Don't kid yourself. HMRC are lazy. Lazy. Even when you offer to pay your tax they still won't let you. Yes, that's right, a TAX OFFICE THAT REFUSES TO ACCEPT TAX.
And yet this "It's gotta be perfect or it's gotta be nothing at all!" attitude is IMHO what has held crypto back a lot more than necessary.
Totally agree. That and the fact that corporate firewalls still block everything except port 80 and 443. Which demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about TCP/IP: the port number does not determine the application! There is absolutely no reason why one website couldn't support many different SSL hosts, all on different ports. Or many different websites.
The whole "certificate must be with a commercial provider" thing has been utterly ridiculous - I'm surprised that Google haven't created a free central certificate authority to be honest.
Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!
Would you believe they had 6 page SQL stored procedures?
I keep coming across multi-page SQL stored procedures too. Horrific, buggy, impossible to maintain. Who are the ???holes that keep getting employment contracts to do this kind of evil? They really need a kick up the backside. And funny how most of them end up in the finance industry...
History will always be the prevailing reason why plain-text is superior.
Going forward one will always be able to look back and understand (well coded and documented) source code in plain text. Already, however, other formats are showing their age: trying to support old binary formats such as Wordstar, Word-Perfect, Microsoft Word, Corel Draw, and various other programs that lived and died a natural life-cycle. The format wars will also be difficult to support over a long time, already the IV50 video format appears to be lost in time, and various audio encodings may disappear.
We are fortunate that we can still read historical texts. Olde English is a little difficult to comprehend but far simpler than deciphering hieroglyphics. Surely we owe it to our successors to be able to read what we've written?
Arguably the simplicity of the English language is also one of the reasons it is the most dominant around the world: it was easy to code 26 characters into early computers. The poor Chinese were never going to win the early technology race by trying to cram 1,000s of characters into a small number of bits. Now that technology has caught up the Chinese have a chance to do something truly revolutionary (imagine if they wrote their own native operating system!).
Just look at the dominant languages in Google: not C++ or C. Not serious languages.
Facebook is an extremely poorly written web application - extremely poorly written. From a chat client that has barely worked to privacy settings that don't work; where different views reveal information that has been explicitly marked as "private".
If you've ever tried to configure a "Google Web Appliance" targeted for the enterprise you'll appreciate just what a dodgy crowd Google are, too.
All in all, Google and Facebook are great bedfellows.
Most computer science students take the subject because they finish high school and think "what career pays well?". On the other hand those with a passion for technology all their youth tend to end up as Electrical Engineers. Thus, with no historical appreciation for the kind of technologically disruptive and legally overbearing company they have been, you can understand why Computer Science students may be lulled into a false sense of self-worth and pride about working for Microsoft.
They've just filtered out all the freeloaders and now have a nice exclusive club of readers willing to pay for something on the Internet.
Indeed. Apple, of course, have this same advantage. They know their users are all willing to pay money, lots of money, often without regard to the actual value of the product/service they are receiving.
Anybody subscribing to The Times' new technically inferior website (to their old one) is clearly not-all-that-discerning when it comes to paying for things.
Maybe The Times do know what they are doing (or appear that way by accident).
... is that people will just say "screw that!" and go to another website where they can get it for free. World events aren't copyrighted to any one provider (for now, anyway...)
What's worse is that the new Times website is vastly inferior to the old, free, one.
The new website mandates the use of JavaScript. You cannot do anything with the website using a non-Javascript web browser. Thus I regard the site as dysfunctional.
I've been motivated to stop purchasing print copies of The Times. Why? Because if they don't have quality IT staff (who know that different browsers are in use on the Internet), then it is likely their journalistic staff are just as incompetent.
I'm personally amazed the Internet has lasted as long as it has. It is about the only electrical/electronic standard that is common between the USA and the rest of the world.
So this was a fun experiment. How did it work out for you, USA? How did it feel not to require an adaptor every time you go overseas? How did it feel to freely communicate with citizens outside your borders?
