Re: How was this made possible?
"my employers have now concluded that everybody has to have a formal office base at one of our larger offices": to be fair there may be tax/financial reasons behind that decision rather than presenteeism ones.
22 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2013
Was watching one of those air crash investigation programmes the other night. An airliner crashed because the software did something the pilot could not have anticpated, indeed the pilots and the airline did not even know the software was on it*. The plane crashed. Clearly the lessons were not learnt - this is exactly what happened in the first 737Max crash.
(*The engines surged due to ice ingestion. The pilot throttled back to clear them, but unbeknown to the pilots the software override them and immediately put the engines to max thrust again; the engines were terminally damaged and the plane crashed. The software had been installed by the manufacturer with good intentions, to prevent a different kind of crash, but the law of unitended consequences. It's the episode called "pilot betrayed" if anyone wants to catch the reruns)
A lot of this stuff is really easy in TB using rules, which are simple and intuitive to set up (the only unintuitive thing is that these rules are called "filters" which is stupid because (a) they aren't filters, they are ruled-based action and (b) there's already something called auto-filter, which actually *is* a filter).
Try hovering over (say) the "from" address on an email, right-click and select "create filter from..."
Rules (filters!) are really good in TB.
There are a couple of things to help with this - a drop down that appears on the right when the number of tabs exceeds the page width such that the tab bar scrolls that lists the tabs, plus the tab group "manage my tabs" which can display the tabs in a variety of different formats according to preference. I too use classic screen restorer - could not stand the dreadful Chrome-lookalike that FF adopted a few years back.
Is it just me or does Google's report of the incident sound very much like the bit in Reginald Perrin where the results of the consumer survey are reported: "73% of housewives in East Lancashire and 81% in Hertfordshire had expressed interest in the concept of exotic ice creams. Only 8% in Hertfordshire and 14% in East Lancashire had expressed positive hostility while 5% had expressed latent hostility. In Hertfordshire 93% of the 20% who formed 50% of consumer spending potential were in favour. Among the unemployed only 0.1% were in favour. 0.6% had told her where they could put the exotic ice creams."
Jeroboashambles = shambles * 4
Rehoboshambles = shambles * 6
Methuselahshambles = shambles * 8
Salmanazarshambles (reserved for NHS f*ckups) = shambles * 12
Balthazarshambles = shambles * 16
Nebuchadnezzarshambles = shambles * 20
Solomonshambles (rarely seen) = shambles * 24
Sovereignshambles (reserved for monarchy-related f*ck-ups not parliamentary ones) = shambles * 34
Primatshambles (reserved for shambles originating directly from the PM) = shambles * 36
Melchizedekashambles (reserved for f*ckup resulting in end of civilisation as we know it) = shambles * 40
Laser "cartridge" sounds an intruiging idea. But don't forget that the sound of a vinyl record is heavily influenced by the turntable that's spinning it (platter material, resonance, inertia, motor and transport mechanism, suspension, etc) as well as by the cartridge (compliance, tracking weight, inertia, coil mechanism etc) and arm (bearings, sonic reflectivity etc). A laser would eliminate some of these things and measure the others more accurately (perhaps). A record player is, ultimately, a record transport device and a measurement system.
"How many aircraft have been lost due to a design flaw over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years?" - DC10 cargo doors. All 346 people on board Turkish Airlines Flight 981 were killed when the cargo door blew out over France in 1974. It was a known design problem (the door could be left partially unlocked without it being obvious rendering it liable to blow open in flight, with subsequent floor collapse severing control lines). OK this is slightly more than 40 years ago but unfortunately design weakness can and do happen - it's not necessarily poor design, sometimes the implications of a design don't become apparent until heavy use. Hopefully they mostly get spotted and corrected or procedures put in place to avoid them causing an incident. Though speaking of procedures 273 lives were lost in a further DC10 crash in 1979 caused by removing the engine and supporting pylon as a unit, to save time, against the manufacturers recommendations (for which American Airlines were fined $500k, but they weren't the only airline doing it).
Someone queried whether aircraft were allowed to fly without primary instruments working; I'm sure somebody in the industry can advise on this but a few years ago my holiday return flight was postponed because the captain's side primary engine display was inoperative; apparently to fly without it was against company policy. An engineer was to be flown out to fix it. After several hours wondering what overnight accomdation was going to be provided the captain appeared and informed us he'd persuaded the company that, as the right-hand instrument plus the backup were both working, it would be perfectly safe, and we duly took off the same night. I think the captain must have had a hot date ;-)
I think someone a while back determined that 2 minutes was the optimum brewing time, then the teabag should be removed to prevent stewing. Which sounds about right. The amount of stirring was not specified though. Personally I'm a stirrer. (a) I'm impatient and (b) this produces a nice strong flavoursome cup but without the "stewed tannin" factor.
This new version is of no use whatsoever to serious photographers. Mayer has completely ruined it. The aim is to tempt mobile phone cam / app users with lots of free space and an app that's 5 years too late, and then fire ads at them. It won't work. They already have facebook for that. What it has done is alienate every serious photographer, who were the lifeblood of flickr and who do not want their images displayed on a sub-facebook-wall. Great move, Mayer. It's useless to me now so subs cancelled and I'm off to Zenfolio/Smugmug.