Expecting cluefulness from banks, indeed from the entire accounting profession, is the height of stupidity in my books. Let me count the ways:
- In the 21st Century, it *still* can take up to three days to transfer money from one acct. to another on their "secure", non-Internet connected network.
- They expend vast amounts of effort on checking, then rolling back, bad transactions and seemingly nothing on ensuring bad transactions can't happen. Vis. TFA. Monday, they discovered they'd been owned!
- I've watched as accredited accountants manually copied (via hunt and peck) numbers from a speadsheet into a non-attached calculator in order to sum them up. Data corruption, anyone? How about right click on the column, then sum? Beyond their capabilities.
They're idiots! Everything about accounting and the banking system is grounded in centuries old tech. (double entry bookkeeping, FFS! as an error correction method!), and they don't need to care, because "The bank doesn't pay!"
Lawyers + accountants == our current financial system, and that's okay?
My battery's dying. BB says ca. C$120 to replace it. On-line offers say ca. C$35. Can I really expect to end up only paying C$35 via BB's price match guarantee? What's the fine print say?
Wonderful. They're using the same trick bed and tire manufacturers do to avoid comparison shopping. Special models for each store so you're never sure if they're the same.
Wait'll you end up with one, then a couple of years down the line when your battery dies, what's a new battery cost?
I agree that identification is obviously required and that a country has every right to search you or do anything they want, if you are seeking to cross their borders. No arguments there.
And I think you're nuts, or suicidally timid. Why people are so willing to bend over for gov't paranoia escapes me. If you've done nothing wrong, nor displayed any propensity for doing wrong, why are you EXPECTED to put up with this sort of !@#$?
The US, at least, used to go by this "Probable..." thing, as in someone suspects you capable of dangerous stuff based on your known and demonstrable probability of doing harmful stuff, THEN you get looked at. Now, it's just dragnet; everyone's suspect. TSA! TSA!
Backbone anyone? Me, I don't like that kind of suspicion of my honourable intentions, so I choose not to go there. They've no right to insinuate that I'm a "potentially" bad person when I've done nothing to raise anyone's suspicions. Their loss.
Yeah, I'm a libertarian, and I think this century sucks horribly. I wish you all would just start saying no to your police state at every turn, whichever it may be.
It's because of h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org.
Er, what is it about recursion that you don't get?
T'anks Rob. You've enabled many great memes to have been born. I hope your next gig will be just as fun. Take me with you, please?
Aside, I think it's pretty funny that the spellchecker won't accept "slashdot" as valid (it just did it again, damnit!). As for the low vs. high UID controversy, anything under 1M is "cool" as far as I'm concerned.:-)
The agency alleges the data is held by Facebook for two years, and wants website owners in the state to remove links to Facebook by the end of next month or possibly face a fine.
I whole heartedly agree. No controversy seen from here, whatsoever.
"Social networking" (a la FB) is a gross (as in, makes me want to puke) application of technology.
He's right. Get out now, and never go back. This is not the web you wanted. This is the web *they* wanted. Don't go there, or accept you'll be owned, ultimately.
Well, I guess 'consumers' in Libya will soon find out how it looks like when you have to start paying bills for everything, and when 'democratic' government is not giving out subsidies anymore (but money goes to themselves and their cronies).
So, we can put you down as synic, yes?
Damnit man, they're restarting their country with intentions toward freedom, and that's all you can come up with?!?
I think rebel forces finally taking the capital qualifies as "...stuff that matters". Do we really need to search for a tech angle just to talk about it on Slashdot?
Yes. Libyan freedom is a good thing./. is about tech. What's wrong with discussing the intersection of the two? If it's not relevant to both spheres, we waste others' time or abuse their patience.
It's not like we're ignoring the "African Spring" by focussing on its tech. corollaries.
I'm arguing that the headline to this story is fucking retarded and sensationalist.
I get what you're saying and mostly agree, but on the other hand, the Argentinian gov't did resort to censorship, and perhaps ought to have realized there would be collateral damage. It's a fairly blunt weapon. You reap what you sow. You censor, you should expect bad press at the very least for instigating it.
