* Posts by ArrZarr

1182 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2015

Hurricane Ian blows NASA Artemis Moon launch into October or November

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Epic story soon to be the stuff of legends. Dear deer.

Demeter is the goddess of plants. We only have winter because she sulks for a third of the year when Persephone is off with her Husband.

Artemis is the good version of Apollo, except where rockets named after the twins are concerned.

Good news for UK tech contractors as govt repeals IR35 tax rules

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It sounds like somebody needs to re-watch Yes, Minister.

Meta, Google learn the art of the quiet layoff

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Re: reminds me of this game

You played Musical chairs and had a butler to stop the music?

You are Jacob Rees-Mogg and I claim my £5 (£7, adjusted for inflation)

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Re: Too many staff?

Well...yeah. Having somebody to talk for when you get stuck is a feature on mid/premium plans on software tools the world over.

Hate on Google all you like, but it just makes sense to get people to work with the clients who pay you the most money.

Internet Society recommends development of Solar-System-scale routing framework

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Re: Sounds great...

Obligatory XKCD - https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030

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Re: Embrace, Extend, Extract

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.

Blue Monday for Blue Origin as rocket bursts into flame

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I'd say you're splitting hairs somewhat there.

It really, truly sucks to be a passenger of the automatic abort system's activation on a rocket, but it's considerably more passenger-friendly than goddamn huge fireballs tearing up your jacksie.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

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Re: Coburg-Gotha-von-Battenberg

It kinda does work logically - the crown rents a lot of land to parliament and parliament makes a huge profit from that land.

No different to any other lease.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Coburg-Gotha-von-Battenberg

To be fair, they've averaged almost 60 years per constitution in the past 200 years.

That's about 0.81 metric QE2s per constitution.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Coburg-Gotha-von-Battenberg

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.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: A very sad day

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.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Goodbye Elizabeth II

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.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: God Save the King!

Well the surely the proper terminology would be

"The Queen is dead. Long live the King"

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Joke

Re: King Andrew in the hot seat

Matt Lucas is 23rd in line for the throne? That sounds like a destination worth getting to for me!

Google, YouTube ban election trolls ahead of US midterms

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Re: 12 Minutes of Democrats Denying Election Results

[Citation needed]

California lawmakers approve online privacy law for kids. Which may turn websites into identity checkpoints

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Pirate

Re: Won't somebody think of the adults?

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.

ArrZarr Silver badge

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.

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

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Re: FUD?

30/60/10 Desktop/Mobile/Tablet.

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Facepalm

Re: FUD?

I'm impressed that you can even use the internet without clicking on any link that sends you to another page on the same domain.

Is it like a cult where the journey of a thousand miles will never start because you won't take the first step?

ArrZarr Silver badge

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.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

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.

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

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Mushroom

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

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Facepalm

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'

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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.

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Childcatcher

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

Icon: NOPE

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Re: I approve

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

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

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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

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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

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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

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Devil

You joke, but half of those are legitimate uses.

ArrZarr Silver badge

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.

ArrZarr Silver badge

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

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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'

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Boffin

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

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Boffin

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

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"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).

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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.

ArrZarr Silver badge

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

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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

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Re: "better vehicles for greenwashing"

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

ArrZarr Silver badge

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

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Devil

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

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Oh. Yeah. My bad.

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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

ArrZarr Silver badge

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.