Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Swiss Miss Incorporation

Corbyn would shove it back up if he got the chance. But 7.8% is lower than either 17% or 19% so the OP's argument still stands.

Re: So obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?

"Of course anyone involved can explain the niceties of Swiss incorporation and international jurisdiction to the SWAT team coming through their door."

Alternatively they can just leave a note for the SWAT team that they've upped sticks and gone. Oh, I forgot, US citizenship doesn't include the right to travel does it? It's like the middle ages in Europe - you have to get permission from the lord of the manor to move elsewhere.

Subtle but brilliant.

Re: So obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?

"I've said before that I don't understand why so many open source projects are incorporated in the US."

A lot aren't physically in any particular place unless you count a Github server and maybe it's time to rethink that in favour of one hosted by a business outside the US. Some are in Germany including NextCloud , KDE and the Document Foundaton. AIUI German law has advantages for registering such organisations. Dyne.org who support Devuan is in the Netherlands and the devuan.org domain is registered in Italy.

Re: Criminal Damage

They'd also have the possible defence that what the update was intended to do would be a reasonable excuse. I say possible because an intended trivial change might not be enough.

Re: What should have happened with IPv6

"This could be fixed easily by national regulators…"

The internet distrusts national regulators.

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics that don't lie.

IIRC DECNet relied on - or assumed - that the MAC addresses were the subset allocated to DEC. Trying to get HP-UX boxes talking to a VAX with a VAX-oriented management we had to buy a DECNet package for HP-UX. When it was installed it promptly changed the MAC (which was programmable) to look like DEC. That confused all the clients until their caches caught up.

Re: Ad Spend

"Product not shifting"

The nothing to lose case.

Re: Ad Spend

It'll take a year for the consequences to become apparent. Still, with bonuses only running on a monthly or quarterly basis nobody in sales is going to care.

Yes, if you're in the EU.

Re: gov sites tend to not work even if you disable every layer of browser protection.

I suppose the requirements "insert more white space" and "spread the functionality over as many pages as possible" provide them with some compensation.

Re: Two things

Of course, you have to then type in your address and credit card details every single time, but that's the price you have to pay for wearing a tinfoil hat keeping control of your bank account

FTFY

Re: Two things

"You tell those people to write that stuff down in a small notebook"

Or use a password manager. And in any case I'd prefer sites that don't keep credit card numbers.

Re: Cookies

Actually that's a good deal more sensible. The page can carry advertising appropriate to the content. No tracking but then no tracking services to be sold to advertisers. If I search for advice on something and find a useful page which has a link to a page of relevant vendors I'm very much likely to follow that up if I'm looking to buy than I am to follow up tracked ads about something I bought weeks ago. I'm also, BTW, more likely to read that page, and hence follow through to the ads than I am to read a page with the same content hidden in a mass of display ads. The latter is likely to have me mousing over to the Back button PDQ.

Re: Who to block?

What you won't hear will be the silent good-byes as users go elsewhere.

Re: re. Stop wasting your money

Unfortunately the "they" who are using the lock picks aren't the "they" who stand to lose money. The lock pickers are the advertising industry whose sole objective is to take money from the advertisers. It's the latter who stand to lose money. Ultimately the advertising industry has no interest at all in whether the advertisers lose money so long as they keep buying and don't actually go down the drain and can no longer buy at all. And it's entirely against the industry's interests in letting their mugs know how much of their money is being spent counter-productively.

Re: I'm forced to wonder

Or it would provide users with a good idea of what sites they wish to avoid.

Re: I'm forced to wonder

"My session lasts for days, weeks sometimes. It only gets interrupted by browser updates and OS updates demanding a reboot."

Yup. For some people convenience beats security any time. Some of us close down sessions we're not using. We even log off when we're not using the computer. We go further still - we switch the computer off.

Re: Ad Spend

What you won't see from that is that A, B, C & D all pissed of some prospects and maybe current customers. You only see the relevant upsides. The downsides are invisible to that sort of comparison. Yes you can see that some customers didn't return but you've no idea that that was because of whatever crap you shoved in their face with your "campaigns" and not for some other reason. As Richard says nobody is going to do that particular bit of research, not if it costs them their jobs.

Re: Ad Spend

"It's carefully tracked and if it didn't give value for money the advertisers would go out of business."

What is very unlikely to be tracked - and it's actually quite difficult to see how unless you actually listen to people like me telling you how they behave - is the people who walk because of it.

For example, yesterday I had to ring up my car insurer to give them an updated card number. The agent then promptly tried to upsell on other insurance products. That annoys me. When renewal time comes around I'll go elsewhere. It won't be the first time I've done that and I don't suppose it will be the last. Their marketing won't have the faintest idea that that's why they've lost this customer. They'll be able to show the positive results of their upselling but they won't know how many customers like me that they've lost. Their figures will be slanted to the optimistic side.

Re: DIY gone mad!

I'd describe it as "adequate". I wish our house was like that.

Re: INP Error - System Halted

SunAccount had a function that started printing out messages to users in advance of their maintenance payment becoming due. As we were screen-scraping over telnet (yes it was a long time ago) from another system to look up accounts this wasn't welcome. We eventually worked out how to look up the ISAM files directly.

Re: Not an actual error condition ....

About 2 weeks from go live I was appraised of a requirement that "everybody knew" about pricing, parts and whatnot. It required some hasty grafting in of tricky exploded parts list code which worked but I really never wanted to touch again. After I'd moved on and my replacement was body-shopped in he received dire threats from the product manager as to what would happen to him if he ever touched it. It eventually proved robust enough to be migrated a couple of times to new environments so it probably was OK...

...unlike the uncommented and incomprehensible code I inherited from my new boss at the next job which took a page and a half to work out what day of week it was and failed as soon as it hit New Year (a long way earlier than 2000). Replaced it by taking a date as day integer from a library function and doing MOD 7.

Re: Assume the worst

"You will be familiar with how the same word is used with the same meaning in physics and isn't true there either."

Actually the meaning of atom in physics was the smallest piece you could divide an element of some substance into and with it still being the same thing. You might divide the atom but you then get atoms of something else so the original concept still holds true.