I can understand why the fresh out of Uni grads failed horribly; but it really depends on what you're looking at hiring those grads into. I've spent just over a year in a "grad scheme" (they called it that, but they'd never hired grads before and it wasn't really a scheme). But the point was that they were willing to hire people that still needed rounding off at the edges and training in the right domain, like you were after C/C++. With the right level of mostly hands off training, a decent bit of pairing and solid project experience the 2 grads they hired are paying off massively.
My C/C++ is pretty rusty simply because I've not had to do a load of work in it. That doesn't mean that I can't work with them, we did some fairly beefy stuff in C++ during the degree, it's just with the other 2 year's of non C++ oriented dev it falls by the wayside. Obviously if i was going for a properly advertised role I'd beef up my knowledge on pointers again, they're always a bit of a pain just because of the sheer experience factor. The EE grads often have the C/C++ experience but won't have ventured further in their degrees.
I thought I'd add the caveat that whilst it's quite common in Europe it's highly unusual in the UK, with only a few instances of a coalition government forming and even fewer where it has actually lasted a substantial period of time.
No idea whether the current one is going to ride the next year's worth of pain and come out the other side or not.
Whilst the crux of your argument is correct, that's not completely true. Thousands of these cameras are going to be in mainline rail stations, underground stations and plenty of other high-risk areas like the West End, Oxford street etc. Granted, we're still talking a few square miles in the centre of London, but no-one really talks about the suburbs much with these statistics.
Yes, but Sky are also the major premium TV and content provider. Programmes broadcast on Freeview (free OTA digital terrestrial) are effectively free whereas you need to pay for Sky's TV, content and services. If people torrent programmes the biggest loser is Sky as you're less likely to subscribe, then the advertisers on commercial Freeview channels and the BBC who lose long-term DVD sales. If I can torrent a Sky-only show like House why would I be swayed to pay Sky £20/month for House with adverts?
Sky have an active interest in preventing people from torrenting, whereas most other ISPs are just ISPs and therefore have very little interest in restricting their customers. Virgin Media are another TV/ISP company and I remember them being fairly pro DEA too.
I'll admit I haven't gone through Wikileaks, although these leaks don't specifically affect/interest me there are others where I might be interested.
For example, The Telegraph got the UK expenses list and they happened to publish the (partially redacted) data, similar to Wikileaks. I took this as an opportunity to research my own MP's ethics. This was actually an unusual case where the whole leak was published, although they actually used crowdsourcing to try and analyse the data!
This particular leak is a bit more awkward for someone to pick through, it's hundreds of thousands of documents. But, over time, I do believe that it will be gone through. If nothing else, this does help reduce the ability for a reporter to take something completely out of context as the context can be checked. How many times have you seen someone accused say "it was taken out of context" and from there are unable to make any conclusions as the full context is never released? Have they just brushed it off or was it misconstrued?
Exactly, instead it will go back to the newspapers/TV news as being the main avenue for releasing leaked information. Once they get their hands on it there's no knowing what they'll do to it in the process of editorialising it and publishing their POV on the incident.
With wikileaks you are able to see the original documents, so even though there may be bias added to some of their reporting (many complained about the shortened & commentated video of the helicopter attack), the original source is also available.
I think the other important difference was that during WWI and WWII we were in "total war" with quite literally all resources being devoted to winning the war (or at least Europe was). In times like that, with daily bombardments by the enemy, censorship and the associated positive propaganda is quite important.
However this "War on Terror" hardly affects anyone back home, it's not a vital war by any definition for those that are fighting it now and we should be questioning whether it's valid to be there. In which case, censorship really isn't a good place to be.
I voted for them but see the evisceration coming the other way (or probably both ways). The country's in quite a bit of shit with its debt and we need to make some nasty cuts.
If they side with Labour they won't have an outright majority and need a coalition of a load of smaller parties. You can't include the nationalist parties because they will "fight for Wales and Scotland", or summing up the SNP's party political, tell Westminister to fuck off if they suggest any cuts in Scotland. The only thing this loose coalition will be able to do is wangle through a vote on PR before collapsing in a massive heap in a very early election.
In the meantime, the markets will decide this barmy coalition of parties won't be able to control the deficit at all, certainly not in the long term. They'll destroy our credit-worthiness and increase the cost of borrowing / require us to print money to keep going in the way this coalition will want. In doing so they'll destroy the country and no-one will vote for the Lib Dems for being so stupid to put their "selfish" demands for PR above anything else.
