It seems like there are a lot of jobs--and career paths--that offer a very low chance of fabulous wealth: dropping out of college for a tech startup, writing a novel, becoming a fashion designer, going to Hollywood, starting a trendy restaurant, dealing crack, doing anything artistic (ballet/sculptur/rock band), day trading, pro sports, being an "inventor", etc. For most people, it's a recipe for going broke or just subsisting. For a few, it leads to greatness.
And while humanity needs risk-takers, and it needs people to strive for greatness, I feel we over-glamorize the few (ALL of whom benefited from generous portions of luck in addition to the hard work and personnel genius they may have contributed) instead of emphasizing the steady, dependable careers that offer a good chance of honest work for honest pay (maybe not in this economy though:-().
This doesn't mean that JavaScript is insecure. It just means there's an exploitable unpatched vulnerability in JS in some browser. The fact that this malware uses JavaScript + iframe doesn't mean JavaScript is inherently insecure or less secure than bare HTML.
This is the wrong way to see this. A markup language that generates a static DOM (from which a GUI is rendered) is inherently more secure than a programming language that has access to a large set of supposedly sandboxed API's in that, while both can have vulnerabilities, the latter has considerably more "surface" to attack. Exploits may leverage one-off, soon-to-be-patched bugs to do their nasty work, but--statistically speaking--these bugs are going to arise more often in the more complex piece of software, and it's going to keep happening so long as new browser code is being written. NoScript nets a huge surface reduction and big security win here.
And now the worst news of all for you: the HTML engine (or any other portion) of the browser can and often does contain exploitable unpatched vulnerabilities. So even if you disable JavaScript you can get infected.
This is a good reminder. An example would be the 2004 exploit in Microsoft's JPEG code. But it would be interesting to see stats about how often the rendering engine is a vector of attack. I'm thinking it's relatively rare (although part of that would be that JS gets more attention from black hats because it's more fertile ground to begin with).
SOMEBODY at Microsoft must be signing up their friends for user interface testing and getting them to leave bad feedback. I don't know who, but they're doing a GREAT job sabotaging Microsoft's flagship products... first UAC, then the Office ribbon, then Windows Search, then Bing, then rearranging control panels in each new version of Windows, and now removing the start button! How can they do it all with a straight face?
Microsoft Interviewer: "Please launch notepad."
Rouge Tester: "Sure! I'll just double-click this README.txt on the desktop."
MI: "Um.. okay, can you create a new document in notepad?"
RT: "Aww... I just edit the README everytime... see, it's got all my notes and everything."
MI:...
RT: "I use to use the Start menu, but now it gives me vertigo."
MI: "Vertigo?"
RT: "Yeah -- I was puking buckets everytime I opened it."
You seem to forget that those tax cuts were bi-partisan, went to ALL American tax payers, and were done in the aftermath of 9/11.
Check the roll calls for EGTRRA and JGTRRA.... there's a clear partisan split. Whether it helped or hurt the current financial situation of the US government is up for debate I suppose, but it looks bad.
No, the Republican party is stupid, the Democrat party is evil. I dislike both, but if I must give money and power to one, I prefer the stupid one... it's less likely to be effective in interfering with my life
I think of police-states as more evil than nanny-states, on the balance. Not that I want either, but Democratic intentions are less evil than Republicans, who seem pretty unabashed about empowering the all ready powerful -- big business, big finance, big religion, the 3-letter agencies, military/police, etc. The liberal disposition seems to be "use the government to write a happy ending for every sob story out there, cost and burden on everyone else be damned". The conservative disposition seems to be "I'll give up my second Bentley to build a new variety of mega-bomb, but I'll be damned if you spend it on a social program that improves lives and saves money in the long run". The Tea Party disposition seems to be "Fuck all government ('cuz i live with my guns in the woods and don't ever encounter a strange person or idea)." or just "Fuck taxes ('cuz one day I'm going to be part of that 1%).".
Cynical, but that's sometimes my take on it....:-\ As always, reality is more complex with good people and ideas (and their hangups) everywhere.
So your idea that Republicans are somehow to blame for this is not backed up by the FACTS. Sorry, bub! Numbers don't lie!
If you have a problem with any of the numbers I brought up, speak up.
Quoting numbers without context is a good way to hide assumptions and misrepresent a complex situation. And economies are inherently complex. I think to be a Republican apologist for the 2008-2012 U.S. financial crisis, you have to mitigate a handful of factors:
A Republican congress repealed Glass-Stegal, paving the way for the bad banking practices evident in the subprime morgtage crisis.
A Republican administration led the charge to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which was very costly.
