tristanperry

Thanks Matt. It's something I hadn't really thought about although this story has raised an interesting point/concern.

A pretty bad story - not that I'm surprised though. Google have never been good at customer service (obviously with the web so large and most of Google being free, you can't expect much, but what is 'offered' is usually sub-par, even for paid products).

On the plus side, this is #1 on Hacker News meaning Matt Cutts should reply any second and internally flag this up inside Google.

One of the comments on the Google+ entry also stuck out:

"The same happened to me. It also means my daughter can't log into her Chromebook!"

If that's true that's pretty awful. It does bring up a good point though - if Google close your account (rightly or wrongly), it does make owning a Chromebook somewhat useless.

Some great copywriting. Makes you wonder if the author does marketing/copywriting for a living. If not, it's pretty impressive as it naturally hits upon some of the key copywriting-to-sell concepts:

1) Enter into a dialogue with the seller

2) Benefits and emotions sell, not features

3) The 'AIDA' formula, etc.

Yep, pretty much.

Not exactly fair, but that's the current 'system'..

What I see on Windows 7 (64-bit), Chrome 15:

http://tristanperry.com/pics/BullBearScreen.jpg

So it's not too bad, but some parts (e.g. the 'Trading assistant for commodity traders' and the footer text) looks aliased.

The code is linked in a few places:

http://bobbelderbos.com/src/moviecollection/getMovieData

It is annoying though; a link doesn't do those using screenreaders (or search engine bots!) much good.

By "UK schools", it'll almost definitely be referring to GCSE (general certificate of secondary education) qualifications. And in this case, in ICT (Information Communications Technology; which doesn't contain any/no real programming).

So a couple (real) ICT GCSE exam can be seen here:

http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/pp_08_jun/ocr_31318_pp_08_jun... http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/pp_08_jun/ocr_31316_pp_08_jun...

They actually do contain a bit more 'technical' stuff than when I did ICT GCSE (~7 years ago I guess?), but there's still not much.

As for this story, I agree with an earlier comment that there might be another side to this. None of my ICT teachers (as far as I know) knew how to program, but at the same time I can't imagine any of them would have failed a clearly-good piece of coursework.

A bit off-topic, but this is a good description of the good (if any) and bad of quantitative easing..

Not sure if you've seen this series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY (despite looking/sounding boring at the start, stick with it; it's really captivating and interesting), but it is amazing just how much 'small' growth (even 2-3% p/a) can cause things to double in much less time than you'd imagine.

Or if you haven't got the time to watch the whole thing (is close to an hour all in all), this touches on a couple of the topics the video covers: http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/exponential-growth-tut... (naturally doubling every minute is on a much faster scale to the Human population!)

You're not being "that dick" - you've justified your point of a review. ("That dick" would just post "It's completely and totally useless" and leave it there).

Anywhoo, that's awesome. And I do think it's useful - as mcknz says, it's a pretty great starting point. It's also pretty great motivation :) From this, people can derive practical value.

A very good read; something I agree with a lot.

I especially love:

"Start something because you have a passion and you want to create something good and long lasting. Start something because you want to change things for the better"

"Honorable mentions: A depth charge or cappuccino on my desk"?

Pretty much sums it up.

(for non-Brit HNers not aware of the NHS-IT project reference, the not-so-thrift previous Government launched various IT projects to 'improve' the NHS, such as http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15014288 which cost £11bn, took 9+ years and was a big failure overall... mind you, they did create IT projects since they thought they sounded 'sexy' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12905303 - so I guess it's little wonder the main NHS-IT project failed)

Personally I'm waiting for the "Sorry, you cannot currently search with us as you aren't logged into Google+" message.

(Am obviously joking, but I agree with your sentiment that G+ integration does seem to be... going quickly; I can understand why from a business POV though)

Bing, DDG and Blekko IMO; naturally Bing have the largest index of the 3.

Ugh, not a fan of this move at all. Just seems clunky and poor usability. I actually know a decent number of non-techies who know about and use the + operator. Seems bizarre to abolish it entirely.

Especially since if you do a search with "+", Google points out that's it's abolished but doesn't change your query for you (i.e. surely it'd also be good for usability to change [hacker +news] into [hacker "news"]?)

Pretty awesome! I just played for a couple of minutes (well, that was the original aim - it turned into 6-7 minutes all-too-quickly!)

Why was this downvoted? (Have just + voted). It might not be an opinion everyone shares, but that's not a downvote-worthy reason?

When I was younger it'd annoy me. I'd always forget and slip back into writing colour. Then I'd wonder why the text or background colour of something wasn't changing. A few minutes later (of checking I was editing the right file, that I was changing the property of the right id/class, etc etc!), I'd finally realise I was simply 'misspelling' it. DOH!

