Here in the UK, we are already taxed on goods purchased over the internet, if anyone at Mount Pleasant sorting office can be bothered to do the paperwork.
Typically, if I order two CD's from a USA based warehouse, they arrive without any additional tax, but if I order three or more, they get intercepted, and I have the pleasure of paying:
Import Duty
Value Added Tax @ 17.5%
A 'service charge' to cover the cost of collecting the above
Because the third item is a service, it is also subject to Value Added Tax, so I'm not only paying Tax on Tax, but I'm paying Tax on Tax on Tax.
At the moment, it's still economically viable to buy CD's from the USA because of the remarkably high prices that retailers over here charge. Things are changing, but a $7 music CD bought in the states is still less than half the UK14.99 it typically sells for over here.
Secondly, how exactly are the EU going to enforce a law requiring companies outside the USA to register for tax purposes; the amount of extra work that this would require on behalf of the various revenue services would be collosal, not to mention the cost to the taxpayer (tax^4 ?).
No wonder Disaster Area's accountant in The hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy had to invent a whole new branch of integral hypermathematics to deal with the tax returns..
It'll be good to see Linux at an event which suggests 'Windows' as the main theme.
I was a little disappointed at the number of products on display which appared to be nothing other than windows boxes. However, there was some interesting hardware and a lot of knowledgeable people about.
However, I didn't find what I was really looking for, which was products geared for the embedded market (we make a number of wierd and wonderful devices for data acquisition and processing, so we need just a little more than the typical thin-client PC has (the best I saw was a 233MHz pentium grade system). Guess I'll just stick with the ICP products for the moment.
Glad to see the move to more floor space. Atleast you could actually see the floor this year.
Liquid crystal displays utilise a feature of liquid crystals in that they line up differently when a voltage is applied, and this twisted alignment causes polarised light passing through them to be rotated. There is a polarising filter on both sides (or on one side with reflective layer at the back so light goes through the same filter twice).
When a voltage is applied, the area appears to go black, because the light polarised by the first filter has been rotated so that it doesn't go through the second filter. Where no voltage has been applied, the light goes through as normal.
Scale this up a bit, make the areas to which you can selectively apply a voltage smaller, add a back light, print a matrix of magenta, cyan, and yellow blobs on the screen, and you have an LCD screen. The screen will be black when off because the two polarising layers are at right angles to each other, and no light gets through unless something (the liquid crystal layer) rotates the light between the two polarising filters.
You can play with this if you have an old LCD calculator, and take it apart. If you find a removable polarising filter, you may be able to reverse it and find that your calculator now does white digits on a black background.
Alternatively, you can remove it altogether, and have a calculator that only you can read (because you are wearing polarising shades).
Back to the subject at hand; Will this process make LCD panel displays easier to build or cheaper? With CRT monitor prices dropping like, errm.. CRT monitors, nothing seems to be happening to LCD monitor prices; they are still ridiculously expensive (although I'm still drooling over the prospect of getting a nice 17" LG Electronics display (Saw one at Linux Expo, London last year, and it made me wonder what it was I've been looking at all this time...))
I beleive myself to be, after many years playing alternately with PDP-11's, VAXen, then DOS, AmigaDOS, windows, and Unix (far too many variants of unix to list), to be a unix kernel hacker in a windows world.
My reasons for coming to this conclusion are these: 1. I program almost exclusively in C (I've never got on well with C++, FORTRAN, or anything with the word 'Visual' stuck on the front of it) 2. My 'speciality' is in the bit-twiddling, string bashing, hairy linked-list world of low level data manipulation. 3. I work with unix firstly because if my latest list processing masterpiece is buggy, I'm likely to find out with a simple 'Segmentation fault' message, rather than find that my disks have got all screwed up. That, and (dons flame-retardant underwear) vi of course.
