9 years old is 2004, be about the time of first serious push at eco-diesels in Europe (I think e.g. VW Bluemotion brand was a year or so later). Poster is in UK, an economy car from 2004 _will_ be a diesel (to help your model search).
Say, maybe, "Astra CDTi ECO4 LS [2004]". Engine size will be 1.6something ccs, probably sold as a 1.6 at the time but likely now bracketed as "1.7" (might have more luck finding it that way). I have an older "1.9" diesel (not vauxhaul) which would now be sold / classed as 2l.
Combined cycle MPG for that example model: 64mpg (UK) = 54mpg (US) = about 4.5 l/100km
Good for its time, but indeed not out of this world amazing for a new car - a modern 1.6 / 1.7 diesel similar size will get near 3l / 100km, or over 70mpg combined cycle US gals.
Of course you won't actually see any of these cars in the US because US market is allergic to diesel cars - quite happy to burn lots of diesel on the road and dirtier stuff than in europe, but only in trucks. Why - who knows, but someone will be making money from keeping it that way.
... and you cut off before the most important bit:
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" “Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in.”
Bad choice of target -.Net does actually have multiple compilers available, including open source. But more to the point for this discussion, it has multiple DEcompilers available, including open source.
Want to know what that nasty MS compiler put in your.Net binary ? - run it through ILSpy.
Don't trust the ILSpy binary - decompile it with itself, or with a.n.other decompiler.
In fact, because.Net decompiles so well, the problem of this article (binaries don't compare) just doesn't occur. Want to check your.Net binary against the supposed source ? - easy (well, a hell of a lot easier than with C++). Build your binary from the source, decompile both binaries and compare the two sets of decompiled source. It works, it is consistent and reliable, and it is one hell of a lot more useful at showing up differences than comparing two binaries.
RTFA - site was developed for, and supports, a range of browsers, not just IE, not just Windows.
All the browser versions supported are ancient - but then so is the site. It's effectively a deprecated site only used for some benefits that are being phased out anyway - so why throw money away on updating it ?
When "internally" is a bit bigger and covers multiple sites you'll find that you typically don't get multiple POTS lines + a PABX into each site like in the old days, rather the VOIP is routed internally to one (or more, if you are lucky) exit points which do have multiple POTS lines. Same as most likely applies to internet connectivity.
Unless you happen to be at the exit site, every call internal or external (and all internet activity) is going over the site to site WAN.
I'm sure someone somewhere has decided this saves money, and it doesn't seem uncommon. Centralised monitoring and logging is also a reason though...
Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works..
I haven't worked anywhere this century where the office phones have not been VOIP.
They are subject to exactly the same issues as the office internet connection, if that happens to be s**t then the phone dammed well does go down (or reverts to unusable quality) when 500 people hit youtube.
And no matter how much people twiddle with QOS parameters, if the underlying conncection is s**t then QOS just means "what quality of s**t gets assigned to phone".
The fact that the office phone has gone VOIP is what will, in the end, lead to its demise. It can be replaced by Lync / Skype / etc. at no loss of quality, and a great improvement in convenience - your phone follows you without having to login to another device for a start.
Get all those stupid computers off people's desks! Things were much better when you had to go to a programmer in order to get software to do anything!
And (not incidentally) it would eliiminate all the productivity that's lost to Slashdot!
Your sarcasm is unwarranted. This is a nice story for us programmers because it's just the kind of anecdote that makes businesses seriously consider hiring more professional programmers. Nobody is suggesting you need custom software for everything.
And you've missed the point.
It is just as likely that the accounting model was incorrect rather than the implementation. If the spec is wrong (or unclear or incomplete) then you will get garbage out whatever tools you use - excel, c, c++, c#, haskell or real programming in Fortran (assembler if you must). If you don't test and cross check your outputs then you risk not spotting implementation mistakes - whatever tools you use.
Essentially, someone's built a wooden shed the wrong size and in the wrong place vs. the plan - and now they're in trouble for it. The submitter is saying "that's what happens when amateurs use wood and nails to make buildings, if they'd just hired us steelworkers to do the job properly using steel, it wouldn't have happened".
