Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Ops Team

"We don't have an Ops team."

You do. It's your provider's Ops team. And when it goes pear-shaped their priorities are not necessarily yours.

Re: Should this be so easy?

"Maybe the world should have adopted different connectors for the two different voltages."

A lot of equipment these days is multi-voltage. That's a much better solution than adding yet another variety to the world's leads.

Re: A board with no insight

It should also be a warning to prospective customers. And existing ones, come to that.

Re: Own goal after own goal

"The employees aren't stupid, they can see exactly what the medium term effect will be, and they'll be the ones paying the price."

Don't get angry, get out.

Re: Shakedown? Extortion?

Issuing regulations - and it's GDPR which is the relevant set of regulations here - like all legislation needs to tread a fine line. If it's too specific it's full of loopholes and/or fails completely to deal with innovation. The best legislation sets out principles and lets some tribunal - a regulator or a court - handle the case-by-case specifics. On the one hand that builds up case law so there is a set of decisions which can be followed when circumstances are repeated, detailed reasoning on how to apply those decisions in future and flexibility to cope when something completely new comes along.

As such GDPR is pretty good as far as it goes. It's arguable that it could have enabled or even required the regulators to be more pro-active instead of sitting waiting for complaints to come in. I suspect the EU, with its ideas about gatekeepers, may work round to that.

Re: How to pay

You didn't mention a subscription-based search engine. If there was an ad-free, reliable search engine that respected a few operators such as +, -, and, not, or, etc would people subscribe? It's probably a moot point because if someone tried to set one up the usual suspects would improve their game for a year or so and roll over it.

Re: The race is ON!

Just leave the bodies lying around in the street as a warning to others.

Re: "activist" investor

They could double down - buy it and put Musk in to run it.

Re: Remember the Honda 50?

"But could be driven on a car licence. A Honda 90 needed a motorcycle licence."

You say that as if the M/C licence is a bad thing. But a rider on a provisional licence doesn't need a qualified rider as company, unlike a provisional driver. It was a cheaper alternative for those of limited means. The whole point of the three-wheelers like the Reliant Robin was that they could be driven on a M/C licence (legally indistinguishable from a M/C & sidecar!) so there was no need to obtain a full car licence.

Re: All a mess

AFAICS it was you who sold off your shares. There are many things for which to blame HMG but is selling Arm one of them?

Re: Connection

"So odd that Tesla is not on that list."

Not at all. Musk won't want to cannibalise his Powerwall market. It pains me to say it but that's the more sensible way to go. The requirements of EV charging and grid backup are not the same and not likely to be fully compatible for many if not most use cases.

Re: C(r)apita....there I've fixed that for you.

Fly by nights? No such luck, they're always there.

Re: Work From Where?

I wonder what happens to the offices, especially as one of the reasons for requiring them to come in was to justify the office space.

Re: How about the ministers go next?

Certainly having law in the mix is sensible - legislators pass laws. Economics? You need some economics input and having N economists you can certainly rely on having at a minimum N + 1 opinions. Political science - maybe the fewer the better.

But as to getting numerate and scientifically literate people involved there's a problem. On the sort of sites they frequent - such as this - there's a default assumption of all politicians being corrupt. However useful someone from STEM thinks they may be if they did go into politics how likely are they to take that step when they know how their peers will regard them. The assumption becomes self-fulfilling and we should avoid it.

Re: I need to look at how the test is done

It sounds strange to me that the "close to the body" test gives lower readings that the "at a distance" test.

They have different limits.

Re: Hype Curve 2.0

A better search engine would be one that isn't smart and always trying to double guess the user. Just stick go back to basics such as respecting key words such as "and", "or" and "not", and understanding that when a series of words are in quotes only hits which fully match the phrase are needed.