If you pay cash for something you'll be required to swipe your ID card through a reader anyways because "it's standard procedure to get a card swipe of some kind with every transaction"
We're almost there anyway. I have recently been asked for my name and address in shops when:
I returned an item of clothing for a refund (because it was the wrong size - arguably my fault for not trying it on, though it was the same size I usually take from that store)
I returned an item of clothing for a refund (because it was mislabelled with the wrong size in the store)
I returned a sampler for curtain fabrics the day after borrowing it, and asked for my deposit back
I bought a new TV (the store has to pass my address to the TV licensing people, IIRC)
I bought a new camera (the store does the guarantee/warranty registration).
Some of these aren't too unreasonable. However, things like requiring me to supply full contact details before returning a deposit on a sampler (having made no mention of this when offering the sampler the previous day) is inexcusable (and I told them so). Also, adding me to a blacklist database for making a return (go on, pretend they wanted my address for any other reason) when the return was due to the store's mistake is equally unacceptable IMNSHO.
Requiring everyone to supply a swipecard ID would make this sort of abuse easier, but the offensive thing here is the unnecessary collection and processing of personal information. As the old truism reminds us, technology is neutral, and it's what you do with it that matters.
If anything, this would be one of the few possible benefits of such a system - the amount of tax you pay could be directly linked to your lifestyle, so people who smoke would pay more because they're probably going to make more use of the NHS than those who don't.
Statistically, that's not true. Smokers cost the NHS less over the course of their lifetimes on average, because they tend not to live as long.
This may be counter-intuitive, but it does illustrate very nicely how dangerous a little information can be. Not that this is at all relevant to the current discussion, of course.;-)
When you claim that defacto standards are worth more than formal specifications, you're ignoring how much of programming comes from specifications. You don't know them, because you've never read them -- they're just something you take for granted.
On the contrary; on my bookshelf sits a copy of the ISO C++ standard, amongst other things, and I last referred to it on Friday.
Imagine what would happen if compiler writers didn't read the spec before implemnting a for loop, or decided to get creative with the way output strings are formatted.
An unfortunate example, given the chaos created by Microsoft's decision to use a different scoping rule for variables declared in for loops in Visual C++ 6 to just about everyone else on the planet. To be fair, VC++ 6 predates the C++ standard, though only just. This one still causes headaches even today, though.
More seriously, and speaking as a guy who's currently reviewing the office coding standards in light of our need to build portably on something like a dozen different platforms that are each being upgraded as an ongoing process, there are countless places where even today, nearly a decade after the standard was published, compilers get stupid little things wrong. You don't notice them most of the time, because most platforms get most things right, but they are there, and many of them are really quite trivial and silly limitations.
As a consequence, the only way we can be confident that our code builds and runs properly on all the different platforms is to do it: each night we make those builds with each compiler, and we regularly run our automated test suite on all of them, and examine any differences between the results on different platforms. Given that we're writing math-heavy code, unfortunately there tend to be quite a lot of those differences, even though our code is theoretically standard-compliant.
I would love for everyone to implement the C++ standard perfectly, so that such checking would be a formality. However, until they do (and I doubt they ever will for a standard as bloated as C++'s), I'll trust the results I see from actually compiling and testing with each platform over the theoretical results every time.
Ask yourself this: when you write code in C++ or Java or Perl, do you blindly guess what might work? No, you look up the language features and APIs that are documented to do what you need done, and you use them.
And then you discover that no compiler on the planet actually meets the C++ standard and silly little things don't work on someone's current compiler, Java is frequently a write-once, debug-everywhere platform, and many Perl modules in CPAN aren't nearly as platform-agnostic as they claimed.
If you want things to work, de facto standards you can actually test against are worth more than theoretical, formal specifications any day. But of course, both are merely a means to an end, and useful exactly as far as they help you to achieve your objective at the time.
Its also going to be a bone of contention for those who included the "this version or higher" in their license.
Indeed. Of course, anyone naive enough to play in the world of software without specifying exactly the licensing terms their code is released under is kind of asking for whatever they get. Why on earth would you trust any group of people you don't know to specify the licensing conditions under which your code may be released as they see fit, particularly anyone in the politics-ridden world of the FSF/GPL? The whole "this version or higher" thing was always an idiocy.
FWIW, I agree with pretty much all of Tom's points about the daftness of the GPL3 and the unfortunate understanding of it and the surrounding issues exhibited by others in this thread. I think a few people around here are suffering from the "everything should be free" fallacy taken to its logical conclusion.
Also, currently if you have something worth patenting, but don't have the funds to go through with the process you can hold off for a bit until you have some investment capital behind you, or maybe until you actually make a few sales.
You have to be very careful with this, though, because often as soon as you disclose your invention, clocks start ticking.
Sorry I don't understand how you came to your conclusion that gordon brown is setting up tony blair.
I thought the commonly held belief is that tony blair intends to hand gordon brown a poisoned chalice.
