Posts by RW 1097 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007
Find out where it's hiding and start stripping out the dll's one by one. It's amazing how few of them are needed to read PDFs -- and how fast Acrobat loads once it's been leaned down.
I suppose you lose some function, but I've never noticed anything.
Paris, because she's so skinny and lean.
Seems to me that one of the root problems is the utter lack of ethics and morality among marketers. Their philosophy—and practice—is that lies are okay if they will improve sales/profitability/the chance of getting laid.
If Comcast and its ilk simply told the truth "we have finite network capacity and we block p2p software so heavy users won't hog the available bandwidth", there would be no issue at all.
But, no, the simple truth won't do: gotta claim extravagant connection speeds (with very fine print saying "up to") in order to lure in the suckers.
This turns Adam Smith on his head, since one of the key elements in an efficient market (in the economic sense) is transparency. I don't know whether to laugh or cry over pigopolists who appeal, when convenient, to Capitalism as the cure for all man's ills, but who then work actively to subvert Capitalism by lying when that is more convenient.
Marketing wonks, spin doctors, and most lawyers need to be sent on a free one way ocean cruise that includes a visit in person to the depths of the Challenger Deep. Free swimming trunks will be provided for this exciting extreme swimming event! Sign up your favorite marketing wonk, spin doctor, or lawyer now!
Perhaps it's time to bring to marketing the stringent demands on courtroom testimony: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The usenet newsgroup rec.music.classical.recordings at one time had a regular who insisted that the main interest of the bigwigs in the music industry was keeping the supply of cocaine flowing to their noses.
Insisted repeatedly, ad infinitum nauseamque.
You know what? He was right. The desperation of the RIAA too closely resembles that of addicts overdue for a fix; likewise, the ideas they come up with too closely resemble those of drug users whose thought processes have been addled by overindulgence in recreational pharmaceuticals.
As the communications director at my former employer used to insist, to understand most political posturing, you have to look at (1) vested interests and (2) consequences.
Vested interests: music bigwigs with big cocaine budgets and habits.
Consequences: threatened reductions to both the budget and the supplies underlying said habits.
Makes sense to me.
Paris, because that lovely, virginal young thing has certainly never sullied the purity of her essential bodily fluids with anything as crass as cocaine.
Billy: "Nothing against Tallahassee. I've never been there but I'm sure it's a lovely place."
No, it isn't. I spent 6 weeks there in the summer of 1960 and can speak at first hand. In those days, A/C was uncommon, so you just sweltered in the climatic sauna of the Gulf Coast. Musical instruments grew green mold, crotches rotted with alarming speed, and every afternoon at 2 pm the heavens would open and a short downpour would pour down for the next hour, leaving a landscape looking not too different from the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes when it was over.
However, the local institution of higher education, Florida State University, didn't seem to be especially behind the eight ball, and may very well have a half-decent law school.
IT angle to placate the moderator: FSU is where I first learned to program a computer, an IBM 650 with (whee!) 2000 biquinary words of memory on a magnetic drum. Or was it 1000 words???? The memory, she dims.
Hot stuff, in more sense than one.
Paris, because she's hot stuff too.
The real IT angle is that Lovehoney in many respects exemplifies what a good e-commerce site should be like. The reviews in their Orgasm Army section
http://www.lovehoney.co.uk/orgasmarmy/
are priceless if you're only there for amusement, invaluable if you are weighing the relative merits of the Target Practice "Ass Force One Butt Plug" vs. the Doc Johnson "Red Boy Extra Large Butt Blug" [sic]
It's quite remarkable how poor many sex toy sites are at providing factual details about their offerings.
Where dildos are concerned, you would expect a site to state name of manufacturer, manufacturer's name and catalog # for the item, diameter, length, circumference, weight, material, presence of phthalates or not, country of manufacture, features, available colors, price, and shipping cost to assorted destinations across the face of the globe. Plus clear photographs -- there's one kink shop in Germany that favors somberly butch black-background photographs, just what you don't want when depicting black vinyl doodads.
Paris because I bet that girl doesn't use vinyl prosthetics.
"I once tried to trace any postal address or phone number for any Ebay business... Nothing in Europe... This outfit (via PayPal) operates a financial service ... and they still don't provide contract addresses."
From time to time I've wanted to point out to Ebay technical shortcomings of their site, the usual crap of assuming that everyone has the latest and greatest PC running the latest and greatest version of Windows via a l&g monitor the size of a Times Square billboard, with all plug-ins present and fully enabled.
Or more elementary mistakes like web pages that don't reflow properly when you tell your browser to enlarge all fonts. Or webpages that, knowing full well I'm in Canada, assume I'm in the US when they display prices.
Presumably, they'd *like* to hear about these matters.
