reeses

Unfortunately, we're lumped in with "Pacific", so all those developers in San Bernardino and Sacramento are dragging us down.

On the surface, the points you cite are inflammatory and often used a priori to justify paying women less.

It's a bit irresponsible after that slide not to put the rest of the results into the context of gender.

Are women represented proportionally by age? The last table in the article ("What Matters Most") would blow the lid off of many of the arguments. Do people who "could find seven attributes of their job more meaningful than base salary" in general make less than others? Do women and men respond differently to those questions? What is the disparity between men and women who value base pay most?

The only value I can extract from this survey is that a) it's BS that female compensation stagnated while male compensation rose (was there a mini-baby boom during which a lot of women took unpaid maternity leave?) and b) Dr Dobbs is getting less and less relevant, given that they consider "Company-paid smartphone/wireless email" to be a form of compensation.

That's why change orders should happen for anything that isn't specified at the time of signing the contract. They can be zero cost, they can be clarification change orders, they can swap scope, or they can involve additional cost.

I try to get to a cadence of about one change order a week on projects lasting longer than ten weeks. Sometimes, depending on how onerous getting an SOW signed can be, we'll even queue up change orders (with the client's willing participation) to execute right after the SOW is approved by legal.

There are plenty of apps that version mockups, but it's also possible to add layers to existing documents as well, whether it's photoshop, visio, etc.

In addition, to have the same quality of life in China or other "developing" countries is much more expensive than the simple comparisons.

The American has enough money to take the family on the annual pilgrimage to Disneyland or Dollywood. The American has a car with A/C and an automatic transmission, shops at grocery stores that source produce and goods globally, and can have four bathrooms with potable water in its house.

To do the same in India, China, etc., you're not making it happen on the $800 per project unless you have a farm of people living in their grandparents' house and riding a bicycle made of cast iron and bamboo to get rice and something to "flavor" it.

Not to be snarky but oops, my bad. :-)

Ruby, as generally served with Rails, has historically been much slower than SQL-in-the-page PHP with APC/etc.

One example[1], from 37 Signals back in 2009, showed a 320ms response time (gack!) with 9,000 requests per minute on 10 4vcpu/4gb VMs in a private cluster.

Assuming they had a reasonably tuned storage subsystem, this is pretty terrible performance. That's about 150 requests per second for 10 VMs with 40 vcpus and 40gb RAM. However, that doesn't quite match up with the 320ms claim, which would have them pushing a little lower. I'll assume a rounding error.

Things have gotten better in many cases, but hardware and scaling up and out is still the best way to improve rails performance.

[1] https://37signals.com/svn/posts/1819-basecamp-now-with-more-...

Reviewing, revising, and summarizing are the keys. The problem with taking notes on the computer is that it's "in there" so it rarely gets edited.

That act of touching the notes again reinforces the information in our brains which is why it's part of an educational notetaking system.

I think she would've been just as successful had she transferred her paper notes into the computer and edited and summarized from there.

ob. org-mode

When a lot of these tools were first implemented, to get enough entropy, you would have to type and move your mouse for a long time to generate a 1024-bit key. I remember really, really hating that process.

Now, you kids these days with your entropy pools and PRNGs in your CPUs because you had an empty spot on the tape-out...get off my lawn!

Something very similar to this has been used in the military to "bridge" network barriers at differing security levels. The US Navy uses "SDR" (Secure Data Replication) to transfer content under control.

You could get all stuxnet and exploit the various applications (such as the components that inspect zipped content), but the transport itself is a simple file copy over a bitstream. You could do the same thing with kermit and uuencode a bit more easily.

And 90% of the time, people want to revoke their old keys because they had a pressing one-time need to have a PGP key (vendor exchange, whatever) and lost the private key without generating and saving a revocation certificate.

This is a place where solid infrastructure support at the OS-level would really help. Instead, it's nerds and the paranoid who bother, and they'll steal the software or insist on open source anyway. :-)

I suspect that it's because 4096 is the largest permitted RSA key on most software right now. There is no 11 on that dial.

Not to be snarky, but have you tried using google?

http://www.biglumber.com/

I get a couple requests a year when someone comes through town. It could do with more participation, though. :-)

There's also the paranoia of non-repudiability with signed messages. In general, there is minimal benefit just signing a document. I don't care if someone I work with is spoofed because it will become obvious very quickly.

