mpalfrey

Yep. I've spent evenings on the phone with AWS support in the past. We spend a lot with them, but their support was excellent and I was able to get on the phone pretty quick (it was issues with an Elasticsearch cluster that crashed).

Overall they're different tools, for maybe different situations. I like AWS and it'd be my usual go to (I'm AWS certified) and also like Azure (I love Azure resource groups - they make life pretty nice). Not used GCP in anger. I've also spent years running software on premises (I kind of miss these days as I did a load of travel when things went wrong!).

The smaller players have insanely good pricing and I'd see why you'd want to use them. But for something like an e-commerce application I think I'd just feel happier hosting it on one of the big players. Not to mention it might be an easier sell from e.g. a compliance point of view (disclaimer, I've not read up into what e.g. Hetzner supports in terms of PCI etc compliance).

Was around then that I got started.

Static sites, created using Frontpage Express (later, full fat Frontpage, then later again Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Fireworks). Blink, Marquee etc tags being used etc. Got to have a visitor counter and guest book too.

I remember creating sites for various things, hosted on a whole load of different places over the years (.tk brought back memories). I also remember figuring out that I had to upload images and why my image links wouldn't work.

Fun times.

I've got this issue also. Through elimination I found out that the bad audio only occurred when I had my MX Master 3 / MX Keys connected via Bluetooth.

I worked around this through using the unified receiver, but it's pretty crap that this is necessary.

I've got an i9 MBP for my work machine.

No issues with my M1 MBA for my personal machine. Admittedly it doesn't get used for heavy weight development, but I've had no issues with e.g. IntelliJ. It feels as quick as my i9 if not quicker for most things.

I quite like Paypal.

I often use it as Paypal accepts Amex when a merchant may not. Works well and I've never had an issue.

Came here to make this exact comment. These are more than likely dodgy.

I use Google Workspace. Works well and zero complaints here. My website is also a Google sites site now - very basic placeholder but it worked well and was easy to configure with SSL etc.

I ran Office 365 for a year, this was pretty good but I got fed up of having separate email clients.

I used to use POP3 and IMAP for emails with Gmail picking them up. This caused a few issues with emails being marked incorrectly as spam so I ended up moving to a better solution. For the sake of a few $ / month it's a no brainer to use Google Workspace for me these days.

Wonder if computer fairs are still a thing. Got fond memories of buying bits at them.

Yeah - the Voodoo 1 was a 3D card so needed a 2D card also.

Sounded like this was 2x Voodoo 1s stacked together. I probably need more coffee this morning!

Did that do much? I know a Voodoo 2 could be SLI'd but first I've heard about this working on a Voodoo 1.

I miss those days. I went from a P133 with 72mb RAM (bought a load of RAM cheap in '98) to a P3 500 with a TNT2 Ultra and 128mb RAM in 1999. Technology progressed at an insane rate.

Edit, I had a K6-2 500MHz in one machine around that kind of time too. Wasn't as good as the P3 personally though but was cheap and reasonable. Started me off down the path of using AMD CPUs in my builds (Duron, Athlon, Sempron) until I started moving away to Mac laptops predominantly (which coincided with finishing university and writing software for a living)!.

My first Java IDE (being used commercially) was Visual Age.

We moved off that to IBM Websphere Development Studio. We were a big IBM shop at the time (Websphere + DB2).

Ships have a lot of steel in them!

It's insane counting the number of APs for wifi networks on ships due to this. I was on the Queen Elizabeth a few weeks ago. A lot of Aruba gear.

I saw a Solutions Architecture role I was tempted to apply for at Carnival, but they're a MS shop and I'm a Linux / Java guy predominantly. I'd guess for most development roles it's typical of your usual corporate style software. Nothing particularly fancy really (inventory systems, stock control, e-commerce etc).

I'd be tempted, but the salaries aren't great compared to what you can get elsewhere.

Princess are doing a pretty good job with e.g. the Princess Medallion and quicker internet access. Other lines (e.g. Cunard) are stuck in the Stone Age a little (although I once got 7Mbit whilst on the Queen Mary 2 and doing a speed test)!

Interesting to see that David Ross is still around at Hexus. I can't remember the name of the guy who set up Bit-Tech but it was another site set up around year ~2000. An end of an era indeed.