But, no, evidently they don't. I spent a long time wandering through the thickets of Ebay webpages and never could find a simple email address to which such problems could be reported. Nor an online form for the same purpose.
I'm reminded of the amusing photograph of a cat with small candy boxes over its ears, captioned "Can't hear you...can't hear you..." ("Bad Cats" from Workman Publishing)
It seems to me that Ebay has fallen into the trap that Microsoft pioneered so splendidly, assuming that they know what the customer wants (needs?) without bothering to ask. [At this point readers can insert the anti-MS rant of their choice.]
It faintly amuses me to visualize these huge dinosaurian corporations writhing in pain after falling on the sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom of the pitfall. But, alas, so far no such thing has eventuated.
Coat'n'hat because I've rambled and the moderator is going to get on my case if I don't clean up my act Real Soon Now.
. . . and therefore no self-respecting party of the people would dream of supporting it. The revolution takes a step further toward completion by cutting another lifeline feeding oxygen to the so-called intellectual community. Once the boffins are wholly unemployed, we can round them up on charges of economic parasitism and send them off for thought reform. All hail the Dear Maximum Leader!
As a bonus to this rantlet, a reminder that education is not the same as training. You can train monkeys, but you can't educate them. Keep this meme in your pocket ready for the next discussion of schools, schooling, IT training, and similar topics.
Yes, I have a license allowing me to use the word "meme".
"How is it that the government can't run their own IT consultancy?"
Some possibilities:
1. Because the mantra "run government in a businesslike way" has been misunderstood as "run government like a business". Big diff.
2. Because IT workers are clearly intellectually elitist economic parasites and we don't want those on the public payroll.
3. Because, following rewording of the relevant mantra, a touching faith has arisen that the public sector is incapable of doing anything right, whereas the private sector can walk on water.
4. Because politicians, esp. the Bolshevists of The Party of The People, are addicted to micromanagement.
5. Because public sector managers are far too often appointed/promoted for reasons of their political leanings or sheer PCness.
6. Because politicians are suckers who believe salesmen's promises.
7. Because you can train monkeys to write software, so why pay more than a few bananas a day?
Take your pick, one or all or any combination (linear or nonlinear) thereof.
Icon because most of these reasons have very little to do with IT.
A good friend is at that stage in life where he needs Viagra or Cialis to function properly. He has found that off-brand Viagra from India is 1/7 the cost of the brand name stuff from the local pharmacy, but works just as well. As a result, his sex life is truly festive far more often than if he depended on the expensive stuff. From India, it's cheap enough to use whenever the urge strikes; bought locally, it isn't.
The situation is much like that troubling the entertainment industries: their products are so overpriced that no one sheds a tear when they are pirated.
Footnotes:
1. While there's a lot of fake, non-functional Viagra (and Cialis) on the web, there are also good versions that work as advertised.
2. The Indian courts have held that Pfizer's patent on Viagra is not valid in India, thus pharmaceutical companies there are free to make it, though trademark laws prevent them calling it "Viagra".
"All you need is a ballot paper with a list of candidates' names on the left and a corresponding box on the right. You put a cross in the box of the guy you want to vote for."
It's been pointed out by more knowledgable people than me, but it's worth repeating that American elections are often so complex that paper ballots are impractical. A full blown November election may involve 1. President of the US, 2. US Senator, 3. US Representative, 4. state governor, 5. & 6. state-level equivalents to senator and representative, 7-N1. dog catcher, tax assessor, judges, and a host of other lesser elective offices, N1+1-N2. assorted initiatives, referenda, and recall ballots. Plus God knows what else.
Contrast this with the usual election here in Canada: you have a list of candidates for Parliament *or* the provincial legislature *or* the municipal council, and you vote for exactly one candidate. Dead easy to count by hand from paper ballots.
Mechanical voting machines use mature technology and don't seem to have any issues: the adoption of electronic voting seems to be impelled by an intuitive sense that mechanical is just too retro for words. Thus one of the most important functions of a democracy is subordinated to fashion sense.
Paris, in view of her fashion sense.
MS can't compete on Google's turf for one very simple reason: MS software is dependent on hardware stability (cue Vista tilt bits), whereas Google accepts hardware flakiness as a given and lives with it. This is a profound difference with consequences that permeate their respective systems.
Hence, therefore, and ergo, MiYahoo will never be able to achieve the same economies that (in part) fuel Google's success.
Or so it seems to me, reading the entrails.
"their MCSE degree"
An MCSE is not a degree, nor are its holders engineers -- at least not in countries where "engineer" is a professional designation e.g. Canada, where "P.Eng" after your name really means something.
Footnote: I'm not sure what the final outcome was, but when MS started touting MCSE in Canada as "Microsoft Certified Software Engineer", the P.Eng.s had a thing or two to say about this misuse of a jealously protected professional designation.
Lots of comments showing that simple Mendelian genetics is well understood by the Register's readers.
