Posts by Doctor Syntax

A tale of two dishwashers: Buy one, buy it again, and again

SaaS

I've often made the point here that the advertising industry only sells advertising. "Do you want to show an advert to someone who's interested in buying buying a dishwasher? We know who's interested in buying dishwashers. [soto voce We know because most of them have just bought one.] Just give us your copy and lots of money and we'll make sure they see your copy every time they go online."

It's hard to believe that the customers, the advertisers, aren't kept in the dark as to just what they're getting for their money. The operators of this sort of scam don't need to confine it to the web. They can offer a spam as a service in the same way.

At the lower end of the market the delivery is to every address that's been scraped of Usenet or anywhere else more than a decade ago*. A lot of these offer some sort of business service such as SEO, website development or more recently mobile app development. The alleged senders have obviously been sold leads generation as a business opportunity, not realising they themselves were the actual business opportunity for whoever sold them the service.

To get into that sort of business you don't even need a great command of your email software. For instance I've had a string of spams all with "Re: " in front of the subject so it looks like one email being sent to a script that responds as a reply to a BCC list. However the first version had a bug: all the emails had the greeting "Hello wilfosula gmail,". Today, however, I find the script's been improved. It now has my name in there. However it's exactly the same text as the last of the wilfosula emails and what's more two arrived together but with different reply addresses.

They usually get a variation of my potential supplier questionnaire. That starts off by asking business-like questions they won't be able to answer such as their registered business name, domain name and, for SEO, their web address so that I can test their ability by finding them on the first page in Google when I Google for "First page in Google". It works round gradually to asking them if they think they can get their money back from whoever sold them this shit. Given the nature of today's pair I CCed the questionnaire to both of them.

* These emails all arrived at an address that I haven't used on Usenet for well over a decade but it's one I still use for some purposes. If a more recent Usenet address were to be used I'd set it to bounce with a "because of spam" message for a while & then just kill it.

Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS

Re: Puzzled

Agreed. I also used it a long time ago but switched to ext3 & 4. I'd guess its main use now is probably on boxes that haven't been updated for a long time.

EU proposes law forcing manufacturers to share data

Re: It won't change until we stop buying...

"But it was such a great price!!"

That will change when the bill for the next microgram of ink arrives.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

Re: An illusoary stranglehold?

"He became PM as one of the very few willing to actually get on with brexit."

I'm sure there would have been others at a pinch but a front man was preferable to getting their own hands dirty.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Sometimes he gets stuck on autopilot.

Re: re. more blankets

I'm afraid it's still virtually impossible to find a Green politician who'll admit that their decades long opposition to nuclear power is why we have quite so much CO2 in the atmosphere.

"If we're going to continue to use gas, it certainly makes more sense to use our own"

We did. There's not enough left now. That's why we're importing it.

Re: re. more blankets

What makes it so unexpectedly irrational for Germany that Merkel was originally a scientist. Our senior politicians have usually had degrees in PPE & the like.

Re: left him too long

"It was clear this was a guy who had set himself up as dictator for life"

One consequence of that is the sort of resignation that might be necessary.

Re: An illusoary stranglehold?

Unfortunately he's been able to fool enough of the people enough of the time.

Re: re. more blankets

Germany must be regretting its rapid phasing out of nuclear power. Responding to a disaster caused by a tsunami to a reactor built above a subduction zone by cloasing down reactors on a table piece of continental crust wasn't exactly rational.

Dutch govt issues data protection report card for Microsoft

Re: It sounds good, but in practice a joke

Policy decisions are made by people who don't realise what alternatives exist nor the reasons for preferring them.

When the EU Data Boundary is in place how will UK businesses be affected? The likes of Ress-Mogg & IDS seem intent on using the control we've taken back to make sure the answer is "very badly".

HMRC: UK techies' IR35 tax appeals could take years

I wouldn't be surprised if there's an application for a judicial review.

Re: Dumb question...