It is inevitable that the Internet in the USA cannot last. Everyone in the world uses the same standards! Time for a new USA-only standard, USA! That's right, A-law companding wasn't good enough for you was it. You couldn't run your power at 220/230V like the rest of the world could you. God forbid your mobile phones should ever work outside the USA. Hell, you can't even drive on the correct side of the road.
You don't assault people. You don't toss your refuse anywhere you choose. You don't drive dangerously. You don't take public transport with your phone playing mp3s through the tinny speaker.
Why? You have something to lose. Courts know this. If you get caught for a minor infraction you'll lose money, time, freedom.
There are three classes of people who don't care and break whatever rules they want:
- children, who are immune from the law
- very poor, who have nothing to lose
- illegal immigrants, who demonstrate their disregard of the law every day they fail to leave and re-enter the country legally
All anonymity does is give those with something to lose a level playing ground with those who have nothing to lose.
The truth is most of us hate each other in this world.
You can pretend racism doesn't exist in the USA or UK but if you talk to a person of the wrong colour in the streets of London your physical safety is at extreme risk.
Half the people feel compassion for the never-ending barrage of beggars. Half the people would like to jail them.
A lot of people drive dangerously, probably several of your co-workers, and you'd likely kick them if you found out who they were for endangering lives.
Everyone is afraid of being exposed because the truth is few of us agree with each other's opinions and thoughts.
Sometimes its not as simple as declaring its their own fault and they get what they deserve.
..yes, but only sometimes, and probably much rarer than you think. But while appearing to "care" might score you points with friends the resulting behaviour from such encouragement can be extremely destructive to whole societies. But that's what you want, right? Moral hazard? No consequences?
HSBC becomes the first bank to issue pre-signed checks to make check writing easier for it's customers. Simply fill in the amount and date and use the checks as easily as their pre-activated debit cards.
Not so funny as you think.
With all the Royal Mail strikes in London I had a chequebook stolen (probably by a Royal Mail worker) who has consequently gone running around the UK and Europe handing out ten-thousand-pound cheques in my company's name. Fortunately there's been a block put on my account.
There's a lot of smokers who just toss their cigarettes on the ground as litter. I guess demanding the government to care is fashionable when the people don't care - but there's no moral imperative.
Tell that to the millions of homeless, not to mention people having been mistreated by the police and nothing happen to the police for the crimes they did against them.
I will! Homeless? It's about time we did actual case-studies of homeless and people who claim police negligence. Because I think it's fear-uncertainty-doubt: there's no evidence from homeless people of what circumstances lead to their position.
There's a saying: a triumph is a series of successes. A tragedy is a series of failures. How does one become homeless? Certainly not through one or two instances of bad luck. One has to make determined choices to make it to the bottom.
...the Met has a reputation for corruption and violence... Whether this represents the reality of policing in those areas - I wouldn't want to live in either of them
I don't think I've ever seen a black person being arrested by the Police in London without his black mate filming the whole thing on his video camera shouting "racist! racist! racist!".
The English invite accusations of racism. They love it. The socialist left has made it a hate crime to have white skin. Thus in an area like London, which is predominantly non-white, there will be a much greater rate of complaints. The fact that the complaints are filed by non-whites make those complaints entirely "valid".
Well i guess if you cant "have the time and energy to be trying to keep 100% on top of these things." then i guess you deserve what you get. I will always read contracts i am about to sign, and cross out things i don't agree with.
Incredible. I also read terms and conditions thoroughly, in fact I've lost weeks I could have been working on contracts because I disputed one or two conditions.
There are two problems. 1. You cannot be expected to keep on top of CHANGING conditions. When EVERY BANK and EVERY PHONE COMPANY is sending you leaflets every two months with changing conditions how is any ordinary person supposed to keep track of all conditions? 2. When a company has 100 lawyers working full-time drafting pages of complex terms how is a single non-legal-trained individual supposed to digest and contest unfair conditions? Where can an individual find the time to digest that enormity of legal clauses?
You might think you're on top of everything but if you were you would have no time to work or play.
