Logging all phone calls... well the exchanges probably do that anyway (at least the numbers not the actual calls... you'd need shitloads of storage to do that).
Logging all emails? Huh? Not all email goes via an ISP. You can't make everyone log all their emails themselves - I don't believe this part of the leglislation is practical or indeed possible.
A few years ago a company came up with a compression which was actually rather good, using fractals. It was called FIF. They made the mistake of greed ovtaking common sense and tried to charge for a license to write compressors for it... The result - when is the last time you saw an FIF file?
If these guys don't have an open format they will simply go the same way.
There is no shortage. I know several people who are skilled, enthusiastic, etc. and are unemployed. The problem is IT companies are unwilling to train, even just a little bit.
It is common for jobs to require experience in a specific compiler, or even a specific version of a compiler, not just C++. Employers arent interested in skills, they're interested in buzzwords - agencies cater for this by essentially stripping your CV down to a list of keywords (I've seen a few agencies' CVs... they are awful).
This is the only industry where people can require '2 Years Microsoft Visual C++ Service Pack 4' and still complain about a lack of candidates...
(you may laugh... I was once turned down for a job because I had been using VC 4.2 not 5.0).
You still see the occasional job which requires 8 years java experience... even though java isn't 8 years old.
Bullshit. Here's three for a start. these have *not* been fixed with service pack 1.
1. The find dialog doesn't update properly (do 'find', delete the files... they stay in the dialog even though they have been deleted).
2. The window focussing is completely shagged. Ctrl-tab has a habit of bringing a completely random application to the top. Highlighting a breakpoint in VC++ does the same. It makes debugging a complete dog.
3. The Jet database engine can't run 'select' statements on indexed dec() fields - this is a bug that will *never* be fixed. MS don't care any more... they've dropped support for Access in MDAC 2.6 anyway.
If I thought about it I could probably come up with about another 10. These are just the ones that have annoyed me the most this week.
Many lawyers in the UK so this. It's called 'no win no fee'. They examine your case, and if (as in this case it seems) the other party hasn't got a leg to stand on they go for maximum damages from the other party (including harassment, stress, anything else they can dream up) to pay their fees.
The disadvantage of this is that you rarely if ever get anything (except smug satisfaction) at the end, since it all goes on the remaining legal fees after you've won.
Over here it's rare to find anyone who's even heard of AIM... they all use ICQ (despite it being a haven for porn merchants it's still useful). Loads of people put their ICQ numbers on their websites - ever seen a website with an AIM number on it? I never have.
If any protocol needs opening I reckon it's the ICQ one (actually it needs sorting out first - it's a bloody awful protocol to run through a firewall).
It could be cultural I guess.. In the US everyone uses AOL because it's the 'local' product*. In the UK very few people use it, since there are better and cheaper alternatives (I think freeserve still has something like 80% of the market).
The way it's going, though, it's all irrelevant,
as java chatrooms are becoming more popular and
people are just chatting through their browsers. We won't be using separate clients in a couple of years.
Tony
* Original AOL was launched over here as EOL, which proved to be even *more* unpopular, so they gave up just used AOL.
"We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the hills..."
Hmm... It sounded OK 45 years ago but it's a bit stupid for a VP of a company in the 21st century to be paraphrasing it (especially since he's talking bullshit. If he comes near my firewall and tries to reconfigure it I'll kick him in the 'nads).
Sadly, I was mistaken. I just tried 1.92, and I won't be using KDE again for some time after this... They seem to have settled on this font layout. It looks bloody awful even on a 1280x1024 monitor. I'd hate to see it on an 800x600. Clicking on the 'K' menu brings up a menu so large that it won't fit on the screen, and as a side effect automatically starts the screen saver! The columns don't line up in the file browser, which looks generally messy, and the icon titles are wrapped at ludicrous places 'netscap...e','CD-Ro...m'.
Oh, and you can't remove that annoying menu from the top, because the theme support crashes constantly (1.91 was better for theming. In the new version you can't change the style of the title bars any more). The 'show menu bar' checkbox is completely ignored.
I know it's a beta, but it's *worse* than 1.91... God I hope KDE isn't going to go the way of mozilla...
Ahh... They said it was the latest beta (1.92). Explains why the yucky windows 3.1 fonts & non-working setup wizard have come back. I'll have to rip it off my box again & try the latest beta.
NT4, up to and including service pack 6a, doesn't enable DMA support by default, let alone UDMA66. M$ don't document this (although they did eventually provide an app to enable it). I would bet 99.9% of NT installations are still using PIO mode and wondering why their hard disks are so slow...
Actually it's not an OSS problem. Bad software is generally caused by:
1) Bad initial design, 2) Bad/Inexperienced programmers, 3) Bad management.
OSS suffers from the first two, but peer review tends to weed out bad programmers pretty fast (at least in larger projects, less so in smaller ones).
