Can you name an instance when it will be used and will actually help? I suspect that the cost of rolling out biometric scanners that are always online to the central database will mean that most govt bits and pieces won't end up using it. The only case the government seem really keen on using it is at your doctors. But do you really want to put your hand on a fingerprint scanner in the doctors waiting room. Hello - sterile procedures. Or how about struggling to get your iris scan to match when you need your eye infection fixing!
You can for once prove you are who you are in the UK
To whom? If the police have reason to stop you and doubt that you are who you say you are they can already detain you while they establish who you are. And criminals will still "prove" they're innocent with faked IDs, or IDs that have been put through on the side by contacts in the ID processing centre. There are very few cases where proving your identity is by itself useful, but your identity is the only bit the card can actually prove.
No need for that silly census where they try to guess how many people live in their own country
Great, so I can pay £300 every five years to avoid five minutes of form filling once every 10 years. You must be better paid than me if this is a worthwhile trade off for you!
Credit card scams are ripe in the UK with people stealing identities and having to provide an absolute minimum of ID to empty your account.
Banks aren't about to start requiring us to turn up in person to take out a new credit card; it would cost us far too much business. As you can't send your ID card through the post, how would it help?
Your post typifies the governments approach. Its thought of a "solution" - an ID card and database. Unfortunately it hasn't identified the problem its supposed to solve. When you analyse the problems they vaguely throw around, it generally turns out that an ID card and database don't solve the problem, or solve it only at far greater cost than simpler solutions.
Actually the page on the USPTO that displays the patent needs a licence. Follow the link in the summary then select "images" from the bottom of the page. You go to a frame based layout with consistent navigation (prev/next page, skip etc) in a left frame and the output of the browser in the right. Would be interesting to know if the USPTO have a licence, or are currently being hounded to get one! -Bruce
A more sophisticated tool could go beyond lines of code and
into log the various logic combinations exercised in "if" statements,
etc. [...] Do these kinds of tools exist, and if so why aren't they more
widely used?
Such tools certainly do exist, including the more advanced variants you suggest.
For example, Cantata++
provides not only the basic statement coverage you suggest, but also
decision coverage (%age of true/false branches executed for all
decisions, including ?:), call-pair coverage and boolean effectiveness coverage.
(Disclaimer: I work for this company so you'll want to do your own research.)
These sorts of tools are infact fairly widely used. When doing unit testing the tools are normally used as part of an automated unit test
script which checks the coverage and fails the test if insufficient coverage is achieved. They are probably the best way of measuring the
effectiveness of unit tests.
Some coverage tools (<shameless-plug>including
Cantata++</shameless-plug>) can also be set to simply log coverage as the program is run normally (e.g. through a user acceptance test) and
the thoroughness of this test can then be evaluated (or checked, if the principle measure of thoroughness is requirements driven) by examining the coverage data gathered. Obviously this impacts on the performance and
memory footprint of your acceptance test - so it doesn't work in all cases. When developing for targets with limited memory, tests are often
run with coverage instrumentation in a development host environment and then re-run without coverage on the target to prove correct execution.
"a panel about two inches square will have the capacity to provide the air conditioning for a living room"
Which shows a basic lack of knowledge of thermodynamics. Even assuming the device works, how is the heat in the room going to get concentrated in a space two inches square so that it can be removed? This quote is designed to make it seem so simple - everyone would like an aircon unit that small - but it would only be able to extract energy from a tiny bit of the room. It would need a rather inconvieniently large metal plate (at least) to actually cool something the size of a room.
Thats even before we ask where they're exhausting the heat to... 50Angstroms away?
Now, why would they want to make it seem much more convinient and it could possibly be...
The stats from users visiting slashdot might be interesting for us, but are hardly going to be representative of the general population.
The best ones I can find for general UK usage are by a consultancy called Proteus. They look reasonable, though I'd have more faith if they showed Mozilla at somewhere past 0.8!
Interestingly these show a much higher percentage of Macs than I'd have expected - maybe MacOS X is really increasing their market penetration. (Thinks wishfully)
Slashdot Mirror
Can you name an instance when it will be used and will actually help? I suspect that the cost of rolling out biometric scanners that are always online to the central database will mean that most govt bits and pieces won't end up using it. The only case the government seem really keen on using it is at your doctors. But do you really want to put your hand on a fingerprint scanner in the doctors waiting room. Hello - sterile procedures. Or how about struggling to get your iris scan to match when you need your eye infection fixing!
To whom? If the police have reason to stop you and doubt that you are who you say you are they can already detain you while they establish who you are. And criminals will still "prove" they're innocent with faked IDs, or IDs that have been put through on the side by contacts in the ID processing centre. There are very few cases where proving your identity is by itself useful, but your identity is the only bit the card can actually prove.
Great, so I can pay £300 every five years to avoid five minutes of form filling once every 10 years. You must be better paid than me if this is a worthwhile trade off for you!
Banks aren't about to start requiring us to turn up in person to take out a new credit card; it would cost us far too much business. As you can't send your ID card through the post, how would it help?
Your post typifies the governments approach. Its thought of a "solution" - an ID card and database. Unfortunately it hasn't identified the problem its supposed to solve. When you analyse the problems they vaguely throw around, it generally turns out that an ID card and database don't solve the problem, or solve it only at far greater cost than simpler solutions.
Actually the page on the USPTO that displays the patent needs a licence. Follow the link in the summary then select "images" from the bottom of the page. You go to a frame based layout with consistent navigation (prev/next page, skip etc) in a left frame and the output of the browser in the right. Would be interesting to know if the USPTO have a licence, or are currently being hounded to get one!
-Bruce
Such tools certainly do exist, including the more advanced variants you suggest. For example, Cantata++ provides not only the basic statement coverage you suggest, but also decision coverage (%age of true/false branches executed for all decisions, including ?:), call-pair coverage and boolean effectiveness coverage. (Disclaimer: I work for this company so you'll want to do your own research.)
These sorts of tools are infact fairly widely used. When doing unit testing the tools are normally used as part of an automated unit test script which checks the coverage and fails the test if insufficient coverage is achieved. They are probably the best way of measuring the effectiveness of unit tests.
Some coverage tools (<shameless-plug>including Cantata++</shameless-plug>) can also be set to simply log coverage as the program is run normally (e.g. through a user acceptance test) and the thoroughness of this test can then be evaluated (or checked, if the principle measure of thoroughness is requirements driven) by examining the coverage data gathered. Obviously this impacts on the performance and memory footprint of your acceptance test - so it doesn't work in all cases. When developing for targets with limited memory, tests are often run with coverage instrumentation in a development host environment and then re-run without coverage on the target to prove correct execution.
Which shows a basic lack of knowledge of thermodynamics. Even assuming the device works, how is the heat in the room going to get concentrated in a space two inches square so that it can be removed? This quote is designed to make it seem so simple - everyone would like an aircon unit that small - but it would only be able to extract energy from a tiny bit of the room. It would need a rather inconvieniently large metal plate (at least) to actually cool something the size of a room.
Thats even before we ask where they're exhausting the heat to... 50Angstroms away?
Now, why would they want to make it seem much more convinient and it could possibly be...
The stats from users visiting slashdot might be interesting for us, but are hardly going to be representative of the general population.
The best ones I can find for general UK usage are by a consultancy called Proteus. They look reasonable, though I'd have more faith if they showed Mozilla at somewhere past 0.8!
Interestingly these show a much higher percentage of Macs than I'd have expected - maybe MacOS X is really increasing their market penetration. (Thinks wishfully)