Posts by Wesley Wakeman

The BOFH is BACK: And it's cloudy with a 90% chance of beatings

Re: Sometimes there's just no substitute for percussive teaching methods.

Don't you mean "Concussive" teaching methods?

Educating Rory: Are BBC reporters unteachable?

Pascal and derivatives are used by many places as the starting point for teaching Computing based subjects. Basic only in Visual versions (4GL), Office macros are really basic VB however out of the population who use computers how many of them will ever program anything? 1% 2%? I think teaching computing at GCSE or A Level is a good thing but basic Office and computer skills are just as important if not more so. Do you want people working in an office that can automate basic task in excel word etc.. or ones that can write "Hello World" both need to be taught shame ICT is getting the boot in place of computing. My educational background is computer studies and computer science and I enjoyed the programming much more than the boring office tasks but I have to admit both are important.

Gmail goes titsup for 30 MILLION PUNTERS

Of the 300 million user base are all 300 million email users or are some email some apps etc?

Laptop computers are crap

Re: Bloody 16:9 screens GRRRR!

20 minutes my old Dell M1730 is now 4 years old and only last 10, damn I need a new battery.

Australia should head-hunt Michael Gove

You may not have seen it but Access 2007/2010 can create a nice simple system for many users in a small business and trust me they do use it so it's still a useful skill to learn. If IT classes no longer teach Databases/Word/Excel who will? Word taught by English Teachers? Excel taught by Mathematics Teachers I very much doubt this, as an english teacher will not necessarily know enough about Word to give enough information in lessons to be useful in later life same goes for the Mathematics Teachers (but probably in the case of the mathematics teachers that excel isn't really needed in their lessons at all compared with a calculator and a lot of formulas). Adding ICT to the rest of the curriculum will probably mean a very small proportion of the school leavers will be able to use basic Office software in any benefical way for the company they work for without teaching them everything needed which would have been taught before the change. However I am a fan of having Computing in the school curriculum (Which has been around for sometime as a GCSE and A Level as well as the older BTEC qualifications). The best thing they can do is add ICT and/or Computing to the core subjects so it counts significantly to the league tables currently it is regarded as a second class citizen by many schools and this cannot be allowed to continue if they truely want us at the cutting edge of innovation. Time will tell.

Depends on the school but many do teach the basics including Macros, Functions, etc..

Access is taught as well in most schools to give a pupil an understanding of basic relational database creation and why its necessary.

Cambridge woman in £90m 'leccy bill shocker

Blast Furnace

Actually I think it would be 25,000 blast Furnaces. If a blast furnace consumes 1000 units a day for 28 days (okay so not a calendar month) thats only 28000 units. 25,000 x 28,000 = 700,000,000. Not sure where you'd store 25,000 blast furnaces though :)

Mines the one with the enormous garage or a T.A.R.D.I.S.

Wes

Quad-core Xeons use small power plant to maul Opterons

@John Latham

[]quote]"[The test] showed Intel Xeon-based servers reaching 14 per cent higher throughput performance over similarly configured AMD Opteron-based servers, which consumed 41 per cent less power."

That could also read "Intel servers reached 14% higher throughput whilst consuming 69% more power".

Which is impressive (for AMD)...if my maths is working this time of the morning.

John

(flame icon for the data centre, obviously)

[/quote]

Nope it would read Intel Servers reached 14% higher throughput whilst comsuming 41% more power.

or

AMD servers were operating at 86% performance of the intel servers whilst consuming 41% less power.

Orange unsure of own upcoming smartphone

Re: Smartphones

I've had two smartphones the old M500 and the newer M3100 both had touch screens but this Treo doesn't look too bad I have however moved to a more basic Sony Ericsson as I suffered with many crashes using the M3100 I just need a phone that works and that I don't have to keep charging all the time.