Posts by Johan-Kristian Wold 1 18 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2016
The problems with a lot of these public contracts, is that the government agency doing the shopping don't really have a clue on what they really want, so a lot of the specifications are vague at best, and in a lot of cases the necessary framework is mostly missing.
The supplier end up doing an insane amount of work that's billed by the hour on very lucrative rates - outside of the contract.
Some cars last incredibly long, as long as you manage to keep the rust at bay.
I bought an '86 Mercedes G-class diesel in 2005 and sold it to a friend i 2014. He still uses it. That car will be 40 years old in 3 years.
Of course, you need to be good at bodging to have a car that age, but it's doable. I have my doubts that a Tesla (or a VW ID.3 for that matter) will be useable after 40 years.
Other stuff that can last for ages - I have a Radionette raido cabinet from the 1950s. Still works and sounds great. The radio part is a broblem, since the radio is FM/AM only, and we are now mostly DAB here. There's only a local radio station with questionable programming available on FM.
A smartphone without apps is kinda useless. this is part of the reason Windows phone died.
A friend of mine is a bus driver, and used to have a windows phone. The phone was decent, and had a very good camera for the time. He had all sorts of problems, because the apps used by the bus company didn't exist for his phone. He had trouple accessing his scheduling, reporing hours etc. You could access this wia a web app, but that was incredibly cumbersome.
In my trade, we have specialised apps for checlists, timesheets, documentation, inspection etc. There are ecosystems from several vendors to choose from, but the common factor is that they are only available for Android and iOS.
The inherent conservatism of beancounter centrals and banks is astonishing. Old systems are kept because they have been working reliably for all these years, and the cost of failures and bugs can be astronomical.
An aquaintance of mine does the books for a building suppiles shop, and this shop is still on a system based on old code running on an AS/400 successor. The connect to a central server through a VPN, and the system still requires a java capable browser to work. Cue calls for help when java support was disabled by default in newer browsers...
The old IBM mainframe and minicomputer environments have evolved through the years, and new hardware (IBM Power systems) with recent operating systems (IBM i) is still available.
>I just wish that Office kept a standard file save dialog rather than their cluttered complicated cloud-first design, but that could just be the muscle memory talking.
No - the person that came up with that cloud-first crap should be flogged with a wet celery once a day. And the person that decided it should not be possible to even shut that function totally off? There's no punishment cruel enough...
The jumbling all the functions of Office into toolbars is insanity from a user standpoint. I wonder if any of the bozos reinventing the user interfaces is actually using the products they screw up?
About 25 years ago, I was involved with changing over to new facilities for a small company.
Some custom systems were involved, with a bunch of different servers, so there was a number of UPS systems in the server room. Everything fed from a distribution breaker panel inside the server room.
A power failure outside normal business hours showed that a critical point was overlooked by the leccys.
The combined start current when the mains returned, and all the UPS systems starting to recharge the batteries was enough to trigger the quick-acting fuse (in the main breaker panel) feeding the distribution panel in the server room. So the UPSes ran out of battery and shut everything down. A change to a slo-blo fuse fixed the problem.
This is very much dependant on circumstances.
For instance - Storing stuff in the cloud can make perfect sense for a small company. Maintaining a simple file server with redundancies, backup, software and maintenance costs can be very expensive per user per year when you are talking about less than 10 users.
Other services are even more expensive to keep going - accounting systems comes to mind, with typical small to medium companies having only one one or two people doing accounts. A lot of small and medium companies here in Norway are now using cloud based accounting systems, minimising running costs and security risks.
A common problem with newer Can Am Quads and 6x6 bikes is the anti theft system. There’s a chipin the key and a pickup in the ignition switch that reads said chip.
Unless you have gotten moisture in the ignition switch, at which point the quad will refuse to start. And moisture in the ignition switch is fairly common, as the bike will often be left outside.
If you leave the key in the ignition, the key has a rubber lip around the edge that will prevent this, but leaving the key in kind of negates the useability of the anti theft system.
Got a new Can Am in June - already had to change the ignition lock once…
I work in the construction industry, and one of the «side quests» I usually get tasked with is making inventory of tools, fixing up what can be fixed etc..
At one of my old jobs, I had quite the pile of old tools to go through, and a lot of this was pretty knackered, so I put aside everything I considered not worth the effort of repairing in a tool container outside, to be taken away once I had a trip to the dump.
One afternoon, I got a call from the cops - «we have stopped a guy with a lot of equipment, and some of it had stickers with the company name. We know you work there (small town) - can you come by and have a look at it, and see what belongs to you?»
As I was out driving, I just dropped in and had a look. The bugger had raided the container with all the broken tools. Some of them was even marked with «defect».
I told the cops what tools used to belong to us, and «no, I don’t want them back». The cops got to take the stuff to the dump, and saved me the effort
Tivoli for most people in Scandinavia is rarely the regular fixed-in-place amusement park.
It is mostly a mobile variant, where the various rides are designed around large trailers, and everything is set up for a short time on a vacant lot, a football pitch etc. It's usually powered by a huge generator.
Most cities and town in Scandinavia are too small to keep a full-time amusement park constantly in business, so this has become a business niche. There's only a handful of these tivolis around.
The main purpose of this is adressing peak loads.
The long term goal to adress polution, means more and more people will convert to electric cars. That means, there'll be a huge load increase on the grid.
When everyone comes home from work, parks the e-car and plugs it in for charging, starts making dinner, puts dirty clothes in the washer and starts it - along with all the neighbours, this create a surge, far surpassing the daily load average.
The national grid is designed for a certain max load. If we exceed that, there is currently no option, but to do rolling blackouts, or get brownouts here and there.
It's a much easier and better solution to peak demand, and that is to even out the load with surge pricing. If it's bloody expensive to plug in your e-car when you come home from work, you wait plugging it in until you go to bed, and the 'leccy price is low.
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