43 and when I started work it was on Vaxen (real ones with washing machine sized disk packs) with Fortran and DCL. And some Coral 66, which no one will have heard of and is as old as it sounds. Some guys had to put up with a very poor text editor on the vax because their dept. wouldn't pay for the CPU cycles for the better text editor. PCs, with diasywheel printers, were for secretarys, and only in the executive offices. Us engineers had to write up by hand and send it to the typing pool. Seriously.
Later at Uni it was IBM Mainframe and then HPUX boxes, with X and a mouse, and Emacs (18 I think). Modern luxuries then. PCs were DOS and not useful for real work. [I do not regret never learning 16bit segmented memory programming - I learned about it, that was enough].
Thinking about it, yeah five years later and all that was long gone. MCC or SLS or the new Slackware which actually had a fancy installer, and you were good for real work on a PC.
-Having to move the mouse all the way into the last 1 or 2 pixels of the corner to active the Start screen, and worse yet activate the charms bar is very annoying. I would rather there be a visible button to click for each corner, yes a return of the Start button would not be out of the question so long as it just brough up the Start screen and not a menu.
Relatively easily fixed. I've done it - I found myself moving mouse to start button area on auto pilot and launching IE so often...
Step 1:
Create a file startscreen.vbs (yeah I know, powershell nicer but too slow to start up). Contents: set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") oShell.SendKeys("^{ESC}") set oShell = Nothing
Step 2:
Create a shortcut to startscreen.vbs on the desktop.
Step 3:
Open properties on the shortcut and change the target property to: C:\Windows\System32\wscript.exe C:\Users\[[my user name]]\Desktop\startscreen.vbs
Change the drive location & path to script as required.
Step 4:
Still in shortcut properties, change the icon. %SystemRoot%\System32\imageres.dll has a windows icon in it. Close properties.
Step 5:
Right click the shortcut and "pin to taskbar". Move it to left hand side. Job done.
- I thought I'd miss aero / glass - but the new flat window chrome etc. has grown on me very quickly, clean and less distracting (takes you back to twm days). - Some bits of the UI and standard dialogs are much improved - new task manager is a _massive_ improvement for one - Explorer has an "up" button again. One of the biggest issues I had with Win7 sorted (no, "back" is _not_ the ****** same...) - It's faster and more responsive. Noticeably. The new start / metro screen even comes up faster than the old start menu on same hardware (and with same programs installed - in-place upgrade).
But biggest plus point for me so far is Hyper-V. Full ring -1 / bare-metal hypervisor performance on your local machine without the stress of (lack of) driver support for server 2008 on laptop / desktop hardware. It's a massive massive improvement on virtual PC or even VMWare workstation (now consigned to trash). [ and yes I know I can do that with Linux for free with Xen / KVM, but Linux isn't an install choice for the works machine, and we're comparing windows with windows here ].
Not so good: Metro apps, charms bar etc. - meh. But I can see some of it might be nice on a tablet if I had one.
It's definitely happened before with physical goods in the UK, not sure about US, probbaly wouldn't be much different. One take on it is here (make sure you read down to the second half):
Essentially a bunch of innocent people had to spend a lot of money on legal action to get their stuff back. Not all succeeded. Of those that did, mostly we don't know because to get their compensation they had to sign gag orders - can't have people talking about the law f**king up now can we....
Search warrant stated 90% of use was illegal... later estimates reckon 10% or less.
Every company car I've had and everyone I know who's had one.
The minute you are given a company car "to take home" [see post above], as opposed to driving to/from work in your own car and picking up a pool car from work for business miles, then you are on personal use, by definition.
Here, you would also be immediately on the hook for tax based on list price of the car, precisely because you've been given a car for personal use.
Saying "take this car home, here's the few thousand tax bill because we've given you a car for personal use", and then saying "you are not allowed to use the car for anything personal" simply makes no logical sense.
