* Posts by ArrZarr

1182 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2015

Science and engineering hit worst as Euroboffins do a little Brexit of their own from British universities

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Well, you're leaving

In all honesty, I was very on the fence between leave & remain for a long time.

I have no doubt that, managed well, leaving the EU would bring benefits to the UK.

I then asked myself if I trusted the Government to manage leaving the EU well.

Needless to say, I wasn''t on the fence any more.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Brexit bollocks

As opposed to when the 2014 referendum was held and the Tories weren't in power?

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

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Re: ORLY?

Wasn't it that it was called 4X because the brewers were too stupid to spell "Beer"?

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Heavy...

My first laptop was a desktop replacement running an early Core2 Duo. It's not as heavy as yours (still a distinctly resilient 7.5kg) but when it was running you certainly didn't need to have the heating on as well.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Heavy...

to my knowledge, describing something physical as a job/jobbie/jobie is basically like describing something as a thing, and you need to figure out what whoever is saying the word is talking about from context. In this case it's an old house. It might be a Yorkshireism but not sure on that.

Neuroscientist used brainhack. It's super effective! Oh, and disturbingly easy

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Holmes

Re: Eternal life is thus possibly within reach

You are CGP Grey and I claim my £5.

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's personal MiG-29 fighter jet goes under the hammer

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Re: I'll bet a plugged nickle ...

To be fair, the MiG is a 2-seater so it's only $100,000,000 for the pack.

UK taxpayers funded Grand Theft Auto V maker to tune of £42m – while biz paid no corp tax and made billions

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: The FIFTH sequel?!

But skip the first because that's before the series realised that being something other than a pure GTA clone was probably a good idea.

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

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Re: Truth in advertising

I protest!

All my pizza boxes are empty.

Also, I'm not a hacker.

Hull be damned: KCOM shuts shop as UK High Court waves through £627m Macquarie deal

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Happy

Re: Is this the end of cream coloured phone boxes?

Well if they outsourced their HQ to India, then some of their staff my speak English.

He's coming home, he's coming... Hutchins' coming home: British Wannacry killer held in US on malware dev rap set free by judge

ArrZarr Silver badge
Headmaster

"The exception that proves the rule"

It's an interesting fact that in the sense of this statement, "proves" is was originally intended in the sense of "proving ground".

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

To be fair, Britain was busy developing Black knight which lead to Black Arrow, which was then abandoned.

We are the only country to have the dubious distinction of developing a functional orbital launch system and then giving up on it.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Mushroom

It says a lot about the optimism of the era that this could even be offered as a prize.

It says a lot more about the fucking beancounters that so little has happened on the matter in the past fifty damn years.

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

ArrZarr Silver badge
Headmaster

I really hope that DR stands for something other than Disaster Recovery in that context.

Gamers get a chance to battle an AI on the QT. Plus: Robo-marines, and fisticuffs over facial recognition in Detroit

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Re: General (5 stars) Electric

I doubt that the props run on petrol either, use the ICE to generate leccy and all is solved.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Any sensible mage is busy cooking up magic missiles and such from the comfort of their own home and lobbing the resulting highly volatile concoction as far away as possible to get out of the blast zone.

This is why all my mages get multiple fireballs shoved into their spell sequencers, gotta have a nice fire going to cook something up.

Good luck deleting someone's private info from a trained neural network – it's likely to bork the whole thing

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Manna Mania ......... Is such a condition recognised for discovery to uncover?

On the note of AIs, you know how feeding an AI good literature to train one to write prose gives bad results?

I wonder what would happen if we gave them your posts.

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

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Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

Have her look at the injury figures shortly after helmets were issues to British troops in WW1, same point but much more visceral.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

Ooh, telling them about neutrinos is evil.

I love it.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Meh

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

To be fair to the fruitcakes, frequency can be important when you get to the pointy end of the spectrum.

They just don't realise that visible light is way closer to the pointy end of the spectrum than 5G waves.

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

ArrZarr Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: up to a 20 per cent pay cut overnight... For many, the cost of their current mortgage

It's not that they're paying less for their mortgage.

It's that they're well paid enough so that it's only 20% of their income.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

ArrZarr Silver badge
Devil

Rule #1 of a good presentation: Don't read from the slide

Rule #1 of showing your working for marks: Write everything you were going to say on the slide

Although one of my teachers was a bit nonplussed when I spent the whole presentation imitating his teaching style & accent (ignoring Rule #1 of a good presentation at the time)

Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Nice Picture

I prefer the A4 class and the Coronation (sans streamlining) myself.

I'm so sad that I'll likely never see a Princess Coronation blasting along at full steam.

UK Home Secretary doubles down on cops' deeply flawed facial recognition trials

ArrZarr Silver badge
Facepalm

I think Sajid is getting mixed up.

The Porn Block is about failing to catch pedophiles.

Facial Recognition is about failing to catch everybody else.

Edit: I might have needed to read that penultimate paragraph more closely.

Now that's just offal: Heap of pig guts hog road after truck spills load in Kansas City

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Coat

El Reg's writing style is to use everything but the oink.

