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User: godrik

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  1. Re:h1b going first? on Microsoft CEO To Slash 18,000 Jobs, 12,500 From Nokia To Go · · Score: 1

    I know this is against the thought-stream, but the H1B are likely to be most recently employed (lifespan of an H1B visa is 3 or 6 years). So I'd say they are more likely to be well aligned with the company strategy. I expect them not to be layed-off because they are probably not in the sections of the company that needs to be shrunk.

  2. Re:Translation: Slash 18K jobs, apply for 18K H-1B on Microsoft CEO To Slash 18,000 Jobs, 12,500 From Nokia To Go · · Score: 2

    I am a foreign worker under H1B and currently in the process of applying for PERM. I don't know how other places are doing, but where I work (a US university) all these forms are posted on the boards of the building. They are right there for anybody to see AND complain if they think something is wrong or the position is unnecessary.

    I know many H1B and they are not underpaid compared to the other people in the same company.

    In this story, they are mostly firing assembly line workers from nokia it seems. Do you really believe they will manage to get an H1B to do that kind of job? I hardly think so.

  3. Re:Probably because of French entitlements on The Least They Could Do: Amazon Charges 1 Cent To Meet French Free Shipping Ban · · Score: 1

    You are really clueles aren't you?

    France enacted the 35 hours a week policy because data showed that production would go up. And indeed it went up. Because employees are less tired they work better. Here, in NC, I have student working 50 hours a week, except they don't do shit for 20 of these hours becasue they are exhausted. I keep pushing them going home and getting some rest.

    Things are expensive in France for two reason. The first one is the cost of living which drives salaries up (otherwise people can not afford rent) and prices up (otherwise the store can not pay its rent).
    The second one is the massive unemployment rate. There are 43 million people between 15 and 64, but only 27 millions of these people are actually working. There is an official unemployement rate of 10% because 13 million of these people are not counted as active, mostly because they have been pushed to change their official status. But the real unemployement rate is closer to the 30%.
    Now I agree that conservative labor laws are part of that problem. But working time is definitively not the issue. One of the problem is the difficulty to get rid of an employee hired under an "undefined length contract" (CDI). It is so difficult to get rid of them that businesses are very reluctant to employing anybody. This drove short term contracts and lack of retention of skills in businesses.

  4. How big is the problem really? on New Snowden Leak: of 160000 Intercepted Messages, Only 10% From Official Targets · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How many people are really being unlawfully spied upon? I am not saying that even 1 would be acceptable. But do we have any numbers on that? Because it seems that there was 10,000 unlawful account being spied upon. This is a very small "collateral damage" on the size of the population. There are 313,000,000 people in the US. We are talking about 0.003% which seems "somewhat reasonnable"

    Maybe the article was talking about only a single program. But how vast this "mass surveillance" really is?

  5. Re:Unethical on Facebook's Emotion Experiment: Too Far, Or Social Network Norm? · · Score: 1

    I think there is an even larger ethical concern than just using facebooker (?) as test subject. This research is of the kind that ultimately leads to brain washing, emotional control, and more generally population control. Rather than asking whether it is OK to perform this research on unaware subjects, I think it is more important to ask whether it is OK to do this research at all.

  6. Re:Question... -- ? on Exploiting Wildcards On Linux/Unix · · Score: 2

    Nop, you can not just use --. because many commands do not understand --

    Here is an article by dwheeler (a frequent slashdotter; often cited for his technique countering the trusting trust problem) about filenames.
    http://www.dwheeler.com/essays...

    I believe he is mostly right. We should move to file systems that do not allow "stupid" names and be done with it.

  7. Re:LLVM auto-vectorisation on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    also auto-vectorization is a dream. You can only vectorize code if the memory is properly layed out. Every compilers knows how to vectorize automatically. The quetion is only, is the memory layed out in a way that enables vectorization. And from what I saw, there is nothing smart in Swift to enable that.

    What you need is to teach developpers about the vectorizatino problem. Most developpers do not know or care about it. The most basic point is whether you should use Structure of Array or Array of Structure (SoA or AoS). And most don't know what that means.

  8. Re:I can never wrap my head around this. on Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage · · Score: 1

    I grew up in France and have been living in the US for a few years. So I feel like I can answer these questions. But first, the current federal minimum wage is around $7/h, few cities or state have it around $10/h. Also working more than 30 hours a week is sometimes difficult. Overall, it is not possible to convert salaries from one country to another and claim value/lifestyle equivalence.

    What is happening is that your gross income in France and in the US are different. In France, it includes "charge patronale" which are various things your employer pays on your behalf: retirement, health insurance. Minimal wage worker in the US have to pay for that out of their income or not get it at all. (Recently obamacare helped on the insurance side by giving minimum wage worker benefits on these which lowers price significantly for them.)

    In France, education is pretty much free. In the US, higher education is not, you are going to have to pay for it, which means that people tend to take on large loans.

    There is almost no public transportation in the US and the cities are spreads which means that pretty much everybody needs a car. It also incurs insurance and gas. Because gas used to be inexpensive (it rose a lot in the last years), cars in the US have not so good mileage. Also people drive a lot (consequence of the spread of the cities). So car expenses actually get high.

    Internet and cell phones aren't really luxury since so many things are done over the internet or over the phone, including searching for job, health insurance policies, taxes, ...

  9. Thanks for this article on How To Prevent the Next Heartbleed · · Score: 2

    Hi dwheeler,

    This is a great article. It covers many common software development and testing techniques. But also some "on live system" techniques. It was a pleasure to read, I'll recommend it to various places.

