Posts by find users who cut cat tail

No Google Play, no problem: Huawei pinches global phone sales crown off Samsung

Re: "or 30 per cent fewer phones"

If you read the entire paragraph, it's clearly:

Huawei down 5%

Samsung down 30%

It does not compare them. But I was originally a bit confused too…

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

Re: The complaint seems confused

Then if you misidentify a significant proportion of users and serve them the wrong content your advertising is likely to be less effective than when you serve neutral or random ads - a lot of folk might be a bit sensitive about having their gender misidentified

Nonsense.

If you serve random ads then half of the time people will see ads for the wrong sex (gender, whatever). If the thing works then this ratio will be [considerably] lower – by definition.

Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific... for Microsoft

Distraction

> the lack of distracting colleagues

Even though colleagues can be sometimes distracting, most people here – including me – prefer to work at work because there is much less distraction there than at home. The only thing the pandemic did was to accentuate the difference.

From Accompli to Microsoft to Google: G Suite chief Javier Soltero chases the 'complete collaborative experience'

Axiom of choice

‘Survive the axiom of choice’?

I mean, the axiom of choice is a strange one and can be difficult to deal with, with all the non-constructive proofs of existence of counterintuitive objects and stuff. But it does not tend to be life-threatening…

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Re: Statistics

This all depends on how you define the baseline…

If your baseline is close to non-stress environment, then stress-free tests show results closer to true skill and stress environment shows the effect of stress. This is probably a reasonable baseline – and the conclusion would be then that even though the women were in fact more skilled they performed worse under stress. You can also choose the baseline differently. The only objective conclusion is the relative shift of performance when the amount of stress changes. In other words, women's performance was more sensitive to stress.

But unless you think stress the work environment should be as large as possible, it is kind of difficult to argue that removing stress disadvantages someone.

Re: but this can't be true

Sure, and why you had to write in weight?

Because no one says just ‘a kilo of apples and a kilo of gravel are equal’. The reaction to that would be ‘WTF?’ – and rightfully so.

Equal without qualifies means equal in all aspects that could be considered. Equal with qualifies limits the equality to some aspects. The qualifiers can be implicit – you might not have to always add ‘under the law’ if it there is enough context to make clear you mean this kind of equal. But your kilo example is just silly.

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Re: Where will this end....

Next? They find out maths exists and demand that ‘perfect number’ must be replaced because it imposes an unrealistic standard of beauty…

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

Re: Excel excels

As I was recently at the receiving end of data provided in Excel, with same data each time organised differently in a dozen ways, I'd say that versatility comes at a cost…

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

Do you want to render the Mandelbrot set or solve Sudoku? Use SQL[ite]!

Yes, the examples are ‘outlandish’ and typical SQL usage looks a bit different. But shell is undeniably a programming language – even if most of the time we use it to run simple commands.

Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS

> Inertia is a powerful thing. People are lazy and afraid of change.

That's why you need the everyone uses Inkscape, it's the default for vector drawing approach. You will get nowhere with the inferior replacement for program X mindset. And around here it's true that basically everyone uses Inkscape. Some creative types may do some weird things on their Macs. But it has always been so (and is not going to change), so they don't matter.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

Re: Are there no other people of colour that read this rag?

No. That would be denylist (single word like blacklist) and it would at least make some sense. There are about six ways to parse phrases like

What most deny lists then become…

I'm doing this to stop humans ripping off brilliant ideas by computers and aliens, says guy unsuccessfully filing patents 'invented' by his AI

> What happens when a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization visits Earth?

They may laugh, shrug or puke and leave as fast as they can…

What they will not do? Fill USPTO patent applications.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: The Modern UI/UX

I would say I am pretty familiar with point and click GUIs – and I am still regularly baffled by basic controls concealed in obscure places.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Re: Trying to teach...

> It might be making them up.

It might be as well. Most likely the spreadsheet was created by a monkey, is mislabelled and generally confusing, has errors in formulae, requires manual steps and workarounds – and probably subtracts dates from telephone numbers too.

Delicious irony: Credit rating builder Loqbox lets customer details and card numbers slip after 'sophisticated attack'

The biggest loss is not the customer details. The biggest loss for society is that ‘credit rating builder’ is a valid (and possibly necessary) service.

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

Re: It's optional

Depending on your target audience, that may be a good thing.

From WordPad to WordAds: Microsoft caught sneaking nagging Office promos into venerable text editor beta

Re: To be fair...

