Is a paper tiger. It was designed that way. You only really find this out when you try to invoke the Data Protection Act 1998 against a data conroller company, and find that it's not designed to protect you, it's designed to safeguard companies holding your data from you.
The reason the UK spam laws are weak is not a coincidence either. The UK government uses the electoral register to sell your data (regardless of whether you "opt out") to third party marketing companies to get revenue.
It's not freedom of information as you might know it, it's a case of "do as I say, not as I do".
Well, that's the weird thing about the Data Protection Act 1998. The data processing company is not particularly responsible for the quality of their data - "we just store the data". The people who give them the data are not responsible for it's accuracy either. This is the problem - no-one's responsible but the end "consumer" bears the consequences of incorrect data.
And according to the DPA 1998, no-one has breached the Act because no-one is directly responsible.
You can "appeal" to the Information Commissioner to get the record changed, but again, it's not a quick process and you have to prove a breach of the principles of the Act. I strongly suspect that the Information Commissioners office is funded by licensing Data Controller provisions to the Credit Reference Agencies, and the Information Commisioner's Office won't want to jeopardize their main revenue stream by constantly falling out with their main customers.
I'm amazed that it's not better publicised in the media, because it's called corruption in most countries.
Never went far enough for a good reason (they basically outlawed electronic spam to private addresses but not to businesses). The reason for this is that the UK government makes money from the electoral register information by selling it to direct marketing companies for postal spam(e.g. MBNA credit card offers - yay!). It would be more than a little hypocritical to criminalize a practice the government regularly makes money from.... aneeway...
It also sells the information to amongst others Equifax. According to recent studies over those opposed to the way information is collected, over 1/3 of all Equifax records are inaccurate enough to adversely influence a credit decision.
I recently found out that for the past six years, even though I pay over $200 per month in local tax, Equifax didn't have that information on file. This meant that I was listed as having effectively avoided paying council tax for that period. I started to examine who was to take responsibility for this "oversight".
Well, the Data Protection Act is very clear on this - no-one takes responsibility for the accuracy of the data. Not Equifax, not the local council, not even the people providing the information (or failing to provide the information). No-one. It is a veritable black hole of responsibility. A key point of the "Data Protection Act 1998" is that it is not there to protect the data subject, but to protect the data controller (yep, Equifax) from recourse by the data subject.
Who is the "data subject"? Well, that's YOU of course.
Agencies like Equifax are answerable to no-one and they have a lot of not quite so accurate information on you which they use to make influential decisions on how you live. They are the single best candidate (and best latter-day substitute) for the incompetent and overpaid bureacrat.
You've never actually seen an EDI transmission have you? Those "effieciencies" you talk of accrue ONLY to the EDI network. When an EDI transmission has to be corrected (as it's so often malformed, because there's so many pointless cross-referenced checksums), the message looks awful. Look at the sample message in my earlier post. Imaging your're looking at a page of that and one of the values is wrong.
and people said "XML will never replace it because no-one's meant to read this stuff and the resulting files will be huge."
XML is replacing EDI already. The EDI networks didn't see it coming, mostly because they tried to use XML as an excuse to hike their kilocharacter transfer charges. Doh.
Now you can see XML already replacing RPC with web services. You might knock it but it's being used right now every time you get a stock market quote. The SOAP wrapper allows remote methods using XML already. a C# client accessing a Perl Server app over the web. Nothing new there, so why are folks here denying it exists?
If you pay someone $6 an hour, do you really expect them to be vigilant defenders of company property?
We recently had an internal discussion of how to reduce theft in the company - we are a retail group and often there's thousands of pounds worth of sports gear etc. parked temporarily in corridors. One of the astonishing revelations was that a large percentage of the theft had to be internal! Our own staff were stealing from us!
After a lot of hand-wringing and head scratching we concluded that the reason they are stealing is because they feel that at $6 an hour, the company is stealing from them. Senior execs were not prepared to negotiate a rise in the shop-floor staff wages, so we took the strategic decision to drop the whole issue.
Not really a difficult conclusion, just an unpalatable one.
Once you try one, you'll never be quite so keen on a normal bicycle design again.
The single drawback of cycling a recumbent is that you cannot use your body weight at the top of the chainwheel arc for extra drive. But with cleated pedals you can push with one foot and pull with the other on a recumbent. And you have a much lower centre of gravity (read: stability) and a lesser drag profile.
