Education Secretary Gove: Tim Berners-Lee 'created the INTERNET' Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and BT have been signed up by the Education Secretary Michael Gove - who thinks Tim Berners Lee is the "creator of the internet" - to offer industry insights into the type of computer science skills British school kids need to be equipped with for the workplace. A £20,000 scholarship was also announced …
"Hard drive is NOT memory." - Errr.... yes it is!
WIWAL "memory" meant magnetic cores -- what we call a "hard drive" today would have been "backing store". The distinction was that the "memory" could be addressed directly by the processor, while anything in backing store had to be copied into "memory" before it could be processed.
These days, of course, the main system RAM of a PC is in a sense "backing store" as there are at least two levels of cache between it and the CPU. Funny how terminology wears out!
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No, it isn't. My databases and my system images are stored on logical volumes in some attached storage farm somewhere in cyberspace. Those logical volumes are the backing store. I don't keep working data on my servers, as that way a new image can be rolled out whenever necessary, by replicating an image from the backing store. I can also backup databases either by on-line replication or by making a copy of an offline database on another volume. Do try to keep up with this cloud stuff, dear boy.
Much of the literature used the term "secondary storage", rather than "backing store". Secondary, in the sense that it could not be accessed across the memory bus by either a CPU or a DMA controller. Modern CPUs indeed only preform instructions on cached memory, and a memory controller is used to move data across the memory bus between cache and RAM. Nevertheless, system memory is still accessed via the memory bus, whereas secondary storage, such as a hard drive, is not. In any case the memory controller is an integral part of the CPU chip these days.
"you actually live in a world where most websites don't track your sessions?"
Er, yeah. There's an option in my browser to deny them access to the cookies they need in order to do that. HTTP is a stateless protocol.
And apropos the original remark that led us down this path: You do not "log on" to anything without some pretence at proving that you are the same person as you were last time. If there's no "state", there's no "memory of who you were last time".
When I worked at Radio Shack in Canada, I got a brief North America regionalisation briefing by my manager. One thing I recall her saying is "And if people come in here asking about batteries for the convertor, they usually mean the remote control for the cable convertor; it was the first battery remote many people had seen so they started calling the remote the "convertor" and the convertor itself they called a "cable box". Just so you know. Oh, and the remote for the TV? That's the clicker. Even if it doesn't."
Originally it was said "You do log on to a website, it's just the browser handles all the hand-shaking for you."
Now it appears to arguing for the sake of arguing. So my tuppence is that even if you call the connection stateful, it is only with the machine and not the webserver service running the http service which normal users call....a website.
Either way you are accessing a website. Logging in/on to a website is something is something different.
That is being rather picky, I always used to say (to people who didn't understand comupters) that computers have short-term memory for things you're working on, lost when you turn the power off (RAM) and long-term memory for things that you want to store away (hard drive/floppy/cd).
Besides, if a disk isn't memory remind me what CDROM stands for.....?
(ps. "retarded" is a rather non PC term, PC... get it?)
Besides, if a disk isn't memory remind me what CDROM stands for.....?
As far back as I can recall, CD-ROM stood for Compact Disc - Read Only Medium.
While wikipedia may disagree, the standards (ISO 9660/ECMA-119 and ISO 10149/ECMA-130) do not expand the acronym (they're also rather inconsistent on the use of the dash...) -- so absent an official definition, I would choose the logical one: CD-ROM certainly is a medium; whether or not it is memory depends on the very term under debate. It does not make sense to use the debated term to define a term being used to justify one position on the term under debate -- therein lies circular logic, so I will continue to define the acronym as I have above, until an authoritative source can be found.
Decide whether to buy or lease ICT hardware - these two options can involve very different costs.
Decide whether to buy equipment in conjunction with an installation and testing service, or even as a whole managed service.
Identify whether the supplier is able to provide cost effective maintenance and servicing.
If buying more than just equipment set up a service level agreement, stating what is expected from the supplier - include targets such as, response times and what to do if equipment is proving unreliable or faulty.
That's why I'm all for mandatory programming classes. Just like with math, school children need to have a basic understanding what a computer is.
A school child can watch "The Numberwang Code" and understand that it's all complete nonsense. They know that numbers are neither good or evil or neutral. They understand that there are no deadly numbers. That won't make them mathematicians, not even by a long shot, but it gives them some basic understanding.
However when it comes to IT people are clueless. They believe in cyber terrorism as if IT systems somehow had intrinsic vulnerabilities. They believe in "copy protection" although computers are more or less designed to copy data. They probably even believe that "privacy" settings at Facebook mean anything to that company, or that they somehow can magically make data disappear from the Internet.
If children would have a basic understanding of what a computer is, and if they would have understood a basic loop, they could make informed decisions in their lives. Then you can start teaching about such media and they will understand why they are like they are.
However there's little profit in this, therefore politicians won't allocate any resources for it. It's just the future of your society, no politician cares about that.
Mandatory programming classes at secondary school is the kind of move needed if this country was serious about dominating the technology sector. We could have too. I am sure that if the government had made programming and computing a mandatory proper GCSE subject 20 years ago the UK would now dominate the technology sector. Many of the Googles, microsofts (well perhaps not that one), Apples, Facebooks and Twitters would all have been invented in the UK.
Of course our government and the complicit population are fucking morons led by a ruthlessly self-interested media. There is zero strategic thinking in government in this country. Perhaps because MPs don't need to know jack shit to do their jobs and only have to worry about surviving elections, so I suspect they don't even understand the need to TRAIN the population for specific skills as a strategic move for the future (long after they've retired). They probably just consider education a process involving reading shakespeare to get a certificate which you can trade in to get an office job.
So whereas Blair could have introduced a radical change in school to introduce subjects that would educate the population towards the obvious direction of technology, we instead get an Iraq War. Brilliant strategic thinking. They seriously are a bunch of fucking twats.
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Yes, it really would. The Internet is a physical network and all the logical structures related to packet layer communications. The World Wide Web is an application. As is DNS, FTP, Gopher, email etc. The two are entirely distinct.
Its really like saying that the telephone network is the same as the emergency services because you access the emergency service via the telephone network.
Derp.
>The Internet is a physical network and all the logical structures related to packet layer communications.
Or the internet is a protocol on top of the wired network - or actually these days generally on top of some other packet protocol.
It's friday and I'm feeling pedantic
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