Commercial software suffers from all three. The pressure from management to meet some imaginary 'deadline' (often invented after two many beers during an 'important meeting') means software goes out barely tested if at all. In 10 years as a programmer I've never seen a program get more than an hours testing before it got sent out.
It's OK for everyone in the US. I wish I had the chance to gripe about DSL - the fastest connection available in the UK is the humble 56K dialup link (unless you want to pay for ISDN, a snip at £200 ($300) a month).
I'm OK with WinDSL, if having machines shipped with it in will kick BT up their arse and get them to support DSL (although they'll probably charge about £1000 a month for the priviledge...)
I hope they don't make a simpsons movie in the same way they did the southpark one... Some things don't stay funny longer than a half hour show.
(Southpark was one of the few films I have walked out on before the end... Did they *have* to have everyone bursting into song every 30 seconds? And do Americans really hate Canadians that much?)
My gf was badly burned by this. She grew up with Spectrums & stuff, and was into programming at an early age. However her school didn't believe that women could understand computers, and forbade her from taking CS lessons (Oh did I mention this is the same school who put someone with a 140+ IQ in a mental school for a year?).
There were allegedly several conversations at college that went like this..
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to work with computers."
"Oh it says here you can type. Have you considered doing secretarial work?"
"No, I want to work with computers."
"Ahh you mean word processor operator!"
"Aargh!" (hits head on desk) "No, I want to work with computers!!!"
etc...
Eventually she came out with a typing and administration qualification. Yeah. Loads of use.
I am now teaching her C, and she's really getting into hacking around with Linux. I'll try to bash a few heads to get her onto a CS course at college but I'm not hopeful really (realistically to do it properly she would have to start again at O & A levels and it would take about 8 years before she got a degree).
I get really angry at an education system that labels people then tries to force them into stereotypes. Anything that changes that (even slightly) is welcome.
Tony
(Apologies to all the US types who have no idea what O and A levels are, but I have no idea about your 'grade' system either, so we're even...:-)
BT is legendary for overcharging for stuff like this. The cost of a 64K leased line is something like £6000 per year... I doubt that something offering 128K will be any less. Still out of reach of anyone but medium-large business.
BTs pricing structure is crippling the use of the internet in the UK. Oftel always make these documents ambiguous enough to get away with it too (This one does too - it allows BT to add an arbitrary amount to the cost for 'overheads').
Digital VCR is just the next logical step now that Digital TV is taking off... You'd need heaps of memory (flashram?) though which would make it very expensive.
I saw a bit about these on 'Tomorrows World' a couple of months back (they had a huge hotwired version the size of a filing cabinet). It was the same device (I recognise the screenshot) so I guess they've managed to shrink it a bit.
When I studied (8 yrs ago) we ended up learning lots of obsolete/irrelevant/stupid stuff just because the lecturers who knew it were there (Ada was touted as the 'next big thing' and we were forced to write all our Cobol projects in lowercase because uppercase was 'old fashioned'). I was actually discouraged from wasting computer time by learning 'C'.... oh and there was not even any internal email let alone internet acccess!
Talking to students recently they seem to be learning better stuff (C++ & SQL come to mind) so it may be that a degree might be worth something nowadays. At least now that internet access is fairly common you can at least teach yourself anything you need to learn while you're connected to a nice 10MB+ link....
Personally I think the review created rather a straw man of one view of the Church, then then criticised that. Harmless enough, and actually irrelevant for the vast majority of people - people will make their own minds up based on the information they have, and the net increases the availability of that information.
This so-called 'traditional church' which is supposed to be so inflexible (but inexplicably has survived 2000 years of social change) if it existed would deserve to die out. However in the real world the structures, traditions, etc. are merely a means to an end (leading people to God) - if the traditions fail to do that then forget them, and do something different. That is what appears to be happening - people creating their own 'church' based on their own experiences, needs, etc.
For myself, If Christianity[1] didn't embrace the things that make up my life (including things like the net, nightclubs, etc.) it could never be real. However it proves to be remarkably resilient. This is enough for me.
Tony
[1] In my case. I can only speak for my own experience, but I also believe the same is essentially true for any other expression of faith.
Slashdot Mirror
Logging all phone calls... well the exchanges probably do that anyway (at least the numbers not the actual calls... you'd need shitloads of storage to do that).
Logging all emails? Huh? Not all email goes via an ISP. You can't make everyone log all their emails themselves - I don't believe this part of the leglislation is practical or indeed possible.
A few years ago a company came up with a compression which was actually rather good, using fractals. It was called FIF. They made the mistake of greed ovtaking common sense and tried to charge for a license to write compressors for it... The result - when is the last time you saw an FIF file?
If these guys don't have an open format they will simply go the same way.