  10. Doesn't everybody knows that already? on Winning Algorithms For Rock, Paper, Scissors · · Score: 1

    (obvisouly I did not RTFA.)

    When I took Simulations in gradschool 10 years ago, one of our assignment was to train a markov chain to predict the player next move at rock-paper-scissors. Using simply as state "lastmove, lastoutcome" is enough to learn what humans (read the students of the class) do.

  11. Re:Introduction to Algorithms on Ask Slashdot: Books for a Comp Sci Graduate Student? · · Score: 1

    And to go with that: "concrete mathematics" which gives lots of basics many grad students lack.
    http://www.amazon.com/Concrete...

  12. Re:No complaints here on Lucas Nussbaum Re-Elected As Debian Project Leader · · Score: 2

    I worked at the same place as lucas in the past. Clearly he knows his stuff and knows to deal with complex situations. He did a lot for QA in Debian.

  13. Re:MIT researchers? on MIT Researchers Bring JavaScript To Google Glass · · Score: 1

    Welcome to the world of PR and marketing. If there is any kind of involvement from a famous party, no matter how small the involvement, the famous party always gets the credit. MIT is more famous than University of Maryland so they get the credit.

    Note that I have no clue how much each person contributed to this particular project. But if it is done by somebody famous (or at a famous entity), it becomes great, if you had done the same thing, nobody would talk about it.

  14. Re:'Involve' is the key word.. very deceiving. on More Than 1 In 4 Car Crashes Involve Cellphone Use · · Score: 1

    Well, there are two issues here. You might not be to blame for the accident in the sense that you are not the one initiating the collision, but you might have been able to avoid it if you weren't distracted. So the information of how "involvement" is still meaningful. Though, as pointed out by many slashdotters, the main problem is that we do not have a point of reference. Is the rate of cell phone use lower or higher than the rate of accidents involving cell phones?

  15. Re:Another amazing fact on More Than 1 In 4 Car Crashes Involve Cellphone Use · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, that statistic is not very useful because it does not take into account many biaises. It is not clear that male and female have the smae driving hours. If male were to drive more during peak hours, it would be logical that they tend to get into more accidents and more fatal accidents.

    Not that GP was not a complete douche, but let's not use statistics to say what they do not say.

  16. Re:supercilious bastress on Turing Award Goes To Distributed Computing Wrangler Leslie Lamport · · Score: 1

    The only thing that surprised me is that he did not already have won that award.

  17. Re:Think you miss the point on Paris Bans Half of All Cars On the Road · · Score: 1

    So that's how it is spelled! Thanks!

  18. Re:How does the carpooling thing work? on Paris Bans Half of All Cars On the Road · · Score: 2

    Most people that drive in paris do not live in paris. They typically live in the suburbs (which are different towns) and drive to paris.

  19. Re:License Plate on Paris Bans Half of All Cars On the Road · · Score: 1

    they are. You can't get a custom plates in France I think. (Thought, you might be able to get plates from an other european country which might help you here)

  20. Re:Think you miss the point on Paris Bans Half of All Cars On the Road · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let me way-in on that.

    I grew up in Paris and the problem there is that the city is way too big for its own good. Every single mode of transportation is overcrowded: the subway, the trains, the streets, the circular belt ("peripherique"), the buses, the pedestrian/biking ways, the tramways.

    This overcrowding comes from decades of political will to centralize everything in the country in Paris. The city was never designed to take that kind of traffic. The last major redesign of the city was by haussmann at the end of the 19th century. Since then, only minor adjustment has been make: subways, tramways, "les quais", circular belt. But they all contribute to bring more people in.

    The only solution for Paris (and for French efficiency) is to push people, administration, businesses into other cities.

  21. Re:Now we have an answer to the 20TB backup questi on 1GB of Google Drive Storage Now Costs Only $0.02 Per Month · · Score: 1

    The point of a google drive backup is to have an offsite backup. Now, I agree you could set up that machine at a friend's house (or familly member) and get the offsite backup with a little bit of network configuration.

  22. Re:In other news... on All Else Being Equal: Disputing Claims of a Gender Pay Gap In Tech · · Score: 1

    Well, I think the study is still interesting. Because we still often hear that women are paid less for the same job. That study essentially proves it wrong. Before you can fix a problem, you first need to understand where it comes from. From this study, the problem does not come from discrimination in the hiring process. And this is good news.

  23. Re:Bill increases, really? on How I Cut My Time Warner Cable Bill By 33% · · Score: 1

    I miss my freebox... :(

    The thing is that there is a serious lack of competition in the US regarding network providers. In my area, there is only one provider that can give me more than 3Mbps. So there is little you can do to fight. I believe the various internet operators see no interest in having too much overlap between them, as they know it would ultimately drops their profit margin.

  24. Re:TIme for IT to do the same if only we had a uni on Visual Effects Artists Use MPAA's Own Words Against It · · Score: 1

    Well, it is not a union that is necessary in the field I believe. It is statistics. Detailled statistics of what gets paid here or there and for different kinds of seniority or field of application could definitely boost workers leverage during negociations.

    A union will do that statistics for you, but with lots of other things that might or might not be good.

  25. Free software lagging behind? on Interview: Ask Richard Stallman What You Will · · Score: 1

    Dear RMS,

    First of all, thank for your contributions to the world of software and agreeing on making that interview.

    In the world of software, I am often under the impression that the "proprietary" world develop the game-changers and that the free software follows. Because of that lag, free software appears to always be in position where it has to adapt to the world around it, which diverts lots of efforts or causes lots of frustration. The only parts where free software appears to pioneer is the infrastructure kind of software. Do you have a similar impression? What are your suggestion to try to bring free software to a leadership position?

    Erik