Posts by Mark Olleson

This misses the point

Issues of reliability of evidence aside, in many cases, the drive will have harvested deleted blocks well before the device is seized and a forensic examination can take place.

this might not be the best incentive

This might not work out quite as you expect if it results in a large number of unsuitable candidates selecting science and engineering subjects simply because they are cheap.

I can well remember that drop out rate on MEng in Electronic Engineering I did at a Russell-group red-brick university in the mid 90's: We started with about 150 students in the first year, dropping to probably under half of this by the 3rd year. By the fourth year, there were 13 of us staying on for the MEng.

My university, no doubt like many others, was very conscious that too many of their students were coming from independent schools.

Whilst the usual way onto an Engineering course was Maths and Physics A-levels, and more often than not another science, they also offered places to candidates from vocational backgrounds - who often a very light on formal mathematics education.

Invariably, these students found 1st year Engineering Maths very hard (those of us who did A-Levels found the first semester a rehash of stuff we'd already done and found it a very easy ride). A huge number of those who failed the year did so because of this course. And without it, they were truly stuffed with all of the other modules as well, which relied heavily on it.

Unless we want to stuff the first years of our science and engineering degrees with students who are likely to fail, education before university is a really big deal.

Wow...

I think you might just have stumbled on the difference between a 'business' and a 'charity'.

Traction

Good luck using fibre-optic cables for traction power. Power cables are the ones really worth stealing, although they're probably so heavy that special handling equipment will be needed to pinch any length of it.

I suspect that lots of signalling cable is already fibre optic, but does the kind of low-life who steals signalling cable know the difference before they rip it out?

Seems quite reasonable

Buy government standards, this was a low-cost initiative, and unlike most other government IT projects, the costs of this one seem in the right order of magnitude.

There is a really no comparison between a proof-of-concept site developed in 7 hours with a productionized one. As anyone who's involved in large IT projects will tell you, development costs are only a small part of the overall budget.

Milestone, millstone?

Title says it all.

It's all about tool support

Google is quite some way behind when it comes to dev tools, with both Microsoft and Apple offering dramatically better offerings, with tight integration. Not having ownership of the entire suite of dev tools is a big problem for Google going forward.

On Android there are quite a few reasons why you might want to go native - for instance if you're writing her performance games, or, as in my case, porting a substantial amount of code from elsewhere. The tools with NDK are very deeply unpleasant. So much so in fact, you'd do as much of your dev outside of the Android environment.

One big assumption...

.... that the app has already been submitted and approved by Apple.

Could Playboy be in for a humiliating public rejection?

Most get caught for stupidity

The vast majority of convictions are as a result of the convictee admitting owning a TV when the 'inspector' calls - or letting him/her in.

What I'd like to know is where getting the evasion statistic from: I suspect they are assuming that everyone property is required to have a TV license and then comparing this to the number that actually do.

As somebody who does not need a TV license (by virtue of not owning one), I am fed up with harassing letters from TV licensing. When the inspector calls, he/she is given a response similar to that given by the defendant in the celebrated case of Arkel vs. Presdram.

All about the experience

Apple is all about the seamless, holistic end-to-end user-experience. There is the impression of quality throughout the experience from the buying experience, through packaging to aftersales service, all of which Apple jealously guards

Systems integration is important too. Apple does indeed test very thoroughly. The Dell approach is to ODM the hardware, bundle Windows and hope for the best. Hence the fiasco of the XPS range - of premium laptops - which shipped with buggy graphics drivers.

Whilst Dell continue to outsource core business functions including design and support they will fail.

in the noise

Smart metering would definitely improve this situation - right now the grid operator never gets a snapshot of all of the meter readings taken at the same time to correlate with upstream meters.

This crime probably worked because the energy theft was distributed around fairly large area and the discrepancies were well below the value needed to set alarm bells ringing: You bet that there is significant administrative error in the energy supply business.

Probably won't wash...

....as railway signalling systems are designed to fail safe in such conditions. The probable result will be red signals for everyone.

Due to bluetooth?

This looks to be a Blue-tooth peripheral - and Bluetooth support is by no means universal in Windows PCs.

Apple would find themselves integrating with myriad shitty Bluetooth drivers and hardware (with associated bugs), not to mention having a difficult 'is this compatible?' issue to handle in store.

Supporting Bootcamp only, they don't have any of these variables.