I once arrived at a (fortunately) short project to find the specification/consisted/ of:
1) The project will use Microsoft Access, because the client has already bought enough copies of that.
2) The project will cost UKP 2000 or less.
3) The developer will not speak to the end users: they're too busy doing real work.
4) Whatever gets delivered gets vetted by the client management. Before any money is paid.
I did about 2Ks worth of what we guessed would be useful software and bailed. The users were/intransigent/ about not changing their working practices (which consisted of/RETYPING/ Word documents with minor changes in each draft), utterly unable to make decisions, and utterly unable to understand that there are some things Access is not a good choice for.
I have no idea what the hell happened at the end, I'm just glad I didn't stick around to find out.
It's not the first time a project has been like that, it's just an extreme case. And yet all these users are surprised by the software that results...
My God, the waste of SPACE, man, think of the WASTE. Our office is open-plan. We have rows of 4 desks, front-to-front, so there are 8 people in a block. There are 2 blocks past the walkway and 9 blocks down the office, making a total of ~80 people in one open space. At any given moment it's possible to hear 2 arguments, 2 landlines ringing, 3 mobiles ringing, eighteen people typing and something beeping insistantly. What's it's not possible to do is think... but it is much more space efficient.
I used to have a stack of file cabinets next to my desk, but they took them away... now there's NOTHING between me (&my screens) and the loud conversations at the walkway junction I'm next to...
Mind you, I only have *2* hours to be here now, but the last few months have been Annoying.
Various sources, including Code Complete quote something like 15 minutes to get back into the flow of writing code.
And an average interruption frequency of ~1 minute.
I can, from my desk, while writing this, hear two conversations whose words are audible, several which aren't. One person giggling, and easily half a dozen phones have rung during the writing of this.
There are people who are good software engineers. There are people who aren't. The issue with the industry in general is that there's too bloody many of the latter, usually because "there's good money in IT". I know a lot of VERY good software engineers. It's in their blood, it's what they DO, it's what God put them on this planet for. And they spend their entire lives fixing the crap that the others cause.
Here I am, I'm a damn good software engineer. Why am I posting to/.? Because I'm waiting for a compile to finish, because the makefile is so badly written it might as well not dependency check, but I'm not allowed to fix it because it's "complicated"
It might well be complicated to people who don't do this stuff in their sleep, that's not a reason to not let the rest of us work.
All around me I see people who don't really want to do this. They're here for the money. They're talking about football, or beer or just about anything rather than getting on with being a software engineer. Because being a software engineer is what they put in the box on the credit card application forms and that's all.
They don't really want to do it, so they don't do it well. It's just a job. I bet there are people at MacDonalds that actually WANT to work in the fast food industry and it must drive them nuts that most of the people around them only smile at the customers because if they don't they get fired.
There must be lawyers who really/believe/ in what they're doing, in gaining justice or representing their clients and so on, but they're drowned out by hordes of people who are there because it's either be a lawyer or watch Oprah and being a lawyer buys bigger BMWs.
Most of the people in the IT industry are doing the bare minimum to get by without being fired, and that, unfortunately, includes the interviewers...
I ask an interview question I admit to stealing from someone else: "We're going to write a computer simulation of Monopoly. Talk me through the sorts of classes you'd build."
There's no correct answer. But going "huh?" or aimlessly flailing gets you a fail. {Actually this was flummuxed once by a chap who was from Eygpt and had never played Monopoly... Since he was the strongest candidate out of the group otherwise he was hired...}
Other results? People destined to be VB programmers (and other low life forms) start talking about arrays of names of squares.
Proper OO developers start saying things like "there's a board, it's got squares... some of them are ownable and they charge rent, some of the ownables can be built on.. squares are an abstract base they have a successor to move to, ownable extends square for squares with a price, street extends ownable, station extends ownable.." Then they ask for a bigger sheet of paper.
I'm not that interested in exactly what they do. I'm just interested in the process. The people I want around me get excited when someone asks them to do something vaguely challenging and the trick becomes getting them to/stop/ writing or drawing or talking. The others regard it as a chore to do anything like thinking.
Amusingly, I've just changed my identity (for a perfectly legal, albeit not common, reason) and the experiences have been both entertaining and somewhat worrying.
I arrive at a bank. I hand them a passbook for an account opened in, like, 1976 by my mother. It's never been updated since so there's no signature on the account. And I succeed in changing the name AND the mailing address attached to the account in one go. Oh, to further complicate things, my current gender differs from the one attached to the accounts..
Required: 1 birth certificate in old name. Easily obtained in about 1/2 hour from the registry office. 1 statutory declaration. Mine was drawn up properly, witnessed by a second solicitor, but as a friend put it, it's just some typing with magic writing on it that everyone trusts. I have no doubt one could knock up a forgery in about ten minutes. And they were looking at a PHOTOCOPY of it. And a driving licence in my new name which has the new mailing address on it.
Now the only hard part of that to get is the latter - again, mine is legit. But fake driving licences are not hard to get hold of... the new photocards may make it marginally harder, but I doubt it would pose a serious problem to people with scanners and high-res printers.
But given what I was doing I'd have expected them to phone and check up on at least one of the documents. No - they just photocopied the things (to protect their backsides in case of problems) and got on with things.
And so this continued.. bank after bank after bank, my AA membership, my investment accounts, my inland revenue information...
