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Comment Hacking the Atari (Score 3, Interesting) 60

by Snotnose (#48878445) Attached to: The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge
We figured out the Atari cartridge was nothing more than a popular PROM (2716?) with one of the control signals reversed. We made our own cartridges that used an EEPROM, then used our EEPROM burner to read cartridges and store the contents on a floppy. We'd then burn EEPROMs of the games we wanted, and pop them into the ZIF socket on our home made cartridges.

Comment Who supports it (Score 4, Interesting) 60

by Snotnose (#48807699) Attached to: Exploring Some Lesser-Known Scripting Languages
I remember 7-8 years ago I was lead on a new project and we were deciding on a scripting language. I wanted Python over Perl. It was clearly easier to both read and write, and had object orientation.

What shot it down? My boss telling me "we have a thousand engineers world-wide who know perl, and you 6 will be the Python experts. You really wanna support a thousand engineers learning Python over the next 5 years?"

Comment Re:Schedule D?! (Score 4, Interesting) 450

I have found that paying a CPA to do my taxes is a waste of money.

Get yourself a better CPA. Mine is a tax expert. First few years I used him I did my taxes in TurboTax to compare, he always found enough magic such that he paid for himself in taxes I saved. Not to mention I just had to shovel data to him, instead of spending a few hours in TT myself.
Gotta find a new guy though, last year he told me he was getting married and moving out of state :(

Comment Gee, wonder why (Score 2) 68

by Snotnose (#48751145) Attached to: Report: DHS Failing On Cybersecurity
Take a bunch of overly bureaucratic organizations that have needed weeding out for decades, create a huge new bureaucracy to oversee them all, and WTF can you expect?

/ Bush was the worst president in my 50+ year lifetime
// Homeland security never made any sense to me
/// I vote Republican prolly 70% of the time

Submission + - The Slow Death of 'Do Not Track' (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: FOUR years ago, the Federal Trade Commission announced, with fanfare, a plan to let American consumers decide whether to let companies track their online browsing and buying habits. The plan would let users opt out of the collection of data about their habits through a setting in their web browsers, without having to decide on a site-by-site basis.

The idea, known as “Do Not Track,” and modeled on the popular “Do Not Call” rule that protects consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls, is simple. But the details are anything but.

Although many digital advertising companies agreed to the idea in principle, the debate over the definition, scope and application of “Do Not Track” has been raging for several years.

Now, finally, an industry working group is expected to propose detailed rules governing how the privacy switch should work. The group includes experts but is dominated by Internet giants like Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo. It is poised to recommend a carve-out that would effectively free them from honoring “Do Not Track” requests.

If regulators go along, the rules would allow the largest Internet giants to continue scooping up data about users on their own sites and on other sites that include their plug-ins, such as Facebook’s “Like” button or an embedded YouTube video. This giant loophole would make “Do Not Track” meaningless.

How did we get into this mess? For starters, the Federal Trade Commission doesn’t seem to fully understand the nature of the Internet.

Submission + - Google Crapifies Search

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: Google Further Crapifies Search, Exploiting Both Users and Advertisers

So Google is indeed being optimized..for its own advertising. The message to all but the very biggest vendors is that you must pay to show up. No more getting in the back door by being picked up by an price listing service that gets on Google’s first page, or by matching the search terms well.

But as a user, it looks like Google is cooking its own goose. These crappy results makes me much more inclined to go to Amazon and look at Amazon merchants, and compare price at 3 or 4 Apple vendors I know are reliable with returns in case I get a bum machine. The fact that I’m not getting remotely usable results from Google searches and that means I’ll skip them.

How long will it take for advertisers to realize that they are effectively being scammed by Google, that they are often paying for bad clickthroughs because Google is putting them on search results where they don’t belong but the retailer has written successful clickbait ads so they get bad visits? My impression is that Google Adsense reporting is opaque enough that they might not recognized Google’s culpability (indeed, I can see Google optimizing its algos to keep the bad clickthroughs at the highest level that an advertiser would tolerate).

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