Tag: Google
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Microsoft versus Linux: did we win after all?
At the end of John Le Carre’s Smiley’s People George Smiley is congratulated for having triumphed in his life’s struggle with Karla, the eminence grise of the KGB and told “George, you won”, to which the British spymaster, perhaps shamed by his need to adopt his opponent’s tactics of threat to the innocent replies “Did…
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So, we are not protected by the US after all
Let me start this post – on the PRISM programme – by making a few things clear. Firstly, I think the jihadist terrorist threat is real and dangerous and even potentially existential in nature: if these people had atomic weapons do you think they would hesitate to use them? Secondly, I think the police and…
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How to get a job as a developer
Last night I went to a Birkbeck training session for prospective mentors. I did not realise before I turned up that all, or almost all, the would-be mentors would be MSc Computer Science graduates. In the end that fact alone turned what could have been a pretty dull way to spend a Friday night into…
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New comment spam fashion
Comment spam appears to have entered a new phase – recently my spam filter is filling up with comments that link to other pages of links. I assume this is some sort of pay-per-click effort, as I am guessing that Google would automatically bomb any page that was just a series of ads and similar…
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Computer science in English schools: the debate rages on
In recent months a new consensus has emerged about teaching ICT (information and communications technology) in England’s schools: namely that it has been sent up a blind alley where kids are taught little more than how to manipulate Microsoft’s “Office” products. That recognition is a good thing, though the way in which the government were…
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What people come here looking for…
Bit of a filler post, but here are the things that are likely to land this website on the first page of a Google search. The first numerical column is the number of times the site has appeared in a Google search for the term, the second numerical column the average placing of the page…
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Does Google cap query returns?
When I look at Google “webmaster” returns for this site I note that for more or less every weekday for the last fortnight it reports my site was returned as an answer to a search query exactly 1300 times, the week before that it was 1000 and the week before that 900. So, am I…
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Microsoft are not the enemy
For the last six years my job situation has made me wary of commenting on the politics of the free software movement and its enemies, but I have just changed jobs (been a busy week round here) and now I feel I comment freely on what every free software advocate has always known as Public…
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“Hacker culture” drove out women from computer science
I have no difficulty for even a second in believing this: There were many reasons for the unusual influx of women into computer science. Partly, it was just a result of the rise of the commercial computer industry in general. There was a tremendous need to hire anyone with aptitude, including women. Partly, it was the…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 