Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Gibberish

Except that's not how "feed based" works. It doesn't need troves of personal information because 99% of the time, the "feed based" algorithms only feed you more of what you just looked at and "sponsored" stuff that is invariably unrelated to either you or your current feed or anything else you ever looked at. If it was genuinely using the data on you and what you have looked at historically, it would be dropping stuff in your feed that you've looked weeks, months or years in the past where there is new and interesting related stuff. But that never happens. It barely "remembers" what you looked at last week in terms of the feed content.

"Exactly. Display ads to raise revenue, just not targeted, personal-data-driven ads."

You'd think all this much vaunted AI would be able to target ads based on the users direct Facebook interaction and/or the conversations they are having and target ads related to the topic of conversation by now, without ever needing any personal data or huge trove of data. It has to better than bombarding you with ads for stuff you looked at two weeks ago and bought last week and now have no interest in buying again for a while.

Re: Thank you!

It is an interesting concept nonetheless. I agree that the way they've done it, it's at the very least morally dubious and possibly illegal. If they had done it the other way around, it would probably be just fine. ie they created a subscription service from the ground up and then later offered a "free" service so long as you consent to data collection and ads. Of course, no one will do it that way around because they all want the "free and rapid growth, monetise later" model.

Re: So how exactly is this different from "reward apps" ?

"Theres an app that gives back rewards for doing as the app company wants."

Precisely what I cam here to say too! the listed "tasks" and "challenges" are all basically "do more of what the app is for". Where's the creativity like, say, find 10 websites on a specific topic or some sort of virtual treasure hunt, or find 10 science achievements of the last century. It's absolutely clear this is designed to get people using it more simply by paying them to use it more. Growth not by being good, unique, better etc, but by bribing users.

Re: Finally Euorpe united

Possibly also part of the Americanization of El Reg, where "Europe" is some sort of country in it's own right.

Re: So, they are leaking cash

Maybe they learned from the "master" of casino operations, the only casino owner to lose money and go bankrupt. Do these owners have a future in politics too?

there's only 43-44 people being charged. The machines can only give out up to $2000 per ticket. They lost $millions over a fairly short period of time. It seems like a small number opf people were winning enough to have tickets to redeem and get an even bigger payout. It not only sounds organised, but they were winning anyway.

Or was it more subtle than that? Were there a small number people simply buying chips and then cashing them back in two tickets at a time? Are these 43-44 people being charged simply the ones who repeated the scam multiple times once they spotted while others only did it the one time, pockets the extra cash and left?

There seems to be gaps in the story outlining just what actually happened.

Re: Walk and Chew gum

Not really. If you look at the actual published flight objectives as opposed to what the press and media say, you'll find they fully expected failures. Just as they had with Falcon and the many attempted but RUD "landings". Most of the "failures" reported are what in crowdfunding terms would be "stretch objectives". They don't do "must succeed first time" style of development. You can argue that this may or may not be a better way of doing it, but it seems to be working for them. Having said that, look at the US early rocket development. They had way more fails than successes.

Re: Chinese architecture

"It's obvious Musk will at some point suggest using Starship. But that would be tasking SpaceX with too much since the company is already involved with the manned Lunar landings."

Much of what i needed and being developed for the Moon landing and the SpaceX side of things is also what will be needed for SpaceX to go to Mars, especially the orbital tankers and refuelling technology. And anyway, SpaceX (or at least Musk) want's to go to Mars anyway, so getting NASA funding to assist with that is exactly what they want.

Re: primary Don't use anything musk related

"but he would support using nazi's? so that's a thing"

Umm...yeah, it is. Both The USA and USSR kickstarted their Space Race with Nazi rocket scientists.

Re: The other rescopes

Or, look at how long it took for SpaceX to go from almost bankrupt to routinely launching and landing Flacon 9's and Heavies and project on from what Starship may do this year and where they may be in 15 years time. It might well be a spectacular failure, but I'd bet on Starship succeeding over that time. Even if Starship is never able to land and take off again from Mars, I'm fairly confident it will be able to deliver a Mars lander that could take off again, whether by taking fuel down with it or by generating fuel on the surface.

Musk may be an arse, but SpaceX has been delivering, despite him.

Re: By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing...

"We control the horizontal. We control the vertical"

Re: Glad I'm retired

"I've never actually been to Scunthorpe,"

I have. The best bit is the M180 past it, preferably heading West, not East :-)

Re: What is the legal situation here?

This is why Google and related "services" pop up a Ts&Cs every so often, especially if they have changed, and make you scroll down and press OK. Not reading them but still clicking OK is legally good enough to say you accepted the Ts&Cs.

I'm not defending Google here, there's plenty to blame them for, but the Ts&Cs banner/acceptance seems to be legally sound. (IANAL, if you don't believe me, pay for proper legal advice on this matter :-))

"No need for monitoring. Match the ad keywords to the words in the video description; then the ads are (more likely to be) relevant to the content being played."