Apart from building hardware, and doing generally interesting system administration type things on the company networks, I also write a lot of the low level code, which other people build flashy user interfaces upon. This means that I sometimes work in kernel mode, and this is somewhat reflected in most of my code. I like to think that it means that the code will cope will with idiot users above trying to do stupid things with it.
In a way, then, I think I have already reached my 'goal'.
I dislike user interface programming, or intense mathematical code; and I've found a team where I can avoid doing that.
Unfortunately, I have to write code for windows boxes. Atleast we have now left the 16bit world behind, so I can malloc(lots) instead of calling one of several different malloc()'s depending on the type of memory I want, etc.
So, back to the original point. (I may have got a little lost here) If you want to work at the low level, do it, but you have to learn to work with a team if you don't want to do all that user friendly GUI stuff. It helps a lot if the people that do want to do the GUI stuff are unwilling to write their own list processing code, etc. because that way, you get a good supply of jobs to do that prevent management from assigning you to some horrid graphics thing.
We have a particularly obnoxious clause in our contracts here that state that any source code we produce while in the employ of the company becomes their intellectual property. We are occasionally remended by middle management that this even means private projects, at home, during non-office hours.
Whether this particular clause is enforceable (and given the way English law works, it probably is) this means that I am stuck in a conflict of interests if I work on GPL'd software.
This said, we use Linux within a number of products, and while our own source code is obviously private, I do keep a log of what the other programmers are using, to make sure we don't break the GPL.
We've written device driver code, and I've had to explain modules to our developers, so we can keep the source secret (and the management happy), as I beleive that writing an in-kernel driver requires source code release under the GPL (is that correct?). If so, some companies (such as M-Systems with their DiskOnChip driver) are breaking it. I don't wish to join them.
Unfortunately, for now, I'm stuck in a situation where I can't use GPL'd code in projects, except via libraries via LGPL, because my boss won't let source code out of the building. In those rare instances where we have had to reveal source code (such as in some defense contracts) he's insisted on it being modified by doing things like stripping comments, or running it through cobfusc (A C obfuscator (we wrote a similar thing for FORTRAN))
I managed to get a couple of cheap shots at Microsoft into Wednesday's Daily Express (UK) letters page.
They didn't print the bit I wrote about newspapers not doing their job and telling the public WHY these virii are dangerous (namely that windows and outlook are so amazingly insecure in the hands of inexperienced users). Most didn't even explain what the trojan was. Most disappointing (but I'm just happy getting into a national newspaper.. even though I did get edited to death;-)
...which would sort of imply that if we are going to have a version of Linux running on that thing, that some Sony rep has to give it the thumbs-up. (Along with all the costs and license restrictions that this would bring)
Kernel reconfiguration will have to be done in a 3d 'shoot this wall to enable network aliasing support' style... etc.
Could it not be argued that to prevent someone making a product that works with, in this example, a Sony Playstation, has about as much legal sense as Sony trying to prevent the BBC from making a television programme that can be viewed on, say, a Sony television set?
I've never thought the legal system made much sense anyway.
If there are any lawyers out there in/.land, could they explain why Sony would be able to prosecute people for writing games for it's console? Seems to me that the customer, the End User would gain; and like the MPAA, the rich guys really hate that.
Over here in the UK, the banks have been getting hugely bad press recently for charging for use of ATM's. Back in the good old days, i.e. last year, it used to be virtually free, and the customer benefited hugely. However, this wasn't making even more money for the enormously wealthy banks, so they slap a charge of typically UK1.50 on any cash transaction if you don't use their cash machine. The transaction actually costs the banks roughly UK0.30 to process, which leaves 1.20 unaccounted for.
The question is, when are the banks going to start charging more because 'our encryption algorithm is better than their encryption algorythm'. (It wouldn't suprise me at all to find that my bank account security is worth about 30p)
Yes, although requests to the majordomo in charge do need to be authenticated (I.e. you send your request, and then reply to it's authentication request it sends you, or it ignores you). This prevents you maliciously subscribing all your enemies to this, somewhat high-traffic mailing list.
