Posts by d3vy 1633 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Mar 2014
@bigs
Which said anything about laptops?
From the article I got the impression it's a desktop.
Look up Seagate medalist, I think the model was 4310 it was 4.3GB and was in the first PC I bought (second hand) with my own money in '97/98 so I'm absolutely certain that desktop PCs had moved past sub 1gb drives by the mid 90s.
I was cleaning up files on an old web server many years ago and came across an aspiring file.
Rather than opening it and reading the contents I thought "I'll just run it, it's in wwwroot what could go wrong" cracked open a browser and typed the URL.
After a surprisingly long time I got the message "complete" nothing else, just that text on a plain white page.
Turns out I'd stumbled on the script that someone knocked up during development and forgot to delete which initialised the holiday system... Of course being asp this used DSNs to connect to the database and being on a live box that meant live data.
21k employees holidays records for 10+ years wiped out.
Luckily the dbas we're quite accommodating and we sorted within the hour... But that taught me a very important lesson!
Interestingly I know what BT think my DOB is because they told me after a particularly long call trying to work out why I couldn't get through the security checks!
I also have a Santander account that I intermittently cannot access because I get asked one of three security questions... On of which is town of birth.. I've never told them where this is and I don't know where they think it is... Whenever they ask that question I have to clear cookies and refresh and hope that it's a different question comes up next time.
@martin
Our splitters from open reach always had an rj11 on the "internet" side.. never seen on with rj45.
Still quite possible to stick an rj11 into a rj45 port on the back of a PC... My first job was tech support round the time that people were switching from 56k modems to dsl.. had this at least once a week.
I heard an interview with airport staff at around 7am this morning where they said they'd seen it over the runways at various points the most revmcent being "around five minutes ago"
So they we're still at it as recently as 7am.
Time for the airport to nip into the duty free PC world buy a dji and send it on a suicide mission to collide with the offender?
At my first IT job I worked repairing PCs in a small computer shop in the north west, we had a guy come.in demanding a new graphics card because solitaire wasn't doing "that think when you choose a card"
After he had screamed and shouted at a colleague for half an hour... With his PC plugged in on a bench to demonstrate the problem AND had his graphics card swapped I overheard what the symptom was and asked if he had ticked the "show animations" check box... Sure enough that was it.
Hours of wasted time because he unticked a box.
@jake..
I'm interested, what exactly do you think a population armed with rifles, handguns and (possibly semi auto rifles) will do against a government which spends more on its military than any other country on the planed (by a large margin)?
Point your Glock at the sky and try to take out the predator drone streaking its way towards you?
Oh... The arguments I've had with people on Yammer.
Them "Does anyone know how to resolve issue x on my work laptop"
Stranger #1 : "just download this thing from www.totallynotmalware.com and install it, fixed my issue"
Stranger #2 : "I had the same thing and fixed it by deleting files x,y,z"
Me : "FFS, we have a massive service desk with tonnes of people who do this for a living, why are you trusting Frank the janitors cousin to tell you how to fix your corporate laptop?!?"
I used to work in a small computer shop where the two workshop managers had been competing to see who had the best home PC by running seti at home.. it then escalated to installing the seti service on every machine they built or fixed... There's probably still a school in Blackpool with a room full of seti churning PCs....
"Clever, but not immune from tape to tape"
Ah but the sea loader did have protection for that built in... Based on the crappy hardware available in consumer grade tape to tape machines... It was something to do with playing a really high pitched tone which the crappy tape decks would try to level out on the transfer resulting in the following low tones being essentially missed...
The guy that wrote the loader has a big blog about it, ages since I read it but it's very interesting.
Seriously? Blocked outlets and filters requires a call out?
I guess that answers the question "who buys extended warranties?" The people who can't figure out the most basic of domestic jobs.
As for your flooded kitchen story.. would an extended warranty cover the replacement of all of the damaged floor and units or would that be a home insurance claim anyway?
A bit of simple maths to work out the mean time between failure and the average cost of failure is enough to rule out extended warranties for me.
