Posts by Curt Eckhart

FCC questions Verizon's early termination fees

eBay

If the early termination fee wasn't so punitive, people could 'buy' a phone at the huge discount, terminate the contract and then sell the 'never used' phone on eBay or some other venue and possibly make a profit on the transaction. I haven't done the numbers (not interested enough), but if there was even a little gain to be made, an enterprising college student could enlist all his/her friends to buy phones, terminate and then sell them over to our entrepreneur so that a goodly amount of beer money could be made.

Seems like a fee as high as the one mentioned in this article would surely prevent someone gaming them that way.

BTW, I'm not a supporter of VZW or any other carrier. IMO they are all getting obscene prices for very little value provided. I have an antique phone that <gasp> just lets me dial numbers and talk to people. Quaint, don't you think?

LHC back after temporary unexistence

"like being rammed by three aircraft carriers"

What kind of aircraft carriers, African or European?

Mine's the one with the dead Parrot in the pocket. ("eee's not dead, eee's sleeping'")

US forces want man-hunting robot wolfpacks

Tinfoil HAT?

I'm getting rigged out for a whole tinfoil body suit. I don't need those robot dogs sensing my heartbeat when I'm hiding.

Mine's the one with the metal lining...

Open AJAX frameworks not fit for 'power users'

re Accessibility

The section 508 rules state that the web page needs to be constructed such that if JavaScript is turned off, the page is still usable among other things.

There are additional recommendations that need to be engineered into a site which is 508 compliant that makes provision for other special needs browsers. For example, it is recommended that a hidden anchor be posted at the top of the page to permit unsighted users to skip any headers and navigation and take the focus to the main content of the page.

My point being that 508 compliance doesn't happen by accident; it has to be engineered just like any other page feature. JavaScript and AJAX isn't the problem. We instrument pages so that if JS is off you get old school HTML navigation, but if it is on, then you get enhanced procedure.

So it is possible to have your cake and eat it too. The state of the art is not yet to the point where this type of engineering is common practice.

Bloody code!

Disagree

In my 25 years of experience, code with multiple exit points usually demonstrates bad thinking about the solution. In my opinion such passages stand out as prime candidates for refactoring or rewriting altogether.

There is one situation where I could understand how code gets like this even in the hands of competent people. That would be where the code has been enhanced or patched many times and each enhancement has been isolated in an attempt to minimize the impact on tried and tested code.

Nevertheless, when this situation is detected, I return to my first assertion; Such convoluted methods should be top of the list when the time finally comes to rewrite.