In fact Barclaycard and the Halifax bank were the only hard ones. Barclaycard because they allegedly have no idea how to rename an existing account - complete crap if you ask me, afterall half their userbase is likely to change their name when they get married.. So they're creating me a new account, closing the old one and doing a balance transfer. I'm expecting this not to work, by the way - if they run a credit check for the new account they'll find there's no history of me...
Halifax managed to order me a new card. Which arrived in an envelope addressed to me in my new name, but which had my old name on the front.
So two places had problems because of incompetence. Everyone else just let me do it. I don't think a single one has done more than photocopy already second generation photocopies of documents and then start typing into databases.
Several of them have done this stuff over the phone, given cursory access checks. Like, knowing my postcode as well as the account number. {Having not moved that long ago, I read the postcode off the same bit of paper as the account number..:-}
I'm surprised identity theft doesn't happen MORE often..
It doesn't violate the DP act; Government Departments are covered by it, except where they can plead "national security".
It doesn't violate the Human Rights Act for much the same reason. And also the various EU laws will be overriden at national level.
What it does violate is common sense. We can't archive our mailing list in any sensible way - we can store the raw text, but indexing it's just a pain, and we're a dozen people sending maybe 300 mails a week. Unless someone's invented a new storage media this is FUD.
I bet you, what they want is to be able to target people without naming them, so they can use their association tracking things to tap everyone connected with targets without having to come up with reasons for each person, and the newspapers have got all huffy about it.
Our current machinery runs faster than us, swims faster than us, flies MUCH better than we can. Our toys can breath atmospheres that would kill us, use temperatures that would burn us or freeze us. They can survive against the vacuum of space and the pressures of the depths of the oceans.
Why is it such a common idea that thinking is human and human alone?
"The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters. It also stores things in perfect quality."
Sorry, you need to learn some information theory and some biochemistry and some neurology.
Neurons are not complicated beasts. Not any more than any other cell, really. They're not as simple as transistors - they're more like integrators over their inputs. There are approx 10^11 neurons. They each have about 10^3 connections.
One could therefore model the static architecture with an array of 10^11 neurons. Each one would need 1000 records of a connection & a weight. Say a (5 byte) integer number and a float weight. 9k per neuron. Let's say 10. 10k=10^5. We need 10^16 bytes of storage.
10^3 = 1Kbyte, 10^6 = 1Mbyte, 10^9 = 1Gbyte, 10^12 = 1Tbyte. So we need 10,000 Terabytes of storage.
Don't get me wrong, that's not a small amount. I don't have that in my living room. On the other hand, we definitely know it will fit in a device filling a couple of litres and weighing a kilo and a half and that neurons aren't the most space efficient storage devices we know of.
Realtime processing the integration aspects of all of this is left as an exercise for those readers with supercomputers.
As for the "perfect quality", remember what the inputs to it look like. The blind spot in your vision that you can't see. The fact that your peripheral vision is monochrome that's conveniently forgotten. The fact that some of the inputs are a tenth of a second behind the "real" world, and your mental model is backdated to cope.
If the inputs were perfect you wouldn't get deja vu, or mistakenly recognise strangers and M.C.Escher wouldn't have had the fun in his life doing all those drawings that are so nearly convincely of real things.
Biochemically, neurons are a mess. Hence you get drunk, hallucinate, have trips.
Perfect? Nowhere near. You just/think/ you are, just like you think your vision is a continous view without a hole in the middle.
So.. the law is there in an effort to thwart the will of the people to have representation?
Way to go!! Democracy in action!!!
{Yes. I know the UK system is similarly flawed. No. I don't like that either.}
Re:A couple of questions for you...
on
Death March
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· Score: 1
I have to say I have much the same attitude. As far as I can tell, contractors in the UK are a slightly different breed from contractors in the US - US ones seem to be employees that earn slightly more but don't get benefits. Here in the UK contractors are employed more on short term things, we run our own limited companies (corporations) and submit invoices for our time.
And I meet an awful lot of contractors who share my view on things. We're the infantry. We get paid money so PHBs can order us to do stuff. We do what they ask. They frequently ask us to do boneheaded stuff, but we do it anyway, because no-one listens.
I can't get emotionally invoved with the companies. I'm here for three months, six months - nine months is a long contract. I can't start developing a pride in what's going on, because there's rarely anything to get proud about. The only thing that keeps me sane is that my future is not vested in these companies, it's in my hands. The sight of permies who are supposed to have a future in these companies is terrifying as they watch management power-diving them at the ground. Us contractors have parachutes, exit routes, limited involvement. These permies signed on to have a future here and they can see the PHBs thrwing that future away in a morass of inept management.
``I thought the DMCA supported reverse-engineering for interoperabillity? Compatability with a file system DEFINATELY is an interoperability issue''
I don't know about the US, but in the EU, one is expressly allowed to reverse engineer things like file and disk formats. One has to make reasonable attempts to obtain the information another way (asking Microsoft would count) and if that isn't forthcoming - you can legally reverse engineer the format. The idea is to prevent people being locked into formats that then end up not being supported or them being unable to move to rival products.
The relevent bits of law have been incorporated into most, if not all, of the EU member states legislation.
Basically, the work can just be moved to a different location and MS can't do a thing about it.
Actually, in the EU, reverse engineering is SPECIFICALLY legal. There was an EU directive which has been incorporated into most of the member states legislation which grants you, if you own a legal copy of the software, to decompile it, to disassemble it, to watch it calling things...