Motorists tend to give you a wider berth too - they seem to respect you as a not-so-average cyclist. A recumbent bicycle will oblige you to use the road responsibly too - you can't kerb hop on most models and you tend to stay with traffic in cities rather than get overtaken a lot.
You are also at the same eye-level as motorists. One of the problems with a normal cyclist is that the motorists who pull the most dangerous maneouvers and visa versa can't see each other.
When you can see a persons face it makes it more sifficult for them to pull a move that could kill you. And you have a deckchair, exercise machine and sunbed in one.
1. They are quite easily the most efficient means of transport there is. By a long way.
2. I have a recumbent bicycle. Actually a Pashley PDQ based on the Counterpoint design. Sunbed and exercise bike in one.
3. Cycling keeps you healthy.
4. It moves you from A to B rapidly, quietly and with minimum environmental impact. Soon after crude is $100 per barrel, cyclists will reclaim their rightful place at the top of the roaduser hierarchy. Grr.
5. I have a quasi-religious belief that in The Future, everyone will wear matching co-ordinates, and will almost certainly travel by bicycle.
I've been informed that corruption is inherent in some countries (Nigeria was specifically mentioned by an ex-resident) and believe it or not, this is the "front line" for market share with pirated Windows 2000 and Linux boxes. But 46 posts at a +2 threshold? That's low.
Is that it? Slashbots are happy to whinge that C# isn't as crap as they hoped yet they're not willing to post about Linux's future mindshare?
This is why I post less on Slashdot than I used to. People post like they're fighting a higher cause but they're actually just whoring.
Giga management didn't see a linear progression from call center staff to future IT analyst. In fact several times Giga management took pains to emphasize that moving from the call center to work as a research associate with a senior analyst was not a sure thing. Six months into the job a vice Giga president and senior analyst asked me to give him the right of first refusal to become his research associate.
So, one day she was a call center staff with a redundant degree in Mandarin. The next day, *ging* she's an IT Analyst. I'm sure there are CS graduates who would be very interested in how that happened.
Hmmm. I think we're not getting the full picture there. Any relatives / "associates" in the company by any chance?
I've worked for companies who hired programmers for a few months then wound up the departments as the project moved into the next phase. One job lasted 4 months.
Where employees ride a boom, employers ride the bust. And that incidentally is why IT employers are still bleating about skills shortages - they don't exist but it makes sense to insist there's a shortage to encourage a cheap supply of well-qualified folks, right?
But the bottom line is buddy, if you want loyalty from your employees, take a pay cut before you sack people next time, after all if you have to get rid of people you've basically failed to do your job, so it's only fair that you should share the blame, right?
I work in retail IT. It's a fairly stable area of the economy. But I'm also conscious of the fact that while a shop attendant with 15 years service gets $10 an hour, the CEO of a retail group will get $10m a year and will stay in the job for 6 months.
Sorry if I sound new to this capitalism thing, but the equation seems really simple. However, as I get it but you don't I'll give it to you in big writing:
IF YOU WANT LOYALTY FROM YOUR EMPLOYEES, START SHOWING THEM SOME LOYALTY YOURSELF.
I write in C#. Yes I confess. It's a highly productive language, and implements a lot of what Java didn't (e.g. foreach, Enums). I release under GPL, which means I can't use VS.NET because the license explicitly forbids it.
So I use #Develop and more recently Mono Develop. Problem is, unlike VS.NET there's no package deployment option to speak of (unless you write your own).
This project means that scripts can be generated from the GUI and then compiled using the C# candle tool provided in WiX. Enabling C# packages to be deployed on GPL.
and reformatted with ext2fs and then run some multiuser Unix-like system like Lynux? Then you could have a multiuser system without the specialised form factor stuff. Kewl!
At a time when the US and Europe were being sold WAP technology, the Japanese developed imode, and gained around 30m users in a couple of short years.
WAP never sold well, and people were never convinced of it's merits. End of story - it was superceeded by 3G and ahem, 2.5G. Kind of.
The fact was that imode could never be sold in Europe because the WAP consortium had outlawed packet switching technologies with respective governments' help. Thus the infrastructure was labelled expensive and proprietary (which is exactly what WAP was anyway), and was prevented from being implemented.
The WAP consortium was formed with the expressed purpose of keeping Japanese technology out of Europe and the US, and so we can see the same thing happening here - the Japanese develop a superior technology, so US and European carriers seek to refuse it entry to the market.
