Posts by nijam 2000 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2011
> Conveniently missing were mentions of all the cases where companies were nationalised because the private sector failed
I was always told that the rail system was bankrupted by the Government not paying enough (or anything in some cases) for rail transport during WWII. If true, that would not be a failure of the private sector, obviously.
> The problem is that he reached for the mobile vision with which he was most familiar: Microsoft's
In other words he was a Microsoft mole after all, albeit implicitly rather than overtly.
I've worked in organsisations which have taken on management from outside, and it's always that same story.... you intend to get new ideas, but all to often end up with another organisation's discards. It's not even surprising.
> Are you saying the music is a truly periodic signal, or that it is sampled in time from minus infinity to plus infinity or something similar? If not, how do you apply the theorem to get *perfect* reconstruction for finite non-periodic signals?
As I recollect, the periodicity only gives uniqueness of decomposition. That uniqueness may perhaps have some practical benefit, but any decomposition would still be correctly re-composed. As for the infinite duration issue, you can easily show that you get the same results (at least so far as human hearing is concerned) as by feeding an arbitrary duration of silence into the sampling process before and after the recording.
So actually it isn't bullshit in practice.
> And aren't there any government rules on retention of official documents ? Surely those responsible for instructing for this to happen should be charged for breaking those rules ?
Yes, but as an earlier commentard observed, email is not an appropriate medium for official (or any other important) documents, for one thing it's almost devoid of security. If the documents are official they should be elsewhere, not in email archives.
> So maybe the lesson is that those with transferable skills will be OK and those without are screwed?
Surely you mean "replaceable" rather than "transferable", or have you missed the the author's point completely? The rise of the motor car didn't mean that farriers started fitting horseshoes to cars (or transferring their skills to apprentice farriers, for that matter), it meant that most farriers had to replace their skill-set with different skills.
> I noticed when I visited the USA that many people seemed happy with a forecast of "there's a 30% chance of snow" whereas the standard British response to this on a TV weather forecast seems to be "well, will it or won't it?" so I think they may have a cultural issue on their hands as well.
In your example, the USA version is essentially useless. In information-theoretic terms they may as well have said nothing at all, as far as the "person in the street" is concerned.
> The Road Fund Licence ... was abolished in 1936!
Well, no it wasn't, only the name (more specifically, the goverment's name for it) changed; everything else stayed exactly the same - the price, the little disc you got to stick the windscreen, the way you bought it, ...
So it wasn't actually changed in any meaningful way. Obviously. And that's why people keep calling it by the original name.
> ... mobile apps that are poor cousins of its own Exchange and Outlook software.
How could *anything* at all be considered a "poor cousin" of those abominations?
> Apps that, in some cases, don’t natively work with Microsoft’s server software.
No, it's Microsoft's server software that doesn't work natively with them.
Don't be silly! The Road Fund Licence (which the government have repeatedly tried renaming, to support their pretence that it was not introduced just to fund roads) will stay with us. Your per km/mile charging will be added on top of that, to cover the loss of the exorbitant excise duty on road vehicle fuel, VAT on road vehicle fuel, and (of course) VAT on the excise duty on road vehicle fuel. So your figures are probably about 10% of what the real charges will be.
> Because you don't. Locally maybe, but on a national level the local-representative election system
> the UK uses will heavily skew the seat distribution on even minor differences in voting totals.
> Because the local winner takes all, and only needs a marginal victory to take that victory, the
> system ensures that a "majority" national government representation will always be an actual
> minority by votes.
That is true of PR to exactly the same extent as it is true for FPTP.
How so? Because, at the end of it all, there is only a single government, and only a minority of voters voted for it* (as opposed to any other potential goverment). PR just gives a different kind of minority goverment and - no surprise - is supported mainly by parties who believe they'd do better than they do under FPTP.
* Unless you live in a single-party state, then all the votes cast will be for the governmment.
> An audit is about giving a "true and fair view" of the financial statements ...
Not strictly correct, it's about *confirming* that the accounts (which may be produced by the company itself or by external accountants, who in turn may be the same accountants that do the audit) give that "true and fair view".
A significant part of that confirmation lies in checking (at least some of) the information provided by thoise being audited.
> (In a former life I was a Chartered Accountant.....)
Me too.
> ... it is illegal to use your mobile phone in a petrol station for fears of it causing an explosion ...
There was never evidence of an explosion risk. There *was* evidence that mobile phones interfered with the pump metering/monitoring systems, so you could get more fuel than the cash register realised. I.e. another fake safety concern wheeled out to achieve something unrelated to safety, just like this latest proposal.
A little oblique to this article, but...
It would be interesting to speculate what would happen if the Data Protection Act went a little further - as you might logically consider it should, in fact - and specified that personal data is irrevocably the property of the person (i.e. the data subject), and consequently organisations (all of them*, not just Google, Amazon, or whoever else the good commentards deem inappropriate this week) need to licence it to use it.
That licence could be for a fixed period, say a year, after which it would have to be renewed, so that the data owner/subject could validate it as accurate, relevant, and so on (as already specified in the DPA). All at the licensee's expense, not the data owner/subject's, of course.
Just a thought.
* EU, HMRC, GCHQ, all spring readily to mind, I'm sure you can all add to the list. No need for any of those pesky exceptions for government organisations, either.
> The fact that Google presents you with their shopping results ahead of anyone else's, and often in lieu of anyone else's clearly shows they know what you want to see but chose not to show it.
WTF? Google has *never* shown me their own shopping results. Nor, I'm delighted to say, have comparison sites ever come near the top of my searches. (Comparison sites are usually just a list of sponsored links anyway, they just don't admit it.)
So what are the rest of you doing that makes these things into an issue?
We use Lync at work and it doesn't work fine. Why not? Because it requires you to push your head right up Microsoft's silo, and we have some non-MS kit. The Apple version is poor. The Linux version is non-existent - with a firm promise that it will remain so. The WIndows version works mostly, kind-of (I remember laughing in disbelief as it popped up a message about a missed phone call *whilst I was in the middle of that call*).
I expect (it is likely that) systemd will (eventually) work (more-or-less) as it is intended to, whereas the SysV 'init' files have already evolved to a working state.
The problem with systemd is that there are crucial conceptual defects in its architecture, and the motivation for the project is to fix flaws that I don't believe really affect anybody, and could be fixed equally well with a little thought in the 'init' based system. Systemd flaws start with petty irritations such as the completely unnecessary use of non-text log files (which at least gives evidence that its designers had no interest in Linux or any other Unix-based OS) right through to entangling it in library code that has no apparent relation to process management.
The fact that systemd may eventually handle some boot-up or some hardware component "better" is a weak justification for the misguided design.
> What must be worrying intel agencies is that 'using encryption' will soon be useless criteria ...
This is so naive. Are you saying that honest folk don't use/need encryption for (say) online banking?
Encryption has never been the preserve of criminals (unless you include that fact that it was "security agencies" that were the first major users).
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