Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I had a 40 minute commute, through nice countryside."
So did I, at least for the half of it closest to home.
"I always found it a useful time to decompress and get work out of my mind"
So did I but only at the end of the day, not at the beginning.
I also, at one time, had about an hour and a half each way by train. A quick calculation showed it was the equivalent of working every weekend for no pay.
How does the economics of hybrid working using public transport work out?
It's a very long time since I had to do this but as I remember it the season ticket was a good deal cheaper than day tickets on a 5-days-a-week basis but would it be cheaper for 3-days-a-week? Even if it would the cost per day would still be perceived as greater.
Also, if most workers choose Tuesday to Thursday as their in-office days what effect does this have on the costs of running the transport network?
"the lines of improved design safety and less explodey battery chemistry will cross about 2025"
As someone said in a previous comment, lead-acid batteries are less explody anyway and if you want something that just sits there and doesn't have to be carried about you don't need to worry about the actual weight. The real thing that's wrong with it is that it's old technology so nobody stands to make any money from the royalties.
"With all six units synchronised and spinning-in-air (water is dispelled by compressed air and the unit draws a small amount of power to spin the shaft at full speed), 0 MW to 1800 MW load can be achieved in approximately 16 seconds."
Wikipedia article on Dinorwig. The same source gives 75 seconds from start to sync without such preparation.
On the one hand the copyright interests on training data affecting the output is a very obvious issue. On the other, the stock image shops are middle-men who can easily be bypassed by AIaaS.
Now the stock image shops are clearing the decks by removing AI images from their own shelves. What happens next?
The commute is a large part of why people are unhappy with being forced back into the office and that stems from decades of centripetal movement of offices into city centres. The citiy centres become so heavily populated during the day that they need increasingly larger areas to house the staff and that means longer commutes.
Perhaps a happy medium would be to close down the central offices and replace them with several smaller hubs, possibly shared working spaces, located closer to where employees live. That way commutes can be short so that hybrid working would be more acceptable, those like yourself unable to find a satisfactory environment at home can be provided for and we can dispense with a mode of life which is environmentally unsustainable.
Once upon a time I had a new employee assigned to me. Unexpectedly as nobody told me he was coming until he arrived. He only lasted a few weeks; shortly after he started it was announced the company was relocating about 200 miles away. Maybe remote working would have suited him better. Just a counter-anecdote.
"some of our departments genuinely struggled ...As much as I'd love to blame managers here - nobody has trained them how to adjust so staff are happy and supported at home."
You could blame them for not taking the initiative to consult with other managers who, it's implied, succeeded. Maybe your company could learn from that who are its better and worse managers.
"WFH really is a cultural problem"
It's a cultural issue, certainly. The issue is, does your company culture support it or not. Let me demonstrate:
My daughter had a job for a few years where the HQ was about 150 miles (Cambridge area) or more away but par of the reason she got the job was that it entailed frequent site visits around the M62 corridor, the rest of the time working from home. She could visit the office once ever few weeks.
The next job was office based but started just before the pandemic. A similar sort of line (clinical trials) but this company demanded presenteeism most days. Interestingly the collaborating sites were mostly out of the UK so remote collaboration was essential. Needless to say, once the pandemic struck they went to remote working. A few months ago the company decided they needed to go back to being on site. She handed in her notice. (It was a difficult commute & I was surprised she even took the job in the first place!)
Hew new job is entirely WFH. It seems to be the way this international company operates. She didn't even know where the company's UK address was until I researched it. Interviewing and even onboarding was done remotely.
So there we have a spectrum ranging from working entirely remotely to working very largely from the office. The choice doesn't even correlate well with the nature of collaboration involved. What other factor can be involved other than company culture?
Prototyping is fine, if only to show the users why their idea won't work.
OK, being serious, a prototype can be useful in getting users to discuss and think through what it is they need. A former colleague had a bit of a problem with this approach: he could never get his users to realise that what he was presenting as a model for discussion wasn't the real thing so his attempts got snared up in their rubbishing this unsatisfactory "product".
Back in the day we were analyst/programmers. That meant that we actually talked to users, possibly at their desks to observe processes,* to find out what they did and coded up a solution. Of course that sort of thing was liable to make several layers of manglement unhappy because it didn't need their high-ceremony processes. As a result it seems to have got stamped on rather heavily.
