[ILUG] anti-spam thing...

[Niall O Broin]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 02:03:02AM +0000, Ronan Waide wrote:

> The former relies on the technobabble factor - the great unwashed, as
> you put it, simply accept the email at face value. Sites like the
> Hunger site serve to back up the idea that such a scheme is possible,
> and the desire to salve one's conscience without doing a whole lot is
> very tempting.

The hunger site is somewhat different in that it's easy to see how its
funded - the sponsors get ad. views and pay a penny or two. But the other
stuff - still, the women empowering women scam shows that such stupidity
doesn't need a PC/email to propagate it.

> people who despite all exhortations in text to use an interface
> according to process X, will determine some other process Y and use
> that regardless. 

Don't remind me. I once wrote some scripts and a procedure to help operators
in satellite ground stations (which tend to be in very remote locations)
backup Sun workstations and more importantly, completely configure a
replacement workstation. Easy enough for those here but if you sit down to
document it you end up with a 20 something stage procedure. 

So I was demonstrating / giving a run through to the agency management who
would be disseminating this procedure to the ground station staff - the demo
consisted of their exercising the procedure themselves. One of them wondered
why he wasn't in a position to carry out step 14 according to the document.
It transpired that he had gone as far as step 8 and then just skipped ahead
because he was bored/in a hurry/whatever and this guy was not a PHB - he
would have possessed an engineering degree of some sort. How do people like
this manage to survive to adulthood. Fortunately this took place in our test
ground station so there were racks and racks of equipment around for me to
go bang my head :-)

> Keyed Slot Principle, or "If it only works one way, make it only FIT
> one way". The latter, I suspect, might be of use to the Tescos trolley
> designers, although the difference in thickness (the necessary

In fairness to the trolley lock designers they provided what they thought
was a good engineering solution to a problem - a key with two slots, the top
surface of which was clearly marked with a graphic indicating that 1 punt
went in the top slot and 1 euro in the bottom slot, not relying on the
glaring difference in size between the respective coins and slots. Not alone
would these people not RTFM they wouldn't even look at the f***ing picture.

Tesco were clearly prepared for the eventual decommissioning of the punt
slots because they had plastic plugs for them and they simply deployed them
a little earlier than planned. FWIW dual slot trollies have been used in a
number of supermarkets in Germany for years - they take either a DM1 or DM2
coin for customer convenience. I don't ever recall seeing a DM1 coin stuck
in a DM2 slot.

> It's unfair to regard it as stupidity, or dumbness, or lack of

That 's what my wife says too :-)

> intelligence. It's precisely BECAUSE people don't think of themselves
> as stupid, or dumb, or lacking in intelligence that these things

Exactly - they don't think - this is why I regard it as stupidity, or
dumbness, or lack of intelligence. I don't know anything else to call it.

> happen. You're doing the same thing every time you grab a tarball and
> do ./configure && make without checking any of the accompanying
> documentation first!

I don't :-) - I read enough of the accompany docs to at least know I'm not
compiling that is not what I want or just plain useless at first glance -
this must correspond to at least checking for the right slot.

> This is all terribly off-topic, and I'm supposed to be working in another window.

Ah well - the tarball reference dragged it vaguely back towards topic
(though I've beaten it away with a large shitty stick) but it'ss Sunday (and
2 in the morning when you wrote) - be thankful we dragged you away from work.



Niall