Posts by ArrZarr

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: Nothing to see here

No. An alert should always come with a meaningful action. There may be exceptions to this rule, but I don't care. If it's not something I need to jump on, then why are you telling me this?

Of course, nothing is a worse offender than automated emails from Jira going into outlook. Every. Single. One. will come in and beep at you.

Something outside of the virus scanner should warn you that there has not been a scan in the last X days. If the scanner has not found anything worth notifying you about, then it should stay quiet until it's got something to warn you about.

Be careful where you install software, and who installs it

Re: Those GUIs ARE only frontends!

My favourite bit about win11 are the right click menus. Somebody must have realised that they were woefully inadequate for the job because they left the old menus in as the bottom option.

Replace it with something that works or leave it alone, Microsoft.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

Re: A couple questions remain ...

It occurs to me that something nice and viscous would increase the lifting ability of the gripper as the entire arm would be full of the stuff.

And the setup time would include spending about three seconds in my house finding a nice big spider, a week to freeze it to death, ten seconds to ram a syringe up its butt and a metric Lady Macbeth's worth of hand washing.

It is, until we start breeding bigger and bigger spiders to grab larger and larger things.

Icon: NOPE

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Re: FUD?

This isn't practically possible.

In essence, you'd need the competitor to implement the tracking tags on their site* for your (their competitor's) benefit.

You could implement rules based off the referrer, but it's unlikely that Argos will willingly send a potential customer to PC World directly so you'll usually have a search engine's domain between the two.

Re: FUD?

No. A good marketer doesn't trick you into doing anything.

What she does is make sure that the thing you might be tempted into buying is available on screen, preferably the bit of the screen you're looking at right now.

On the other hand, site UX is important and uses exactly the same tools. I've implemented tags for our UX team in the past that were all about whether users were following the site's journey comfortably (think [french car brand]'s online configurator. We wanted people to buy cars, but giving people a rubbish experience while mucking about choosing options isn't conducive to actually selling somebody said car.

Are there marketers out there who will try to trick you? Absolutely. Should consumers need to be as paranoid as they are to avoid scammers? No. Will these scammers always abuse any legitimate tool they can corrupt to their purposes? Yes. They always have done.

The problem you're facing is that doing good UX is hard, but you only notice it when it's bad. It's not so different from maintaining the network. People will only notice when it's down and not when it's up.

Shoutouts to the kings of utterly vehemently user unfriendly design - Google. Their search page is the only thing of theirs where the UX isn't a complete and utter disaster.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Bank of England going to trade show

Let's face it. There are either a bajillion iterations on a new bank note or some half-drunk PHB will sketch something they like on the back of their business card and tell the people doing the work to make exactly that.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: No doubt it's easy to do if you know how...

And, for what it's worth, the alt gr key will give you grave accents for when you're feeling posh enough to type café correctly.

If anybody knows how to get the funky I in naïve without resorting to hex codes or the aforementioned comment, I'm all ears!

Tesla lawsuit alleges unlawful layoffs at Nevada gigafactory

Re: WARN employees they are being fired?

Regan's presidency was so littered with terrible long-term decisions that I find myself perfectly willing to blame him for everything.

Stubbed my toe? Regan's fault.

Power cut? Regan's fault.

Wasp in the office? Regan's fault.

Wallowing in the existential horror of knowing that the late stage capitalist hell we're charging towards is unavoidable? Regan's fault.

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: My advice for Biden

Biden was elected to the US senate in 1973.

Carter is only 18 years older than him and his entire presidential term was during Biden's Senate career.

I think it's a pretty safe assumption to make that Biden remembers Carter.

Will optics ever replace copper interconnects? We asked this silicon photonics startup

Re: Production limitations

Okay, but 50 years ago, somebody probably said the same about PCBs and transistors when compared to vacuum tubes.

