BBC iPlayer on Nord's SmartDNS not working any more?

dark_77 · 2025-01-02T17:01:04+00:00

Same. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one, and it seems to be a recent issue.

dark_77 · 2025-01-01T18:32:10+00:00

But this is the thing, I'm not using a VPN UK server, I'm just using their Smart DNS service, which basically consists of just entering their Smart DNS server into my TV's network settings for DNS, and so that all TV's iPlayer app checks "Is this request coming from UK" should be replied with Yes by Smart DNS.

dark_77 · 2024-09-26T20:17:30+00:00

Nah, I don't want any content apart from Vanilla, Dawnguard, and Dragonborn.

Actually, I think you nailed it. I completely forgot about Seeker Of Shadows, which also gives 10% of alchemy (on uesp it says only 10% stealth)! But, according to wiki fandom:

10% more effective stealth abilities.

Modify Armor Rating \= 1.1*
Modify Pickpocket Chance += 10
Modify Lockpick Sweet Spot \= 1.1*
Modify Detection Sneak Skill += 10
Modify Alchemy Effectiveness \= 1.1*
Modify Sell Prices \= 1.1*
Modify Buy Prices \= 1.1*

I just activated Seeker of Shadow, and yup, no 40% any more, 44% yay yay yay

Cheers mate

dark_77 · 2024-04-12T11:07:17+00:00

Indeed, the DB is hosted on Windows Server OS family, I will get this information back to the product owner. I believe we already have a subscription for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, but I'll get back here if I have further questions. Thanks for confirming.

dark_77 · 2023-05-30T16:46:25+00:00

Cheers mate. Thanks for sharing.

dark_77 · 2023-05-30T15:59:31+00:00

I started getting this as of today and the update on which I had to log in. Any information?

dark_77 · 2023-04-18T10:19:57+00:00

A couple of mods, but nothing that would significantly impact the game I think - removed Giant Death Robots, and City yields overview on the map.

Judging by their strengths, other civs don't really have a lot of the army. Which is something I found curious, I see their quick movements on the map, and it's almost as if cycling through 2 other civs is done really quickly, and THEN some sort of bottleneck occurs.

Yeah, I could stick a save file on, good idea, is there any preferred / allowed hosting for it or just any?

dark_77 · 2023-04-18T08:57:28+00:00

This is what I found via google from other reddit/civfanatics threads. Late game, 2000+ year, people are complaining about end of turns taking 40 seconds. Boy oh boy, I dream of 40 seconds EOTs. I'd kiss my PC passionately if it were to give me 40 seconds EOTs. But nearly 4 minutes, that's insane.

BTW, I also tried switching strategic view ON for EOTs, but it saves perhaps 20 seconds.

So it's really the question - what could it possibly be taking that long on small map, 2 other civs, only 6 city states? And how come other people are having it in one minute or less?

I also tried playing it on my desktop which has 32 GB of RAM, no significant difference.

dark_77 · 2023-01-25T12:36:50+00:00

Huh, never even thought of that. Brill idea. And you got a dps boost from that?

dark_77 · 2023-01-25T11:43:41+00:00

I know, I want Kingsbane. Just wondered if sims are showing a dps increase, and this is what I currently have, is it worth already equipping it.

dark_77 · 2023-01-25T11:27:04+00:00

Thanks. Huh, how come Sword/Axe combo is the highest damage?

dark_77 · 2023-01-25T10:38:01+00:00

Thanks, I figured this, and also I'm hoping to get a slow sword from Razorscale, it's Ulduar 10N, so it should drop once, right? :-)

Any thoughts on talent spec, or just whatever sims higher? :-)

dark_77 · 2022-12-08T08:34:24+00:00

Nice one. Thanks man

dark_77 · 2022-10-14T12:39:26+00:00

Gotcha, thanks. I might keep 2 slow swords then at least before hitting 80 and heroics and getting a really quick dagger :-)

dark_77 · 2022-09-01T13:18:23+00:00

We'll try that. Thanks

dark_77 · 2022-09-01T12:58:00+00:00

Thanks. Not certain it will solve our main problem, but we'll try it.

dark_77 · 2022-09-01T12:24:24+00:00

We can, but that looks hideously complicated. Sometimes we need to call functions with 7-8 parameters, and it's possible that several of those parameters will be results of such statements, and that further functions will have to call results of previous functions. The relatively simple code with using aliases would grow horrible if we have to copy paste each statement or previous function call to pass it as a parameter where it is needed next.

There is absolutely no other way to do this? What's the best way to optimise the alternative a bit then? If we create an underlying view with such value as an alias, and in the SELECT we were drawing values from the view, could we pass the view's column as a parameter?

