Posts by Doctor Syntax

In defence of online ads: The 'net ain't free and you ain't paying

I can never understand why vendors would pay good money to the advertising industry to try so hard to piss me off so I'll never touch their products unless I have no choice.

Re: Free IS the problem

"And adverts will have to improve their game immeasurably as the throw-shit-at-the-wall approach will become impossible."

Even better, in the situation you describe advertising wouldn't be needed.

Re: It's not like we don't have a micro payment rich alternative ecosystem...

"Also few people complain about ads, what people complain about is tracking and Javascript which are completely different things."

I complain about all three - or would if I didn't block them.

"I'm fine with ads as long as they are static and not making any noise. Can't stand anything moving in the corner of my eye!"

That was my point of view until a site I use quite a lot repeatedly showed a jiggling animated GIF. That's when ad-blocking went in and it's stayed in. It's a shame for that site but if the couldn't or wouldn't curate their ads then that's the consequence.

Re: Sorry, but no.

"Every ecosystem contains parasites."

You mean like advertisers who use the bandwidth that users paid for to send them ads they don't want for things they don't want just so the advertising industry can con the advertisers* into paying them to do that?

* Strictly speaking, of course, it's not the advertisers paying, its the advertiser's customers who actually want the product, might well have bought it without the adverts but, because of the advertising tax, are having to pay more.

Re: Too little, too late for advertisers

"And surely they need to know which articles are most popular with various demographics?"

Why?

Re: Beeping, flashing and semi-naked women...

Is it the semi- bit you object to?

"In the old days newsgroups - rather than web pages - were a major source of everything. It soon became obvious that only a few big players had the resources to catch all the postings in all the possible groups. That was worth a subscription"

Until recently I paid a subscription for a newsgroup service as, unlike the ISP bundled service they did a reasonable job of spam filtering. A few months ago one of my regular groups started to get lots of spam which they failed to filter. I didn't renew the subscription. I do, of course, still pay for newsgroups - it's part of my ISP sub.

Re: Short-lived but well-received

"The problem with advertising on the Internet is that it doesn't actually generate much income - either for the publisher or the traditional advertister (the intermediaries seem to do OK...)"

As I keep saying: the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising. It's the only thing they're interested in selling.

Re: The thing is... it's nothing new.

"Postal mailshots? That's what the paper recycling bin is for."

It's what the sender's paper recycling bin is for when their litter's been posted back to them.

Re: World Gin Day

"my mouth demands to know why the heck I'm drinking Pine-Sol again."

1 bottle of gin + 1 lb of sloes + 1 lb of sugar. Allow to mature for several weeks. It improves the gin no end, even the commercial sloe gin.

"Momentous Time Period of Global Importance of one sort or another."

Some Hyped International Time?

PETA calls for fish friendly Swedish street signage

Re: Wow.

"until they actually meat a vegan."

Deliberate or Freudian?

Re: Free advertising

"PETA doesn't benefit much from the exposure they get over this kind of thing."

I'm not sure. Going back to your previous post, it probably brings more crazies into the fold. It also provides them with the satisfaction of getting publicity; their most appreciative audience is themselves.

England's top judge lashes out at 'Science Museum' grade court IT

"The reason they ask for clarification is not because they don't know, but because they want precise details in the court records."

And not only that, they want what's on record to have been agreed by both sides so one of them can't turn round later and say "That's not what we meant".

Also, a moment's thought should be enough to realise that judges the cases flowing through the court rooms keep judges very much in touch with current life

Re: On the up-side

"That makes them very difficult to hack in to."

That was my immediate reaction. In the case of court documents there's not only the risk of data being copied, there are obvious incentives to change or delete documents. And that might not just be the result of deliberate hacking; the Atlanta ransomware incident resulted in some permanent loss of data: https://www.myajc.com/news/local/atlanta-police-recovering-from-breach-years-dashcam-video-lost/dowuJGBMcW7PLOdK0UhgJJ/

ICO smites Bible Society, well fines it £100k...

Re: OK if they pro-rata the fine when its applied to big business

"Whether this was done under the old rules or they were particularly lenient is the next question."

The breach was 2016 so that'll be old rules.

The hits keep coming for Facebook: Web giant made 14m people's private posts public

Re: In 2018, its getting harder to see the satire anymore:

It certainly is. See FuzzyWuzzys' post.