A Republican administration instituted large tax cuts during a war.
Of course, probably the easiest way to mitigate these is to point out the unclean hands here... Clinton approved Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Obama extended the Bush-era tax cuts, and the Democratic congress went along with the war effort.
I think the Daily Show called it right once: Republicans are the party of bad ideas; Democrats are the party of no ideas.
I thought they had developed an algorithm that predicted your next move.
A (competition-winning) algorithm I read about keeps track of 6 strategies:
Playing what your opponent played last turn.
Playing the move that would lose to what your opponent played last turn.
Playing the move that would win against what your opponent played last turn.
Playing what you yourself played last turn.
Playing the move that would lose to what you played last turn.
Playing the move that would win against what you played last turn.
Each turn, the strategies would be evaluated against the history of moves and the best one would be selected and used. Apparently this worked pretty well, but they later added a seventh strategy: randomly pick a move. So if the opponent gets too good at analyzing you, you can at least fallback on a strategy that gives you even odds.
Begun crossing the Rubicon? That's bad word choice for a cliche that refers to a definite, irreversible commitment. What's next? Gradually falling head-over-heals in love? A mild gut-wrenching pain? Tentative writing on the wall?
California University Launches Book Opposing Use of Electric Cars
Maybe your submission was rejected because the linked article is pretty anemic and doesn't really support your proposed headline. Maybe you can find a better link (heck, the Amazon page and the promo site are both more informative). And a better headline would be "Berkeley Academic Argues that the Market Nullifies Green Technology" or perhaps "Berkeley Academic: Social Causes Do More Good for Environment than Green Tech".
in a PROPERLY staffed team, you will have experts in many areas. you need platform guys, compiler guys, even hardware-aware guys at times. some of them are good at algorithms, some are great coders, some are big-picture guys.
I'm not aware of many line-of-business shops that need compiler or hardware guys.
please consider a mix, next time you are managing a team. try to get different levels of experience and in different areas. it makes for a better team and better products.
Having a mix of some sort is inevitable. And yes, sometimes it's that person who seems totally unqualified who ends up being the "magic" that holds a team together or accomplishes some great feat. You can't identify that ahead of time though, so you're still best off trying to (1) identify what you need and (2) hire people who experiences doing it.
As the saying goes, the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong... but that's the way to bet.
If you'd lose a wife because you couldn't get a new job quickly enough, then it was a gold-digger that wasn't worth keeping.
Maybe, maybe not. Remember that, at any point in time, there are n% of marriages hovering just above the call-it-quits threshold. Any bit of extra stress can tip them over the line. And money is the leading cause of stress in marriages (probably).
Besides, unless you have a Donald Trump-like fall from grace, the true gold-diggers will have rejected you at the dating stage.
Good programmers can pick up new languages as needed, and do so quite quickly.
Sure, language fundamentals can be picked up quickly, but five+ years gets you expertise with the platform. That includes the language, its idioms, its pitfalls, its evolution/history, its API's, the community, the third-party market, etc. etc. From an employeer's standpoint, it's nicer to hire that directly and get the benefit now rather than hiring someone and letting them pollute your codebase for a few years.
And realistically, employers lack the ability to determine upfront whether you're a quick learner or not. If you're looking for a Python programmer and you have a hundred resumes that say "Python", why would you solicit a hundred more that don't? The prior experience criteria is a filter that saves everyone time...
Good thing Linux's long-term success has nothing to do with whether it is ever popular on the desktop, then.
Your being disingenuous: a broad-loosely organized techno-cultural movement like Linux and FLOSS can't have a business plan or clear criteria for success and failure. However, most of us who salivate at the idea of Linux conquering the world and creating a free software hegemony would agree that staying stuck at 1-2% in the desktop market is not success.
We can do better if we avoid the denialism that the grandparent post is (in part) complaining about and strive to position Linux as a superior fields. We must compete on the desktop in areas such as usability and enterprise management, because being zero cost and open source alone isn't sufficent.
Does anyone have any idea why the W3C opposed this? It seems like a no-brainer.
DNT requires the cooperation of advertisers to work. So think thru this from an advertiser's perspective: if DNT is enabled everywhere by default, that cuts my business off at the knees and I have no more reason to respect DNT than I do all the people who say "pretty-please-don't-track-me". OTOH, if DNT is only enabled by the ~5% of people who cared enough to take the extra 10 seconds to turn it off, than maybe I should respect DNT to avoid future lawsuits/legislation/villification writ large.