I briefly ran another hardware website with a couple of other guys around this time. It was fun, but we never got the levels of success of either of these (although we did get some decent sponsorship for review samples through some companies). Fun times.

Another ex Warwick person here!

Flexibility. Can be a lot quicker to hire a contractor (and get rid of them) than a permanent employee.

Also useful if you require niche skills for a project.

I would recommend doing your own research on this one. Contractor UK forums are worth reading - http://contractoruk.com

Contracting in the UK used to be pretty good. These days things have changed a lot with further IR35 crackdowns.

I've investigated this a few times personally over the years and am a permanent employee still. Admittedly a few rungs up the corporate ladder these days, but contracting isn't the gravy train it used to be.

+1. Although you know things are _bad_ when you end up reaching for Wireshark / tcpdump normally!

Good ol' UVB-76. The Buzzer has been around for an age.

I got _very_ into number stations a few years ago. Still have a vague interest in them these days but there's not so much traffic now. Scared the crap out of myself when I first found them though!

There's all sorts of interesting/creepy stuff out there on the airwaves.

+1 for Openresty Lua being great. It's saved my ass a few times.

Pretty fascinating. CAS and broadcast tech is a pretty big interest of mine and I've been lucky enough to work for 2 of the biggest players in this space in the past (although not directly on the CAS side of things and sadly I'm not in the video space these days).

Some very cool engineering was done without much in the way of technology being available!

+1 for Eclipse MAT. It works well for me.

Multicast via satellite is comparatively cheap really. Especially for lower bitrate channels. Add into the mix regional opt outs (e.g. local news, local tv programs) and it's not _that_ bad an option.

Lots of other channels on Sky already use AdSmart. It's a bit weird to have obviously targeted advertising on UK wide channels (e.g. local car dealerships).

As a disclaimer - I used to work for the company who created the software Sky are using for AdSmart.

As someone who lives < 30 minutes drive from LHR, it's something I do appreciate. It's kind of cool being able to get to most places in the world within a couple of hops.

I started off doing VB6, both at a personal level, then a few years later, commercially.

It wasn't bad. If you wanted a quick app with a few forms and a backend DB, then this was a decent choice.

I quite like it.

I'm _very_ surprised this worked at all. I'd have thought HBO et al would have wanted a good (Cisco NDS, Nagra, Conax etc) CAS layer to prevent this kind of stuff happening as part of any agreements to be carried on the network.

In the past I've worked on a few IPTV projects. Users would only see channels they were entitled to (unlike Sat / Cable) projects, and there was a heavy CAS layer.

Interesting though. A lot of boxes are essentially just running an embedded browser so there's scope for some poking around.

I had a Voodoo Banshee (combined 2d/3d card). It wasn't as good as a V2 but was OK for me back in the day.

I then moved to NVidia predominantly (TNT2 Ultra), although I did pick up a cheap V5 5500 which I ran for a bit.

Like other's have said, it was a fun time to be involved with PC gaming. Unfortunately life has got in the way since, although I do spend time on Vogons looking at old systems and wondering if I should build a couple of retro machines!

Satellite is still great. You can get a shit ton of bandwidth to a load of people, really pretty easily. Awesome for developing nations.

The downside is cost. Building them is expensive, as is launching them. Most people in developed nations have half decent (20Mbit+) internet access now, so do we need them?

When you can get 4k Netflix which looks great at 15Mbit or so, satellite is a little redundant these days (and I _love_ satellites and worked in the TV industry from 2008 until 2015!).

SAP Hybris (www.hybris.com) | Java Microservices developers AND Frontend developers | Maidenhead/London UK | Fulltime | Onsite

Looking for Java developers (several positions open) with Microservices experience as well as frontend devs.

Great team and good atmosphere (think a startup atmosphere but with the backing of a corporate company), great products, great benefits and salary.

https://jobs.sap.com/job/Maidenhead-Software-Engineer-Job-LN...

https://jobs.sap.com/job/Maidenhead-Frontend-Software-Develo...

As a time served (11 years commercial, 20+ years hobbyist) developer, I'm out.

I'd rather use my own choice of Linux distro running what I need rather than a baked together mix of stuff with a dodgy site that's been hacked together quickly without QA!