Re: Yeah yeah yeah yeah, but everything is ok - really...

"Because Zuk & Crew apologized."

My mother used to say that saying sorry meant you were saying you wouldn't do it again. Their mothers must have told them something different.

Hmmm, we can already seize your stuff, so why can't we shoot down your drone, officials mull

Just declare open season on them for anyone with a shotgun.

Microsoft will ‘lose developers for a generation’ if it stuffs up GitHub, says future CEO

Re: Gitlab's 10x claims

"The rest will wait until Microsoft actually does something they don't like."

Waiting until the horse bolts before closing the stable door?

FTSE has a nap after a full English IT glitch

Overnight batch running late?

1,300 customers of Brit bank TSB defrauded due to botched IT migration

Re: First Hand Experience

"Recommendations?"

Any other bank. They might be slightly better. Just slightly.

Re: Cashless Swedes

"How does this work if you are a child? Want to buy a bag of toffees for 0.5Euro?"

Toffees are probably banned 'cause they're bad for your teeth.

I'm not sure how Swedish prices compare with Norway but a while ago someone at a client came back from a trip to Norway and said "It's a great place. You can buy anything for £25 - a beer ... a sandwich...". On that basis there'd be no problem; nothing too cheap to buy with plastic.

Re: Truly Shambolic Bank

Didn't they used to be known as, "The Bank That Likes To Say Yes"?

Under the Lloyds' ownership I found them to be the bank, or at least branch, that says "don't care".

Re: Another false claim...

what an incredible typical response

Re: For goodness' sake

"If I was a Project Manager and this was my project, I'd have been pushed out of the door a *long* time ago!"

He probably was pushed out to save costs.

Re: Loss of customers

"they still only lost less than .25% of customers."

The other 99.75% are still trying to get enough access to switch.

Re: "CEO said city law firm Slaughter and May is conducting an independent review"

"They know they can't get rid of it, so they do what they can to strip it to the bone."

I wonder if we may be reaching a turning point. When everybody's reached the bottom the next logical step is a race to the top.

Re: Another false claim...

"I would buy an edible hat if I were you, his yachting/golfer mates will soon find him some other highly paid job ideal for an ignorant and lazy of his kind."

Note the OP said in an FI regulated business. That may well be the case if the regulators so decide. But it wouldn't stop him popping up in another capacity. Perhaps a career in politics beckons.

"There is no one who feels more for TSB customers than me," a grovelling Pester told MPs.

By now we've learned exactly what credence to attach to your statements.

GNOMEs beat Microsoft: Git Virtual File System to get a new name

"The SC part reminds me of this piece of crap: Visual SourceSafe."

You must be too young. SCCS. Where do you thing MS got the idea from?

The really smart thing would be SCVFS: Source Control Virtual File System which would only define an interface. The interface would provide the semantics but the implementation could be Git or any other source control S/W.

Tor-forker Joshua Yabut cuffed for armoured personnel carrier joyride

I didn't know you needed an armoured vehicle to transfer cryptocurrency.

At last: Magic Leap reveals its revolutionary techno-goggles – but wait, there's a catch

Re: How do you keep an idiot in suspense?

"Given how long this has been going on does it have competitors?"

That Spectrum console thing?

NHS England fingered over failure to forward patient correspondence

Re: outsourced the work and thought also the responsibility

"We won't get service improvement in the NHS until it starts bringing stuff back in house."

It depends on who's then doing it in-house. If it's the same lot of fungible managers who see things as a structure of cost centres and contract terms it won't change. If it's someone who sees things in terms of patients being treated then it might. The traditional hospital management largely depended on people who'd come up through the medical and nursing ranks.

Re: True story.

"Why is the optician contacting your GP? Your optician should let YOU know and YOU should contact whatever healthcare provider you want to provide the service."

The GP is, presumably, the OP's healthcare provider of choice, at least in the first instance although there may then be a further specialist referral. Secondly, the optician will be providing specialist information so a written communication of some kind is preferred - would it really be a good idea to rely on the patient remembering everything correctly? Thirdly, there's a lot of value in having the various providers cooperate and especially having one of them act as a central point to keep all the information together and the GP, who can be expected to have a longer term relationship with the patient being that person.

