Re: Hybrid work ?
I'd imagine its also the most expensive for them. The price of a single day return is around 3 or 4 days of the season ticket equivalent. And if its short notice....
8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Read somewhere in the last couple of days that boomers (of which I'm apparently one) are the most unhappy of the randomly names generations. The report said it was probably due to excessive competition for resources (including partners???).
I also read a report suggesting people in the US from the 50s-the end of lead in petrol had IQs 5 points lower on average and up to 9 points. I guess other report was published before that one came out.
A few years ago I looked into knocking up some HV FET stuff for connection to a central controller for a modular Inverter/charger/MPPT and was told it would cost me $40,000 just for the spice parameters to simulate the process I was trying to get access to, without which I couldn't even be sure the process would do what I want!
I'm just completing some designs for a wind generator that should pay for itself in a couple of years (no planning permission required!) but thats for 12/24V output and integrating it into the grid/house system would require A) putting an OCR on the useless smart meter to judge prices and consumption, B)an inverter that would double the cost of the system despite only needing to cost about £100 more than the bloody legally required transformer interface, C) a whole other collection of over-expensive bits and pieces to get in the way of using your own power and sharing the excess with the grid (or not should that stop working and prevent you using your own power.
Or bloody bureaucracy if you like to avoid checking things. Surely its not beyond the realms of amateur engineering to have the test equipment the engineer is using to spot its not connecting to the users premises and for the users equipment to say when its on so the engineer, no sorry the fucking equipment, can say job done, job not completed as customer equipment not connected/powered on cos the line has been powered. Or at least make the fucker take a timed photo of the output connector.
There's at least one rover that could do with a drone flying over its solar panels, and maybe blowing away the sand round its wheels. Would be amazing if we could send a solar powered microlight to carry one of these around mars and get it to do a bit of housework! Though those thermally induced tornadoes may put the dampers on that!
They offer different ways of thinking about problems. You may never need to use these different ways - much in the same way as I doubt you use more than 10% of the standard library of any of the languages you mentioned because you can normally craft the other 90%'s functionality from the 10%. Indeed the whole world runs on code with less than 100 basic assembler functions and several modes. You may, however, realise that if you'd known them earlier you may have used them, or at least the ideas behind them because they could have provided better solutions to problems you were working on.
The last 70 years has seen some of the brightest and best educated people in history work on different languages and ideologies in software and hardware and as someone who came over from electronics and chip design with a lot of computing to IT I have never felt I have done anything but scratch the surface of this vast resource of tricks tips and tools for getting thinking to run on bits of silicon, copper and any other bit of crap you can connect to it. Since I stopped working full time in the industry 16 years ago I've dabbled in things - you can get lots of free books on learning languages and AI and software engineering - and I've learnt many things I wish I knew when I was working (also check BOFH series).
I'd like to think you'd enjoy the journey as much as I have but you may be too stuck in your ways and defensive of what you've already learned - the language/OS/paradigm arguments you see in these comments threads make it obvious that once people have devoted a lot of effort and soul into learning something they defend that knowledge from other knowledge quite vigorously - I've done it and do it myself still but at least now I know I'm pissing in my own chips.
I've also been made redundant twice - first time when I was going to resign (Result!), second not so much fun. Both times where when the market for jobs was shit. Fortunately neither time was I forced into finding another job quickly, which, even with useful skills can be a bloody painful and stressful time. The first time I got made redundant the only options were to work abroad to use my skills, something I really didnt fancy as pretty much any post would have been a step down! The second time I'd branched into IT but it would still have involved moving around the UK at the least, and the expense of moving house would have been horrendous. I have been incredibly lucky in that twice I've moved and had difficulty selling the old house but managed to rent it to friends (at a considerable discount from market rates) and as such have made more money from property than I've earned. I doubt anyone being made redundant now will have anything like the opportunities we had, and many will probably be legally blocked from using a lot of their accumulated knowledge!
I worked for a small council where the staff had avoided being outsourced by not revealing the secrets of their job to contractors and so had one of the smallest most efficient IT depts, For some reason I got employed there and one of the originals was on holiday and I needed to access some data in a program of hers and so did a bit of digging, sussed it out and got what I needed to do working. The look on her face when I told her what I'd done was a picture. I did also inform her that here secret was safe with me and the code I'd written was lacking my normal detailed comments and left it in her capable hands and wandered off into retirement.
A lot of people complain about VB but in the hands of an experienced programmer you could do stuff in minutes that seemingly take weeks now. An old systems manager I worked with used to love spending as much time as possible being at MS training courses and managed to get us upgraded from MSLQ4.2 to 6 IIRC and came back after four or six weeks of learning the new menu arrangements and upgraded everything and sat in a meeting explaining the new features we'd be able to use in the business only to find I'd already implemented them on the old system simply by writing VB and C++ code to do the things I wanted. I didnt want to show him up in the meeting but he seemed to be hell bent on me writing a lot of changes to my code and having me cancelling a holiday to get it done in time! The code changes took about an hour - just replacing my subroutines with the new bright shiny MSQL6 API calls. It took a lot longer for him to talk to me again!
I used to at least try and get an idea of the processes and flows of what the code I was meant to be writing were. Once you've done a few you can sometimes smell what is really needed and accidentally show the customer something you lashed up once the PHB has been convinced you've written the code in the specs. Its a pleasure when the customers eyes light up as they realise this is what they wanted all along before being dragged through 30 meetings with people who just wanted to take money off them.
That was because women were not encouraged to study sciences! Indeed a friend of mine at the local Girls Grammar School nearly started WW3 before she was allowed to study A'Level sciences at the school. This would be 1974! When went to Uni 3 years later there were only 3 women on my Electrical And Electronic Eng course out of over 60 and they did not receive a warm welcome from a large part of the intake. It must have been hell for them as their is nothing worse than obsessive sexist autistic engineering students on their case, something I only found out after graduation as I tended to skip most classes.
and spent a lot of his time tracing his family line back the the 13thC (probably Norman) and my mums back far enough to discover some sheep stealing which pleased him far to much. He also devote a huge amount of time to the Geneology of the British people and alas died before he finished a rather comprehensive book covering blood groups, place names and a huge amount of historical facts thrown in. I've got the text but not the associated maps and pictures to go with it.
What I can say is its very likely the author does have Finish ancestry - they were part of the Vikings invasion, and introduced not only their genes but ones they imported from all over Europe, Turkey and North Africa. Its also worth remembering the Normans were in fact Vikings who settled Normandy and it seems it was only when they came to the UK that they decided to try and avoid breeding with the locals for a couple of hundred years or so and establish the poisonous class system which still infests the place.
I took VR in my early 30s, 30 years ago. Didn't go back to working for the same company (or industry) but I'm still waiting for the chips I designed then to turn up on the market at the price we could have delivered them then!
I can buy a chip with tens of billions of transistors that work at the same speed the ones I designed with hundreds of transistors but none so cheap...
Yes I'm still bitter!
"I suspect that there are some bright people in the civil service" Not so much - one thing the external contractors are good at is spotting people who know what they are talking about and lifting them out of the way one way or another. You'd be surprised the number of people who had a great salary for a couple of years before being in-outsourced.
You get free coffee for health insurance points? When I was a long distance runner it became apparent pretty quickly coffee was your enemy and not your friend when it came to building stamina. No-one in my rowing crew drinks coffee on the day of a race either.