DNT is not a technological solution, it's a social bargaining. And the negotiation doesn't work unless users express an individual choice to not be tracked. The real question is: why does Microsoft wish to f*ck up this standard? Most likely they wish to punish/ensnare Google (who will be under more pressure than most to respect DNT). But the practical consequence will be to make DNT useless (hopefully just on IE10, but possibly everywhere).
Your argument is based on the assertion that we are somehow discouraging women from entering CS, which according to my experinces is complete baloney.
Are you a woman? Perhaps the people who are passionate about this have had difference experiences. That is in part what the fine article is about... maybe exposure to geeks internet forums is repelling some of our sisters from joining the trade. Some of the comments on this thread are certainly illustrative.
At my Uni female CS applicants got preferential placing just because of gender, and every company I've ever worked at has always actively encouraged women employees and made sure that they get paid at least the same as men.
Ah... it's the specific policy measures you object to. You are on firmer ground here (as opposed to telling folks who are worried about this to not be worried).
Most women automatically think more based on emotion while men generally use more logic. Consequently women tend to shy away from subjects that require rigorous or analytical thought. Perhaps its cultural but I'd suggest its more fundamental than that. Men and women ARE biologically (including psychologically) different, just accept it.
And what of masculine biology makes the male more logical? Is the penis an axiomatic device? Look, we have some evidence for innate psychological differences b/t men and women (for instance, men make better piano tuners, women exhibit greater facility with language at earlier ages, and the two genders appear to process spatial information differently), but claiming that men are innately more logical is the result of your perspective, judging female actions from a male perspective in a society where women are led away from math and science at an early age (if they don't learn to hide it). (Incidentally, soft skills are a huge part of programming... the field can benefit from bringing in people who's talent lies outside that od sheer "logic".)
Why is the ratio of men to women in CS even an issue? Its not intrinsically wrong that it mostly attracts men. Can we end this sexist crap please?
In a nutshell, the more women participate in society, the better off society is. If women are avoiding the field because it's populated with slimeballs, then both society and the field itself suffers as a result. A situation doesn't have to be "intrinsically wrong" (whatever that means) to warrant rectifying... just suboptimal.
There are plenty of professions that have a significant majority of women.
I don't see any corresponding massive outcry about how to get more men in those fields.
Fixing the gender imbalances among, say, waiters or garbage collectors isn't going to be a priority because those fields aren't influential or strategic. They're more like temporary or fallback jobs. (That said, I'm willing to outcry/lament the lack of male schoolteachers: if we could encourage more of them, kids could be exposed to role-models of both genders, and boys would greater access to men who understand the unique challenges boys face.)
We just need to offer equal education opportunities to both genders and employ people based on merit not gender.
I agree with that, at the institutional/legal level. In addition though, we need to figure out as individuals and as a culture the places where we are unnecessarily discouraging talent and participation and work on modifying those attitudes.
Seeing as how screenplays for Snow Crash have been kicking around almost as long as the book itself, I'm amazed it finally got picked up. Still, I don't have high hopes.
Perhaps Stephenson's depiction of a hyper-privatized society struggling with disruptive technologies, unpredictable religious groups, and the complete usurpation of rational discourse (all while a marginalized federal government steeps ineffectually in its own paranoia) has never been more applicable to current events. The text is ripe for exploiting (and commenting on) the current political zeitgeist...
Not sure what the colored text that seems to be attached to the "ribbon" tabs is either...
They're contextual choices related to the currently selected object. They probably got feedback from UI trials that people weren't noticing the new bands appear when they clicked on stuff, so the color was added to dramatize/force it.
Negotiation has nothing to do with the actual work you're doing.
Yes, but they have a lot to do with an employee's unique qualifications, and they have a lot to do with an employee's and an employer's decision to commit to an employment relationship. Those are market realities. Maybe it's unfair, but it's not the employer's unfairness.
So you think the company is completely justified in hiding that information for the end goal of simply fucking Alice over?
No I don't. Coworkers should be free to discuss salaries with each other if they choose. I'm saying that employer's reasons for salary discrimination aren't just invalid/evil ones.
It could be a matter of finding the right drug.. or the right supplement.
For me, it was realizing that a small part of me enjoyed being depressed. So I started "dieting" and limiting how much time I sulked in an easy chair before kicking myself to get up and do something. It was utterly startling to me that such a simple change in thinking could have such profound results (hit upon after years of thinking and obsessing about it off and on).
That was my [relatively lightweight] experience though... the same cure isn't going to work for everyone in all circumstances. It may not even work for me, the next time depression returns in force to my life.
