Posts by h4rm0ny 4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008
Your entire rant about how people can apply for jobs if they want them, how gender ratios shouldn't be enforced etc., is really very odd given that the subject is how to stop school children being discouraged from an interesting career. One might even suppose that you just wanted to rant against your preferred strawman. Sorry. Straw-woman.
So you're saying that an actress who plays scientists on TV is a role model for female engineers and programmers? There are tonnes of highly skiled female engineers and programmers. These are role models. An actress is a role model for people who want to act! She may be a very nice person in real life (I've never met her) but your whole comment about female geeks and nerds just confused the Hell out of me. What has DragonCon got to do with programming? Why is the presence of women at DragonCon relevant to women being turned off programming? Please tell me you are not confusing an interest in dragons with studying computer science or similar!
So basically, run, run, run away from actual empirical evidence and fall back on argument by assertion that "girls are indeed more fascinated by dogs and horses". :D :D :D
I only asked a very simple logical question. And you scarpered away from even pretending to answer it and hid behind logic that would make a Creationist blush. Too funny. As to programming languages created by men and women, first and foremost, they are programming languages created by *people*.
Anyway, I would like to thank you for helping undermine the idea that men are inherently more logical than women. By existing.
What an odd reply. It presupposes that men who take care of their appearance or look good are less technically adept than men who don't. As there seems no logical basis for this, we can propose a bias on your part and suggest that you are probably one of the "types of men" that are being criticised. But despite your leaping to characterise the OP's position as wanting more metrosexuals who "Sharon" can turn to when she has a bust up with her boyfriend, I think it's more reasonable to suspect the OP is talking about creepy guys who see women less as people and more as entities defined by their gender. You know, like you do in your post?
V. funny. Oh wait, you're serious? Okay then, I presume as a rational male, you like the scientific method, i.e. you are willing to put your hypothesis (it's not worth calling a theory) to an actual test.
If it's biological in basis, how come you see vastly different gender ratios along cutural lines? How come in India there is a massively massive bigger proportion of women as programmers than in the USA? How come the farther East you drift from the USA, across Europe and into Asia, you see less and less gender division in IT?
I await your unsupported, unresearched assertions that somehow positive cultural influences outside the USA (which of course should be considered the Natural state), overwhelm the underlying biological tendencies that you have faith *ahem* sorry, that you know to be there.
You know I feel really sorry for all those people with Autism who AREN'T computer geniuses (you knpw, 98% of them). Ever since the Rain Man movie and ever since Aspergers became trendy, anyone remotely socially awkward is expected to be obsessively brilliant. It must be like when you're asked "what do Black people think of X' and you're like: "I don't know - we don't have comittees or a hive mind,"
Some Aspergers types, they just want to stand on the platform and collect train numbers, you know? Stop putting all these expecations on them.
The above is true. These shows have to be produced by men. They think that showing the woman as "hot" and cool, amongst a bunch of nerdy losers is showing women in a postive light. Instead of asking themself what woman wants to be the only female in a group of nerdy, socially awkward losers. It's not (much) like that in real life in the UK. Why does it have to be shown that way?
And do you care that gender stereotyping and expectations lead to a gross gender imbalance in the IT work place? The article is correct. The Geek stereotype - a bizarre cultural export from the American school system which insists on pushing people into being either smart or cool - does indeed put many women off pursuing such a direction.
No-one cares whether you think cool should be a factor in whether someone wants a job or not (though I don't believe you if you say that whether or not your job is respected of laughed at has had no affect on how you feel about it). The point is that if you get rid of the Geek stereotype and accept that programming is just another career like accountancy, architecture, whatever... then you will have a wider a choice of people to choose from on the basis of competence, which is what you say you care about. Ergo - Geek stereotype is harmful to your ability to hire competent people.
I enjoy programming. I started off writing device drivers. Does it mean I want to talk to you about the latest Spiderman vs. Batman comic? No it does not. Please keep your American high school student's hang-ups out of my career choice.
"LOL... so your defence for Bing is that is actually is slower but people wouldn't notice and that it works as well as Google if you are in the USA and only input "non-contrived" search phrases..."
No. My point was very clearly stated. That a search result time of 0.64 seconds is below any human-discernible threshold for being held up. Quite honestly, if Google returns results in 0.54 seconds, it's irrelevant. And I don't have to persuade you that you should use Bing. I'm just dismayed by the massive bias or astro-turfing that goes on against it. I got six downvotes for a purely factual rebuttal of an easily proven wrong claim about Bing. Says it all about bias.
