Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
The last things I assembled from IKEA - two identical corner desks for the grandkids - both had a component with half the holes drilled 180° out of alignment with the other half, presumably either a half turn missed in the programming or an extra one inserted. One duff desk might have been an accident, two suggests a whole batch were out. That's the thing about consistency based quality - you swap the occasional rogue error for a job-lot of junk.
From observation the newbies who might make the junior role will be impressed. Those who've been round the block enough times to wualify for the senior role will know the warning signs when they see them. However, it's very considerate of IKEA to put up the "Danger, Wanker Management" signs so obviously.
Oddly enough '99 was a relatively thin time. I did get one contract doing some Y2K testing during the summer. I had a few days between getting the contract, which was supposed to be to cover paternity leave, and doing it. The contract was only 3 days - I suspect if I'd worked it out it might have been at a loss but it kept things ticking over. It seemed rather odd that someone couldn't fit 3 days to test their new box for Y2K compatibility around a mere 3 days paternity leave.
In retrospect it seems likely that that they wanted a fall-guy at minimum cost (Scottish client) if things went bad. OTOH I knew that both aspects of the platform - up-to-date Unix and Informix - was unlikely to have any problems. I also had time in that few days to Google an official-sounding test regime I could point back to if needed and tailor a schedule based on it. I also had years and years experience of writing reports that would stand up to close legal scrutiny by being explicit in what they did and didn't cover.
So basically, apart from the overheads, money for old rope. Their then new box will be unlikely to survive to Y2K38 if, indeed, it's still running now but that's SEP.
One from my more distant past, my forensic science days. We definitely weren't police but the police were inevitably our biggest "customer". One way or another* the local station got to know my address, or at least that I lived in their area and my phone number was in the book. Late one Saturday evening I got a somewhat apologetic call. It wasn't anything to do with my work but would I come into the station because they wanted an independent witness.
They'd arrested a drunk. You may have heard the expression "feeling no pain" as a euphemism for being drunk. For this guy it wasn't a euphemism, more like the literal truth; he must have been well anaesthetised. He was head-butting the cell door and shouting. By the time I got there he'd damaged one cell door - two layers of wood interleaved with a steel sheet and had to be put in another cell. They thought he'd broken his nose in the process and he'd bled all over the first cell. He was continuing to hit the cell door. There was no way I could actually go into the cell to see inside but there was a continuous racket coming from it: bang, bang, bang, "I want my solicitor", bang, bang, bang, "I want my MP", bang, bang, bang, "I want my solicitor"... Never heard anything more about it.
* It may have been because the station sergeant was a former senior SOCO. We came across him once off-duty in the local supermarket following the store detective. He suspected she was on a bonus for each case brought to court and was slipping merchandise into unsuspecting victims' shopping bags. He eventually caught her.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "More than 250,000 people have used our online services in the past year, with more than 80 per cent satisfied with their experience."
I wonder if the spokesman has tried calculating how many were dissatisfied and considered whether that's a number they should be prepared to live with.
"So it got me thinking it ought to be possible to upload harmless but misleading photos to social media and let the hackers and spammers get on with it."
I doubt they check much - just fire off emails. All of which reminds me I must change my very obviously eBay-specific email address and set the old one to bounce. After all, the real eBay aren't going to email me to click on some link to fill in a customer survey and offer to reward me with an Amazon voucher.
"The actual landline number is given to business & officialdom then shunted directly to voicemail without causing my phone to ring."
Just wait until you need hospital appointments. Or even better, have a hospital appointment that's cancelled on the day because of an emergency.
Look at the number of cars in a motorway car service station car park. Assume that 90% of those are going to want charging if EVs are the norm and they're going to want a charge in no more than 30 minutes that's going to last them for 3 hours at motorway speeds.
Installing that infrastructure in a service station isn't going to be done overnight but it's not going to be done gradually either. It''s be a fair sized project to bring in the supply and dig up the tarmac to lay the cables.
But the SOP being recommended for EVs on long journeys is that the stops we'd now make in the middle of a long journey would become recharging stops. That implies that the vast majority of drivers pulling into a motorway service station will not just expect but need to find a charger where they park capable of fully charging the car in the space of 20 or 30 minutes. Given the prices motorway service stations charge for petrol when most of the time most drivers manage to avoid filling up there I dread to think what prices they'll put on power.
OTOH I've not seen the equivalent of a filling station able to charge a dozen cars at the same rate as a filling station fills cars up with petrol.
But lucky old Norway - all that hydroelectric power. No problem with greens shouting that we must get rid of ICE cats but no fossil fuel power stations and no nuclear either.
"Even then if it is a multi-day trip many will charge at a destination charger when they get there."