However, simple Mendelian genetics is only a first approximation to "how genetic inheritance works." It doesn't explain anomalies like eyes of different colors, an eye with a two-color iris, etc. Understanding these oddities (or analogous ones) won a Nobel Prize for Barbara McClintock, and since her important work with multi-colored corn (maize) decades ago, all sorts of complications and wrinkles have been sorted out.
Inheritance can be, and often is, a great deal more complex than the simple Mendelian model implies though simple Mendelian genetics is the starting point for understanding.
"ActiveX also presents an unacceptably high security risk to any user whose browser supports ActiveX technology. It is ridiculously easy to penetrate and damage a computer running a browser that allows ActiveX applets to be executed. For this reason, we cannot recommend ActiveX as a viable applet implementation technology and we go so far as to recommend that users disable ActiveX capability within their browser -- specifically Internet Explorer."
p. 395, in "HTML, The Definitive Guide" by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy. 2nd edition, May 1997 (O'Reilly, Sebastopol)
" . . . IFPI has slammed The Pirate Bay, saying that it was not motivated by "idealism" and a love of music but was only interested in making bundles of cash."
Oh, dear, would someone please tell El Reg's editors NOT to publish this kind of troll bait again? I just had to change my diaper, having bepissed myself laughing.
Most Canadians using Amazon don't waste time at amazon.ca because the selection is so poor and the prices so much higher. We instinctively turn to amazon.com in the US, whereupon we get bitten by an exceptionally stupid example of mal-design.
When you log on to amazon.com, it knows what country you are in. Yet the amazon system is happy to let you fill up your shopping cart with goods they will not ship outside the US. (Only if the listing includes "international shipping available" will they ship ex-US.)
When you then go to check out, you get the Highly Illuminating error screen "there is something wrong with your order." I kid you not.
Given such overt stupidity, you can't help but wonder what hidden stupidities infest the Amazon system . . .
Ebay has analogous stupidities involving knowing what country you are in but not acting on the information. AFAICT, all these big e-commerce sites are like this, and the sooner they get ousted by an outfit in, say, China, the better.
foo_bar_baz: "Bill Gates because he's a prime example of an "amoral" capitalist engineer."
Amoral, yes. Capitalist, maybe. (Quite possibly a fascist.) Engineer, no.
Gates dropped out of Harvard without getting a degree, not in sociology, not in fine arts, not in law, and definitely not in engineering. Just what he had studied before he dropped out I dunno.
What is Gates, really? An amoral capitalist/fascist marketing wonk. A con man, in other words, like every other marketing wonk on the planet.
Exemplary reminder that the initial demonstration of Windows v.1 was a Potemkin village: there was no Windows behind the windows, just a canned display of predetermined graphics. Or so the story goes.
Gates: a con man then, a con man now.
Used to be that the best way of ensuring a book was a best seller in the US was to get it banned in Boston.
Just another twist on the old adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity."
Paris, because she knows this and exploits it to the max. Clever girl, pretending to be stupid...
A. It's a parody. No one in their right mind (unless they've been immured in a nunnery for fifty years) thinks that the model is anything other than a adult.
B. As a parody, it's supposed to be funny and it is, including the snark it flips at the contemporary shibboleth "pedophilia". Satire, if you prefer. Sounds to me like 13 people plus the ASA forgot to engage their senses of humor -- if they have any.
C. For some odd reason, one suspects that those offended are staunch feminists who find offense in anything that treats women as sexual beings. Antidote: Boccaccio's Decameron. Penguin Classics has a good edition in English.
D. I'm waiting for Ryanair to further fluster the anti-sex crowd by issuing an ad on the theme "if there's grass on the playing field, play ball!" If you don't get that, I will not explain it.
Some other sillinesses of the flesh:
* An American city that demands, if you go barebutt in public, that your asscrack be covered by a strip of <something> at least an inch wide. Aimed at the gay boys who like to run around in leather chaps and a jockstrap.
* Where the preceding leaves the ladies who wear thongs in public, I dunno.
* Fundamentalists, Mor(m)ons, etc who think that any display of flesh is obcene and indecent. Such folks merely demonstrate that they are obsessed with sex (or, to use older idiom, have dirty minds they need to get out of the gutter). It is amusing to point out that man was made in God's own image: is God himself therefore obscene or indecent?
* Is it a sexual organ or not, for various values of "it"? I am reminded of a Canadian court case in the early 1980s. A gay newspaper, The Body Politic, had published an article "White Jockstraps Only", about the New York fisting scene and was had up on obscenity charges. One of their defenses was that neither the hand nor the anus was a sexual organ and therefore the article could not be obscene within the meaning of the law.
Many more where these came from!
Paris, as an icon of the flesh.
I'm surprised to read someone proposing to store longitude/latitude data as unsigned numbers and cute little N-S-E-W codes.