I do join from time to time, although I'm not listening at the moment, mainly because I'm currently snowed under doing other things, and my work mailbox is pushing back the boundaries of disk space mathematics as it is...
Having had to deal with chinese beureaucracy (I'm not sure I can spell that) recently to try and get a couple of modems installed in some kit we sold to them, I give up trying to figure out the way chinese IT management think. We have had minor problems with some bits of kit, and most customers would happily perform minor tweaking given some simple instructions. Not over in China!. We are currently trying to resolve their 'Major Complaint' that the size of the digital xclock display is too small, and their windows based X server, which is using the wrong fonts, is chopping off the last digit of the year. This is apparently more confusing and important than any of the showstoppers we are trying to resolve. Aaargh..
There is a double glazing company based near Fareham, Hampshire, England called MS Windows. I hope they don't crash when you try and open more than one window at a time. They have been established far longer than MS, but I doubt that the lawyers think that's a fair excuse. I hope they continue to use the name, because it might give MS Windows a good reputation... (on average)
I have enough difficulty balancing braces in C code converted from extremely dodgy FORTRAN written 20 years ago. Whoever perpetrated it should be shot. It got so wierd and so urgent that we even copied over a few goto's. That always makes me feel guilty.
(In a display of chronological ineptitude, Jim now relpies to the next post.....) Anyhow, we pay ridiculous amounts for CD bonus tracks, etc. A typical chart audio CD costs the equivalent of US$ 24, which is why we order all our music CD's from over your way.
Fed up as we are of not being able to get movies a a decent time (I.e. on release) at the same time as you lot in the USA, us Euros are behind you again. I went around Woolworths today, while waiting for the coach to this years Ladbrokes Social Club Christmas Dinner & Dance (which if you're remotely interested will be at http://www.notout.demon.co.uk/cdad99/ and found the usual complete lack of games that said anything other than 'Requirements: 100% compatible Windows 95/98/NT system'. Not knowing exactly what a 100% compatible windows 95/98/NT system is (given that Windows 95 is not 100% compatible with Windows 95 (or atleast seems that way)), I didn't buy anything.
So, if you are seeing items in store for linux, you're far ahead of us euro-types.
Anyhow, I need sleep. I'm overdue for about a week's worth... One day the revolution will come. Keep working on it guys, we all know it's the right thing to work towards. It's 01:50 now, so I'm going to start catching up on ZZzzzzzz. Goodnight.
I work for Ladbrokes, one of the major players, if not that largest cash betting company in the UK, with several interests abroad. While I couldn't possibly comment in any official way, blah blah; it's not suprising that we don't accept credit cards from the general public. We do accept debit cards (same funds transfer system, except that money comes directly from the owner's bank account - No money in account = no authorisation = no bet) on the telephone betting services. This attitude seems to be prevelant throughout the UK.
I occasionally bet, in other companies shops, although not online, because I don't feel that a company wouldn't rip me off by, say, changing the game such that when in 'demo' or 'play free' modes, it pays far more than when in 'real' mode.
What guarantees does the internet gambler have that he is dealing with a reputable company. The Ladbrokes rule book, which governs all transactions covers, in small print, an A2 poster (USA speak: A2 = 2xA3. A3=2xA4, our nearest equivalent to your 'letter' paper (which is the most annoying default on loads of software - Aargh!) - work it out for yourself). Do they have a code of practice? A complaints procedure? A governing body? I'd bet hard cash that most of the 'guarantees' offered are pretty much worthless. Comments?
Atleast when betting on sporting events and racing, you know that the bookmaker does not have any control over the outcome (and even if he has, for my pitifully small stakes, nobody is going to risk fixing anything).
Having read the RFC and got fed up with all our office machines being given names based on the initials of their owners, and then being swapped about blah blah until nobody knew who they were any more, I suggested naming them using a theme that didn't include names. The management asked for suggestions. Several good themes were put forward by various members of staff. The usual cars, cartoon characters, etc. However, the management decided on 'biblical names'...