There are provisos about what intent justifies these actions: hacking about with, say, Word to produce a filter to load Word documents would be covered, because Microsoft won't document the format to allow you to use the files {IANAL but as I read it, if they'll TELL you the format, you're not supposed to reverse engineer it}. The intention of those provisos would seem to be to prevent people being locked into file formats that then fall into disuse and hence to be unable to access their data, but they're pretty broad-ranging.
Now under UK law, the fact that that license attempts to remove a right granted by legislation would render the whole thing void - this is why Microsoft includes a magic phrase something along the lines of "within the limits imposed by relevent local laws".
The free software movement really ought to aquaint itself with the EU laws in this respect. Hint: taking apart DVD encryption so YOU can watch the movie YOU own a copy of is another one of those "specifically allowed" things...
I can't actually buy half these games in the UK. Civ:CTP and QuakeII are the only Linux games I've seen actually sat on shelves. (And yes, I bought CTP.) Loki's stuff just isn't here: even stores that WANT to sell the stuff can't. "Game" just dropped their Linux section because after four months of having CTP and Quake on it (and selling some), they couldn't get hold of new products: Railroad Tycoon II apparently STILL has no UK release date and the Windows version is in the 10 quid bin. Trouble is that now they've tried it and it didn't pan out, they're not likely to give it another go. It's no good people pointing at 30 available games if they're not actually available at ground level. If they're not on shelves, they're not going to have casual purchasers and mail ordering stuff from California is not quite the same.
See, this is my concern about all these conspiracy theories. All these UFOs tucked away in hangers and stuff. That's a lot of people need to know about this stuff.
Helicopters need their engines stripping down and fiddling with every few hundred hours of flying, that's people to fiddle with them. They need painting, that's people to paint them, fuelling, people to fuel them, flying, that's pilots, with log books. They need spare parts, which is orders for parts, which is drivers of trucks to deliver them which is guards on the gates to sign trucks in and out. Which is guards in general on airbases, quite a few of them to make sure no-one gets in, on 8 hour shifts 24 hours a day, every day for years. That's a lot of manpower.
None of these people look up as the things go out?
None of the people nearby own cameras? Take photos in their back gardens? Photograph one, even accidentally? None of them? No news helicopter that racket about cities watching car chases or fires has bothered to point a camera at them?
Governments can't keep secret who their leaders are sleeping with. Black spy helicopters and UFOs have got no chance.
Actually, the recent historical evidence is that in Nazi Germany's case, the government basically acted independently of it's leaders. See Hitler was, by all accounts, rather lazy. He didn't like actually running the country much. So he'd waffle and blab on about things, might mention in passing it would be a good thing for, say, homosexuals to be killed off, or how much he hated the romanies or whatever. And then various people would rush off to try and achieve this in order to get into his good books. The high levels of the Nazi party were basically constantly infighting for bits of delegated authority, and trying to please Hitler. They'd wave the "Fuhrer's Will" line at anyone who argued to get it to happen so they could take the credit. It was never particularly policy to do all those things, it just kind of happened because of the environment in which it took place: the Nazi party was effectively all powerful, Hitler was both head of state and leader of the parliamentary system, so he could basically do anything. That power filtered down and became coloured by each person it passed through, each lower rank trying to appease the next one up. If you think about it rationally, it simply doesn't make sense to kill off a functional 10% of the population. No government would do that as a conscious decision, but in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, there effectively was no conscious decision making happening.
No. They can't. The Falklands are part of the United Kingdom. They're not a territory or a dependency, they're part of the country. In the same way that, say, Islington is. You can't have them. {Humourously, the UK is therefore one of the largest countries on earth. Northernmost point is not far outside the arctic circle, the southernmost point is, IIRC, inside the antarctic...)
>But it seems to me that privacy as a concept is >somewhat outdated and needs to be reevaluated in >light of social and technological changes. Our >society is increasingly reliant upon the fruits >of technology, and despite what people think, >this change is inherently at odds with the >notion of personal privacy. Privacy is very important to some people - some people are the members of minority groups open to persecution and have to keep their personal lives hidden or they'll be open to attack. Yes, the same principles would mean that the systems that destroyed their privacy would carefully film their stabbings, but that's scant comfort. Some people are engaged in activities they have no wish to be publicised: some people who are homosexual live for years openly gay among friends but hiding it from families to save the pain. In what way is this panacae of open access going to help ease that pain it released? People do things they don't want discovered for whole variety of reasons: not always that they are wrong in any criminal or moral sense, but often simply that life is easier that way. We should value that privacy, that space, that room to be ourselves - its loss will destroy a lot of lives.
Well, I've done all sorts of stuff, I've done VB development, Access, Paradox and C++ for Windows. I've developed for the Mac, for embedded systems, for tons of flavours of UNIX, and the reason to use UNIX, for me, has to be the documentation. Mac has this advantage as well, with the proviso that you have to buy "Inside Mac". Once you've bought it, you've got a UNIX level of documentation.
When you want to know what something does on UNIX, the documentation is there. In/excruciating/ detail it describes the API, and everything it can do and everything that can go wrong.
Windows/has/ the documentation available, but it's somehow much less accessible. Firstly it carries a lot of layers about with it: there are multiple image formats, and multiple string types and layers of API and not all of what you can do in one layer is wrapped in another layer.
Secondly, the documentation is scattered around. It's a lot harder to grep for things: you have to know exactly the right trigger phrases to get the info out of the help systems. (To be fair, it's hard to grep dead trees, but Inside Mac comes with an index volume bigger than the Bible to help on that front.)