Now this would be very different if Labour and Lib Dems had enough seats between them for the outright majority. They could actually form a stable coalition, have a fair amount of confidence and get PR through all at the same time. The problem is, the numbers don't add up.
Except multi-party politics breeds compromise. If another party comes along promising most of what you do but without the crazy you'll start to lose votes to them. The Lib Dems are left-of-centre, but are still in the middle, whereas Labour are on the left.
The 65% bitching about the 35% being in power are probably less disgruntled than the 48% bitching about the 52% in the US, because each side over there is so polar.
I agree, although i do need to read into all the systems properly.
The Lib Dems want something more proportional and call for PR, but I do fear the removal of the constituency link. The fact that a person represents ~70k people in a local area is a good thing and provides for accountability. If we remove this you could end up with some very unpopular people put at the top of each party's list resulting in them never being removed from power.
With the constituency link they would need to be able to find anywhere that would actually take them!
I think will is a bit of a strong word, however in the current example the Conservative party represent the one with the most stringent cuts proposed and the others may disagree enough to vote against it.
However the Conservative party is only 20 seats short, so they just need 20 people out of the other 344 to agree with them. It's called running a minority government, and depending on how much of a minority you are it may simply fall apart.
I don't get this argument. As soon as it becomes actively required, I don't see what would ever stop the US from using their nuclear weapons. You've spent hundreds of Billions on your nuclear arsenal and aren't going to be limited by a fancy piece of paper with a presidential stamp on it.
When was the US likely to use their nukes on any country that attacked them via conventional means anyway? As most people have pointed out, this is a nice PR stunt, but you've reiterated the sort-of known stance of the US since the end of the cold war, we've got nukes but we don't really want to use them.
Not only that, we knew that those were going to become obseleted as soon as the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats come into power. It was only the Labour party that wanted ID cards and it's (one of many) reasons i don't want them to win the next election.
So that seems any better when your lawyer is there? Are you meant to make up some form of alibi? Are you supposed to try and make up a place where you weren't?
It might be an unfortunate fact that where you were was somewhere, alone that's quite unverifiable. However this is reasonably common, what are you supposed to do?
Wait for a couple of years for the apps to be developed.
But current Tablet PCs do so much already! With the kick of "Apple's doing one" we've got some innovation finally, they'll get as cool as the Apple one but be a fully fledged multitasking OS to boot.
Firstly, what is to stop you from using a stylus?
Somewhere to keep it!
What is stopping application developers from creating apps that allow annotation of PDF files or that duplicate the functionality of "One Note". If the market demands such functionality, will the market not deliver it?
As you said, they will but it will take time.
Furthermore, what makes you think that software such as "One Note" is anything but a niche market for certain professionals? And do you really need to be able to scribble ugly handwriting on the screen? Aren't there better ways of inputting text? I suppose the market will decide.
I agree, a decent touch on-screen keyboard is a good idea that should be used on other systems. The correction is really good too. It is faster than using a pen, but with the auto-completing browsers and search by keying one or two characters will be just as quick with the pen. Don't forget that doing sketches, diagrams and mixing writing with text (think notes, maths work) is a very useful part of the pen's function.
Anyways, my opinion is that this is an embryonic platform. Once HTML5 starts to take over, the Flash issue will be less of a concern. And with HTML5, you will be able to do things with a browser that you probably couldn't imagine.
HTML 5 based apps, and therefore cross platform, would be a really good launchpad. But with the Apple iStore interface behind their core product lines now i can see plenty of iPhone OS-only based apps.
Will it flop? Not completely, there is a market. But this doesn't innovate, it's not the magical grand leap forwards they want us to believe and it won't be massively popular. It will sell well, but it's not going to be a major line.
Exactly my thoughts, they've done the Tablet PC without including the pen, the reason that Tablet PCs are so useful.
Our Uni publishes all the notes online as PDFs, i load up aforementioned app and annotate right on the notes. But i can also insert extra pages, copy-paste and insert diagrams. My logic coursework and having the ability to copy/paste/edit previous lines, as well as doodle without wrecking it is so much more useful than a pad of paper. The brilliance of a Tablet PC is the pen, not the fact you can poke it.
My 3.5 year old Tablet PC has a 1.7Ghz Pentium M with 1GB RAM and is now running Windows 7. It blows the functionality of this thing out the water.
Of the 4.5m individuals in the database, a fifth have never received any convictions or cautions from the Police.
Than means that for approx 80% of the people they initially suspected, they were right!