However, yeah, "Doofuses attempting to carry out gov't decree..." would have been more accurate.
Future digital businesses may look more like 4chan than like IBM or Oracle.
Frankly, from what I've seen lately, we're already there. Every company and its dog now has "web presence", but it's so half-assedly done, it's useless. Yeah, you can finally apply to most jobs while still in your pyjamas, and you can log into some op's website and see the status of your account. On the other hand, try to discontinue a service you've subscribed to and you land back in telephone land. It took hours for shaw.ca to call me back yesterday. Unsubscribing from Telus (telephone provider) cannot be done in person with any form of "customer support" person; all done on the phone.
Then, there's connectedness. When you phone them, are they sitting in front of a computer where you can tell them your phone number, and they can then bring up the details of your account? No. It can take fifteen minutes for them to transcribe your pertinent details, then you're put on hold while they contact another department which can access those details.
Present day computer development produces a lot of marginally useful websites geared towards marketing their product, and that's all. "Systems Analysis" is a now dead skill. Present day developers are simply unable to completely think through all of the ramifications of whatever they're working on, so you get brittle, shallow, ultimately useless and frustrating results from them.
A: By directly -- and heavily -- taxing companies that outsource labor and manufacturing.
And the companies we are taxing will just move out of the country entirely. Since we won't be using tariffs, their prices will go back down, and now even more foreign businesses will have a competitive advantage over American businesses, and even more jobs will go overseas,...
Interesting. Back in the day, libertarians wondered if it would be moral and ethical to invade the USSR to force the Reds out of power. You've just made an excellent argument in favour of that. Tyranny anywhere hurts everybody everywhere in one way or another eventually, so yes it is our duty to stamp it out everywhere.
The corollary is we should despise any people who allow themselves to be ruled by such regimes. "Grow a fscking backbone already, damnit!"
Where do I sign up? Libya or Syria or Burma/Myanmar I suppose. Anyone want to sponsor my transportation costs?
Re:Data, Images, Binary builds etc.
on
The Rise of Git
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· Score: 1
Why or how I retroactively lost data, I don't know.
Uh huh. Yet another "computing professional" who can't figure out how to burn his $HOME to a CD.
I'm not a professional, I'm a student in mathematics. Programming is just a hobby of mine. Nor do I have the disk space left to back up everything I own since my computer is old enough to be eligible for kindergarten if it were human.
Ah. Sorry, I assumed too much.
First, you don't "back up to disk". That's just asking for trouble. You back up to media off disk, whether that be tape, CD, or DVD, etc. I use a bash script that calls find, bzip, and afio, then wodim (cdrecord) to create iso images I can burn to CDs. Smiple [sic]. My $HOME seldom hits more than a third of a CD.
Second, my computers are ancient too. They serve me (mostly) well. The CPU du jour is not necessary if you're not running stupid OSs.
Third, I wish the world was less stupid, 'cause then I'd be rich, instead of wasting time pontificating on/. Can't have everything.:-P
Fourth, damn, I wish I was better at math. Good on you!
Re:Data, Images, Binary builds etc.
on
The Rise of Git
·
· Score: 1
God I hate people that put bins and bits and images that should be linked and stored on appropriate storage, not archived in a RCS.
Please keep in mind that pre-Vista, Windows didn't actually *have* proper symlinks. NTFS junctions technically existed since NT4, but Microsoft guarded them like a state secret and bent over backwards to avoid making people aware of them. Also, junctions are more like Ext3 hardlinks, so you can't *quite* use them with reckless consequence-free impunity the way you can with real symlinks.
GIGO. Serves you right for relying on a toy OS.
How many malware checkers are you running today?
Re:Data, Images, Binary builds etc.
on
The Rise of Git
·
· Score: 1
Pictures and video are fluid, They change, maybe release to release.
Gahd, this is stupid. Have you never heard of symbolic links?!? From my.bash_history:
ln -s/dev/null./.adobe/Flash_Player
Whoever's creating pics and video files provides a link to their latest version, and you tell your code to pull from the link! This isn't even version control related (except on their end). It's fscking basic.
