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In the UK to own a gun you need to have a good reason to do so. This is usually by being a member of a gun club, and getting a license to own a gun. Once you have a club membership and a license you then need to start speaking to the police to purchase a gun alongside having a gun box that is secure and certified by the police. Its an awful lot of hassle so the only people with guns are those who are interested in it.

Police dont tend to have guns apart from specially trained units(?) so you only see these quite rarely. Northern Ireland is a bit of an exception all police in NI have a gun, and are trained to quite a high standard to just be able to use it. NI's police actually go over to England reguarly enough to help when police with guns are required.

Not really all that exciting a story. Small enough company with an even smaller IT team, with management who aren't at all aware of what IT actually do and an ethos of "just stick it on the IT list" to solve any problem.

Its not an IT business so naturally the focus isn't on how IT does their job the attention is on how quick can we get it done. Unfortunately that leads to a lot of half baked solutions being put out knowing full well that this is a time bomb and it will blow up at some point. I usually wake up with this immense feeling of dread before turning over to my phone to see what has broken over night and to gauge what my day is going to be like.

The worst thing is, everyone in IT are aware of these issues and bring them up constantly but there is no desire to improve things higher up in the company so it'll continue on as it is because it works well enough.

The IT exodus isn't for fear of AI or anything of the sorts, its never something I've been interested. I got my start as a teenager programming mods for Minecraft and making games on Roblox. I enjoy some of what I do at work but when your spending more time politicking then actually developing software it begins to bore you

As for the new non-IT job, my formal education is in Technical Theatre and Live Entertainment, its something I have been doing for about as long as I have been programming. I was at PLASA (Big events industry tech conference) in London last year and seen a cruise line hiring technicians which put the thought into my head. It was a few months before I actually applied but I got it and managed to get all my Visas and my ENG1 cert. Its a bit of a pay bump, but ultimately I am starting from square 1 so I dont mind it all that much.

Theres probably enough in this for one of my colleagues to put 2 and 2 together to figure out who I am, but nothing I've said here is something I've not said aloud and been quite vocal about

Finishing up at my current employer as a Software Dev. Been here for nearly 4 years, which is about 4 years too long and I am at my absolute limit.

On the good news is I am also leaving the IT industry which is nice

Wait until you hear about CAPWAP!

I used an AMD Radeon 7770 for years, then I upgraded to a GTX 1060, the 7770 became my younger sister's GPU for her PC. It has only recently gave out, after some 14 years of service.

Likewise for the 1060, its still going strong. I upgraded to a 3060 round about the time my younger brother decided he wanted a PC so he is now using it without any issues. About 10 years use out of it, plenty more to go.

GPUs are pretty damn resilient if you aren't pissing around with them.

They haven't violated GDPR.

You are not a European citizen, you do not reside in the EU, GDPR only applies to those physically within a country within the EU. Same is true for EU citizens if they reside outside of the EU, a European living in America using an American service does not get the rights the GDPR provides

This is amazing news! I've just gotten my seafarers medical and my C-1/D visa for a job in shipping. Perfect timing!

I kinda went through this when I joined my current employer. My boss's emails were (are) at worst unintelligible and best hard to follow, weirdly formatted and generally hard to grok. Usually they are just blocks of text that are one big garden path sentance. But it all magically goes away in client communications

Not sure why this is, but it never really bothered me. It took me a while to learn my boss's interpretation of the English language. I don't think its a case of being in a position where it doesn't matter, other department heads don't do this, I reckon its just down to necessity.

You aren't trying to portray an image of yourself to your team, you don't need to come across as a poet laureate for internal discussions.

If you are trying to craft an image of yourself to your team instead of doing your job well and letting your work build your image you are doing something wrong

Spend your time wisely, put effort into your emails where it matters, format everything nicely, double/triple check your grammar, but among colleagues you don't need to pretend

I dont think people fully realise how novel Stripe actually is.

The idea of capturing payments via an API itself isn't unique, but the fact that as a company Stripe is actually on average pretty competent. I've never had an issue with stripe on the integration side because that just works.

I work with a massive variety of payment gateways, I'd imagine more than most people on this site ever will, 90% of them suck. The big ones all suck, Stripe's "competitors" suck. They all have effectively the same API but the issues are organisational.

Stripe is a technology company, its technology is good, its approach to the end user (Technical people implementing it) is good. The rest are finance companies and you get all the slow to move, impossible to get through to bureaucracy that comes with it. Of course they didn't respond to the actually issue and said "You've already solved it" and then ignored the actual problem. These payment providers sell their services to business not developers or anyone with technical chops.

They wont care about these issues because your boss has already been sold on the product, the issues are very very unlikely to change their mind and it is now your problem to solve.

I mean the RIRA is a splinter group of the PIRA which had massive funding from overseas, especially from the United States. PIRA was not a small-time group.

Hearing some of these stories of Belfast its hard to believe. Flew out of both Belfast International and Belfast City airports last year and they are by far the best airports I have ever had the luxury of travelling through.

Out of Belfast I flew into both Heathrow and Stanstead both are fucking miserable ordeals.