Thirdly, the documentation is often simply out of date. Windows chanegs API at a scary rate and it's hard to be sure what you're reading is applicable or useful.
The fourth problem I found is that the API levels are incomplete. They lack details. Obvious example; loading images in MFC in a format to display them. It's horrible and code that gets repeated over and over. It needs an image class to handle that, and several dozen are available but are 3rd party and hence buggy or licenced or shareware or unfinished or unsupported or...
There's no way to tell what will remain a supported interface: Will this DX5 call still work in DX8? Who knows. Macintosh has promises of support attached to the APIs.
I found projects annoying on VC++ as well as other people here, but I didn't on Codewarrior so that might just be the way they're done. I dislike MFCs dialog accessing stuff: Delphi does it much more elegantly.
On the final front, the whole concept of having stuff like running a window being so complicated that tools are needed to generate the boilerplate code to save people from the tedium, kind of indicates that that code is too complicated. On a personal front, I'd much rather have it take 3 lines of code to drive a window than have a tool to write the 300 lines for me.
Microsoft is running with two huge conflicting goals: the first is to drive stuff forward creating new APIs, but the second is not to outdate anything ever. Coupled with their financial issues ("ship it quickly") means that they layer things but layer them badly - some of the layers have thin bits which expose lower level nastynesses, others parts are too thick to expose useful functionality.
The solution to windows being complicated to develop for is to/make it simpler/, not to hide that complexity behind wizards. The problem there is that the minute you try and do something the wizard isn't expecting, you're dropped off into this ocean of complexity with little or no support. This leads to a development style where that which is "possible" is effectively determined by that which the wizards support - and that often there is one way of doing things, because any other way, no matter how obvious leads to complexities and incompatibilities and huge amounts of effort. The example given of switching an MDI to an SDI project is a perfect example of this: you aren't supposed to. You're supposed to make that decision on day 1 of the project and stick with it. Access never used to export new toolbars along with the database: toolbars have to be built on each user machine. Corrollary: Access is designed to be used in a fashion where the development machine is also the deployment machine... anything else requires a fight.
MFC uses macros instead of virtual function calls to dispatch window messages. Why? Because using vfunc calls was too slow in early versions, given the volume of window messages generated. So now it has this history of macros and general untidiness dealing with that sort of thing. UNIX never had the problem in the first place. Why? Because X allows you to choose which messages are ever dispatched in the first place, rather than sending them all and letting the app sort out the wheat from the chaff. Manipulating the macros is complicated and error-prone, so now a wizard does it for you: a patch on the patch on the...
UNIX concentrates on being small, layers appear only slowly and are more complete. And at almost all layers, there are interchangeable options. Different shells, X servers, editors, window managers.
This smallness makes it easier for the layers to be complete, and uniform in shape and well understood.
The downside is that it does take it longer to evolve higher layers - media players and so on.
Baden Powell was really something wasn't he? Basing his organisation on one that would be invented ~40 years later. The first scout event would be the camp in 1907. "Scouting for Boys" was published in 1910. I don't suppose it's at all likely that the Hitler Youth was a corruption of the Scout movement instead of the other way round?
Talisman's sort of died a quiet death. It was a solution to the problem of decent high speed rendering in software, but these days everyone has 3D cards.
To be honest, I'm not sure the box is powerful enough. It looks nice next to todays PCs, but 18 months time? People could well be shipping 1.5GHz cpus by then. Fully functional PCs could well be down at those price levels. That's far enough away that Dreamcast will be on 2nd generation games, and N64 will be looking long in the tooth...and be due for replacement. And the spec looks low compared to a PS2 available in right-now -> 6 months.
I think MS thinks they can make a profit on the boxes themselves...
Re:(OT) Rant on rants, maybe flamebait
on
Review: "Scream 3"
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· Score: 2
Have to say, the more stuff on/., the less likely I am to get bored at work. This review might be only marginally relevent, but what the hell. It's not like there's a quota of only X stories a day and it's pushing something "more important" out. And... well... movies in a meta-culture vein are kind of geeky in a way. Now if we could just get people to stop "first post"ing. Isn't that EVER going to get boring?
You/HAVE/ to be kidding me? This is how they search for "smut"?
Good grief. I mean, according to those bits of search file, doesn't having the phrase "you are too stupid" on a page sucessfully match?
Maybe we need a publicly accessed "blocker"... kind of like NoCeMs in usenet - you basically pick a set of "trusted" people who you rate as being able to block stuff. The christian fundies can all subscribe to christian fundie blockers for all the categories, whereas a merely concerned parent might just go with someone a bit less radical.
Having a centralised system just seems hugely open to all kinds of manipulation: right from the naive bozoness that seems to permeate the industry these days to corruption, bribery and even actual criminal intent. Distributing the system removes a large amount of that failure.
I mean personally, I kind of think it would be nice to trust sites to rate themselves as "porn" or "unsuitable for minors" or "religious content", but I can see why people wouldn't trust it. The porn sites include "perl" in meta-tags and stuff. Honesty doesn't exactly seem to come hand-in-hand with web businesses. (Business models built on hit-counts seem basically flawed to me. Would you want to advertise on a page whose basic method of getting people to go there was to con them? Great chance they'll read the ads then...)
Distribution has to be the way to go. Undermine the obviously broken corporate approach with an open standard that ends up being free.
