Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"a move that researchers involved said could cut the cost of solar installations by half."
I was wondering why adding something to a solar installation could cut the cost by half - unless it came with free money. The quoted article says it cuts the cost of solar storage installations by half. As it's using second-hand components that's not surprising.
"We keep hearing this canned response too. Maybe their staff are just not up to it."
And somehow we never hear them explain why they didn't live up to it. Personally I'd like the media to get together and refuse to report such statements unless they're prepared to answer questions on those lines.
As I recall they already had / as the escape character for end of line. It seemed to me that when those vast hard drives were added to PCs they tried to do a pivot from the rather DEC-like command-line syntax of CP/M and early MS-DOS to something more Unix-like to accommodate subdirectories and ended up being neither.
"an email with the incoming call as an mp3 attachment"
That's the difference. You get an attachment that can be played. This scam uses an attachment that requires you to log in. There's a simple rule to apply here:
Any unsolicited email which included a URL should be treated as phishing.
Corollary: if you don't want your emails to be so treated, don't include URLs.
I think the point is that if someone wants to end me a voicemail message the attachment should be a .wav or similar that I can play without logging in to anything (or, more likely, treat with utmost suspicion, report as phishing if it comes in to my hotmail address, and ignore).
"Free services simply can't be counted on, as demonstrated by Google's discontinuation of unlimited cloud storage for Google Workspace for Education customers, which takes effect in July."
Oh yes they can. Just download LibreOffice or one of the other FOSS alternatives
OK, not strictly speaking a service but that's for the better. As Google have illustrated numerous times, a service can be turned off; an unencumbered executable, running on your own hardware, can't.
That, or it's a subtle push to move our SQL servers (or maybe ALL of our servers) out to "the cloud".
Certainly not to the cloud. Put the servers for the plant onto the plant's network, separated from the office network. The tricky bit comes when you need to push reports back from the plant to the office.
I think I'd have just upgraded a few of them, then invited the district head to decide whether they were useless. If he stuck with his opinion I'd have pointed out that the upgrades so far had come out of my own pocket & the materials were therefore still my own property and I'd reclaim them.
Those destination chargers - that's a very substantial infrastructure that you've got to persuade everyone to build. I've seen one small hotel that had one charger but due to the awkward layout of the premises you'd need to be almost first in/last out to use it. Another, again with one charger. When I rolled up that happened to be the only parking space free so I ended up blocking it. Token charging points aren't going to cut it and 25 charger equipped places in a typical motorway service station will be tokenism. You're going to have to have a situation where nearly every parking space has a charging point so that those in desperate need of a charge can be assured of one being free.
The ultra-rapid filling station model might be the most practical.
Because of planning policies local mass employment (mills) is extinct. Commuting is likely to be several tens of miles each way. And good luck getting most workplaces to install an adequate number of chargers and then getting staff to be responsible about sharing them.
"And yet I can't help wondering if it;s not cheaper to retain existing customers"
I don't know if it still happens but I used to see motivational posters in offices about it being cheaper to keep an existing customer than to win a new one. The trouble with so many top managements is the view that what applies to the plebs doesn't apply to them and it's their decisions which determine whether it's possible to retain customers.
"try the forums that also run where unpaid other customers are expected to help you."
I can't help feeling that these must be very open to being gamed. Imagine a query starts off "I just bought an Acme Squidifier MkII..." and that's pounced on with "Well, that's your mistake right there. You should have bought Superbo's model instead." Is that genuine advice, if not actual help, form another customer or one of Superbo's PR staff?
If your employer prefers this form os customer support please feel free to point out this possibility.
Just thinking idly for a moment... For short range do you need any fragile connections?
I can seen what's on my screen here with no fibre optics getting in the way and, as Pete implies, using air rather than glass the light is travelling faster. A broadcast or, at best loosely aimed set of transmitters and receivers would do just as well.
At first sight this is OK if there are only a pair of end points trying to communicate in this way, otherwise there would be conflicts. But we already have the technology to deal with such conflicts - CSMA/CD. Optical Ethernet.