I put my Linkedin and my Twitter, don't bother with politicking on my Twitter and my LinkedIn is a hollow sad looking profile. Didn't realise it was optional and just put it in.

Can't wait to get turned away at the border when flying there in a few months for a new job for liking something years ago.

Does the ESTA not already require social media? I recall having to provide stuff like that when I applied for mine a few months back

We have some basic endpoint security (Huntress) and DNS filtering (Was Cisco OpenDNS, something else now but not a clue what it is as I never installed the client).

We used to have local admin accounts as our normal logins, but we changed that for Cyber Essentials Plus, so now we have our normal logins and then our elevated name_admin accounts to do anything thats needed.

Not really bothered by any of that, but what I do care about is we recently put a new GPO that locks the background to the company approved branded one, that upset me a touch I liked my background. Now I have this garish purple and orange background :(

Cannot wait for another version of Lua to sit unused basically everywhere.

Truly is a shame, everything seems to have settled on 5.1 for the most part without ever being updated, or any intention of it being updated. Some really nice features post 5.1

I understand each version of Lua introduces breaking changes in the language, which isn't great as the language becomes fragmented (Or not really, once again 5.1 is pretty ubiquitous)

Ooh very nice. Going to keep an eye on this, because while qlabs is nice, it certainly is up there in price for some features I require. Just had to spend nearly 100$ on renting it for this week!

Any plans on supporting video playback and rudimentary keystoning? The audio features in qlabs are alright, the video is its killer feature that similar software often touted as alternatives lack.

I have recently taken a job with an American based company and will need to complete a few weeks training in Miami. Based on the information they have given me I need a B1 visa and maybe an ESTA since I'm in the UK, and a C-1/D for moving through the US.

However they keep flip flopping between me needing a B1 and me just using my ESTA for the training, and their communication hasn't been the most straight forward. Which visa do I need to get to enter the US for the training?

My understanding of the B-1 visa is all you really need is a letter of employment. Might get tricky with you providing the letter of employment to yourself however.

All these people talking about voluntarily giving their kid Linux.

When I was 12 or so my Dad installed Linux on my laptop as punishment because I kept installing viruses on Windows.

I suppose it definitely helped with my knowledge of Linux as I had to do a lot of tinkering to get anything I wanted to work, even then 90% of the games I wanted to play didn't work (Waaay before Proton was a thing, Wine alone wouldn't work for most games)

Also had the added benefit of me just generally not wanting to use the computer, Linux sucks for desktop use. Constant source of issues that I just dont care for, I use a computer to play games or do work - I don't care about the operating system side of stuff. You dont daily drive a project car.

"I'm sorry you feel that way" was literally the first thing I ever got taught when doing front of house/customer service training. Its definitely a super common phrase, at least in English speaking countries

You see this all the time with professional lighting fixtures as well!

For example, the ETC Source4 LED Lustr X8 has: Deep Red, Red, Amber, Lime, Green, Cyan, Blue, Indigo[0]

RGB LEDs are pretty crappy at rendering colours as they miss quite a lot of the colour spectrum, so the solution is just add more to fill in the gaps!

[0] https://www.etcconnect.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10...

They are not required by law to show any banner. The banner is the website actively being belligerent.

It does and doesn't. You can have any arbitrary index, but that changes the table from being an array to being both an array and a dictionary, some real weird Frankenstein stuff

Best part about gov id, there is no link between accounts. I have my personal gov ID account, I have my director of a business gov ID account and I also have a gov ID account for the business.

Why are these all separate, why am I 2 people according to gov ID. Why can't I access my director of a business gov ID from my personal gov ID???

The kicker is these are all linked, it knows they all belong to the one person, but if you log into the wrong one it tells you to use the other one.

Not sure where youve learnt that Lua gives you access to the AST considering Lua doesn't build an AST

"Credit card transactions take weeks before you get the money" Where is this the case?

The only time I have experienced this being true is refunds, they usually take a bit longer to clear.

When I pay for something online or in person the payment is cleared within seconds, and I get a notification from my back that it has went through.

We had something like this in our school called Accelerated Reader. Read books answer a quiz on it get points, best class/student got rewarded.

Was really easy to game though. Our school library had a selection of books for what I can only assume were for special needs kids, really really simple books very few words with even fewer pages. These books rewarded an appropriate amount of points however so you got less, but you could easily bang out 20 of those books in one class and get a lot more points than you'd be rewarded for reading a real book.

A few of us would just go over grab a bunch of those books and read through them in like 2 minutes and complete the quiz.

They ended up not letting those books get used for AR

Thought this was Pangolin the laser control software, got excited there :(

You wouldn't really use something like this to control the video and lighting. The power of a tool like this is the ability to generate content or modify it on the fly.

Judging by the Robe press release there's a good chance the lighting was controlled by an Avolites console which is owned by Robe, Avolites' desks also have the ability to control video.

Lightkey is more hobbyist level control software, its a very visual application. If you want to see the more professional stuff look up MA Lighting's GrandMA2/3 consoles, Avolites Titan software or ETC's (Electronic Theatre Controls) Eos. The software is more akin to a glorified spreadsheet/command line interface then a nice and approachable interface like Lightkey