Posts by ArrZarr

Re: All this hoopla for nothing

Considering that it is a virtual world, what makes you think that the above are unmanageable?

Sun glare is a visibility inhibitor in a specific direction - reducing view distance towards the virtual sun will handle it,

Intense rain is another visibility inhibitor, as is (falling) snow - reduce the view distance of the simulated car again.

Snow/ice on the road is a modifier to the coefficient of friction - have a variable changing unexpectedly

Awkward potholes can be inserted for maximum awkwardidity or virtual road surfaces could just have a "council budget" slider - all modifiable parameters.

On top of that, autonomous vehicles do not need to be perfect before they are better than humans, they just need to be better than humans to be better than humans.

Re: We have surely reached peak beard.

Getting very fed up of people thinking that how other people choose to present themselves is any of their business, so if you are: try being an individual and let them be as it has nothing to do with you*. You definitely sound like a pillock. And it sounds like all you ever taste is a dog's arse.

Oh, and for the love of God, ditch the bloody "Wiser than thou" attitude, and think about how somebody could take the piss out of your post - there are other assholes on the internet too, you muppet. And keep sitting there staring out the window like a drooling imbecile.

Jesus, you make me puke.

*outside of a professional environment

Bravo, Sir!

Re: cheating

That wouldn't be caught by this anti-cheating code - while not intended by the developers, messing with the options provided in game is, at worst, an exploit. In this case, it's not something that the game can readily detect, even before you consider the legitimate reasons for running the game below your screen's max resolution (eeking performance out of a weak PC as one example)

This anti cheat code is there to stop external code that modifies play, whether that be changing map files so that a section of floor is missing so that you can skip a series of bosses (WoW - AQ40), have the computer do your aiming for you (aimbots), having it so you have infinite ammo/removing the need to reload, changing the speed you move at. The list is pretty much endless.

Re: Bah!

Roses are Red

Violets are Blue

Huawei have said

Our tech can woo.

Re: Hardware mute buttons which didn't mute

"not-quiet-a-mute button"

I see what you did there

Personally, I've always considered AMfM to make the most sense when you take the name literally.

Re: Who is paying?

EDIT: I misread your question. Turns out that people in general trust paid search links and Shopping results. They do tend to be more relevant than the natural search results as they're much more directly curated to search terms than the SEO guys can achieve. Original answer below.

To answer seriously rather that all the (not entirely unjustified) paranoid rantings above:

- "Google web properties revenues – ad money from Google's own websites – were $27bn"

This is companies paying for Paid Search ads at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That could either be the text ads (PPC/CPC) or the shopping ads (PLA/LIA). The shopping tab on the results page also pays into this. This also includes Youtube pre/post roll ads and banner ads on youtube, Google+ etc.

- "Google network revenues – display ad cash from non-Google sites – were $5.6bn"

This is also companies paying for banner ads, just from the rest of the web. Google has nowhere near the dominance in the display market that it enjoys in the search and shopping markets, but still buys ad space on second & third party sites (A quick look at El Reg's ads shows me that they most likely use the Google Display Network (GDN)). In this case, the Company pays Google who, in turn, pays sites for screen real-estate.

To round off this overly long answer, the revenue for all of the advertising cash Google is raking in comes from the same place that pays millions for an ad slot during the Superb Owl or the world cup.

Re: What counts as 'disabled'?

Agreed.

The other thing that stuck out to me was that it appears that they're including those in and out of employment, of which you can assume that there will be a higher proportion of disabled people out of employment, leaving them with less disposable income to spend on luxuries like smartphones.

Goanna be honest, the Goon Show never made me think - the mental exercise achieved while listening was more along the lines of keeping up with whatever crazy bollocks was happening...on the radio version of "On Screen".

That being said, Spike Milligan's approach to humor seems to have been to keep throwing jokes at the script/book until there was *something* to make you laugh. I'm pretty sure that at no point in his 83 years did he ever meet a joke he didn't like.