Why are people like you even employed in IT?!?
Re:Data, Images, Binary builds etc.
on
The Rise of Git
·
· Score: 1
Why or how I retroactively lost data, I don't know.
Uh huh. Yet another "computing professional" who can't figure out how to burn his $HOME to a CD. I'm so fscking impressed.
How the fsck do you people manage to remain employed?!?
You can't just sit in a corner come election time and say "they're all the same," because they aren't.
I used to think that too, before I became hopelessly disillusioned with politics as it's now practiced. However, yes, they are all the same. The only difference between them is the colour of the hobby-horse they're riding. There's not a lick of "civic duty" left in any of them. Their "job" these days is to generate campaign funding for the next election, and nowadays, that means doing the bidding of corporate interests.
I cannot help it if you lost your e-mails, and it certainly isn't the fault of the provider of free service such as gmail either.
Of course it is! They're offering you a free service and telling you you can rely on it better than other sol'ns (though, no promises of course, YMMV, $legalese,...). They would, of course, because if you fall for the pitch they can sell you to their clients (advertisers).
It all looks great, until you find out they're doing backups to other (mirrored) harddrives on another system, and both of them blow up at once (as happened recently to some outfit in Australia, thereby shutting them down), or any number of other stupid things people do over which you've no control. Have they changed their privacy policy today (cf. Facebook)? Does the NSA/FBI/CIA get to grep your mail too? They can't/won't tell you?!? WTF!?!
I do back up my stuff, and I don't have to expose any of it to a cloud provider in the meantime.
If you're lazy, just admit it. I am too. I say there's smart lazy and foolish lazy. YMMV.
Actually, smart people still use gmail; they simply enable POP or IMAP and access it from a real e-mail client, thereby giving you the best of both worlds.
Uh huh. Then one morning, you go into work and find $someone's lost all your mail, and you get to sit around for three days doing nothing while they scurry around trying to get it back. No. Thank. You. This happened to me on a recent contract at $honking_big_corp.
I want my valuable communications under my control, not some wannabee Exchange Server support person. Nor do I want anyone grepping my mail for THEIR purposes (selling it to their advertisers).
I'm astonished to see so many take that lazy way out./.ers bitch and moan about losing their privacy day in and day out, yet so many of you just hand that valuable function off to $some_cloud_provider because spending an hour figuring out how to configure three or four apps to seamlessly work together to do it all the right way's too much to ask of you.
Me: fetchmail from ISP's smarthost --> postfix --> mutt+procmail+bogofilter --> postfix --> ISP's smarthost. I also Bcc: a copy of all mail I send while at clients to myself so I know it's not going to get lost.
Ah, "But (n)curses interfaces are so last century!" Let me tell you kids: the cloud is just a re-invention of the mainframe era, when wizards in white coats behind glass walls had control of your stuff; not you. "Brillant!" [sic] You're not as modern as you think, kids.
BTW, when I first saw this story (young vs. old), the first thing I thought was, "Well, duh!" Who'd you prefer to remodel your house; a kid straight out of trade school, or a seasoned contractor who's spent twenty years learning how to fix others' boneheaded mistakes?
You know what site my U.S. govt censors? None. Not a single one.
Does Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) not ring any bells for you? At the behest of Disney, et al, they're stealing domain names, often on the flimsiest of evidence.
(Cue for "You had BASIC?!", "Punchcards" and other even older geezers that will make me feel a bit younger)
I remember the day they upgraded the card readers from things that went "thunk, thunk, thunk,..." to new ones that went "t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t..." It was beautiful (Raytheon 500 mini-computers, and honking big desk size machines that the geophysicists pointer-finger typed their punch card jobs on). These were the days when "disk packs" looked like Angel Food cakes. 40 MB I think? 6250 bpi tape drives,...
":ex:ba"
I've replaced the battery in my Canon F-73P "Scientific Statistical Calculator" three times now. Still a brilliant machine (even if it has no external access ports). Excellent manual came with it too (though the paper's getting a bit crumbly now).:-)
Its aluminum ya damned Limey! I swear we bust our balls saving your pasty white asses from the rampaging Krauts and what do you do?