As does complaining that Bing is slower than Google when results are about half a second. You can't expect anyone to believe that holds you up. Ergo - bias.
And who said anything about the USA? I'm in Europe.
"compile monodevelop windows"
Congratulations. You're the first person I've asked this of (and I've asked this many times) whose actually managed to come up with a search term for me that gives reasonably different results in Bing and isn't insanely niche. Okay, pretty niche, but legitimate. Thanks for actually taking on the challenge.
Btw, do you mind if I put you in touch with the other Bing critic further up whose objection is that Bing is a copy of Google's search results? ;)
Well if Bing thinks your in Ireland because you're connecting from Ireland, and Google does not, that's presumably because Google has pinned down your location through other means such as gmail accounts, sneaky cookies, etc. Yes? You can't seriously be suggesting that Google magically knows that the proxy in Dublin is actually serving someone in the Isle of Man. So it must know from tracking your individual data. That's hardly an issue with the search engine. I'm actually happy with Bing not tracking me individually by my mail accounts, thanks. ;)
Okay. You think Google is faster than Bing? Maybe you are a robot from the future who notices tiny millisecond load times. Maybe you are in China and there actually is a load time difference due to some proxy issue. Just for you I timed a Bing search in my browser. 0.64 seconds. I do not belive your brain works so fast that's an issue for you. You're really clutching at straws.
As to useful search results, I asked for a non-contrived search phrase that gave significantly different results. So go ahead. Show it. It would have been quickker than your anecdote about six people in your office all agreeing to do a two week trial. And man, if that's actually true, you work in a seriously boring office.
"Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it: http://goo.gl/1qsuo"
That's a lie and if you're the poster from previously, you know this. Alternately, maybe you've just been told this and believe it without actually looking into it. Which is a lesser fault, but still a fault. The Register covered this last year:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/google_accuses_microsoft_of_copying_its_search
What happens is that MS collect data from what users click on to improve their search results if the option is enabled, just the same as Google do. A few Google employees realized that if they created entirely random strings that they arbitrarily linked to particular sites and used IE with preferences set to allow collection of user data, then Bing would learn to associate the random string with those sites. I.e. they deliberately set up a situation in which the only possible source of information was people using Google in their browser and submitting that information to MS, to then claim that MS was copying their results.
The Google version of the story is link at http://goo.gl/1qsuo and once you know the above and understand what is happening, that story seems horrendously two-faced and misleading.
But still, if a lie is repeated often enough, people pick it up and think there's something to it.
And here we begin the slew of posts about how crap they think Bing is. Again, I'd like to see any remotely non-contrived search term that gives significantly different results in Bing than in Google. I personally like Bing better. I like the layout and I think the layout when returning image results is actually noticeably better to use. But I don't spam stories about the Google search engine going 'har har - isn't it crap'. Because it isn't. Both are pretty similar. The only noticeable difference I think, is Google is better at searching usenet groups, etc., for which I switch to it.
Oh yes, what's the other one - people outraged that Bing is the default search engine in IE, and ignoring that every blasted time I install Firefox, instead of just selecting my preferred search engine from a drop down, I have to go off in search of the Bing Add-on for it.
I know, I should probably wait for all the FUD to be posted before I complain about it. But it's so predictable it will be here soon enough.
He had paid for a licence for X amount of Windows seats. He bought in new computers and installed additional WIndows OSs without giving up the old ones, exceeding the number of seats he had paid for. Now it wasn't very nice that he got raided and it's possible that this is due to mistakenly breaking the law rather than wilful (he tries to imply the former, but he would, wouldn't he, so we don't know). But basically, the link is a story about someone using MS sofware without properly paying for all his installs as I said. And I have read the story, thanks.
Really disagree there. The reason tablets haven't taken off in the past is because to any sort of reasonable processing power and screen quality out of them, they had to weigh about 1.5kg. Tablets aren't great for real productive work (graphics, word processing, programming, anything), but they're good for lying on a sofa and reading the web, watching a movie on a train, basic emails, etc. You could do all that with a desktop OS on the tablet but if the device is too heavy to casually hold, what point is there? Size and weight were the real barriers - if you doubt it, just ask whether a tablet-focused OS would make any difference if the iPad was the size and weight of one of those older laptops. It wouldn't. But the inverse is not true: a device as light and portable as modern tablets would still be fairly fit for purpose even with a barely altered desktop OS.
