Posts by Charles 9

Re: They might learn

"It can -always- be found somewhere else."

NOPE. I speak from experience. When it comes to things like obscure device drivers, it's like trying to find a bone needle in a haystack (and no, either no hardware substitutes are available or it'll mean a lot of money). Plus there are plenty of other things that take great pains to make sure there is one and only one source, usually content that quickly stales or enforces copyright.

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

"TPS. Offenders either get the long weight treatment or get grassed up to ICO/Ofcom as appropriate to build the case for those nice fines."

Until you find out the calls came internationally from foreign countries who could care less about EU law. After all, they're sovereign and follow their own laws. Plus the numbers are frequently throwaways meaning blocking them one by one becomes a game of whack-a-mole.

"AKA letter-box litter - let's clearly identify it as what it is: pollution. Gets posted back."

(a) It doesn't get picked up, (b) The Return to Sender gets Returned to Sender because the return address doesn't exist and the company was a shill that's disappeared, (c) You have to pay the postage. Trust me. These ad men know all the tricks better than you do. They can either play the law against you or know how to vanish.

Re: They might learn

"Tell them you appreciate their concerns and agree -- so you'll stop reading their content and find it elsewhere on the Web unmolested by popups."

To which they'll respond, "Good luck. Our content is exclusive."

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

"Fine, I'll leave it. That denies you any alternative means of raising revenue.'

Yes there is. Junk calls. Junk mail. Billboards. Tons of ways in the real world. Sure, abandon the Internet. We'll be waiting for you outside. Unless you intend to disconnect completely from society and go out and live somewhere like in Alaska.

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

TV on Demand BLOCKS ad skipping. Trust me. I've tried.

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

You know, if there weren't ad networks, the malcontents would just go on to attack the sites themselves. How many website defacings have we had this year so far, hmm? Let's face it. Haters gonna hate, and ads have been here for a long time, will be here for a long time, and have always gotten more and more obnoxious simply because the average person ignores anything else, and if people abandon a medium and move on to another one, the ad people will already be there waiting for them. Pretty sure the next will come along WON'T be less obtrusive ads (that summarily get ignored) but ad walls that force you into a Take It Or Leave It. Then you either accept the ad like you do on live TV or, to quote the Smash Mouth hit, "You might as well be walking on the Sun."

Re: So: FF22 says advertisers aren't worred about adblockers.

If I'm not mistaken, a logarithmic curve flattens over time. The higher the number, the slower the rise, just as ln of e^3 is only one more than ln of e^2. Now, if you were to say the curve is exponential, then you'll turn heads because the means the curve runs away over time.

They have to charge like that because you have to take into account the users who won't abide by paywalls. Once they go up, many users go away, so you have to figure the ratio of balkers to buyers in your subscription fee since you have to recover the revenues you once got from ad views by balkers.

Re: Hrrrmm.. this feels like a stretch....

You could always do what I used to do in the 90's and code your website for the lowest common multiple. Simply assume everyone that goes to your site is visiting it on a dialup connection (14.4kbps), on a 256-color display at 512x384 (don't laugh--early color Macs and the Color Classic were this resolution) and only 4MB of total memory (forget about graphics memory).

Re: Serverside

No, the reason for the "laziness" is because this way the ad people are the ones that rotate the ads rather than the site owner. They can just ping each other to see if an ad got served or not. You don't like it? Like with television, just turn it off. But if the site has exclusive content, you're left with a take-it-or-leave-it scenario.

"If they believe that ads are the only way they're going to make money... then perhaps they should start charging a subscription fee."

Ever thought the ad revenues will be greater than ANY subscription fee will ever bring in?

Re: @FF22

"Another question on your logic, if the anti-adblock program doesn't infiltrate the clients memory space how can it possibly know what information was displayed on a client browser?"

The server would know on its own end just what parts of the web page got requested (it's basically how the protocol works). If the server is designed to make every page served unique, it can distinguish just which users are blocking ads just by noting which ads are being called up (if the ads are a third party, it and the third party can check with each other without involving the user).

Re: @FF22

"Kudos to webmasters who use, or used, static ads, vetted and safe ads, non-intrusive ads. Perhaps the large ad companies will follow suit. Or become irrelevant and die. Either one is a win."

No, the ones using unobtrusive ads will just wither on the vine because no one pays attention to them. The reason ads are more obnoxious is because, as you note, it's the only way to get their attention. It's been that way for decades. Even E. E. Smith noted this, way back in the onset of World War II. People get numb to ads, so the ads have to be more attention-getting. Eventually, there will reach a breaking point. Either customers succumb to the ads or the medium itself is abandoned. Thing is, the advertisers are wise to new media and will be waiting for you wherever you go. Think mobile ads, which are frequently of the take-it-or-don't-use-the-app kind now (and with root detection increasing, escapes are shrinking).

Re: A la les chickens

Rapid evolution tends to encourage frequent mutation. As a reault, bacteria can evolve resistances to all sorts of things once thought impossible. For example, some bacteria cluster together and develop biofilms that allow them to survive exposure to chlorine bleach. I would think physical spikes can be resisted with a similar technique, only physically hardened rather than chemically hardened. Even that recent breakthrough, quorum-sensing disruption (quorum sensing is part of the biofilm technique) can be evolved against (apparently by using different signal molecules between groups of bacteria).

