Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: So basically we're going to have to re-name everything.

"I'm just ... speechless."

That's the best way, the less you say the less they can find offence in. They'll lokk pretty thoroughly though. Can I say "pretty"?

Re: Who are these peopel?..

Peer reviewed? That's an elitist concept long replaced by mass acclamation (for carefully select values of mass, of course).

Re: Who are these peopel?..

WTF is a "Distinguished Consulting Engineer"?

It's one they can distinguish from all the others who are indistinguishable.

Re: Lefties

I'd have thought a lefty would define Right as wrong. Left would be unwrong or maybe right.

Re: Did this 10 years ago...

You have our sympathy.

Re: Who are these peopel?..

I'm afraid RMS needs to accept a smidgeon of blame here. By introducing a political aspect into the idea of Free Software he left the door ajar and a whole mob has now walked through it. We need to establish once and for all the software development is a branch of engineering, not a branch of politics.

Re: What are we going to do about the embedded devices?

In 10 years the currently approved terminology will have been deemed offensive and we'll have to start all over again.

Re: What are we going to do about the embedded devices?

"Obviously, over time, old kit dies and is replaced with new kit that should no longer contain outdated language."

The entire problem arises from the fact that words, at least in English, have long been able to have multiple meanings. This seems to be at the root of your idea of "outdated" - it seems that the offence seekers want words to have only one. What's even more peculiar is that they seem to only want a word to have its most offensive meaning even if it's one, for example "blacklist", which only they attribute to it.

If we are to update the language this is a Herculean task. Perhaps you could start be looking up the dictionary definition of "set", tell us which is the most offensive meaning which should be retained and then suggest alternatives for all the other meanings.

Re: Sigh...

"I think its a new problem"

Unfortunately it isn't. It's Puritanism updated. These things go in cycles. Bowdlerisation and high Victorian prudery followed in the late 18th & the 19th centuries. Periodically we get outbursts of of people looking for things to be offended by. Samuel Johnson's riposte is often the best way of dealing with them.

Re: How exactly?

"I don't want to have to deal with the loss of the feeling of freedom that it gives me."

I don't think TPTB have ever been happy with us having the degree of freedom that the car brought. They probably had the same attitude to the bicycle.

You live in a property where installation of a charging point is feasible, right? Millions of car users don't.

Re: Not a chance !

Given that there are large tracts of dense housing, urban and, in my case rural, where there is no off-street parking in the form of drives and on-street parking is bumper to bumper it's not a question time but of feasibility. The only solution would be to knock down the houses, rebuild at lower density and find somewhere else to build houses for those displaced. Unless there's a subsidy to do this existing houses in these areas will be blighted.

I lie. It's not the only solution. The other solution is to reorganise society so we are no longer dependent on the car. In another post I described housing near here. When they were built there was no problem with car parking - cars didn't exist but there workplaces within walking distance. However for decades planning policy has been to separate workplaces and housing. As we're in between several conurbations most of the residents in the houses I described will be employed in cities over 20 miles away for which there is no effective public transport service.

We have a problem which has been created over several decades by public policy. It is a complex problem of which carbon dioxide production by cars is no more than a symptom. No amount of hand-waving at the symptom is going to make it go away in 15 to 20 years or ever. It will need hard thinking and, like all problem solving, that depends on recognising what the actual problem is in the first place.

Re: Not a chance !

"cars on peoples drives and on street corners"

Cars on drives and street corners are the easy bit. Not far from here are several hundred metres of road with houses opening directly onto the footpath. There are cars parked there more or less bunper to bumper outside the owners' houses. For a good deal of that there are houses and therefore cars lining both sides of the road. And that doesn't even take into account the Pennine phenomenon of the stacked house - the house that opens onto the pavement may have another house underneath it accessed by a flight of steps at the end of the row, or, on the other side of the road, another house above it. How anybody expects all those to be replaced with electric cars all being charged I don't know.

Re: It is unclear what President Trump hopes to achieve

"Not sure what any member of the Congress hopes to gain by not putting a stop to this madness by firing the loser right now."

I've been wondering if they might resort to that and what the trigger might be.