If only Mr blair would just go, hand over the leadership to his successor (probably gordon brown) and give him a chance to repair some of the damage caused by Mr Blair and his policies and impliment a few of his own.
That's certainly a common belief in some quarters. However, I've noticed a distinct change in the waters recently. Until a few months ago, even when Tony was off on one of his crusades, he was almost invariably backed publicly by every major figure in his party. The dissenters were the well-known rebels and lower-ranking people, not Cabinet high-flyers and the like. Even Gordon Brown repeatedly and publicly denied major rifts with Tony Blair. Recently, though, we've had open discussion not just of the succession but also of Cabinet dissent over things like Israel/Lebanon and our "special relationship" with the US. I think a lot of the party high-flyers know that Tony Blair is effectively a lame duck, and rather than going down with him over things like ID cards and foreign policy, they're starting to shift so they can later say "Of course we backed Gordon [or whoever else] from the start".
The other side of this is that, as all-but-leader-elect, Gordon Brown's influence is currently at an all-time high. He is giving policy speeches well outside the Chancellor's remit. He is working out who is going to form his front bench team in the run up to the next election, who his friends are and who needs to go. And he is not a stupid man: he has seen how big names can fall from grace and even return later, and how major policy headaches can be spun or outright reversed with minimal collateral damage to the party's reputation.
This is why I think Gordon Brown is setting up Tony Blair. Brown is a shrewd political operator, and I think he has determined that Blair is now a very useful political fall-guy. With Brown having played the loyal party member for a long time now, possibly since day one if you believe the rumours, I think Blair's loyalty credits are all used up. If Brown can send a lot of the unwanted policy baggage with him when he goes, Labour will have a much better chance at the next election.
As for the nationality question, and leaving aside your inappropriate and unnecessary stereotyping of all English people, I think Brown's problem isn't that he's not English, it's that he's Scottish. This puts him in a very difficult position with regard to the so-called West Lothian question: if, as I think is inevitable, Scottish MPs have to give up their voting rights on UK Parliamentary issues that are delegated to the Scottish Parliament, then it will be difficult for a Scottish MP to lead with authority on such issues for the same reasons.
Sounds like IT-Guy doesn't realise that all the good hacking tools available in linux are quickly ported over to windows where his darling students are going to smuggle them into the school on thumb-drives bigger than the hard-drive in most classroom computers.
You're both deliberately ignoring my point and deliberately using a dubious counterexample.
If Windows is an operational requirement, then you are forced to deal with Windows security issues, regardless of what else is on the network. This can be done reasonably well, despite the popular myths around these parts, by a competent Windows admin. In any case, allowing other platforms doesn't reduce the risks here.
What you are suggesting is that in addition, the admins should voluntarily accept any security risks incurred by people using other systems, with which the admin may or may not be familiar. We're not necessarily talking about some smart-ass network crack using script kiddie tools; it could just as easily be a vulnerability in a non-standard e-mail client or document viewer that allows a keyboard grabber to be installed or mails out confidential information stored on the hard drive. Perhaps the alternative software doesn't have such vulnerabilities, or at least is rapidly and automatically patched to fix them as soon as they are known. The point is, why should the admin have to care? Supporting arbitrary software just makes his life more difficult, increases the risk of a cock-up for which he will be held accountable. It simply has no up-side, from the admin's point of view.
Simple data program, so what's wrong with java? Actualy you could probably find most of it all ready written on the web.
When I wrote that program, Java was barely developed enough to draw a window on a screen. In any case, I'd rather use a more powerful language than a theoretically more portable one, when portability is explicitly not a requirement according to the guy paying me.
Explain to me how have a Linux or Mac OSed machine sitting on a properly DMZed intranet is any more of a security threat than have any machine on the intranet.
<IT guy> No, you explain to me why they're not, sufficiently convincingly that I'm willing to bet my job on it. </IT guy>
Please control your troll, there maybe a smattering of educational administration programs that are windows only, but that's about it
Calling me a troll doesn't make a convincing argument, particularly when you're asserting the demonstrably untrue. We're talking about further and higher education here. At sixth form level (roughly ages 16-18), pretty much all of the programs used in the classroom are Windows-based IME. I was even contracted to write one, once, just a little toy program to display data from a simple measuring device in physics classes; care to guess how much interest the guy requesting the program had in any environment other than Windows?
At university level things are probably rather different, because the media used tend to mean there isn't the same focus on teacher-led demonstrations using prepackaged software.
No problem. Tony Blair admitted the other day that he gets one of his children to load his iPod for him. Would anyone like to take a guess about whether every single track was legitimately copied onto that machine?
Even worse, in the U.K. they could be extradited without the evidence even having to be disclosed to a judge or anyone else due to a treaty (supposedly to be only for terrorist cases but recently used on a fraud charge) with the U.S.A. which the U.K. has ratified but the U.S.A. has refused to. Now, that's scary!
Not for long, I think. In fact, the whole post-9/11 draconian government thing is rapidly dying in the UK, Tony Blair just doesn't realise it yet (or at least doesn't admit to realising it in public).