Now, though, things have clicked and I find I can very easily switch between color and colour when needed.

Even to the point that if I'm typing on a US based site, I tend to use color (and Americanized spellings), and on non-US sites I tend to British spelling. Can take a while to get used to though.

Anywhoo, I loved this blog post :) Especially the:

Words fail me at this point. How is any self-respecting gentleman expected to make head or tail of these "words". It beggars belief that anyone could allow such distortions of words to be entered into a programming language. They, along with the myriad of similar errors, should be reverted to their proper forms immediately:

Bit!

That's awesome, many congrats.

Whilst Twitter is (obviously) now very well known, you are right that many people underestimate it from a communication point of view.

I currently do Folding@Home (based on how proteins fold; research which has implications for numerous Human illnesses/diseases). It's quite good, although it doesn't currently support all GPUs.

I'd agree with these findings.

Windows 7 especially does seem fairly safe and secure. The only time I've had a virus on my current computer is when I've actively downloaded files and run them without properly scanning them first (which is 100% my own fault of course; not a wise idea to download when rushing!)

I know some non-tech-savvy users who literally have 200+ programs installed and 3+ of those spammy toolbars on their IE installs. When you've got people who will download anything and everything they see, it's no surprise they get loads of viruses - and then blame Windows when thing go awry.

I agree that the architecture of Unix-based OSes is probably more secure than Windows 7 overall, although this doesn't mean that W7 is insecure.

(UK poster here - living away from the riots though, thankfully)

There was apparently a decently large group of Turkish business owners in London last night who got together with baseball bats to protect their businesses (which apparently worked).

I'd say it's a bit of both.

Still says it's closed? (Checking from the UK)

Also I know it's probably considered trivial, but why are Google calling it a 'project'? I.e. calling it merely a 'project' sounds like this is a bit of fun by Google and that they aren't taking it seriously?

Meh, I doubt it'll have any major effect.

The vast majority of TLDs that are introduced fail very quickly (.name, .biz, .pro, a range of ccTLDs whose country's citizens opt for the 'big 3' - .com, .net and .org - regardless, etc)

All that'll happen here - IMO - is that a few of the bigger names will waste $185k on their unique TLDs, realise that their users get confused by them (never underestimate the ability of big companies to misunderstand it's users..) and either switch back or stick ridgidly to using them with no positive effect.

So yep, I'm not too concerned about this. ICANN aren't a great organisation, and they seem to mainly bring out new TLDs to get more money.

</Rant>

Many hosts (and users of hosts) - including myself - over at WebHostingTalk use/sell cPanel hosting a fair amount.

And naturally 64 MB of RAM would NOT be enough for a VPS running cPanel (or any other mainstream server control panel, for that matter).

If the user is happy to use command line though then yes, he can run 18 static sites on a 64 MB VPS.

His post doesn't mention whether he's happy to have a no-control panel VPS though, so this entire blog post (well, the basis for it) does seem to be predicated on a fairly big assumption...

Overall it's a good, informative post though.

Ah yep, works for me now. Is working well :)

It'll be good to test this feature; it sounds like it could be a useful addition to the other social-esque 'like this' type buttons.

One thing though, the 'add +1 to your website' page (http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html) is broken for me.

I see the following in vanilla Firefox 4.0.1, Windows 7 64-bit:

http://www.tristanperry.com/pics/GoogleSite.jpg

Changing the settings doesn't fix the fact that the preview doesn't appear (and that its bounding box is overflowing)

Just an FYI.

I've been a bit AFK in the past couple of weeks, but one that surfaced last night/early this morning was that if a website sends out a newsletter and too many people flag it for spam, you could get banned from Google.

There's probably been (many) more, too (there's usually plently).

It is a difficult issue. I do a mathematics and computer science degree hence there's obviously no real lack of mental arithmetic maths skills for this degree (well, at least the basics are consistent across the maths students).

Anywhoo, this is - IMO - something that the author's college should look at collectively. If there are some students and professors with massively different ideas of the required level of mental maths skills, perhaps the college should look at introducing a mandatory first year 'mental maths' crash course/module?

This would help to make things a little more consistent. If there's genuine confusion/disagreement between the students and Professors, this should - IMO - be addresses by a course-wide decision being made.

Regarding programmable calculators - they can be reset in about 2 seconds total (it's usually Menu -> Settings -> Memory -> Reset All).

In our University, the exam invigilators ensure that all programmable calculators are reset (with them watching them being reset, of course) before the start of the exam.

So I'm not sure why this (to me) fairly obvious idea seems to be overlooked in the article? As I say, it takes 2 seconds total.

An interesting article though; even though I think the author/prof is approaching things in a slightly muddled (for want of a better - non insulting- term!) way. The college should (IMO) decide on how they want to approach things, and then be consistent across all modules and all Professors.