At least in academia most places let you separate your work on the side. If you want to use your work on the side as part of your research work well that's where you get into your situation.
I wouldn't trust that to be the case everywhere - my recollection is of research grants / studentships coming with "everything you do while you get this grant belongs to...". Plus you had to co-operate in patenting it if they wanted and sign over the patents. etc.
That was a lot of years ago though - maybe it's all more enlightened, less money focused and less bureaucratic in academia these days...
Not quite how I recalled, coach and a truck, and the crushed car was noticed quickly. Although various reports have the truck driver initially believing he'd been hit directly by the coach, not realising there was a car crushed in between. A Galaxy is around 16ft long, normally.
Amazingly, two people in the car survived. I suspect they and the front of the car were pushed under the truck in front, while the back pf the car was crushed. The kids in the back all died.
Any car can be crushed to inches if hit at speed between two trucks.
I recall accident report like that from a few years ago - they didn't even realised there was a car full of (ex)people there until they pulled the trucks apart. It was Ford Galaxy I think. 7 seater. Is that too small too ?
Sully could have left the cockpit with his lifejacket and got out the front door as fast as he could before the plane sank (which it could have). He actually supervised the evacuation and went back through the length of the plane to check everyone was off. Twice. Before he got out.
There's captains and there's real captains. Hero ? I think he would jsut say he was doing his job.
The costa captain, however, was just doing a runner. Having spectacularly failed to do his job.
Problem is, unless all your competitors are doing that, you'll stop winning any business and rapidly be out of a job...
Procurement processes, particularly public sector, are all biased towards lowest cost rather than honesty of cost, and box-ticking over real due dilligence, because it's more objective that way. Everyone (unless they are allready bust, or have so much business they can pick and choose - and then have hte nightmare of trying to resource it...) trys to get the deal by under quoting the base price and making it back on change control. Because the customer will always have forgotten something somewhere....
Rock and hard place - you have to keep your salesweasels on short enough leash to prevent the catastophic undersells, but you do have to give them enough leeway to actually sell something.
Where I work, every time we get told to put our details into some new provider system for expenses, business travel or whatever (happens regularly with corporate changes) we see who can hack it first. We're developers, it's our personal data, why wouldn't we check ?
The fraction that are hacked in minutes is probably near 50%, and 32% for SQL injection is probably about right.
I'm not sure which is more depressing - the state of the sites or that even though we have a "security" consultancy practice in house, we get corporate edicts to put our data into sites that we haven't even bothered to audit to the extent of sticking a single quote in a couple of form fields or changing the userid in the url...
Correction, it might be good news, and it might be more accessible, IF they've done it right. First cut with a new language/framework for development, and that's a big IF.
HTML5 won't magically fix things - it is perfectly possible to write accessible Flash and inaccessible "HTML5".
Case in point - I recently found that scridb (www.scribd.com) now has a new "HTML 5" interface - for which read HTML+lots of flaky javascript - replacing flash. The new interface:
- was inaccessible and unfriendly, broken in different ways in 3 different (up to date) browsers on the same machine
- had features that no longer worked at all (eg. print)
- even though content was HTML it seemed practically impossible to get it to print in any sane manner - so expect accesibility to be poor
I eventually got it to do what I wanted by finding out you could switch preferences to get the old Flash interface, which rendered identically in every browser I tried, and just worked...
Moral: it's possible to write crap in any language.
It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose
Not true.
Emails often contain personal information, at the very least contact information, and keeping such information indefiintely risks breaching data protection laws in various jurisdictions.
Slashdot Mirror
9 years old is 2004, be about the time of first serious push at eco-diesels in Europe (I think e.g. VW Bluemotion brand was a year or so later). Poster is in UK, an economy car from 2004 _will_ be a diesel (to help your model search).
Say, maybe, "Astra CDTi ECO4 LS [2004]". Engine size will be 1.6something ccs, probably sold as a 1.6 at the time but likely now bracketed as "1.7" (might have more luck finding it that way). I have an older "1.9" diesel (not vauxhaul) which would now be sold / classed as 2l.