Yes, there was the recent case of three banking executives who were transferred to the US under dubious circumstances. However, that caused a huge political storm, because the "anti-terror" legislation was clearly being used for something that had nothing to do with safeguarding the land from terrorists. In this case, I suspect that either the US will ratify the treaty and agree the reverse as well very soon, or the UK government will be forced to pull out.
It's the same story elsewhere. Just this week, Walter Wolfgang, the long-standing Labour party member removed by heavies from last year's party conference for daring to heckle Jack Straw over the war on Iraq and then denied re-entry under anti-terror laws(!), was elected by the party membership to their national governing body. Not only does he get to speak at the next conference as a result, it seems he's guaranteed the chance to do so from the same platform as Blair et al.
ID cards and the National Identity Register... Ah, yes, New Labour's greatest threat. Except, of course, that even those people who would like to be involved with it as a lucrative business opportunity are openly questioning whether the government's scheme can even be implemented, never mind bring the claimed benefits. Both the significant opposition parties in England oppose the scheme. The Information Commissioner (our quasi-independent guardian of data protection and freedom of information issues) has issued some of his most damning comments ever on the subject, and ruled against the government several times on information disclosure issues. The timetables are obviously slipping badly, but no-one will admit how badly. The costs are huge, but no-one will disclose how huge. Sooner or later, the whole illusory stack of cards is going to collapse, and all Tony Blair's big "it's be a centrepiece in our next election manifesto" rhetoric is doing is digging his successor's grave early.
Likewise, a bill described as "Blair's (latest) enabling act" because of its attempt to reduce Parliament to pretty much a rubber stamp was quietly all but dropped a few weeks ago.
The government has been ruled against yet again in the past few days over the whole restraining order/detention without trial thing. This is one of those awkward issues: it's a good bet that a high proportion of the people subject to restraining orders really are nasty bits of work, but I think the principle of freedom from arbitrary detention transcends the importance of removing some liberties from a small number of individuals who may or may not pose some level of threat. It would be far better, if the government really has enough good intelligence to believe these people pose a current threat to our security, that the government should bring charges against them in a suitable court of law and make its case properly. In any case, one of the most senior judges in our land has now said outright that if the Home Secretary wants to impose this sort of thing, he's had ample time to consult Parliament since some of these suspects came to light, and therefore he can't just award himself new powers without scrutiny to do as he sees fit. (This on top of one of the most damning judgements in recent legal history from the High Court during the previous round of the case, which pulled few punches as far as telling the government it was way out of line.)
Personally, I increasingly think this is Gordon Brown setting Tony Blair up to take the fall for al
Not what could have been, what is. The fact that Slashdot's set-up couldn't make the idea work doesn't mean other sites, such as Digg, can't do so.
Of course, whether Digg can maintain its grand position in the site rankings for as long as Slashdot has been around is another question entirely. There are reasons that I still visit Slashdot far more often, and those reasons generally relate to the fact that there is some editorial control on stories and a reasonably powerful moderation system, and despite our jests, both of these do a lot for the signal/noise ratio.
I've been predicting for quite a while now that "Web 3.0" will come a lot quicker than Web 2.0, and it will be based on information-centric sites with some combination of editorial and web-of-trust input. Just as the "old" news sites (pure editorial) have been outpaced by good blogs and community-driven sites, so the most successful community sites may suffer as their complete openness is abused.
It's impossible to see how YouTube is currently profitable. It does however, thanks to the team of legal snakes hired to draft its licence agreements, own the rights to everything posted on it.
Only if:
the person posting the content had the rights to give away in the first place; and
the agreement turns out to be enforceable, which it may well not be if the people posting the content didn't understand the implications of doing so at the time they posted it.
Moreover, if YouTube ever tried to do something like that and made money from it, I imagine an awful lot of people would suddenly be interested in how their illegally copied material was being redistributed by YouTube, since any hope it had of a viable defence along the lines of automated processes would evaporate almost instantly. (Example: I know for a fact that teaching videos related to some of my hobbies have been ripped and put on sites like this, and that this was done without the consent of the teachers and production teams involved in making the videos. These things have a relatively small market in the first place, and are usually produced by tiny outfits who don't make a lot of profit off them, so blatant infringement of the copyright does hurt.)
IANAL, but I've been around long enough to see that this isn't black and white.
The mother of a friend of mine witnessed some very 'wolly' thinking when at a meeting to plan the next generation of IT infrastructure for a large part of Londons public library system. She was representing the libraries in one borough of London (despite having next to no computing experience). On the subject of which office package they should purchase my friend had already primed his mother with a suggestion of Open Office. However, the technical advisor (who represented a company which resold Microsoft products) told the committee that such 'toy' free software may be OK for smaller endeavours but wasn't appropriate for a professional and highly important environment as theirs.
Did your friend actually give his mother any objective data with which to support his suggestion? Otherwise, it's just going to sound like something someone heard in a sound-bite, and it's entirely likely (and justified) that a technical advisor will slap it down.