Luckily, presumably for them, we also own the hotel up the road, and that bloke called Gideon is always leaving copies of his book there... Off went the M.D. to find a copy and get a load of biblical names, which I as sys.admin get to allocate 'in the order on the list' (he said). What he didn't say was in what order I should visit people to give out their names. Applications engineering got 'job' and 'lot', and several other not-so-humourus names were handed out.
Not being a particularly religious person myself, after a while I ran out of names. Hence our new, rather less officially sanctioned hostname theme, introduced by myself in the interests of religious equality. We now have, amongst the various disciples, romans and countrymen, the names 'Vishnu', 'Hezbollah', 'Ayatollah', 'Oestre' (go figure that one out), 'Zoroastra', 'Allah', and 'Siddhattha'. My own machines are 'Index' (that one came from the bible;-) and 'Creation', which is about the only name for the strangely assembled pile of components that always seems to be missing something or other (a case for a start).
I'm always on the look out for more ways to buck the trend that 'them upstairs' seek to push onto me. Suggestions?
Apparently I get a discount at Hilton hotels as they are a member of the Ladbroke group, which is the parent company of Ladbroke Racing in the UK. I was looking forward to cool $100,000 off the price... (Mind you, the chance of me having the other millions is remote, given that they won't let me place bets with the company... (Except at our greyhound tracks miles away...)
If we export MS Windows, which also incedentally happens to be the name of a double glazing company in south Hampshire, England, to Iran, I guess they might be pretty upset. Back to the main subject, what other countries are affected; I was about to export three linux systems to hong kong; what with this Chinese embassy business, we have had to delay for three weeks atleast.
Somewhereabouts I still have an annotated source listing of GEOS, a similar windowing system on the Commodore 64. Now, those were the days; writing apps in assembler and working out how to overlay them so you could fit everything in 38k. I never bought the mouse, though; I used the joystick like most users.
Ladbrokes, the bookmakers in the UK, used to use Vic 20's for settling bets; we still have a few gathering dust in some shops. The new system works on windows. This is progress? If the Vic had developed at the same rate as PC's have, we'd all have 100MHz 6502's with maybe half a meg of RAM, and that'd still be enough...
In my company we have this daft 'coding standard' forced upon us that means, that apart from illogical hungarian notation, we have to do stupid things like: /* Set iBletch according to the foo coefficient of iBar */ if( 0 != iFoo(iBar) ) { iBletch = 1; } else { iBletch = 2; } instead of (among other possibilities) bletch = foo(bar)?1:2;
Comes of having too many managers reading code that they have virtually no business reading, without having any idea of what it is the code is supposed to do overall, let alone any single part of it. Consequently, I bet even our student programmers churn out 20,000+ lines of code a year. All those redundant braces give me vertigo.
Those of you who think this is an april fools joke - Think again!. The 'as-yet-unnamed' complainant is Microsoft's legal department. Illiad has been hassled by them for the past week. If Illiad is hassled by MS, how long until/. is closed down?
Fine, but I wish they'd educate their resellers..
on
HPs Linux Push
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· Score: 1
I have had to explain to the reseller I just bought five HP Vectra P-II-450 systems from all about Linux, and that I didn't want Windows 98, NT, or anything else at all on them. The irritating this was that they wouldn't ship the PC's to me at the time, because they were out of stock of Windows 98 CD's. Trying to explain that I didn't want a windows 98 CD led to some heated phone calls. I normally build my own systems, but I needed a brand name manufacturer so that they can be supported at their eventual destination without me having to go all the way over there (Hong kong) from the UK just to plug some board or other back in.... I might as well try and herd cats. Now my reseller is telling me that the hardware isn't supported without the preinstalled software... Aaaarrgghh! Shameless company website plug
A) I build all our office/project PC's from parts. B) Usually the parts don't include windows C) If they did, I suspect my boss would want to keep them.
