Posts by John Styles 489 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jul 2007
No, the point is that whilst I think most people here have teased out of what he said that this means 'go back to teaching proper programming skills' (e.g. the purpose of the Raspberry Pi project and foundation), his speech writers are too hopeless to come up with something accurate and not gibberish conveying this. I'm sure that you would be ashamed of coming up with something so wide of the mark in your daily working life and wouldn't accept colleages doing so.
I see one of the Oxford bullet points is:
"effective systems verification and assurance"
I imagine that this is some 'formal methods' stuff being taken for another canter round the block. Not, clearly, that it is completely worthless, but I do have a feeling the Oxford Comp Sci academics are quite good of relieving people of their money by putting a new spin on whatever they wanted to do anyway.
Pause briefly to mock their 'about us' page with its links that aren't https://www2.cybersecurity.ox.ac.uk/contact-us/
We at Pengwyn Towers are working on the next stage beyond gamification of the workspace - pornifiction of the workplace.
Here's the API we will be using https://github.com/qdot/librealtouch/blob/master/python/realtouch.py (NSFW by implication) - the fact that it is in Python is somehow appropriate.
Unless someone funds some proper market research (and why would they) we will never really know what languages people really use. Assuming of course you can agree what counts as programming. Does using IF(logical_test,value_if_true,value_if_false) in Excel count?
Most of these measures are measures of people jumping up and down squeaking more than anything. Clearly if a, say, Fortran programmer buys one book every ten years, changes jobs every twenty and doesn't blog or post to forums they aren't going show up , whereas a 22 year old using Python on Pails and Javascript in Jails tweeting every commit to the tosspothub version control repository is.
Back in the days when American TV shows got shown here ages after they were shown in the U.S. and back when there were things worth watching, I used to pay fo one of these premium news servers. The joy of downloading Buffy / X-Files episodes over NTL dial-up, then assembling the parts then unRARing them.
It is frightening how long ago it was that Buffy and the X-Files finished.
I think the last thing I downloaded was the first episode of Tru Calling. Whilst I commend the TV network for knowing their audience, in having a series that involved Eliza Dushku running between places without adequate support (*), it didn't quite seem worth the few dollars a month.
(*) I hope she got danger money.
... was trying to get OS/2 onto one.
I actually quite liked OS/2 1.1. It was a shame that
a) it was almost impossible to get it to install on computers, even IBM PS/2s.
b) it had a habit of lovingly resuming things on reboot so accurately that once it had crashed, it would crash in the same way on restart etc.
The deliberate confusion with having the extended edition allegedly only work on PS/2s was a big mistake.
Well, yes, obviously, clearly I needed to spell things out in more detail with less shorthand... OK, then, why do people in the 'geek community' prefer people who failed to actually achieve ever much, over people who actually achieved real things in the messy real world? I think you are naive to think that the Countess vs Rear Admiral thing i.e. some vicarious imagining of what it would have been like to be one of the aristocracy in a stratified society isn't part of it.
Why might the steampunk croud prefer Countess Ada Lovelace over Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper? Hmm. Countess, Rear Admiral, Countess, Rear Admiral.
See also Babbage vs Hollerith - things that actually were made and commercially successful are much more glamorous than things that weren't - otherwise people would be dressing up as 1910s CTR salesmen - DarkSuitWhiteShirtPolishedShoesPunk doesn't have the same ring to it.
If I have a GPS watch / phone will it
a) magically pick up Galileo as well as the U.S. satelites?
b) not
in which case how will I get it? Could a phone have a software upgrade or would it need a hardware one?
When both systems are in use will things come with an option to choose?
Will be where you go into a pub and say 'I'd like a pint of your best bitter mine host', mine host will draw a pint, then I will pass over 3 to 4 of you finest quids.
Much better value than 182 million dollars.
