You clearly do not grasp the sheer idiocy, incompetence and utter lack of any skills whatsoever which characterises the British civil service. These days there IS no IT department apart from the outsourced PFI numpties who charge for each and every action performed. This is why whole database dumps get transferred all over the place; there isn't anyone who has the handy database skills to run a quick SQL query and put out only the required data into a twin-key encrypted package, because the way the PFI deal was written every such action costs the Government money.
Add to this the last Government had a number of highly embarrassing incidents of data loss, where USB sticks were let on trains, and in one case CD-ROMs of sensitive data were encrypted, but the password for the encryption was written onto the media disks themselves. The civil servants were complying with the regulations, but doing so in such a way that no hassle over passwords would occur. The same civil servants that did this are still employed, and the UK Home Office (which is dealing with this data) has the reputation of being the dumping ground for all the most incompetent, most useless and most stupid civil servants in Government.
Outsourcing data disposal like this is the safest way to ensure complete destruction without any little unofficial backups being taken and sold on, or people "forgetting" to wipe the disks before ebaying them, and so on. 400K is peanuts compared to the cost of cleanup after a data leak.
You'd better send along a few minders for them then, since the British Government civil servants and MPs have a silly habit of leaving unencrypted data on trains, or exposed at the top of folders where paparazzi can photograph it, or even sending it through the post encrypted as per regulations, with the passphrase written on the CD-ROM (which was not forbidden in regulations, since the author of these regs didn't grasp the knuckle-dragging depths of stupidity that civil servants can descend to)...
Windows Vista suffered terribly from a bug possibly caused by too-rigorous DRM implementation; it caused file copy and move to be extremely slow; the entire OS also gave the impression of bloated sluggishness. Windows 7, by contrast, is really quite nippy and has decently fast file copy etc. Admittedly you don't get virtual desktops as per Linux and MacOS and the security side of things is still a bit ropey, but the overall impression is of a much improved OS (and this is a die-hard UNIX geek saying this, too).
The only real gripe I have regarding Windows 7 is some truly boneheaded decisions regarding drivers that Microsoft seem to have made, which we discovered a few months back.
Take one fairly standard PC, with an unusual USB keyboard. Ubuntu Linux supports everything out of the box with the install CD. So does Windows 7 Enterprise. But Windows 7 Home edition doesn't recognise the keyboard. This, frankly, is a pretty daft way to do things; you're way more likely to encounter weird hardware in the home market than you are in the heavily controlled and standardised Industry market, so skimping on the drivers on the Home edition doesn't make much sense.
Apart from that, I agree with Microsoft: Windows 7 really is the best Windows ever. Give it a few decades, and it'll be almost as good as Linux...
This is why big corporations ike to recruit straight from college. Doing so lets them effectively indoctrinate their new hires, and subsequently burn quite a few out completely. Hiring older workers gets the job done, and quite often gets things done more effectively and more quickly but the problem for the corporation is that older workers cannot (and will not) work stupidly long hours to make insane deadlines. Given that the workforce is getting older as people live longer and birthrates drop, I'd say that corporate culture is going to hit a brick wall at some point where abusing young people is simply not going to be a viable proposition any more.
The lesson here is simple, though: you only get one life and one body, so if a company is asking you to throw away your life and your health for them then they'd better compensate you very well indeed for this loss, and do so in actual money paid into your bank account, not fairy gold paid in stock options. If the company doesn't want to do this, then walk away; they're trying to get something for nothing out of you, which just isn't fair.
Yes, the management asking for these sorts of favours is a sure sign that the company is failing. As has been said before, most companies fail and unless you hold stock in the company, then you don't really have much investment in it; you may feel some emotional investment but take it from me, once a company's management get away with one stunt like this, they'll carry on pulling stunts like this. People rarely change character much once adult, and bad managers usually remain bad managers forever.
Cut your losses and run; that job has gone sour now and you might as well save yourself a lot of grief and unnecessary pain and get out now, because things are only going to get worse.
I agree; the character-based systems only work well when you can have a specific class of scribes in a society whose specialisation is the written language. As soon as reading and writing becomes commonplace, switching to a phonetic alphabet is a much better idea since such systems are so much easier to learn, and mis-spellings and poor grammar do not render any message illegible, merely rather silly.
When I read the plot for Jumpgate Evolution, I get an incredible sense of deja vu. There's a very simple reason for this: their plot is pretty much identical to to that of the existing space-based MMO Vendetta Online, http://www.vendetta-online.com/
Again, we have humans isolated in space away from Earth, with several different races and some credible aliens (run-away mining robots in VO, which have turned nasty). Again we have twitch-based player versus player combat, licences for ships, role-playing and so on.
So, I'd say skip JGE and have a look at Vendetta Online; exactly the same plot, exactly the same capabilities but VO exists and is playable right now.