No, that means that 80% of those have had some form of criminal conviction or caution at any point in their life, which could be for a large array of fairly minor things.
Cautions can be given out for petty vandalism or fairly minor crime, lots of things that people may have done during their younger years. Not the sort of crimes that i think DNA should be kept on a database for.
When I treat the European Union as a single united government under a single president (because that's what they are now that Lisbon Treaty has passed), I see this:
Yeah, except for the fact that we're not. The Lisbon Treaty, apart from being controversial in its own right, doesn't make the EU a "United States of Europe". Each country still has its own laws, government and healthcare.
Just because the position of "European President" has been created, which is apparently a rather figurehead position, does not mean that we're all now one country. The UK still has its NHS, the French have their compulsory insurance system and they're all self contained. So no, you can't just bundle all EU countries together to suit your statistics.
To be honest, i use this feature all the time to share media with my mates.
Your account can be on 5 machines at once (and deactivated at will), so my account, my brother's and a couple of mates have done this with our consoles. Any time i purchase from the online store, they get it too. Sony probably know this thing happens, but yet it's one of the many reasons i happily use their download service, it's pretty damned open as online market places go.
Infact, they've got a lot of purchases because their online store is actually good. I purchase in my local currency (not MS Points), the minimum amount they charge my card at a time is £5 (fair enough, it costs them money to do this), but if the game is more than that, they only charge me that and not in increments of £5. This means i don't have strange quantities of "Points" left over because they sell them in quantities you can't use like MS!
How are they meant to regulate online downloads like this? I think Sony have actually been pretty fair with their policy. I mean, who actually has 5 PS3s they need to have their content on?
The NewScientist i was reading a few days ago was talking about planes going wireless (that's right, WIRELESS) to save weight on copper wiring. They call it fly-by-wireless.
They also claim it has other benefits, such as not having to worry about wires snapping and redundancy. I'd still feel a bit weird flying in a plane with no physical connection to the engines/wings/other.
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand why the fresh out of Uni grads failed horribly; but it really depends on what you're looking at hiring those grads into. I've spent just over a year in a "grad scheme" (they called it that, but they'd never hired grads before and it wasn't really a scheme). But the point was that they were willing to hire people that still needed rounding off at the edges and training in the right domain, like you were after C/C++. With the right level of mostly hands off training, a decent bit of pairing and solid project experience the 2 grads they hired are paying off massively.
My C/C++ is pretty rusty simply because I've not had to do a load of work in it. That doesn't mean that I can't work with them, we did some fairly beefy stuff in C++ during the degree, it's just with the other 2 year's of non C++ oriented dev it falls by the wayside. Obviously if i was going for a properly advertised role I'd beef up my knowledge on pointers again, they're always a bit of a pain just because of the sheer experience factor. The EE grads often have the C/C++ experience but won't have ventured further in their degrees.
I thought I'd add the caveat that whilst it's quite common in Europe it's highly unusual in the UK, with only a few instances of a coalition government forming and even fewer where it has actually lasted a substantial period of time.
No idea whether the current one is going to ride the next year's worth of pain and come out the other side or not.
Whilst the crux of your argument is correct, that's not completely true. Thousands of these cameras are going to be in mainline rail stations, underground stations and plenty of other high-risk areas like the West End, Oxford street etc. Granted, we're still talking a few square miles in the centre of London, but no-one really talks about the suburbs much with these statistics.
Whilst the Dome was a huge waste of taxpayer's money the London Eye is a profitable private enterprise.
Yes, but Sky are also the major premium TV and content provider. Programmes broadcast on Freeview (free OTA digital terrestrial) are effectively free whereas you need to pay for Sky's TV, content and services. If people torrent programmes the biggest loser is Sky as you're less likely to subscribe, then the advertisers on commercial Freeview channels and the BBC who lose long-term DVD sales. If I can torrent a Sky-only show like House why would I be swayed to pay Sky £20/month for House with adverts?
Sky have an active interest in preventing people from torrenting, whereas most other ISPs are just ISPs and therefore have very little interest in restricting their customers. Virgin Media are another TV/ISP company and I remember them being fairly pro DEA too.
I'll admit I haven't gone through Wikileaks, although these leaks don't specifically affect/interest me there are others where I might be interested.
For example, The Telegraph got the UK expenses list and they happened to publish the (partially redacted) data, similar to Wikileaks. I took this as an opportunity to research my own MP's ethics. This was actually an unusual case where the whole leak was published, although they actually used crowdsourcing to try and analyse the data!