Slashdot Mirror
I once arrived at a (fortunately) short project to find the specification /consisted/ of:
/intransigent/ about not changing their working practices (which consisted of /RETYPING/ Word documents with minor changes in each draft), utterly unable to make decisions, and utterly unable to understand that there are some things Access is not a good choice for.
1) The project will use Microsoft Access, because the client has already bought enough copies of that.
2) The project will cost UKP 2000 or less.
3) The developer will not speak to the end users: they're too busy doing real work.
4) Whatever gets delivered gets vetted by the client management. Before any money is paid.
I did about 2Ks worth of what we guessed would be useful software and bailed. The users were
I have no idea what the hell happened at the end, I'm just glad I didn't stick around to find out.
It's not the first time a project has been like that, it's just an extreme case. And yet all these users are surprised by the software that results...
Cubicle? Walls?
My God, the waste of SPACE, man, think of the WASTE. Our office is open-plan. We have rows of 4 desks, front-to-front, so there are 8 people in a block. There are 2 blocks past the walkway and 9 blocks down the office, making a total of ~80 people in one open space. At any given moment it's possible to hear 2 arguments, 2 landlines ringing, 3 mobiles ringing, eighteen people typing and something beeping insistantly. What's it's not possible to do is think... but it is much more space efficient.
I used to have a stack of file cabinets next to my desk, but they took them away... now there's NOTHING between me (&my screens) and the loud conversations at the walkway junction I'm next to...
Mind you, I only have *2* hours to be here now, but the last few months have been Annoying.
Various sources, including Code Complete quote something like 15 minutes to get back into the flow of writing code.
And an average interruption frequency of ~1 minute.
I can, from my desk, while writing this, hear two conversations whose words are audible, several which aren't. One person giggling, and easily half a dozen phones have rung during the writing of this.
This would be a "development environment" then.
There are people who are good software engineers. There are people who aren't. The issue with the industry in general is that there's too bloody many of the latter, usually because "there's good money in IT". I know a lot of VERY good software engineers. It's in their blood, it's what they DO, it's what God put them on this planet for. And they spend their entire lives fixing the crap that the others cause.
/.? Because I'm waiting for a compile to finish, because the makefile is so badly written it might as well not dependency check, but I'm not allowed to fix it because it's "complicated"
/believe/ in what they're doing, in gaining justice or representing their clients and so on, but they're drowned out by hordes of people who are there because it's either be a lawyer or watch Oprah and being a lawyer buys bigger BMWs.
/stop/ writing or drawing or talking. The others regard it as a chore to do anything like thinking.
Here I am, I'm a damn good software engineer. Why am I posting to
It might well be complicated to people who don't do this stuff in their sleep, that's not a reason to not let the rest of us work.
All around me I see people who don't really want to do this. They're here for the money. They're talking about football, or beer or just about anything rather than getting on with being a software engineer. Because being a software engineer is what they put in the box on the credit card application forms and that's all.
They don't really want to do it, so they don't do it well. It's just a job. I bet there are people at MacDonalds that actually WANT to work in the fast food industry and it must drive them nuts that most of the people around them only smile at the customers because if they don't they get fired.
There must be lawyers who really
Most of the people in the IT industry are doing the bare minimum to get by without being fired, and that, unfortunately, includes the interviewers...
I ask an interview question I admit to stealing from someone else: "We're going to write a computer simulation of Monopoly. Talk me through the sorts of classes you'd build."
There's no correct answer. But going "huh?" or aimlessly flailing gets you a fail. {Actually this was flummuxed once by a chap who was from Eygpt and had never played Monopoly... Since he was the strongest candidate out of the group otherwise he was hired...}
Other results? People destined to be VB programmers (and other low life forms) start talking about arrays of names of squares.
Proper OO developers start saying things like "there's a board, it's got squares... some of them are ownable and they charge rent, some of the ownables can be built on.. squares are an abstract base they have a successor to move to, ownable extends square for squares with a price, street extends ownable, station extends ownable.." Then they ask for a bigger sheet of paper.
I'm not that interested in exactly what they do. I'm just interested in the process. The people I want around me get excited when someone asks them to do something vaguely challenging and the trick becomes getting them to
Amusingly, I've just changed my identity (for a perfectly legal, albeit not common, reason) and the experiences have been both entertaining and somewhat worrying.
:-}
I arrive at a bank. I hand them a passbook for an account opened in, like, 1976 by my mother. It's never been updated since so there's no signature on the account. And I succeed in changing the name AND the mailing address attached to the account in one go. Oh, to further complicate things, my current gender differs from the one attached to the accounts..
Required: 1 birth certificate in old name. Easily obtained in about 1/2 hour from the registry office. 1 statutory declaration. Mine was drawn up properly, witnessed by a second solicitor, but as a friend put it, it's just some typing with magic writing on it that everyone trusts. I have no doubt one could knock up a forgery in about ten minutes. And they were looking at a PHOTOCOPY of it. And a driving licence in my new name which has the new mailing address on it.
Now the only hard part of that to get is the latter - again, mine is legit. But fake driving licences are not hard to get hold of... the new photocards may make it marginally harder, but I doubt it would pose a serious problem to people with scanners and high-res printers.
But given what I was doing I'd have expected them to phone and check up on at least one of the documents. No - they just photocopied the things (to protect their backsides in case of problems) and got on with things.
And so this continued.. bank after bank after bank, my AA membership, my investment accounts, my inland revenue information...