Worth remembering next time you go into a mobile phone shop and think "Why hasn't the technology here improved much in the last 5 years?"...
That quite a few people were killed by that thing.
When I worked on the Jubilee Line Extension in London and went down 20m (that's below the water table) to see a slurry tunnelling machine I was amazed a) at how hot it is even that far down and b) how dangerous it is.
There are pressurized fuel and bentonite (a kind of rock lubricant) lines everywhere and large carbide tipped cutting teeth which can jam and flip the entire machine at it's rock face.
People work inside these machines when they're working and as a consequence this TBM will have killed more than a few people.
I've encountered the most awful design flaws in software, written by grad students! Imagine a large Java program, that could have been rather elegant (for Java) using proper OO design... except the program is written completely static!
Can I guess they were writing business/enterprise applications?
A typical CTO, IT Director or Project Manager does not care about elegance.
They do care about readability and maintainability - a certain amount of elegance will support easy maintenance but beyond a certain point, clever hacks do not a good program make. Especially bearing in mind that writing your own software is infinitely easier than reading someone elses - especially when it has too many natty "tweaks" and not enough documentation.
The real world is not a CS lecture - your boss won't let you you're not paying enough attention to the important topic for the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Is a paper tiger. It was designed that way. You only really find this out when you try to invoke the Data Protection Act 1998 against a data conroller company, and find that it's not designed to protect you, it's designed to safeguard companies holding your data from you.
The reason the UK spam laws are weak is not a coincidence either. The UK government uses the electoral register to sell your data (regardless of whether you "opt out") to third party marketing companies to get revenue.
It's not freedom of information as you might know it, it's a case of "do as I say, not as I do".
have something to do with it too.
I think they wish IT wasn't important mostly because they don't really understand it.
Well, that's the weird thing about the Data Protection Act 1998. The data processing company is not particularly responsible for the quality of their data - "we just store the data". The people who give them the data are not responsible for it's accuracy either. This is the problem - no-one's responsible but the end "consumer" bears the consequences of incorrect data.
And according to the DPA 1998, no-one has breached the Act because no-one is directly responsible.
You can "appeal" to the Information Commissioner to get the record changed, but again, it's not a quick process and you have to prove a breach of the principles of the Act. I strongly suspect that the Information Commissioners office is funded by licensing Data Controller provisions to the Credit Reference Agencies, and the Information Commisioner's Office won't want to jeopardize their main revenue stream by constantly falling out with their main customers.
I'm amazed that it's not better publicised in the media, because it's called corruption in most countries.
Never went far enough for a good reason (they basically outlawed electronic spam to private addresses but not to businesses). The reason for this is that the UK government makes money from the electoral register information by selling it to direct marketing companies for postal spam(e.g. MBNA credit card offers - yay!). It would be more than a little hypocritical to criminalize a practice the government regularly makes money from .... aneeway ...
It also sells the information to amongst others Equifax. According to recent studies over those opposed to the way information is collected, over 1/3 of all Equifax records are inaccurate enough to adversely influence a credit decision.
I recently found out that for the past six years, even though I pay over $200 per month in local tax, Equifax didn't have that information on file. This meant that I was listed as having effectively avoided paying council tax for that period. I started to examine who was to take responsibility for this "oversight".
Well, the Data Protection Act is very clear on this - no-one takes responsibility for the accuracy of the data. Not Equifax, not the local council, not even the people providing the information (or failing to provide the information). No-one. It is a veritable black hole of responsibility. A key point of the "Data Protection Act 1998" is that it is not there to protect the data subject, but to protect the data controller (yep, Equifax) from recourse by the data subject.
Who is the "data subject"? Well, that's YOU of course.
Agencies like Equifax are answerable to no-one and they have a lot of not quite so accurate information on you which they use to make influential decisions on how you live. They are the single best candidate (and best latter-day substitute) for the incompetent and overpaid bureacrat.
You've never actually seen an EDI transmission have you? Those "effieciencies" you talk of accrue ONLY to the EDI network. When an EDI transmission has to be corrected (as it's so often malformed, because there's so many pointless cross-referenced checksums), the message looks awful. Look at the sample message in my earlier post. Imaging your're looking at a page of that and one of the values is wrong.
Now tell me if you prefer working with XML.
The arguments being posted here are exactly the same that would've been posted about arguments against XML replacing EDI.