I propose all/.ers post this guy's reply on their wall as an example of where the typical US-ian has sunk to.
1. I (FFS!) was the one complaining about al-u-min-i-um, idiot!
2. I'm a Canuck, and my dad was cannon fodder in the tail turret of a B-17 before either of us were born.
2a. Canucks were kicking Nazi ass long before you 'murricans' deigned to join the fray (kicking and screaming against your will, fsckin' isolationists)!
3. Reading comprehension? What's that?
4. You're an idiot!
Have a nice day (and please learn to read), idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
Expecting cluefulness from banks, indeed from the entire accounting profession, is the height of stupidity in my books. Let me count the ways:
- In the 21st Century, it *still* can take up to three days to transfer money from one acct. to another on their "secure", non-Internet connected network.
- They expend vast amounts of effort on checking, then rolling back, bad transactions and seemingly nothing on ensuring bad transactions can't happen. Vis. TFA. Monday, they discovered they'd been owned!
- I've watched as accredited accountants manually copied (via hunt and peck) numbers from a speadsheet into a non-attached calculator in order to sum them up. Data corruption, anyone? How about right click on the column, then sum? Beyond their capabilities.
They're idiots! Everything about accounting and the banking system is grounded in centuries old tech. (double entry bookkeeping, FFS! as an error correction method!), and they don't need to care, because "The bank doesn't pay!"
Lawyers + accountants == our current financial system, and that's okay?
Insane!
and you can use their "price match"
Honestly curious: Can you?
My battery's dying. BB says ca. C$120 to replace it. On-line offers say ca. C$35. Can I really expect to end up only paying C$35 via BB's price match guarantee? What's the fine print say?
Wonderful. They're using the same trick bed and tire manufacturers do to avoid comparison shopping. Special models for each store so you're never sure if they're the same.
Wait'll you end up with one, then a couple of years down the line when your battery dies, what's a new battery cost?
BestBuy == DumbBuy. WorstBuy, SillyBuy, StupidBuy, ...
My discussions with BB technical support (GeekSquad) have been like talking with two year old Win* HellDesk twits. Never again. Life's too short.
I agree that identification is obviously required and that a country has every right to search you or do anything they want, if you are seeking to cross their borders. No arguments there.
And I think you're nuts, or suicidally timid. Why people are so willing to bend over for gov't paranoia escapes me. If you've done nothing wrong, nor displayed any propensity for doing wrong, why are you EXPECTED to put up with this sort of !@#$?
The US, at least, used to go by this "Probable ..." thing, as in someone suspects you capable of dangerous stuff based on your known and demonstrable probability of doing harmful stuff, THEN you get looked at. Now, it's just dragnet; everyone's suspect. TSA! TSA!
Backbone anyone? Me, I don't like that kind of suspicion of my honourable intentions, so I choose not to go there. They've no right to insinuate that I'm a "potentially" bad person when I've done nothing to raise anyone's suspicions. Their loss.
Yeah, I'm a libertarian, and I think this century sucks horribly. I wish you all would just start saying no to your police state at every turn, whichever it may be.
I read all of these horrible fish puns. Honestly, I thought they all smelt.
Stop it! Just stop! Carp!
how in the world did the name come about?
It's because of h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org.
Er, what is it about recursion that you don't get?
T'anks Rob. You've enabled many great memes to have been born. I hope your next gig will be just as fun. Take me with you, please?
Aside, I think it's pretty funny that the spellchecker won't accept "slashdot" as valid (it just did it again, damnit!). As for the low vs. high UID controversy, anything under 1M is "cool" as far as I'm concerned. :-)
The agency alleges the data is held by Facebook for two years, and wants website owners in the state to remove links to Facebook by the end of next month or possibly face a fine.
I whole heartedly agree. No controversy seen from here, whatsoever.
"Social networking" (a la FB) is a gross (as in, makes me want to puke) application of technology.
He's right. Get out now, and never go back. This is not the web you wanted. This is the web *they* wanted. Don't go there, or accept you'll be owned, ultimately.
