For those interested in this subject you may like to know that the Opera browser supports WML. Handy for testing your code before releasing it to the wide wireless world.
How about this. If every e-mail contained something like a sig, which was maybe a list of words or phrases that triggered snooping you might innundate them with so much information that it would be impossible for them to cope with.
Personally I'm atheist, but the point I've noticed is that there seems to be two subjects guaranteed to generate the most comments on any forum (even techie ones) and thats God (existence/non-existence of) and Sex (particularly gay sex - pro/anti arguments)
I have no idea if this means anything at all, just something I've noticed...:)
An experience I had a few years ago which may be relevant.
A company I freelanced for had outsourced their IBM mainframe legacy systems maintenance to a 3rd party. I had to do some modifications to print output streams from the mainframe to accomodate a new inserter (changing barcode positions and formats..yawn). Anyway all the company had to do for us was change some JCL to accomodate my programs to pre-process the print stream before printing. Three months to code and test my part of the deal, then another 3 months still waiting for a correct set of JCL from 3rd party. I ended up getting permission to do the job myself (about 2 days work - JCL if you are not familiar with it is very very simple grunt work). Unfortunately we had by then hit the Y2K change freeze so changes had to wait (I didn't, left the updates ready to be implemented and left not wanting to sit around thumb twiddling for another 2 months).
The reason as I later found for this ineptness was that the company also considered JCL to be grunt work and so assigned a bunch of recently graduated employees to do the work. JCL while simple still needs an appreciation for the system you are working on and what you are trying to achieve, as well as a basic understanding of the syntax.
The point of this is that if you consider the work to just be grunt type work, then so might they - and you may not get anyone working on it who has the relevant experience to do a good job.
Additionally as a freelancer I've worked for a lot of dofferent companies (in the UK) over the last 10 years and without exception those that had offloaded all or part of their systems to 3rd party maintainers (after an initial honeymoon period during which they became locked in) suffered poor service. Basically the 3rd party maintainer makes a profit by using less people - one sys admin could be dealing with the machines from more than 1 company for example.
I'd advise against it for your long term mental health basically.
Thanks everyone who took time to reply. I have to say I am a bit mystified by the flas card thing too as I am asking this question for a friend. I know that they get heavt use, as the application is taking digital images of such things as mining waste tips etc, and then processing these images to highlight any changes in the positioning of the tip (hopefully to get warning of imminent collapses etc). So there are a lot of pictures taken on one trip and a lot of trips.
Slashdot Mirror
For those interested in this subject you may like to know that the Opera browser supports WML. Handy for testing your code before releasing it to the wide wireless world.
How about this. If every e-mail contained something like a sig, which was maybe a list of words or phrases that triggered snooping you might innundate them with so much information that it would be impossible for them to cope with.
Personally I'm atheist, but the point I've noticed is that there seems to be two subjects guaranteed to generate the most comments on any forum (even techie ones) and thats God (existence/non-existence of) and Sex (particularly gay sex - pro/anti arguments)
I have no idea if this means anything at all, just something I've noticed...:)
An experience I had a few years ago which may be relevant.
A company I freelanced for had outsourced their IBM mainframe legacy systems maintenance to a 3rd party. I had to do some modifications to print output streams from the mainframe to accomodate a new inserter (changing barcode positions and formats..yawn). Anyway all the company had to do for us was change some JCL to accomodate my programs to pre-process the print stream before printing. Three months to code and test my part of the deal, then another 3 months still waiting for a correct set of JCL from 3rd party. I ended up getting permission to do the job myself (about 2 days work - JCL if you are not familiar with it is very very simple grunt work). Unfortunately we had by then hit the Y2K change freeze so changes had to wait (I didn't, left the updates ready to be implemented and left not wanting to sit around thumb twiddling for another 2 months).
The reason as I later found for this ineptness was that the company also considered JCL to be grunt work and so assigned a bunch of recently graduated employees to do the work. JCL while simple still needs an appreciation for the system you are working on and what you are trying to achieve, as well as a basic understanding of the syntax.
The point of this is that if you consider the work to just be grunt type work, then so might they - and you may not get anyone working on it who has the relevant experience to do a good job.
Additionally as a freelancer I've worked for a lot of dofferent companies (in the UK) over the last 10 years and without exception those that had offloaded all or part of their systems to 3rd party maintainers (after an initial honeymoon period during which they became locked in) suffered poor service. Basically the 3rd party maintainer makes a profit by using less people - one sys admin could be dealing with the machines from more than 1 company for example.
I'd advise against it for your long term mental health basically.
Thanks everyone who took time to reply. I have to say I am a bit mystified by the flas card thing too as I am asking this question for a friend. I know that they get heavt use, as the application is taking digital images of such things as mining waste tips etc, and then processing these images to highlight any changes in the positioning of the tip (hopefully to get warning of imminent collapses etc). So there are a lot of pictures taken on one trip and a lot of trips.