Is It Time To End The Clearing Process ?

 General  No Responses »
Aug 202011
 

We are now in the middle of the confirmation and clearing process, which is a process by which students check to see if their place is confirmed at the University of their choice, and to cast around looking for alternative places if they are not confirmed. To those not familiar with the process of applying for a University course, the following is a quick overview of the process.

Back around the beginning of the calendar year, A-level students take ‘mock’ exams which give them (and the Universities) an idea of what they might obtain in the final exams. They then use these results to apply for University courses – if they choose to go to University.

What happens then is that the relevant University offers a provisional place to the student dependent on them getting those results.

Once the students get their real A-level results, there is then a frantic rush to :-

  1. Contact the University of their choice to confirm whether their results entitles them to a place on the course they chose. Sometimes if the results were not quite as good as expected, but the University has spare places, the University will confirm their place anyway. If not the student goes onto clearing.
  2. The student looks for a place on a course available through clearing that matches what they want to do, and the results they have obtained. This has to be done quickly because the best places will be snapped up fast – you may have heard that Universities have started to close their clearing phone lines this weekend, but that gives a false impression. The best courses can close for clearing in as little as an hour after clearing starts!
The whole process is very stressful for the University staff involved as the Universities have to hit a target for the courses. Too many students and the University loses money; too few students on a course and a University won’t make as much money as it could do. Plus the process is very expensive.

But more importantly the students themselves are not only being put into an incredibly stressful situation, but during one of the most stressful periods of their lives – when many have obtained results that are poorer than they wished – they are expected to make decisions that will have a significant effect on the rest of their lives. We usually concentrate on students who get poorer results than expected, but what about those with better results ? In theory they could go through clearing to try and find a better course, but in practice this is very hard – a better strategy would be to take a year off and apply with their real results during that year.

That last bit is a clue as to how we could get rid of the whole clearing mess. Students should wait until they have their A-level results and then apply for their University course. The deadline for applying would be around the end of September, at which point Universities could sort through all of the applications and offer confirmed places to those students they wished to teach.

There would have to be a system comparable to the clearing process to sort out courses for the students who weren’t offered a place at their first choice of University, but this could be handled in a much less stressful manner with better results for all involved. At the very least, there would be much more time available to the students needing to hunt down a place.

This would also involve the start of the academic year to be moved to January which would involve its own challenges but as someone involved in the HE sector, I would rather see the pain of changing the academic year than see the current clearing process continue.

Do OSX Users Need Anti-Virus Products?

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Aug 192011
 

Revised answer: Yes

The longer answer gets a bit more involved. First of all, there is some level of protection built into OSX against malware called File Quarantine. There are limits to how much protection this provides compared with PC anti-virus and anti-malware products as it protects against known malware at the point where the malware is installed or run.

It is also limited by the frequency at which the OSX operating system is updated – OSX is typically updated once a week – unless you put off applying updates whereas a PC-style anti-virus product will typically update it’s virus definitions on an hourly basis. This would seem to make it totally inadequate, but OSX just doesn’t have as much malware as Windows.

There are a number of possible reasons for this including that OSX is inherently more secure and that OSX just doesn’t have enough of a market share for malware authors to bother with. The truth behind the lack of malware for OSX is only known to the malware authors, although it should be noted that OSX viruses do exist (as do Linux ones).

You could take the attitude that a flood of OSX malware is due any day now, and insist on running an anti-virus product in addition to the inbuilt protection OSX has. There are of course people warning that the flood of OSX malware is just around the corner, although they tend to be people connected to the anti-virus industry so are perhaps less than totally disinterested.

Of course if you have some seriously private data to protect, you should probably consider it. But most of us don’t work for the intelligence services, so can be a little less protected … for now. This of course can all change next month, next year, or sometime, so don’t take the word of this blog entry seriously especially if the date on it is a long time ago!

Of course now some time has passed, the situation has changed (with Flashback amongst others), so the answer is that yes you do need an anti-virus product. It is true that Apple has some built-in protection against Malware, but Apple is not an AV company and so they may well react too slowly to protect you.

HP To Stop Making PCs? Is This Wise?

 Computing  No Responses »
Aug 192011
 

According to the site where I usually get my news, there are two articles today … one reporting on HP supposedly spinning off the PC business, and another reporting on Lenovo’s bosses patting themselves on their back for buying IBM’s PC business a few years ago. The interesting thing about these two stories is that HP may be making the same mistake that IBM has previously made.

It may not appear at first glance to be a mistake – IBM and now perhaps HP are ditching a very low margin business because their core area of profitability is in business software and services with much higher margins. But is it a sensible decision ?

One of the advantages of selling pieces of tin that ordinary people have a chance of encountering when they are looking for a new desktop PC or laptop, is that your name is “out there”. Ordinary people will know your name, and know what business you are in – just the kind of publicity that an obscure company selling business software would love – how many people in the street know who Oracle are ? Or Autonomy ?

Operating System Patches As Preventative Maintenance

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Aug 132011
 

It is often the case that people are reluctant to apply operating system patches to servers for two core reasons :-

  1. Applying patches often means an interruption to service, and arranging an appropriate outage can sometimes be difficult.
  2. There is a risk in applying patches that they may break something that previously worked.

Both concerns are legitimate, but what is less often observed is that an unpatched server may appear to be working but to an extent is already broken – the patches are released to fix broken servers.

If we look at car maintenance, we are used to the idea that we take our cars for preventative maintenance – it is called a service. Almost everyone with a new car will routinely take it along at regular intervals for a service to reduce the risk that it will break unexpectedly. Those with older cars frequently accept that their car will unexpected break and they will have to cope with that when it occurs.

Or in other words we apply preventative maintenance to cars, deliberately taking them out of service (you can’t use a car when it is in the garage getting services) so as to exchange a scheduled period of unavailability for reducing the risk of an unexpected unavailability.

It should be the same for operating system patches.

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