Far simpler to use signed numbers following the convention that north and east are positive, south and west are negative -- a well-established convention, btw.
Google Maps accepts such arguments, in fact. Try entering 25.345,97.4 and see where you end up. In fact, by using successive approximations of increasing precision it's possible to use Google maps to pinpoint a location within a few feet. "Where do you live?" "At 48.7732, -143.4775."
"Don't bleat Apple are evil - they are just in business to make money."
Or, as Milton Friedman put it, to maximize shareholder value, the consequences be damned. This idea that making money excuses or justifies any kind of behavior has to be stamped out.
It's time to insist that corporations' first responsibility be to society as a whole, in the broadest possible sense, secondarily to their customers and employees, and only third to their shareholders. IOW, Apple would have to be ethical and honest, even if doing so cramps Steve Jobs' style and reduces his profits. View the loss as the cost of benefiting from the laws that create the legal fiction "corporation."
Statistics Canada phoned with questions about my census return. I asked them to provide me with a telephone number listed in the phone book under "Statistics Canada" that I could call to verify the credentials of the caller. (They used to be careful about this but evidently no longer.)
He couldn't. He offered one number but it wasn't in the phone book. Too bad.
I refused to answer on the grounds that he had not properly identified himself, that I believed he was a phisher, and that was that.
Glenn Gilbert: "It was Microsoft who decided to fall asleep for half a decade and stop developing IE -- or fixing any bugs for that matter. The world didn't stop just for them and things have moved on without them. Just get used to it Microsoft; adopt the standards and stop bloody whinging. If your Trident rendering engine's not up to it, is that really the fault of anyone but Microsoft?"
Anonymous coward: "Sorry to belittle Firefox (it *is* my main browser btw) but I imagine Microsoft have a hell of a lot more money/manpower/etc dedicated to building a browser. Why can't they just do the job properly?"
I wonder if the reason MS abandoned IE for so long was that, once they'd bashed in Netscape's head, working on IE didn't generate any ROI. In fact, given the amount of effort they'd put into IE by then, it probably had a big debit balance on MS's internal accounts.
The same may very well be true today: MS doesn't see any real payback from upgrading IE hence are reluctant to do the job right. Costs too much money.
Andrew: "Why don't the web standards project just ask Microsoft to write the standard?"
Because MS don't know how to write a standard. Redmond has a long-established reputation for not documenting their software even for internal purposes, going back to DOS days. A lot of MS's software troubles are traceable to the fact that all they have is source code that no one understands, the original author having long since left for greener pastures.
The repetitive data losses by UK guvmint is like an insane G&S operetta. At the top you have a bunch of utterly clueless pols who parrot whatever is the fashionable tagline of the minute, and who appear to occupy positions of authority because it's PC to put them there, not because they know what the hell the job entails.
At the bottom, you have underpaid, demoralized grunts -- as someone said in a comment on another story, "pay peanuts, get <something>".
In the middle you have all those lovely senior managers hired in from the business sector; in my opinion, that's where the real rot starts.
The business world has managed to widely propagate the meme "business is everything, and someone successful in business is blessed by God." 'Tain't so. Success in the business world is generally due to luck and possession of a certain low animal cunning and in no way implies intelligence or skill.
That meme has a variant: "run the public sector like a business." What nonsense! The public sector is not a business: it's "customers" are captive, and it has no competition, unless it's false competition fostered by the idiots described earlier. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the original of this tagline/meme was "run the public sector in a business-like way", which is a horse of an entirely different color.
What was asked for was often nothing more than keeping proper accounts for the individual departments so you could get some sense where the money was coming from and where it was going. But this need was often dealt with by setting up Crown corporations (quangos in UK-speak), contracting out, and assorted other mistaken actions.
What's to be done? Nothing. If you don't like it, emigrate. The stranglehold that business has on life is irrevocable. Me, I'm going to hang out in my bomb shelter the rest of the day.
I am reminded of a report in Computer World many years about detecting benefit fraud. The states of Ohio & Pennsylvania have a common boundary, and decided to data match their welfare recipient lists in the adjacent counties to catch double-dippers living close to the line.
The published an article in which the IT director in one state gushed away about this wonderful program that had cost $1,000,000 to implement -- and, it turned out, not unearthed a single cheat.
Someone pointed out in a followup letter (remember those? something like comments on El Reg) that the cost benefit ratio was pretty bad; in fact, it was infinite.
The situation under discussion has an eerie resemblance to that ancient report. Nothing ever changes.
"MS ditched the Win3.x/95/98/98SE/ME codebase after ME -"
Given bugs in Vista that turn out to have also infested Win3.1, it's clear MS by no means ditched the *entire* codebase. My guess is that they reused a great deal of it and that Vista's problems are largely due to Vista reusing a hodge-podge of undocumented code written by people who've long since left MS.