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You clearly do not grasp the sheer idiocy, incompetence and utter lack of any skills whatsoever which characterises the British civil service. These days there IS no IT department apart from the outsourced PFI numpties who charge for each and every action performed. This is why whole database dumps get transferred all over the place; there isn't anyone who has the handy database skills to run a quick SQL query and put out only the required data into a twin-key encrypted package, because the way the PFI deal was written every such action costs the Government money.
Add to this the last Government had a number of highly embarrassing incidents of data loss, where USB sticks were let on trains, and in one case CD-ROMs of sensitive data were encrypted, but the password for the encryption was written onto the media disks themselves. The civil servants were complying with the regulations, but doing so in such a way that no hassle over passwords would occur. The same civil servants that did this are still employed, and the UK Home Office (which is dealing with this data) has the reputation of being the dumping ground for all the most incompetent, most useless and most stupid civil servants in Government.
Outsourcing data disposal like this is the safest way to ensure complete destruction without any little unofficial backups being taken and sold on, or people "forgetting" to wipe the disks before ebaying them, and so on. 400K is peanuts compared to the cost of cleanup after a data leak.
You'd better send along a few minders for them then, since the British Government civil servants and MPs have a silly habit of leaving unencrypted data on trains, or exposed at the top of folders where paparazzi can photograph it, or even sending it through the post encrypted as per regulations, with the passphrase written on the CD-ROM (which was not forbidden in regulations, since the author of these regs didn't grasp the knuckle-dragging depths of stupidity that civil servants can descend to)...
Windows Vista suffered terribly from a bug possibly caused by too-rigorous DRM implementation; it caused file copy and move to be extremely slow; the entire OS also gave the impression of bloated sluggishness. Windows 7, by contrast, is really quite nippy and has decently fast file copy etc. Admittedly you don't get virtual desktops as per Linux and MacOS and the security side of things is still a bit ropey, but the overall impression is of a much improved OS (and this is a die-hard UNIX geek saying this, too).
The only real gripe I have regarding Windows 7 is some truly boneheaded decisions regarding drivers that Microsoft seem to have made, which we discovered a few months back.
Take one fairly standard PC, with an unusual USB keyboard. Ubuntu Linux supports everything out of the box with the install CD. So does Windows 7 Enterprise. But Windows 7 Home edition doesn't recognise the keyboard. This, frankly, is a pretty daft way to do things; you're way more likely to encounter weird hardware in the home market than you are in the heavily controlled and standardised Industry market, so skimping on the drivers on the Home edition doesn't make much sense.
Apart from that, I agree with Microsoft: Windows 7 really is the best Windows ever. Give it a few decades, and it'll be almost as good as Linux...
This is why big corporations ike to recruit straight from college. Doing so lets them effectively indoctrinate their new hires, and subsequently burn quite a few out completely. Hiring older workers gets the job done, and quite often gets things done more effectively and more quickly but the problem for the corporation is that older workers cannot (and will not) work stupidly long hours to make insane deadlines. Given that the workforce is getting older as people live longer and birthrates drop, I'd say that corporate culture is going to hit a brick wall at some point where abusing young people is simply not going to be a viable proposition any more.
The lesson here is simple, though: you only get one life and one body, so if a company is asking you to throw away your life and your health for them then they'd better compensate you very well indeed for this loss, and do so in actual money paid into your bank account, not fairy gold paid in stock options. If the company doesn't want to do this, then walk away; they're trying to get something for nothing out of you, which just isn't fair.
Yes, the management asking for these sorts of favours is a sure sign that the company is failing. As has been said before, most companies fail and unless you hold stock in the company, then you don't really have much investment in it; you may feel some emotional investment but take it from me, once a company's management get away with one stunt like this, they'll carry on pulling stunts like this. People rarely change character much once adult, and bad managers usually remain bad managers forever.
Cut your losses and run; that job has gone sour now and you might as well save yourself a lot of grief and unnecessary pain and get out now, because things are only going to get worse.
I agree; the character-based systems only work well when you can have a specific class of scribes in a society whose specialisation is the written language. As soon as reading and writing becomes commonplace, switching to a phonetic alphabet is a much better idea since such systems are so much easier to learn, and mis-spellings and poor grammar do not render any message illegible, merely rather silly.
When I read the plot for Jumpgate Evolution, I get an incredible sense of deja vu. There's a very simple reason for this: their plot is pretty much identical to to that of the existing space-based MMO Vendetta Online, http://www.vendetta-online.com/
Again, we have humans isolated in space away from Earth, with several different races and some credible aliens (run-away mining robots in VO, which have turned nasty). Again we have twitch-based player versus player combat, licences for ships, role-playing and so on.
So, I'd say skip JGE and have a look at Vendetta Online; exactly the same plot, exactly the same capabilities but VO exists and is playable right now.