Posts by Doctor Syntax 40560 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
government minister Lord Ashton of Hyde* countered that the sharing of individual-level pupil data is "already highly regulated" and runs according to a "rigorous process".
That's fine providing the regulations are fit for purpose. It doesn't excuse lack of consideration as to their fitness.
*Does he have a neighbour, Lord Hyde of Ashton to make things symmetrical?
"Surely a bit difficult to argue against two facts which are each 100% demonstrably true."
Brexiteers find no difficulty at all arguing against anything that can be laid at their door. It's very simple: Brexit is good for everything so your problem must be due to something else.
"the customer (machine maker)"
And therein lies the problem. Intel's customers are machine makers, not us. We, as the ultimate customers, are just at the end of the chain and there are, as yet, insufficient of us who actual care about security. Once a large scale malware campaign worms its way into the ME, possibly resulting in a class action, then we'll finally see Intel frantically scrabbling to try and roll back what they've done and launch ME-free chips.
Presumably all these installations are specified by a consulting engineer, architect or whoever.
Is it not their responsibility to specify that they be installed securely and to inspect them before signing them off for final payment of the contract? The finger should be pointing there, not at manufacturers or installers. If they find manufacturers incompetent they stop specifying their products, if they find installers incompetent they remove them from future short lists.
"Whether you wish them to or not, many people have users that create file systems with billions of files, and then struggle with the management of said data."
Database Management System. The clue's in the name.
If you're going to create data on that scale you should work out the management scheme from the start or, at worst, as soon as you realise that you're creating more than you intended. When you do that you'll find that there's a choice of engines available off the shelf, commercial and FOSS. The database can hold the metadata that your application needs, which is probably going to be more than the file system provides and the data itself. If your data is in file system files anyone with the right (or wrong!) permissions can just delete some of them irrespective of the metadata saying, via business rules, that it should be kept.
Example: upstream provides files containing up to 1,000 documents in XML format* to be printed on an industrial scale. Any XML file can contain different sorts of documents than require different base stock or printing hardware, some running to 10s of pages. S/W splits them up into the individual documents, transforms each into a form ready for the print formatter and stores it as a database blob. The batching engine gathers up documents of common properties (base stock and printer) ready for the print room operators. Only when a batch is selected for printing is a file system file generated and it contains 1,000 documents or whatever the batch parameters call for. Spoiled documents have their database record sent back for re-batching. Once despatched documents can be purged from the database. The system might have thousands of documents going through it at any one time but there are few actual bulk files involved and only at the input and output. Multiply that a few times for different contracts being handled.
* Yes, technically the file is a document in XML terminology. As each file contains multiple documents in the application domain technology it's easier to stick with the latter and call the file an XML file.
"In the UK we have seen frankly appalling things happen since the privatisation of energy, public transport and communications."
It varies across the board but public investment has a very poor record overall.
A large part of the privatisation of BT was to enable the private sector to make the levels of investment that governments of all colour had been unable or unwilling to make. What would the mobile or internet provision be like in the UK if left to government investment?
The privatisation model of the railways was stupid. The infrastructure and the operators were separate and, therefore, had separate, likely conflicting interests and relatively short franchises weren't going to lead to long-term investments whilst also avoiding any competition between destinations. I can't see how it could have been expected to work out well and I can't see any government making investments except in high profile vanity projects.
On roads we have the cheapskate addition of lanes by taking out the safety measure of the hard shoulder and such gimmicks. New roads such as M6 Brum bypass? - revert to the C18th turnpike financing despite having collected huge sums from road taxes in the form of VED, fuel duty, insurance premium taxes and VAT.
I can only imagine that they hope that the ICO will be HMG's poodle when it comes to voting on the "adequacy" of the "oversight" of the universal surveillance. In turn that would enable them to keep the Privacy Figleaf in place because if it's allowed for the UK it has to be allowed for the US.
"appreciation of all arts"
Literature and music were, of course, written to be enjoyed, not studied (I'm not sure if that applies universally to what's written today) so it's not surprising that those who didn't study them can still appreciate them. It's odd that those who did study them never seem to widen their experience into science and technology out of general interest.
An interesting couple of A/C posts. We had streaming (into 4 forms) but after the first term. There was also a facility for sec. mod. to grammar transfer, I'm not sure if it was at a specific year and can't actually remember anyone who did but there must have been some.
