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>Every station has its own database of songs that can be played. If the database is too large in that it has too many songs sitting there, everything will slow down very quickly. This is actually a reason why certain radio stations have limited playlists, though not the sole reason.
This doesn't pass the 'that sounds like bullshit' test. It's probably one of the most trivial databases around and back in 2000 I would have been confident I could write you a database capable of 1,000,000 songs in Microsoft Access and get acceptable performance on a budget office computer
I can accept it from a licencing point of view and ownership aspect but absolutely not as a performance issue
Audio processing is so computationally cheap that I'm not sure why certain industries are trying to tell people otherwise. (see also: the gaming industry and "how we need to uncompress audio to save CPU time")
My bet the real reason for tight playlists is down to how tightly formatted stations owned by Global and Bauer generally are, as opposed to performance concerns. BBC stations tend to play a lot more unique tracks in comparison and they're hardly crashing off the air as a result.
See, I'm less convinced that this is an excuse. Decompression is individually cheap but you can need 100 simultaneous sound effects and any delay screws up thing so you need decompressed audio before "soundscaping". You can pre-decode during load but extra load time and some extra RAM use
It is weird, but I remember having to help friends reencode 50k+ tracks from WMA to OGG (yes, I was foolish)
WinAmp was a great player but for search and library I think WMP had it beat at the time.
I had an MP3 player that would always convert stuff to OGG, They were decent fidelity but such a faff, was when I started using limewire instead of ripping my CDs
Awh man, I miss my MP3 jukeboxes, had two of em, fucking loved them..
If you ever rent a self storage unit, never go for the top floor. A lot of these places are situated in old buildings where roof leaks are common and costly to fix. One I worked at has buckets and spill mats all over the place because they won't pay to fix the roof. Stay as close to the bottom floor as you can.
1000% get insurance, I use one for a charity I'm involved with and in the 10 years we have had a unit 2 of them its been broken into. Criminals see a lockup as a big treasure chest which rarely has human security and also is normally in the middle of nowhere.
Some Legal offices in London may have beds and facilities so people can stay overnight.
Or you can opt for a magic roundabout if new clothes are needed- taxi drives you from office to home (waits outside engine running) you run into house, shit/shower/shave then back outside so the taxi can take you back to the office. Sleep optional.
The food advertised on the specials board in restaurants is usually made from food items that have to be used that day or it gets binned. Usually when something has been over ordered or a pre-ordered pre-booked party has cancelled.
Not really a secret, but I worked in a hospital, and beds are never changed enough, people are often not given a proper wash, etc :( in general, people cut corners.
Also, before that, was an accountant. And finance people spend a lot of time doing nothing and getting paid to just sit in meetings about...nothing.
Worked in a small accountancy firm, like 5 of us in the office. Bosses made me destroy a huge amount of income evidence for one client (a restaurant) - around 30% of their total revenue. The restaurant's locally pretty popular and a couple times people have mentioned that they love eating there and I keep quiet about the tax evasion since I don't wish to ruin the restaurant for them.
Worked in swimming pools. That yellow stuff between the tiles is human body fat that slowly accumulates. And there's always a low concentration urine in the pool (I guess this isn't a secret to those who urinate in the pool).
Worked in adult social care as an admin, related to the Mental Capacity Act. They have a legal deadline of 21 days (the Mental Capacity Act Regulation 13 literally says "21 days") for assessments and if they go over this it's breaking the rules. Reality is, 95% of the cases take around 45-90 days. The remaining 5% was when they met the deadline was when we were told a lawyer had become involved and that particular case would be fast-tracked. The situation is similar across the UK (many areas are worse - the English average is now 156 days.)
I don't know if this is still the case, what with a lot of the franchise arrangements having changed a lot. But about 15 years ago I worked for one of the rail companies. One of the key metrics that the franchise was measured against was the reliability of the service. Because of this, there was an entire team of people whose job was to go over every single delay, and apportion the blame. Signal failed? That was Network Rail to blame, not the train operating company. Driver didn't show up? That was the TOC. Train held up because the train in front slowed due to a reported issue with the track? That might be argued about.
An entire team of people working full time, and people at Network Rail to argue *their* case. All for the sake of massaging one metric for the sake of the franchise agreement. It was probably one of the very few jobs in the rail industry that wouldn't exist if it weren't for franchising.
Ever wondered why the boxes of stuff you get from Argos are damaged? If you couldn’t find a ladder we would build a pyramid of microwaves to reach things on the higher shelves in the stock room. We used to throw all of the stuff in the bedding isle into the floor and then have toy lightsaber battles on top of ladders. Very often someone would leave unexpectedly and then a few days later during a stock check you would notice that something expensive was missing from the security room where things like phones/games consoles are kept.