Well, I guess 'consumers' in Libya will soon find out how it looks like when you have to start paying bills for everything, and when 'democratic' government is not giving out subsidies anymore (but money goes to themselves and their cronies).
So, we can put you down as synic, yes?
Damnit man, they're restarting their country with intentions toward freedom, and that's all you can come up with?!?
I think rebel forces finally taking the capital qualifies as "...stuff that matters". Do we really need to search for a tech angle just to talk about it on Slashdot?
Yes. Libyan freedom is a good thing. /. is about tech. What's wrong with discussing the intersection of the two? If it's not relevant to both spheres, we waste others' time or abuse their patience.
It's not like we're ignoring the "African Spring" by focussing on its tech. corollaries.
Syria next! Woohoo! :-)
I'm arguing that the headline to this story is fucking retarded and sensationalist.
I get what you're saying and mostly agree, but on the other hand, the Argentinian gov't did resort to censorship, and perhaps ought to have realized there would be collateral damage. It's a fairly blunt weapon. You reap what you sow. You censor, you should expect bad press at the very least for instigating it.
However, yeah, "Doofuses attempting to carry out gov't decree ..." would have been more accurate.
It's almost as though companies don't want you to stop paying for their services.
I'm moving. I'd think they'd want to impress me with their abilities so I'd want to re-subscribe to their service.
Future digital businesses may look more like 4chan than like IBM or Oracle.
Frankly, from what I've seen lately, we're already there. Every company and its dog now has "web presence", but it's so half-assedly done, it's useless. Yeah, you can finally apply to most jobs while still in your pyjamas, and you can log into some op's website and see the status of your account. On the other hand, try to discontinue a service you've subscribed to and you land back in telephone land. It took hours for shaw.ca to call me back yesterday. Unsubscribing from Telus (telephone provider) cannot be done in person with any form of "customer support" person; all done on the phone.
Then, there's connectedness. When you phone them, are they sitting in front of a computer where you can tell them your phone number, and they can then bring up the details of your account? No. It can take fifteen minutes for them to transcribe your pertinent details, then you're put on hold while they contact another department which can access those details.
Present day computer development produces a lot of marginally useful websites geared towards marketing their product, and that's all. "Systems Analysis" is a now dead skill. Present day developers are simply unable to completely think through all of the ramifications of whatever they're working on, so you get brittle, shallow, ultimately useless and frustrating results from them.
But they sure have pretty animations.
Interesting. Back in the day, libertarians wondered if it would be moral and ethical to invade the USSR to force the Reds out of power. You've just made an excellent argument in favour of that. Tyranny anywhere hurts everybody everywhere in one way or another eventually, so yes it is our duty to stamp it out everywhere.
The corollary is we should despise any people who allow themselves to be ruled by such regimes. "Grow a fscking backbone already, damnit!"
Where do I sign up? Libya or Syria or Burma/Myanmar I suppose. Anyone want to sponsor my transportation costs?
Ah. Sorry, I assumed too much.
First, you don't "back up to disk". That's just asking for trouble. You back up to media off disk, whether that be tape, CD, or DVD, etc. I use a bash script that calls find, bzip, and afio, then wodim (cdrecord) to create iso images I can burn to CDs. Smiple [sic]. My $HOME seldom hits more than a third of a CD.
Second, my computers are ancient too. They serve me (mostly) well. The CPU du jour is not necessary if you're not running stupid OSs.
Third, I wish the world was less stupid, 'cause then I'd be rich, instead of wasting time pontificating on /. Can't have everything. :-P
Fourth, damn, I wish I was better at math. Good on you!
GIGO. Serves you right for relying on a toy OS.
How many malware checkers are you running today?
Gahd, this is stupid. Have you never heard of symbolic links?!? From my .bash_history:
ln -s /dev/null ./.adobe/Flash_Player
Whoever's creating pics and video files provides a link to their latest version, and you tell your code to pull from the link! This isn't even version control related (except on their end). It's fscking basic.
Why are people like you even employed in IT?!?
