Posts by Gwaptiva 112 posts • joined 11 Dec 2007
Informality is certainly a turn-off; in English this is much more subtle than in languages like French, German or Dutch. So is trying to get me (M, 50+) interested by offering "free soft drinks/smoothies and a chill room with fussball table and Xbox, followed by Laser Tag and pub crawl"... ok, might join you for the pub crawl...
Google, Microsoft, Amazon et al should be hard at work lobbying the US government to scrap stuff like the CLOUD Act and introduce privacy safeguards as strong as the EU's, or they can all forget about winning in the EU.
Yes, AFAIK, the existence of the CLOUD Act and its impact on GDPR has yet to be decided by the European courts, but if previous verdicts about Safe Harbour etc are anything to go by, the fact that an individual European citizen lacks practical legal recourse when their data are improperly handled by US companies, suggests it won't be long before cloud solutions operated by US-owned companies, even if those are EU subsidiaries/joint ventures etc, are declared non-GDPR, and as such will be off-limits to almost every operation in the EU
> these are things that are provisioned and priced like utilities now.
Ironically, IBM recognised very early on this was where the internet would be heading (with a bit of pushing from IBM of course); it was Gerstner's pet project (at a time when Microsoft was still trying to work out if this world wide web thing would be important or not).
But, as per usual, IBM cannot do joined up thinking
"In this case, Proton received a legally binding order from the Swiss Federal Department of Justice which we are obligated to comply with. There was no possibility to appeal or fight this particular request because an act contrary to Swiss law did in fact take place (and this was also the final determination of the Federal Department of Justice which does a legal review of each case)."
Hmmm, either some issue in the reporting or just utter BS: Where I'm from, and I suspect this is the same in other countries in the Council of Europe, whether or not an act contrary ot national law has "in fact" taken place can only be determined by a Judge. Not by the executive branch. These orders can (and routinely are) appealed or fought.
Except that regulators in small countries can issue the same fines as regulators in large countries under the EU's GDPR: Up to 10 million euros or 2 percent of the corporation's global revenue (note: revenue, not profit, not pretax, plain revenue), whichever is the HIGHER. And this is *per violation*.
In Germany, some police are more armed than other police.... I'm still shaking at the memory of the morning an Arrest Team (SEK) stormed my neighbour's flat. I'm just a regular nerdy joe, and I was in the flat next door, but I nearly peed my pants at the shock and awe. And that was just a regular SEK... GSG9 are another level altogether
As long as the JDKs continue to support compiling and running to Java 8, I'm fine with release schedules. Java 9's Jigsaw is a nightmare that will stop uptake (by most significant legacy applications, at least) of any new features post that; until the powers that be admit it was a mistake and remove it again
I was a wee bit earlier to that decision, but chose Mercurial as the reviews (and mine) showed it was easier to use that Git, something that was highly critical in a legacy environment (where people thought Subversion fixed ALL issues that CVS has). At that point, it was maybe 50-50, maybe Git a bit ahead due to its "made by St Linus" predicate.
Now, we don't host our source code externally, so I am much more concerned about continued support for Mercurial in Atlassian's SourceTree.
"Gives clever people 3 years to leave."
And the very clever ones to smile quietly knowing that their rates are going to rise and rise.
I mean, COBOL is still around and those that know how to maintain it are making gold money. You all move to your fun languages, and I'll fatten my pension account with the Java left-overs.
And this is the exact reason that once you made the phone call without a resolution, you write a letter (or email if you are in a hurry) to the CEO or Chairman of the company you are trying to deal with with your complaint.
In the majority of organisations, these "executive complaints" get handled by a special team, with loooads of leeway and leverage, considering they were told by the CEO -- in reality his/her secretary, to make the complaint go away.
The Cloud = The Ultimate in Vaporware
Thank FSM, the company I work for has been hosting our business application for some customers for 10+ years but we still call it Hosted Service. We occasionally joke that we should call it Cloud Edition, but we're afraid our customers will think our servers are hosted by the NSA
As others have already pointed out, the issue is with actually finding out what the facts are, not just the facts we are being given. If nothing else, the Climategate affair demonstrated data is being withheld. I don't care about the reasons for this, it is not the way science should be done, and has dragged this science into the area of homeopathy and iriscopy: cherrypicked results to prove a position
Ok, so they get away with this line of defence without sparking a full-blown international scandal because it's possible to search a server in Iceland from the US.
Which is a bit rich for an agency (and its government) that is hellbound on treating the internet as the same as the physical world.
Can you imagine what the reaction would've been had the FBI flown out to Reykjavik to search suspect's appartment without a warrant... or even with a warrant signed by a US judge?
But if it's all the same, can the Met please perform a search of Mr G.W. Bush's private residence? No warrant needed, because it's abroad, and the crimes he's suspected of are quite serious
Taking into consideration the still high levels of unemployment in the areas where Amazon has its distribution centres in Germany, plus the types of employment offered (low/unskilled manual warehouse/shipping work), the fact that in Germany you need to complete an apprenticeship to stack shelves or <strikethru>flip burgers</strikethru> work in system gastronomy, plus the relatively high numbers of immigrant workers, your free market idealism falls flat. There is nowhere else to go for a lot of many of these folk.
The free market is neither free, nor a market... if it were free, it would be Deutsche Bank, AIG and others that were broke and not Greece
So, there we have it. There are illegal minicab drivers in the UK as well. The only difference appears to be the definition of what is a minicab. It just seems that German courts are going to interpret the definition of minicab to include cars booked through Uber (and possibly in the UK they aren't).
Also, the risk with any kind of certification in IT is that people forget that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Plenty of people know their stuff without ever bothering (or being given the resources to bother) with the tests, paperwork, brown-nosing, or whatever else it takes to be noticed.
In Germany, non-compete clauses are only enforceable if they are accompanied by full pay for the duration. So essentially, it's equivalent to an enforced garden leave. It's also limited in duration (I believe 6 months). Of course, it makes employees less attractive to competitors, because it gives you a notice period of 7 (or more commonly 9) months, but for most companies it's not worth to pursue it.
In all other cases, trying to enforce such provisions are met with outright rejection by courts, as it constitutes a restriction of trade not mandated by a court of law or authorised professional body.
"Getting polish workers into Germany and paying them polish wages on the other hand..."
would make no difference, considering these jobs are subject to a nationwide CBA. Totally irrelevant what the nationality is of the people working there. And if you argued that Polish people wouldn't mind earning less, think again.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022