You imply in your post that the advisor did this because of a corporate connection to Microsoft. You don't mention whether his organisation also sold Linux distros, for example. More to the point, you also ignored the simple possibility that MS Office might have been a better choice in this context, and the advisor might have known why.
I've seen what you describe. The people behind such policies tend to see alternative configurations as timesinks and distractions, rather than as amazingly useful education for their staff about how things really work and what tools are available.
Or they take the (not unreasonable) view that if they're responsible for the network, and it's their ass on the line if security is breached and damage is done, then having unknown (to them) systems with access is a vulnerability that should be addressed.
Having a house standard for machines and requiring everyone you don't trust not to screw up (which means pretty much everyone in any large organisation) to use it is a somewhat annoying but entirely understandable policy for an IT group. Whether Windows should be that standard is a matter for the particular organisation in question, but in academia, there may be strong argument that it should be since a lot of specialist software is available for Windows while there's very little that's Mac- or Linux-only.
Attitudes like the parent poster's from L337 geeks are exactly why, despite the geeks' ongoing protestations, competent managers still don't let them anywhere near the authority to set policy.
You're falling for the common fallacy that all software is either "office software" (WP, graphics, etc.) or "Internet software" (e-mail, web stuff, etc.).
In the academic world, this is far from true. There are countless specialist teaching programs out there, many of which run on Windows.
Yes, the BT callout charge is exactly what I was objecting to as well. They refused to budge, repeatedly stating that I had to accept responsibility for the charge before they would escalate the fault report. Eventually, I got one of their old-timer support guys to say categorically that the policy was just because so many people don't bother to check obvious things like hardware being properly connected up before reporting a fault, and if I had done everything on their checklist and found no fault on my side, I would not be blamed. They wriggled for weeks before we got to that point, though.
(In my case, that particular problem did turn out to be on BT's side, and what they claim was a signal/noise ratio adjustment on my line fixed it.)
In any case, I have no problem with usage quotas as long as they're transparent. As someone who doesn't spend all day illegally ripping things over P2P, and whose monthly bandwidth only gets anywhere near the current 3GB threshold I have on the rare occasions that I download several very large installers in one month, I'm quite happy not subsidising the aforementioned P2Pers.
Now, signing someone up for an "unlimited" package and then imposing usage quotas without a corresponding drop in price, that's a different thing entirely.
And to be honest I'm not sure I trust the report about back-ups failing. I suspect they didn't have any.
If your back-up system isn't regularly tested and found to be restorable, then you don't have any, no matter how many tapes/spare hard drives/CD-Rs/whatever you use.
I do wonder at what stage this sort of cock-up becomes outright negligence. I haven't checked my terms of use recently, but I doubt disclaimers will hold up for long after this sort of mess anyway.
I asked about alternatives on a local forum recently. Some of the responses were a bit surprising. Our local cable firm is NTL, for example, and despite having a less than stellar reputation generally, it sounds like their ISP wing is doing its job fine (at least, according to a few locals who use it).
I've also heard good reports about some of the smaller but significantly more expensive ISPs. These are backed up by various ISP comparison web sites, where the smaller outfits consistently get way higher feedback than most of the big names. Apparently in Internet connections, as with much in life, you get what you pay for.
Their customer service has never been particularly superb, it's true: they messed me around a bit when I was initially getting broadband installed, for example. Still, until maybe the start of this year, the tech support guys always seemed to know their stuff, and any problems I did have usually resulted in a fairly quick solution after a fairly short wait to speak to a real and knowledgable person on the phone. I've noticed a really obvious drop in their service levels over the past six months or so, though.
I've been with PlusNet for years, and they were a pretty good ISP until a few months ago. Since then, we've had a string of problems, of which this is only the latest.
I've had my broadband connection out more than on for weeks at a time, for a start. This in itself is inexcusable. What's even more inexcusable is telling me I had to accept a significant penalty charge if they escalated the fault to my telephone service provider (BT) and they found no fault -- which doesn't sound unreasonable, until you know that the fault was evident using nothing but PlusNet-supplied hardware plugged into a BT-installed phone socket, with no complications whatsoever, and that PlusNet had already indicated that they themselves couldn't diagnose a fault. This was a total loss of service for hours at a time, several days a week, remember.
On top of that, they decided to forcibly upgrade everyone to "up to 8MB" broadband recently. The ethics of using that term are dubious at best: it's only for downloading; the highest recorded speeds off-peak are more like 5-6; and at peak times you'll be lucky to get more than 1-2. Moreover, they acknowledged ahead of time that there would be significant disruption (for weeks, not hours) to each customer after the upgrade, they said they wouldn't confirm when any given customer was being upgraded (so no idea whether the problems I had were to do with this or some more general issue, then) and they said some customers' performance would actually drop but they wouldn't revert the change if this happened. They had so many problems with this that they have now suspended/abandoned the process, and sent a grovelling e-mail message to their customers.