*Remote working wouldn't have made that easy.
"If my Magic Doohickey synchronises with my Phone using some discoverable server in a vendor specific cloud, there is no easy answer when the discoverable server stops existing."
Here are a few:
1. Require it to be able to synchronise with your iPhone over your WiFi. It means you can't contact it remotely unless you open your network for incoming connections from your phone. But it's a non-bricking fall-back.
2. Have a manual mode as fall-back.
3. Make it clear to purchasers before buying that you have not made any provision for ongoing operation of the service, that you cannot guarantee to keep operating the service and that if the service lapses the product is bricked. And see how many sales you get then.
TL;DR design your device to fall-back sensibly or tell the customer very clearly they're about to buy a pig in a poke.
" Companies will work around it, or avoid it altogether."
To be effective and prevent work-rounds it needs to make the entire marketing chain - yes, eBay, that means you - responsible.
Avoiding a well regulated market if you want to ship shoddy goods is quite acceptable to the market. If the manufacturers have a problem with that there's no point coming to me for sympathy. Innovation is no excuse for cutting corners or making customers act as QA.
"Products will be launched where early fixes and revisions are tolerated, and maybe taken to Europe a few years later."
Excellent - up to a point. That means the EU gets good products and elsewhere gets the crap. Up to a point because here in the UK we no longer get that protection.
If the current year is meant then a day and month should be sufficient. If provision is made to enter a 2 digit year then the sensible default is to that closest to the current year which is what the user is most likely to expect.
Historical dates are a nightmare. E.g. the archivist classified something as "Early C14th" but looking at it I suspect it could be before another dated in the 1290s and none of the witnesses who are found in other, dated, documents are exclusively C14th.
I've used LibreOffice entering dates - as 4 digits - back to the C12th. I have no problem with using 4 digit formats. But if the year is set to 2 digits the default should be what a user might find most reasonable and I doubt a date almost a century ago compared to one a few years ahead is not likely to be considered reasonable.
This might have been reasonably considered Good Practice back in 1999 but I can't imagine anyone being able to put forward a cogent argument for its being that almost a quarter of a century later.
the millennium bug was mostly "an overblown scam to suck money into the tech industry"
It's not so long ago that I posted this here, as I have done a few times before but obviously it needs to be repeated:
I had a client who had a non-Y2K compatible version of their accounts S/W. Their old alleged hot standby server (also previously commented on) wouldn't run the newer version so both servers were replaced and UAT completed to the accountants' satisfaction. We planned to cut over between Christmas & New Year. The accountants chickened out and wouldn't let us until they'd closed out 1999 accounts in mid January. It was a torrid couple of weeks with the vendors dialling in (a modem on a serial port!) several times each week to fix the data.
Yes, Y2K really was a genuine problem.
The headline says "fines" but the article says "damages". As it's a civil suit being launched on behalf of publishers the latter makes more sense. Personally I have no objection to ad-merchants slogging it out between themselves indefinitely. My lack of sympathy is equally distributed.
"Firstly you can put a condition in the license that states that use of the open source component in any commercial application is at the company's own risk, and that the authors of the component do not accept any responsibility for legal problems that this might cause the company."
Something along these lines is fairly standard.
I know Ptolemy is regarded as having done a good job regarding details of rivers etc but his was a distant view. The Romans who were actually occupying part of the island were in no doubt that there was only one island called Britannia. Their only distinction was between two provinces within the island.
I doubt Ptolemy was ever consulted about what Wikipedia refers to as the "shared etymology" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany). cf Bretagne vs Grand Bretagne.
"Is Charles the King of Northern Ireland?"
The title is King of the United Kingsdon of Great Britain* and Northern Ireland.
* Great Britain to distinguish the island from Brittany to where a lot of Britons emigrated after the Anglo-Saxons arrived in what was to become England.
Parliament wasn't quite the same thing in middle ages as it is now so you could extend that beyond Charles I. Richard II might be considered an example of that.
But you quote the OP saying "or exiling" and that includes James II as well as Edward VII and even Charles II temporarily.
"years were counted from the date a new sovereign accessed his throne"
That was certainly how a lot of legal documents were dated so you need to know on what date in the year the accession fell. An entire published volume of the Wakefield Manorial Rolls has a classic off-by-one error, presumably by misinterpreting that.
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