If somebody works as a janitor, there's no reason to base their salary over their negotiation skills, is there? I mean, a janitor with good negotiation skill does the same job as the other with less. A janitors work is to clean up the floors. It's a binary: either done, or not.
Precisely wrong: there are qualitative attributes to every job, even janitorial work. Maybe both janitors get the floor clean, but one does it with a good attitude, is helpful to people who are lost, is always on time, and never throws away important papers that some cubical drone has dumbly propped across the corner of his trash bin. And this is a thousand times more true for white collar jobs... there are trillions of (valid) things that make a worker better or worse than their peers in a particular position. Unfortunately, it's not feasible to identify all of these factors ahead of time, communicate them to the employee, document observed performance, and prove it all in court years down the road.
Market fluctuations do not justify the different measure between people. "Valid" market reasons has nothing to do with merit-based reasons.
I'm not equating market- and merit-based reasons. I'm saying that you're going to have some pay discrimination that results from market realities... and that's not among the "Invalid" reasons that wierd_w lists (favoritism, sexism, etc.). Is it fair? No, not in the same sense that merit-based compensation is fair. But how are you going to force them to be the same? Let Alice sue her employer and make them prove the difference? Let the employer decrease Sally's wage so they can increase's Alice's? Let the employer fire Sally so they can hire a replacement at Alice's salary? Force the employer to increase Alice's salary... making them paranoid to hire during boom periods? These options seem to be more unfair (and have more unintended consequences) than leaving the discrepancy as-is.
(Just as an aside... have you ever taken advantage of a sale to buy more of a product than you normally would? Did you go back to the store and reimburse them when the sale ended? Did you ever pay the MSRP price on a clearance item? Why not? The product itself may not have feelings, wants, and desires, but the people who helped create and get that product to you sure do, and it's not "fair" [by your logic] that you paid them $1/unit on one day and $3/unit some other time when it filled the same specific need for you on both occasions.)
"valid market reasons" are used for breaking the free market ideal (well informed seller and buyer)
I'm not defending the employers who tried to restrict information flow b/t coworkers. The US Labor Board made the right decision here. What I am defending is DoofusOfDeath's point that employers want to restrict salary discussions for reasons beyond the sinister/invalid ones that wierd_w lists.
The market does not recognize talent
In one company I know, they can't give job candidates a simple programming quiz. They can't require them to write a single SQL statement, even though the hire will have to do this on the job every damn day. Because, to do that, the company would have to jump thru enough bureaucratic hoops to prove that a simple, objective test wasn't some sinister attempt to exclude minorities. If merit is the ideal, this sure seems to be pushing us further away...
Thanks for the link! It was worth visiting to see them (try to) defend the decision and read people's reactions in the comments. I like the not-so-subtle insinuation that their users are screaming monkeys reacting on emotions instead of the calm, well-thought out logic that they so generously employee while studiously finding the most "effective way of providing structure and emphasis".
I am forming a hypothesis that designers can rationalize any decision they've taken a fancy to, no matter how obtuse. This ALL CAPS thing a great example (better than the new-tabs-open-on-left feature they introduced previously), so here's what I think: their real goal with this change is to remind programmers not to make arrogant design decisions while they're coding.:O
That would be the [favoritism] poison, would it not?
Sally gets paid more than Alice, because?
Maybe Sally was a better negotiator during the hiring process. Or maybe Alice negotiated other considerations, such as flextime or telecommuting. Or maybe Sally does better work and has gotten higher bonuses. Or maybe Sally was hired when that job skill (tech writing, for the sake of example) was harder to fill. None of these are favoritism... they are "valid" market- and merit-based reasons.
To DoofusOfDeath's point, it's still to the employer's benefit to discourage information sharing because when Alice hears that Sally is being $n thousand more per annum, she's not going to remember that she was hired when the market was flooded with tech writers or that she's pretty bad about taking initiative despite constant prodding from her boss. The drama and/or legal headaches that follow hurt the bottom line.
You're talking about RFC 3401, which (if I read it right) randomizes the 64 low bits of the address. DarkOx's point is that ISP's are likely to assign each household a (static, semi-permanent) network with the same 64 high bits. If I'm a web-tracking firm, I'd expect that to be similar to but more reliable than the (temporary, high turnover) IPv4 address that basically identifies a household today.
Good thing Microsoft's way includes a required option in the UEFI setup to turn off secure boot. This whole story is horribly misleading.