That's also a likely reason MS has resisted documenting their network stuff for the EU: they don't have any documentation other than the source code itself, which no one in Redmond fully understands.
We're doomed, doomed I tell you. Given the general level of idiocy of the population (*any* population), no matter what warnings you sound or safeguards you set up, the idiots *will* fall for vishing calls, just as today they fall for phishing emails.
Trying to stop this inevitable stupidity is akin to King Canute telling the tide to turn back. (At least Canute knew he had no such power.)
Perhaps the law should be changed so chickens come home to roost: if you reveal your banking information to a third party, the resultant losses are strictly your business. Let the banks off the hook. There'll be a great weeping and wailing and gnashing of the teeth by the bleeding hearts, but good Lord! if your bank sends you a printed warning "DO NOT DO THIS" and you ignore it, surely you have to take some personal responsibility, no?
In fact, we might even encourage the 419 scammers: the more folks they take for a ride, the sooner word will get around that responding to such nonsense is Not A Good Idea.
I want to bear Paris's babies, but will settle for "Outlook not so good" as, indeed, the outlook is not good today.
My (former) employer had a large IT department. Unfortunately, setting development priorities was a giant political exercise where the winner was the manager with the most clout. (We had a regionalized structure with 20+ semi-autonomous sub offices. The heads of these offices were in constant competition with one another to climb up the ladder into central management. Backstabbing was perpetual and he who got the largest proportion of his pet ideas implemented won.)
The net result was a system that often did not deliver what the grunts at the working level really wanted.
Furthermore, there was no ongoing process to prune away unnecessary complications, hence the entire system gradually became extremely involuted, convoluted, over-elaborated, and fine grained. After some 25 years of adding innumerable bells and whistles, the overall system had become so unwieldy that it had to be replaced by a wholly new system written from scratch.
Moral: involvement of an IT department is no guarantee that those at the working level will get the systems they need.
As for folk software, one insidious tendency is that supposed one-off subsystems (typically, complex analytical reports) cobbled together from bits and pieces, like Frankenstein's monster, show a tendency to come to life. Being jury rigged, they are of course wholly unsuitable for production use and upgrading them becomes a major issue.
Moral: When someone says "oh, we only need it this once", don't believe them. They'll be back next year saying "where is that annual analysis you did for us last year?"
Anonymous Coward: "And I thought Microsoft aimed their products at enterprises."
They may say they do, but the design of MS products is clearly aimed at the lowest common denominator -- Joe Six-pack and his family of chicken boner trailer trash.
By training, I'm neither a logician nor a philosopher, but this doesn't stop me from having a sneaking intuition that systems designed for the feckless masses are not serviceable for serious use by enterprises.
Case in point: the design philosophy that if the user makes a mistake, the software will guess what he *meant* to do. Wonder how many financial spreadsheets there are that incorporate the results of such goofiness? Lord knows it's hard enough to get a complex spreadsheet right without the software inserting guesswork into it!
Rantlet: it wouldn't be so bad if MS actually understood the uses to which their products are put, but holy moly, sometimes you get the impression that MS went and read a "For Dummies" book and now they is [sic] experts in this or that specialized field of knowledge.
Case in point: Windows machines controlling realtime medical equipment that decide to call home and install an update at an inopportune moment. (Is this fact, or is it an urban legend?)
Dear Bill: You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Love,
Me.
[torn between <heart> and <PH>, so settled on <geek>]
Chris Miller: "...many OS that include fundamental security constraints - e.g. segregating code from data and preventing changes to executable code in memory - but this produces severe issues, for a start it's difficult to get applications written in C (and its derivatives) to run in such an environment."
I've been wondering about that! When I read, over and over and over again, about yet another security hole based on a buffer overflow, I wonder why anybody will put up with a programming environment that even allows this to happen.
Or, to put it another way, if MS can burn off processor cycles en- and decrypting HD video repeatedly, while checking drivers 30 times a second, there's enough processor power to have enforced array bounds checking operating at all times. If you leave it to the programmers, they *will* forget to do it.
Time for some bold soul to dump C and devise a progamming environment that has some built-in safety.
Hey, I resent that. I'm hardly a newbie, yet the first time a popup along these lines appeared on my archaic Win98 machine running Netscape 7.2, I had to stop and think before figuring out what was going on.
It was the use of what I suppose was an XP theme that was the clue, but even me with my marvelous brain had to pay attention. Cut the real doofuses and noobs some slack, okay?
[IIRC, it was one of those "your computer is infested with malware, quick, download our malware so you have a complete set to tell your grandchildren about" scams a few years ago.]
"Why did Microsoft have to make a way (turned on by default, no less) to automatically run a program upon insertion of a disc/device?"