Combined cycle MPG for that example model: 64mpg (UK) = 54mpg (US) = about 4.5 l/100km
Good for its time, but indeed not out of this world amazing for a new car - a modern 1.6 / 1.7 diesel similar size will get near 3l / 100km, or over 70mpg combined cycle US gals.
Of course you won't actually see any of these cars in the US because US market is allergic to diesel cars - quite happy to burn lots of diesel on the road and dirtier stuff than in europe, but only in trucks. Why - who knows, but someone will be making money from keeping it that way.
... and you cut off before the most important bit:
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in.”
Bad choice of target - .Net does actually have multiple compilers available, including open source. But more to the point for this discussion, it has multiple DEcompilers available, including open source.
Want to know what that nasty MS compiler put in your .Net binary ? - run it through ILSpy.
Don't trust the ILSpy binary - decompile it with itself, or with a.n.other decompiler.
In fact, because .Net decompiles so well, the problem of this article (binaries don't compare) just doesn't occur. Want to check your .Net binary against the supposed source ? - easy (well, a hell of a lot easier than with C++). Build your binary from the source, decompile both binaries and compare the two sets of decompiled source. It works, it is consistent and reliable, and it is one hell of a lot more useful at showing up differences than comparing two binaries.
If they'd written HTML instead of IE6,
RTFA - site was developed for, and supports, a range of browsers, not just IE, not just Windows.
All the browser versions supported are ancient - but then so is the site. It's effectively a deprecated site only used for some benefits that are being phased out anyway - so why throw money away on updating it ?
When "internally" is a bit bigger and covers multiple sites you'll find that you typically don't get multiple POTS lines + a PABX into each site like in the old days, rather the VOIP is routed internally to one (or more, if you are lucky) exit points which do have multiple POTS lines. Same as most likely applies to internet connectivity.
Unless you happen to be at the exit site, every call internal or external (and all internet activity) is going over the site to site WAN.
I'm sure someone somewhere has decided this saves money, and it doesn't seem uncommon. Centralised monitoring and logging is also a reason though...
Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works..
I haven't worked anywhere this century where the office phones have not been VOIP.
They are subject to exactly the same issues as the office internet connection, if that happens to be s**t then the phone dammed well does go down (or reverts to unusable quality) when 500 people hit youtube.
And no matter how much people twiddle with QOS parameters, if the underlying conncection is s**t then QOS just means "what quality of s**t gets assigned to phone".
The fact that the office phone has gone VOIP is what will, in the end, lead to its demise. It can be replaced by Lync / Skype / etc. at no loss of quality, and a great improvement in convenience - your phone follows you without having to login to another device for a start.
Get all those stupid computers off people's desks! Things were much better when you had to go to a programmer in order to get software to do anything!
And (not incidentally) it would eliiminate all the productivity that's lost to Slashdot!
Your sarcasm is unwarranted. This is a nice story for us programmers because it's just the kind of anecdote that makes businesses seriously consider hiring more professional programmers. Nobody is suggesting you need custom software for everything.
And you've missed the point.
It is just as likely that the accounting model was incorrect rather than the implementation. If the spec is wrong (or unclear or incomplete) then you will get garbage out whatever tools you use - excel, c, c++, c#, haskell or real programming in Fortran (assembler if you must). If you don't test and cross check your outputs then you risk not spotting implementation mistakes - whatever tools you use.
Essentially, someone's built a wooden shed the wrong size and in the wrong place vs. the plan - and now they're in trouble for it. The submitter is saying "that's what happens when amateurs use wood and nails to make buildings, if they'd just hired us steelworkers to do the job properly using steel, it wouldn't have happened".
43 and when I started work it was on Vaxen (real ones with washing machine sized disk packs) with Fortran and DCL. And some Coral 66, which no one will have heard of and is as old as it sounds. Some guys had to put up with a very poor text editor on the vax because their dept. wouldn't pay for the CPU cycles for the better text editor.
