Posts by Doctor Syntax 40470 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I think the problem is more often imposed helplessness. Manglement build a structure based on some requirement such as belief that compartmentalisation improves security or that they need to find more roles for direct reports because more direct reports means more status. The compartments grow into fiefdoms. The inhabitants of one fiefdom, although not technically helpless if they have appropriate skills, are functionally helpless regarding the functions of another.
do we need people to "install" software
Easily addressed. As a freelancer I took a very short contract (the technical term is "afternoon" ) to install some bought-in software for one company before returning to my main contract of writing software for another company.
Of course, the software written for the main client also had to be installed. Unfortunately they'd gone down the route of having a separate admin group and communication between the two" was not ideal. I did miss the situation of having the access to do both sides. I do appreciate your frustration with having admin separate from development. I spent the entire two weeks of a holiday cover contract for a really badly segmented company doing the paperwork to get one admin team to provide some extra disk space to enable the DBA team I was with to add to the database. Crazy!
You are highlighting a very valid point but the real problem is that of company structure and culture. That's a problem that should be fixed, not bypassed.
" And maybe with the management. We'd developed the application so that configuration of new products on the system could and should be done through the UI and the manager insisted it should be done through SQL run by admin, That was tricky, which is why it we'd automated it.
"There are people who want to start a business that will use some equipment but they can't buy, either the equipment itself, or more likely all the facilities needed to operate it. Fortunately, servers are very easily rented."
OTOH the risk of not making the rent due to cash flow problems needs to be factored in. Will the vendor simply wipe the storage or keep it for a period & let you reconnect?
In 5 years time the capex & previous years opex will both become money then. How much money? Which would have been cheaper?
We've rented and bought as soon as we could manage to get a deposit together. At the point where we made that transition rent was money down the drain. Gone. Nothing, here and now (or there and then!) to show for it; money that wasn't available for a deposit to buy. Money spent on the deposit represented equity in property which will almost certainly increase in value (unlike a server, of course) and could subsequently be traded up which we did several times until we inherited.
Our son rented for years before buying. He realises he has spent a lot of money with nothing to show for is hear and now and has, incidentally, had to pay far more than had he bought earlier.
One very significant aspect of renting computer space, if the business were to stop and think about it, is that what's in that computer space may represent the whole of the company's value. Without it the physical stock, property, furniture and fittings are worth no more than than a forced sale would bring. If a bit of a cash flow problems comes along and they can't make the rent of a month or a quarter or whatever it it, then they might as well get the forced sale catalogues drawn up because they're no longer trading. It's not the same as renting the furniture or whatever.
Do I sense a developer with an inflated ego here?
Let's fix that opening statement:
Here lies the fundamental issue, infrastructure exists for applications and applications are created by developers exist for the business. It matters rather less who crested the application. It could be developed in house. It could alternatively be bought in or it could be FOSS (free as in beer as well as in speech!). And you don't need developers to install the last two.
I should point out that my preferred method of handling all this is as a unified team that develops and administers its own applications, in house and on prem. That way you don't write what you can't administer and if you find you can't administer it properly you rewrite it to fix it.
"That lovely lady was brought up on Windows and even worked for MS in the UK for a while as a developer."
I'd have thought it not beyond her to install it herself in that case. You could always have insisted on at least one more grandkid.
In normal circumstances (my experience of dealing with murders was those linked to terrorism and I don't wish to consider that normal) a vary large proportion of murders arise from arguments or from a long term experience of domestic abuse. Thinking and knowing aren't really factors one way or another.
Let's think this through from a few points of view in court.
From a witness first. You know that your evidence can lead to someone's death. You're aware that sometimes there are miscarriages of justice. Can you live, long term, with the possibility that you might have made a mistake and killed someone. From personal experience I can tell you that if you're conscientious the stress of life in the witness box over the years becomes unbearable without that additional thought. Would you want to be there? If you do then you should be automatically disqualified.
Now look at it as a juror. In the 12 men and women good and true there's a good chance that you'll find one who, as a matter of conscience, would not be prepared to vote to take away someone's life no matter how strong the evidence. There's a real likelihood that your hang 'em high approach might lead to he guilty getting off. Hmm.
Now look at it from the jurist's PoV. You're seeing the strongest possible cases failing. Should you accept majority verdicts? For a capital offence? Again, you're aware that miscarriages of justice happen. Maybe, despite all the problems you should require unanimous verdicts. But if you require unanimous verdicts for some cases why do you accept majority verdicts in other cases? After all, and no matter how many failures there are, it's a principle of English law and its derivatives that it's better that the guilty go free than that one innocent man is convicted.
But, hey, it's a lot easier when we can settle complex matters of conscience and justice on the basis of simple economics.
Does it mean that they've finally given up on our own galaxy?
The fact that we're here, on the only planet we've looked at closely, seems to lead people to believe that life must not only exist elsewhere as well but that it's actually common. Considered in the abstract, assembling the necessary subsystems for the simplest living organism by inorganic means seems so unlikely that you wouldn't expect life to exist at all. The fact that it did happen once doesn't raise the odds that it has happened elsewhere.
"Except that those people I know who have a BEV are actually quite ok with the rythm of driving and taking a break."
Yes, that's fine and easy to do with an ICE. Not so easy when you're dependent on there being a charger at the parking space where you take your break. I assume Norway put some effort into ensuring that happens.
Do you really think the people buying vehicles aren't capable of knowing what their longest journeys are nor are they capable of looking around them to see what the existing charging infrastructure is and combining those too pieces of information? Range would not be a problem if available charging capacity matched petrol and diesel refuelling capacity.
If I could be sure of rolling into a motorway service station and finding an unoccupied, working fast charger I'd be confident to buy an EV. I can't therefore I'm not.
"unless... there’s simply no adequate charging infrastructure en-route."
It's adequacy that matters. It's no good saying that you can recharge in the time it takes to stop for coffee unless there's a charger free when you stop. In practice that would mean that most if not all parking spaces at a motorway service station or the like would have to have chargers capable of charging at that rate and the supply to the service station would have to be capable of supplying that much power.
"the average journey is something like 7 miles, and they don't tow things, so EV is a solution, just not a solution that covers everything"
Most people need their car to cover everything. It the occasional longer journey isn't supported by the charging infrastructure then EV isn't a solution. The present refuelling infrastructure for ICE driven vehicles took decades to build up. It would take a major drive to replicate that in the time-frame that governments want to replace the ICE fleet.
I've had success in the past by returning letters ()also annual) for former tenants marked "Not at this address" and after doing that for a few years marked the return to say that in future there will be a £10 handling charge and rung them up to make that clear. They stopped.
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