Japan makes online insults a crime that can earn a year in jail

Re: I approve

Obligatory XKCD - https://xkcd.com/1357/

Supreme Court urged to halt 'unconstitutional' Texas content-no-moderation law

Re: The first amendment also limits companies.

Okay, but what part of giving people more severe punishments than companies is out of character for the US?

Oracle really does owe HPE $3b after Supreme Court snub

Re: First Amendment

I suspect that even Oracle's lawyers knew that it wouldn't fly but it was the best they had and the fees from the extra work would be dwarfed by the $3B Oracle were going to have to pay anyway, so it was worth it to at least try.

Apple's self-repair service finally launches after months of silence

Re: Stop Buying Apple Product

In the case of Intel, it turns corporate suits who can save money be easing off the gas on R&D into corporate suits who need to get back into the game.

In the case of Apple, it would turn corporate suits who can demand an outrageous Apple tax into corporate suits who wouldn't be able to demand an outrageous Apple tax.

Nothing human in the before or after for either.

US Army may be about to 'waste' up to $22b on Microsoft HoloLens

You joke, but half of those are legitimate uses.

If you're interested in what I expect is a fairly reasonable view of what this kind of thing could grow into, I heartily recommend the Frontlines series by Marko Kloos.

Definitely useful and powerful tech.

Possibly even useful enough that even MS will have the resources to do it approximately right.

At some point, technology similar (but much more mature and resilient) will start to be incorporated into front line troops' kit. It probably won't be for a couple of decades at this stage, and the various sci-fi powered battle armours are even further off* but (and I admit to being a non-military layperson here), with everybody linked into a tactical network, you reduce the likelihood of friendly fire between linked groups and offer command teams more data to decide upon tactics & strategy.

Will it be a modified hololens when it goes into active service? Almost certainly not. Will it be issued to the entire infantry once the military has a design it's happy with? Certainly not. They'd start at senior field officers and would have it trickle down from captains to lieutenants to seargents to corporals to privates.

*Unless the US gets into WW3. Then I expect we'll see some rapid improvements in front line AR tech as that's a wide-open field for development to my knowledge.

Intel debuts Arc discrete GPUs for laptops

Re: "This is sort of the future of rendering as you know"

I'm almost curious what the price will be if the Intel cards are priced higher than their Nvidia counterparts.

Google resumes shoveling stuff into its 'Privacy Sandbox'

Re: @Neil Barnes - I wonder

Incorrect. Google show ads on a CPM (Cost Per thousand impressions) and a CPC (Cost Per Click) basis.

CPM targeting has been falling out of style for a long time now, and the value of an impression is hotly debated. For some reason, these debates usually have proponents from places that stand to gain the most from CPM models (Those who put far too many ads on site). No idea why it skews that way, of course.

When it comes to spending the client's money, CPM is very efficient. When it comes to making the marketing basically worthwhile, you should just use CPC.

Boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in UK compsci classes

Considering that I am the T, I'm fully aware of the wonderful world of Enbies ;)

Q = Queer, which is an umbrella term

I = Intersex for those who are biologically non-binary

A = A-specs (Asexual, Aromantic, Agender)

+ = Look, people are complicated, okay?

Nice assumption on the "his", btw :D

"The fact that women on average don't want to do that sort of thing."

The point is that we genuinely don't know whether a woman on average does or doesn't want to do that sort of thing without society's expectations.

I'm pretty sure that with all other things being equal, it would be damn near 50-50 (in any subject that wasn't directly related to biology. I'd be prepared to accept that gynecologists wouldn't be 50-50 for example).

Re: Gender-equality paradox

And yet there isn't a country on earth where the societal expectations on men & women are the same. We may have reached de jure equal rights in some countries, but society's momentum after 3,000+ years of male dominance in western society means that lots of people have yet to fully get with the programme.

Even then, there are certain biological aspects where equal rights aren't there, even in the most progressive societies - one example is Maternity leave vs Paternity leave. Whether the two should be aligned or not isn't something I wish to discuss, just bringing up a discrepancy.