Their tech support people have also been completely over-run, partly due to inadequate resources and partly due to their own incompetence (e.g., they totally failed to read a note I'd helpfully left on their system for them clarifying a question they always ask, and asked the question in boilerplate form anyway). To add insult to injury, they've changed their phone system in ways that have repeatedly broken, and now mean you go through several layers of automated menus before talking to a real person. Yes, they really did tell me at one stage that if I was experiencing broadband connectivity faults, I could find more information on their web site.
And now, of course, we have the e-mail fiasco. It's not the first big e-mail problem: I've recently had legitimate and important messages from the sysadmins of another service I use being bounced because they "contained a virus". (Not according to the other service, whose admins I know and trust, nor according to one well-respected intermediate service that was involved in forwarding the mail.) Moreover, this occurred even when I disabled virus checking for incoming e-mail; they were blocking incoming messages to me against my explicit instructions. Oh, and their new webmail system is poor in functionality and so bug-ridden that you can actually lose data. Some of this, in particular an arbitrary time-out for composing mails using webmail, was regarded as a feature when I asked the support staff about it!
I don't know what's happened to PlusNet. Perhaps they have simply been victims of their own success, after getting very positive comments for years (they were widely regarded as one of the best ISPs in the UK for a while) and a consequent boost in custom? In any case, the mighty have well and truly fallen, and I (along with many other people I know) am currently investigating alternatives as a matter of urgency.
Unfortunately in the real world, giving up some of your self respect if its going to get you off a large fine or a trip down to the station is a necessary evil.
No, it's not. It's a voluntary choice, often made to make your life easier in the immediate future at the expense of doing the right thing.
The world is full of opportunities to make such choices, and the fact that so many people do make them in this way has a lot to do with the state of the world today.
Slashdot Mirror
We're almost there anyway. I have recently been asked for my name and address in shops when:
Some of these aren't too unreasonable. However, things like requiring me to supply full contact details before returning a deposit on a sampler (having made no mention of this when offering the sampler the previous day) is inexcusable (and I told them so). Also, adding me to a blacklist database for making a return (go on, pretend they wanted my address for any other reason) when the return was due to the store's mistake is equally unacceptable IMNSHO.
Requiring everyone to supply a swipecard ID would make this sort of abuse easier, but the offensive thing here is the unnecessary collection and processing of personal information. As the old truism reminds us, technology is neutral, and it's what you do with it that matters.
Statistically, that's not true. Smokers cost the NHS less over the course of their lifetimes on average, because they tend not to live as long.
This may be counter-intuitive, but it does illustrate very nicely how dangerous a little information can be. Not that this is at all relevant to the current discussion, of course. ;-)
On the contrary; on my bookshelf sits a copy of the ISO C++ standard, amongst other things, and I last referred to it on Friday.
An unfortunate example, given the chaos created by Microsoft's decision to use a different scoping rule for variables declared in for loops in Visual C++ 6 to just about everyone else on the planet. To be fair, VC++ 6 predates the C++ standard, though only just. This one still causes headaches even today, though.
More seriously, and speaking as a guy who's currently reviewing the office coding standards in light of our need to build portably on something like a dozen different platforms that are each being upgraded as an ongoing process, there are countless places where even today, nearly a decade after the standard was published, compilers get stupid little things wrong. You don't notice them most of the time, because most platforms get most things right, but they are there, and many of them are really quite trivial and silly limitations.
As a consequence, the only way we can be confident that our code builds and runs properly on all the different platforms is to do it: each night we make those builds with each compiler, and we regularly run our automated test suite on all of them, and examine any differences between the results on different platforms. Given that we're writing math-heavy code, unfortunately there tend to be quite a lot of those differences, even though our code is theoretically standard-compliant.
I would love for everyone to implement the C++ standard perfectly, so that such checking would be a formality. However, until they do (and I doubt they ever will for a standard as bloated as C++'s), I'll trust the results I see from actually compiling and testing with each platform over the theoretical results every time.
And then you discover that no compiler on the planet actually meets the C++ standard and silly little things don't work on someone's current compiler, Java is frequently a write-once, debug-everywhere platform, and many Perl modules in CPAN aren't nearly as platform-agnostic as they claimed.
If you want things to work, de facto standards you can actually test against are worth more than theoretical, formal specifications any day. But of course, both are merely a means to an end, and useful exactly as far as they help you to achieve your objective at the time.
Indeed. Of course, anyone naive enough to play in the world of software without specifying exactly the licensing terms their code is released under is kind of asking for whatever they get. Why on earth would you trust any group of people you don't know to specify the licensing conditions under which your code may be released as they see fit, particularly anyone in the politics-ridden world of the FSF/GPL? The whole "this version or higher" thing was always an idiocy.
FWIW, I agree with pretty much all of Tom's points about the daftness of the GPL3 and the unfortunate understanding of it and the surrounding issues exhibited by others in this thread. I think a few people around here are suffering from the "everything should be free" fallacy taken to its logical conclusion.
