Posts by macjules 3426 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2014
Compared with what the Americans want to do to Mr Assange, a slap on the wrist and a lifetime driving ban for someone driving on the wrong side of the road and subsequently killing another road user does not equate.
Now, if we were talking about Mark Zuckerberg delivered cuffed, gagged and bagged at Heathrow complete with confession regarding Cambridge Analytica and other nefarious activities then I might reconsider.
At the moment I am contracting to a client that requires me to use a Citrix receiver to logon to their VPN, then to log in to a remote virtual desktop and THEN login in from there to a virtual development environment similar to Amazon Workspaces. Metering this I discovered that my broadband can just about handle this during the daytime so long as the children are at school. I am seriously considering setting up a separate billable zone with choked bandwidth and speed in order to be able to charge the client and to be able to produce a monthly expense report for usage.
Anyone know of software that can do this, including the reports? I am thinking along the lines of a new router reflashed with DD-WRT, since it can produce the zones and a full activity report.
Aka, “The Magic IT Support”, similar to “The Magic Taxi” where you get you home after 8 pints wearing a T-shirt in midwinter and none the worse for it. MITS makes every IT problem disappear after 2 pints and substitutes the assurance of a job well done.
Of course getting the call next morning of, “WTH was that message you left on my answering service about? Were you drunk?” is a penalty that has to be paid.
Right up there with the LinkedIn “transversality thinking and multi-agility preprocessing abilities”.
All of which works great until you ask the applicant, “kindly explain how you would apply your multi-agility preprocessing abilities to a scenario such as this”.
By the time these Tuesday sightseers have finished HMS Victory will be the most modern ship in the fleet. How on earth could a company with a proven track record of sheer, bumbling incompetence, ESPECIALLY in the army recruitment contract, be given this?
I suppose that with COVID-19 and huge contracts being awarded left, right and centre to £100 off the shelf companies we should not be surprised. Hence the icon.
By the way, the army has actually extended the RPP contract to Capita until 2022.
I did get the call from "people's energy customer services" to inform me that "no personal data was released apart from possibly your email address and some other details". So far this morning I have had an 0203 number call claiming to be HMRC. Held on to see what they knew about me and they do have my home address, DoB, number of dependents and my bank name (but not account or sort code). I do not usually give out my DoB so about the only company that has had that recently was PE.
Our own Oxford/AZ vaccine is being repeatedly attacked by various Putin organs. Frustrated by their latest failures they have now embarked on a series of 1980's type mistruths. My favourite is that the Oxford/AZ vaccine can turn you into a monkey.
Mine is a Miele Scout. It is still like watching dogs playing a curling match: 1 pug sits on the robot while the other chases it and 2 retrievers run along backwards barking at it and causing it to change course every so often. We keep it simply because the dogs find it entertaining: it is bloody useless otherwise.
2 pugs, 2 golden retrievers, a very recently rescued Pomeranian (someone had left him on the verge of the A27) and I am not sure if we still have cats* since I put down food for them but they seem to prefer my neighbour's house. Tried one of those robot vacuums but it gave up after ingesting enough dog fur to create a new pug. It also didn't help that one dog would sit on the vacuum and wait for it to drive off. IT-wise I applied the vacuum cleaner to the innards of my only desktop PC and managed to practically double to speed of the computer.
As a measure of how bad it can be I recently sold my wife's Audi TT which has a very small interior space. It cost £90 to have the interior cleaned by a company that prepares cars for resell, in addition to the normal £100 deep "anti-allergy" clean.
* Humans never own cats: they just deign to occasionally eat in your home or defecate on it - a bit like 18th century royalty. Once a paw-operated can opener has been invented then you will never see them again.
"The group said "trading restrictions" and the removal of "call usage caps" during COVID-19 dented income."
What trading restrictions and who on earth makes money from calls now in an age of WhatsApp or Skype? Right at a time that most of the UK has been living under severe local restrictions fast, reliable broadband is now no longer a nice-to-have but a fundamental necessity and I am sure that TalkTalk have a nice big share of that pie. Especially consider that having multiple owners of broadband infrastructure competing to deliver to the network does not translate into more competition and most certainly has not translated into better outcomes for consumers as companies like TalkTalk have actually increased their charges during the pandemic.
TalkTalk, as usual, appear to have confused their mouth with their Dido Harding.
I presume that if you want to print out 2 shots per page per person as a visible body or close-up headshot you are going to need something a lot better than a camera capable of a maximum 640x480 resolution. At that time the Kodak Nikon or Canon DSLRs were great cameras, if only for the incredible Kodak Photoshop acquisition plugin that could render into black and white amazingly well on the fly.
In an age where the government is buying 40m 3M dust masks "because they look like n95 masks" for £200m and the masks are not even being delivered, £500m is peanuts in comparison.
Especially when as a MoD procurer you probably get a bonus for sorting the mess out at only a few hundred more millions than the original contract cost.
“Kindly move yourself and your family over a thousand miles to a new location to improve your quality of life. If you do not want to do that then you are no longer an employee and we do not care that your quality of life just took a change for the worst”. <beep>
Now steady on there, I passed my driving test in an Austin Allegro. I think it was because the test examiner was so petrified at the sound of bits occasionally falling off that he was silently screaming "stop, you win". I "owned" a Tesla from 2014 to 2017 (you never own a Tesla, you just get to ride in it sometimes between software and firmware updates) but my wife refused to drive it. She said it reminded her of those awful Renault 5 cars that had acres of rattling grey plastic interior.
Oh, and I have a neighbour in London with exactly the same problem as you. He runs a power cable from his house up to the car and uses one of those rubber blocks electricians use to make sure that nobody trips over the wire in the street. My dogs seem to play some form of chicken with the cable and make a point of lining up to pee on it.
Was amazed when I saw one of those installed in my "datacenter" (basement office with a lock on the door in a dingy part of Westminster). I thought that they were intended for industrial use and kept being told, "statistics, now shut up". This one was a beast with 16Mb RAM added on, plus a backup module in case that failed. Never had to go near it apart from to replace the UPS several times.
I saw him at Harrods around Christmas in 1981. He was chatting with Douglas Bader and Laddie Lucas at their book launch. Someone asked him if he had any advice for anyone who wanted to take up flying and he joked, "Make sure your instructor has legs first" to lots of laughter from the other 2.
Although not apparently state-sanctioned, the levels of racism, violence against minorities and actions by the police would possibly have resulted in South Africa-levels of sanctions imposed against the USA once upon a time.
I wonder how long it will be before someone (China?) manipulates everyone else into instigating "Boycott America", as a "social awareness" campaign.
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