dsparkman's comments

dsparkman | 3 years ago | on: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

Yeah, most of these companies park their cash outside the US to avoid having to pay taxes, then borrow money in the US against their assets/stock. It worked great when interest rates were essentially zero. Not so much now.

dsparkman | 3 years ago | on: Apple Rankings

Yeah, these rankings are bogus. Snapdragon is far superior to Honeycrisp.

dsparkman | 4 years ago | on: Amazon completes its $8.5B acquisition of MGM

I vote for more Stargate! It is a franchise that has just be languishing for far too long.

dsparkman | 4 years ago | on: How to turn your car into a tiny camper

Try looking at the site with uBlock Origin turned on and the article is missing important details, since the affiliate links aren't being inserted. Makes for a hilarious read.

"This is why the first thing I got for my CR-V was a . They are, as far as I know, the first and only all-terrain tire built specifically for crossovers."

The whole article is like that.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Why can't you get the data used to create the Consumer Price Index (CPI)?

The CPI is a propaganda tool. It is designed to keep the real inflation hidden to make it seem that inflation is not a real thing to worry about. Because it is formulated in secret, they can manipulate it to give a fairly rosy picture. The published CPI never panics.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Bill allows U.S. publishers to team up when negotiating with Facebook, Google

Nothing like some good old-fashion collusion.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Facebook Australia: PM Scott Morrison 'will not be intimidated' by tech giant

Facebook should just pay the link tax. They then need to add a link insertion fee for the media outlets, when they are the ones creating the links. Don't pay the fee, don't get any links. Make the fee 3-4x the rate of the link tax to cover added expense of everyday users sharing links.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: 26 Years of Delphi

I had Spinel Clean and Tidy that let you clean-up your registry and various temp files that were left all over the place back in the Win95 era. Also Spinel ScreenPik which was a screen capture utility.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: 26 Years of Delphi

Delphi, ah the memories. I use to make a fair amount of money in the late 90s making shareware applications with Delphi. It was the most productive I have ever been as a developer. But, the world moved to web fairly rapidly, so I had to move on to the web.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: H.R.127 – Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act

I will never understand how everyone forgets the first part of the second amendment. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State". That pesky regulated Militia part that everyone skips over. Since the only "regulated militia" in the United States, currently, is the National Guard, that seems to state that you can't infringe on their ability to posses and carry fire arms.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Comic Mono

The ! glyph has some issues. Other than that, I like it.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Twtxt Is a Self-Hosted, Twitter-Like Decentralised MicroBlogging Platform

Is it just me or are all of these "new" micro blogging platforms just trying to recreate RSS feeds. You take a few pieces of relatively simple tech and wire them up and you have solved the "decentralized social media" problem. RSS, Webmention, Webfinger, and WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub).

Create a better "RSS reader" that is more Twitter timeline interface and less email "folders" and you have it.

Also for the love-of-god can we dump the hokey @username@hostname mentions and just use username@hostname like the internet at large has used for decades. username@hostname is NOT only for email addresses.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: U.S. House's antitrust report hints at break-up of big tech firms: lawmaker

If the CCP wanted to cause chaos in the US, they would stop container ships from leaving China bound for North America.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

They will require you to only accept Apple Pay in your restaurant, or you will have to remove your app from the app store. :)

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Remington Arms Declares Bankruptcy

If a business is purchased by a private equity company, it is not long for this world. Private equity is all about strip mining a business.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Companies made millions building unemployment websites that didn’t work

Florida purposely built a broken system under Governor Rick Scott. It was engineered to make sure that as few eligible people could access it as possible. It is socially and technically engineered to make it so that people give up trying to claim the unemployment benefits they are entitled to. Florida used the system to keep their unemployment numbers artificially low coming out 2008 recession.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Companies made millions building unemployment websites that didn’t work

Really the "small government" party likes to use crony "capitalism" to line the pockets of the "private-sector" with as much tax payer dollars as they can.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

I would say most of what passes for journalism, is no longer journalism.

Journalism is about passing on the who-what-when-where-why. Factual information to the public. You see very little of that these days. Too many opinion in basic article.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: Create No-JavaScript friendly sites

Thank You! I could not have said that better myself.

dsparkman | 5 years ago | on: The Return of the 90s Web

It is because we understood the full-stack.

There was not "frontend" and "backend" developers. There were designers and developers. Designers created designs. They were usually delivered as PDFs, because the bulk of them came from print design backgrounds.

Their designs were then implemented by developers. Senior level developers tended to more of the application level heavy lifting (server-side scripting & db), with junior level developers working on converting designs to html, then to templates. By the time a junior developer moved on to app code, they were well versed and had mastered HTML and all the weird edge cases. They knew HTML.

The first real wave of "frontend" and "backend" developers came on the scene when you had designers learn Flash. They started driving more complex applications and there was a more bifurcation.

Granted even in small teams of the era, you had developers prefer "front" or "back". We tended to value "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one"