You have to be very careful with this, though, because often as soon as you disclose your invention, clocks start ticking.
That's certainly a common belief in some quarters. However, I've noticed a distinct change in the waters recently. Until a few months ago, even when Tony was off on one of his crusades, he was almost invariably backed publicly by every major figure in his party. The dissenters were the well-known rebels and lower-ranking people, not Cabinet high-flyers and the like. Even Gordon Brown repeatedly and publicly denied major rifts with Tony Blair. Recently, though, we've had open discussion not just of the succession but also of Cabinet dissent over things like Israel/Lebanon and our "special relationship" with the US. I think a lot of the party high-flyers know that Tony Blair is effectively a lame duck, and rather than going down with him over things like ID cards and foreign policy, they're starting to shift so they can later say "Of course we backed Gordon [or whoever else] from the start".
The other side of this is that, as all-but-leader-elect, Gordon Brown's influence is currently at an all-time high. He is giving policy speeches well outside the Chancellor's remit. He is working out who is going to form his front bench team in the run up to the next election, who his friends are and who needs to go. And he is not a stupid man: he has seen how big names can fall from grace and even return later, and how major policy headaches can be spun or outright reversed with minimal collateral damage to the party's reputation.
This is why I think Gordon Brown is setting up Tony Blair. Brown is a shrewd political operator, and I think he has determined that Blair is now a very useful political fall-guy. With Brown having played the loyal party member for a long time now, possibly since day one if you believe the rumours, I think Blair's loyalty credits are all used up. If Brown can send a lot of the unwanted policy baggage with him when he goes, Labour will have a much better chance at the next election.
As for the nationality question, and leaving aside your inappropriate and unnecessary stereotyping of all English people, I think Brown's problem isn't that he's not English, it's that he's Scottish. This puts him in a very difficult position with regard to the so-called West Lothian question: if, as I think is inevitable, Scottish MPs have to give up their voting rights on UK Parliamentary issues that are delegated to the Scottish Parliament, then it will be difficult for a Scottish MP to lead with authority on such issues for the same reasons.
You're both deliberately ignoring my point and deliberately using a dubious counterexample.
If Windows is an operational requirement, then you are forced to deal with Windows security issues, regardless of what else is on the network. This can be done reasonably well, despite the popular myths around these parts, by a competent Windows admin. In any case, allowing other platforms doesn't reduce the risks here.
What you are suggesting is that in addition, the admins should voluntarily accept any security risks incurred by people using other systems, with which the admin may or may not be familiar. We're not necessarily talking about some smart-ass network crack using script kiddie tools; it could just as easily be a vulnerability in a non-standard e-mail client or document viewer that allows a keyboard grabber to be installed or mails out confidential information stored on the hard drive. Perhaps the alternative software doesn't have such vulnerabilities, or at least is rapidly and automatically patched to fix them as soon as they are known. The point is, why should the admin have to care? Supporting arbitrary software just makes his life more difficult, increases the risk of a cock-up for which he will be held accountable. It simply has no up-side, from the admin's point of view.
When I wrote that program, Java was barely developed enough to draw a window on a screen. In any case, I'd rather use a more powerful language than a theoretically more portable one, when portability is explicitly not a requirement according to the guy paying me.
<IT guy> No, you explain to me why they're not, sufficiently convincingly that I'm willing to bet my job on it. </IT guy>
Calling me a troll doesn't make a convincing argument, particularly when you're asserting the demonstrably untrue. We're talking about further and higher education here. At sixth form level (roughly ages 16-18), pretty much all of the programs used in the classroom are Windows-based IME. I was even contracted to write one, once, just a little toy program to display data from a simple measuring device in physics classes; care to guess how much interest the guy requesting the program had in any environment other than Windows?
At university level things are probably rather different, because the media used tend to mean there isn't the same focus on teacher-led demonstrations using prepackaged software.
No problem. Tony Blair admitted the other day that he gets one of his children to load his iPod for him. Would anyone like to take a guess about whether every single track was legitimately copied onto that machine?
Not for long, I think. In fact, the whole post-9/11 draconian government thing is rapidly dying in the UK, Tony Blair just doesn't realise it yet (or at least doesn't admit to realising it in public).
Yes, there was the recent case of three banking executives who were transferred to the US under dubious circumstances. However, that caused a huge political storm, because the "anti-terror" legislation was clearly being used for something that had nothing to do with safeguarding the land from terrorists. In this case, I suspect that either the US will ratify the treaty and agree the reverse as well very soon, or the UK government will be forced to pull out.
It's the same story elsewhere. Just this week, Walter Wolfgang, the long-standing Labour party member removed by heavies from last year's party conference for daring to heckle Jack Straw over the war on Iraq and then denied re-entry under anti-terror laws(!), was elected by the party membership to their national governing body. Not only does he get to speak at the next conference as a result, it seems he's guaranteed the chance to do so from the same platform as Blair et al.
