairness to them, though, they are fairly responsive on Support Tickets and do genuinely try to help.
@Alien8n - I briefly worked as a programmer as an employee of NatWest early in my career. They would only pay my salary into a NatWest bank account, which they insisted I open, and would not grant an overdraft as employees were expected to be exemplary at handling their money and thus should not need an overdraft.
So every month my salary went into my NatWest account, and the next day the totality of it was transferred by Standing Order to my existing current account with another bank. Apart from the month they messed up and I got hit with bank fees for a failed Standing Order, which they had to reimburse.
They also royally shafted me on holiday pay buy-back and other benefits when I moved on to another job a year or so later.
Moving from SVN to a DSS, I chose Mercurial over Git for a few reasons:
1) The command line of Mercurial is very similar to SVN.
2) The workflow is also very similar.
3) History is inviolate. What is committed is there, warts and all, in Mercurial just like SVN (and CVS before it).
The thing that I have never liked about git, apart from the complexity, is that history is a bit wibbly-wobbly and malleable. Now, perhaps I am a bit old school (I have been in professional software development for 25+ years) and am a little set in my ways (or, rather, like a lot of developers, am lazy and prefer the comfort of familiarity), but Mercurial just seems to fit the way I like to work rather better than git does. Sure, I can learn to do things the git way, but I'd rather continue as I am.
It's a shame, because I'm happy on Bitbucket. But now I either have to port all my mercurial repos to git, or move them elsewhere. And as others have pointed out, if you're having to port to git then there is no reason not to port *and* move elsewhere. I think Bitbucket have shot themselves in the foot here and are losing their USP. If they are going to be just another git host then why use them over another git host?
I was with PIPEX and it was a great service.
Much like Demon, though, each time it was bought out and changed hands, it got a little bit worse until it was pretty much unusable. That was round about the time Tiscali or TalkTalk got their hands on it, I think.
But back in the day, PIPEX was awesome.
I had one agent who was a lovely girl but was a bit, um, shall we say "proactive" in looking for new leads.
I'd had a bit of a lull in work earlier in the year, so had filled the gap in my CV with my own company details, saying that the period of time had been spent on internal projects.
Imagine my surprise when I was contacted through the Contact Us page of my company website, with the sender being this agent, saying that I had worked for my company in the past and was interested in doing so again, and did I have any work? I was especially surprised as I had not authorised this agent to contact my previous clients.
Years ago I got approached by an agency wanting me to be the instructor on a Desktop Training course. The agent got quite shirty when I said I didn't do that. "Yes you do! It says so on your CV!" he said hotly, to which I pointed out I'd helped write a Ground Crew Training Simulator for BAe Military, part of which was a Desktop Trainer / Computer-based Training (CBT) package. Yep, you've guessed it, he'd searched for "desktop trainer".
The funniest part was that the recruiter was obviously really desperate, as his final question was "I don't suppose you'd like to have a go, would you?" :)
One place I worked at had every PC named after a muppet character. Some were pretty obscure.
Another place had their servers named after tennis stars of the 80's - Bjorg, McEnroe, etc. They were great servers (groan).
Then they were bought out by a big corporation, who insisted all servers were renamed to a boring convention of letters and numbers, and also insisted the "Caution: Respiratory Protection Required" warning sticker be removed from the door of the gents' toilets.
I had a business meeting with a client many years ago who was in the Direct Marketing game, and had developed a super-fast database that was several orders of magnitude faster than anything else around at the time (according to them). The guy I was taking to told me a couple of fun little anecdotes.
The first was that they had had to anonymise all their test data and discipline a developer, as he had been running database searches as a personal dating service and making unsolicited contact with potential dates. No, really.
But my favourite one was the story of how when the system went live for the first time, a test job still in the system immediately selected the top 10% richest people in the database and sent them a direct marketing letter which started "Dear Rich Bastard..."
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