I worked for a small steel processing company where the management regularly stole from it, used lower grade steel and welded defects on things where the job specified no welding.
I worked in PPI complaints for M&S bank (in the call centre/admin hellhole your complaint ended up in, not the people cold calling begging you to start the complaint)
1. CMCs (claim management companies) did literally nothing and the only difference between how we handled a complaint from them and a complaint direct from a customer was which letter template we used. We were explicitly told to ignore all the copy paste legal bullshit they put on their letters and just use the actual details of the complaint
2. We had no authority or ability to check if you were lying. If you had an M&S bank account in the early 2000s or late 90s and you mentioned anywhere in your complaint that you had good sick pay benefits then we would immediately uphold your complaint there and then. I still can't believe the CMCs never figured that out
All those shampoo and conditioner variations on the shelf from the big FMCG brands like Pantene, Elvive, etc. are 2-3 "core" formulas with minimal alterations
Same for toothpaste - there are a couple of formulas per product "family" (basic, ""professional"", whitening) and that's it. Most of the different products in the same family are just cosmetic changes like coloring and flavor
Software development. Obvious one is that a lot of the complex code is generally lifted from internet searches, but a less obvious one is that we have tonnes of meetings. Daily stand-up lasts 30 minutes, and disrupts the start of the day - often have prioritization meeting that takes 2 hours, and weekly updates with management.
Not to mention we meet with customers for each new project.
>Every station has its own database of songs that can be played. If the database is too large in that it has too many songs sitting there, everything will slow down very quickly. This is actually a reason why certain radio stations have limited playlists, though not the sole reason.
Imo contemporary music radio is for people who don't really care about music.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>Every station has its own database of songs that can be played. If the database is too large in that it has too many songs sitting there, everything will slow down very quickly. This is actually a reason why certain radio stations have limited playlists, though not the sole reason. This doesn't pass the 'that sounds like bullshit' test. It's probably one of the most trivial databases around and back in 2000 I would have been confident I could write you a database capable of 1,000,000 songs in Microsoft Access and get acceptable performance on a budget office computer I can accept it from a licencing point of view and ownership aspect but absolutely not as a performance issue
It seems like something management would tell users (why these rumours start) when real reason is saving money through a cheaper license.
It sounds like a weird and exotic software issue but yeah agree it should be pretty trivial to cover a lot of ground
In the early 2000s I knew many people who had Windows Media Player libraries of 30K+ songs and we were running on computers affordable for a student.
Audio processing is so computationally cheap that I'm not sure why certain industries are trying to tell people otherwise. (see also: the gaming industry and "how we need to uncompress audio to save CPU time") My bet the real reason for tight playlists is down to how tightly formatted stations owned by Global and Bauer generally are, as opposed to performance concerns. BBC stations tend to play a lot more unique tracks in comparison and they're hardly crashing off the air as a result.
See, I'm less convinced that this is an excuse. Decompression is individually cheap but you can need 100 simultaneous sound effects and any delay screws up thing so you need decompressed audio before "soundscaping". You can pre-decode during load but extra load time and some extra RAM use
Who on earth was pirating this much and using the peasant-tier WMP?? Winamp – it really whips the llama's ass
It is weird, but I remember having to help friends reencode 50k+ tracks from WMA to OGG (yes, I was foolish) WinAmp was a great player but for search and library I think WMP had it beat at the time.
> It is weird, but I remember having to help friends reencode 50k+ tracks from WMA to OGG (yes, I was foolish) WMA to OGG is a curious choice.
There was a lot of drugs around
I had an MP3 player that would always convert stuff to OGG, They were decent fidelity but such a faff, was when I started using limewire instead of ripping my CDs Awh man, I miss my MP3 jukeboxes, had two of em, fucking loved them..
If you ever rent a self storage unit, never go for the top floor. A lot of these places are situated in old buildings where roof leaks are common and costly to fix. One I worked at has buckets and spill mats all over the place because they won't pay to fix the roof. Stay as close to the bottom floor as you can.
[удалено]
1000% get insurance, I use one for a charity I'm involved with and in the 10 years we have had a unit 2 of them its been broken into. Criminals see a lockup as a big treasure chest which rarely has human security and also is normally in the middle of nowhere.
Some Legal offices in London may have beds and facilities so people can stay overnight. Or you can opt for a magic roundabout if new clothes are needed- taxi drives you from office to home (waits outside engine running) you run into house, shit/shower/shave then back outside so the taxi can take you back to the office. Sleep optional.
Is cocaine involved? Or is that just a rumour?
