Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"should be forcibly broken up."
Not as easy as it sounds. You could split off the stuff-selling and bit-barn business from each other and still have two businesses which remain a threat to the rest of their respective industries. You'd need to split those two businesses up so that at least they represented competition to each other.
And why not? That's basically what the reputation of any trading company should be based on. It makes no difference whether they were better of worse in the more distant past and you can't base it on what they'll be like in the future because your only sound predictor of that is what they've done recently.
"but Amazon have started claiming the lockers are "full" for smaller items"
It seems to be more complex than that. They won't deliver some sorts of products - for unclear and probably inconsistent reasons - to lockers. There may be a small print notice to this effect on the product listing but again I'm not sure it's consistent. But instead of telling you this explicitly when you try to assign it to a locker you get the "full" garbage.
Amazon seems to have become a distinctly curate's egg business.
Their store S/W is full of the above type of junk.
- Search was bad and has got worse. Results are padded with stuff that doesn't get anywhere near to matching search terms.
- I've seen tracking that showed a non-delivered product go into a warehouse and no further, there seems to have been no warning that something was wrong when it didn't get picked for despatch.
- I've had stuff shown as out for delivery to locker and then, for whatever reason, failed to be delivered. At that point they then fail to realise they need to despatch another PDQ or even realise that something;s wrong. When queried they'll tell you what they're doing to try to find the original. I've even had them report that it was found in a warehouse in another country. And they take the non-delivery as a return authorisation because that's the only way they can order a replacement so a courier then turns up to collect the undelivered item.
- The repeated attempts to flog Prime are beyond annoying.
Frankly I don't even care whether they use Oracle or their own database engine. I just wish the management of their logistics S/W was handed to somebody prepared to say "I don't care if it's running the biggest sales operation on the planet it's still not good enough.". Or maybe their logistics management would take that attitude and demand better.
OTOH I've found their Basics stuff to be OK. E.g. once well-respected British electrical goods company sold to asset-stripper who treat it simply as a brand; electric hot water jug has short-lived spring in the lid latch which fails in months. Like the asset stripper Amazon presumably get their equivalent made by some Chinese factory nobody in the West has heard of but theirs just works and keeps on just working.
"Invent one that can fish itself out of canals and rivers, or just take itself back to the store after being left half a mile away and I might be impressed."
Tackle the problem, not the symptoms. Self-braking trolley with GPS & geofencing; won't let itself be pushed off the premises.
The plain old mains plug is a fairly tough lump for the very good reason that safety matters.
I've no experience of Apple products but my latest laptop has a ghastly wall wart with a vulnerable looking plastic earth pin and an even more vulnerable looking rectangular plastic box on the back of it. I dread to think what an accidental kick would do to it. The combination of a localised mains lead with a rectangular or clover leave connector and a trailing power brick seems inherently much safer - an accidental kick of the power brick will simply move it across the floor.
"That slur on ISO 9000 has been repeated so often it isn't even funny any more."
It was never intended to be funny, just a comment on the quality scam industry.
The business I worked for long ago went from TQM (mantra: Get It Right First Time Every Time) to ISO 9000 (Continuous Improvement). When asked nobody in manglement was prepared to explain how, it we'd been getting it right first time every time there was scope for continuous improvement.
The value in a .com address is the result of the effort that the registrant has put into whatever goods or services lie behind it. The registrar has put in very little in terms of the costs of running the registry. If the registry raises the rate on the basis that the name is now more valuable perhaps the owner should invoice them for the work done in making it so.
"Why does every major update break something that has been stable for years?"
Maybe the real question is why has something appeared to have been stable for years? It may well be that the apparent stability is based on special handling for specific cases. The moment a change goes near such a case and somebody forgets to tweak the special handling it breaks.
"How the hell do you even get to that?"
It's simple. He has N thousand users. They all get updates and whatever the update does to their machines isn't a problem. It's whatever the great Microsoft did so it must be right. Complaints not allowed. He probably doesn't know it but all his users brought in their own devices and use those for actual work.
"What may have happened was that the suspect found and kept Bah's state ID that he earlier lost"
No. Bah was the suspect at one time. What may have happened is that the culprit found and kept Bah's ID.
The one whodunnit is the culprit (or perp if you want to use US jargon).
The suspect is the one who's suspected* of being the culprit but remains innocent until proved guilty.
Unless and until someone else is suspected, and there doesn't appear to have been, then there is at present no suspect.
*Big clue here as to meaning.
Client ran a few of them. Their business was printing, quite a bit of the work with those printers was with MICR toner. They were probably some of the cheaper devices in the plant.
One interesting fault on one occasion.- ink failed to adhere to the middle of the document. It turned out that the printer had been run a long time on one particular width of paper which had worn a groove of that width in a roller in the fuser unit, very shallow groove but sufficient for wider stock to sit clear above that part of the roller.
"Having something that can erase a disc on removable media labelled "PC-Check" should be grounds for a lawsuit. Just asking for confirmation is inadequate."
How do you test a disk write function without writing to it?
I suppose you could read a track, save the data, write zeros, check the result and then re-write the original data which would be very slow.
AFAICR the SCO Openserver install disk offered non-destructve and destructive write test.options. You were expected to know what you were doing and take care.
"I find it less than straight-forward to find things on Amazon"
Agreed. In fact it seems to have got worse in the last few weeks. There seems to be a compulsion to return as many hits as possible irrespective of relevance, especially sponsored results, and returning nothing where nothing would fit seems to be quite impossible. It's easier to search Amazon via Google apart from the hits for obsolete products.
And recently I had the offer of a pick-up location about 250 miles away, the email for the locker release code arrived about an hour after the website showed delivery and the SMS never arrived at all.
I get the distinct impression that they survive by sheer size - it would be feasible for someone to improve on the software for both search (there was at least one better search engine in the '80s!) and logistics but not be able to get into the market because scaling up to match would be impossible.
From the report linked in TFA:
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). ... Through PSN, a broad spectrum of stakeholders work together to identify the most pressing violent crime problems in the community and develop comprehensive solutions to address them.
Just how many forcible attempts at transferring domain names do they have to require "comprehensive solutions to address them"? Why not just prosecute the case on its own merits?
