Posts by Ucalegon 47 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2016
Who'd have thought Computacenter secured this rancid deal without going through tender after making a £100,000 donation to the Tory party in November 2019 through Non-exec and founder Philip Hulme's spouse? Not me. Just no longer surprised by this.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/96m-laptop-contracts-went-to-tory-donors-firm/
The Tory Chumocracy is shaping up to be one of the greatest liquid shit stains splattering the door of No.10 in our time.
I would disagree strongly.
We run just under 300 PCs in my educational establishment. Since upgrading this summer from 7 to 10 it's been steady but persistent slow down across the board. After a flashy September go live on Windows 10 the entire suite of computers have landed at the end of 2018 as things of ridicule among the students. They are now slow to boot, slow to respond, random freezing and of course the dreaded blue screen of Nope.
My complaint also drags with it the incomprehensible desktop design of 10 and the shear randomness of where you will find controls you might want to use. It's fast becoming a PR nightmare among the students. It's fast becoming an excuse not to complete tasks which is even more irritating.
Whilst I fully appreciate our organisation has an abomination of a company doing our tremendously cheap outsourced "support" it's been like traveling back to the 1990s for usability/reliability. Well it would be but in 2019 it's actually worse. We'll have to upgrade windows 10 again at some point just to stand still. Given it took 2 months to sort out the big problems from the upgrade to Windows 10 there's delay and irritation to look forward to every couple of years at the least.
All this is, of course, my prejudiced experience of Windows 10 to date. I have to use, I would never choose to use it. But in contrast after many years of making do with Windows 7 I found that OS to be reasonably transparent. With the glories of 10 and it's increasing size and poor condition I am seriously exploring alternatives to see if we can migrate to a more modern operating system.
"Hell, someone nicks something from intel and they go to prison, you put hundreds of children at risk and you get fined £700.... Joke, absolute joke."
Not wishing to get too side tracked but in fairness to the courts and indeed most public bodies at least it went to court.
Personally, I'm still waiting for the first, UK, senior banker to be charged with anything over the 2008 banking crisis...Society has some quirks still.
I believe quite a posts on here show a lack of experience in trying to get 30 fairly disaffected teenagers to learn anything on just two hours a week for 60 weeks.
It's not all about adding something *special* to the lesson, whilst that's a lovely idea and not to be dismissed, it is far more about managing those students. After all most cannot remember their password, where they saved their work, what an IDE is, how to read a problem, what a sequence is, how do you actually come up with an algorithm and best of all was there homework set for today?
Teaching Computer Science (much like any science subject) is incredibly challenging before you even sit down to determine what the "basics" should even look like in your lesson.
When it's your passion it's so, so easy to forget how an average student could start your climb.
Define "basics".
One of my offspring has this year started GCSE Computer Science and is currently plodding through a module using Python. He appears not to have been taught the "basics" of what variables are and their scopes, how different kinds of loops work, what a "function" is nor why it's useful to put code into functions.
Before you get that far it might be useful to point out that a Computer Science GCSE will typically get half the timetabled lessons as Mathematics or English (~5 hours per week). For this reason alone I tell my students it's a difficult subject.. a bit like mathematics but with half the time available in lessons.
Btw I'm still not sure I can teach it to students who can't solve the simplest of problems on paper never mind coding a solution despite having 20 years software development behind me.
"That's true, but as an initial investment, I think it's a great starting point...."
Except perhaps I can see that bit of cash simply going straight into a few teacher's pockets as schools do the rounds poaching from each other. Actually retaining a member of staff for education purposes would take far more thought and effort than just money. The whole profession is ... well lacking professional oversight shall we say.
The students in my secondary school are shown how to search on Windows 10 like this:
"Windows key, start typing the application you wish to launch..."
"Nothing coming up on the screen? Ok, click on the desktop"
"Windows key, start typing the application name you wish to launch..."
"Didn't find the application known to be installed?"
"Okay, click on the applications icon, then on settings, then back on applications again"
"There ya go. Easy."
In fairness, it has meant not needing to prepare a starter activity for any of my lessons this year. Thank you Microsoft.
"... ah well, I can dream. Until then, I'll use DuckDuckGo..."
The school, where I work, has just blocked DuckDuckGo as it's been branded "malicious". I now have to use Google or Bing. This decision has struck me as slightly obtuse and now perhaps from an educational perspective even more so.
"If you are talking about the EU, have a look at their defence budgets and then come back and say if you think they would be useful and reliable partners. The reality is, the rest of the EU relies on the UK and France (and the US, of course) to defend it. Even after Brexit, their expectation is that the UK taxpayer will dig into his increasingly empty pockets and pay for EU defence."
I think a useful framing of that would be to look at China's spending on defense versus the EU. Roughly the same figure in 2016. Looking at the direct conventional threats the Chinese face, assuming the toddler over the pond is held in check, the EU face around 10 times less capability than the Chinese.
So, I'd surmise the EU probably don't need to look to the UK's billions to keep them safe regardless of our contribution. Clearly I have no idea who's about to declare war on the EU but that's my potted analysis of global, conventional threats.
