Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
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.
Way back in '86 I moved into IT working with what had recently been renamed from Marathon to Informix (much better name than Snickers!).
The system I started on was the older, non-SQL version. The application environment had a two classes of products. One class had serial numbers and individual rows in a table (or records in a file as the older Informix terminology had it). Assuming the warehouse hadn't misplaced any, stock levels could be assessed on demand by counting* the rows with the status code showing the individual items as being in the warehouse. The other class didn't and stock levels were assessed by dead reckoning between stock-takes. The code for determining stock level was a bit of C that looked at the product type and then did the appropriate bit of calculation. There were some complications around bill-of-materials issues in that some products consisted of assemblies of other products.
Eventually the older Informix version was to be replaced by SQL. A colleague wrote some YACC & Lex stuff** to do the grunt work of replacing much of the old-style C with the appropriate SQL versions. It left a good deal of manual tidying up to do and more complex bits, of which there were few but included the stock level calculation, had to be done by hand. I did the stock level by a somewhat convoluted bit of SQL involving NULL and the consequent 3-way logic. This ran successfully for years and survived migration to Informix on VAX, the reason for the SQL conversion, and a hasty retreat back to Unix, now on HP and Informix 2 to 4 and conversion of most if not all from C to Informix 4GL.
A little while after I'd moved on into freelance I had a gig with Informix which involved a bit of hand-holding with the old firm when they migrated to a bigger box and Informix 6 or 7. The actual cut-over date was after I'd finished the gig but I dropped in to make sure it was all working properly. I was told that in the end they'd discovered that in the entire suite there was one problem . I looked at it and recognised it at the SQL stock level calculation I'd written 10 years earlier. I looked again and realised there was an error in the 3-way logic, easily corrected. But for a decade this had run doing what I meant, not what I'd said. The really odd thing was that the bloke who'd taken my old job when I got eased out was convinced that the SQL was correct and there was a bug in the SQL engine. If there was it must have been that they'd dropped the telepathy function that worked out what I wanted it to do.
* At this remove I can't remember whether the C library used to access the database had the equivalent of the SQL COUNT or whether it had to be hand coded.
** I'd kept a copy of that. As the old ALL-2 library Informix wasn't going to be useful fro Y2K I hoped there'd be a market for last minute conversions. There wasn't.
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.
"But the Treasury Committee clearly don't understand just how much they're already doing, and how bloody hard that is."
And the financial services industry doesn't realise that they still aren't good enough and specifically that the loss of a local branch that we can visit is a particular problem.
The branches might not be used as much as they were given that there are other options. However they have a very specific role to play: they're our back-up. In IT we're used to the idea that we need to take back-ups and yet hope never to have to use them but when we do have nothing else will do. A slightly worrying possibility is that if banks can save money on the back-up the branch network provides maybe they're also saving money on not backing up their systems.
The first bank or building society that puts a branch back in my preferred village - a village where there used to be three - gets both my current and deposit accounts. I rather think that the bank or building society that realises that rebuilding a branch network is a competitive advantage will get a slew of new customers that makes it worth while.
"My own buinding society ... going to start to use SMS as a second factor."
And for the first time my bank did that just now. And the phone battery promptly expired. As I'm sitting at home next to the charger I could plug it in. It's not exactly hard (except, it seems, for banks) to think of circumstances where that might not be possible.
A few houses ago we had some work done on roofing or guttering or something. The guys had to come back with a ladder to retrieve an electric drill they'd left on the roof. The same house had a kitchen fitted by the kitchen fitter becoming-ex-boyfriend of my sister-in-law. He left an electic jigsaw on top of a wall cupboard. I still have it - when became ex I had no contact for returning it.
To be honest, probably better. The respiratory tract does have a mechanism, mucous and coughing, to protect itself against airborne pollution and the computer doesn't. OTOH it's not evolved to the extent that it can deal with pollution so directly introduced into it.
"The peat is Bord na Móna certified so should keep the greenies happy."
Not too sure about that. The thought now is that far too much carbon captured in peat has been released and bog growth should be encouraged to start capturing more. I have to admit, however, that we've burned a good few of those BnM briquettes in our time.
"Far be it from us to speculate why the Australian Border Force should spank taxpayers' money on a portal that only works on a browser used by just over 6 per cent of users globally and whose maker is desperate for customers to leave it behind."
That money was probably spanked when IE was new and shiny. Now somebody needs to tell them they need to spank some more, preferably several years ago so it would be ready now.