Slashdot Mirror
Typically, if I order two CD's from a USA based warehouse, they arrive without any additional tax, but if I order three or more, they get intercepted, and I have the pleasure of paying:
Because the third item is a service, it is also subject to Value Added Tax, so I'm not only paying Tax on Tax, but I'm paying Tax on Tax on Tax.
At the moment, it's still economically viable to buy CD's from the USA because of the remarkably high prices that retailers over here charge. Things are changing, but a $7 music CD bought in the states is still less than half the UK14.99 it typically sells for over here.
Secondly, how exactly are the EU going to enforce a law requiring companies outside the USA to register for tax purposes; the amount of extra work that this would require on behalf of the various revenue services would be collosal, not to mention the cost to the taxpayer (tax^4 ?).
No wonder Disaster Area's accountant in The hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy had to invent a whole new branch of integral hypermathematics to deal with the tax returns..
It'll be good to see Linux at an event which suggests 'Windows' as the main theme.
I was a little disappointed at the number of products on display which appared to be nothing other than windows boxes. However, there was some interesting hardware and a lot of knowledgeable people about.
However, I didn't find what I was really looking for, which was products geared for the embedded market (we make a number of wierd and wonderful devices for data acquisition and processing, so we need just a little more than the typical thin-client PC has (the best I saw was a 233MHz pentium grade system). Guess I'll just stick with the ICP products for the moment.
Glad to see the move to more floor space. Atleast you could actually see the floor this year.
Liquid crystal displays utilise a feature of liquid crystals in that they line up differently when a voltage is applied, and this twisted alignment causes polarised light passing through them to be rotated. There is a polarising filter on both sides (or on one side with reflective layer at the back so light goes through the same filter twice).
When a voltage is applied, the area appears to go black, because the light polarised by the first filter has been rotated so that it doesn't go through the second filter. Where no voltage has been applied, the light goes through as normal.
Scale this up a bit, make the areas to which you can selectively apply a voltage smaller, add a back light, print a matrix of magenta, cyan, and yellow blobs on the screen, and you have an LCD screen. The screen will be black when off because the two polarising layers are at right angles to each other, and no light gets through unless something (the liquid crystal layer) rotates the light between the two polarising filters.
You can play with this if you have an old LCD calculator, and take it apart. If you find a removable polarising filter, you may be able to reverse it and find that your calculator now does white digits on a black background.
Alternatively, you can remove it altogether, and have a calculator that only you can read (because you are wearing polarising shades).
Back to the subject at hand; Will this process make LCD panel displays easier to build or cheaper? With CRT monitor prices dropping like, errm.. CRT monitors, nothing seems to be happening to LCD monitor prices; they are still ridiculously expensive (although I'm still drooling over the prospect of getting a nice 17" LG Electronics display (Saw one at Linux Expo, London last year, and it made me wonder what it was I've been looking at all this time...))
Illiad will be appearing as a guest of SuSE at the Linux Expo, Olympia, London, June 1st + 2nd.
Further details at IT Events site.
I beleive myself to be, after many years playing alternately with PDP-11's, VAXen, then DOS, AmigaDOS, windows, and Unix (far too many variants of unix to list), to be a unix kernel hacker in a windows world.
My reasons for coming to this conclusion are these:
1. I program almost exclusively in C (I've never got on well with C++, FORTRAN, or anything with the word 'Visual' stuck on the front of it)
2. My 'speciality' is in the bit-twiddling, string bashing, hairy linked-list world of low level data manipulation.
3. I work with unix firstly because if my latest list processing masterpiece is buggy, I'm likely to find out with a simple 'Segmentation fault' message, rather than find that my disks have got all screwed up. That, and (dons flame-retardant underwear) vi of course.
Apart from building hardware, and doing generally interesting system administration type things on the company networks, I also write a lot of the low level code, which other people build flashy user interfaces upon. This means that I sometimes work in kernel mode, and this is somewhat reflected in most of my code. I like to think that it means that the code will cope will with idiot users above trying to do stupid things with it.