Pay attention to how it tells you to cancel because sometimes that's very important
Whilst this is a great loop-hole the fact is few, if any, of us have the time and energy to be trying to keep 100% on top of these things.
These companies count on inertia. They count on the fact you're not a lawyer. They count on the fact that the book-size terms and conditions drafted by hundreds of in-house lawyers cannot possibly be digested by a single individual customer in anything less than eight continuous hours.
Essentially law does not free people, it enslaves them, for the same reason that science creates weapons of war: it is not the tool at fault but the people who seek to use it for evil and corrupt purposes. Governments and legal students COULD free people with simple laws. They choose instead to manipulate, bully, and coerce instead.
Right or wrong, native Africans see it as their stamp on post-apartheid Association Football.
Wow, talk about your extreme racists. Who would think that there were white people in South Africa! I guess minorities don't count, right? Well that's your opinion - as long as you are consistent and don't start suddenly supporting minorities in your own country. Wouldn't want to be a hypocrite would you?
One the thing Australians do very well at sports broadcasts is immediate live replays and being able to slow down the action even to a frame-by-frame level which would have been welcome during some questionable incidents in the World Cup already. Unfortunately the Australian TV channels also jam in adverts excessively. So while watching ITV and BBC broadcasts is like stepping back into the 80s (technology-wise) the freedom from adverts is welcome.
WTF on inexperienced foreign broadcasters
100% agreed - the very first thing I thought when I heard those trumpets was - wow - they're all within about 3 semitones.. give me a notch filter! Something very junior about the coverage. Perhaps the good operators decided to keep away from crime-ridden South Africa for this World Cup.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't kid yourself. HMRC are lazy. Lazy. Even when you offer to pay your tax they still won't let you. Yes, that's right, a TAX OFFICE THAT REFUSES TO ACCEPT TAX.
Not the brightest bunnies in the world.
This is a non-story. Or pure fantasy. Or both.
As the inventor of AutoRun
F*** you as*h**e!
I've been trying to figure out how to disable autorun ever since Windows started forcing it upon us.
Dare you to reveal your true identity!
Very few users of cracked software work full-time as unpaid volunteers.
When I was a student I downloaded a copy of a popular music sequencing program.
Now I have a good full-time job I've bought the most expensive edition of this software and have been also purchasing upgrades over time.
Actually it's not okay to pirate anyone else's work, whether you provide yours for free or not.
Says you. And you're just one person. That makes the above statement your opinion. It is certainly not a matter of fact.
And yet this "It's gotta be perfect or it's gotta be nothing at all!" attitude is IMHO what has held crypto back a lot more than necessary.
Totally agree. That and the fact that corporate firewalls still block everything except port 80 and 443. Which demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about TCP/IP: the port number does not determine the application! There is absolutely no reason why one website couldn't support many different SSL hosts, all on different ports. Or many different websites.
The whole "certificate must be with a commercial provider" thing has been utterly ridiculous - I'm surprised that Google haven't created a free central certificate authority to be honest.
Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!
You make it sound like it’s easy or something.
Why do the apologists keep trotting this lame line out. You're a big company making massively huge profits. You can afford real software developers.
And sure, I'll work on a large website that's used by millions of people every day. Oh wait, I already do.
Would you believe they had 6 page SQL stored procedures?
I keep coming across multi-page SQL stored procedures too. Horrific, buggy, impossible to maintain. Who are the ???holes that keep getting employment contracts to do this kind of evil? They really need a kick up the backside. And funny how most of them end up in the finance industry...
History will always be the prevailing reason why plain-text is superior.
Going forward one will always be able to look back and understand (well coded and documented) source code in plain text. Already, however, other formats are showing their age: trying to support old binary formats such as Wordstar, Word-Perfect, Microsoft Word, Corel Draw, and various other programs that lived and died a natural life-cycle. The format wars will also be difficult to support over a long time, already the IV50 video format appears to be lost in time, and various audio encodings may disappear.
We are fortunate that we can still read historical texts. Olde English is a little difficult to comprehend but far simpler than deciphering hieroglyphics. Surely we owe it to our successors to be able to read what we've written?