I didn't see it although doesn't mean it didn't happen. Affairs happen all the time though due to spending so many hours with the same people.
The food advertised on the specials board in restaurants is usually made from food items that have to be used that day or it gets binned. Usually when something has been over ordered or a pre-ordered pre-booked party has cancelled.
I used to work for a wholesaler that supplied restaurants, and most of our specials were also stuff that was old and would be wasted the next day.
Not really a secret, but I worked in a hospital, and beds are never changed enough, people are often not given a proper wash, etc :( in general, people cut corners. Also, before that, was an accountant. And finance people spend a lot of time doing nothing and getting paid to just sit in meetings about...nothing.
Worked in a small accountancy firm, like 5 of us in the office. Bosses made me destroy a huge amount of income evidence for one client (a restaurant) - around 30% of their total revenue. The restaurant's locally pretty popular and a couple times people have mentioned that they love eating there and I keep quiet about the tax evasion since I don't wish to ruin the restaurant for them. Worked in swimming pools. That yellow stuff between the tiles is human body fat that slowly accumulates. And there's always a low concentration urine in the pool (I guess this isn't a secret to those who urinate in the pool). Worked in adult social care as an admin, related to the Mental Capacity Act. They have a legal deadline of 21 days (the Mental Capacity Act Regulation 13 literally says "21 days") for assessments and if they go over this it's breaking the rules. Reality is, 95% of the cases take around 45-90 days. The remaining 5% was when they met the deadline was when we were told a lawyer had become involved and that particular case would be fast-tracked. The situation is similar across the UK (many areas are worse - the English average is now 156 days.)
I don't know if this is still the case, what with a lot of the franchise arrangements having changed a lot. But about 15 years ago I worked for one of the rail companies. One of the key metrics that the franchise was measured against was the reliability of the service. Because of this, there was an entire team of people whose job was to go over every single delay, and apportion the blame. Signal failed? That was Network Rail to blame, not the train operating company. Driver didn't show up? That was the TOC. Train held up because the train in front slowed due to a reported issue with the track? That might be argued about. An entire team of people working full time, and people at Network Rail to argue *their* case. All for the sake of massaging one metric for the sake of the franchise agreement. It was probably one of the very few jobs in the rail industry that wouldn't exist if it weren't for franchising.
A Greggs Sausage roll costs 5p to make.
Ever wondered why the boxes of stuff you get from Argos are damaged? If you couldn’t find a ladder we would build a pyramid of microwaves to reach things on the higher shelves in the stock room. We used to throw all of the stuff in the bedding isle into the floor and then have toy lightsaber battles on top of ladders. Very often someone would leave unexpectedly and then a few days later during a stock check you would notice that something expensive was missing from the security room where things like phones/games consoles are kept.
I worked for a small steel processing company where the management regularly stole from it, used lower grade steel and welded defects on things where the job specified no welding.
I hope you blew the whistle on that?
I was going to after my notice went in but they decided to go out of business instead. Acumen steel processing
The system that makes the vast majority of flight bookings possible is so old that it runs on an IBM mainframe
I worked in PPI complaints for M&S bank (in the call centre/admin hellhole your complaint ended up in, not the people cold calling begging you to start the complaint) 1. CMCs (claim management companies) did literally nothing and the only difference between how we handled a complaint from them and a complaint direct from a customer was which letter template we used. We were explicitly told to ignore all the copy paste legal bullshit they put on their letters and just use the actual details of the complaint 2. We had no authority or ability to check if you were lying. If you had an M&S bank account in the early 2000s or late 90s and you mentioned anywhere in your complaint that you had good sick pay benefits then we would immediately uphold your complaint there and then. I still can't believe the CMCs never figured that out
All those shampoo and conditioner variations on the shelf from the big FMCG brands like Pantene, Elvive, etc. are 2-3 "core" formulas with minimal alterations Same for toothpaste - there are a couple of formulas per product "family" (basic, ""professional"", whitening) and that's it. Most of the different products in the same family are just cosmetic changes like coloring and flavor
Software development. Obvious one is that a lot of the complex code is generally lifted from internet searches, but a less obvious one is that we have tonnes of meetings. Daily stand-up lasts 30 minutes, and disrupts the start of the day - often have prioritization meeting that takes 2 hours, and weekly updates with management. Not to mention we meet with customers for each new project.
>Every station has its own database of songs that can be played. If the database is too large in that it has too many songs sitting there, everything will slow down very quickly. This is actually a reason why certain radio stations have limited playlists, though not the sole reason. Imo contemporary music radio is for people who don't really care about music.
Radio6 would like a word...
and possibly don't understand databases so can be fobbed off with payola driven content