In a way, then, I think I have already reached my 'goal'.
I dislike user interface programming, or intense mathematical code; and I've found a team where I can avoid doing that.
Unfortunately, I have to write code for windows boxes. Atleast we have now left the 16bit world behind, so I can malloc(lots) instead of calling one of several different malloc()'s depending on the type of memory I want, etc.
So, back to the original point. (I may have got a little lost here) If you want to work at the low level, do it, but you have to learn to work with a team if you don't want to do all that user friendly GUI stuff. It helps a lot if the people that do want to do the GUI stuff are unwilling to write their own list processing code, etc. because that way, you get a good supply of jobs to do that prevent management from assigning you to some horrid graphics thing.
We have a particularly obnoxious clause in our contracts here that state that any source code we produce while in the employ of the company becomes their intellectual property. We are occasionally remended by middle management that this even means private projects, at home, during non-office hours.
Whether this particular clause is enforceable (and given the way English law works, it probably is) this means that I am stuck in a conflict of interests if I work on GPL'd software.
This said, we use Linux within a number of products, and while our own source code is obviously private, I do keep a log of what the other programmers are using, to make sure we don't break the GPL.
We've written device driver code, and I've had to explain modules to our developers, so we can keep the source secret (and the management happy), as I beleive that writing an in-kernel driver requires source code release under the GPL (is that correct?). If so, some companies (such as M-Systems with their DiskOnChip driver) are breaking it. I don't wish to join them.
Unfortunately, for now, I'm stuck in a situation where I can't use GPL'd code in projects, except via libraries via LGPL, because my boss won't let source code out of the building. In those rare instances where we have had to reveal source code (such as in some defense contracts) he's insisted on it being modified by doing things like stripping comments, or running it through cobfusc (A C obfuscator (we wrote a similar thing for FORTRAN))
I managed to get a couple of cheap shots at Microsoft into Wednesday's Daily Express (UK) letters page.
;-)
They didn't print the bit I wrote about newspapers not doing their job and telling the public WHY these virii are dangerous (namely that windows and outlook are so amazingly insecure in the hands of inexperienced users). Most didn't even explain what the trojan was. Most disappointing (but I'm just happy getting into a national newspaper.. even though I did get edited to death
...which would sort of imply that if we are going to have a version of Linux running on that thing, that some Sony rep has to give it the thumbs-up.
(Along with all the costs and license restrictions that this would bring)
Kernel reconfiguration will have to be done in a 3d 'shoot this wall to enable network aliasing support' style... etc.
Could it not be argued that to prevent someone making a product that works with, in this example, a Sony Playstation, has about as much legal sense as Sony trying to prevent the BBC from making a television programme that can be viewed on, say, a Sony television set?
/.land, could they explain why Sony would be able to prosecute people for writing games for it's console? Seems to me that the customer, the End User would gain; and like the MPAA, the rich guys really hate that.
I've never thought the legal system made much sense anyway.
If there are any lawyers out there in
Over here in the UK, the banks have been getting hugely bad press recently for charging for use of ATM's. Back in the good old days, i.e. last year, it used to be virtually free, and the customer benefited hugely. However, this wasn't making even more money for the enormously wealthy banks, so they slap a charge of typically UK1.50 on any cash transaction if you don't use their cash machine.
The transaction actually costs the banks roughly UK0.30 to process, which leaves 1.20 unaccounted for.
The question is, when are the banks going to start charging more because 'our encryption algorithm is better than their encryption algorythm'. (It wouldn't suprise me at all to find that my bank account security is worth about 30p)
Yes, although requests to the majordomo in charge do need to be authenticated (I.e. you send your request, and then reply to it's authentication request it sends you, or it ignores you).
This prevents you maliciously subscribing all your enemies to this, somewhat high-traffic mailing list.
