Netcraft has confirmed: Unicode is dying

Never any mod points when you need them! Someone vote this informative please!

Er actually... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Something like... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

It's being accredited by GCHQ rather than designed or run, the university stipulates the course material, structure etc... GCHQ obviously felt that only the Masters level courses met their requirements (whatever they maybe) for accreditation. My Engineering degree was accredited by the IET, both Bachelors and Masters components but you didn't have to do the Masters if you wanted an accredited BEng so it is a bit unusual.

University in the UK is rapidly catching up with the US in terms of cost, I was amoung the first year of students who had to pay but it was only at £1000 per year. If I were to do my 5 year Masters in Computer Systems Engineering again now it would cost about £7000 for each of the 5 years (let's say $60000ish). They aren't typical loans however, government provided they charge a very low interest rate and are only paid back once you earn over a certain amount and increase in proportion to your salary. They do however survive bankruptcy and HMRC aren't known for writing debts off easily if you try skipping abroad etc... ;-) It is written off at normal retirement age otherwise.

Excluding doctors or vets it's unusual to spend more than 3 years doing an undergraduate degree at university in the UK, very unusual doing more than 4 years for a Masters. I elected to do a foundation year of extra mathematics and goffing off with jet engines... as you do.

...a baking tray full of them for HA obvs.

Having the name, logo, colors or even font branding (let alone address) of the company on a security pass is a complete fail. If you drop it and a bad person picks it up they can then tell where it will get them access to, this is catastrophic if it's RFID swipe pass for barriers/doors. The only marking that should be present on a security pass is a photo, no name, no barcodes, nothing but a color photo of the owner. Lanyards may, in low security applications be color coded to some function or other (temp, contractor or perm employee for example) but not relied upon.

You've been on that Real Life ITIL 101 course as well huh? Did your certificate have little perforations at top and bottom as well?

It's a coded message from the resistence, 15-inch Hole is clearly a reference to Beta.

You've just introduced the hammer to the nail.

I think IT/Programming as an Engineer discipline also faces a challenge that no other ever has (or at least a greater scale of problem) and that's a matured Business Administration field that has well developed strategies for keeping costs down and aggressively turning new technology into commoditized blobs. I suspect the golden age of computing has already been and gone with the dawn of the Internet. No more glory days of the railways and locomotives, we've headed straight into the grind of delivering a commuter service of ever increasing efficiency and decreasing costs.

I don't fear that as such but worry that it's going to slow or even distort the maturing process. There's a host of new technologies (secured BGP, IPv6, DNS-SEC, DANE, HTML5 etc) which are crawling along in implementation because the benefits to end users aren't easily marketable or just opaque to managers who are "Professional" managers rather than capable leaders from our own field.

There was an article in The Register the other day about how the large players (Google, Amazon etc...) pursuit of horizontal scalability and vertical integration had effectively caused a skills shortage in "pure" Systems Administration. Couple those factors to aggressive out sourcing in IT and you end up with such a small field of experience that it causes a drought of innovation.

It's something like Building Architects and Civil Engineering, because their so out sourced and "small pool practices" they may churn out beautiful designs but there's no true revolution in construction industry practices. Why are robots not building houses to order, all the components (bricks, girders, windows) are fairly standardised, the requirements are well defined etc. Why isn't urban street furniture standardised so that instead of re-tarmacing or repaving a road or pavement a new "top" is dropped in to cover up the utility pipes and cables kept tidily arranged below?

Crowd-funded development of an open platform to replace Slashdot with 1, 2, 3 and 4 digit UIDs as rewards?

...they miss the point and try and make it sing, dance & make morning toast for you and that the motion and solar charging is a frantic attempt to make the battery life acceptable. Inductive charging would be good but anyone in the smart watch arena needs to take a leaf out o Pebbles book and keep it simple.

The list price is £200,000 which doesn't seem to cover shipping and installation etc so it could be anything up to £250,000 so that's about $330-415,000.

Yeah.

No, no, no this is BRITISH Telecom. One of their engineers will draw up perfectly feasible and realisable plans for an even better version, management however won't be interested and so the plans will be left in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'. In the meantime some foreign competitor will eventually come to the same level fives years later and proceed to patent it six ways from Sunday and make £500 bazzilion from it.

...the link is already Tango Down.