"Patients should be in control of their treatment, not some archaic old boys club."

What matters ultimately is quality of care. The local providers working relationships can contribute to that.

Earlier this year SWMBO had a black patch appear in part of her visual field. There was some delay in getting an optician's appointment but as soon as he saw her he rung the local hospital and got an appointment there the same afternoon, she was seen then and operated on, successfully, next day for a partial detached retina. Both optician and consultant agreed time was of the essence to avoid permanent damage.

You apparently see such an arrangement as being the operation of an old boy's club to the disadvantage of the patient. We saw it as an efficient handling of a problem avoiding her losing the sight of an eye. You can keep your view and my wife can keep her sight.

Re: "concerns over its debts owed to private equity parent, Rutland Partners"

"There wasn't a service level agreement in the contract for telling anyone about misdirected post."

Capita are definitely getting slipshod. In the old days they'd have got this added on as an expensive change to contract. It's not surprising they're losing money. If they keep missing things like this how will they be able to afford executive bonuses?

Hear that? Of course it's Indiegogo's deadline for a Vega+ whooshing by

Have they tried asking for a moratorium?

Australia wants tech companies to let cops 'n' snoops see messages without backdoors

Re: It's simple

"Oh no; they understand alright."

Not if they're in the Amber Rudd class of elected official (remember hashtags?) - whether this guy is in that class I don't know.

What you have to remember is that behind the elected officials are a group of unelected officials who do understand. They prefer their politician front not understanding. That way the front don't know they're talking bollocks and are so much more convincing because they actually believe what they're saying. Could you have spouted such stuff and kept a straight face?

Re: It's simple

"I stopped reading your comment at that point"

I almost did so too. What you missed was a short, well-stated summary of exactly what's wrong with key escrow or, indeed, any other form of back door..

Pwn goal: Hackers used the username root, password root for botnet control database login

Even when the errors are as basic as this it really isn't a good idea to publish them. Just let them make the same mistake elsewhere.

Loose .zips sink chips: How poisoned archives can hack your computer

If you're going to run "unzip" as an administrator then you're very careless.

Or you're doing it deliberately. It's been a way to install or update stuff since forever. If you didn't intend to give an absolute path when you created your tar it's also been a way to make a balls-up for just as long. I'm sure somebody would have a "Who, me?" story on that.

Continental: We, er, tire of Whatsapp, Snapchat on work phones. GDPR, innit?

Re: We, er, tire of Whatsapp, Snapchat on work phones

"So they blew a gasket."

Well played, sir.

Amazon scam trio primed for prison stretch after million-dollar fraud

Re: Trust and lack of trust.

"suffer being vetted"

"vetted" is also a euphemism for something a little more drastic. That would be a deterrent.

US govt mulls snatching back full control of the internet's domain name and IP address admin

Perhaps a 3rd option is needed such as putting IANA under a consortium of registrars. Make that a 4th option if the ITU is being considered as the 3rd.

Finally, San Francisco cleans up the crap from its streets – yes, all those fscking scooters

Re: Surely the solution is simple

"Throw abandoned scooters in your nearest skip/dumpster"

It only really works if skip-diving's illegal but it would ease the litter problem.

Here's a transaction Transamerica regrets: Transgressors swipe retirees' personal info

If they have 5.4 million account holders it's very likely some would have been EU resident even if there weren't any amongst the 45,000. Have they notified EU regulators?

Nadella tells worried GitHub devs: Judge us by our actions

Re: So what did you want?

"If this was the best choice for Github, then Github was already doomed and is fully worthy of being abandoned."

I think you may have missed the point. The OP was right, Github was doomed financially without someone buying it. For the corporation and its investors it probably was the best choice.

Re: So what did you want?

"the recruiter attitude"

I think, in fact, that point was made on a drift OT about LinkedIn and whether it was essential but there does seem to be a scenario where recruiters want to see candidates having published code on GitHub or similar.

This seems to reflect the situation in science where a young researcher needs to have published, preferably in a reasonably prestigious journal. That has given the journal publishers an opportunity for gouging. I think the long term solution there will be for universities and libraries to offer themselves as online publishing houses, that being the cheaper alternative to buying print journals. Perhaps there's also a need for someone, possibly the universities, to provide a pro bono equivalent for open source publication.