Posts by Matthew Taylor

The gender imbalance in IT is real, ongoing and ridiculous

What a load of rot. Why do we assume that the reason for the small number of women in I.T must be some sort of oppression / discrimination? That always strikes me as enormously patronising to women. Make your mind up, are women just as strong and capable as men, or not? If they are (and I believe they are) then there's nothing to stop them entering I.T. The many women who already have successful careers in the industry prove this.

I think that the fact there are relatively few women in computing, can be put down to their relative lack of interest in the subject, (measured statistically as a group). I've never understood why it's considered holy writ that men and women must have statistically identical interests. I don't think we do at all, but that's not demeaning anyone's ability - it's just average preferences.

Ofcom will not probe lesbian lizard snog in new Dr Who series

I've nothing against gay rights, each to their own and all that. However it seemed like Moffat was pushing the gay agenda at the expense of the story to me. It seemed gratuitous. And the whole dinosaur roaming london thing was a bit to much like a story primary school kids would make up in the playground. All a bit over the top. V. Poor, in my view.

A shame mind you, as I was looking forward to Peter Capaldi as the doctor.

Women-only town seeks men

Summer is a comin' in...

Where's Edward Woodward when you need him?

Dubai to get huge climate-controlled domed city and giga-mall

Will the slaves used to construct it be allowed to press their noses up against the outside of the glass dome?

Also, if it's a "city", why do they call it MALL of the world? Someone should let Dubai know that there's more to a city than endless gaudy designer label shops.

I QUIT: Mozilla's anti-gay-marriage Brendan Eich leaps out of door

Re: really cannot see what the fuss is about

All these things that you said are true - everyone has plenty of freedoms and rights. The problems are twofold.

Firstly, there is the problem of conflating someone's private political opinions with their role in an unrelated industry. Brendan Eich didn't publicise his views during the 15 years he was at Mozilla, nor is there any evidence to suggest that he was about to start, having become CEO. His donation was discovered through an investigation. People have a right to private opinions that differ from other people's, and unless Brendan Eich, as CEO of Mozilla, were to begin enacting policies which discriminated against gay people, he has done nothing wrong.

Secondly, evidently the power of the gay lobby is considerable. They seem capricious, and have demonstrated a willingness to use quite disproportionate tactics, yet they are accountable to no-one. This sort of behaviour amouonts to a kind of extra-legal chilling effect on public discourse, and that's no good.

Re: Animals

It's heartwarming when we see things that unite us all as human beings! Straight people, gay people, black and white, from all creeds, or no creed at all - we all have it in us to become bullying tyrants, given half the chance. Ahhhh - here's to humanity!

Re: It's a shame

ObBackToTheFuture: Where we're going - we don't need trolls...

Re: Now boycott Islam

I heartily concur - the gay lobby should have a crack at radical Islam, anything else would be rank hypocrisy. I won't hold my breath though. No doubt the gay lobby will say "we need to pick our battles".

That said, it would certainly be quite a show!

Re: I have lost a little respect for the LGBT community

"the absolute least he could do"? What would be appropriate penance, might I ask? The man gave a donation to a political cause he believed in - that's how society is supposed to work. The fact that you don't like it, doesn't give you the right to hound him out of a job. It really is disgusting behaviour.

Re: Irony

You're quite right - although Obama is a politician - well used to defending himself against angry groups, and notably a MUCH tougher target than Brendon Eich - a programmer, who I doubt was ready for such a nasty fight.

And you need to learn to spot a witchhunt. If any group, through "exercising their free speech" has the power to remove a CEO of a major company, they ought to be accountable for their actions. There should be some responsibility there. The rule of the mob is NOT to be desired.

The unaccountable mob

I don't blame him for quitting, it was a battle that would have cost him dearly - still, it's disgusting that he was coerced into resigning by a mob who are wholly unaccountable for their actions. "We're just exercising our rights to blah blah blah". No you're not, what you did amounted to a worldwide witchhunt that was beyond disproportionate, and can destroy a person in short order. I believe that pressure groups wield way too much power in this internet-amplified age - they need to be held accountable for that power.

Friends don't do tech support for friends running Windows XP

Re: Properly Not Linux

I'm sure you're right. Although there was literally NO software on there, that wasn't in the existing installation - we hadn't changed a thing.

I agree with you about techies on sites such as this enjoying getting their hands dirty with the inticacies of Linux - I'm the same with different tech areas - but from an outsider's perspective it was frustratingly (and surprisingly) hard to do something really quite basic!

Hi Grease Monkey

"12.04? 12.10?"

Firstly, as you say, I am relatively uninformed about Linux - I think it was version 12.04. We were very aware of the details at the time, but having moved on I couldn't swear to it now. I don't think that ought to matter though. It's version 12.x not version 0.x, and it should've worked. And believe it or not, we're not idiots - we tried lots of different things, and worked with the Cloud providers tech guys.

"with such limited knowledge should you really be installing* an OS for business use?"