We had the same "skip a year" idea. It wasn't a good one. It involved not sitting the subjects you were going to take at A level so you ended up with a rather diminished crop of Os and, in the real world, nobody noticed the A level coverage complemented them; they just counted the number.
Eventually, as with the account above, the school lost its 6th form to a specialised college, it became a comprehensive and is now viewed as considerably weaker than the former sec. mod. turned comp. which my granddaughter attends.
There were a considerably number of primaries feeding the school & have no idea how their pass rates compared but there were 4 of us from my small school who passed in my year - I should think it must have been getting on for a third of the year but, of course, the statistics of such small numbers don't mean very much. Nevertheless AFAICS it was a mechanism of social mobility - I don't know what modern sociologists would make of a 3 generation household, including two unmarried aunts, with no electricity, no mains drainage (handy river) and, initially, no mains water (even when we got it we preferred our spring water for drinking, these days we could have bottled it and made a fortune).
"Furthermore that "empty space" would need water, sewers, electricity, roads, rail, hospitals and so on and so on."
Well, some of them. Enough roads to get the building materials in. Commuter transport? Hospitals? Schools? Someone else's problem, different department and all that. Jobs? no chance, planning police dictates that we can't have industry anywhere near housing. Jobs belong in the big conurbations and we have to stop people travelling there because they cause congestion? Joined up planning? We started an inter-departmental enquiry 30 years ago; it hasn't reported yet.
"There is a weird politically-correct idea in schools nowadays that all kids are equally bright."
Political correctness might not be the only factor. Subjects are (one hopes) taught by people who are good at them end enjoy them. Too many then assume that being good at and enjoying their particular subject is normal throughout the population. They fail to grasp that some pupils find it difficult and believe that those who don't conform to expectations are being lazy or deliberately obtuse. Even if they do grasp that they then fail to realise where the difficulties lie for those not so gifted (after all, it's all equally easy isn't it?), what parts of a lesson need to be taken more slowly and better explained.
"I hear a lot of people telling me the UK is overcrowded: mostly people who live in overcrowded places."
The trouble is that the PPEs in government think it can all be solved by telling local councils how many houses they have to build. This is done in isolation from any other consideration such as where the people who are to live in them are to work and how they're to get there. And similar daftnesses.
So my area at the head of a valley is supposed to have X number new homes.
Fair enough, we sit in the middle of a number of conurbations. Any shouts of joy from such conurbations about how many new jobs they're attracted are mixed with howls of complaint about congestion. Councillors and officials haven;t worked out that if people are going to work in those jobs they're going to have to travel there.
Several of the routes out of here are high level routes. It won't take much more snow than we've just had to close those completely because they might, if we're lucky, get them gritted but will a heavier fall be cleared? Not usually; they'll be blocked for several days.
Then there's the hair-raising junction between here and the motorway. Years ago it was slightly modified to make it, in my view, more dangerous. It needs some creative remodelling with roundabouts to make it safe and provide a better throughput. It's needed that for years.
Why don't they encourage development of more employment in the area? Because to sites where that could happen were called brown-field and released for housing - the extra job-needers were imported by removing jobs.
Fund FE Colleges (if they still exist), not schools, which are inadequate baby-minding services. ... those who suffered secondary education in areas like Suffolk t"
If Suffolk schools were inadequate wouldn't it make sense to fund them to improve and not remain as baby-minding services?
"And whatever happened to SCO?"
They got taken over by a company that decided litigation was more productive than writing solid software and selling it at a price that could compete against the rather more incomplete offering that Linux was at the time. If the original SCO product hadn't been priced as a Veblen good, Linux would never have been more than a curiosity we'd now be striving to remember.
"The way java is structured any sufficiently large project needs to have API contracts and APIs and SPIs portion."
Should Oracle win, however, they have the tricky task of doing so in a way that ensures that anyone writing a Java application (which they presumably still want people to do) can do so legitimately whilst preventing Google from legitimately implementing the run-time. If they fail in that they must surely kill Java stone dead.
"One of Big Red's arguments is that Android destroyed the market opportunity for Sun to license a decent mobile Java."
I thought the reason Google went for a roll-your-own approach was their view that Sun had a decent* Java and a mobile Java and they weren't the same thing.
*Argue amongst yourselves about about "decent" if you want to.
"If YT paid creators based a viewers ability to buy the products being advertised then none of these guys would get a look in as their viewers are 3-9 year olds."
3-9 yos don't need to handle the money themselves. The advertisers will rely on pester power, just as they always have with products aimed at that age group.
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