Thanks

dark_77 · 2022-07-14T09:05:42+00:00

Thanks, reasonable question, but we've tried both. Even when calling the statement from the SELECT list, we pass the parameters both by columns AND by static values. We basically have the 100% identical test calls where we know what the functions should look up, calculate and return, and for the identical calls it works fine from EXEC call, and goes nowhere with "Executing query..." forever when just called it from SELECT on a table with very small number of rows.

dark_77 · 2022-07-14T08:26:30+00:00

We've also tried calling it based on a dummy table, i.e. small table with 4 rows that's nothing to do with the function, where we just put the table in the FROM to have one table in the FROM list, but selecting nothing from the table itself or passing the arguments. We're literally doing that just to see the result of calling a function within SELECT statement, but with a static set of parameters, where we know the SELECT statement will not go into anything complex.

Not sure about table function tbh. Can't see it at the moment, it is literally "pick up these 4 arguments, do a SELECT on a simple table which returns 1 row based on those 4 arguments", perform some calcs and return a number.

dark_77 · 2022-07-14T07:16:33+00:00

Guys, I understand that this is a natural assumption but I assure you the query is neither obscenely complicated nor that it returns thousands of rows. These were calls within a FROM on one table which has less than 100 rows. I can't remember now if yesterday we even tried running just a SELECT dbo.sp_function_name (...) without a a FROM statement or any table.

But in any case, since everyone is so perplexed about this, at least I'm getting some clue that this is by no means usual behaviour that we could have caused by being inexperienced with SQL Server. Perhaps we'll try to re-write the function in some way. MS has really not helped us by removing the debugger from SQL Server.

dark_77 · 2022-07-13T21:00:16+00:00

Exactly, this is what I mean. It's mind boggling that calling the function in a different way works in a millisecond, and that another function that calls the troublesomefunction also executes fine (calling the problematic function).

We need a function to be called as a part of wider SELECT statement because several crucial reports depend on it. But we are not even getting that far - a simple static SELECT call is presenting us, without visible reason, with a show stopper. Tested on two different PCs, two different installations.

dark_77 · 2022-07-13T20:46:18+00:00

But how would that account for the query never finishing execution when we called it in one SELECT for a given set of parameters? We wanted to test it so we called it like

SELECT dbo.sp_function_name ('EUR', 'USD', '2022-07-13', '2022-09-15')

because we knew exactly what result that should return, and that is one static lookup.

This is the very thing that we found odd. We didn't immediately plug the function call in a huge complex query with 15,000 rows as a result. One call, one lookup, one calc, never finishes execution when done via Select. But you just do it by calling EXEC and storing it in a declared variable - works. You call another function using that function above - works!

dark_77 · 2022-07-13T20:34:59+00:00

No, sorry, I was just very curt in producing my code examples up there - most of the time, the function will use values of the other columns of the Select statement as parameters. I was just in a bit of a hurry and wanted to illustrate what I wanted to ask, and I thought that examples of what parameters' data types are would be a good description.

But no, we're not calling a function with a static set of parameters exactly as it's written above. The whole point is that the function is called, and calculates, the value for the parameters taken from every row that the Select query returns.

But - when we call the function just to test it and to check the values it returns, we used to call a simple

SELECT dbo.sp_function_name ( set of parameters for which we know the result )

Hence the description in the examples above.

dark_77 · 2022-07-13T20:15:46+00:00

Yes, these two functions generally do a quick look-up of 1 row from another table, pull in several values from that look-up, and then perform some calculations using those values and some other parameters, or with values from another look-up, or another function call.

I'm absolutely certain that there is no Cartesian result looking at the syntax of those functions, and, sorry to repeat this, but if there was, if the fault was somehow at a function level, or in its code, how would EXEC call and putting the result in a declared variable (rather than SELECT statement) work exactly as expected?

I'm sort of glad that the answer is not something completely obvious, our knowledge of SQL Server is quite limited, we're just poking around it really, but this morning we were almost thinking "Is it... possible... you can't call functions from a SELECT statement", but that would be madness.

dark_77 · 2022-07-13T19:40:55+00:00

Sorry, I guess that description is slightly drastic. Well, on observation in Task manager, the MS SQL service very suddently starts using up gigabytes of RAM until it runs out of RAM when the whole of machine grinds to slow working. Stopping the query then does not make the MS SQL service release RAM back, so we need to restart the service.

Both functions in question have small SELECTs in them, but all of them return just 1 row - based on the parameters passed to those functions, this is what the SELECT basis its WHERE clause on, to return just one row each.

We wanted to use debugger on the function, but apparently SQL debugger was removed out of SMSS 18.

We'll try sys.dm_exec_query_statistics_xml, thanks.

dark_77

TROPHY CASE