"Yeah, fucking with the moon seems a really good idea. It's not like its exact position and trajectory has any effect on life on earth or anything"
You can't be serious. PLEASE tell me you are not serious. You cannot actually have so little grasp of science and scale that you think human activity of any kind on the moon (let alone a little mining) is going to alter the Moon's mass or trajectory. Can you?
You missed out:
5. Make future attempts at this much more likely to be successful and to show that this is possible and can be profitable, thus massively increasing the chances of us profitably mining asteroids and producing fuel in Space in the future.
I think it reasonable to think that with all that expertise on board both in existing Space operations and in building and running hugely profitable enterprises, that sums have been done and this is at the least, plausibly viable.
This is a necessary step to using the vast resources available in Space. So the question to everyone is essentially, do you want us to use the vast resources available in Space. It's their money, they're starting programs that can massively benefit humanity in the future. The programs even raise the profile of science and create highly technical jobs also. We should be happy about this.
This post made me go back and re-read the article. Did it really say there was such a feature? Yes it actually did. Still not quite believing this, I checked out what Smart Connect actually does. And it's worse than you think! It's not "hardware accellerated Twitter". What it actually does is allow the hardware to connect to Twitter, email, Facebook whatever, WHILE THE LAPTOP IS ASLEEP! Basically, it periodically tuns over in its sleep, checks to see if any updates have come in and grabs them ready for when you resume.
Personally, like constantly getting txts when I'm trying to sleep myself, I can't see this as being any kind of good. I'll leave the security implications of the hardware accessing my various accounts below the OS level for others to contemplate.
I think AMD's combined GPU/CPU have actually got Intel rattled. I can't see how anything is better for low-power, reasonable performance simple devices than AMD's APUs. Assuming they can manufacture enough of the buggers, anyway.
Ahhh. So $300mil now, and $23mil on paper, but don't try to cash it all in or the value of it will start collapsing in panic.
Funny how there is all this "money" floating around in the form of stocks, which only has value as long as no-one tries to cash it all in and spend it. If I were one of the Instagram recipients of this generosity, I would be attempting to find the optimum Sell-Off Speed : Discretion midpoint as discarding these as profitably and as a quickly as I could.
Did a billion US dollars actually transfer between accounts here? Or did the absurdly valued Facebook say here is some of the hyper-overvalued bits of paper we call shares in exchange for some of the stupidly overvalued bits of paper that you call your shares. Does Facebook actually have a billion dollars lying around in some bank account or is this all some bizarre fantasy money based on their supposed worth that will all vanish the moment reality sets in?
Actually, the person your replying to is right. Having been present in a series of procurment meetings, I can tell you that the reason was explicitly (but off-the-record) about being able to deny responsibility. People complain to them that things aren't good, they just point at the outsourced company and say: "not our fault. They promised better". In practice, attaching blame to someone for making a bad choice in who to hire, is a lot harder than directly blaming them for mismanagement. And they know this.
"1. gain economies of scale (small 100 man insurance company outsources infrastructure yes, NHS or major comercial firm no)"
I'm glad you pointed out that it isn't appropriate for all. Another thing is that economies of scale don't apply to all things. Making widgets? Yes - economy of scale reduces per-unit costs. Tech support, training, things like that: They don't scale so well. If one person can help ten people per day, then that doesn't change because you put them all in the same office. Not in the same way that mass production of machinery does for example. And oftentimes, things scale in a negative way. For example, our small IT support group (I wasn't one of them by the way, I was management elsewhere at that point) knew the local practices, knew how they worked and what they needed and because they were local could prioritise routes, co-ordinate work between themselves and generally perform like small groups of intelligent people can. The outsourced IT support had none of these things. It was just slightly more people supporting a lot more users with none of the local non-centralized intelligence and this bizarre expectation that "economies of scale" would reduce the amount of hours one person took to solve one problem.
In other cases, outsourcing can make sense as you say. Don't disagree. But in this case I know because it was eventually said, that the reason for outsourcing was so that responsibilty didn't lie with people in the NHS. At least in their heads. I still hold them responsible.
"Can anyone state exactly how much cost savings there have been with the outsourcing of ICT from government hands to the private sector?"
