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ABTA Travel Convention special report: Website to be overhauled as part of revamp |
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At least 80 ethnic Indians are charged with illegal assembly for taking part in street protests in Malaysia. |
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British Energy has halved the time required to complete some of its basic
training programmes amid an acute shortage of experienced nuclear staff. |
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ANDREW FASTOW’S allegation that the NatWest Three were involved in the
financial deceits which brought down Enron does not mean the men are guilty.
But it does mean that they have a case to answer — a case which is rightly
being tried in the US. <br/>
<br/>
The US has had no particular beef with British businessmen. It seeks out
suspects of white-collar crime whoever they are, wherever they are. Kobi
Alexander, the chief executive of Comverse Technology, was apprehended this
week in Namibia, ending his two-month flight from American law enforcers
seeking to prosecute him for the back-dating of stock options. The “perp
walk” — the US practice of hand-cuffing and frog-marching a
multi-millionaire American executive out of his office and into a waiting
police car in full view of the waiting, tipped-off camera crews — has become
a regular feature of the nightly news in the US. Foreigners who do business
in America know full well that the Land of the Free is not nice to
criminals, nor even criminal suspects. <br/>
<br/>
The public outcry over the extradition of the NatWest Three — Gary Mulgrew,
David Bermingham and Giles Darby — has from the outset felt like a
misplaced, sometimes mendacious venting of national frustration at
Washington. <br/>
<br/>
The fact is that this case has nothing to do with the war in Iraq, with the
presidency of George W. Bush, with Tony Blair’s Atlanticist inclinations.
Even the esteemed British chief executives and chairmen who signed up to the
letter calling for fair trials abroad looked like suckers: their campaign
seemed to put patriotism, even a huffy anti-Americanism, before the due
process of law. <br/>
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Certainly, they had a just complaint: the British Government agreed an
extradition treaty without securing reciprocity from the US. But, for that,
more fool the British Government. It knows a pledge from the Administration
will not necessarily be honoured by Congress, particularly involving the
issue of extradition. <br/>
<br/>
Fastow’s claims against the three British men may be suspect. The quiet chief
financial officer of Enron has made a second career for himself shopping his
old acquaintances. In 2002, he was indicted on 78 counts of fraud,
money-laundering and conspiracy. Thanks to his “co-operation with the
authorities”, he has been sentenced to six years in prison. <br/>
<br/>
Nonetheless, Fastow’s legal deposition describes a “close, personal
relationship” with Mulgrew. Enron collapsed in 2001, undone by an intricate,
ingenious web of financial fraud. Fastow claims that, in his financial
dealings with the men as late as 2000, they “knew what I expected”. The
deposition seems to skewer the argument that the men should be tried in
Britain. They may have to face allegations of defrauding their former
British employers too, but if they played a part in Enron’s downfall, then
they have a case to answer in America as well. There is a principle at
stake, one which underpins global capitalism and one which is as dear to
every Briton as it is to every American: respect for the due process of law. |
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Highlands and Islands Enterprise chiefs reveal a potential reduction of up to 50 staff as a result of reforms. |
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A youth who beat a woman to death had been electronically tagged for a previous offence at the time of the attack. |
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Prudential has said that about 1,750 UK jobs will be transferred to Capita as part of its cost-cutting plans. |
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A programming lesson I keep relearning.
The design of the central data structure of an app determines the quality of the app, in every way.
Any extra thought that goes into this, will pay off in:
1. Maintainability of the code.
2. Size of the code (you'll write less code with a well thought-out central data structure).
3. Simplicity of the user interface (the structure inevitably shows through in the UI).
4. Ability to respond to feature requests.
5. Adapt to new hardware, OS changes, other apps.
6. More "it just works" experiences.
This is why it's sometimes the right thing to start over from scratch. Programmers often want to start over because they look at the code and it looks complicated, and they think they can make it simpler if they start over. They're right, of course, it will be simpler when they start over, because it won't do nearly as much as the mature product does. Once they finish building out the feature set, it may well be just as complicated.
It's a judgement call. I remember looking at the source of Unix kernel for the first time as a grad student in Wisconsin, and being amazed at the simplicity and obviousness of the code. I couldn't believe something so simple actually worked. Your code at its kernel level must have this simplicity. But at the edges, where you're accomdating the minds of users, inevitably it gets a little messy. The key thing to look for is how hard is it to add a completely new feature. It should be easy to do that. If it's not, it's likely because of a poorly organized (and therefore not well-understood) central data structure.
I've rewritten apps many times, over many years, because when I wrote the first or second versions, I didn't understand the problem well enough, and the code had turned into a morass of patches and workarounds.
Right now I'm recoding the internals of a special-purpose aggregator. I've written many of these, over the years, always quickly, trying to get something running fast, and then lived with data structures that resulted. This time I'm going slowly and carefully, with an installed base of one (me) and ripping up the pavement whenever I find even a slightly better way of doing something. I have other users who are waiting, but that's life.
5/7/97: "When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed." |
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For all those taking part in the One Laptop Per Child "Give One Get One" program, ever wonder where those donated laptops are going? I wondered the same thing. Here's what I found out. |
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It's almost 2008. It's time for conference organizers to ensure that their attendees have all the power they need. |
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