An EDI message looks like garbage:
ILD=1+0+0+1222+3+0+0+S+17500'STL=1+1+S+ASSOR. NP11+?'EXT?''
and people said "XML will never replace it because no-one's meant to read this stuff and the resulting files will be huge."
XML is replacing EDI already. The EDI networks didn't see it coming, mostly because they tried to use XML as an excuse to hike their kilocharacter transfer charges. Doh.
Now you can see XML already replacing RPC with web services. You might knock it but it's being used right now every time you get a stock market quote. The SOAP wrapper allows remote methods using XML already. a C# client accessing a Perl Server app over the web. Nothing new there, so why are folks here denying it exists?
I think someone forgot to get their permission to link to their site from Slashdot.
If you pay someone $6 an hour, do you really expect them to be vigilant defenders of company property?
We recently had an internal discussion of how to reduce theft in the company - we are a retail group and often there's thousands of pounds worth of sports gear etc. parked temporarily in corridors. One of the astonishing revelations was that a large percentage of the theft had to be internal! Our own staff were stealing from us!
After a lot of hand-wringing and head scratching we concluded that the reason they are stealing is because they feel that at $6 an hour, the company is stealing from them. Senior execs were not prepared to negotiate a rise in the shop-floor staff wages, so we took the strategic decision to drop the whole issue.
Not really a difficult conclusion, just an unpalatable one.
Once you try one, you'll never be quite so keen on a normal bicycle design again.
The single drawback of cycling a recumbent is that you cannot use your body weight at the top of the chainwheel arc for extra drive. But with cleated pedals you can push with one foot and pull with the other on a recumbent. And you have a much lower centre of gravity (read: stability) and a lesser drag profile.
Motorists tend to give you a wider berth too - they seem to respect you as a not-so-average cyclist. A recumbent bicycle will oblige you to use the road responsibly too - you can't kerb hop on most models and you tend to stay with traffic in cities rather than get overtaken a lot.
You are also at the same eye-level as motorists. One of the problems with a normal cyclist is that the motorists who pull the most dangerous maneouvers and visa versa can't see each other.
When you can see a persons face it makes it more sifficult for them to pull a move that could kill you. And you have a deckchair, exercise machine and sunbed in one.
Try one soon.
For a few reasons.
1. They are quite easily the most efficient means of transport there is. By a long way.
2. I have a recumbent bicycle. Actually a Pashley PDQ based on the Counterpoint design. Sunbed and exercise bike in one.
3. Cycling keeps you healthy.
4. It moves you from A to B rapidly, quietly and with minimum environmental impact. Soon after crude is $100 per barrel, cyclists will reclaim their rightful place at the top of the roaduser hierarchy. Grr.
5. I have a quasi-religious belief that in The Future, everyone will wear matching co-ordinates, and will almost certainly travel by bicycle.
Huzzah for the bicycle!
Africa is where Linux can make a real difference.
I've been informed that corruption is inherent in some countries (Nigeria was specifically mentioned by an ex-resident) and believe it or not, this is the "front line" for market share with pirated Windows 2000 and Linux boxes. But 46 posts at a +2 threshold? That's low.
Is that it? Slashbots are happy to whinge that C# isn't as crap as they hoped yet they're not willing to post about Linux's future mindshare?
This is why I post less on Slashdot than I used to. People post like they're fighting a higher cause but they're actually just whoring.
Giga management didn't see a linear progression from call center staff to future IT analyst. In fact several times Giga management took pains to emphasize that moving from the call center to work as a research associate with a senior analyst was not a sure thing. Six months into the job a vice Giga president and senior analyst asked me to give him the right of first refusal to become his research associate.
So, one day she was a call center staff with a redundant degree in Mandarin. The next day, *ging* she's an IT Analyst. I'm sure there are CS graduates who would be very interested in how that happened.
Hmmm. I think we're not getting the full picture there. Any relatives / "associates" in the company by any chance?
I've worked for companies who hired programmers for a few months then wound up the departments as the project moved into the next phase. One job lasted 4 months.
Where employees ride a boom, employers ride the bust. And that incidentally is why IT employers are still bleating about skills shortages - they don't exist but it makes sense to insist there's a shortage to encourage a cheap supply of well-qualified folks, right?
But the bottom line is buddy, if you want loyalty from your employees, take a pay cut before you sack people next time, after all if you have to get rid of people you've basically failed to do your job, so it's only fair that you should share the blame, right?
