Posts by Michael C. 36 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Nov 2010
> Pure technical contributions aren’t enough – we need interpersonal skills as well
rather discriminatory against those who lack interpersonal skills? if you're contributing purely technically, then you're not breaking the code of conduct, surely. not every developer who wants to contribute wants to engage interpersonally with the kinds of people who write contributor convenants, nor contravene such a convenant. you can do neither.
@Charlie: numerous post-referendum polls have shown that idealogical reasons like sovereignty and identity were more important to voters than anything else, e.g. http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why/
Let me correct you on two of your mistakes, I said people who voted for Brexit, so I'm not talking about everyone, and I'm talking about a very specific and minor point with regard to employment prospects, not employment prospects in general, which sounds much graver.
Your response only goes to further confirm my analysis that what you consider important is completely out of step with what Brexit voters consider important. That's my opinion, as a Brexit voter.
This is such a ridiculously minor point about Brexit. I don't suspect people who voted for huge changes in how the country is governed cared a great deal about a very minor reduction in their employent prospects in multinational US companies.
Seriously, this is enormous 'constitutional' change like we've almost never seen before and you're talking about this. It demonstates a vastly different set of concerns between people like you and the people who voted for Brexit, the Venn diagram basically doesn't touch at all.
Any service with geolocation features, like twitter for instance, stores your location against your postings ...
For those who have opted out, they store IP based location guesses .. so what, any simple web stats application I've ever used in the last 10 years has done IP location. I'm sure El Reg have those stats too.
They share information with government in compliance with US law .. like every other tech company in the states.
What am I missing here?
I may be missing something but how does the malware get on the USB device in the first place? Seems like a chicken and egg situation if the infected USB devices are designed to infect a computer, but requires an infected computer to infect the USB device?
If the devices have to be prepared with the malicious code, then how does it differ from designing and manufacturing a malicious USB device from scratch, which I would imagine has always been possible?
"Sectional times, i.e. [time taken for horse a to travel between point x and y] are also published elsewhere for public consumption. "
Don't mean to hijack this for my own purposes, but where are sectional times published? This kind of data, along with accurate finishing times for runner ups (this isn't widely published, we only get distance in lengths from next horse generally) would be gold dust to me.
You're all nuts. Of course the police have to have more powers than us, or they wouldn't be able to police. You've all come from the same crowd who are rightly disgruntled that the security services were doing illegal things against innocent people, but you've failed to make the distinction that these people were law breakers.
If someone's speeding, the police can speed after him. If someone's being dangerous, the police can kill him. If someone's involved in crime, the police can surveil him. If someone's DDOSing, the police can DOS him.
Go live in a bunker you paranoid git.
It may come as a surprise to you but in democracies governments are elected. People contribute to and develop societies to define and shape the laws we live under, the laws that governments govern. Those are the two most prominent differences between terrorist organisations and governments.
Your historical references are all examples of where governments have gone wrong, or were never established by the people. Sure, governments aren't perfect, we all know power corrupts, which is why it's an endless struggle. As Salman Rushdie once said, "freedom is not a tea party, freedom is a war".
If you have laws, someone has to brandish the stick, to borrow a phrase. Sounds like you'd rather live in a lawless state. I'll hang around here if that's okay.
Unreal was so far beyond anything at the time, the lush environments, the state-of-the-art AI, the scripted elements that didn't feel scripted, the fantastic story-line, the incredible soundtrack. Not to mention that it's the last game I've ever played that has been value for money. It was a long game, and a truly difficult game, I don't know how many months it took me to complete.
I've played Unreal since it was released. I've played it online since a few months afterwards. The best Unreal MOD was by far Infiltration Standoff, which I run a server for today from a spare PC, great community and truly pure FPS gameplay. Coop mode was so much fun and Deathmatch was the groundwork for the utter brilliance that is Unreal Tournament. Yeah the net code was junk, but the official patches that followed from Epic went a long way to addressing that.
UT also led to great MODs such as the flagship realism MOD Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror, which was released before Counter-Strike was out of beta and was head and shoulders above it in gameplay (imo!) and graphics.
Also UT99 CTF instagib is probably the best FPS gameplay out there, even today. This is my favourite instagib video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gapcs3u4s_c
I can see there's a division of opinion over the maths requirement. It obviously depends on what area of computing you want to specialise in. For most jobbing programmers they won't need an awful lot of complex maths skills.
When I was at Cardiff University they split us up into three bands based on our maths experience: those with no A-level maths, those with lower than a C grade, and those with C and above (IIRC). Being in the top band awarded you a position on the MATLAB course (hooray!).
I also went on to do a Computer Graphics module which was extremely maths intensive. Certain areas of computing, computer graphics/vision being one of them, you will definitely struggle without a really sound foundation of mathematics, in others you'll get by just fine.
Good post but my one bugbear this constant description of human rights as innate. There's no such thing as innate rights, there's no omnipotent justice minister. People in committees decide what your human rights are. They're weren't delivered from space on a moral meteorite.
You're right in one aspect, and I believe this was probably what you were getting at in a round about way: for all intents and purposes they should be considered innate. However, it's very important to remember that they are written by people, and whilst they should hold great reverence, they are not entirely exempt from criticism.
Just for balance, I joined Outlook.com as soon as it launched and switching my current email address to Outlook.com was an absolute doddle, I could also set up mail.mydomain.com to point to Outlook.com with a further few steps.
The user experience is great, lovely interface, and I didn't experience any outage.
*shrug*
Reading that hurt. I don't know if it's my instinctual reaction, as a CS student, to take a little offence to some of the allegations in the article, but I'll shrug it off!
I guess I must've chosen a good university in Cardiff, because all the things mentioned in the article that CS grads are lacking, are all taught here. I'm currently in my third and final year and we've had modules on Operating Systems, Algorithms and Data Structures, lots of database modules (object orientated stuff, SQL, web), several maths modules, and I've never had a module about computer ethics.
Sure, our main learning language is Java too; universities have to teach at least one language in order for students to be able to implement the techniques that they learn about. They don't teach in-depth knowledge of lots of languages, because programming skills are very transferable once you've got them down. We did however have modules that touched on C/C++, web languages, and MATLAB.
The way I thought it would be, for companies looking to employ graduates, is that they'd look for a graduate with a strong foundation of all things computing, and programming, and they'd train him in the particulars (and he'd pick it up fast if it was a new programming language, or something). They are after all just graduates, if you're looking for an experienced programmer who knows 15 languages, you're probably not going to find that in a graduate, I would have thought?
Obviously the author of this article knows more about employing CS grads than me, but there's no chance that anyone with a half decent degree classification from my course at my uni, would fit in with the image portrayed in article.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
