Posts by Ken Hagan

With good staff being in such short supply, it is going to depend on the school.

Re: Isn't C supposed to be average?

"In my view exam scores shouldn't be set to deliver a normal distribution across each year's cohort."

That's more or less what GCSEs were supposed to do but instead we just got 3 decades of grade inflation so they've given up and the new scheme boils down to percentiles. (The actual rules are stupidly complex, but the constraints at top, middle and bottom of the 1-9 scale mean that you'd need a truly perverse population to deviate far from a simple percentile arrangement. It looks very much like a committee designed the rules so that they could reintroduce percentiles without the arts graduates noticing.)

Re: Stick this in your magic quadrant

Agreed, and if you substitute "quality" for "security" then you have another example.

Re: And that, kids, is why I DO read them: but what about fake names?

"what happens if you use a fake name when you sign up?"

I think the position in the UK is that you can operate under as many names as you like as long as the aliases are not intended to fool someone. So, in your example, either you intend to use the name fraudulently, in which case they can sue you for fraud, or you don't intend that, in which case UK law (at least) says that "fake name" is your legitimate alias for the purposes of this contract.

Re: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1999/2083/contents/made

Section 5, in particular:

"(1) A contractual term which has not been individually negotiated shall be regarded as unfair if, contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations arising under the contract, to the detriment of the consumer.

"(2) A term shall always be regarded as not having been individually negotiated where it has been drafted in advance and the consumer has therefore not been able to influence the substance of the term."

Of course, IANAL so I can't actually say whether those clauses would help a UK customer. (Section 9, by the way, seems to make it perfectly clear that UK law would apply to such a case.)

"firms have figured that if you don't agree, you can do without the service"

The firms can't do without us anymore than we can do without them. It's a question of numbers and the OP was suggesting that all customers should take this approach. That's very unlikely, but it would be immediately effective since otherwise the company's revenue simply dries up, forever.

Re: Bah!

"If I can find the actual essay about concurrency then I'll post again."

It's essay 14 ("Synchronisation") in the book "Programming on Purpose - Essays on software design" and the ISBN in my copy is 0-13-721374-3. It is based on two columns that he wrote for "Computer Language" magazine in November and December 1987, but the only thing that really dates it is a passing reference to "a social faux pas roughly equivalent to turning down a date with Brooke Shields".

Re: Bah!

It is in one of three paperback collections of essays that originally appeared in some magazine, but I can't remember if it is in vol 1, 2 or 3. I certainly can't remember the title and it may or may not be online even now. I haven't re-read these for many years but I thought they were mostly good and occasionally excellent, so if you can pick up old copies on the cheap then I'd recommend it.

If I can find the actual essay about concurrency then I'll post again.

Sample amazon links for completeness:

Vol 1

Vol 2

Vol 3

Re: Bah!

PJ Plauger wrote an essay about 30 years ago in which he described the evolution of a programming model that is so standard that many readers of this forum might be unaware that there was ever any other.

He noted that when operating systems first started being able to run multiple programs (Yes children, that was a thing once.) the OS designers naively offered pretty much all of the synchronisation primitives to user-space programers that they had themselves used to implement the operating system. This included stuff like async IO, signals, multiple threads of execution in a single address space, ... whatever.

Very quickly they learned that their customers, the pleb user-space programmers, couldn't handle this. The solution was to create the abstraction of "your program owns the entire machine and there is only one thread in your program". The plebs could handle that and if the OS was cunning enough it could run several pleb programs and multi-task them against each other to maintain efficient resource usage.

I can imagine that the abilities of some pleb programmers has gone up a little since then, but probably not enough to make it safe to encourage everyone to do everything async "just because they can".

Re: Python 3 split over?

Python3 is not *that* much of a change. Yes there are breaking changes, but none should trouble a competent programmer if the code is under active maintenance so if anyone is presenting code in 2017 and spreading FUD about 3 then you should avoid them. They do not understand their chosen implementation language and that is never going to end well.

Re: Genuine question

"Would it have been sensible not to have started the whole debacle in the first place and spent the money on something useful like education and health?"

Probably. I can't think of many cases where it has been tried, but over the long term I'd say we were very much less likely to be attacked by a country that knew we paid for the education of its children and the ongoing health of the whole population. (You'd be literally winning hearts and minds.) The only possible fly in the ointment is that, on the evidence of our own schools and hospitals, we don't know how to spend the money.

Re: The thin line between right and wrong

I can't change *any* of my genes without changing my parents. Equally, however, I am not restricted in my interbreeding to those who are of the same haplogroup. There may be geographical constraints on supply, but in the last century or two these have lessened.

Furthermore, I'm not sure I could place any potential partner in their correct haplogroup if I wanted to, so I'm afraid interbreeding may now be unavoidable. Of course, because of the high degree of traceability down the female line, there is zero traceability down the male line, so we'll never know just how much interbreeding has already occurred.