This particular leak is a bit more awkward for someone to pick through, it's hundreds of thousands of documents. But, over time, I do believe that it will be gone through. If nothing else, this does help reduce the ability for a reporter to take something completely out of context as the context can be checked. How many times have you seen someone accused say "it was taken out of context" and from there are unable to make any conclusions as the full context is never released? Have they just brushed it off or was it misconstrued?
Exactly, instead it will go back to the newspapers/TV news as being the main avenue for releasing leaked information. Once they get their hands on it there's no knowing what they'll do to it in the process of editorialising it and publishing their POV on the incident.
With wikileaks you are able to see the original documents, so even though there may be bias added to some of their reporting (many complained about the shortened & commentated video of the helicopter attack), the original source is also available.
I think the other important difference was that during WWI and WWII we were in "total war" with quite literally all resources being devoted to winning the war (or at least Europe was). In times like that, with daily bombardments by the enemy, censorship and the associated positive propaganda is quite important.
However this "War on Terror" hardly affects anyone back home, it's not a vital war by any definition for those that are fighting it now and we should be questioning whether it's valid to be there. In which case, censorship really isn't a good place to be.
I was trying to make that point, maybe it wasn't clear as some people don't want it to breed compromise.
Breeding compromise is good!
I voted for them but see the evisceration coming the other way (or probably both ways). The country's in quite a bit of shit with its debt and we need to make some nasty cuts.
If they side with Labour they won't have an outright majority and need a coalition of a load of smaller parties. You can't include the nationalist parties because they will "fight for Wales and Scotland", or summing up the SNP's party political, tell Westminister to fuck off if they suggest any cuts in Scotland. The only thing this loose coalition will be able to do is wangle through a vote on PR before collapsing in a massive heap in a very early election.
In the meantime, the markets will decide this barmy coalition of parties won't be able to control the deficit at all, certainly not in the long term. They'll destroy our credit-worthiness and increase the cost of borrowing / require us to print money to keep going in the way this coalition will want. In doing so they'll destroy the country and no-one will vote for the Lib Dems for being so stupid to put their "selfish" demands for PR above anything else.
Now this would be very different if Labour and Lib Dems had enough seats between them for the outright majority. They could actually form a stable coalition, have a fair amount of confidence and get PR through all at the same time. The problem is, the numbers don't add up.
Except multi-party politics breeds compromise. If another party comes along promising most of what you do but without the crazy you'll start to lose votes to them. The Lib Dems are left-of-centre, but are still in the middle, whereas Labour are on the left.
The 65% bitching about the 35% being in power are probably less disgruntled than the 48% bitching about the 52% in the US, because each side over there is so polar.
I agree, although i do need to read into all the systems properly.
The Lib Dems want something more proportional and call for PR, but I do fear the removal of the constituency link. The fact that a person represents ~70k people in a local area is a good thing and provides for accountability. If we remove this you could end up with some very unpopular people put at the top of each party's list resulting in them never being removed from power.
With the constituency link they would need to be able to find anywhere that would actually take them!
I think will is a bit of a strong word, however in the current example the Conservative party represent the one with the most stringent cuts proposed and the others may disagree enough to vote against it.
However the Conservative party is only 20 seats short, so they just need 20 people out of the other 344 to agree with them. It's called running a minority government, and depending on how much of a minority you are it may simply fall apart.
I don't get this argument. As soon as it becomes actively required, I don't see what would ever stop the US from using their nuclear weapons. You've spent hundreds of Billions on your nuclear arsenal and aren't going to be limited by a fancy piece of paper with a presidential stamp on it.
When was the US likely to use their nukes on any country that attacked them via conventional means anyway? As most people have pointed out, this is a nice PR stunt, but you've reiterated the sort-of known stance of the US since the end of the cold war, we've got nukes but we don't really want to use them.
Not only that, we knew that those were going to become obseleted as soon as the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats come into power. It was only the Labour party that wanted ID cards and it's (one of many) reasons i don't want them to win the next election.
So that seems any better when your lawyer is there? Are you meant to make up some form of alibi? Are you supposed to try and make up a place where you weren't?
It might be an unfortunate fact that where you were was somewhere, alone that's quite unverifiable. However this is reasonably common, what are you supposed to do?
I don't buy that example one bit.
Wait for a couple of years for the apps to be developed.
But current Tablet PCs do so much already! With the kick of "Apple's doing one" we've got some innovation finally, they'll get as cool as the Apple one but be a fully fledged multitasking OS to boot.