ID cards and the National Identity Register... Ah, yes, New Labour's greatest threat. Except, of course, that even those people who would like to be involved with it as a lucrative business opportunity are openly questioning whether the government's scheme can even be implemented, never mind bring the claimed benefits. Both the significant opposition parties in England oppose the scheme. The Information Commissioner (our quasi-independent guardian of data protection and freedom of information issues) has issued some of his most damning comments ever on the subject, and ruled against the government several times on information disclosure issues. The timetables are obviously slipping badly, but no-one will admit how badly. The costs are huge, but no-one will disclose how huge. Sooner or later, the whole illusory stack of cards is going to collapse, and all Tony Blair's big "it's be a centrepiece in our next election manifesto" rhetoric is doing is digging his successor's grave early.
Likewise, a bill described as "Blair's (latest) enabling act" because of its attempt to reduce Parliament to pretty much a rubber stamp was quietly all but dropped a few weeks ago.
The government has been ruled against yet again in the past few days over the whole restraining order/detention without trial thing. This is one of those awkward issues: it's a good bet that a high proportion of the people subject to restraining orders really are nasty bits of work, but I think the principle of freedom from arbitrary detention transcends the importance of removing some liberties from a small number of individuals who may or may not pose some level of threat. It would be far better, if the government really has enough good intelligence to believe these people pose a current threat to our security, that the government should bring charges against them in a suitable court of law and make its case properly. In any case, one of the most senior judges in our land has now said outright that if the Home Secretary wants to impose this sort of thing, he's had ample time to consult Parliament since some of these suspects came to light, and therefore he can't just award himself new powers without scrutiny to do as he sees fit. (This on top of one of the most damning judgements in recent legal history from the High Court during the previous round of the case, which pulled few punches as far as telling the government it was way out of line.)
Personally, I increasingly think this is Gordon Brown setting Tony Blair up to take the fall for al
Ironically, the story from the bet-this-story-won't-get-dugg dept made it right onto the front page of Digg. :-)
Not what could have been, what is. The fact that Slashdot's set-up couldn't make the idea work doesn't mean other sites, such as Digg, can't do so.
Of course, whether Digg can maintain its grand position in the site rankings for as long as Slashdot has been around is another question entirely. There are reasons that I still visit Slashdot far more often, and those reasons generally relate to the fact that there is some editorial control on stories and a reasonably powerful moderation system, and despite our jests, both of these do a lot for the signal/noise ratio.
I've been predicting for quite a while now that "Web 3.0" will come a lot quicker than Web 2.0, and it will be based on information-centric sites with some combination of editorial and web-of-trust input. Just as the "old" news sites (pure editorial) have been outpaced by good blogs and community-driven sites, so the most successful community sites may suffer as their complete openness is abused.
Only if:
Moreover, if YouTube ever tried to do something like that and made money from it, I imagine an awful lot of people would suddenly be interested in how their illegally copied material was being redistributed by YouTube, since any hope it had of a viable defence along the lines of automated processes would evaporate almost instantly. (Example: I know for a fact that teaching videos related to some of my hobbies have been ripped and put on sites like this, and that this was done without the consent of the teachers and production teams involved in making the videos. These things have a relatively small market in the first place, and are usually produced by tiny outfits who don't make a lot of profit off them, so blatant infringement of the copyright does hurt.)
IANAL, but I've been around long enough to see that this isn't black and white.
Did your friend actually give his mother any objective data with which to support his suggestion? Otherwise, it's just going to sound like something someone heard in a sound-bite, and it's entirely likely (and justified) that a technical advisor will slap it down.
You imply in your post that the advisor did this because of a corporate connection to Microsoft. You don't mention whether his organisation also sold Linux distros, for example. More to the point, you also ignored the simple possibility that MS Office might have been a better choice in this context, and the advisor might have known why.
Or they take the (not unreasonable) view that if they're responsible for the network, and it's their ass on the line if security is breached and damage is done, then having unknown (to them) systems with access is a vulnerability that should be addressed.
Having a house standard for machines and requiring everyone you don't trust not to screw up (which means pretty much everyone in any large organisation) to use it is a somewhat annoying but entirely understandable policy for an IT group. Whether Windows should be that standard is a matter for the particular organisation in question, but in academia, there may be strong argument that it should be since a lot of specialist software is available for Windows while there's very little that's Mac- or Linux-only.
Attitudes like the parent poster's from L337 geeks are exactly why, despite the geeks' ongoing protestations, competent managers still don't let them anywhere near the authority to set policy.
You're falling for the common fallacy that all software is either "office software" (WP, graphics, etc.) or "Internet software" (e-mail, web stuff, etc.).
In the academic world, this is far from true. There are countless specialist teaching programs out there, many of which run on Windows.
I wouldn't normally bring this up, but since the subject appears to be under discussion...
For bonus points, we could learn the difference between an acronym and an abbreviation, and the corresponding HTML tags.
