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Comment Re:Missing data point. (Score 1) 349

If you think architecture doesn't change much over time, then you haven't been paying attention to architecture. Lots of data structures from 10-15 years ago suck on modern hardware because of changes in the relative costs of cache and branch predictor misses, and that's just on a single machine. When you get into distributed systems then the relative speeds of networks and local storage have changed dramatically.

Comment Re:That shouldn't surprise anyone (Score 1) 349

There's one more reason, which is that there are sometimes good reasons for writing your own sort routine. Specifically, if you have data that has a known distribution that lets you beat a comparison sort. One of the questions I was asked in a Google interview was along these lines. The point was not to see how well I could write code on a whiteboard or reproduce an algorithm from a textbook, it was to see if I could understand that the problem wasn't the same as 'sort arbitrary data', see if I could extract what properties of the problem made it amenable to optimisation, and see what tools I had for approaching that kind of optimisation.

And sometimes it's not about knowing if you can reproduce an algorithm, but about knowing whether you understand the limitations of a particular approach. Do you understand when that off-the-shelf quicksort library would do a terrible job on certain input data? In one interview, I discovered that my interviewer didn't know about hopscotch hash tables, but did know about cuckoo hashing, so we ended up with a discussion about what the overheads of the two approaches are and when either would be better.

Comment Re: Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score 1) 349

People should be hired based on who is best for the job. Period.

If you have a mechanism for identifying, up front, who is best for a job requiring creativity and technical skill and is not subject to subconscious biases by interviewers then please let the rest of us know. I know a lot of companies that would be able to save huge amounts of money by replacing their hiring mechanisms with such a technique.

Comment Re: What difference (Score 1) 198

Banning running my own mail server for personal use? No. Banning a company running their own mail server? No. A company banning using my private email for company business? Sure, I'd be happy with that. The government banning government employees from using their personal email (or any third-party email provider) for government business? Absolutely!

Comment Re:No cuts are ever possible (Score 1) 198

a) it goes Mach 1.6, and b) it's virtually impossible to detect via RADR. If both a) and b) are true it's impossible to take out with missiles (which require a target of some sort before you can fire them)

Two things. First, Mach 1.6 is not that fast relative to the speed of air-to-air missiles. Sidewinders (from 1956) travel at Mach 2.5, modern AAMs exceed Mach 4. Second, RADAR is not the only way of targeting missiles. Modern anti-aircraft weapons use a combination of RADAR, IR, and acoustic targeting. The kinds of jet engines that can get you to Mach 1.6 basically paint an enormous IR arrow in the sky with the tip at your aircraft. This was old tech a decade ago.

This will, in theory, make every other combat aircraft anyone has ever designed obsolete.

No, they're going to be made obsolete by cheap semi-autonomous drones that can be launched en mass from aircraft carriers and can handle 20G turns for evasion, which gives them a massive advantage against missiles, which have very limited turning abilities.

Comment Re:It's hard to credit the behavioural science cla (Score 1) 198

It's hard to credit the behavioural science claim.

Especially as studies of deception, phishing, online fraud, and so on are often conducted by social scientists in computer science departments with funding that is nominally directed towards computer science. Anyone who is actually working on these areas is likely to be either in a computer science department or in an interdisciplinary team working with computer scientists, so will not have a problem getting funding.

Comment Re:We can learn from this (Score 1) 163

The US political funding rules allow any organisation to buy 'issue' adverts that aren't specifically pushing a single candidate, with no limits. Why not use this in the next election to run prime-time ads listing exactly which corporate interests each candidate has taken bribes from and their amounts, and the legislation that it bought. If taking money from certain organisations starts costing more votes than it buys, then politicians will be a bit less eager to take it...

Comment Unsurprisingly, no one bothered to read (Score 1) 356

The original google post about this, which makes it clear that mobile friendly sites get a higher ranking when you search on mobile devices . This change will affect mobile searches. Mobile. Not desktop. So if you're searching from a mobile device then results that are more mobile friendly will be ranked higher, on the assumption that people searching from mobile devices would prefer mobile content.

Submission + - Firefox marketshare plummets to 10% (computerworld.com)

Billly Gates writes: This is a story which is both sad, yet unsurprising. News like this just 5 or 6 years ago would send many of us in a panic as only Firefox was the savior from the stranglehold of IE 6 on the internet last decade. Many things have changed since then. Microsoft decided to start developing IE again to remain competitive. IE became secure and standards compliant starting with IE 9 which is still continuing to catch up with project Spartan for Windows 10 and no longer is proprietary.

New players have arrived derived from a new standard called webkit. Webkit and it's fork Blink created a new more modular rendering engine. Chrome, Safari, and mobile apps and browsers based on it rapidly have taken marketshare over the last few years. Chrome became a better browser with very fast java, threaded tabs, and tight memory management, and innovated many of the new HTML 5 and CSS 3 technologies leaving Firefox and IE in the dust.Firefox meanwhile has frustrated it's users over various issues and poor releases starting with Firefox 4.0 and continual breakage with add-ons every 6 weeks.

Netmatshare produces statistics independently from other companies which have Firefox marketshare listed at around 10%. but all seem to show the same trends. Are we heading into an era soon where webmasters will not support Firefox and put banners encouraging their users to download Chrome instead?

Comment Re:The UK Government Are Massively Out Of Touch (Score 3, Insightful) 191

He is wanted in the UK for violating bail. Judges should only interact with criminals in the court where everything said is a matter of public record (and subject to strict accounting). Allowing judges to talk to criminals in other settings sounds like a good recipe for legalised bribery.

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