They didn't "have to"; they chose to for reasons that seem pretty obvious: either MS wants to simplify Windows so any idiot can use it, or MS thinks the users ~are~ idiots.
Two expressions of this attitude or design goal, whichever it is, are (a) guessing what the user intended when he makes a mistake and (b) doing favors for the user he didn't ask for. The dividing line between these categories is not sharp.
[An alternative analysis points at MS's arrogance,their patronizing attitude toward customers, and their "wasn't invented here" attitude toward lessons other people learned the hard way. Maybe it all amounts to the same thing.]
The minute you start trying to guess what the user intended, you are guaranteed to make mistakes. And those unasked-for favors will turn out to be mistakes of their own some of the time. Artificial intelligence is not yet a sufficiently advanced field to make either approach practicable.
Chris C again: " Any idiot can tell you that automatically running unknown (and hence untrusted) code upon insertion of a disc/device is a stupid idea and is bound to cause problems."
You're right, and this just demonstrates how flawed MS's p.o.v. is.
I conjecture that it's impossible to implement an idiot-proof system on a general purpose, programmable platform, but I'm not enough of a logician to be able to prove this.
A corollary to all this palaver of mine is that Windows, being designed for in-home use by idiots, is de facto not appropriate for serious applications.
PH as an example of "idiot" -- only seemingly, of course. That girl is smarter than she's given credit for.
"Joke: Assembler is the only true language! All hail assembly!"
I think you may be confusing symbolic machine language with assembler language.
Certainly the IBM System 360 Assembler (and it's presumable Nth generation descendants) was a devil of a lot more complicated than mere machine language. On the one hand, you had to worry about making sure the hardware environment was suitable (all those lovely base registers -- anybody else remember those?) and on the other hand you had a macro facility that was an invention of Satan himself.
[Let me annoy the moderator by discoursing at some greater length on the topic, how to teach programming.]
It seems to me that it's a mistake to think that teaching any one language is "teaching programming." All that does is churn out graduates with a single skill and very little understanding, especially if the one-and-only language is a very high level one. There's no particular virtue in suffering, but exposure to the hardware guts of a computer and to a selection of languages of varying levels of abstraction is really The Thing To Do. (If I use caps like that, can I use the Man from Mars icon?)
The point of doing so is to teach not gruesome details of syntax but rather, and much more importantly, underlying principles. The successful student would be able to relate the rather simple structure of classical procedural languages (Algol, Fortran, Cobol) to all sorts of wild and wooly derivatives: OO programming environments, Lisp, Ada, Python, Java, you name it.
With the right selection of languages taught, the student is then able to get his head around whatever turns up next a lot faster than the poor doofus who thought learning one language was "learning programming."
I've been out of touch with the field for so long I can't begin to even speculate what selection of progamming languages would be optimal for teaching, but I think readers will understand my point.
[Hey, what happened to the Man From Mars icon???? Guess PH will have to do in lieu.]
The first widely publicized mass theft of CC information was at CD Universe in 1997. No lesson was learned: to this day, many sites retain your CC info: number, billing address, etc. The reason, as far as I can tell, is as a *convenience* to the customer, saving them the onerous chore of re-entering that information when they make their next purchase.
The only site I've run across that offers CC data retention as an option is Alibris. (Or maybe it's ABEBooks; one of the two at any rate.)
The rest seem to be captive to the Microsoft-meme "hold still, we're going to do you a favor you didn't ask for." [This meme is at the root of a lot of the stupidities in MS Windows.]
Isn't it time for Visa, Mastercard and their ilk to flatly forbid merchants to retain this information, no exceptions allowed? If merchants have to retain *something* in case a transaction must be reversed, they can put the CC number through a one-way hash function and use that to validate it when re-input.
"Sears only warned users of the privacy implications of the software on the tenth screen of a 54-screen license agreement"
Reminds me of signing up for ADSL from my telephony provider and having the install CD present a very long license agreement in very small type in a very small scrollable window. I took one look, clicked "decline" and set up my connection manually.
Doing so had the added advantage of not installing whatever software Telus thought i needed; I can make that decision without their help, thankyouverymuch.
What the world needs are legal decisions that deliberately obfuscatory licenses and agreements such as these are not legally binding. If it won't fit on one browser page in 12-pt type, it should de facto be invalid. Paper agreements such as the infamous MS shrinkwrap license should be required to meet similar requirements to be binding.
Canucks still pay a tax on CD blanks (also DVD blanks, I believe). It's easy to circumvent by buying from the US, a tactic which also offers substantially lower prices anyway.
The galling thing is the assumption that *all* these blanks are used for storing downloaded copyright music, that everyone with a PC and an internet connection is using it mainly for this purpose. Such statistics as I have seen suggest a small minority of internetters download huge amounts of p2p music (most of which they never listen to!), some download modest amounts, and a very large proportion download no music at all.