> question whether content is worth anything to anyone other than the website owners

But that's perfectly OK because the website owners can pay for hosting if they want people to see their content. It used to be normal and many still do that. Web went to hell exactly the moment when everyone decided to not pay and instead [try to] make many through ads.

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

Re: "hovering up of data"

Please take your pills.

Globo PC sales up for first time in 7 straight years – but market still 25% down on 2011

Re: Globo?

It was a shield the poor ‘a’ held against what was coming next – and now look what happened to it…

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

Re: 2038

time_t is not meant for storing historical dates. If you do that you have much bigger problems than Y2038. You cannot use negative time_t values (they might work, but it is not guaranteed).

So, what are you talking about?

What if everyone just said 'Nah' to tracking?

Day-in, day-out, people and algorithms work to remove non-responsive target audiences from who they advertise to.

Perhaps, but if it is so they then add those audiences right back. Otherwise everyone would have stopped advertising to me long time ago.

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

Re: "Lightsaber"

So do you travel to Wien, Venezia, Praha, Москва, etc.? Or Vienna, Venice, Prague and Moscow?

If Americans misname places everywhere in the world then we can reciprocally (mis)name places in the US.

Fuming French monopoly watchdog is so incensed by Google's 'random' web ad rules, it's fining the US giant, er, <1% annual profit

Re: no smoke without fire

Exactly. There is only a single reason for saying ‘have never been convicted of doing’. They did it and cannot even deny it because there is no doubt about it and such blatant lying could itself get them into trouble.

Tracking President Trump with cellphone location data, Greta-Thunberg-themed malware, SharePoint patch, and more

Re: "Everyone is trackable, traceable, discoverable to some degree.”

I agree with the sentiment. On the other hand, getting robbed and killed is rarely a necessary part of something people want. Whereas tracking…

Even discounting the idiots who cannot find a store across the street without GPS, lots of services can only really work by identifying you, getting your location and cross-referencing it with some big database (i.e. sending it somewhere ‘to the cloud’). Often even not keeping history of locations would break them, to varying degree.

I do not use any such service (in fact do not even carry any phone most of the time), but many people do and do like them. Trying to forbid the tracking part of tracking may prove rather unpopular (read: impossible). You can forbid by law the data selling part – and it should be forbidden. But will it be enough?

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Re: This is probably a dumb question...

> This is probably a dumb question...

Yes.

Without any apparent irony, Google marks Chrome's 'small' role in web ecosystem

Re: One task done properly

Bank websites are generally terrible... But with uMatrix you can at least allow things like 3rd party cookies selectively with precise control.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

The entire microspectroscopy thing is a scam. Yes, it will measure some spectra and report some composition of the food. It will make happy people who do not know enough about chemistry and IR spectroscopy (and statistics) to question the results – and that's the entire point.

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

Re: Really?

> 'Fucked' means 'really' in Slovak...

It would sound the same only if English had final-obstruent devoicing and the final ‘d’ was pronounced as ‘t’. But few people notice...

Breaking, literally: Microsoft's fix for CPU-hogging Windows bug wrecks desktop search

Fixed

If SearchUI.exe cannot launch, that prevents it from using too much CPU. Problem solved. What are you complaining about?

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

Re: Posted AC so I don't look like too big of a tool

> Which particular rock have you been living under?

You have to be an IT guy who follows the development to find out. Most people are not. The thing they do requires (or can be done better with) some programming. If they installed Python x.y and it still works for them, that's what they still use. Even I learned about Python 2 EOL quite some time after its originally planned 2015 EOL, and compared to most, I am that IT guy...

So I will ask the opposite question: where and how was everyone supposed to find out?

Name any source and I can tell you: few people follow that.

Finally! A solution to 42 – the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

Re: Nice.

Actually, Wiles' theorem proves Fermat's old conjecture. But I'm afraid Wiles has zero chance of his name being associated with the theorem in popular media...

Q. If machine learning is so smart, how come AI models are such racist, sexist homophobes? A. Humans really suck

Re: Not at all clear how to decide what is biased

If this was reflected in training sets and this in turn was reflected in the output of an AI trained using these sets would the result be 'biased'?

This. The problem everyone is trying to pretend it does not exist.

The real world is a messy place. All kinds of things are correlated with all kinds of other things -- for reasons good, bad and random. Often the reason is simple: History took a specific course. You don't have the entire multiverse available for training.

The more inputs and outputs, the more odd correlations the classifier will find. And as you say there isn't really any way to sort them out. We would need some automated way, perhaps some sort of AI? Right...

We are always getting headlines about sex and race. But that's just the tip of an iceberg.

