* Posts by ciderbuddy

24 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Dec 2012

Ah, uni days! Drugs, sex, parties... sci-tech startups? Not so much

ciderbuddy

Re: Ah, uni days! Drugs, sex, parties...

I remember coming out of a lecture at uni, and someone mentioning ' this is nothing like the movies - where are all the toga parties etc' befored I reminded him we are computer scientists and our course only has 2 girls in the entire year.

ciderbuddy

Re: Meanwhile in America ...

Had a quick read of https://mashable.com/2017/08/29/millennial-generation-z-doorbell/#Y4AsDgwuKOqM - I don't believe a word of it. It sounds like a 30-something hipster journalist trying to be cool, but being completely pretentious....bugger, that's millennials isn't it? Just realized I'm getting old :(

ps. I dont recommend the article it will make you want to puke

Cryptocurrencies kill people and may kill again, says Bill Gates

ciderbuddy

Re: Worst argument ever

The Yorkshire Ripper was nearly caught due to tracing a £5 note he left on a victim's body back to his company's payroll. It was only because some dimwit Geordie made a fake confession tape that the focus was shifted.

http://www.execulink.com/~kbrannen/fivenote.htm

National Museum of Computing rattles the bucket: Help shift war-winning proto-puter

ciderbuddy

Re: Well-known actor Bandersnatchington Cumperdinklehough

Cumberland Sausage

ciderbuddy

Re: Tourist Trap

The pigeons were brilliant. Was the only thing I learnt all day when I visited. It is very much the amusement park; it was fun, but they didn't even scratch the surface on the work done there

Shhh! DropBox 'quietly files' for IPO

ciderbuddy

@PermissionToSpeakPlease

Proof that building The Box is a bad idea (you beat me to it - shucks)

UK exam chiefs: About the compsci coursework you've been working on. It means diddly-squat

ciderbuddy

Re: Numpties

Exactly this. The whole system needs rethinking, and until this happens we will always have a factory-fodder education system in this country. I like these ideas as they are demonstrable and practical skills. Exam only CS is a joke; I was in teacher training when it was a 50/50 split between exams and coursework, and I thought it was bad when it dropped to 20%.

tbh, the skills shortage of the teachers is shocking too

Docs ran a simulation of what would happen if really nasty malware hit a city's hospitals. RIP :(

ciderbuddy

Should be called the 'Shit-Bit'

It is crazy. I was buying a new vacuum cleaner last week, and there was one which had WiFi.

Apparently there is also an app so you can monitor suction efficiency or something

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

ciderbuddy

Mobile Generation

I think it's because they mainly listen to music on their mobiles. My niece was always running out of data about 1 week into her month because of watching music vids on Youtube at school and coming home, so I gave her my spotify password.

ps. nope I hadnt heard of stream ripping either and it made me feel old

May the excessive force be with you: Chap cuffed after Star Trek v Star Wars row turns bloody

ciderbuddy

Re: In a fight over...

The Babylon 5 picture is the most blatant act of trolling there has ever been. So much hate for that show

Bonkers call to boycott Raspberry Pi Foundation over 'gay agenda'

ciderbuddy

At first I thought "Where?" then I noticed it on the back of the monitor.

People like this shouldn't be allowed nice things.

2 kool 4 komputing: Teens' interest in GCSE course totally bombs

ciderbuddy

Re: When you deskill for 40 years and then promote outsourcing to other countries....

You must be looking in the wrong places then as Raspberry Pi is the new focus. M$ package dullness is being pushed out by any school with any sense

(apart from those cashing oin on BCS's European licence garbage)

ciderbuddy

Re: Too Hard? WTF

translate: "mainstream languages are too challenging for less able teachers." The 100% examination thing is also the best way to kill any interest in CS for pupils stone dead.

When they began phasing the controlled assessments out my tutor was shocked to see things going backwards after they had just starting moving forwards.

ciderbuddy

Not the Biggest Shock

I enrolled to gain my PGCE Secondary last september in CS after graduating, and I agrre alot with this article.

The plans laid out for the curriculum are very ambitious indeed -not unachievable, but very ambitious.

I agree though that training teachers properly is the only way this will succeed.

One of my interests in the new curriculum was that it is a chance to build some key soft skills through CS, as well as stronger national skills in maths and problem solving (that was my utopian dream anyway )

CS can be the driest subject in the world to both learn and teach - they require a level of curiosity, and at the moment schools seem to be teaching them as if they are teaching times tables in a Victorian factory school.