Yes, the BT callout charge is exactly what I was objecting to as well. They refused to budge, repeatedly stating that I had to accept responsibility for the charge before they would escalate the fault report. Eventually, I got one of their old-timer support guys to say categorically that the policy was just because so many people don't bother to check obvious things like hardware being properly connected up before reporting a fault, and if I had done everything on their checklist and found no fault on my side, I would not be blamed. They wriggled for weeks before we got to that point, though.
(In my case, that particular problem did turn out to be on BT's side, and what they claim was a signal/noise ratio adjustment on my line fixed it.)
In any case, I have no problem with usage quotas as long as they're transparent. As someone who doesn't spend all day illegally ripping things over P2P, and whose monthly bandwidth only gets anywhere near the current 3GB threshold I have on the rare occasions that I download several very large installers in one month, I'm quite happy not subsidising the aforementioned P2Pers.
Now, signing someone up for an "unlimited" package and then imposing usage quotas without a corresponding drop in price, that's a different thing entirely.
If your back-up system isn't regularly tested and found to be restorable, then you don't have any, no matter how many tapes/spare hard drives/CD-Rs/whatever you use.
I do wonder at what stage this sort of cock-up becomes outright negligence. I haven't checked my terms of use recently, but I doubt disclaimers will hold up for long after this sort of mess anyway.
I asked about alternatives on a local forum recently. Some of the responses were a bit surprising. Our local cable firm is NTL, for example, and despite having a less than stellar reputation generally, it sounds like their ISP wing is doing its job fine (at least, according to a few locals who use it).
I've also heard good reports about some of the smaller but significantly more expensive ISPs. These are backed up by various ISP comparison web sites, where the smaller outfits consistently get way higher feedback than most of the big names. Apparently in Internet connections, as with much in life, you get what you pay for.
Their customer service has never been particularly superb, it's true: they messed me around a bit when I was initially getting broadband installed, for example. Still, until maybe the start of this year, the tech support guys always seemed to know their stuff, and any problems I did have usually resulted in a fairly quick solution after a fairly short wait to speak to a real and knowledgable person on the phone. I've noticed a really obvious drop in their service levels over the past six months or so, though.
I've been with PlusNet for years, and they were a pretty good ISP until a few months ago. Since then, we've had a string of problems, of which this is only the latest.
I've had my broadband connection out more than on for weeks at a time, for a start. This in itself is inexcusable. What's even more inexcusable is telling me I had to accept a significant penalty charge if they escalated the fault to my telephone service provider (BT) and they found no fault -- which doesn't sound unreasonable, until you know that the fault was evident using nothing but PlusNet-supplied hardware plugged into a BT-installed phone socket, with no complications whatsoever, and that PlusNet had already indicated that they themselves couldn't diagnose a fault. This was a total loss of service for hours at a time, several days a week, remember.
On top of that, they decided to forcibly upgrade everyone to "up to 8MB" broadband recently. The ethics of using that term are dubious at best: it's only for downloading; the highest recorded speeds off-peak are more like 5-6; and at peak times you'll be lucky to get more than 1-2. Moreover, they acknowledged ahead of time that there would be significant disruption (for weeks, not hours) to each customer after the upgrade, they said they wouldn't confirm when any given customer was being upgraded (so no idea whether the problems I had were to do with this or some more general issue, then) and they said some customers' performance would actually drop but they wouldn't revert the change if this happened. They had so many problems with this that they have now suspended/abandoned the process, and sent a grovelling e-mail message to their customers.
Their tech support people have also been completely over-run, partly due to inadequate resources and partly due to their own incompetence (e.g., they totally failed to read a note I'd helpfully left on their system for them clarifying a question they always ask, and asked the question in boilerplate form anyway). To add insult to injury, they've changed their phone system in ways that have repeatedly broken, and now mean you go through several layers of automated menus before talking to a real person. Yes, they really did tell me at one stage that if I was experiencing broadband connectivity faults, I could find more information on their web site.
And now, of course, we have the e-mail fiasco. It's not the first big e-mail problem: I've recently had legitimate and important messages from the sysadmins of another service I use being bounced because they "contained a virus". (Not according to the other service, whose admins I know and trust, nor according to one well-respected intermediate service that was involved in forwarding the mail.) Moreover, this occurred even when I disabled virus checking for incoming e-mail; they were blocking incoming messages to me against my explicit instructions. Oh, and their new webmail system is poor in functionality and so bug-ridden that you can actually lose data. Some of this, in particular an arbitrary time-out for composing mails using webmail, was regarded as a feature when I asked the support staff about it!
I don't know what's happened to PlusNet. Perhaps they have simply been victims of their own success, after getting very positive comments for years (they were widely regarded as one of the best ISPs in the UK for a while) and a consequent boost in custom? In any case, the mighty have well and truly fallen, and I (along with many other people I know) am currently investigating alternatives as a matter of urgency.
No, it's not. It's a voluntary choice, often made to make your life easier in the immediate future at the expense of doing the right thing.
The world is full of opportunities to make such choices, and the fact that so many people do make them in this way has a lot to do with the state of the world today.