Posts by veti

Re: "..manage these people more efficiently by retaining them."

I hope you appreciate the irony of this post.

Re: "because it can deliver quicker, cheaper and easier"

Contrary to popular belief, laws are not (in general) made to benefit the rich and powerful.

It's the other way round: people and companies become rich and powerful by successfully exploiting the laws. The legitimate loopholes (or "economies", as we used to call them) exploited by Amazon are available to anyone. Amazon merely figured out a cost-effective way to do it.

It's important to understand this, because it gives you a valuable predictive insight: if you change the rules, you will not prevent companies or people from becoming rich and powerful by exploiting them. If not Amazon, someone else will do it.

I'm not saying the rules can't be improved on. I'm sure they can. What I am saying is that any attempt to change the rules that's inspired by, basically, spite against Amazon - or anyone else, for that matter - is unlikely to be an improvement.

Re: Would you trust a USA court ...

Well, no.

But would David Davis be standing up for him, if he wasn't a millionaire, OBE, public school and Cambridge graduate...? Fairness, or rather unfairness, works both ways.

Re: No beer on the train?

Yes, but an unspoken requirement of beer drinkers is that the supply needs to far exceed any plausible level of demand within the time of the journey. A single thermos wouldn't last you long, you'd need to bring a six-pack of them. That gets a bit unwieldy.

Re: Needed for SharePoint

If your company uses SharePoint, you've got a bigger problem than the browser.

I don't understand why IE attracts so much hate, yet SharePoint seems to be relatively accepted, as if it were somehow a necessary evil.

Re: Enquiries

Well, I do see such a reason. Email is a terrible tool for communicating with a school. Even worse than with a bank.

For one thing, if I want to let the school know my child will be absent, it's nice to know that I'm communicating over a secure channel. (Of course someone may have nicked my phone, but if that's true then I'm likely to know about it.) With email, anyone could fake my address well enough to fool an average school secretary.

For another thing, I have all my communications with the school in one place. No filtering required, no filling up my mailbox with PDFs I don't want to keep. No having to hunt through a stack of correspondence to find stuff like term dates, appointments, special events, or old newsletters - I know exactly where to find all those things.

And last but not least, I'm reasonably sure that if I contact the school through the app, they'll actually receive my communication, and vice versa. With email that's by no means a sure thing any longer, such is the enthusiasm of current spam filtering.

tl;dr: email sucks.

Re: Sedation for tooth extraction?

You wanna make sure the tooth fairy gives you a decent price for that. Palladium is worth around $100 per gram, currently.

Re: All of this would have never happened ...

Conversely, once they did make that decision, this was inevitable. The fact that they didn't see it coming and write something into their rules up-front to handle it - speaks volumes to their failure of planning.

Re: Sure, deny it and point to the evidence that supports your position...

The thing is, Musk wails about "short sellers" all the frigging time. Anytime Tesla gets any kind of not-totally-rave press, it's malicious lies planted by short sellers. It's getting old.

Just because someone has made a bet that your shares will go down, which is all short selling is, that doesn't mean that their complaint is without merit. Maybe they're selling short because there's a problem, not inventing a problem because they want to sell short.

Re: Dumb, dumb, dumb

Who cares that they can identify the phone, if they have no way of telling who it belonged to?

Re: Still my number 1 (only just though)

"Phones", in their basic design, reached "100% functionality" in the 1980s, when cordless handsets and programmable dialling became mainstream. Everything since then has been adding new features - such as the ability to take pictures, read books, browse the web, download apps...

Re: A decent backup strategy is very expensive.

If I have to pay 10% of my annual profits, for a form of insurance that mitigates a risk that has a 5% per year chance of occurring, then the rational choice is not to buy that particular insurance.

Of course you can quibble about how the percentages are calculated, but ultimately it's a judgment call. There is no single "right" answer in every situation.

Re: Dealmaster

Every president in 40 years has had that discussion. Trump got lucky in the timing.

Casting back across America's history, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the USA was a hotbed of IP theft of every kind. It stole designs and machinery, art and prose - mostly from Europe and the UK, but later also from Japan and yes, even China.

In the mid-20th century, the USA suddenly realised that it now had quite a few artists, creatives, engineers and designers who were doing original work of their own. And at that precise moment, it had an abrupt change of heart about "IP" in general and started its movement toward its present position as the number one global champion of it.

That's the position China is at today. Across the board, Chinese designers have reached the point where they don't need to rip off "the west" any longer. Sure, in some areas they still lag - but in others they're our equals, and in some they've actually taken the lead. Suddenly, "IP" looks less like a restriction and more like an opportunity. And yes, you can cavil about how they got to that point, but the awkward truth is that it's the same way every other country got there.