Oh, and I don't think I need a reference. You appear to understand the genetics just fine. From here, the consequences are just maths.

Re: The thin line between right and wrong

A haplogroup is not a race. It is merely one group of genes that happens to be traceable back many generations. We all have squillions of other genes that just aren't so readily traceable. Classifying humanity according to what you can trace is not biology; it is stamp collecting.

Re: Casual Racism in The Register?

"I listed clearly racist claims and sought to justify them with claimed stats"

But they aren't clearly racist (at the group level) if the stats stack up. I know that sometimes the stats pretty much collapse under their own weight as soon as you even ask what they are, but often it is not.

Freedom of speech is a way of allowing a non-obvious (or just plain unpopular) viewpoint enough time to present supporting evidence and if you have reason to expect that you'll be shouted down almost immediately then calling for freedom of speech at the end of your first sentence is quite sensible. It doesn't imply that you doubt your own arguments, merely that you expect others to doubt them at first.

Re: Out of Date Discussion

"Google may we'll have to [...] relocate their creative headquarters elsewhere."

Why would they have to move their creative HQ? Surely Google can open an office anywhere and use some geeky gizmo to join up the talent. I get that Silicon Valley has an almost unique supporting ecosystem of entrepreneurs and supporting businesses, but Google is no start-up and can stand on its own now.

Re: Does this firing thing only work one way?

"The BBC [...] is worshipping the alter of balance to the point of insanity"

Possibly, but that's their insanity rather than yours. In my experience, the BBC is a fairly accurate marker for the median political view of the UK and is therefore a useful resource. It is also mildly entertaining to watch both Left and Right attacking the same organisation for being hopelessly biased against them. (Spoiler: It is biased against both of them, because both extremes are stupid.)

Re: "why Blacks are such fast runners?"

Well, yes, actually. They are utterly crap at the power events like sprinting and long-jump. I can't think of a single one. Conversely, the descendants of abused slaves aren't so hot at distance running.

Re: Just to clarify

"If that manifesto is not bringing the company into disrepute I honestly don't know what would?"

That would depend on who is making the judgement of "disrepute". I'd say that sacking someone for expressing views you don't like is pretty disreputable but I suppose I'm fairly liberal, and in the UK, where liberal is an adjective rather than an obscene interjection.

It is also pretty stupid, since it has drawn huge amounts of attention to Google's actual performance in this area (which isn't stellar) and at the same time made it impossible to have a reasoned discussion of the policy. (Perhaps they should google for "Streisand effect".)

Given the price tag, definitely.

Re: All I wanna know is...

"I don't want all the other call packages that you have to have currently."

They may call them "call packages" but they don't really cost the phone company anything. They only have one product and it costs them the same almost regardless of what you do with it (*), but they make more money by slicing and dicing it in these strange ways. The same is probably true for mobile providers.

(* One might guess that sheer volume of usage was an additional cost, but the near-universal offering of "unlimited" packages suggests that this isn't the case. I suspect that the reason is that the provider can just throttle your pipe if your usage starts to inconvenience them.)

Re: All I wanna know is...

You can drop it now, by not using the phone.

No, it won't save you any money, but not having to support voice calls won't save the telephone company any money either, so I fail to understand why they should be offering it as a (cheaper) product.

They do, but might broadband be part of the answer? Unpleasant regimes all over the world reckon that the internet is something that, to coin a phrase, you wouldn't want "your wife or your servants" to read.

Re: Still not going there

"Win 10 is currently what I have to use at work ..."

Me too. Speaking as a developer, there are an infinite number of non-default configurations that we can't test against but there is one default configuration that we can test against and if we don't then we look a bit foolish if that's a configuration that doesn't work. So all my test systems stick largely to the defaults. They also have no personal data on them, (and no source code, as it happens) so if MS want to slurp then there is nothing for them to find except for usage patterns that will skew their stats towards "None of your newly-introduced features are getting *any* usage whatsoever.".

So I am "several" of the 70%, despite switching the telemetry off on the systems I actually care about.

Re: Reality

"This is amazingly apparent in schools. Boys have a tendency to fight and normally punch each other a few times and next day are best mates again. Girls tend to be far more psychological in their fighting, with cliques etc. that go on for years."

That's true enough for kids, but my impression is that actually both sexes spend the next decade becoming more like each other again. At least part of the problem, then, is that important (ie, door-closing) life choices are being made at an age when the children are at the "most divergent" (or most stereotypical, if you prefer) part of their development. Not sure what the answer is...

Re: @Ken: There is evidence

Ooh. Thanks for that. I honestly didn't think to look, but now that I google for "adolescence impaired judgement" I find that the academic community has explored this a fair bit over the years. For example, the pruning seems to be what's mentioned in http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr07/teenage.aspx. I'm not sure they use the phrase "bad to crap" but that's pretty much how I'd describe the process. (I don't consider myself to have been particularly wayward but I know, because I still feel guilty about some of it, that I did stuff that I simply could not do now.)