The same can happen to a permie. In fact it happened to my son. His then employer had made the deductions but never paid.

Re: Justice delayed is justice denied

This is HMRC. Nothing to do with justice.

Skills shortage puts SAP projects on hold

Re: There is no skills shortage.

Manager: By the way, your own module is last on the schedule.

Re: You don't need training

Half and half.

'Well, I don't have the same skills I used to have.'

But think of all the salaries you saved by getting rid of the staff.

Escape from The National Museum of Computing

"ap codes into a BBC Micro as the final seconds drift past."

If you choose 1960s does that become punched cards and hours as you wait for the next batch run?

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

Re: Can you say outsourcing?

Add possibility of completing task.

I've often thought that testing should be carried out by a group of 3. One is a developer; one is a tester, a user familiar enough with the domain the application deals with but not with the application itself; and an invigilator. The tester is only allowed to ask - and the developer to answer - questions of the form "Where does it tell me how to do X?". Nominally the invigilator's role is to enforce this rule; it's actually to stop the other two coming to blows. The actual purpose of the procedure isn't to test anything, it's to teach the developer how to design a user interface.

Re: Has someone re-thunk their Testimonial

The testimonial's from a manager - possibly one of those who signed off acceptance tests (there were UATs & they were signed off weren't there?). He's not a user.

These days I use KeePassX and its random password generator.

Re: Special characters

Password: HHH^H^H^H

"testing was performed after each development sprint."

Of course we tested it. Was it supposed to pass the tests?

It was being complained about nearly 3 weeks ago on soc.genealogy.britain. Obviously not improved. Equally obviously no provision to roll back in event of failure.

Re: Special characters

"any character that isn't alphanumeric and isn't a control character,"

AFAICR even control characters were allowed in old-style Unix passwords - except return, of course.

"some cruddy old implementation that noone had bothered to drag into the modern world"

As you've discovered it has been dragged into the modern world. Modern world means broken.

AI-created faces now look so real, humans can't spot the difference

Good. Start feeding about a trillion to Clearview to poison their data.

Beware the techie who takes things literally

We're not told what steps had been taken, either verbally or in writing, to document the situation therefore we have insufficient information to decide if he was right or not. We don't even have any information as to whether the agreement with the shareware vendor including the deletion.

Re: He protected his boss from legal problems IMHO..

"it should have been made clear in a way that was provable that the boss had been informed of this approach."

It takes two to be informed. The boss might well have been told. He seems to have been the type who wouldn't have listened.

Experimental WebAssembly port of LibreOffice released

"If you absolutely must inflict your poor little computer with the drek from Redmond"

Back in c 1990 there wasn't much alternative. There were also specialised xterms. We had one in our team. it was a good way to get multiple terminal sessions on the server.

Re: Single user vs Multi-user collaboration

Etherpad on your own server?

I can only think of one use case: let's run LO in the browser because we can. For any use case involving editing a file on a remote server there are better solutions,

If only port 80 is open on the firewall Own/NextCloud will let you edit locally and manually upload through the browser. You can cut out the browser by using the O/NC desktop client to sync selected local directories with the remote. If you don't want to have the file local at all both LibreOffice and, AFAIK, MS Office have Open Remote available through WebDav. It's a while since I tried this on LO and memory says it was a bit of a faff; that might be because I didn't use it enough but no doubt it would be easier to make it a bit slicker than to get this idea working.

If SSH is also available use X over SSH to run an X-server locally and LO on the remote. An X server was the first use case I had for Windows? Is it still possible to get one?

Re: Single user vs Multi-user collaboration

I think an office suite would be the wrong tool. What happens if two people try to edit the same passage at the same time? You'd need to have locks on selections or on the current location of everyone's cursor (think one one person doing character by character deletions while someone else is trying to type there). It would end up more like a transactional database at the back end with an HTML generating front end....

Hold on there. That's a Wiki. That's what you need. Then you can typeset the result.