Get the kids working together to solve problems -computer science is not just coding!

The other mistake I have seen alot is that they use the computers for everything they do. Students don't need to record their binary homework on a word document, and then encouraged to save it within a file structure that is meaningless. I have spent quite a few lessons showing them how to save work - all I wanted to do was give them a pen and paper and stick them in pairs.

Thanks

(an ex-student teacher who went back to developing)

‘Penultimate’ BlackBerry seen on 'do not publish' page as fire sale begins

ciderbuddy

Re: The riots..

No, it was much earlier. I worked for O2 a few years ago and they always had a good working relationship with RIM(they are neighbours in Slough I believe).

BBM had already been popularised when networks started offering Blackberries on prepay - we sold a lot of cheap blackberry curves that year. The demographic was almost entirely teenage girls and I think at that time if RIM had made BBM for other platforms BB10 might have been a contender.

Got to dash out for some rubber johnnies? Amazon has a button for that

ciderbuddy

If I found 2 I would use them as track and field controllers - next day a lorry of Durex and Playdo would arrive :P

Microsoft promises free terrible coffee every month you use Edge

ciderbuddy

Bing overinflated figures

Having people's scripts over-inflating Bing search numbers reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode where the skinny bloke (I forget his name, he is brilliant but his character is pure magnolia) where they are so happy when their user base is growing. Comedy is best when it is true

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware storms live TV weather forecast

ciderbuddy
Boffin

More fuel for the Fire

Here's one that people may not be aware of - if you want to develop on win phone 8 you need windows 8.1+.

My uni course had a mobile dev module and one of our labs had to be upgraded from Win7 just to let us do this. Talk about a lockdown...oh, and we needed dev accounts just to test our apps out.

Such fun getting it to work properly

Lizard Squad back to blast Blizzard’s gaming hub

ciderbuddy

Possibly this reason

Blizzard closed the popular nostralius server for warcraft; basically it's a private server that runs the vanilla version of wow (or did) because Blizzard allowed private servers. Well they had over 20k people playing on there and bliss didn't like it . Could be this I reckon

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36044000

Is Facebook about to get a Virtual Reality check?

ciderbuddy

Currently studying VR

I am studying VR as part of my BSc Computer Science and her in Salford we have a full VR "octave room" - think VR Cave but much bigger (floor screens the lot).

What is interesting is my lecturer has actually moved his office to health and a lot of research at present is in the field of mental health. I know of at least one student who is using VR to study the effects of VR in therapy for people who have lost limbs for example.

It did make me smile seeing the comments in the article on "What can we do with VR", as Second Life was a disaster and even though computers have evolved, I don't think the failing their was just low tech.

Currently I am conducting an experiment involving fear of heights using VR and immersion is still key to VR's success.

Dungeons & Dragons relaunches with 'freemium' version 5.0

ciderbuddy

Or use Calibre

I thought all e-readers had PDF support anyway. I download all my uni lectures as PDF and they work fine

Google Chromecast: Here's why it's the most important smart TV tech ever

ciderbuddy
Happy

Re: I only regret that I have but one...

@Jerome Apple AirPlay is not compatible with Windows or Android as a sender. So it's great if you're an Apple person. If you're not, it's not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPlay

-not true, I have an android app that can airplay

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zappotvapple

The one thing I cant do is use my phone as an AppleTV remote unless I hack the AppleTV box.

Half a MEELLION passwords reset after Scribd security snafu

ciderbuddy
Thumb Up

The Importance of security?

I always love the uncertainty of these articles about security -words like proably ,and should be ok we hope.

Even the security guy at the bottom of the article says at this point it probably doesnt matter and as true as this is its still such a weird choice of words.

Grinchy Google to shut down another batch of services

ciderbuddy
Facepalm

Very annoying

This is a shame as it was a really great workaround for copying contacts between smartphones. I work for a mobile telco in tech support and have used this option many times to help sustomers migrate too and from IPhones as an easy way to get the contacts off the phone.

As far as I remember if you set the GMail account up on the IPhone as Gmail and not exchange it doesnt give the option to also add contacts and calendars - anyone fancy checking this for me, because I think that google might be well aware of this fact also!!

As I said...annoying -esp. as I will now have to migrate my contacts to outlook.com as a backup measure too