Not without using a minus sign. You think the answer is "pretty much bollocks all". During my involvement with a procurement process in the NHS, where I several times pointed out that for the same money you could get people in-house and have some change left-over, I know for a fact that money was lost through outsourcing to private companies. It was eventually made clear that I was there to lend legitimacy to the process (as a representative of my group) rather than to actually be of use.
Really, the entire idea of outsourcing: that Cost of Work + Private Profit < Cost of Work is dubious. It presuposes a wonderful level of improved efficiency to be introduced by virtue of Private Enterprise. There's a lot of wastage in the NHS, but not sure it's enough to counter the literal billions of profit that various companies have made out it.
Oh, and that outsourced company they eventually hired? They were a complete joke, failed in their role and then walked off at the end of the year with the money. All because - and I quote from one of the people on the decision board - "by outsourcing it, it's not our responsibility".
And incidentally,
"Compare that with HHGTTG or the newer WotW where entire plot elements are omitted or warped almost out of recognition."
Douglas Adams was always re-writing those stories. The books were different to the radio plays, the TV series was different to the books. I don't see why when he wanted to roll elements from the first four books of the Trilogy into one film, he shouldn't have started again.
...is can we create something "better" than DNA? Whether that is more energy efficient, or quicker replicating or less prone to damage or more information dense... Not that what has been done here isn't amazing, but to be able to make a Life 2.0, would be incredible. I'm vaguely thinking of that scene in the Fifth Element where the scientist compares Leeloo's DNA with human DNA, showing how much extra is encoded in it. But more realistically - what practical differences could there be between natural DNA and a synthetic alternative?
"Do they really think this hacking has any positive value other than sending them to prison?"
Yes - absolutely. We're reading about it, aren't we? It's helping make people aware of the atrocious human rights abuses that go on in Bahrain, isn't it? And making people aware of abuse is a vital step in helping stop the abuse. So with this elementary train of logic, yes, I applaud Anonymous for this. It's what they should be doing. It's what a lot of people should be doing. Have you any idea how women are treated in Bahrain for example? Or how people speaking out against the government there are treated? I really hate to resort to cliches, but you should live in such circumstances for a short time and then you might wonder how neighbouring cultures can sit by and allow people to suffer so much.
(Incidentally: note to El Reg. reporters: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. One of these is not like the others. Hint: it's the one where a small Eastern group from Banghazi who had pre-arranged plans with the West, started an "uprising" backed by a massive NATO air-campaign to bomb the shit out of the rest of the country and where they made up for their lack of numbers by importing ground troops from Qatar. Egypt and Tunisia actually were popular uprisings. Even a brief fact-checking on Libya shows it was not).
Now all those people who thought: "yeah, I don't fancy that", raise your hand if the penalty being a decade in a Singapore prison rather than exectution suddenly makes you think "Okay, I'll try it now".
No takers? Well then capital punishment is no greater deterrent to the rational mind than ten years in prison.
Well presumably if they've been caught for the first, they shouldn't have much opportunity to commit a second. And if they haven't been caught for the first then it's more or less irrlevant unless they are.
But really, the penalties for murder et al are so high (unless your governments says these people are okay to kill and pays you for it), that you'd already have to be unable to rationally factor in consequences to do it anyway, unless you thought you'd get away with it. Basically, to any person behaving rationally, committing murder or similar is already a bad idea. If someone discards the risks of years in prison, they're almost certainly going to discard the risk of execution.
I don't think it's about competing with Ubuntu on a stick (though their Metro interface seems an attempt to compete with Ubuntu's Unity for Biggest Fundamental Error of Judgement in a GUI).
The way I read the break down above is that you have three categories for actual computers: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise. The basic is your home user package. - the let it find your router and go crowd. The Pro includes all the features you'd really want if you were a business user: seamless file encryption, domain joining, etc. And Enterprise is not Even More Pro. Enterprise is for those that want others to manage their computer. So there's nothing extra in there that a business user has to have themselves, the extras are about integration into a larger organization's systems. So you have the secure remote file management tools, more sophisticated remote PC control and setting up of corporate cache.
The breakdown makes sense to me: Home, Professional, Professional + Tools for Corporate Integration and Management. Users are going to mostly fall into one of those three categories quite naturally and it makes a lot more sense than the rather forced differentiaion between Professional and Ultimate previously.
Anyway, the bootable USB fits into this quite nicely. If you read the actual press release it suggests it is more than just a simple copy of Win8 on a USB drive. It's actually a manageable corporate instance so that you can, for example, give temporary contractors, auditors, etc. access to your systems in a more secure way or (from their press release) support the "Bring Your Own PC" crowd.