Firstly, what is to stop you from using a stylus?
Somewhere to keep it!
What is stopping application developers from creating apps that allow annotation of PDF files or that duplicate the functionality of "One Note". If the market demands such functionality, will the market not deliver it?
As you said, they will but it will take time.
Furthermore, what makes you think that software such as "One Note" is anything but a niche market for certain professionals? And do you really need to be able to scribble ugly handwriting on the screen? Aren't there better ways of inputting text? I suppose the market will decide.
I agree, a decent touch on-screen keyboard is a good idea that should be used on other systems. The correction is really good too. It is faster than using a pen, but with the auto-completing browsers and search by keying one or two characters will be just as quick with the pen. Don't forget that doing sketches, diagrams and mixing writing with text (think notes, maths work) is a very useful part of the pen's function.
Anyways, my opinion is that this is an embryonic platform. Once HTML5 starts to take over, the Flash issue will be less of a concern. And with HTML5, you will be able to do things with a browser that you probably couldn't imagine.
HTML 5 based apps, and therefore cross platform, would be a really good launchpad. But with the Apple iStore interface behind their core product lines now i can see plenty of iPhone OS-only based apps.
Will it flop? Not completely, there is a market. But this doesn't innovate, it's not the magical grand leap forwards they want us to believe and it won't be massively popular. It will sell well, but it's not going to be a major line.
Exactly my thoughts, they've done the Tablet PC without including the pen, the reason that Tablet PCs are so useful.
Our Uni publishes all the notes online as PDFs, i load up aforementioned app and annotate right on the notes. But i can also insert extra pages, copy-paste and insert diagrams. My logic coursework and having the ability to copy/paste/edit previous lines, as well as doodle without wrecking it is so much more useful than a pad of paper. The brilliance of a Tablet PC is the pen, not the fact you can poke it.
My 3.5 year old Tablet PC has a 1.7Ghz Pentium M with 1GB RAM and is now running Windows 7. It blows the functionality of this thing out the water.
The 2 classic locations I can think of are:
Natural History Museum, nearest tube South Kensington.
Somerset House, nearest tube Temple.
Of the 4.5m individuals in the database, a fifth have never received any convictions or cautions from the Police.
Than means that for approx 80% of the people they initially suspected, they were right!
No, that means that 80% of those have had some form of criminal conviction or caution at any point in their life, which could be for a large array of fairly minor things.
Cautions can be given out for petty vandalism or fairly minor crime, lots of things that people may have done during their younger years. Not the sort of crimes that i think DNA should be kept on a database for.
When I treat the European Union as a single united government under a single president (because that's what they are now that Lisbon Treaty has passed), I see this:
Yeah, except for the fact that we're not. The Lisbon Treaty, apart from being controversial in its own right, doesn't make the EU a "United States of Europe". Each country still has its own laws, government and healthcare.
Just because the position of "European President" has been created, which is apparently a rather figurehead position, does not mean that we're all now one country. The UK still has its NHS, the French have their compulsory insurance system and they're all self contained. So no, you can't just bundle all EU countries together to suit your statistics.
The PS3 has several software titles you can install, including VidZone, an on demand music video application.
To be honest, i use this feature all the time to share media with my mates.
Your account can be on 5 machines at once (and deactivated at will), so my account, my brother's and a couple of mates have done this with our consoles. Any time i purchase from the online store, they get it too. Sony probably know this thing happens, but yet it's one of the many reasons i happily use their download service, it's pretty damned open as online market places go.
Infact, they've got a lot of purchases because their online store is actually good. I purchase in my local currency (not MS Points), the minimum amount they charge my card at a time is £5 (fair enough, it costs them money to do this), but if the game is more than that, they only charge me that and not in increments of £5. This means i don't have strange quantities of "Points" left over because they sell them in quantities you can't use like MS!
How are they meant to regulate online downloads like this? I think Sony have actually been pretty fair with their policy. I mean, who actually has 5 PS3s they need to have their content on?
Whereas here in the UK we're not getting a price drop, but apparently the standard bundle is going to come with an extra game!
Fuck you console makers, you keep screwing over the UK market and i'm sick of it!
The NewScientist i was reading a few days ago was talking about planes going wireless (that's right, WIRELESS) to save weight on copper wiring. They call it fly-by-wireless.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327245.300-flybywireless-set-for-takeoff.html
They also claim it has other benefits, such as not having to worry about wires snapping and redundancy. I'd still feel a bit weird flying in a plane with no physical connection to the engines/wings/other.