Kinda.

It could be an indication that there are still societal expectations that nudge girls away from the subject (or they just don't want to deal with the sausage-fest).

That being said, I definitely agree that it means the girls who do take the subject are probably individually more interested in the subject than the majority of the boys.

Bear in mind that gaming (one of the main things that lead to doing comp sci) is still male dominated and speaking as somebody who has dealt with both sides of the coin, far more friendly to men.

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

Honestly, that was my greatest fear at the start of the Pandemic. I know this is selfish but my god I hate WFH. I get so much more done in the office.

I know that I'm probably in the minority but having an office I can go into is huge for me.

Alphabet's Wing drone unit inks supermarket delivery deal

Re: "better vehicles for greenwashing"

Never been, but from what I understand, Canberra makes Los Angeles look like Manhattan Island.

Yeah, the drone stuff is cool and silly. Sure.

That being said, the important thing here is how weird it is for a Brit to hear that Woolworths is a market leader in something besides being the defunct "Shop that probably has the thing you're looking for if you can't think where to buy it but feels like it should be available on the high street somewhere".

Fujitsu confirms end date for mainframe and Unix systems

Re: Support for five more years ?

Now admittedly, I'm bumbling into this conversation from a standing start, but I'd guess it's likely that they don't have a big production line for these, especially considering the low volume being described by the article.

You're probably right that they shouldn't expect to sell many more of the mainframes, but they aren't going to throw away the money from being able to put a couple more together on demand, are they?

Beyond that, they've been clear about timelines until support ends so anybody buying one will have the information readily available (and any subsequent failures due to lack of support post-2035 are on the customer for making a poor decision).

Icon: Devil's advocate

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Oh. Yeah. My bad.

From how it's described in the article, I think the shareware was the only thing that got deleted. That's why the demo didn't disappear, it just stopped working.

We get the privacy we deserve from our behavior

Cool, so now they have no tracking on site. They'll be remembering you fondly if they ever try looking at user flow through the site and realise they have no data to work with or if their SEO results plummet due to some obscure change at Google and they have much more limited avenues to figure out where their traffic loss is coming from.

And before you get on my case about your PII, especially in a medical context, it's specifically against GA's TOS to track PII through it - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6389382?hl=en.

But sure. Feel free to hound your GP over the fact that they had the industry standard website tracking and make them remove it.

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

Re: The State changed its tune

Religion - noun: An organisation run by people, for the people at the top's benefit. Often claiming to be the way to enlightenment or paving the way to an afterlife. Notable for the abject lack of any actual evidence that they are correct in their claims.

US President Joe Biden reminds the White House he is serious about repairability

Re: Tough on Crime

Okay, sure. He's not perfect.

Shall we take a look at who the competition was for the office in the 2020 election again?

Google and Facebook's top execs allegedly approved dividing ad market among themselves

Re: let the publisher decide which ads they want to display?

They used to, but it's considerably easier for display marketers to set up ads on Google, throw in some targeting criteria and let the algorithms work it out.

It lacks the craftmanship of the old days where you would specifically choose which sites your ad would go on based upon supposed interests of whoever is likely to see that page.

There are other advantages like how Google only attributes an impression after the user actually sees 50% (iirc) of the ad rather than just loading a tracking pixel on page load and saying that the ad got an impression even if the user never saw it. Another advantage is that while you don't hand pick where you want the ads to appear, you can do a whole hell of a lot more volume with one person managing a GDN account than keeping relationships up with a host of individual content publishers.

Google splurging cash on UK offices to lure staffers back from the kitchen table

Re: Draconian?

Well it certainly helps when some beliefs are based upon ethics and other beliefs are based upon a magical sky god whose literature is written with the clarity and precision of a Nostradamus prophecy.

Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes

Re: It's' MY printer

No you don't understand. They need to add a bit of cyan to black to make the black look blacker.

They also can't just add the cyan to the black ink ahead of time because *mumble*.