One's guilt as a downloader is assumed, in other words. The possibility that blanks are used to store data is blithely ignored.
"If there is to be a new generation of nuclear power stations who will actually build and work on them? With the recent cuts to physics funding, including nuclear physics and related fields such as particle and astrophysics, there's likely to be a grave shortage of the experts needed for nuclear power."
The debate pro and con nuclear power is interesting but D L Clements has put his finger on a much deeper issue: society's devaluation of technical and scientific education, expertise, experience, and plain ol' talent. Can't have that nasty intellectual elitism, you know!
The prevailing attitude seems to be that a shipload of copies of "Physics for Dummies" will neatly fill the gap overnight.
OTOH I think the physics of nuclear power generation is actually very well understood; it's the engineers that design nuclear plants who will be in short supply. You may cue "Nuclear Power Plant Design for Dummies" as the Brownite cure.
In fact, it may be fair to say that there's always been a shortage of competent nuclear power plant designers. Such projects have repeatedly experienced enormous cost overruns as well as amazing operational malfunctions -- hardly likely to inspire confidence in the designers. Cue Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the never-completed and now demolished Trojan plant in Washington state as examples.
Charlie Miller's analogy of the three little pigs is amusing but irrelevant. One has to wonder about the motivation for uttering such nonsense. Cui bono?
That said, it's an interesting question whether "security through diversity" is real or illusory. It's a good meme, but questionably anything more. Has any serious researcher investigated the matter? Likely more a matter for the logicians and philosophers to look into rather than the technical wonks.
ISTM that unless networks are designedly resilient in the face of single-element failures, possibly widespread, platform diversity is a red herring. Example: the inherent design of the internet is supposed to be highly resilient, but all too often we read of major outages traced to the malfunction of a single router or something equally silly.
The Minneapolis freeway bridge that fell down may be analogous, having been designed with no structural redundancy. One bolt rotted thanks to pigeon poop and road salt and bingo! down the whole thing came. Maybe.
A. Those 10 password holders? They haven't asked because HMRC has lost the list of their names, and no longer knows who they are.
B. Or: It wasn't a password, it was a 3-digit number to activate a keypad controlled lock. And someone simply tried one combination after another. Remember, Richard Feynman was able to unlock "secure" safes at Los Alamos for amusement.
"...you don't seem to understand the concept of a STANDARD and the difficulty and amount of work that goes into developing e.g. an advanced word processor"
But most office drones do NOT need an advanced word processor. Very simple word processors work just fine for the vast majority of documents generated.
On reflection, it is worth commenting that all the effort MS has put into version after version of Wurd is, as far as the customer is concerned, wasted effort because they have made no effort to maintain a stable file format. This is no accident, being a strategy devised by low-born marketing wonks to lock customers in and force upgrades.
In the long run, it's going to be format stability that counts, esp. in government where some programs last well over a century.
War pension programs are a notorious example of such longevity because young widows of aged veterans often inherit pension rights. A few veterans will receive pensions for upwards of 80 years (15 y.o. during war, death at aet. 95, say). Those who marry women 50 years younger (say) can cause the pension scheme to last considerably longer than a century, as indeed happened with both the Crimean War and the War Between the States.
It will be amusing to see so-called paperless offices trying to decipher electronic documents generated by programs that disappeared a century earlier. The steady growth in document file complexity merely aggravates a long-standing problem.
[Paris because she represents the eternal feminine.]
A late comment but perhaps of interest: I went into a TJX store today, a "Winners/Homesense" place. To my delight they had a stock of excellent Costa Rican Terrazu coffee. When I went to pay, however, the bastards tried to nail me for both provincial and federal sales taxes. (Geographic reference: British Columbia, in Canada)
Coffee beans are subject to neither of these taxes. It took 5–10 minutes for the cashier to figure out the rather elaborate sequence of keystrokes necessary to override what the TJX computer thought the tax status of these goods was.
I don't understand why this was a problem, since every store in BC has to cope with the fact that some goods are not taxed at all, some get only provincial sales tax, some only federal, and some both. (Except food items, most items fall into the last category.) What I smell is an underhanded way to collect taxes that may never be remitted to the relevant government. But it may be, like their credit card data fiasco, simple incompetence.
Another data point re corporate IT incompetence.
Another online IT cockup in Ottawa:
Canada conducted its regular quinquennial (or decennial) census a couple of years ago. For the first time, they set up a site for (optional) online submission of your responses to the census questionnaire.
I went to the website and was confronted with a message "You must have Java version <something or other> enabled", the version being very precisely defined. In the words of the profit, fuck that. I keep Java turned off, that particular version of Java may not even be available for my preferred combnation of browser & OS, and I don't install new software unless there's a compelling reason to do so.
Lowering Statistics Canada's census processing costs is not a compelling reason. I sent in the paper form instead.