Personally, I quite like how the features break down into Home, Pro and Enterprise. Now if we can just have a way of turning off Metro, I think this could be good.
"It's an Islamic country, so it would be saying bad things about the prophet Muhammed surely?"
No. Mohammed is the central figure in Islam, but Jesus is considered a prophet also and therefore criticism of Jesus could also be considered blasphemy by muslims (and punishable in countries like Pakistan).
Oddly enough, the one gadget I immediately thought of for helping get to sleep was a Rampant Rabbit (a vibrator to those that have less brand-awareness). If you're tense and you want to get to sleep, there's nothing that will get you off as well as, well, getting off.
Note: methods may vary with gender.
Ha! Glad I'm not the only one who accidentally bought a one of those WD MyBooks. I don't know what I was thinking. Mine too is now sitting on a shelf, long since replaced by a proper computer acting as my home server. I bought an AMD Hudson M1 motherboard for about a £100 (comes with pre-installed, fanless APU). It sips power in the lightest of ways and comes with 5 SATA 6GB/s ports. I have two RAID-1 arrays in there and it serves data incomparably faster than my old WD MyBook ever did. I should stick a couple of cheap hard drives in the MyBook and see if I can flog it, but I doubt I'd recover the cost of the drives.
"I remember receiving a document with an embedded picture in it that I wanted to amend. To edit the picture I (eventually) discovered that I needed to click "Insert" on the ribbon first. Not particularly intuitive."
That's a bit bizarre. If you open a document in Word and then click on the picture, a big purple tab appears at the top of the screen with Picture written on it. This contains all the options for editing the picture in one place.
"My own personal thoughts are that the ribbon is an attempt to lock a new generation of users into their own software by force / legality. They do this by creating a new totally unintuitive interface that looks nothing like the "File - Edit - Vew - Etc." we've all become accustomed to and then copyright or patent it"
An argument against progress if ever there was one. Also an expression that you dislike the Ribbon because you're not used to it rather than because of any actual flaw.
"This new generation of kids can now no longer use the classic interface when released into the real world, and as such cannot use competing products, and will refuse to do so. Competing products are unable to incorporate "the wrong way" interface into their products, because MS have copyrighted / patented it. Yay, no threat to any of MSs revenues by competitors or Open Office."
If "kids" are unable to use competing programs because they haven't been taught it at school, then I think that would be a pretty strong argument that the menu system was hard to remember and navigate for some people. (Not for me - I found it fairly easy, though I had to hunt around for the more obscure stuff). So I would hardly blame MS for wanting to replace it. Also, this "real world" you refer to, contains the Ribbon now. Are you arguing that kids should be protected from it so that they come to it unprepared?
And for someone arguing against the Ribbon, it seems rather contrary to take the stance that it's wrong because other people can't emulate it. Isn't that an argument that the Ribbon is advantageous?
Really, this is a tired argument. The Ribbon has been with us for years and I have seen more than enough non-technical users adapt to it and even welcome it in that time. Similarly I have seen plenty of technical people nod at it and say "Yep - this is cool." The only people I find against it are a weird demographic of technical users who loudly complain about it, but don't seem to actually demonstrate what is wrong with it (e.g. X takes more clicks), instead coming out with vague (read: unsupported) statements that it is unintuitive or - a new one on me - that it's wrong because other companies will be disadvantaged by not being able to do it themselves. Quite frankly, any person who thinks of themself as technical, and struggles with the Ribbon, should hang themselves in shame. And if they can understand it just fine, then what's with all the angst and ranting?
Well, I find it rather hard to understand how the average technical user (such as I would think most people on El Reg. qualify as) can say they find it hard to work out the ribbon. As for laptops and desktops, I'm interested to know why the availability of an even more precise tool for clicking than fingers (the mouse or touchpad) suddenly makes the ribbon less suitable for these devices than on tablets. Sure, menus are more penalized on tablets than the ribbon is, but that doesn't mean that the reverse is true. Why would it? As pointed out, the majority of activity in Word, Excel, etc. takes the same or fewer clicks with the Ribbon. And it's not hard to guess where things are to be found. There are only seven default categories, none of which have sub-menus like the old system did. Unless people who profess to hate it so much can actually point out remotely common use-cases where the Ribbon makes things harder, not easier, then I don't see how it isn't just being annoyed because they don't like change.
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