He'd be a fool to do a deal with either one, at present.

Only a real idiot signs any kind of "deal" with Donald Trump. America's graveyards and prisons are full of people who learned that lesson the hard way.

As for China, its present government has used the cover of Trump's sheer malevolence to expand its own evil into a shadow that falls on everything it touches. Just ask the American NBA, or the people of Hong Kong or Taiwan, or Prof Anne-Marie Brady,

The irony is that making overseas payments - to, e.g., friends or family members - is much harder now than it was 20 years ago.

There are some cave paintings in the south of France, and probably a few other places as well, that are quite a bit older than that.

Also some archaeological sites, and approximately all fossils.

But nothing that you would probably describe as "still around", exactly.

Re: "designed by clowns managed by monkeys" type comment sounds damning

Step 1 in software development: fire all the "rockstars" except one. I don't want your goddamn rockstars, I want honest workers who will do a solid 3-4 hours' work a day.

Step 2: get an honest project manager who will tell you how things are really going.

Step 3: put in place verifiable, objective milestones to make sure the PM is honest.

Step 4: whenever a milestone is missed, tell the sponsors that there's a revised timeframe and it cannot be negotiated with. It may technically be possible to buy it off, but you really wouldn't believe how much extra that will cost.

Step 5: remember that rockstar we kept? - put him (it's bound to be a "him") in charge of the test team, make it clear that he's solely responsible for signoff. You need someone in that role with the self-confidence and bloody-mindedness to say "no" to the whole goddamn company.

Re: "Lightsaber"

Their subscription lapsed in 1776. Since then they've forked their own version.

Re: And the consequenques fo failing to act?

There is no meaningful definition of "an act of war". Basically, it's like "high crimes and misdemeanors" - it's whatever some politician wants it to be. If you want to start a war, and someone attacks your embassy, then you say it's an act of war. If you don't, then you don't.

Contrary to appearances, I doubt if even Trump is crazy enough to try to invade Iran. (Which would be approximately 6x harder and costlier, in both blood and treasure, than the Iraq war, with the added burden that America would have *no* allies supporting it at all, not even the Saudis, and the Chinese and Russians would actively help Iran.) On the other hand I'm sure he's quite happy to bomb it to buggery, and doesn't care what happens when the Iranians develop their own bomb because that'll be his successors' problem.

The Iran crisis is entirely of Trump's own making. He's the one who torpedoed the nuclear deal and announced that instead of negotiating, he would simply apply "maximum pressure" to Iran. Everyone, but everyone, warned him that Iran would retaliate by stepping up its efforts to thwart American interests in the wider region, but he did it anyway. He's a bully who instinctively expects enemies to fold when treated harshly enough, and is taken aback when they don't. Which they don't.

North Korea has shown the way. Iran will have its own bomb before long, and nothing Trump can do - short of a full-scale invasion, which would cost tens of thousands of American lives - can stop them. Start getting used to it.

Re: Yeah, sure

Look, the Feds have done everything right. They've seized the phone, they've got the search warrant. All the concerns about "search and seizure" and "due process" have been satisfied. They're not trying to get in through some back door, they're trying to kick down the front door.

At this point, I really, really want them to have access. Because if they can't get it, then our days of being allowed to use proper encryption at all are numbered.

Watching the watchmen is a balancing act. Sure, keep them from overstepping the bounds. But if you're trying to thwart them even when they do everything right, then you are the one who has crossed the bounds, and now you're their enemy. Expect to be treated as such.

Re: Now you know what 2020 is going to look like

"Early/mid/late Victorian" were periods invented well after the event. People in, e.g., the 1880s used to have a very clear idea of what they meant by "the 50s".

People like to wank on about the pace of change today, but Victorian Britain was arguably changing even faster. There's a huge difference between the London of 1850 and 1890 - much more so than from 1950 to 1990. It's the difference between a loose conurbation of small towns, and a single big city.

Politically, the period saw the invention of trade unions and socialism. Culturally, it's the distance from Emily Bronte and Lewis Carroll to Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie. Militarily, it's the introduction of breech-loading rifles, machine guns, percussive shells that actually worked, ironclad steam warships. Homes went from candle and lamplight, through gas, to electric lights. Tap water became drinkable. First trains, then telegraph, then telephones. Heck, even cars were invented in the period.

Sure, times are changing now - but to say that the changes are bigger or faster than ever seen before is very doubtful.