Well they were shopping at Worries PC Hurled, so that shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

Re: With every new device there is a Windows 10 Install

The problem being that there's no clever way to link windows 7 to the word apocalypse like we had with the XPocalypse in 2014.

I might humbly suggest the Armaseven, the 7radgedy or the bowl of petunias, but they lack the zing of the first time around.

Re: Rule of thumb: the bigger they are, the less poisonous they tend to be (there are exceptions)

[citation needed]

Here is the appropriate wikipedia link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae

Re: took the day off

I have considered sending in a story to On Call but the details would be too recognisable to my boss who also reads El Reg.

Suffice to say we have had one person on 1st level support for 9 months, including on call.

Re: and ECHELON?

Officially, as a country, you aren't supposed to steal knowledge.

Unofficially, as a country, you are supposed to steal knowledge.

The line between Officially and Unofficially is quite fuzzy.

China can't see the line. They are taking, as it were, the IPiss.

Re: Facebook's shadow profile.

How about:

Adblockers (probably) don't block sponsored posts, so companies can still put advertising in your timeline. These are still targeted.

Adblockers don't block Non-Sponsored posts, so FB can look at your profile and still put companie's regular posts (still counts as advertising) in your timeline. These are still targeted.

You may not believe that these affect you/that you ignore them but they do sit in the back of your mind - if nothing else as knowledge that a product, service or company exists. If FB get hacked, suddenly the hackers know everything about you and can use that for whatever nefarious purpuse they like.

The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that you're smarter than the people trying to get this information and monetize it. Being smart is fine until you're blindsided and nobody has a monopoly on ideas.

Re: Well, if they don't think it's fair...

Libertarian =/= Bob.

Libertarianism simply means that you believe people should be free.

Bob appears to believe that governmental sadism is defendable.

On the matter at hand, if the big ISPs can't compete with a government IT project, then they don't deserve to stay in business.

Re: Oh good

For now, humans are the gold standard of driving quality (let that terrifying thought sink in for a moment...) so having the AI work towards human equivalence is the best we've got for the weird situations that will always crop up.

Clarification for those not in the business -

PPC (pay per click) links are the sponsored links at the top of the page, managed through adwords; have the bejesus tracked out of them.

SEO (search engine optimisation) links are put there by the algorithm that Google obfuscates to stop SEMs (search engine marketers) gaming the system too hard.

For the sake of completeness, Google Shopping is PLA (product listing ads) or LIA (local inventory ads) and also paid but, certainly where I work, are treated as distinct entities for the different knowledge required in managing the adwords accounts.

For the sake of further completeness, these are entirely seperate again to the banner and video ads that we all know, love and block.

If only one system relies upon the certificate, and that isn't something checked by another system to inform other systems (or even people) of the failure, then that system can grind to a halt without anything else caring.

Five great charters knit the land

Together linked, hand in hand

One in the people who hold the power

Two in the folk who heal the sour

Three and Five became the civil service

Four engineers this endless circus

Re: If only...

I think you'll find that they work perfectly in abort mode. The difficulty is getting the cars to turn abort mode on automatically.

Re: SAP and Salesforce?

So, you're asking an El Reg journo to go from biting the hand that feeds IT to biting the hand that feeds it?

Mine's the one with a note in the pocket to say that the joke only works if I use the gender neutral pronoun.

Re: I have friends in Hull

I used to live in Hull.

Now I live south of the Humber and cross the bridge every workday.

Partly the mortgage is cheaper, partly I can be with Zen internet.

Well worth the bridge toll.

Re: Who had the loss?

It's Google destroying the last vestiges of a free society? I thought the government could be trusted to do that without supervision. Guess the govt. screwed that up as well then.

Re: I rather like it, but for one detail

Any device in the 17" Screen range will definitely have a numeric keypad due to the extra real estate necessitated by matching the larger screen.

What you've got to watch out for more is the keyboard layout (ANSI vs ISO). The different enter key will drive you wild if you make a mistake.