Re: Single user vs Multi-user collaboration

" Paramount is the multi-user part, where documents are accessed simultaneously by the users. No need to do too fancy formatting. Final formatting is a one-man job anyway and can be done in a local LO copy."

I wonder how the practicalities of that work out. If two people want to express the same thing differently somebody's going to have to arbitrate.

Maybe an alternative approach would be to save the working text in a flatter format - maybe .fodt or .md - managed with Git so the final (human) editor does the merging and formatting.

Re: Got curious. Clicked the link.

"Yes, I know what the error message means."

Cannibalism?

Linux Snap package tool fixes make-me-root bugs

Re: Snap is a bad idea

"all work-arounds for problems you wouldn't have if you just compiled statically"

If any of the libraries you compile in has a vulnerability that won't be fixed by the user updating the shared version.

A better starting point would be to set the minimum dependencies as the oldest versions of every library that provides all the facilities you use.

Food for thought on the return to the office

Re: Working from home is great...

I knew about thrushes but do crows do that as well?

You can find a lot on the interwebs. I assume this works because you get used to having a battery that only works at 50% of its capacity.

The alternative version is that you fully charge it but let it fully discharge before recharging to avoide memory effects.

I did the same to you for using vim instead of vi.

Re: Union?

"Money promised is much more effective than money given"

Oh no it isn't. Not if you come from Yorkshire.

Re: 4x10 working - Fridays off

But you're not doing it now*, are you?

*Sunday morning, UK.

Re: Fresh milk!

On some hot drink machines even the soup tastes of coffee. With those I always choose hot chocolate - it's the only thing that successfully covers the influence of coffee.

Re: Fresh milk!

I'll take your word for that. I don't touch the stuff.

Re: Working from home is great...

Cooing? If that's all they're doing think yourself lucky. They're apt to arrive at first light and start stamping on our roof which isn't thin, blue Welsh slate but sandstone slates the best part of an inch thick. It's amazing how birds which are light enough to fly make a din suggestive of wearing hob-nail boots.

Re: Union?

We, the employees, united in giving the union the push; employers are not the only ones who can be self-serving.

Looking after my own interests vis-a-vis the complacent employers was solved by giving them the push. It came as a surprise to them that someone they'd assumed would be safely trapped in a specialised corner of science had alternative skills that were marketable elsewhere. It was amazing how a much over-due promotion was offered immediately, outside the annual review cycle without the formality of a board. I was tempted to try to negotiate it back-dated a couple of years without actually committing to stay but instead took pleasure in explaining exactly why I was turning them down. I still have their replay protesting that it wasn't like that at all. Liars. I suspect that if I'd accepted and turned down the external offer there'd have been a board after all and all sorts of other complications.

Re: The Great DeResignation

I had a lad in my team who ended up spending the night in a telephone box on some station out in Essex.

Not so much Heathrow as the central London terminal* that used to be near Gloucester Rd Underground station. Some of us had been to a British Ecological Society conference in London and rolled up there to find bad weather had stopped all the flights to Belfast until morning. The cross section of society we met there was most of the rest of the QUB Botany department who'd been at some other conference.

*This was before Central Line had been extended out to Heathrow. You checked in there & were taken out West by bus.

Amazon, Visa strike global truce on credit card charges

Re: Still Avoiding Them

"See within."

Is he hiding from the police?

Re: Innovative payment experiences

"The traditional method is for banks to figure out patterns to your purchase activities, and stop any that are sufficiently shady. "

You mean like HSBC blocking the card every time I tried to buy dial-up access from a hotel phone line because it was in a not-spot and I needed to review another client's logs? Every week for a four week contract. Even after they'd been told.

Yup, works really well, right up to the time when you need to make a change to your spending requirements.

UK starts to ponder how Huawei ban would work

"which is recognised as being among the most secure and trusted in the world."

HMG probably doesn't want secure and trusted. They want something with back doors for them.