G'uhgh.... once again geeks confusing a technical capability with a real-world practicality. Turning off secure boot sounds bad and raises the barrier to entry for non-Microsoft OS'es. It also complicates the newbie install experience, which is something that Ubuntu, Debian, and many others have worked for years to simplify. And now they are using their monopoly position to extort tribute from a competitor.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like there are a lot of jobs--and career paths--that offer a very low chance of fabulous wealth: dropping out of college for a tech startup, writing a novel, becoming a fashion designer, going to Hollywood, starting a trendy restaurant, dealing crack, doing anything artistic (ballet/sculptur/rock band), day trading, pro sports, being an "inventor", etc. For most people, it's a recipe for going broke or just subsisting. For a few, it leads to greatness.
:-().
And while humanity needs risk-takers, and it needs people to strive for greatness, I feel we over-glamorize the few (ALL of whom benefited from generous portions of luck in addition to the hard work and personnel genius they may have contributed) instead of emphasizing the steady, dependable careers that offer a good chance of honest work for honest pay (maybe not in this economy though
This doesn't mean that JavaScript is insecure. It just means there's an exploitable unpatched vulnerability in JS in some browser. The fact that this malware uses JavaScript + iframe doesn't mean JavaScript is inherently insecure or less secure than bare HTML.
This is the wrong way to see this. A markup language that generates a static DOM (from which a GUI is rendered) is inherently more secure than a programming language that has access to a large set of supposedly sandboxed API's in that, while both can have vulnerabilities, the latter has considerably more "surface" to attack. Exploits may leverage one-off, soon-to-be-patched bugs to do their nasty work, but--statistically speaking--these bugs are going to arise more often in the more complex piece of software, and it's going to keep happening so long as new browser code is being written. NoScript nets a huge surface reduction and big security win here.
And now the worst news of all for you: the HTML engine (or any other portion) of the browser can and often does contain exploitable unpatched vulnerabilities. So even if you disable JavaScript you can get infected.
This is a good reminder. An example would be the 2004 exploit in Microsoft's JPEG code. But it would be interesting to see stats about how often the rendering engine is a vector of attack. I'm thinking it's relatively rare (although part of that would be that JS gets more attention from black hats because it's more fertile ground to begin with).
SOMEBODY at Microsoft must be signing up their friends for user interface testing and getting them to leave bad feedback. I don't know who, but they're doing a GREAT job sabotaging Microsoft's flagship products... first UAC, then the Office ribbon, then Windows Search, then Bing, then rearranging control panels in each new version of Windows, and now removing the start button! How can they do it all with a straight face?
Microsoft Interviewer: "Please launch notepad."
Rouge Tester: "Sure! I'll just double-click this README.txt on the desktop."
MI: "Um.. okay, can you create a new document in notepad?"
RT: "Aww... I just edit the README everytime... see, it's got all my notes and everything."
MI: ...
RT: "I use to use the Start menu, but now it gives me vertigo."
MI: "Vertigo?"
RT: "Yeah -- I was puking buckets everytime I opened it."
MI: ...
RT: "Buckets. Totally."
You seem to forget that those tax cuts were bi-partisan, went to ALL American tax payers, and were done in the aftermath of 9/11.
Check the roll calls for EGTRRA and JGTRRA.... there's a clear partisan split. Whether it helped or hurt the current financial situation of the US government is up for debate I suppose, but it looks bad.
No, the Republican party is stupid, the Democrat party is evil. I dislike both, but if I must give money and power to one, I prefer the stupid one... it's less likely to be effective in interfering with my life
I think of police-states as more evil than nanny-states, on the balance. Not that I want either, but Democratic intentions are less evil than Republicans, who seem pretty unabashed about empowering the all ready powerful -- big business, big finance, big religion, the 3-letter agencies, military/police, etc. The liberal disposition seems to be "use the government to write a happy ending for every sob story out there, cost and burden on everyone else be damned". The conservative disposition seems to be "I'll give up my second Bentley to build a new variety of mega-bomb, but I'll be damned if you spend it on a social program that improves lives and saves money in the long run". The Tea Party disposition seems to be "Fuck all government ('cuz i live with my guns in the woods and don't ever encounter a strange person or idea)." or just "Fuck taxes ('cuz one day I'm going to be part of that 1%).".
Cynical, but that's sometimes my take on it.... :-\
As always, reality is more complex with good people and ideas (and their hangups) everywhere.
So your idea that Republicans are somehow to blame for this is not backed up by the FACTS. Sorry, bub! Numbers don't lie!
If you have a problem with any of the numbers I brought up, speak up.
Quoting numbers without context is a good way to hide assumptions and misrepresent a complex situation. And economies are inherently complex. I think to be a Republican apologist for the 2008-2012 U.S. financial crisis, you have to mitigate a handful of factors:
Of course, probably the easiest way to mitigate these is to point out the unclean hands here... Clinton approved Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Obama extended the Bush-era tax cuts, and the Democratic congress went along with the war effort.