Re: The king of Spain is the king of Gibraltar would have done the trick

I was thinking more of a law requiring every able-bodied citizen to report outside the parliament building on 1 April for archery training.

Re: Systemd = Marmite

The sheer objective wrongness of your attitude to Marmite tells me everything I wanted to know about Systemd.

Re: frustrating genius

I too went through an SF phase, from the ages of about 15 to 25, but gradually devolved more into honest fantasy, which is to say "SF that doesn't try to pretend it's based on science".

However, I can still find "SF", of sorts, to grip me. Have you tried Connie Willis, or even Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go?

Re: EA hardly needs Linux as an excuse to ban people

It's not about the lawyers. (Well, not directly.) It's the sheer amount of hassle. After a while it just wears you down.

I had a similar experience with the company formerly known as Atari. This was back in the days when "copy protection" meant you had to keep the original DVD in the drive while playing, but when I launched their damn' game, it gave me a "Insert original disc" message, even though the damn' disc was already in there.

So I contacted their support team. They asked me to tell them - some serial number printed in very small, barely legible print on the inner rim of the disc. I did that, and a day or so later they sent me a patch that, I later discovered, was basically a "noCD" hack. The whole transaction took at least a couple of days.

And that was fine, until they updated the game - whereupon it broke again, and I had to go through the whole rigmarole again. At this point it must have dawned on them that now I had the magic serial number in my email, I could have flogged off the original disc and be lying to them about it, so the process to convince them of my bona-fides grew steadily more convoluted. After a few iterations, it would take several days to get the hack back. I could almost hear them scratching their heads to come up with new ways to test my honesty.

And this game was still quite new, which meant patches were coming out about once a week.

By the time I'd been through this cycle three or four times, I was thoroughly fed up with the process, the company and the damn' game anyway, so I contented myself by bad-mouthing the game, the publisher, and SecuROM on every relevant forum I encountered for the next 15 years. But it never even occurred to me to try to pursue any "claim" against the company. I'd just - spent enough of my life on it by then.

Re: Support ticket

Seriously? You came into computing already knowing this lesson, you never had to, y'know, learn it?

Re: Tell me about it

Peterborough to Milton Keynes - is over an hour's drive, according to Google. You could have got to Leicester or Cambridge in the same time, which makes Milton Keynes seem an odd choice.

Re: What does vaccination have to do with software licencing?

This is an answer to the above question "why do we need an OSI at all?"

A hundred approved licences may sound like approximately 95 too many, but think how much worse it could be if there were nobody to filter out nonsense like this.

Re: idiot

Thou shalt not share documents in Microsoft Office formats. Surely everyone who works in IT knows that?

Mostly, I think it's another example of one of the cardinal rules of crime: it's really, really hard to think of everything.

Re: Remote bricking

Everything electronic degrades over time. I recently had to retire a sound system that has lasted me through four PCs over 20 years, when it developed intermittent hissing and buzzing.

Still a crap reason for killing the secondhand market, though.

Re: Deceptive units.

If it comes to that, who buys bog rolls by the sheet?

I don't think I've seen a shop where you rip off and pay for X sheets of bog roll, you just buy "a roll" of the stuff.

An "emergency" is an acute crisis requiring immediate action. Emphasis on "acute". The whole reason for having a "state of emergency" is to allow the executive to take action without waiting for legislators to discuss it, because sometimes there isn't time for that.

Now, I sympathise with anyone who gets a bit impatient waiting for Congress to act on stuff, but after 40 odd years, the whole "no time" schtick starts to feel a bit - forced. If Congress haven't yet reached any conclusion about the ownership of Iranian government property (i.e. whether the government property under the Shah should now belong to the revolutionary regime, which is the oldest "emergency" still on the books), we can be pretty sure it's not for want of time.

Re: Especially because this sale doesn't provide any benefits to holders of .org domains

Do you not have fair trading laws where you come from? Is there no assumption that goods and services offered for sale are "fit for purpose" and of "merchantable quality"? Companies certainly go well out of their way to persuade potential customers that they provide these things, so there must be some value in them, ne?

In this case there is a specific "public interest" case to be made, which ICANN is supposed to take into account. ICANN's mission statement says it is "... in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems". That's why the word "stability" features so strongly in the story.

All now depends on which way ICANN wants to jump. If ISOC has greased ICANN's palms appropriately, then I would expect them to say "there is no threat to the stability of the system, if a domain goes down for a while that's a problem for the owners and the registrars but it doesn't damage the system as a whole, we have no remit to interfere". If they've been cut out, however, then this should give them all the ammunition they need to force a renegotiation stop it.