PCs, with diasywheel printers, were for secretarys, and only in the executive offices. Us engineers had to write up by hand and send it to the typing pool. Seriously.
Later at Uni it was IBM Mainframe and then HPUX boxes, with X and a mouse, and Emacs (18 I think). Modern luxuries then.
PCs were DOS and not useful for real work. [I do not regret never learning 16bit segmented memory programming - I learned about it, that was enough].
Thinking about it, yeah five years later and all that was long gone. MCC or SLS or the new Slackware which actually had a fancy installer, and you were good for real work on a PC.
Dude, you missed out.
-Having to move the mouse all the way into the last 1 or 2 pixels of the corner to active the Start screen, and worse yet activate the charms bar is very annoying. I would rather there be a visible button to click for each corner, yes a return of the Start button would not be out of the question so long as it just brough up the Start screen and not a menu.
Relatively easily fixed. I've done it - I found myself moving mouse to start button area on auto pilot and launching IE so often...
Step 1:
Create a file startscreen.vbs (yeah I know, powershell nicer but too slow to start up). Contents:
set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
oShell.SendKeys("^{ESC}")
set oShell = Nothing
Step 2:
Create a shortcut to startscreen.vbs on the desktop.
Step 3:
Open properties on the shortcut and change the target property to:
C:\Windows\System32\wscript.exe C:\Users\[[my user name]]\Desktop\startscreen.vbs
Change the drive location & path to script as required.
Step 4:
Still in shortcut properties, change the icon. %SystemRoot%\System32\imageres.dll has a windows icon in it. Close properties.
Step 5:
Right click the shortcut and "pin to taskbar". Move it to left hand side. Job done.
> Could you please list ONE big improvement?
Well from my experience so far (only since RTM):
- I thought I'd miss aero / glass - but the new flat window chrome etc. has grown on me very quickly, clean and less distracting (takes you back to twm days).
- Some bits of the UI and standard dialogs are much improved - new task manager is a _massive_ improvement for one
- Explorer has an "up" button again. One of the biggest issues I had with Win7 sorted (no, "back" is _not_ the ****** same...)
- It's faster and more responsive. Noticeably. The new start / metro screen even comes up faster than the old start menu on same hardware (and with same programs installed - in-place upgrade).
But biggest plus point for me so far is Hyper-V. Full ring -1 / bare-metal hypervisor performance on your local machine without the stress of (lack of) driver support for server 2008 on laptop / desktop hardware. It's a massive massive improvement on virtual PC or even VMWare workstation (now consigned to trash).
[ and yes I know I can do that with Linux for free with Xen / KVM, but Linux isn't an install choice for the works machine, and we're comparing windows with windows here ].
Not so good: Metro apps, charms bar etc. - meh. But I can see some of it might be nice on a tablet if I had one.
It's definitely happened before with physical goods in the UK, not sure about US, probbaly wouldn't be much different. One take on it is here (make sure you read down to the second half):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1222777/The-raid-rocked-Met-Why-gun-drugs-op-6-717-safety-deposit-boxes-cost-taxpayer-fortune.html
Essentially a bunch of innocent people had to spend a lot of money on legal action to get their stuff back. Not all succeeded. Of those that did, mostly we don't know because to get their compensation they had to sign gag orders - can't have people talking about the law f**king up now can we....
Search warrant stated 90% of use was illegal... later estimates reckon 10% or less.
> Where is this accepted?
Every company car I've had and everyone I know who's had one.
The minute you are given a company car "to take home" [see post above], as opposed to driving to/from work in your own car and picking up a pool car from work for business miles, then you are on personal use, by definition.
Here, you would also be immediately on the hook for tax based on list price of the car, precisely because you've been given a car for personal use.
Saying "take this car home, here's the few thousand tax bill because we've given you a car for personal use", and then saying "you are not allowed to use the car for anything personal" simply makes no logical sense.
At least in academia most places let you separate your work on the side. If you want to use your work on the side as part of your research work well that's where you get into your situation.