And they can't possibly let you, on your* printer, print off a page of text that isn't a perfect black because that would degrade your customer experience much more badly than not being able to print in the first place because you're out of cyan.

Re: I guess a firmware update to remove the DRM functionality is out of the question?

I like your suggestion that any part of using a printer is a satisfactory experience.

What will life in orbit look like after the ISS? NASA hands out new space station contracts

Re: In this day and age no centrifugal section?

It wouldn't just be the showers and toilets though. The human body is "designed" with the expectation of Earth gravity. From the serious considerations like muscular atrophy to the merely convenient (your sinuses use gravity to drain mucous so being in zero-g for any length of time makes you feel stuffy like with a cold), artificial gravity is something we really ought to figure out before sending humans away on 2+ year journeys to other planets.

Google sued for firing staff who claim they tried to follow 'Don't be evil' motto

Re: Politics, not Good

What does it matter who founded what or who ran what 400 years ago? All we need to agree on is that religion is the worst reason for doing anything and work from there.

If at first Amazon doesn't let you succeed, try, try again: Warehouse workers given second chance at union vote

Re: Another vote

Okay, but does that make the working conditions in that whole area right?

Re: Another vote

Yeah, like that'll ever happen.

Re: Another vote

While I have no doubt that Amazon will pass any increase on cost on to the customers, having the prime membership means a certain amount of complicity in the practices of the company.

I've got one too so am just as complicit as yourself, but if it needs raising so the staff have basic levels of comfort, then it should never have been so cheap in the first place.

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

Remember when we believed that a clever, fully interconnected system would make everybody's life easier?

Man, nothing like taking years of reality like a brick to the back of the skull...

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

Check the other comments. This only stopped people managing their car from their phones when outside of bluetooth range.

Fobs and keycards are provided (and anybody who relies upon their phone not running out of battery rather than bringing the keycard is blatantly asking to get screwed)

Activision shareholders demand Kotick's head after CEO 'failed' to take claims of staff sex assault seriously

Re: How is the latest Call of Duty selling?

CoD is a cash cow, no doubt, but it's a buy once own forever kind of deal (I have no doubt that Activision have added in microtransactions), but it's Warcraft that has the most profitable business model. Huge numbers of expansions sold and £10/$15 subscription fees from all the active players.

I cancelled my sub a couple of weeks after the original lawsuit came to light but I hear that Shadowlands is going to probably be a 3 year expansion that's already been received poorly.

People have called WoW a dead game for years now but I fear that it truly is collapsing under its own weight now.

Billion-dollar US broadband bonanza awaits Biden's blessing – what you need to know

The new internet satellite constellations cannot be considered in the same field as traditional geostationary satellite internet.

Starlink satellites sit between around 550km up.

Geostationary orbit is 35,786km up.

It won't be able to compete with a decent FTTC connection, but the two systems are leagues apart.

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

Re: Amateurs

"Why would I want to be a manager? I want to work for a living."

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

The problem with any concept that you can configure something without code is that you always need something just as complicated as code to actually do the heavy lifting in the configuration space.

People keep falling for this concept without realising that anybody who can understand the labyrinthine rules behind the codeless configuration will be fully capable of dealing with code based configuration anyway. Do the managers really think that it's (a) going to be possible for them to futz around in the config without a huge learning curve or (b) anywhere near a good idea for somebody who hasn't climbed that curve to mess around in a configuration file?

WTF is 'Computing First Networking'? Think load balancers for the age of edge

Re: "have a role streaming video into cars to entertain their occupants"

I remember that Land Rover implemented a special front screen back around 2008-2012ish that would show different things depending on the viewing angle. This meant that a passenger could watch a film while the driver would only see the sat nav or w/e.

Cool idea, but would be pretty grim to actually drive a full car and great distance I think.

Amazon hasn't launched one internet satellite yet, but it's now planning a fleet of 7,774

Re: Climate change?

All makes sense, thanks for the explanation :)