Yeah... But another way to look at it is a £550 dishwasher is very likley to last more than five years without much more than a good clean of the filter every now and then (ours is approaching it's 8th year with no issues)
In fact I can't remember the last time we had any white goods fail (other than the abused washing machine as my partner insists on washing colours seperatly... As in light blue load, dark blue load, white load etc..)
So what you've done is decided that mitigating the very small risk of failure is worth £30 a year.. over five years. Do you have similar policies for all of your white goods... Because that could get quite expensive.
O2 go to the length of having separate direct debits for the handset and the tarrif.. so when your handset loan finishes they just stop collecting it.
They also show you the outstanding balance in the myO2 app and allow you to pay off early if you want too.
It's rare I say this but I really can't fault O2, I've been with a few providers and they're by far the best.
Smudge?
Where in the highlands?
Because I lived in the Hebrides until the late 90s and its common knowledge (in fact it's the reason that I have a BOS account) and other family members who lived on the south island have RBS accounts.. not through choice, those were the only options for local banking.
"It's also HUGE.
For people like me with a small wrist, 34mm is the largest watch I can wear without it looking clunky and oversized. Most men's watches are 38mm at the most.
42mm across is far too big. 46mm is just silly"
I agree, I have a Christopher Ward dress watch and its 38mm and thats just about OK... Just about.
"Contractors do indeed get the same basic allowance, however they do not get hit with corporation tax. Their company has to pay corporation tax on the profits. A contractor is not their company. their company provides sick pay, holiday pay etc. You are why IR35 exists."
While you are absolutely correct the contractors money and the companies money are not one and the same most people like to blur the line for the sake of contractor bashing...
But youre right it's all separate.
In fact, you have no idea if a contractor is taking 100% of the profits as a wage and paying full tax and NI, taking minimum wage and dividends or just leaving everything in the company to claim entrepreneurs relief when shutting the company down (if that still exists).
The majority will be taking minimum wage and a dividend AND leaving some in the company to cover sick days, holidays and time between contracts.
Seeing as you insist on posting as anon it's very hard to work out which of the other comments are yours, or who youre addressing..
"Where I work, one contractor has been employed by the Govt. for over 10 years at a stoopid rate (£800+ per day) and all he does is take a month off now and again and change company name. Same guy doing same work for same money but avoiding IR35. Wouldn't mind so much but he isn't even that good :-)"
Filed under "Things that didnt happen"
They clampped down on that behaviour YEARS ago, so either hes been very lucky or youre talking out of your bum.
"AFAIK, the company contribution reduces the Corporation Tax payments."
Yes company contributions reduce CT - the same as your employers contributions to your pension reduce their CT.
"And your contribution is before tax."
Yes, but so is yours. I dont really see your point. If youre going to have issues with contractors avoiding tax dont pick pensions as your jumping off point because your pension is taken from your gross income too.. you filthy tax dodging permie.
You're right we don't pay NI (at least not as much), when I was perm I think my NI was about 3k (+ change) a year.
Now it's closer to 300, however I'm paying around 20k more in tax overall than I ever did as a permie...
And my net pay isn't that much more (some months when I'm feeling frugal it's less).
What people continue to realise is that for insurance and liability we have to work through limited companies, which means OUR DAY RATE IS NOT OUR MONEY, of my day rate I pay out 19% immediately on corporation tax (what's the basic rate for a permie?) Then when I take the money out of the company and it becomes mine I pay personal income tax on it again.
Admittedly, this still works out less % wise than I'd pay as a permie, but £ wise HMRC are getting much more from me.
If I lost the ability to control who I work for, when I work or where I work I'd go back to permie, my income wouldn't change much but HMRCs take of my money would go down.
"And all of that software could be run in WIndows running in a VM under Linux. It's not hard to do anymore, even for people with limited tech skills.
Seriously, the need for legacy software stopped being a good reason to stick purely with Windows quite a long time ago."
I always find these comments amusing... so your suggestion to alleviate some issues to windows is to run Linux AND Windows... What problem does that solve exactly?
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