A glass is its own kind of substance, primarily a solid but with no crystalline structure (most solids have a structure). As a result, it doesn't behave like your average solid (ceramics are structured solids) and therefore has unique properties that can be exploited depending on its composition.

Re: One word.

And why haven't the non-compete agreements been challenged in court on cartel grounds?

Re: Is it just me

Actually, ATSC IS compressed, and depending on the channel, pretty badly, too.

Remember, ATSC only uses MPEG-2, pretty old technology when we have H.265 now. Because of this and a 19Mbit/sec allotment limit, it's limited to 1080i60/30 or maybe 1080p24 if a film's on. Plus, only the local stations are in reach. Some are lucky to be able to pick up one or two. I can't get any due to range. Plus the channels can be multiplexed, further crimping the available bandwidth.

At least with the box I can connect it to my HD PVR and do pretty much the same thing as you, only with the complete cable lineup, including most of the on-demand stuff.

Re: One word.

"It is not that Comcast do this. It's a good thing to do in certain situations. It is that it has a monopoly."

What about Verizon and FiOS and AT&T with uVerse? Don't they compete with Comcast in various areas?

Re: Nah!...

By what do you mean by "fixed"? And what codecs? H.264 is a well-documented and mature codec with plenty of reliable implementations out there. H.265 is on its way as well but is still a bit young for most specs.

And at the same time you have people who swap in SSDs only to come back a short time later due to catastrophic controller failures, so at best the situation is rather inconsistent.

Re: Look for Rising Prices

Thatt'll depend. If the inventory shrink only occurs at lower capacities, which makes sense, then while prices may go up, so will capacity (that's the one place rust still dominates--bulk storage fields where capacity trumps performance). Meanwhile, demand for nonmechanical storage is rising and pressuring price drops. Have you seen how cheap flash sticks are these days (yes, I know, relatively bad example here, but it shows the trend).

Re: : Amazon

"Yet it wouldn't be that hard to make the normal site into an Accessible one, they would just have to start LABELING their screen elements & lose the auto-trigger-on-first-reached-entry drop down menus"

That's EXACTLY why they DON'T label them, so no one can act as a go-between and create a slim interrface. It's either use Amazon or Walk on the Sun.

Re: Lazy Devs

"It usually stops when I propose to put the Marketing drone on point for emergencies,"

What would've happened, though, if one on the marketing team suddenly went, "I'll do it! Sign me up! Now can we get our stuff on your site NOW?!"

Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

Technically, W should be double V (and in some languages like Spanish they DO say that--as in "doble ve") As for why not double n, probably because M comes BEFORE N in the alphabet AND a capital M looks nothing like two capital N's side by side unlike with W which DOES look like 2 V's.

PS. Why DOES English say double U instead of double V? Is it because of cursive script where it IS a double U?

They'll just innovate hidden letter-impression readers in the rollers and breed falcons and hawks, and breed Nineteen Eighty-Four levels of paranoia in your neighbor.

Re: Beyond consumer devices.

Simple. They've hogged ALL the oxygen, leaving you with a sadistic choice. Either you let them live so you can leech off the oxygen they possess...or you asphyxiate...

Re: Barking up the wrong tree

They'd have to get past the threat of a veto, too, and Congressional Republicans lack the votes.

Re: Physically picking locks is nothing new.

"Seriously. I learned to pick physical locks in the mid 1960s.

Nothing has changed."

Actually, it has to an extent. Modern high-security locks are pick-resistant by using techniques that either require the tumbler pins to rotate as well as rise as well as means to prevent holding the pins in place while you're trying to dial them in.

Anyway, the obvious wasn't mentioned in the article. It seems a lot easier to find a way to steal the key, no matter how sophisticated, and make a mold of it.

Re: How many Oxfam emloyees use iPhones ?

Shareholders can invest offshore, too, and the R&D, building, etc. can occur practically anywhere in the world now thanks to the global economy. As long as you can keep the transportation costs down (which you can usually mitigate through economies of scale), you can keep more of the cake then you would if you built at home. As for dividends, there are other ways to pay off investors that avoid taxes such as by using stock options and investment vehicles that aren't assessed for taxes until their sold, and "Tax Planning 101" says inherited investment is re-based, wiping out the capital gain and any taxes associated with it.

Re: Offline device

Wouldn't you need online access to sync things between devices? Otherwise, what happens when you add or change an entry, forget about it then change another entry on another device, creating a mess of out-of-sync copies? Then you find you need the updated code from device A but all you have is device C and it's five minutes to close before a three-day weekend and the bills are due (and yes, I have actually, personally seen someone that damn desperate)?

Re: What is the point of this?

Perhaps, unless they decide to defect en masse, but if they're just driven plumb loco, we'll never hear the story as the loony will be quietly shipped off and replaced with another helpless pawn. And as they probably primarily communicate by radio, it would be impractical to send deaf men over there. So it's still a way to keep Pyongyang irritated and busy.

Re: What is the point of this?

That's the exact idea. The guards are the target, the idea being to either drive them crazy or convince them to defect. Either way, that means fewer guards along the border forcing Pyongyang to spend resources restaffing the border.