Re: Schooling
Bob, for all of his curmudgeonliness, lives on a planet of hope where the school system is within a spitting level of the most basic level of doing its job.
1189 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2015
There are different levels to it and it really depends on the goals of the tracking. Something like El Reg doesn't need complex tracking (although I really hope they aren't just throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks with all the redesigns)
Standard GA, for example, doesn't come with button tracking by default, it just tracks which webpages people see. How people navigate between the pages isn't picked up - they may be typing URLs in directly, for example and you'd have no way of knowing.
Then there's event tracking where you're looking at user flow. This is most useful for something like a conversion path (think basket -> order confirmation page). The page tracking will show you that 50% of people aren't getting from the card details page to the final "Are you sure?" page so there might be something wrong. This level of tracking will show that 90% of people are clicking the next button so that 40% discrepancy indicates an issue with that specific button.
Level three is something like hotjar where the position of the user's cursor is tracked on site. This is still aggregated and you end up with a heatmap of cursor location, which is somewhat usable as a proxy for where the user is looking. This is used for specific UX issues as you can check if the Buy Now button isn't in the best spot or some important option/information isn't being found by people.
This sounds like level 4 where sessions are recorded. Seems like it would be tricky to deal with on something getting the volume of Papa John's site but I've seen this used on very low volume, very high complexity checkouts in the automotive sector where people buy cars online going through the configurator and finance and everything. The fields were all blurred by the software but it made sense in that situation because selling a £100k car is worth a lot of effort to the manufacturer.
Sure, but the size of the fields and landscape aren't very similar the world over.
Compare Iowa to County Durham. One is an unbelievably flat regular patchwork, the other is only hills with irregularly shaped fields to account for that.
I'm not going to pretend to know much about farming, but there is an obvious difference in the size and regularity of fields compared between the two.
The tourism money is good.
More technically, the Royal family owns a lot of land that is leased to Parliament and creates far more revenue for the government than the Royal family cost to keep.
Frankly, it just doesn't make financial sense to abolish the monarchy.
I'm no monarchist, but that's overly reductive.
Yes, abdication was an option for her at any point in her 70 years as queen, but it doesn't take into account qualities like a sense of duty or loyalty.
It's a very restrictive life in a lot of ways. Waited on hand and foot, but lacking in a lot of the freedoms that us commoners enjoy. She has her own set of freedoms, of course, but it's hardly a simple life to be even a constitutional monarch.
I remember that our history teacher tried to trip us up with asking what the Monarch's House (or whatever the nomenclature is) in 1914 and 1918 in two consecutive questions.
Half the class looked at the poster at the back of the room and decided that since it was the same king, obviously the answer was the same for both questions.
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions they claim maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessarily limited to, the state[1] and capitalism.
Please don't sully the good name of anarchists by relating them to the religious right.
Depends on the wording of the bill. If it's similar to the EU's GDPR, then it will apply to any service that can be accessed by an individual who is legally resident in the state (and therefore subject to any privacy laws).
I believe that GDPR is worded in such a way that the apparent location of the EU citizen is also irrelevant - they are protected by it by virtue of being an EU citizen and nothing more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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.