One presumes Statistics Canada used Java to implement detailed client-side data validation instead of using Javascript or server-side validation, an implementation strategy of dubious merit. It's always harder to make sure client-side stuff works correctly in all cases, being highly dependent on the exact combination of browser, OS, and settings.
You have to wonder how many other potential users of their online systerm joined me in walking away from the online submission site, in the face of its demand for a specific Java version? Considering that Joe & Jane Sixpack probably don't even know what Java is, much less how to upgrade it, I suspect that the participation rate was a lot lower than they hoped for and the costs of developing the online site were not recovered.
Sometimes I think the Ottawa winter climate congeals the ability to think clearly...
"any cuts would send all the wrong signals."
How about "would demonstrate for the Nth time that Those In Charge haven't got a clue."
This business of "sending signals" (or "sending a message") is traceable to American Southern culture, which teaches that you can never say anything negative about or to anyone, hence when they fuck up, you "send them a message" via actions instead of speaking in plain English.
Given the advent of hyperPC, this attitude has become very widespread: you can't offend anybody at any time for any reason, truth and justice notwithstanding.
The most egregious example I personally know of was a woman who wasn't satisfied with repair work on her car. She drove back and forth in front of the mechanic's establishment "to send him the message" that she wasn't satisfied. Gee, honey, what's wrong with picking up the telephone and saying "This is Jane Doe speaking. I'm not satisfied with the work you did on my car and want it re-done right"???
But plentiful other examples are easy to spot. When George Bush says "we are doing X to send a message to Y," for any of a variety of values of X and Y, one has to wonder why he doesn't just have the State Department draft a diplomatic note.
The difficulty with "sending a message" via actions instead of words is that the semiotic significance may be overlooked or misconstrued. Perhaps cutting 400 jobs from SOCA is really sending the message "we think you are useless twits and are justifiably dumping you." Or maybe it's saying "we want British business to get fucked by hackers, teach 'em a lesson for not fully supporting the NuLabour agenda." Who knows? (For that matter, who cares?)
Moral (and to bring in the IT angle), if you have a problem, put it in writing and be plain about it, even if you end up in hot water for not being fully PC. As an example, I'm sure that when our Paris was nailed for driving sans license, the coppers put it in writing. (See how deftly I dragged in the Paris angle?)
What I smell is that NuLabour's love of micromanaging government functions at the lowest level has eroded (even eradicated) civil servants' ability and desire to act autonomously and with gumption. Treat underlings like brainless robots and guess what? They act like brainless robots, complete with programming bugs. [Programming bugs = ignoring written protocols]
This observation segues off into a rant about the folly of passing endless laws and regulations against politicially unacceptable behavior, followed by a further rant pinning the blame for the dreadful state of the NHS on micromanagement by Cabinet ministers. However, I'll spare El Reg's readership and let them word their own rants on these points. Have fun, amigos!
"the executive director of the agency apologized for the problem"
<yawn>
Another public-titty-sucker who isn't willing to take responsibility. Betcha she's quick to take credit for Good Things that happen under her direction, however.
Is anyone else getting tired of these empty apologies? It's time for managers, govt ministers, etc to start admittng responsibility and do the right thing: fall on their swords.
One wonders if the governing body of the Marin transport agency will dock the executive director significant pay and perks for having done the job poorly. Probably not. It's time to start saying "no excuse, security is a known issue and under your direction we had an insecure system."
One thing I wonder about all these police-state database proposals: who is proposing them, and doing it so well that Brown et cie stick to demonstrably flawed proposals like glue, through thick and thin?
It's reminiscent of the problems we have here in Canada with Customs: they are always on the warpath against gay porn (porn, I might add, that is perfectly legal to originate and to possess in Canada - it's only in passing through Customs that there's censorship). It's as though some unelected eminence grise in Ottawa or Toronto has so much power that his overt homophobia must be catered to.
So who's the dick who wants a British police state so badly, and where does he get his power from? Maybe it's time to name and shame.
Anonymous Coward wrote: "[A sickline] is a note from the doctor to say why you were unwell and to prove that the time off was genuine. Sicklines can be "X has Y and needs Z time off" or words to that effect."
In all my years working, whenever my doctor wrote a medical certification to my employer, he refrained from specifying "Y" on the grounds of confidentiality of medical records and the privileged nature of the doctor-patient relationship.
The beancounters were, of course, hostile to this, but had to swallow it as "the rules" failed to specify the precise content of a medical certificate.
What I found most interesting was the beancounters' veiled implication "you're just in cahoots with your doctor to get some extra vacation time'. This blithely ignored that MDs (at least here in Canada) are members of professional colleges and required to be honest.
It also revealed that the beancounters, in the classical manner of a thief assuming everyone else is a thief, were themselves devoid of honesty and ethics.