From what I've gathered from some YouTybe channel operators, the title and description of the video, especially when first released, can make quite a difference to where it gets pushed by Youtube, eg in the "recommend" or "similar videos" links in the side bar. To such an extent that some have said they create "click bait" titles and descriptions for initial release to get the extra ranking score from the YT algorithm then change it later to something much more honest and descriptive when the views/votes etc take over in the rankings.

"BTW I'm sure a bunch of you won't have noticed how the free site theregister.com has adverts all of its pages because you use an Ad blocker in your browser."

In my case, uBlock Origin and Ghostery are disabled for El Reg domains. I still don't see ads though. Probably because I still use NoScript. If that happens to block the ads, then it's because I don't trust 3rd party scripts from random ad providers and it's up to them to find a way to present the ads without using scripts or to deliver them from one of El Regs own domains (making them responsible for any malware delivered from said domains). In the case of El reg, I'd pay for a guaranteed ad-free site visit, but they don't provide that option.

Re: they just delete it without warning

"And... what's with the fact that half their adverts are scams?"

What? Only half? Have they had a major crackdown on scammers or something? :-)

"Why isn't there a nice graphical config page with radio buttons and check boxes for every option and a paragraph of text explaining what each one does?"

The hard disk isn't big enough to hold that much data if you want every key documented. And there is a finite amount of time before the heat death of the universe. There's no point in starting a job you know you can't finish before the end of all life.

Re: Crabby old greybeard

"I just use, and sit down for this, desktop shortcuts to what I need and use keyboard shortcuts or a few strategic mouse clicks to launch programs."

Back in the olden days, when it was possible to customise the start menu and create folders/sub-menus etc, it worked pretty much as you describe, just a couple of clicks to your most used stuff, items were where you put them, and they stayed there. Of course, only "advanced users" knew how to do that. "Noobs" just filled their desktops up with shortcuts all over the place :-)

TL;DR

"precious little snowflakes"

Downvoted after getting that far through the rant.

Re: If you read the Windows EULA carefully, you'll note the words...

I only use Windows at work and so it's an "enterprise" build. It's Win10 and I have seen stuff such as "recommendations", ie "ads" in both the task notifications and the start menu. Rarely, I admit, but no obvious way to turn them off. Maybe it's more obvious to people who use it more often than I do.

Re: I never split the bill when I had my girlfriend with me on expense

Our company always books the hotel with a meal allowance. I can spend as much as I like, but if I go over the meal allowance, I get billed at reception when checking out. So there's no issue with taking my wife if I so choose since the company only ever sees the booking agency bill for room+allowance, never broken down into individual items.

The last time I was down in London, it was for a couple of days. I was asked to extend to 3 days. No problem, a small but decent hotel 45mins out of town 5 mins walk from the railway station was my digs, with a direct route to one of London's main stations, 5 mins walk from the job. I called my boss to make sure it was ok by him and he says "yeah, but stay another night, no need to travel after a full days work and it's coming out of someone else's budget anyway!" :-)

Re: failed meeting

I'd have thought a "major agricultural irrigation system" would be scaled in gallons, not pints. But then the US Gall is also different to the UK gall, so...erm...yeah, same problem, as you were :-)

Re: failed meeting

"If only Boris was still our illustrious leader you could have taken the Boris Bridge he planned to cross the Irish Sea"

Even by US standards, that would still have been a hell of a drive from Heathrow up to Scotland, across to Northern Ireland, then all the way back down to Dublin in the Republic of Ireland :-)

Similar here. Scored "nice" hotels a couple of times over the years, c£500/night, but rarely had the time to do more than enjoy a nice evening meal, sleep, a nice breakfast and then moving on. Not by any stretch of the imagination like the articles hero or many of the stories recounted in the comments, but still a nice treat :-)

Re: Not interested

"Thirdly, if a particular place gets a reputation for being mostly scam ads, the big legitimate companies, the ones with really big advertising budgets, won't want to be seen next to them."

I doubt they look for or monitor stuff like that unless it becomes such an issue that people start talking about it and maybe the media pick up on it and report it publicly on TV/radio etc.

Re: Not interested

"When sites become too enshitified folks tend to start avoiding them, "

Half of people are below average intelligence. There are lots of people out there that don't seem to understand what bookmarks or favourites are and always search for everything. Hell, I've seen people open search on Windows, enter "Google" into Bing, click the first result and only then search for what they are looking for, invariably by hopping between the mouse and keyboard because they still haven't figured out how the Enter key works in a form field.

...and then there is the disconnect between the InfoSec department and Marketing/Sales. InfoSec draw up rules, employees get trained what to do and not do, how to be more secure etc, and Marketing/Sales and HR are sending internal and external communications blindly ignoring everything, sending out "rich" emails breaking every guideline InfoSec are trying to enforce. And people then wonder why the run of the mill staff are confused over what is allowed and not allowed.