In fact Barclaycard and the Halifax bank were the only hard ones. Barclaycard because they allegedly have no idea how to rename an existing account - complete crap if you ask me, afterall half their userbase is likely to change their name when they get married.. So they're creating me a new account, closing the old one and doing a balance transfer. I'm expecting this not to work, by the way - if they run a credit check for the new account they'll find there's no history of me...
Halifax managed to order me a new card. Which arrived in an envelope addressed to me in my new name, but which had my old name on the front.
So two places had problems because of incompetence. Everyone else just let me do it. I don't think a single one has done more than photocopy already second generation photocopies of documents and then start typing into databases.
Several of them have done this stuff over the phone, given cursory access checks. Like, knowing my postcode as well as the account number. {Having not moved that long ago, I read the postcode off the same bit of paper as the account number..
I'm surprised identity theft doesn't happen MORE often..
It doesn't violate the DP act; Government Departments are covered by it, except where they can plead "national security".
It doesn't violate the Human Rights Act for much the same reason. And also the various EU laws will be overriden at national level.
What it does violate is common sense. We can't archive our mailing list in any sensible way - we can store the raw text, but indexing it's just a pain, and we're a dozen people sending maybe 300 mails a week. Unless someone's invented a new storage media this is FUD.
I bet you, what they want is to be able to target people without naming them, so they can use their association tracking things to tap everyone connected with targets without having to come up with reasons for each person, and the newspapers have got all huffy about it.
Why should computers not outperform us?
Our current machinery runs faster than us, swims faster than us, flies MUCH better than we can. Our toys can breath atmospheres that would kill us, use temperatures that would burn us or freeze us. They can survive against the vacuum of space and the pressures of the depths of the oceans.
Why is it such a common idea that thinking is human and human alone?
"The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters. It also stores things in perfect quality." Sorry, you need to learn some information theory and some biochemistry and some neurology. Neurons are not complicated beasts. Not any more than any other cell, really. They're not as simple as transistors - they're more like integrators over their inputs. There are approx 10^11 neurons. They each have about 10^3 connections. One could therefore model the static architecture with an array of 10^11 neurons. Each one would need 1000 records of a connection & a weight. Say a (5 byte) integer number and a float weight. 9k per neuron. Let's say 10. 10k=10^5. We need 10^16 bytes of storage. 10^3 = 1Kbyte, 10^6 = 1Mbyte, 10^9 = 1Gbyte, 10^12 = 1Tbyte. So we need 10,000 Terabytes of storage. Don't get me wrong, that's not a small amount. I don't have that in my living room. On the other hand, we definitely know it will fit in a device filling a couple of litres and weighing a kilo and a half and that neurons aren't the most space efficient storage devices we know of. Realtime processing the integration aspects of all of this is left as an exercise for those readers with supercomputers. As for the "perfect quality", remember what the inputs to it look like. The blind spot in your vision that you can't see. The fact that your peripheral vision is monochrome that's conveniently forgotten. The fact that some of the inputs are a tenth of a second behind the "real" world, and your mental model is backdated to cope. If the inputs were perfect you wouldn't get deja vu, or mistakenly recognise strangers and M.C.Escher wouldn't have had the fun in his life doing all those drawings that are so nearly convincely of real things. Biochemically, neurons are a mess. Hence you get drunk, hallucinate, have trips. Perfect? Nowhere near. You just /think/ you are, just like you think your vision is a continous view without a hole in the middle.
So.. the law is there in an effort to thwart the will of the people to have representation? Way to go!! Democracy in action!!! {Yes. I know the UK system is similarly flawed. No. I don't like that either.}
I have to say I have much the same attitude. As far as I can tell, contractors in the UK are a slightly different breed from contractors in the US - US ones seem to be employees that earn slightly more but don't get benefits. Here in the UK contractors are employed more on short term things, we run our own limited companies (corporations) and submit invoices for our time.
And I meet an awful lot of contractors who share my view on things. We're the infantry. We get paid money so PHBs can order us to do stuff. We do what they ask. They frequently ask us to do boneheaded stuff, but we do it anyway, because no-one listens.
I can't get emotionally invoved with the companies. I'm here for three months, six months - nine months is a long contract. I can't start developing a pride in what's going on, because there's rarely anything to get proud about. The only thing that keeps me sane is that my future is not vested in these companies, it's in my hands. The sight of permies who are supposed to have a future in these companies is terrifying as they watch management power-diving them at the ground. Us contractors have parachutes, exit routes, limited involvement. These permies signed on to have a future here and they can see the PHBs thrwing that future away in a morass of inept management.
I'm actually rather glad I'm not in that boat.
``I thought the DMCA supported reverse-engineering for interoperabillity? Compatability with a file system DEFINATELY is an interoperability issue''
I don't know about the US, but in the EU, one is expressly allowed to reverse engineer things like file and disk formats. One has to make reasonable attempts to obtain the information another way (asking Microsoft would count) and if that isn't forthcoming - you can legally reverse engineer the format. The idea is to prevent people being locked into formats that then end up not being supported or them being unable to move to rival products.
The relevent bits of law have been incorporated into most, if not all, of the EU member states legislation.
Basically, the work can just be moved to a different location and MS can't do a thing about it.
Actually, in the EU, reverse engineering is SPECIFICALLY legal. There was an EU directive which has been incorporated into most of the member states legislation which grants you, if you own a legal copy of the software, to decompile it, to disassemble it, to watch it calling things...