There is no shortage. I know several people who are skilled, enthusiastic, etc. and are unemployed. The problem is IT companies are unwilling to train, even just a little bit.
It is common for jobs to require experience in a specific compiler, or even a specific version of a compiler, not just C++. Employers arent interested in skills, they're interested in buzzwords - agencies cater for this by essentially stripping your CV down to a list of keywords (I've seen a few agencies' CVs... they are awful).
This is the only industry where people can require '2 Years Microsoft Visual C++ Service Pack 4' and still complain about a lack of candidates...
(you may laugh... I was once turned down for a job because I had been using VC 4.2 not 5.0).
You still see the occasional job which requires 8 years java experience... even though java isn't 8 years old.
Tony
only 1 of which ever is actually seen in public
Bullshit. Here's three for a start. these have *not* been fixed with service pack 1.
1. The find dialog doesn't update properly (do 'find', delete the files... they stay in the dialog even though they have been deleted).
2. The window focussing is completely shagged. Ctrl-tab has a habit of bringing a completely random application to the top. Highlighting a breakpoint in VC++ does the same. It makes debugging a complete dog.
3. The Jet database engine can't run 'select' statements on indexed dec() fields - this is a bug that will *never* be fixed. MS don't care any more... they've dropped support for Access in MDAC 2.6 anyway.
If I thought about it I could probably come up with about another 10. These are just the ones that have annoyed me the most this week.
Tony
Many lawyers in the UK so this. It's called 'no win no fee'. They examine your case, and if (as in this case it seems) the other party hasn't got a leg to stand on they go for maximum damages from the other party (including harassment, stress, anything else they can dream up) to pay their fees.
The disadvantage of this is that you rarely if ever get anything (except smug satisfaction) at the end, since it all goes on the remaining legal fees after you've won.
Tony
Over here it's rare to find anyone who's even heard of AIM... they all use ICQ (despite it being a haven for porn merchants it's still useful). Loads of people put their ICQ numbers on their websites - ever seen a website with an AIM number on it? I never have.
If any protocol needs opening I reckon it's the ICQ one (actually it needs sorting out first - it's a bloody awful protocol to run through a firewall).
It could be cultural I guess.. In the US everyone uses AOL because it's the 'local' product*. In the UK very few people use it, since there are better and cheaper alternatives (I think freeserve still has something like 80% of the market).
The way it's going, though, it's all irrelevant,
as java chatrooms are becoming more popular and
people are just chatting through their browsers. We won't be using separate clients in a couple of years.
Tony
* Original AOL was launched over here as EOL, which proved to be even *more* unpopular, so they gave up just used AOL.
"We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the hills..."
Hmm... It sounded OK 45 years ago but it's a bit stupid for a VP of a company in the 21st century to be paraphrasing it (especially since he's talking bullshit. If he comes near my firewall and tries to reconfigure it I'll kick him in the 'nads).
Tony
Sadly, I was mistaken. I just tried 1.92, and
I won't be using KDE again for some time after this... They seem to have settled on this font layout. It looks bloody awful even
on a 1280x1024 monitor. I'd hate to see it on an 800x600. Clicking on the 'K' menu brings up a menu so large that it won't fit on the screen, and as a side effect automatically starts the screen saver! The columns don't line up in the file browser, which looks generally messy, and the icon titles are wrapped at ludicrous places 'netscap...e','CD-Ro...m'.
Oh, and you can't remove that annoying menu from the top, because the theme support crashes constantly (1.91 was better for theming. In the
new version you can't change the style of the
title bars any more). The 'show menu bar' checkbox is completely ignored.
I know it's a beta, but it's *worse* than 1.91... God I hope KDE isn't going to go the way of mozilla...
Ahh... They said it was the latest beta (1.92). Explains why the yucky windows 3.1 fonts & non-working setup wizard have come back. I'll have
to rip it off my box again & try the latest beta.
Tony
NT4, up to and including service pack 6a, doesn't enable DMA support by default, let alone UDMA66. M$ don't document this (although they did eventually provide an app to enable it). I would bet 99.9% of NT installations are still using PIO mode and wondering why their hard disks are so slow...
Actually it's not an OSS problem. Bad software is generally caused by:
1) Bad initial design,
2) Bad/Inexperienced programmers,
3) Bad management.
OSS suffers from the first two, but peer review tends to weed out bad programmers pretty fast (at least in larger projects, less so in smaller ones).
Commercial software suffers from all three. The pressure from management to meet some imaginary 'deadline' (often invented after two many beers during an 'important meeting') means software goes out barely tested if at all. In 10 years as a programmer I've never seen a program get more than an hours testing before it got sent out.
Tony
It's OK for everyone in the US. I wish I had the chance to gripe about DSL - the fastest connection available in the UK is the humble 56K dialup link (unless you want to pay for ISDN, a snip at £200 ($300) a month).