Ah, yes, the destination charger. In a couple of places I've stayed over the last couple of years there was a charger. Note the singular. Just one each. In one I had to park my ICE car there when I arrived because the other spaces were taken. Most places there have been none or, possibly, in the larger hotels, maybe one or two well hidden.
"electrical charging stations can be distributed anywhere there is a adequate power supply."
And a place to park the car while it's charging.
Would work for me. We have space to get both cars off the road.
Just down in the village there's a stretch of road with cars parked nose to tail down one side of the road. A little further along they're parked nose to tail don both sides. That's because there are so many houses built in the days before the car and there was no room for off-road parking and no feasible way to provide it.
Wouldn't work for them. Even in the days when there were a couple of local filling stations they only had about a couple of pumps each and that was only to supply the choice of fuel as there was only space for one car at a time and for one of those the car was stood on the road whilst being fuelled.
Would also work for me most of the time. In fact would probably work very well. Living half-way up a hill any journey, irrespective of whether I turn left or right outside the gate, involves at some point hauling the car up several hundred feet and converting the potential energy thus given it into heat by the time we get back to the bottom. Getting some of that back with regenerative breaking would be great and the mileages are sufficient for an overnight top-up.
That's most of the time but only about half the annual mileage. The rest is on holiday when there's a journey each way which is going to require a big re-charge at a service station in the middle and the reassurance that at the other end there's going to be a charging point for each car in the hotel car park. That's why I can't see a fully electric car doing the job for me. Why not, you might argue, just hire a petrol car for the holiday? Good idea but how do I - or you - do that in the all-electic EV Nirvana?
"GDPR quickly loses its teeth for anything that requires a login"
??
GDPR says that accepting use of PII over and above that needed to perform the functions of the service requires opt-in and should not be a condition of provision of the services. I can't see how requiring a login affects this.
It sounds very much like drilling through the plaster in our house. My dad built the house and on my grandmother's side we're descended from many generations of plasterers. When I finally get through to good quality 1950/60's brick it's softer.
"we're being responsive to our customers who have requested this capability"
They seem to have lost sight of the fact that their big customers are enterprise IT departments who aren't going to like it.
It looks to me as if this is the brain-fart of a marketing department within MS that doesn't deal with those enterprise customers and possibly a battle in an internal MS war. Quite possibly, if the enterprise marketing bods win it gets pulled and the licences end up being orphaned.
"Are they providing indemnity for the 4% of turnover this could cost in each of 28 countries?"
Not to mention any other costs, including reputational, of dealing with a breach. I suppose their defence would be that it's up to the customers to deal with things by their own policies but if they're promoting this as a way to get round those policies - or it it can be presented that way in court, there could be some interesting cases coming up. Of course it will take long enough for legal shit to hit the fan that whoever in MS marketing thought it up to have got their bonus, cashed in their shares and moved on.
It must be about 25 years ago I was sent an unsolicited - by me - Amex card which I promptly cut up. It was then announced that then employer had organised that across a broad swathe of staff. We were supposed to make company purchases on the card and would be liable for any, including accrued interest, that the company didn't refund. Not trusting them an inch I had no regrets about having cut it up.
"if I need to take a training course I don’t earn anything."
Pro tip. You have an advantage here. The average employer finds great difficulty in making up their mind about this sort of investment. Your employer can make up your mind PDQ. There are circumstances where you can use that to pick up a contract for work that the average employer's employee could do but won't because they don't get that training. Yes, you're not billing and you have the cost of the course plus maybe overheads of travel and accommodation but it can be a worth while investment.
"you are almost certainly an employee in all practical terms anyway and thus should be paying your National Insurance like the rest of us"
Usual uninformed A/C contractor envy. Usual reply: if you think it's that easy why are you still an employee? Are you not good enough or are you too risk averse? If the latter perhaps you're getting some inkling of why contractors used to be, and should be, treated as businesses, not as employees.
"Minor nit - you are a full time member of staff, you're just a full time member of staff who is also the owner of your own employer. "
Contra-nit. The difference is that the client pays their full time staff holidays and sick leave when they're taking that leave. They don't pay their contractors when they're not there so the contractor's company has to pay that out of the fees received from the times they are working. The OP might not have made that quite clear enoug for you but it's undoubtedly the point that was being made.
"or could retain a few branches in larger towns and cities only, if need be"
I don't want a branch in a larger town or city. The town where my nearest branch is now located, like so many, has an anti-car obsession that means the most effective way of getting there is to drive to where I previously banked, park there and get a bus. Any bank or building society that puts a branch back there gets my accounts as fast as I can get over there to transfer them.
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