There are provisos about what intent justifies these actions: hacking about with, say, Word to produce a filter to load Word documents would be covered, because Microsoft won't document the format to allow you to use the files {IANAL but as I read it, if they'll TELL you the format, you're not supposed to reverse engineer it}. The intention of those provisos would seem to be to prevent people being locked into file formats that then fall into disuse and hence to be unable to access their data, but they're pretty broad-ranging.
Now under UK law, the fact that that license attempts to remove a right granted by legislation would render the whole thing void - this is why Microsoft includes a magic phrase something along the lines of "within the limits imposed by relevent local laws".
The free software movement really ought to aquaint itself with the EU laws in this respect. Hint: taking apart DVD encryption so YOU can watch the movie YOU own a copy of is another one of those "specifically allowed" things...
I can't actually buy half these games in the UK. Civ:CTP and QuakeII are the only Linux games I've seen actually sat on shelves. (And yes, I bought CTP.) Loki's stuff just isn't here: even stores that WANT to sell the stuff can't. "Game" just dropped their Linux section because after four months of having CTP and Quake on it (and selling some), they couldn't get hold of new products: Railroad Tycoon II apparently STILL has no UK release date and the Windows version is in the 10 quid bin. Trouble is that now they've tried it and it didn't pan out, they're not likely to give it another go. It's no good people pointing at 30 available games if they're not actually available at ground level. If they're not on shelves, they're not going to have casual purchasers and mail ordering stuff from California is not quite the same.
"my uncle used to paint them"
See, this is my concern about all these conspiracy theories. All these UFOs tucked away in hangers and stuff. That's a lot of people need to know about this stuff.
Helicopters need their engines stripping down and fiddling with every few hundred hours of flying, that's people to fiddle with them. They need painting, that's people to paint them, fuelling, people to fuel them, flying, that's pilots, with log books. They need spare parts, which is orders for parts, which is drivers of trucks to deliver them which is guards on the gates to sign trucks in and out. Which is guards in general on airbases, quite a few of them to make sure no-one gets in, on 8 hour shifts 24 hours a day, every day for years. That's a lot of manpower.
None of these people look up as the things go out?
None of the people nearby own cameras? Take photos in their back gardens? Photograph one, even accidentally? None of them? No news helicopter that racket about cities watching car chases or fires has bothered to point a camera at them?
Governments can't keep secret who their leaders are sleeping with. Black spy helicopters and UFOs have got no chance.
Actually, the recent historical evidence is that in Nazi Germany's case, the government basically acted independently of it's leaders. See Hitler was, by all accounts, rather lazy. He didn't like actually running the country much. So he'd waffle and blab on about things, might mention in passing it would be a good thing for, say, homosexuals to be killed off, or how much he hated the romanies or whatever. And then various people would rush off to try and achieve this in order to get into his good books. The high levels of the Nazi party were basically constantly infighting for bits of delegated authority, and trying to please Hitler. They'd wave the "Fuhrer's Will" line at anyone who argued to get it to happen so they could take the credit. It was never particularly policy to do all those things, it just kind of happened because of the environment in which it took place: the Nazi party was effectively all powerful, Hitler was both head of state and leader of the parliamentary system, so he could basically do anything. That power filtered down and became coloured by each person it passed through, each lower rank trying to appease the next one up. If you think about it rationally, it simply doesn't make sense to kill off a functional 10% of the population. No government would do that as a conscious decision, but in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, there effectively was no conscious decision making happening.
No. They can't. The Falklands are part of the United Kingdom. They're not a territory or a dependency, they're part of the country. In the same way that, say, Islington is. You can't have them. {Humourously, the UK is therefore one of the largest countries on earth. Northernmost point is not far outside the arctic circle, the southernmost point is, IIRC, inside the antarctic...)
>But it seems to me that privacy as a concept is >somewhat outdated and needs to be reevaluated in >light of social and technological changes. Our >society is increasingly reliant upon the fruits >of technology, and despite what people think, >this change is inherently at odds with the >notion of personal privacy. Privacy is very important to some people - some people are the members of minority groups open to persecution and have to keep their personal lives hidden or they'll be open to attack. Yes, the same principles would mean that the systems that destroyed their privacy would carefully film their stabbings, but that's scant comfort. Some people are engaged in activities they have no wish to be publicised: some people who are homosexual live for years openly gay among friends but hiding it from families to save the pain. In what way is this panacae of open access going to help ease that pain it released? People do things they don't want discovered for whole variety of reasons: not always that they are wrong in any criminal or moral sense, but often simply that life is easier that way. We should value that privacy, that space, that room to be ourselves - its loss will destroy a lot of lives.
Well, I've done all sorts of stuff, I've done VB development, Access, Paradox and C++ for Windows. I've developed for the Mac, for embedded systems, for tons of flavours of UNIX, and the reason to use UNIX, for me, has to be the documentation. Mac has this advantage as well, with the proviso that you have to buy "Inside Mac". Once you've bought it, you've got a UNIX level of documentation.
/excruciating/ detail it describes the API, and everything it can do and everything that can go wrong.
/has/ the documentation available, but it's somehow much less accessible. Firstly it carries a lot of layers about with it: there are multiple image formats, and multiple string types and layers of API and not all of what you can do in one layer is wrapped in another layer.