I do join from time to time, although I'm not listening at the moment, mainly because I'm currently snowed under doing other things, and my work mailbox is pushing back the boundaries of disk space mathematics as it is...
Having had to deal with chinese beureaucracy (I'm not sure I can spell that) recently to try and get a couple of modems installed in some kit we sold to them, I give up trying to figure out the way chinese IT management think. We have had minor problems with some bits of kit, and most customers would happily perform minor tweaking given some simple instructions. Not over in China!.
We are currently trying to resolve their 'Major Complaint' that the size of the digital xclock display is too small, and their windows based X server, which is using the wrong fonts, is chopping off the last digit of the year. This is apparently more confusing and important than any of the showstoppers we are trying to resolve.
Aaargh..
There is a double glazing company based near Fareham, Hampshire, England called MS Windows. I hope they don't crash when you try and open more than one window at a time. They have been established far longer than MS, but I doubt that the lawyers think that's a fair excuse. I hope they continue to use the name, because it might give MS Windows a good reputation... (on average)
LISP? Yeeuuch.
I have enough difficulty balancing braces in C code converted from extremely dodgy FORTRAN written 20 years ago. Whoever perpetrated it should be shot. It got so wierd and so urgent that we even copied over a few goto's. That always makes me feel guilty.
(In a display of chronological ineptitude, Jim now relpies to the next post.....)
Anyhow, we pay ridiculous amounts for CD bonus tracks, etc. A typical chart audio CD costs the equivalent of US$ 24, which is why we order all our music CD's from over your way.
Fed up as we are of not being able to get movies a a decent time (I.e. on release) at the same time as you lot in the USA, us Euros are behind you again. I went around Woolworths today, while waiting for the coach to this years Ladbrokes Social Club Christmas Dinner & Dance (which if you're remotely interested will be at http://www.notout.demon.co.uk/cdad99/ and found the usual complete lack of games that said anything other than 'Requirements: 100% compatible Windows 95/98/NT system'. Not knowing exactly what a 100% compatible windows 95/98/NT system is (given that Windows 95 is not 100% compatible with Windows 95 (or atleast seems that way)), I didn't buy anything.
So, if you are seeing items in store for linux, you're far ahead of us euro-types.
Anyhow, I need sleep. I'm overdue for about a week's worth... One day the revolution will come. Keep working on it guys, we all know it's the right thing to work towards. It's 01:50 now, so I'm going to start catching up on ZZzzzzzz. Goodnight.
I work for Ladbrokes, one of the major players, if not that largest cash betting company in the UK, with several interests abroad. While I couldn't possibly comment in any official way, blah blah; it's not suprising that we don't accept credit cards from the general public. We do accept debit cards (same funds transfer system, except that money comes directly from the owner's bank account - No money in account = no authorisation = no bet) on the telephone betting services. This attitude seems to be prevelant throughout the UK.
I occasionally bet, in other companies shops, although not online, because I don't feel that a company wouldn't rip me off by, say, changing the game such that when in 'demo' or 'play free' modes, it pays far more than when in 'real' mode.
What guarantees does the internet gambler have that he is dealing with a reputable company. The Ladbrokes rule book, which governs all transactions covers, in small print, an A2 poster (USA speak: A2 = 2xA3. A3=2xA4, our nearest equivalent to your 'letter' paper (which is the most annoying default on loads of software - Aargh!) - work it out for yourself). Do they have a code of practice? A complaints procedure? A governing body? I'd bet hard cash that most of the 'guarantees' offered are pretty much worthless. Comments?
Atleast when betting on sporting events and racing, you know that the bookmaker does not have any control over the outcome (and even if he has, for my pitifully small stakes, nobody is going to risk fixing anything).
Having read the RFC and got fed up with all our office machines being given names based on the initials of their owners, and then being swapped about blah blah until nobody knew who they were any more, I suggested naming them using a theme that didn't include names. The management asked for suggestions. Several good themes were put forward by various members of staff. The usual cars, cartoon characters, etc. However, the management decided on 'biblical names'...