(am a bit concerned the pint in the pint icon looks rather light to me, I hope it's not lager)
I offer my services to the Government (or whoever will pay) at a modest fee of 200k per annum as CEO of OFINT, the office of assignment of integers to things. Obviously I will be needing legal and administrative backup but
I present, by way of job application, some of what I think is my best work in assigning integers to things
dt_file_based = 2
ds_not_updatable_internal_version = 16
lang_traditional_chinese = 12
Isn't this called an internship? The important feature being that you need to do it in large chunks of the media, meaning that you can only do it if mummy and daddy can support you, meaning that the people in the media are drawn largely from the ranks of those where mummy and daddy can support them.
See also workfare.
BT (or rather the subcontractors of the subcontractors of their subcontractors) put a giant green wardrobe in the middle of a narrow path blocking it from people wheeling push-chairs / wheelchairs etc. and blocking the view towards the main road from the shared drive of a few houses. After some complaining (by me and the people whose view was blocked) it was removed. Clearly we are now at the bottom of the list as one has yet to reappear in the more sensible location by the strange Post Office green box into which things for postmen to deliver are put.
I cannot say that I care personally, I don't quite see the need for something faster than my 4 MB/s link, but maybe some people have unusually refined / high bandwidth porn needs.
I was actually moderately taken with the Lumia (not one of the two new ones, obviously) I tried in some phone shop whilst my girlfriend was buying an Android phone, but the browser didn't reflow text or to put it another way 'was about as much use as a chocolate teapot'. [There may have been some way but some searching on forums gave me the impression you couldn't].
The software development community... the only industry where lots of people feel they shouldn't be unionised, that it shouldn't get the tax breaks every other industry lobbies for, where innovation shouldn't be protected, and where there is a dominant ideology that the product should be given away for its marginal cost of production (*)
(*) yes, I am aware that there is some sophistry by which it is claimed that the GPL doesn't mean that things have to be free as in given away, not convinced this stacks up in reality.
On Thursday evening I took the dogs for a walk up Wittenham Clumps. When I got there (about 9 p.m). the car-park seemed suspiciously full of cars with people in. Given the nature of the clumps (the name being a clue) I came to the obvious conclusion and, on my Android phone, googled 'dogging Wittenham' (quotes in this message, not in the search). Clearly the words dogging and wittenham are SEO'd up to the hilt because none of the first 3 pages of hits looked (from the excerpts of text shown) as though they would have anything useful - clearly just designed to get hits - I imagine much the same pages would appear for dogging Abingdon, dogging Wallingford, dogging Didcot etc.
So, none the wiser, the dogs and I went for our walk.
As it happens, for those wondering, I kind of suspect it isn't, as when I got back at 22:15 there was only one white van left in the car-park (not obviously rocking or steamed up), but this is one of the many occasions I have found recently where Google has been so gamed as to be useless.
It has struck me for a long time (particularly in the light of the handling of the Foot & Mouth epidemic) that if there is some sort of pandemic / similar crisis we can rely on this country to handle it very badly, probably signifiantly worse than elsewhere. This is what I refer to as 'lessons have been learnt' syndrome - things are f****d up due to the ignorant and incapable outsourcing to the ignorant and incapable who outsource to the ignorant and incapable. The 'oh it was our subcontractors that screwed up' is a feature not a bug. Then it goes wrong, people wring their hands, say 'lessons have been learnt', the dogs bark and the caravan moves on.
There have been so many times I have seen people go along with the Creative Commons stuff until they find some nasty evil company wants to use the picture. I imagine the same gang will be up in arms when they see how this really pans out (though presumably in reality this ends up at the ECJ, anyway).
... what would you like British TV companies (or not to use any dogmatic and backwards facing terms like that, 'the people in Britain wot generate visual entertainment in a manner vaguely reminsicent of television programmes, or film, or theatre or something') to be producing and how would you like it to be funded. Or is this a market we should be surrendering to the U.S. with its greater consumer base?
I thought that the alleged creative industries are actually pretty small, they are only perceived as being important because they, er, big themselves up (as the yoof say, I believe) relentlessly.
The same goes for football clubs, it is not big business, it is medium business at best.
Or am I out of date (genuine question - I don't work somewhere with big books of SIC codes and this sort of data any more).
Are we a net exporter of TV these days, anyway?
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