/make it simpler/, not to hide that complexity behind wizards. The problem there is that the minute you try and do something the wizard isn't expecting, you're dropped off into this ocean of complexity with little or no support. This leads to a development style where that which is "possible" is effectively determined by that which the wizards support - and that often there is one way of doing things, because any other way, no matter how obvious leads to complexities and incompatibilities and huge amounts of effort. The example given of switching an MDI to an SDI project is a perfect example of this: you aren't supposed to. You're supposed to make that decision on day 1 of the project and stick with it. Access never used to export new toolbars along with the database: toolbars have to be built on each user machine. Corrollary: Access is designed to be used in a fashion where the development machine is also the deployment machine... anything else requires a fight.
When you want to know what something does on UNIX, the documentation is there. In
Windows
Secondly, the documentation is scattered around. It's a lot harder to grep for things: you have to know exactly the right trigger phrases to get the info out of the help systems. (To be fair, it's hard to grep dead trees, but Inside Mac comes with an index volume bigger than the Bible to help on that front.)
Thirdly, the documentation is often simply out of date. Windows chanegs API at a scary rate and it's hard to be sure what you're reading is applicable or useful.
The fourth problem I found is that the API levels are incomplete. They lack details. Obvious example; loading images in MFC in a format to display them. It's horrible and code that gets repeated over and over. It needs an image class to handle that, and several dozen are available but are 3rd party and hence buggy or licenced or shareware or unfinished or unsupported or...
There's no way to tell what will remain a supported interface: Will this DX5 call still work in DX8? Who knows. Macintosh has promises of support attached to the APIs.
I found projects annoying on VC++ as well as other people here, but I didn't on Codewarrior so that might just be the way they're done. I dislike MFCs dialog accessing stuff: Delphi does it much more elegantly.
On the final front, the whole concept of having stuff like running a window being so complicated that tools are needed to generate the boilerplate code to save people from the tedium, kind of indicates that that code is too complicated. On a personal front, I'd much rather have it take 3 lines of code to drive a window than have a tool to write the 300 lines for me.
Microsoft is running with two huge conflicting goals: the first is to drive stuff forward creating new APIs, but the second is not to outdate anything ever. Coupled with their financial issues ("ship it quickly") means that they layer things but layer them badly - some of the layers have thin bits which expose lower level nastynesses, others parts are too thick to expose useful functionality.
The solution to windows being complicated to develop for is to
MFC uses macros instead of virtual function calls to dispatch window messages. Why? Because using vfunc calls was too slow in early versions, given the volume of window messages generated. So now it has this history of macros and general untidiness dealing with that sort of thing.
UNIX never had the problem in the first place. Why? Because X allows you to choose which messages are ever dispatched in the first place, rather than sending them all and letting the app sort out the wheat from the chaff. Manipulating the macros is complicated and error-prone, so now a wizard does it for you: a patch on the patch on the...
UNIX concentrates on being small, layers appear only slowly and are more complete. And at almost all layers, there are interchangeable options. Different shells, X servers, editors, window managers.
This smallness makes it easier for the layers to be complete, and uniform in shape and well understood.
The downside is that it does take it longer to evolve higher layers - media players and so on.
Baden Powell was really something wasn't he? Basing his organisation on one that would be invented ~40 years later. The first scout event would be the camp in 1907. "Scouting for Boys" was published in 1910. I don't suppose it's at all likely that the Hitler Youth was a corruption of the Scout movement instead of the other way round?
Talisman's sort of died a quiet death. It was a solution to the problem of decent high speed rendering in software, but these days everyone has 3D cards.
To be honest, I'm not sure the box is powerful enough. It looks nice next to todays PCs, but 18 months time? People could well be shipping 1.5GHz cpus by then. Fully functional PCs could well be down at those price levels. That's far enough away that Dreamcast will be on 2nd generation games, and N64 will be looking long in the tooth...and be due for replacement. And the spec looks low compared to a PS2 available in right-now -> 6 months.
I think MS thinks they can make a profit on the boxes themselves...
Have to say, the more stuff on /., the less likely I am to get bored at work. This review might be only marginally relevent, but what the hell. It's not like there's a quota of only X stories a day and it's pushing something "more important" out. And... well... movies in a meta-culture vein are kind of geeky in a way. Now if we could just get people to stop "first post"ing. Isn't that EVER going to get boring?
You /HAVE/ to be kidding me? This is how they search for "smut"?
Good grief. I mean, according to those bits of search file, doesn't having the phrase "you are too stupid" on a page sucessfully match?
Maybe we need a publicly accessed "blocker"... kind of like NoCeMs in usenet - you basically pick a set of "trusted" people who you rate as being able to block stuff. The christian fundies can all subscribe to christian fundie blockers for all the categories, whereas a merely concerned parent might just go with someone a bit less radical.
Having a centralised system just seems hugely open to all kinds of manipulation: right from the naive bozoness that seems to permeate the industry these days to corruption, bribery and even actual criminal intent. Distributing the system removes a large amount of that failure.
I mean personally, I kind of think it would be nice to trust sites to rate themselves as "porn" or "unsuitable for minors" or "religious content", but I can see why people wouldn't trust it. The porn sites include "perl" in meta-tags and stuff. Honesty doesn't exactly seem to come hand-in-hand with web businesses. (Business models built on hit-counts seem basically flawed to me. Would you want to advertise on a page whose basic method of getting people to go there was to con them? Great chance they'll read the ads then...)
Distribution has to be the way to go. Undermine the obviously broken corporate approach with an open standard that ends up being free.