I think the Daily Show called it right once: Republicans are the party of bad ideas; Democrats are the party of no ideas.
I thought they had developed an algorithm that predicted your next move.
A (competition-winning) algorithm I read about keeps track of 6 strategies:
Each turn, the strategies would be evaluated against the history of moves and the best one would be selected and used. Apparently this worked pretty well, but they later added a seventh strategy: randomly pick a move. So if the opponent gets too good at analyzing you, you can at least fallback on a strategy that gives you even odds.
Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon...
Begun crossing the Rubicon? That's bad word choice for a cliche that refers to a definite, irreversible commitment. What's next? Gradually falling head-over-heals in love? A mild gut-wrenching pain? Tentative writing on the wall?
California University Launches Book Opposing Use of Electric Cars
Maybe your submission was rejected because the linked article is pretty anemic and doesn't really support your proposed headline. Maybe you can find a better link (heck, the Amazon page and the promo site are both more informative). And a better headline would be "Berkeley Academic Argues that the Market Nullifies Green Technology" or perhaps "Berkeley Academic: Social Causes Do More Good for Environment than Green Tech".
in a PROPERLY staffed team, you will have experts in many areas. you need platform guys, compiler guys, even hardware-aware guys at times. some of them are good at algorithms, some are great coders, some are big-picture guys.
I'm not aware of many line-of-business shops that need compiler or hardware guys.
please consider a mix, next time you are managing a team. try to get different levels of experience and in different areas. it makes for a better team and better products.
Having a mix of some sort is inevitable. And yes, sometimes it's that person who seems totally unqualified who ends up being the "magic" that holds a team together or accomplishes some great feat. You can't identify that ahead of time though, so you're still best off trying to (1) identify what you need and (2) hire people who experiences doing it.
As the saying goes, the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong... but that's the way to bet.
If you'd lose a wife because you couldn't get a new job quickly enough, then it was a gold-digger that wasn't worth keeping.
Maybe, maybe not. Remember that, at any point in time, there are n% of marriages hovering just above the call-it-quits threshold. Any bit of extra stress can tip them over the line. And money is the leading cause of stress in marriages (probably).
Besides, unless you have a Donald Trump-like fall from grace, the true gold-diggers will have rejected you at the dating stage.
Good programmers can pick up new languages as needed, and do so quite quickly.
Sure, language fundamentals can be picked up quickly, but five+ years gets you expertise with the platform. That includes the language, its idioms, its pitfalls, its evolution/history, its API's, the community, the third-party market, etc. etc. From an employeer's standpoint, it's nicer to hire that directly and get the benefit now rather than hiring someone and letting them pollute your codebase for a few years.
And realistically, employers lack the ability to determine upfront whether you're a quick learner or not. If you're looking for a Python programmer and you have a hundred resumes that say "Python", why would you solicit a hundred more that don't? The prior experience criteria is a filter that saves everyone time...
Good thing Linux's long-term success has nothing to do with whether it is ever popular on the desktop, then.
Your being disingenuous: a broad-loosely organized techno-cultural movement like Linux and FLOSS can't have a business plan or clear criteria for success and failure. However, most of us who salivate at the idea of Linux conquering the world and creating a free software hegemony would agree that staying stuck at 1-2% in the desktop market is not success.
We can do better if we avoid the denialism that the grandparent post is (in part) complaining about and strive to position Linux as a superior fields. We must compete on the desktop in areas such as usability and enterprise management, because being zero cost and open source alone isn't sufficent.
Does anyone have any idea why the W3C opposed this? It seems like a no-brainer.
DNT requires the cooperation of advertisers to work. So think thru this from an advertiser's perspective: if DNT is enabled everywhere by default, that cuts my business off at the knees and I have no more reason to respect DNT than I do all the people who say "pretty-please-don't-track-me". OTOH, if DNT is only enabled by the ~5% of people who cared enough to take the extra 10 seconds to turn it off, than maybe I should respect DNT to avoid future lawsuits/legislation/villification writ large.
DNT is not a technological solution, it's a social bargaining. And the negotiation doesn't work unless users express an individual choice to not be tracked. The real question is: why does Microsoft wish to f*ck up this standard? Most likely they wish to punish/ensnare Google (who will be under more pressure than most to respect DNT). But the practical consequence will be to make DNT useless (hopefully just on IE10, but possibly everywhere).