Everyone remembers their first time: ESA satellite dodges 'mega constellation'

Re: Telecom Companies Rule

> All the telecom companies on Earth are stutteringly terrified by Starlink and others of it's ilk.

All? Maybe American... Why would be ISPs here terrified by Starlink? They offer 200 Mb/s and better latency for 13.5 € per month right now -- not in 2027.

But I am terrified by some company usurping low orbits.

My god, it's full of tsars: A gun-toting Russian humanoid robot is on its way to the International Space Station

Re: "the bot will be carrying out menial tasks"

> Why would they do any of the above?

What kind of question is that? That's what they do. You obviously don't live in Eastern Europe...

Thunderbolts and lightning very, very frightening as loo shatters, embedding porcelain shards in wall

Florida

Was it necessary to specify where the thing happened? There's only one possible place...

LibreOffice handlers defend suite's security after 'unfortunately partial' patch

Re: Linux: Remove LibreLogo

Normally, you should not need to remove LibreLogo from RedHat/Fedora/Centos. It's a separate subpackage, not installed by default with LO.

Kids can be so crurl: Lead dev unchuffed with Google's plan to remake curl in its own image

Re: Google has a vision

Google may have a vision, but their products are crap.

GMail is quite poor webmail UI-wise with terrible handling of threads. Its ability to filter e-mails is awesome though -- sometimes it even throws away replies to e-mails sent from GMail.

But what really made me laugh is `pretty good maps'. See a comparison: https://imgur.com/a/1yBHbKs. And this is still pretty much in the middle of a town where Google Maps should be strongest. For outdoors you just get blank rectangle from Google where other on-line maps show an actual map.

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Re: Oddly

Can't even tell the difference from here. Both Texas and Afghanistan are far, big and teeming with crazy people carrying guns.

Now that Microsoft have developed a thing which listens to your PowerPoint nonsense, could we finally stop? Please?

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

But if I want to keep myself moving – and motivated – it makes sense...

No, it doesn't.

LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents

Fourier

I love Fourier analysis and use it a lot. But when you find yourself needing it in a spreadsheet please take it as a slight nudge you are using the utterly wrong tool for the job...

Why telcos 'handed over' people's GPS coords to a bounty hunter: He just had to ask nicely

Re: Capitalism baby

> ...your ability to detect sarcasm.

Never encountered people saying exactly the same seriously? Lucky.

Wine? No, posh noshery in high spirits despite giving away £4,500 bottle of Bordeaux

Why would you care if it's Pepsi or Coke? Neither of them is beer.

Make America Infringe Again: Trump campaign video pulled over Batman copyright

Re: Let's move along

It's not Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump.

Now somebody should explain that to Mr. Trump.

You don't need a PhD to phish a Brit university: Nonprofit claims 100% hit rate is easy peasy

Re: Wot no web filtering

do much less 'x' per hour.

In a corporation the problem may be doing less X per hour.

In a university or other research institution, it is usually ‘we need to do X, Y and Z, none of which has ever been tried before’. Doing new things is the job description. Especially in hard sciences, where people regularly build their own devices, write software and invent ways how to control them, you can bet at least one of XYZ will be IT-related and impossible in locked down environment...

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

It's much more accurate. Last time I checked 3/14 ≈ 0.2142857, which is quite far from π. Or have Americans ruined fractions too?

In some countries dates are written with a dot (mine for instance), but the order is D.M, not M.D, so you can't get 3.14 anyway.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: Plaid shirt?

I must be in the 5% then. I couldn't describe what either means. Bloody English fashion jargon...

Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

Re: the error is in call it "AI" !!!

Automated stereotyping is actually an excellent description. We should switch to it immediately.

The goal is to classify (or otherwise map) a large and variable data set as lazily and efficiently as possible. So the NNs do the same thing we do -- pick some easy to spot things (proxies) that are correlated in the cases encountered so far. Because when we state the problem like that, this is simply the solution (in our case we arrived to it by evolution). Except, unlike us, the poor NNs cannot reason about it. Not that we do it often, but anyway...

'Now is the winter of our disk contents'... Decision on Lauri Love's seized gear due next week

Re: El Reg Headlines

I've yet to see a deadline which is about ‘delivering the work you promised’. They are arbitrary dates set by someone for you -- and then changed several times.

Never mind that naked selfie scandal... Brazil lights the, er, kindling, dot-Amazon saga roars back into life

Seriously? Even my country's TLD is based on the English name, not local -- as a bunch of them are. What does it have to do with anything?