;-) and 'Creation', which is about the only name for the strangely assembled pile of components that always seems to be missing something or other (a case for a start).
Luckily, presumably for them, we also own the hotel up the road, and that bloke called Gideon is always leaving copies of his book there... Off went the M.D. to find a copy and get a load of biblical names, which I as sys.admin get to allocate 'in the order on the list' (he said). What he didn't say was in what order I should visit people to give out their names. Applications engineering got 'job' and 'lot', and several other not-so-humourus names were handed out.
Not being a particularly religious person myself, after a while I ran out of names. Hence our new, rather less officially sanctioned hostname theme, introduced by myself in the interests of religious equality. We now have, amongst the various disciples, romans and countrymen, the names 'Vishnu', 'Hezbollah', 'Ayatollah', 'Oestre' (go figure that one out), 'Zoroastra', 'Allah', and 'Siddhattha'. My own machines are 'Index' (that one came from the bible
I'm always on the look out for more ways to buck the trend that 'them upstairs' seek to push onto me. Suggestions?
Apparently I get a discount at Hilton hotels as they are a member of the Ladbroke group, which is the parent company of Ladbroke Racing in the UK. I was looking forward to cool $100,000 off the price... (Mind you, the chance of me having the other millions is remote, given that they won't let me place bets with the company... (Except at our greyhound tracks miles away...)
If we export MS Windows, which also incedentally happens to be the name of a double glazing company in south Hampshire, England, to Iran, I guess they might be pretty upset. Back to the main subject, what other countries are affected; I was about to export three linux systems to hong kong; what with this Chinese embassy business, we have had to delay for three weeks atleast.
Somewhereabouts I still have an annotated source listing of GEOS, a similar windowing system on the Commodore 64. Now, those were the days; writing apps in assembler and working out how to overlay them so you could fit everything in 38k. I never bought the mouse, though; I used the joystick like most users.
Ladbrokes, the bookmakers in the UK, used to use Vic 20's for settling bets; we still have a few gathering dust in some shops. The new system works on windows. This is progress? If the Vic had developed at the same rate as PC's have, we'd all have 100MHz 6502's with maybe half a meg of RAM, and that'd still be enough...
In my company we have this daft 'coding standard' forced upon us that means, that apart from illogical hungarian notation, we have to do stupid things like:
/* Set iBletch according to the foo coefficient of iBar */
if( 0 != iFoo(iBar) )
{
iBletch = 1;
}
else
{
iBletch = 2;
}
instead of (among other possibilities)
bletch = foo(bar)?1:2;
Comes of having too many managers reading code that they have virtually no business reading, without having any idea of what it is the code is supposed to do overall, let alone any single part of it.
Consequently, I bet even our student programmers churn out 20,000+ lines of code a year. All those redundant braces give me vertigo.
Those of you who think this is an april fools joke - Think again!. /. is closed down?
The 'as-yet-unnamed' complainant is Microsoft's legal department. Illiad has been hassled by them for the past week.
If Illiad is hassled by MS, how long until
I have had to explain to the reseller I just bought five HP Vectra P-II-450 systems from all about Linux, and that I didn't want Windows 98, NT, or anything else at all on them. The irritating this was that they wouldn't ship the PC's to me at the time, because they were out of stock of Windows 98 CD's. Trying to explain that I didn't want a windows 98 CD led to some heated phone calls. I normally build my own systems, but I needed a brand name manufacturer so that they can be supported at their eventual destination without me having to go all the way over there (Hong kong) from the UK just to plug some board or other back in.... I might as well try and herd cats.
Now my reseller is telling me that the hardware isn't supported without the preinstalled software... Aaaarrgghh!
Shameless company website plug
A) I build all our office/project PC's from parts.
B) Usually the parts don't include windows
C) If they did, I suspect my boss would want to
keep them.
Good luck to y'all anyway.