Your argument is based on the assertion that we are somehow discouraging women from entering CS, which according to my experinces is complete baloney.
Are you a woman? Perhaps the people who are passionate about this have had difference experiences. That is in part what the fine article is about... maybe exposure to geeks internet forums is repelling some of our sisters from joining the trade. Some of the comments on this thread are certainly illustrative.
At my Uni female CS applicants got preferential placing just because of gender, and every company I've ever worked at has always actively encouraged women employees and made sure that they get paid at least the same as men.
Ah... it's the specific policy measures you object to. You are on firmer ground here (as opposed to telling folks who are worried about this to not be worried).
Most women automatically think more based on emotion while men generally use more logic. Consequently women tend to shy away from subjects that require rigorous or analytical thought. Perhaps its cultural but I'd suggest its more fundamental than that. Men and women ARE biologically (including psychologically) different, just accept it.
And what of masculine biology makes the male more logical? Is the penis an axiomatic device? Look, we have some evidence for innate psychological differences b/t men and women (for instance, men make better piano tuners, women exhibit greater facility with language at earlier ages, and the two genders appear to process spatial information differently), but claiming that men are innately more logical is the result of your perspective, judging female actions from a male perspective in a society where women are led away from math and science at an early age (if they don't learn to hide it). (Incidentally, soft skills are a huge part of programming... the field can benefit from bringing in people who's talent lies outside that od sheer "logic".)
Why is the ratio of men to women in CS even an issue? Its not intrinsically wrong that it mostly attracts men. Can we end this sexist crap please?
In a nutshell, the more women participate in society, the better off society is. If women are avoiding the field because it's populated with slimeballs, then both society and the field itself suffers as a result. A situation doesn't have to be "intrinsically wrong" (whatever that means) to warrant rectifying... just suboptimal.
There are plenty of professions that have a significant majority of women. I don't see any corresponding massive outcry about how to get more men in those fields.
Fixing the gender imbalances among, say, waiters or garbage collectors isn't going to be a priority because those fields aren't influential or strategic. They're more like temporary or fallback jobs. (That said, I'm willing to outcry/lament the lack of male schoolteachers: if we could encourage more of them, kids could be exposed to role-models of both genders, and boys would greater access to men who understand the unique challenges boys face.)
We just need to offer equal education opportunities to both genders and employ people based on merit not gender.
I agree with that, at the institutional/legal level. In addition though, we need to figure out as individuals and as a culture the places where we are unnecessarily discouraging talent and participation and work on modifying those attitudes.
Well I'm glad that they're posting the job listings openly. Secretly posted listings don't usually have a great response rate.
Yes, but posting it secretly--to your honeypot network--makes it a a whole lot easier to ferret out people with actual skill. ;-O
Seeing as how screenplays for Snow Crash have been kicking around almost as long as the book itself, I'm amazed it finally got picked up. Still, I don't have high hopes.
Perhaps Stephenson's depiction of a hyper-privatized society struggling with disruptive technologies, unpredictable religious groups, and the complete usurpation of rational discourse (all while a marginalized federal government steeps ineffectually in its own paranoia) has never been more applicable to current events. The text is ripe for exploiting (and commenting on) the current political zeitgeist...
Not sure what the colored text that seems to be attached to the "ribbon" tabs is either...
They're contextual choices related to the currently selected object. They probably got feedback from UI trials that people weren't noticing the new bands appear when they clicked on stuff, so the color was added to dramatize/force it.
Negotiation has nothing to do with the actual work you're doing.
Yes, but they have a lot to do with an employee's unique qualifications, and they have a lot to do with an employee's and an employer's decision to commit to an employment relationship. Those are market realities. Maybe it's unfair, but it's not the employer's unfairness.
So you think the company is completely justified in hiding that information for the end goal of simply fucking Alice over?
No I don't. Coworkers should be free to discuss salaries with each other if they choose. I'm saying that employer's reasons for salary discrimination aren't just invalid/evil ones.
It could be a matter of finding the right drug.. or the right supplement.
For me, it was realizing that a small part of me enjoyed being depressed. So I started "dieting" and limiting how much time I sulked in an easy chair before kicking myself to get up and do something. It was utterly startling to me that such a simple change in thinking could have such profound results (hit upon after years of thinking and obsessing about it off and on).
That was my [relatively lightweight] experience though... the same cure isn't going to work for everyone in all circumstances. It may not even work for me, the next time depression returns in force to my life.
If somebody works as a janitor, there's no reason to base their salary over their negotiation skills, is there? I mean, a janitor with good negotiation skill does the same job as the other with less. A janitors work is to clean up the floors. It's a binary: either done, or not.