I wouldn't trust that to be the case everywhere - my recollection is of research grants / studentships coming with "everything you do while you get this grant belongs to...". Plus you had to co-operate in patenting it if they wanted and sign over the patents. etc.
That was a lot of years ago though - maybe it's all more enlightened, less money focused and less bureaucratic in academia these days...
More likely this one: http://www.southwalesguardian.co.uk/archive/2005/02/09/Ammanford+Archive/4258471.Bus_tragedy_parents___life_sentence_/
Not quite how I recalled, coach and a truck, and the crushed car was noticed quickly. Although various reports have the truck driver initially believing he'd been hit directly by the coach, not realising there was a car crushed in between. A Galaxy is around 16ft long, normally.
Amazingly, two people in the car survived. I suspect they and the front of the car were pushed under the truck in front, while the back pf the car was crushed. The kids in the back all died.
Any car can be crushed to inches if hit at speed between two trucks.
I recall accident report like that from a few years ago - they didn't even realised there was a car full of (ex)people there until they pulled the trucks apart. It was Ford Galaxy I think. 7 seater. Is that too small too ?
"sure, just sign here"
Wrong. And not beacuse I'm american - I'm not.
Sully could have left the cockpit with his lifejacket and got out the front door as fast as he could before the plane sank (which it could have).
He actually supervised the evacuation and went back through the length of the plane to check everyone was off. Twice. Before he got out.
There's captains and there's real captains. Hero ? I think he would jsut say he was doing his job.
The costa captain, however, was just doing a runner. Having spectacularly failed to do his job.
So change job title to architect. No problem there.... :-)
Problem is, unless all your competitors are doing that, you'll stop winning any business and rapidly be out of a job...
Procurement processes, particularly public sector, are all biased towards lowest cost rather than honesty of cost, and box-ticking over real due dilligence, because it's more objective that way. Everyone (unless they are allready bust, or have so much business they can pick and choose - and then have hte nightmare of trying to resource it...) trys to get the deal by under quoting the base price and making it back on change control. Because the customer will always have forgotten something somewhere....
Rock and hard place - you have to keep your salesweasels on short enough leash to prevent the catastophic undersells, but you do have to give them enough leeway to actually sell something.
Where I work, every time we get told to put our details into some new provider system for expenses, business travel or whatever (happens regularly with corporate changes) we see who can hack it first. We're developers, it's our personal data, why wouldn't we check ?
The fraction that are hacked in minutes is probably near 50%, and 32% for SQL injection is probably about right.
I'm not sure which is more depressing - the state of the sites or that even though we have a "security" consultancy practice in house, we get corporate edicts to put our data into sites that we haven't even bothered to audit to the extent of sticking a single quote in a couple of form fields or changing the userid in the url...
If it's been bought out of bankruptcy by someone else, then there is still a corporation behind it... it is changed, not gone.
3c) fail to read "where the corporation behind it was gone"
Correction, it might be good news, and it might be more accessible, IF they've done it right.
First cut with a new language/framework for development, and that's a big IF.
HTML5 won't magically fix things - it is perfectly possible to write accessible Flash and inaccessible "HTML5".
Case in point - I recently found that scridb (www.scribd.com) now has a new "HTML 5" interface - for which read HTML+lots of flaky javascript - replacing flash.
The new interface:
- was inaccessible and unfriendly, broken in different ways in 3 different (up to date) browsers on the same machine
- had features that no longer worked at all (eg. print)
- even though content was HTML it seemed practically impossible to get it to print in any sane manner - so expect accesibility to be poor
I eventually got it to do what I wanted by finding out you could switch preferences to get the old Flash interface, which rendered identically in every browser I tried, and just worked...
Moral: it's possible to write crap in any language.
How can you (or why would you) license a patent that isn't granted yet (and might never be granted) ?
It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose
Not true.
Emails often contain personal information, at the very least contact information, and keeping such information indefiintely risks breaching data protection laws in various jurisdictions.