Uh huh. Yet another "computing professional" who can't figure out how to burn his $HOME to a CD. I'm so fscking impressed.
How the fsck do you people manage to remain employed?!?
I used to think that too, before I became hopelessly disillusioned with politics as it's now practiced. However, yes, they are all the same. The only difference between them is the colour of the hobby-horse they're riding. There's not a lick of "civic duty" left in any of them. Their "job" these days is to generate campaign funding for the next election, and nowadays, that means doing the bidding of corporate interests.
Sorry, but they've irrevocably lost me.
Of course it is! They're offering you a free service and telling you you can rely on it better than other sol'ns (though, no promises of course, YMMV, $legalese, ...). They would, of course, because if you fall for the pitch they can sell you to their clients (advertisers).
It all looks great, until you find out they're doing backups to other (mirrored) harddrives on another system, and both of them blow up at once (as happened recently to some outfit in Australia, thereby shutting them down), or any number of other stupid things people do over which you've no control. Have they changed their privacy policy today (cf. Facebook)? Does the NSA/FBI/CIA get to grep your mail too? They can't/won't tell you?!? WTF!?!
I do back up my stuff, and I don't have to expose any of it to a cloud provider in the meantime.
If you're lazy, just admit it. I am too. I say there's smart lazy and foolish lazy. YMMV.
Back at ya.
Actually, this fifty-something has been considering just that lately.
Kristofferson?!? Wasn't that either Gordon Lightfoot or Janis Joplin?
Uh huh. Then one morning, you go into work and find $someone's lost all your mail, and you get to sit around for three days doing nothing while they scurry around trying to get it back. No. Thank. You. This happened to me on a recent contract at $honking_big_corp.
I want my valuable communications under my control, not some wannabee Exchange Server support person. Nor do I want anyone grepping my mail for THEIR purposes (selling it to their advertisers).
I'm astonished to see so many take that lazy way out. /.ers bitch and moan about losing their privacy day in and day out, yet so many of you just hand that valuable function off to $some_cloud_provider because spending an hour figuring out how to configure three or four apps to seamlessly work together to do it all the right way's too much to ask of you.
Me: fetchmail from ISP's smarthost --> postfix --> mutt+procmail+bogofilter --> postfix --> ISP's smarthost. I also Bcc: a copy of all mail I send while at clients to myself so I know it's not going to get lost.
Ah, "But (n)curses interfaces are so last century!" Let me tell you kids: the cloud is just a re-invention of the mainframe era, when wizards in white coats behind glass walls had control of your stuff; not you. "Brillant!" [sic] You're not as modern as you think, kids.
BTW, when I first saw this story (young vs. old), the first thing I thought was, "Well, duh!" Who'd you prefer to remodel your house; a kid straight out of trade school, or a seasoned contractor who's spent twenty years learning how to fix others' boneheaded mistakes?
Does Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) not ring any bells for you? At the behest of Disney, et al, they're stealing domain names, often on the flimsiest of evidence.
I remember the day they upgraded the card readers from things that went "thunk, thunk, thunk, ..." to new ones that went "t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t ..." It was beautiful (Raytheon 500 mini-computers, and honking big desk size machines that the geophysicists pointer-finger typed their punch card jobs on). These were the days when "disk packs" looked like Angel Food cakes. 40 MB I think? 6250 bpi tape drives, ...
":ex :ba"
I've replaced the battery in my Canon F-73P "Scientific Statistical Calculator" three times now. Still a brilliant machine (even if it has no external access ports). Excellent manual came with it too (though the paper's getting a bit crumbly now). :-)
I propose all /.ers post this guy's reply on their wall as an example of where the typical US-ian has sunk to.
1. I (FFS!) was the one complaining about al-u-min-i-um, idiot!
2. I'm a Canuck, and my dad was cannon fodder in the tail turret of a B-17 before either of us were born.
2a. Canucks were kicking Nazi ass long before you 'murricans' deigned to join the fray (kicking and screaming against your will, fsckin' isolationists)!
3. Reading comprehension? What's that?
4. You're an idiot!
Have a nice day (and please learn to read), idiot.