Arguably the simplicity of the English language is also one of the reasons it is the most dominant around the world: it was easy to code 26 characters into early computers. The poor Chinese were never going to win the early technology race by trying to cram 1,000s of characters into a small number of bits. Now that technology has caught up the Chinese have a chance to do something truly revolutionary (imagine if they wrote their own native operating system!).
Just look at the dominant languages in Google: not C++ or C. Not serious languages.
Facebook is an extremely poorly written web application - extremely poorly written. From a chat client that has barely worked to privacy settings that don't work; where different views reveal information that has been explicitly marked as "private".
If you've ever tried to configure a "Google Web Appliance" targeted for the enterprise you'll appreciate just what a dodgy crowd Google are, too.
All in all, Google and Facebook are great bedfellows.
Most computer science students take the subject because they finish high school and think "what career pays well?". On the other hand those with a passion for technology all their youth tend to end up as Electrical Engineers. Thus, with no historical appreciation for the kind of technologically disruptive and legally overbearing company they have been, you can understand why Computer Science students may be lulled into a false sense of self-worth and pride about working for Microsoft.
They've just filtered out all the freeloaders and now have a nice exclusive club of readers willing to pay for something on the Internet.
Indeed. Apple, of course, have this same advantage. They know their users are all willing to pay money, lots of money, often without regard to the actual value of the product/service they are receiving.
Anybody subscribing to The Times' new technically inferior website (to their old one) is clearly not-all-that-discerning when it comes to paying for things.
Maybe The Times do know what they are doing (or appear that way by accident).
... is that people will just say "screw that!" and go to another website where they can get it for free. World events aren't copyrighted to any one provider (for now, anyway...)
What's worse is that the new Times website is vastly inferior to the old, free, one.
The new website mandates the use of JavaScript. You cannot do anything with the website using a non-Javascript web browser. Thus I regard the site as dysfunctional.
I've been motivated to stop purchasing print copies of The Times. Why? Because if they don't have quality IT staff (who know that different browsers are in use on the Internet), then it is likely their journalistic staff are just as incompetent.
I'm personally amazed the Internet has lasted as long as it has. It is about the only electrical/electronic standard that is common between the USA and the rest of the world.
So this was a fun experiment. How did it work out for you, USA? How did it feel not to require an adaptor every time you go overseas? How did it feel to freely communicate with citizens outside your borders?
It is inevitable that the Internet in the USA cannot last. Everyone in the world uses the same standards! Time for a new USA-only standard, USA! That's right, A-law companding wasn't good enough for you was it. You couldn't run your power at 220/230V like the rest of the world could you. God forbid your mobile phones should ever work outside the USA. Hell, you can't even drive on the correct side of the road.
Isn't that the case in society?
You don't assault people. You don't toss your refuse anywhere you choose. You don't drive dangerously. You don't take public transport with your phone playing mp3s through the tinny speaker.
Why? You have something to lose. Courts know this. If you get caught for a minor infraction you'll lose money, time, freedom.
There are three classes of people who don't care and break whatever rules they want:
- children, who are immune from the law
- very poor, who have nothing to lose
- illegal immigrants, who demonstrate their disregard of the law every day they fail to leave and re-enter the country legally
All anonymity does is give those with something to lose a level playing ground with those who have nothing to lose.
The truth is most of us hate each other in this world.
You can pretend racism doesn't exist in the USA or UK but if you talk to a person of the wrong colour in the streets of London your physical safety is at extreme risk.
Half the people feel compassion for the never-ending barrage of beggars. Half the people would like to jail them.
A lot of people drive dangerously, probably several of your co-workers, and you'd likely kick them if you found out who they were for endangering lives.
Everyone is afraid of being exposed because the truth is few of us agree with each other's opinions and thoughts.
Sometimes its not as simple as declaring its their own fault and they get what they deserve.
..yes, but only sometimes, and probably much rarer than you think. But while appearing to "care" might score you points with friends the resulting behaviour from such encouragement can be extremely destructive to whole societies. But that's what you want, right? Moral hazard? No consequences?