RTFM: Wireless Broadband Alliance squeezes out 40-page ode to the joy of Wi-Fi 6

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Pint

Re: Wi-Fi 6 represents the end of the idea of wiring desks for Ethernet

Y'know, I was going to post something almost entirely identical to that but you've beaten me to it.

How DARE you.

Have a pint.

Frenzied bidding war for hot property KCOM as share price rockets by tuppence and a half

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

If you're on lightstream, then life on the web is gravy.

If you're not, then life on the web is gravelly.

I moved south of the Humber to get out of KC's monopoly* area and it's well worth paying the bridge toll every day to be with Zen.

*Techincally it's not a monopoly but practically, it is.

UK watchdog fined firms £3m for data breaches last year – before its GDPR balls dropped

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Marriot fine

$123M for 339M is a damn sight better than £250k for 500M as Yahoo got.

I would also posit that fining a company into oblivion hurts those at the bottom way more than it hurts those who made the decisions that lead to the breach.

I don't have a solution, just lingering malcontent.

Dear El Reg, Will Windows 10 break my VPN? I read it on the web so it must be true

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: RASMAN ? fuggedabowtit, use OVPN/Passepartoute and PiVPN

"Does anyone run a VPN using windows server as an endpoint?"

I'm going to hazard that yes, people run VPNs using windows server as an endpoint, even if for no other reason that the windows install base is goddamn massive.

You may as well ask if anybody is running on Dial-Up any more, which they probably are despite that being so obsolete that I can't imagine going back to it.

Boffins find asteroid with the shortest solar year of any space rock in our Solar System

ArrZarr Silver badge

Could it be the case that instead of having two general belts of asteroids (as defined on School astronomy charts), that the areas cleared by planets are actually the exception and there's just a general abundance of asteroids all around the solar system except for where planets have cleared a path?

Cool find though.

FBI and immigration officials trawling US driving licence databases for suspects

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: How is the different from a wanted poster?

The situations are reversed.

In the wanted poster example, a single image of a person or group of people who already have enough evidence behind them to proceed to further action is used.

In the driving license case, images of every driver are being checked to see if there's anything worth going after.

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

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Re: Accurate Ads

This isn't a defense or critique of how the targeting works currently, just an explanation of the likely chain of events

Assuming you visited the bargain sites for the hotel in London, which I think you must have done to get the information that booking direct from the hotel was cheaper, then what happened is the bargain sites seeing that you were interested in booking a room at that specific hotel and being unable to see that you did convert on the hotel's own site.

Even pre-GDPR, that information wouldn't be shared between sites. Now it's illegal.

Similarly, the events and offers for around London would come from different sites/organisations, running into the same problem as above.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Advertising: a business oriented-scam?

Facebook were generally overreporting the total views or total traffic. The traffic numbers they reported indicated that there was a lot more space for extra advertising to fill rather than the value of the advertising on the platform.

One of the clients I've worked for averaged out at 10% COS (£1 advertising -> £10 revenue) for CPC.

It's not about the grand campaigns (Old spice, Dear Kitten), a lot of advertising online is about getting the ad under the nose of somebody who is about to buy and ensuring they click on your blue link.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: ArrZarr - Accurate Ads

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” John Wanamaker (1838-1922)

You are entirely correct that advertising has been around forever.

Put a magazine ad out, you choose the magazine for its demographic - you'll do better getting an ad for an upcoming racing game into Nintendo Power than into Playboy. However a lot of the readers wouldn't be interested in the genre, wasting a proportion of your marketing spend by putting an ad in front of somebody who doesn't care.

What PPC and Display do, and what Google wants this data for, is to try and figure out who is interested specifically in racing games. Not only that, but you can see how many clicked an ad and how many converted to get the most out of the advertising budget.

Disclaimer: a lot of the following paragraph is Google's goal and is currently far from perfected

This is why you can always trust Google in the way you would trust an enemy - they will soldier on to the goal of knowing everything about everybody. If they know you, they know what you mean when you search for something. Their SEO results are the driving force here, if those were bad then nobody would use their search engine. Because their SEO results are good, they get a lot of eyeballs on SERPs and can combine your search with what they know about you to present ads that are relevant. With the tracking on sites, the advertiser/retailer can see what is working and what isn't working to a degree that would be unthinkable 15-20 years ago.

As has been pointed out, I am indeed one of these marketing bottom-feeders. Take that as you will, but even when working on the accounts, I didn't care who you were. If people searching for a keyword were converting, then we paid more for that keyword. If a demographic were converting well, then we would bid more for that demographic. Trying to figure anything out about an individual was (a) impossible and (b) so far from worthwhile as to be laughable.

My final point on the subject is that a lot of the common complaints about ads are not Google's fault, they are the advertiser's. It's the advertiser who decides that remarketing fridges to people who have already bought a fridge might want to see more fridges in ads. There are also limitations in what you can see, Go to Curry's site looking for a Fridge but then convert from Argos, then Currys will probably remarket fridges to you because they haven't seen that you've converted already.