I'm OK with WinDSL, if having machines shipped with it in will kick BT up their arse and get them to support DSL (although they'll probably charge about £1000 a month for the priviledge...)
Tony
I hope they don't make a simpsons movie in the same way they did the southpark one... Some things don't stay funny longer than a half hour show.
(Southpark was one of the few films I have walked out on before the end... Did they *have* to have everyone bursting into song every 30 seconds? And do Americans really hate Canadians that much?)
$0.01 for 'hemos.com'
Tony
Wow... Graduates??? I'm only on £25K after 7 years....
The difference is probably because I'm in the North??
Tony
>It would take 3 days to boot and wouldn't boot on sunday
Hmm... Jesus rose on a sunday, so perhaps that should read 'It would take 3 days to boot and only on a sunday'
Or 'It would take 3 days to boot and wouldn't boot on saturday', since sunday was a tradition added by the 1st centura church.
Tony (Christian, not anti-anything and has no problems with processes that create zombies).
btw. Anyone who doesn't find the whole parody-thing hillariously funny needs to seriously get a life IMHO.
My gf was badly burned by this. She grew up with Spectrums & stuff, and was into programming at an early age. However her school didn't believe that women could understand computers, and forbade her from taking CS lessons (Oh did I mention this is the same school who put someone with a 140+ IQ in a mental school for a year?).
:-)
There were allegedly several conversations at college that went like this..
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to work with computers."
"Oh it says here you can type. Have you considered doing secretarial work?"
"No, I want to work with computers."
"Ahh you mean word processor operator!"
"Aargh!" (hits head on desk) "No, I want to work with computers!!!"
etc...
Eventually she came out with a typing and administration qualification. Yeah. Loads of use.
I am now teaching her C, and she's really getting into hacking around with Linux. I'll try to bash a few heads to get her onto a CS course at college but I'm not hopeful really (realistically to do it properly she would have to start again at O & A levels and it would take about 8 years before she got a degree).
I get really angry at an education system that labels people then tries to force them into stereotypes. Anything that changes that (even slightly) is welcome.
Tony
(Apologies to all the US types who have no idea what O and A levels are, but I have no idea about your 'grade' system either, so we're even...
BT is legendary for overcharging for stuff like this. The cost of a 64K leased line is something like £6000 per year... I doubt that something offering 128K will be any less. Still out of reach of anyone but medium-large business.
BTs pricing structure is crippling the use of the internet in the UK. Oftel always make these documents ambiguous enough to get away with it too (This one does too - it allows BT to add an arbitrary amount to the cost for 'overheads').
Digital VCR is just the next logical step now that Digital TV is taking off... You'd need heaps of memory (flashram?) though which would make it very expensive.
I saw a bit about these on 'Tomorrows World' a couple of months back (they had a huge hotwired version the size of a filing cabinet). It was the same device (I recognise the screenshot) so I guess they've managed to shrink it a bit.
They're all over the place...
Try here
(Fastest from UK).
URLs pop up on usenet from time to time... checkout dejanews for an image near you.
Looks like someone at M$ tried to update the page and botched it...
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch 'CInt'
/security/inc/scripts.txt, line 279
It just starts appearing at 5pm & I have to go home (I have a life unfortunately).
I suppose I could quickly setup a cron job to start sometime in the evening...
When I studied (8 yrs ago) we ended up learning lots of obsolete/irrelevant/stupid stuff just because the lecturers who knew it were there (Ada was touted as the 'next big thing' and we were forced to write all our Cobol projects in lowercase because uppercase was 'old fashioned'). I was actually discouraged from wasting computer time by learning 'C'.... oh and there was not even any internal email let alone internet acccess!
Talking to students recently they seem to be learning better stuff (C++ & SQL come to mind) so it may be that a degree might be worth something nowadays. At least now that internet access is fairly common you can at least teach yourself anything you need to learn while you're connected to a nice 10MB+ link....
Personally I think the review created rather a straw man of one view of the Church, then then criticised that. Harmless enough, and actually irrelevant for the vast majority of people - people will make their own minds up based on the information they have, and the net increases the availability of that information.
This so-called 'traditional church' which is supposed to be so inflexible (but inexplicably has survived 2000 years of social change) if it existed would deserve to die out. However in the real world the structures, traditions, etc. are merely a means to an end (leading people to God) - if the traditions fail to do that then forget them, and do something different. That is what appears to be happening - people creating their own 'church' based on their own experiences, needs, etc.
For myself, If Christianity[1] didn't embrace the things that make up my life (including things like the net, nightclubs, etc.) it could never be real. However it proves to be remarkably resilient. This is enough for me.
Tony
[1] In my case. I can only speak for my own experience, but I also believe the same is essentially true for any other expression of faith.
$200 difference between a 400 and a 450? Surely a typo...