Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"entire layers of management are now desperate for people to be back in the office"
The smarter managers will be attributing such an increased productivity to their success at managing a remote working staff.
Of course the smarter managers wouldn't have been interrupting their staff on an hourly basis in the first place so they'll have less of an increase in productivity anyway.
"The annual assessment exercise exists to be annually audited."
This is because ISO9000 and its offspring are standards for quality of paperwork. It's the rule that once a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric writ large.
"As much as we malign managers in the comments section, management is a skill."
The reason we malign them is that relatively few have the skill. Promoting people to management on account of having some other skill makes no more sense them promoting someone to head chemist because they're an outstanding mechanical engineer. But it happens because company (it goes far wider than public sector) career structures allow only limited promotion in non-managerial specialities and they need to make those promotions for staff retention.
"Of course the client might have been a (minor) deity or, not uncommon in this game, at least thought of themselves as such."
More likely the opposite, I'd have thought. Policies exist to further the business's objectives. If a policy is getting in the way of that it sounds as if the original policy maker has long gone and been replaced by a weight to keep the chair from escaping with no understanding of why the policy exists.
I've always thought that policies should be written with a rationale so they can not be over-ridden by idiots ("This is a legal requirement") or reviewed when no longer appropriate ("This was a legal requirement but the law has changed").
" Mass adoption is still dependent on further battery energy density improvements that will reduce size, weight and cost."
And charging infrastructure.
"I think the Japanese manufacturers in general have been holding out for solid state batteries."
This will be a surprise to my daughter who's had her Nissan Leaf for a few years now.
"Early in the dawn of personal motor cars for the masses, there were still plenty of trips that couldn't be made. You took a train (or even a stagecoach) as there were no places to refuel."
But we're not there any more.* The alternative to an inadequate personal EV would be a personal car..** Also in the early days the motorist embarking on a longer journey might have started out with a few cans of extra fuel. You can't carry a can of electricity.
The infrastructure needs to be addressed. Anyone on a long journey would have to be able to expect to pull into a motorway services and find a fast charger available. That would mean a considerable proportion of parking spaces would have to be fast chargers and the supply to the services would have to be able to support those chargers being in use.
So far the UK government's targets have been vestigial and missed.
* We never were there in terms of stage coaches. When the first railway service between Liverpool and Manchester opened several stage coach services went out of business in the first week.
** Yes, yes, we've heard it: "You rent an ICE car for those journeys." It doesn't work on two grounds. The first is that ICE vehicles are supposed to be phased out so long term there wouldn't be any to rent. The second is that at least since I retired I make most of my journeys within a fraction of EV range from home but half of my mileage on those few long trips. Do I want to hve to hire another vehicle for half my annual mileage? Pre-retirement the ratio might not have been quite as tilted but enogh to present a serious consideration.
"A very limited level 2 charging point (3kWish) at a train station where you catch a train to get to work would be sufficient to replenish a battery over the course of a working day."
For the one driver who gets to it first. Not for the rest of the drivers who may have been hoping, or even depending on getting it. For EVs to take off the charging infrastructure away from home needs to be much better. PHEVs really ought to be a stepping stone to getting enough demand for charging whilst giving the drivers confidence they're not going to get stuck without a charge on a long journey. Remember that the long journey might not just be driving from home to destination today; it might also include driving back tomorrow and if there's no vacant charging point at the destination that might have to be on one charge.
No solder required, at least not at the time. He made a board with a set of spring-loaded contacts spaced for a set of pads on the back of the motherboard. That plugs into the Pi. He has to take the back of the laptop off and move a cover out of the way but then just needs to press the Pi/contacts assembly against the pads while it boots.
"As for the rivet holes, these should have been picked up during manufacture and fixed at the time:"
Possibly this is related to recent reports about rivet holes being drilled in the wrong place by Spirit and retrospective checks and remedial action being taken after the planes had entered service.
"We are continuing to investigate these images and have strengthened our existing safety systems to further prevent our services from being misused to help generate images like them"
It's "help", if course. Spokespeak translation: We didn't actually generate the images, all we did was help.
"I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder."
But who's going to tell them? Well, I suppose anyone. The better question is "Who's going to make them do that?". If we had a good answer to that we'd be well on the way to getting out of the woods.
OTOH two can play that game. Find a city where the lease is nearly up or at a break point. Walk away, closing the office completely. No taxes being paid, not even broken ones. No footfall for shops and cafes. Make sure other cities know what happened.
Is it just the US where this tax-break thing happens?
"Especially sites which require 10 to 20 "Legitimate Interest" areas of data processing to be unchecked individually, in order to opt out of tracking. Or worse, sites that list 200 or more advertising partners, and having to uncheck every one individually."
Looking at it another way, it's good of these sites to make it clear that you will want to leave now and never go near them again.
"I'm convinced that the framers envisaged a default of no tracking with options to allow it if acceptable, with clearly explained consequences."
This should have been how it was framed. No doubt there was a lot of lobbying to make it as it is now. It's time the EU held a review with the specific objective of deciding whether to make on-consent the default.
"more than 1,300 malicious servers"
Assuming the culprits don't run on prem these must have been hosted somewhere. I wonder what mileage there might be in prosecuting or victims suing the hosting companies as accessories. A bit of KYC in the hosting business might go a long way in dealing with this.
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