Precisely wrong: there are qualitative attributes to every job, even janitorial work. Maybe both janitors get the floor clean, but one does it with a good attitude, is helpful to people who are lost, is always on time, and never throws away important papers that some cubical drone has dumbly propped across the corner of his trash bin. And this is a thousand times more true for white collar jobs... there are trillions of (valid) things that make a worker better or worse than their peers in a particular position. Unfortunately, it's not feasible to identify all of these factors ahead of time, communicate them to the employee, document observed performance, and prove it all in court years down the road.
Market fluctuations do not justify the different measure between people. "Valid" market reasons has nothing to do with merit-based reasons.
I'm not equating market- and merit-based reasons. I'm saying that you're going to have some pay discrimination that results from market realities... and that's not among the "Invalid" reasons that wierd_w lists (favoritism, sexism, etc.). Is it fair? No, not in the same sense that merit-based compensation is fair. But how are you going to force them to be the same? Let Alice sue her employer and make them prove the difference? Let the employer decrease Sally's wage so they can increase's Alice's? Let the employer fire Sally so they can hire a replacement at Alice's salary? Force the employer to increase Alice's salary... making them paranoid to hire during boom periods? These options seem to be more unfair (and have more unintended consequences) than leaving the discrepancy as-is.
(Just as an aside... have you ever taken advantage of a sale to buy more of a product than you normally would? Did you go back to the store and reimburse them when the sale ended? Did you ever pay the MSRP price on a clearance item? Why not? The product itself may not have feelings, wants, and desires, but the people who helped create and get that product to you sure do, and it's not "fair" [by your logic] that you paid them $1/unit on one day and $3/unit some other time when it filled the same specific need for you on both occasions.)
"valid market reasons" are used for breaking the free market ideal (well informed seller and buyer)
I'm not defending the employers who tried to restrict information flow b/t coworkers. The US Labor Board made the right decision here. What I am defending is DoofusOfDeath's point that employers want to restrict salary discussions for reasons beyond the sinister/invalid ones that wierd_w lists.
The market does not recognize talent
In one company I know, they can't give job candidates a simple programming quiz. They can't require them to write a single SQL statement, even though the hire will have to do this on the job every damn day. Because, to do that, the company would have to jump thru enough bureaucratic hoops to prove that a simple, objective test wasn't some sinister attempt to exclude minorities. If merit is the ideal, this sure seems to be pushing us further away...
If you go to the source, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx
Thanks for the link! It was worth visiting to see them (try to) defend the decision and read people's reactions in the comments. I like the not-so-subtle insinuation that their users are screaming monkeys reacting on emotions instead of the calm, well-thought out logic that they so generously employee while studiously finding the most "effective way of providing structure and emphasis".
:O
I am forming a hypothesis that designers can rationalize any decision they've taken a fancy to, no matter how obtuse. This ALL CAPS thing a great example (better than the new-tabs-open-on-left feature they introduced previously), so here's what I think: their real goal with this change is to remind programmers not to make arrogant design decisions while they're coding.
That would be the [favoritism] poison, would it not? Sally gets paid more than Alice, because?
Maybe Sally was a better negotiator during the hiring process. Or maybe Alice negotiated other considerations, such as flextime or telecommuting. Or maybe Sally does better work and has gotten higher bonuses. Or maybe Sally was hired when that job skill (tech writing, for the sake of example) was harder to fill. None of these are favoritism... they are "valid" market- and merit-based reasons.
To DoofusOfDeath's point, it's still to the employer's benefit to discourage information sharing because when Alice hears that Sally is being $n thousand more per annum, she's not going to remember that she was hired when the market was flooded with tech writers or that she's pretty bad about taking initiative despite constant prodding from her boss. The drama and/or legal headaches that follow hurt the bottom line.
You're talking about RFC 3401, which (if I read it right) randomizes the 64 low bits of the address. DarkOx's point is that ISP's are likely to assign each household a (static, semi-permanent) network with the same 64 high bits. If I'm a web-tracking firm, I'd expect that to be similar to but more reliable than the (temporary, high turnover) IPv4 address that basically identifies a household today.
Good thing Microsoft's way includes a required option in the UEFI setup to turn off secure boot. This whole story is horribly misleading.
G'uhgh.... once again geeks confusing a technical capability with a real-world practicality. Turning off secure boot sounds bad and raises the barrier to entry for non-Microsoft OS'es. It also complicates the newbie install experience, which is something that Ubuntu, Debian, and many others have worked for years to simplify. And now they are using their monopoly position to extort tribute from a competitor.