HSBC becomes the first bank to issue pre-signed checks to make check writing easier for it's customers. Simply fill in the amount and date and use the checks as easily as their pre-activated debit cards.
Not so funny as you think.
With all the Royal Mail strikes in London I had a chequebook stolen (probably by a Royal Mail worker) who has consequently gone running around the UK and Europe handing out ten-thousand-pound cheques in my company's name. Fortunately there's been a block put on my account.
Ever heard of "social contract"?
There's a lot of smokers who just toss their cigarettes on the ground as litter. I guess demanding the government to care is fashionable when the people don't care - but there's no moral imperative.
Tell that to the millions of homeless, not to mention people having been mistreated by the police and nothing happen to the police for the crimes they did against them.
I will! Homeless? It's about time we did actual case-studies of homeless and people who claim police negligence. Because I think it's fear-uncertainty-doubt: there's no evidence from homeless people of what circumstances lead to their position.
There's a saying: a triumph is a series of successes. A tragedy is a series of failures. How does one become homeless? Certainly not through one or two instances of bad luck. One has to make determined choices to make it to the bottom.
...the Met has a reputation for corruption and violence... Whether this represents the reality of policing in those areas - I wouldn't want to live in either of them
I don't think I've ever seen a black person being arrested by the Police in London without his black mate filming the whole thing on his video camera shouting "racist! racist! racist!".
The English invite accusations of racism. They love it. The socialist left has made it a hate crime to have white skin. Thus in an area like London, which is predominantly non-white, there will be a much greater rate of complaints. The fact that the complaints are filed by non-whites make those complaints entirely "valid".
Well i guess if you cant "have the time and energy to be trying to keep 100% on top of these things." then i guess you deserve what you get. I will always read contracts i am about to sign, and cross out things i don't agree with.
Incredible. I also read terms and conditions thoroughly, in fact I've lost weeks I could have been working on contracts because I disputed one or two conditions.
There are two problems. 1. You cannot be expected to keep on top of CHANGING conditions. When EVERY BANK and EVERY PHONE COMPANY is sending you leaflets every two months with changing conditions how is any ordinary person supposed to keep track of all conditions? 2. When a company has 100 lawyers working full-time drafting pages of complex terms how is a single non-legal-trained individual supposed to digest and contest unfair conditions? Where can an individual find the time to digest that enormity of legal clauses?
You might think you're on top of everything but if you were you would have no time to work or play.
Pay attention to how it tells you to cancel because sometimes that's very important
Whilst this is a great loop-hole the fact is few, if any, of us have the time and energy to be trying to keep 100% on top of these things.
These companies count on inertia. They count on the fact you're not a lawyer. They count on the fact that the book-size terms and conditions drafted by hundreds of in-house lawyers cannot possibly be digested by a single individual customer in anything less than eight continuous hours.
Essentially law does not free people, it enslaves them, for the same reason that science creates weapons of war: it is not the tool at fault but the people who seek to use it for evil and corrupt purposes. Governments and legal students COULD free people with simple laws. They choose instead to manipulate, bully, and coerce instead.
Right or wrong, native Africans see it as their stamp on post-apartheid Association Football.
Wow, talk about your extreme racists. Who would think that there were white people in South Africa! I guess minorities don't count, right? Well that's your opinion - as long as you are consistent and don't start suddenly supporting minorities in your own country. Wouldn't want to be a hypocrite would you?
What they need is more angles
One the thing Australians do very well at sports broadcasts is immediate live replays and being able to slow down the action even to a frame-by-frame level which would have been welcome during some questionable incidents in the World Cup already. Unfortunately the Australian TV channels also jam in adverts excessively. So while watching ITV and BBC broadcasts is like stepping back into the 80s (technology-wise) the freedom from adverts is welcome.
WTF on inexperienced foreign broadcasters
100% agreed - the very first thing I thought when I heard those trumpets was - wow - they're all within about 3 semitones.. give me a notch filter! Something very junior about the coverage. Perhaps the good operators decided to keep away from crime-ridden South Africa for this World Cup.