In the UK employers have to provide eye test vouchers for employees who use screen display equipment. I keep thinking that if the government knew anything about dev environments they'd be providing us with free hearing tests instead.
Regarding the policy being set at national level - I've seen mention of the Western Cape seceding - how realistic was that, and has this had any effect on that? I'm ex Durban/Johannesburg, abandoned the rainbow nation 20 or so years ago with zero confidence in its future, and I'm afraid it was the right call; part of me would love to return, and the WC (there's a pun there) seceding would interest me for a move there.
Natwest is RBS - there is no point interacting with them - useless. Same with many UK household names, once they reach a certain size you are not a person and what's in your head is of no interest to anyone.
Exactly, and "...the 1% took 85% of income growth and the situation has only worsened since. During that time, however, homicide rates showed nearly the opposite pattern". This is dishonest Guardian agenda. Even before getting to that dismissal the article never mentioned the word poverty which is often confused with inequality, probably deliberately by the likes of the Guardian who won't be happy until the UK has re-created the Venezuelan economy.
UK pushing hard on the multiculturalism agenda yet haven't even managed to unify Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. More variables - biting off more than they can chew.
"It's just as illegal to threaten someone with murder on the internet as it is on a street corner" -- this interests me. On a street corner the face-to-face threat is far more real and the threatened outcome more likely than on the internet where the lack of physical presence leads people to rant and vent in offensive ways that don't amount to much. Half the time the people engaged are on different continents with made up names, so even if someone got sufficiently worked up to pursue another s/he wouldn't get very far unless he was so psychologically divergent that frankly s/he's going to kill someone else soon enough that twitter policing is irrelevant. I think twitter, and possibly the net, should possibly be at least partially treated like MMA - sport, not taken too seriously, get in, take a beating, give a beating. I haven't give this much thought, but basically there seems to be no acknowledgment of the fact that the virtual world is not physical, and it seems to me that we interact with the two differently and that should be considered.
I have an HTC bootlooped by an OTA, hence my now having a OnePlus3. Getting fed up with all this nonsense. Seems to me the android ecosystem is just too wild west, especially for such an important device, and may now have to head to apple. I see I also have this EngineerMode, data usage 1.4MB since Aug 7, modify system settings enabled. When I tweeted them about the recent data collection issue they replied with "it's standard industry practice".
I was thinking something related this morning, that one of the reasons uptime is important to google, apart from the usual reasons, is because if they were switched off for a day people would realise the extent to which they have so many of their eggs in one basket, and a basket over which they have no control. I would expect that would trigger some concern, and significant numbers seeking alternatives, and building them.
For me it's the jarring noise. A coffeeshop tends to have consistent levels of muddied noise, whereas the office might be quiet and then suddenly a clear, loud voice starts, and another couple of clear, loud voices arrive - jarring. Also, office lights are too bright, they switch me off somehow. Then the erratic temperature - freezing for a couple of hours, then tropical for a few, then back to icy. The office is, ironically, the worst possible environment for getting any work done.
Yes, the first two lines of the front page: "Darcs is a free and open source, cross-platform version control system, like git, mercurial or svn but with a very different approach"
I thought there might be some comments on darcs in here. I've only just started learning OCaml so haven't yet used darcs, but am looking forward to trying it out.
I like the idea of visualising the decisions. Break down an issue into its constituent parts, then show all the graphs and see-saws - if you vote x, then it a, b, c will change like this, and l,m,n will change like this.
At my last job I probably did 20 hours of work a week due to the awful environment. I started burning out from frustration. I'm not convinced the number of hours is as important as the suitability of the environment.
On a related note, I've recently had two UK banks request more personal documents from me, and a video, for anti-fraud or anti-laundering, blah, blah reasons. When, not if, they get hacked, the intruders will have even greater ability to abuse my identity. Data protection acts are barking up the wrong tree - what we need are data limitation acts to require corporations to store as little data as possible.
Employee experience. The biggest problem at the company I recently left was inexperience. The company thought they could hire cheap and simply cross train and up-skill everyone. A FTSE 100 company. Eg a dev manager was a js dev now managing half the 200 odd dev dept. Hired mostly PHP devs who were all going to be cross trained as Go devs. My last manager had no management experience and was also the dept's Go tech lead, with no Go experience - a PHP dev, now starting at amazon, should be entertaining. Another Go dev on the team an ex-lawyer with two years dev experience as a ruby dev. The place was disorganised, frustrating, and not delivering. Toward the end of last year people started leaving, then more, then more - exodus. The dept has effectively collapsed as it's now a fraction of the size and a significant proportion of the remaining devs are new. It won't absolutely collapse because like all big corps they'll just keep hiring replacements and eventually paper over the cracks. They're now "restructuring", but the same rookies are still running the show so they're probably just going to botch it all over again, just in a different way.
What I found recently of someone who switched from another career to programming is not that they struggled with programming so much but that they struggled with the environment. I had the misfortune of working with an ex-lawyer, two years of programming experience. Hell. He also lacked the ability to have any sort of interesting conversation about programming as he had no background to reference.
"The very best and long lasting victories are made when you convince the loser that they've won." -- that's catchy, but I don't agree. Often the result will be "damn that was close, better enhance the defences". Whereas the ignorant just carry on.
Bezos will then start putting pressure on farmers. I don't know how these things work in the states, but the dairy industry would be the prime example in the UK.
I can't stand these subway maps. I carry a copy of the geographic tube map on my phone. I want to relate the locations to reality, and these subway maps fail to do that. I could possibly go along with a geographic map that changed scale toward the outside, as long as it included contour lines to indicate the reducing scale.