"Well, the other option would be to drop corporation taxes as far as possible, and out-compete Ireland as a tax haven. Raising taxes unilaterally would just give companies another reason to pull out of the UK after brexit."
A plan that would result in many Japanese corporations withdrawing their HQs from the UK due to the Japanese government actively deterring use of tax havens. No idea how this affects other nationalities, perhaps Japan are unique in this respect. But, for me, the benefits of undertaking dramatic cuts in corporation tax cut are not entirely clear in the current global rush to deter corporations making good use of havens.
"since it makes them seem like thugs, and not many people want to be governed by thugs"
I see your point but in fairness they will merely apply their own rules to the letter. We may feel that to be unfair but merely sticking to your own rules, that we helped write, written before we even had a referendum is not really all that thuggish.
"Already there. Planning on doing it for 11 more months then quitting development altogether and going in to primary school teaching. Probably out of the frying pan in to the fire but at least I can see far more reward teaching than I can in development."
Good luck with that and be prepared to be exhausted in new and interesting ways.
I'm 5 years ahead of you in secondary ed. and loving every (nearly) minute of it. Huge amounts of bullshine in the institutions, natch, but working with students is far more rewarding than working with a team of developers. On top of that there's every chance students actually grow up and mature :)
"What do young people in UK do, when they are intelligent and want to learn computing?"
Take the AQA GCSE in Computer Science?
http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/computer-science-and-it/gcse/computer-science-8520/specification-at-a-glance
As a current main stream (requires improvement, natch) Comp Science Teacher (5 years) following 20 years in Software Development I would say AQA courses (GCSE & A-Level) are the gold standard in the UK if you're looking to develop a broad understanding of computational thinking.
Have had a quick look but can't see online the average number of charges brought in these cases. Just wondered if the system had some sort of benchmark for prosecution intimidation based on the number of charges brought against the accused? No idea where on the federal judiciary's system 6 gets you.
"approximately 300 times more likely to die on the roads than in a terror attack." - yes, yes all very sensible but you seem to be advocating terrorists start targeting traffic lights and blocking roundabouts with crashed Uber cabs to avoid adding to the terrorist casualties statistic.
Poor old Amber will be furious when she gets hold of your account.
"Careful now, el reg seems to have turned into the tech wing of the Guardian"
- opinion, we all have them
"Mass extinctions aren't going to happen due to temperature rises"
- poorly informed opinion, we all have them but some of us don't shout out our ignorance so much.
"all the world's creatures have been through worse and date back millions of years considerably longer than humans, when the world was a lot hotter"
- irrelevant to topic but you might want to see how adaptation might work in a very short period of time.
"Worse case they drink a bit more water.... but they aren't all going to keel over because its a bit hot,"
- More mass oversimplification than extinction this one.
"we have 20+ deg swings already it's called the four seasons"
- you do understand it's about the climate not just the heat? My son, according to his school, can now name and describe the four seasons. I thought to myself, "Wow! I can't tell where they start and end anymore. Son, you're a genius".
"Given that the teachers know when they're going to be inspected it occurs to me that getting a good Ofsted score is pretty arbitrary since the teachers can put together amazing lessons for the day they're inspected then return to shitty lessons when the inspection is done."
In fairness, not Reg style I know but hey it's a brave new world chock full of facts, OFSTED no longer care muchly about the detail of lessons observed on the day. They no longer grade a lesson like they used to and will be looking for long term indicators to assess "Teaching" at the school. Inspectors spend more time speaking to students, LSAs, senior leaders and looking closely at the typicality of assessments and feedback being given to students over a period of time to help grade across the subject/dept what they've just witnessed in the classroom. Was the behaviour good? Was the behaviour good for learning? Is there evidence of planning a coherent series of lessons? Are students getting consistency? Are students disengaged or enthusiastic? and so on.
As for security at schools themselves (never mind OFSTED) don't get me started....
"The 34 billion is less than 3 years net contribution by the UK, and about 20 months gross."
Do you have a citation for that? Only asking because our net contribution appears to be at most £9.4 billion (2014) but as low as £4.3bn (2009) in recent history and more like 6.6 as an average. Estimates for total, direct net, contribution to the EU between 1973 and 2010 appears to be £77 billion. If that figure can be trusted (source UKIP) that EIB money is half our net contribution a mere 5 years ago?
"The big problem I see is the lack of viable alternatives in UK politics. Cameron, Boris, Farage?"
Hence the referendum I thought cynically. It's almost as if Cameron manufactured a "crisis" to win something tangible, distract the voters, whilst at the same time finishing off any remaining political credibility left in his opposition.
Genius?
"France 90% nuclear", maybe when I was last in school. The World Nuclear Assoc. have it as 75% in March 2016.
As a percentage it's fallen year on year since 2004, from nearly 88%. That may not seem much but that's just under 80+TWh coming from somewhere else. Given France export "cheap" energy across Europe they must be making their model work (low carbon) even if nuclear is a diminishing percentage of total production. Nuclear,is predicted to dip to 50% of total production by 2025.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