Apparently not. Apparently on Linux, it requires specialist knowledge to stably share some files over a network, without the server running out of ram every 10 minutes. Windows Server seems to be able to manage it though - and I don't have any special knowledge of Windows networking either.

It seems to me that there's a tendency to glory in Linux's arcane ins and outs. Good geeky fun, no doubt - but sometimes one just wants it to work.

*For the record, we never installed Linux, it was a preexisting VM image, which had been set up by the cloud provider. As I said, all we did was share a few directories via nfs.

I saw a few "upgrade to Linux" posts here - I'm a graphics programmer, but recently our company had to set up some cloud networking type stuff. We decided to try Linux, as its instances were cheaper than those running Windows Server, and I'm always hearing how much better it is.

We couldn't make it work for love nor money. We used the default ubuntu 12 distro supplied by the cloud vendor, enabled nfs, and shared a few directories. We followed the instructions, and it all worked, but the fileserver machine kept running out of ram. Its ram usage would just shoot up, for no good reason that I could see until the machine gave up and hung. We had a swap partition, and 4GB of ram. And it wasn't under anything like a heavy load, and the only other thing it was running was an ftp client. Asked the cloud company's tech. support about it, and their best guess was a kernel bug. What a pile of arse.

Switched to Windows server in the end. I know, I know, Micro$oft blah blah. But at least it worked. At least it didn't run out of ram every 10 minutes. As I mentioned previously, what a pile of arse.

Snowden leak journo leaks next leak: NSA, GCHQ dying to snoop on your gadgets mid-flight

Re: Thwarted bomb attacks

All together now...

On the first day of Christmas, the NSA saved me,

From a gun toting jihadi.

On the second day of Christmas, the NSA saved me,

From two dirty bombs,

And a gun toting jihadi.

On the third day of Christmas, the NSA saved me,

From three terrorist cells,

Two dirty bombs,

And a gun toting jihadi.

I'm "typing" on an iPad, so that will have to do. More verses welcome

Taiwan's Polytron promises see-through phones

Just looked like a piece of perspex to me. The '0' and '1' on the screen looked like they'd been etched in somehow - it certainly wasn't turning opaque as described.

Sony to ship VR-style 3D headset in November

VR immersion requires much larger field of view

There have been a few such headsets around in recent years, but they all seem to simulate a screen viewed at a distance, much as one might watch a television - a field of view of 20-30 degrees. This is a far cry from the 110-120 degree view required for the immersive experience that VR is supposed to be.

I have long wished for such an immersive display - but have never found one. Of course such a field of view would not be suitable for watching a film on, (even IMAX is only 70 degrees or so) - which perhaps puts manufactureres off. Still, games could work well - as long as the accelerometer tech is REALLY tightly coupled with the view direction!

Nvidia dollars lifted by Intel's Sandy Bridge ramp, payola

CUDA is a tricky customer

I've had a few run-ins with CUDA, and the problem I've found is that you need to know a lot about the architecture of the card, in order to get decent performance out of it, e.g. the memory layout of a "warp" (a small batch of items to be processed), and how the card pipelines texture fetches.

I found I could easily raise or lower my performance by a factor of 4-5 by adjusting some parameters, and it wasn't clear why. I ended up just trying loads of combinations and picking the best - but then on another card, that wouldn't give good results. NVidia need to do a lot more in the compiler to abstract that stuff away.

Having said that, it was over a year ago, so things may well have improved in that regard these days.

Google expands plan to run own internet

This is, well, annoying.

Sorry to be commenting on the prose style, rather than the subject - but for some reason the use of ", well, " in written pieces has blossomed on the internet of late. It seems designed to mirror spoken language, where one might pause to think of an example to prove one's point, and use "well" to indicate what one is doing.

"I searched, well, everywhere".

"We wrote about it, well, last week".

In spoken language, this is fair enough - but writing is not done in realtime. One can pause during composition without the audience being aware of it, so there is no need for "well, errrm, aaaaand" or any of those "gather my thoughts" fillers.

Sorry to seem pedantic, but I've been noticing this a lot lately (not particularly in your fine publication, but thought I'd post here anyway). It smacks of an attempt to indicate the writer is casually confident and at ease - but writing has it's own tricks to achieve this, and writing down fake "vocal tricks" is, (well), highly lame.

(Beer icon because it's my birthday, yay!)

Birmingham drops the possessive apostrophe

Kings aiith

This comes as no surprise at all.

But then again, if I were to see video footage of Birmingham city council smearing their badly punctuated signs with their own shit, and dancing around them , screaming and grunting, it would come as no surprise.

However, that would not make it right. The apostrophe is there for good reason, and a million realpolitik, anti-elitism arguments spouted in ugly rustic accents will not change that.

We need to stop anti-intellectualism in its tracks. A pity that organisations, such as the BBC , which once might have been counted upon to take a paternalistic attitude to the maintenance of good standards regarding English language, have instead fallen under the spell of the markets, and chase ratings with Saturday night reality drivel.

Very sad.