Awaiting downvotes

Arrzarr

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Accurate Ads

Having seen the numbers, we see better results from targeted ads than untargeted. This is true across both PPC and Display which are the big two when it comes to targeted traffic.

No argument from me on oversaturation and post-conversion retargeting for big ticket items.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Accurate Ads

I address that in the following sentence where I point out that the data being collected for targeting is there to try and entice businesses to use a specific platform where they can get the best return by focusing on a smaller group of users.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Accurate Ads

Blocking ads is your choice.

In terms of Targeted ads and Location tracking, I can understand why you don't like them, that's also your choice.

Considering that most of the online economy is either ad supported, paywalled, retiail or loses money, it makes sense to try and improve ad targeting because the companies buying the ads also need to get their return.

Hate it as you do, a lot of the web straight up wouldn't exist without ads because the money has to come from somewhere. Do you think El Reg. survives on its merch store?

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: A new OS from Google

No. Google is a big company and does a lot of stuff.

Is it related to the data harvesting? To my knowledge, no.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: A new OS from Google

That's possibly because Monsieur Monett's comment implies the sort of rabid Google hate common in these forums.

Don't get me wrong. Google is extremely far from perfect. That being said, the data harvesting is the logical extreme of their core business' goal of giving the best search results and the most accurate ads* that they can.

In the context of this article, it appears that they're trying something where not much progress has been made with a security by design OS. if it's full to the brim with telemetry, that would suck but it's Open Source. The existence of solutions to existing problems around this design is only a good thing and will be out in the open where programmers can see how problems were solved. If it's really good, it may get its own GNU variant (Dahlia is Not Fuchsia).

*The typical response to this statement is that the ads aren't relevant to the user. This is mainly true for people who go out of their way preventing Google from knowing anything about them.

Your apprehensive servant,

ArrZarr

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

ArrZarr Silver badge
Happy

Re: "falling over" or "fell over" ...

Screw the C-Suite, I'm talking about client comms here - the people doing the work at the client will also need to translate "Greatly increased CPU load leading to cascading server failures" into "Fell over", but the externally facing paper trail is the formal bit.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: "falling over" or "fell over" ...

It has, however, always been a fairly informal way of indicating a TITSUP*. Hopefully we can now treat it as a technical term.

*Toppling IT Servers Uncovering Problems

ArrZarr Silver badge
Happy

I will most certainly be using Cloudflare's update including the phrase "...caused primary and secondary systems to fall over." as a reason to include the term "Falling over" as a technical term for TITSUP* situations. If it's good enough for their CEO, it's good enough for me.

*Total Inability To Send Users Pages

UK.gov pledges probe into tourists' 'motivations'

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Re: Thus guaranteeing

<original>

I'm so hip, they had to replace one of them for being too hip

</original>

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Joke

Re: Thus guaranteeing

Then come here on Holiday instead.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Happy

Re: The Britain Experience

I think you'll find that misanthropy is the true national sport of England.

We're certainly better at it than football.

What happens in Vegas ... will probably go through the huge bit barn Google is building in Nevada

ArrZarr Silver badge
Joke

Re: Bloody Cloudflare!

Twenty minutes of Cloudflare outage is even more entertaining than El Reg!

Former UK PM Tony Blair urges governments to sort out online ID

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Coat

Re: German ID cards

So what you're saying is that they didn't Nick Kew?

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Unhappy

Re: Yeuch...

The Tories really are that bad.

It's just depressing that Labour manage to be worse.

It's a good job that there are so many other relevant parties who have a hope of getting into power.

BOFH: What's Near Field Implementation? Oh, you'll see. Turn left here

ArrZarr Silver badge
Happy

Re: BOFH really is becoming more userfriendly

There was a BOFH a while back where he considers the four kinds of user. One of these kinds, he's well disposed to - namely the ones who don't need much work from him to get them on the right track.

Sneaky fingerprinting script in Microsoft ad slips onto StackOverflow, against site policy

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Boffin

I would suggest that a good amount of it does represent value for money for the companies paying for the ads.

Online channels are very "Data rich", you can take a single ad and see exactly how many people saw it, how many clicked on it, how many converted through it etc. That is an impossible task for newspaper ads, billboards, Superbowl ads.

You also get different types. Awareness campaigns are run, I don't think these provide value for money because they have the intent to splurge out as many ads as possible to as many people as possible. Other campaigns will try to get you to buy something directly because there's a sale on.

SEO vs PPC is difficult. SEO is reliant upon a good number of people visiting the page along with myriad other factors, but highly specific pages are difficult to get ranked because their traffic is comparatively lower. Managing SEO is difficult because Google obfuscates as much of what's going on as possible as part of their work on getting people to stop gaming the system

PPC gives the advertiser a lot more control over exactly when and where they want a very specific ad to appear to get the searcher - Size 12 red dress can go directly to a dynamic search page which wouldn't necessarily have ever been seen by a search engine's scraping bot.

There is also a certain amount of irony in those who block any tracking to the extent that Google et al. have a minimal view of you as a person and then saying that the results they get are irrelevant.