Posts by Doctor Syntax 40484 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
If they rely on DECT phones then the phone will fail. That's why it pays to have a POTS phone in the circuit. If they have, then all they have to do is pick up the handset & they'll hear the dial-tone. Using a mobile in an extended power cut - assuming the base stations are working - is likely to mean starting the car to recharge it.
Does that Act move the task of actually doing the work from the manufacturers' employees to the FAA? Does it fund the FAA sufficiently to enable it to have the appropriately qualified staff to do that work? Protecting whistle-blowers is solving the wrong problem. The right problem would be ensuring that they're not needed.
"It would probably be good to make sure the non-managers responsible for anything safety-related have a good handle of statistics."
It would also be good to make them personally legally responsible. The American way seems to be that the company can buy its way out with the addition of paying someone rather handsomly to be one scapegoat and throwing the other under a bus.
"Corporations have a budget and are willing to spend, but it takes too much time,...Finding projects that need help and maintainers willing to help in exchange for money is hard."
No harder than finding the projects they want to use. Check which projects you use. Find the maintainers from GitHub or wherever the project lives. Offer them money.
"But sure, businesses don't put enough back into the open source that they rely on."
In this case, a feature added for big business according to TFA, perhaps one of those businesses should have written and tested it themselves and then submitted it to the maintainers for incorporation.
They make a lot of money for selling targeted adverts. The actual targeting is things you've already bought, of course. The fact you've bought it already and aren't going to buy it again doesn't affect Google's bottom line because Google have no interest in selling you anything.
Let me repeat that. Google have no interest in selling you anything. Unless, of course, you want to buy advertising.
All they sell is advertising to advertisers.
In practice I think you usually get there. The most significant thing we learned from our first DR was that, left to itself, the vendor's backup routing left /etc well down the list. We almost ran out of time before it was restored. Having rewritten the backup to prioritise the directories we needed to boot, we could do that and then get the database restore running in parallel with everything else. I suspect the everything else that originally stood in the way of /etc was largely a huge stack of crud whose owners would have been prepared to defend it to the death.
The bail he skipped was for extradition to Sweden. There was no extradition request in place from the US. His chances of getting extradited from Sweden are generally reckoned as less than from the UK. By skipping bail he effectively imprisoned himself giving the US several years to get round to attempting extradition. If he hadn't skipped he might or might not have gone to jail in Sweden. Where he'd have been now is impossible to determine. He might even have been ignored by the US and subsequently forgotten.
"The patent document takes a hack at the disadvantages of desktop engineering software, which typically require powerful computers."
The powerful computers are still needed but they're just moved off the desktop. I suppose it enables Nvidia to sell components for two computers, one on the desktop and one in the cloud. Next time round they can advocate doing it with desktop computers and sell more components for that. And then back to reinventing the mainframe in yet another form.
No single person might be indispensable. The workforce, or a big enough chunk of it is. The manager who drives that chunk away may then have to reflect on that first statement.
"But it never ceases to amaze me how many people think they are right up until the day they hand in their notice."
Oddly enough there was a time when I handed in my notice and was promptly offered the promotion that had been withheld for years. None of the usual formalities such as boards at least not obviously although they might have appeared if I'd accepted. I didn't. Obviously I wasn't indispensable because things didn't collapse when I left. But employers can take people for granted just as much, or even more, than employees take their supposed indispensability for granted.
That's right.
My old firm was in Leeds with a big office which largely became call centre. Then they spread out to several other big call centres, all in cities spread over N England. There's no reason why, given suitable premises in which they could have taken small spaces, they couldn't have set up multiple small centres and recruited locally to them.
This big centre, long commute model of working isn't sustainable. The longer it takes that to sink in the worse will be the problems of sorting it out. An intelligent government would be looking at tax incentives to drive working at home or locally but those are rare and the current one seems to be on the less intelligent end of the spectrum.
The planning policy which has dictated the present situation was a response to C19th slum dwellings clustered round heavy, polluting industry. By and large that's not the problem now but the policy hasn't changed.
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