Re: Whats to come

The successor might well have an eye to the future under the new administration and agree with Krebs. He'd be much harder for Trump to fire. To lose one may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness!.

Re: Come to watch the lunatic

"he was nonetheless a military genius"

When he was winning. Just like any other general.

Re: Without us, you'll 'widen the north-south digital divide'

Given that the original interview was in The Grauniad it's possible that the North starts at Euston Rd.

Re: Who NEEDS a desktop?

"I have seen a guy admin-ing his server on an i-phone."

Back in the day i.e. the day of this http://www.gsmchoice.co.uk/en/catalogue/nokia/9110/Nokia-9110.html I was the subject of one visiting US Informix User Group promoter shouting over to his mate "Look at this, he's DBAing his box on his phone." Those were the days of being able to have a dial-in modem on the back of the box and using it to collect the local email to check overnight jobs had run OK.

Re: But to be the advocate of the devil

"Are you too young to remember times when e-mails service had to be paid for."

I got as far as this. I pay for an email service on which I can set up and tear down email addresses as needed for anything important. I still have an old Hotmail address and that's the one that gets the genuine* phishing attempts - although MS are fairly good at trapping most of them some get through and a surprising proportion are those pretending to be from themselves.

*My bank, building society and even local council keep arranging to have what look like phishing emails sent by 3rd parties impersonating themselves. The closest thing for authentication is that they arrive at the correct email address.

Let me correct that - I can exclude the bank because I told them a few years ago that if they wouldn't authenticate emails I sent to their address for reporting phishing I'd close down the address. They didn't so I did.

"They should stop kidding themselves that complaining about ad-blockers will magically make people decide that they both want to see the adverts, and that they will deliberately follow them."

They're not interested in that. All they're interested in is getting money from the advertiser for shoving the ad in people's faces. If the advertiser loses money by that it's not their problem.

"The adverts are usually more reserved in how they are implemented and some effort has usually been taken to integrate them into the site in a sensible way. "

They're also more likely to be relevant to the page the viewer has chosen to read.

Re: Wasting their time

How often do we have to say this: The only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising.

They sell it to advertisers. Providing they can sell that successfully they're home and dry. As far as they're concerned it doesn't matter if the advertisers waste money because that wasted money ends up in their pockets.

"I purposely wipe out all traces of local storage, cookies, browsing history"

I have a browser set to wipe all storage on exit for this purpose or for any site that seems too keen on Javascript. It seems to get used more and more often.

Re: Just say no

You mean you're not getting those already?

Re: They just don't get it.

"Let me have a go - it's beneficial (to the advertiser) because it allows them to make more money by using personal data to profile individuals and target advertising at them."

No. It's beneficial to the advertising industry because it enables them to sell these targeting services to advertisers. As we're all aware this results in advertisers being charged for adverts and the targeting service to punters who've either (a) already bought what the advertiser's trying to flog and don't need another or (b) are being targeted with something quite irrelevant because of the quirks of the AI/ML algorithm whose results are irrelevant but can't be explained because it's a black box.

The advertisers are the mugs in this game.

Re: They just don't get it.

Of course. The only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising.

Re: They just don't get it.

Nevertheless I wonder what proportion of those in the advertising industry, including the actual advertisers don't block ads in their own browsers. I'm sure they all find ads annoying but don't actually connect this reaction to any possible audience response to what they do for a living.

Re: They just don't get it.

A few days ago SWMBO was trying to look up Pears Cyclopaedia on Amazon. I don't know if that actually came up but she was complaining about all the junk; I think there was even a girlie calendar on there. It doesn't bode well for this idea of Alexa trying to double-guess users the product.

Re: They just don't get it.

"Just like predictive text."

For a long time I've contrived to get auto-suggest out of the Google search. That no longer seems to work - an no, even if it gets rid of it I am not going to sign in to Google. So now the browser home page is DuckDuckGo. In the long run pissing off users doesn't do you any good.

Re: They just don't get it.

Marketing people are narcissists who are convinced the world is eagerly waiting for their next fart, brain or otherwise, so of course they think people want to be tracked to avoid any risk of being deprived.