I work in retail IT. It's a fairly stable area of the economy. But I'm also conscious of the fact that while a shop attendant with 15 years service gets $10 an hour, the CEO of a retail group will get $10m a year and will stay in the job for 6 months.
Sorry if I sound new to this capitalism thing, but the equation seems really simple. However, as I get it but you don't I'll give it to you in big writing:
IF YOU WANT LOYALTY FROM YOUR EMPLOYEES, START SHOWING THEM SOME LOYALTY YOURSELF.
(karma and conscience are both burnable rubbish)
"production, sale or distribution of hacking tools"
Assuming that includes DeDRMS, it's a good thing that Norway's not part of Europe!
(Oh no it isn't).
I write in C#. Yes I confess. It's a highly productive language, and implements a lot of what Java didn't (e.g. foreach, Enums). I release under GPL, which means I can't use VS.NET because the license explicitly forbids it.
So I use #Develop and more recently Mono Develop. Problem is, unlike VS.NET there's no package deployment option to speak of (unless you write your own).
This project means that scripts can be generated from the GUI and then compiled using the C# candle tool provided in WiX. Enabling C# packages to be deployed on GPL.
and reformatted with ext2fs and then run some multiuser Unix-like system like Lynux? Then you could have a multiuser system without the specialised form factor stuff. Kewl!
At a time when the US and Europe were being sold WAP technology, the Japanese developed imode, and gained around 30m users in a couple of short years.
...
WAP never sold well, and people were never convinced of it's merits. End of story - it was superceeded by 3G and ahem, 2.5G. Kind of.
The fact was that imode could never be sold in Europe because the WAP consortium had outlawed packet switching technologies with respective governments' help. Thus the infrastructure was labelled expensive and proprietary (which is exactly what WAP was anyway), and was prevented from being implemented.
The WAP consortium was formed with the expressed purpose of keeping Japanese technology out of Europe and the US, and so we can see the same thing happening here - the Japanese develop a superior technology, so US and European carriers seek to refuse it entry to the market.
Worth remembering next time you go into a mobile phone shop and think "Why hasn't the technology here improved much in the last 5 years?"
You can get a sidewinder missile lobbed at a Fallujahn mosque much closer to home ....
(I have karma to burn and a conscience to clear)
For a 38 year old CEO, you'd think he was quite smart. OTOH I think he's been quite daft.
Making friends with your enemy's enemy, leading to profit doesn't usually work. Not in Illinois, not in Iraq.
That quite a few people were killed by that thing.
When I worked on the Jubilee Line Extension in London and went down 20m (that's below the water table) to see a slurry tunnelling machine I was amazed a) at how hot it is even that far down and b) how dangerous it is.
There are pressurized fuel and bentonite (a kind of rock lubricant) lines everywhere and large carbide tipped cutting teeth which can jam and flip the entire machine at it's rock face.
People work inside these machines when they're working and as a consequence this TBM will have killed more than a few people.
Sorry, that was me. I scrolled down using the middle button, which also moves the dropdown selection.
Just to prove I'm not on crack, I'm posting this to undo the moderation.
France and UK are reluctant to share intel
I didn't know Intel was France or the UK's to share
From the Prothon implementation page:
.box.attributes.size.width # self
The first character of the path always tells whether the starting point is local, global, or self.
obj.parent.owner.privelage # local
String.lower-case-letters # global
The period being used for self is actually an implementation of the "with" keyword, which will be described next.
Ummm, it might seem like a small point, but that's not how you spell privilege.
That's not an keyword, is it??
I've encountered the most awful design flaws in software, written by grad students! Imagine a large Java program, that could have been rather elegant (for Java) using proper OO design... except the program is written completely static!
Can I guess they were writing business/enterprise applications?
A typical CTO, IT Director or Project Manager does not care about elegance.
They do care about readability and maintainability - a certain amount of elegance will support easy maintenance but beyond a certain point, clever hacks do not a good program make. Especially bearing in mind that writing your own software is infinitely easier than reading someone elses - especially when it has too many natty "tweaks" and not enough documentation.
The real world is not a CS lecture - your boss won't let you you're not paying enough attention to the important topic for the day.
He'll just fire you.
... they would be used in channels that could be as much as several hundred microns in diameter. A human hair is about a hundred microns.
I presume they must mean "A human hair is about a hundred microns in diameter", not length.
Honestly, how do these people get jobs as writers?