It's only in a very few cases where there's an advantage in signing a document, and it's usually more in the verifiability of content (so that you can verify that nothing is lost/changed in transit) than in the verification of identity.

Given the lack of adoption of PGP/GnuPG in email clients vs. S/MIME, if I'm signing my emails without encrypting them, chances are the recipient would still be able to read my emails and, knowing my writing style and given the context, be able to suss out that I was in fact the author.

I use the word "paranoia" intentionally because there's a lack of meaningful legal precedent establishing that a gpg-signed message is enough to establish authorship. In a civil case, sure, it looks bad, but you could easily say,"oops, I stored my public key on [vps or cloud service], which was a well-known victim of a hack."

The post to which you were replying was amusing at the cost of a lack of rigor.

Bruce generally does not sign/encrypt his email because he views email as a low-security communications mechanism anyway.[1]

He generally advises a rational risk assessment when determining how much security to apply to a process. He often uses the example of locking doors on your house, etc.

In re PGP, he's been critical of a number of shortcomings in PGP and GnuPG since the beginning, but by the same token, one of his first hires at Counterpane was Jon Callas.

[1] http://www.esecurityplanet.com/trends/security-tips-from-bru...

Or the early 1990s if you were unfortunate enough to have an Indigo. Mid-1990s if you were really unfortunate and had an Indy, or were fortunate enough to have an Indigo2 with decent gfx.

About the same amount of RAM then, too. :-)

Unless there's no gravity giving your arms weight.

The A-mount Alphas are not mirrorless. They have a semi-transparent, non-moving mirror that steals about 1/3 of a stop to send light to the AF sensor. It gives most of the advantages of the DSLRs (phase-detect AF, but that's creeping into higher-photosite-density mirrorless cameras) while making live view and continuous AF much less complicated.

That's why Sony refers to them as "SLT" cameras and not SLR.

You'd be just as well served by comparing a $900 Nikon (D7[12]00?) or Canon DSLR to the D4. If you can't justify the difference between, let's say, a D600 and a D4, then it's moot anyway. I imagine the D4 compares quite favorably to the HST and Kepler on many axes as well. :-)

In addition, the VG-900 shows that the e-mount will accommodate a 35mm sensor. Mind you, the e-mount lenses are almost universally crap, but I've had good luck using my NEX-7 as a digital back for my M glass.

Because they're not yanking yet and the equity growth is still attractive enough to keep unvested "low performers" from leaving. Google don't have to cut costs to make Wall Street happy. They need to grow and increase the top-line, and for that, they need people.

Once they reach the point of "maturity" where they need to minimize operating costs to increase net margins and continue to justify their P/E, they'll be like Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, and others, disgorging 5-30% of their workforce in a single massive push.

I'm not sure when you were at MSFT, but my time there was in the mid-90s.

"It's simply unimaginable that this loss of talent hasn't had a huge impact on the company."

I think it would have done if the rank-and-yank/up-or-out happened when we were a 6,000-ish person company. They had just opened RedWest while I was there and were working on the new buildings across from the main campus. I think they were talking about the Issaquah campus right around the time I left as well.

It was clear that the company was growing and things were changing. There was even talk about not granting stock to new hires anymore, which has obviously been reversed. However, this was heresy at the time. (Mind you, most of us were thinking we were past the guaranteed "millionaire" stage and thinking that a stock grant would cash out for a down payment on a nice house.)

Now it's most definitely a "big" company, and you don't need that many people who would earn 1s in their reviews and get promoted every year. A company like that needs a lot of consistent contributors. If you let some good people fall through the cracks, even if it's 10%, the company can continue for years.

I fink u freeky and I like you a lot.

There's the stuff we wish we could have done 50 years ago but couldn't. There's the stuff we could have done 50 years ago but only one person could do it by making a $1m multi-user computer not so multi-user. Then there's the stuff we didn't even know about. They're all awesome.

Yes, Javascript has genital warts, but I don't have to care. I can write sorta-lisp, which means I can layer my own stuff on top, and it magically works. I mean, emscripten!

The things that I miss, like automatic image-based persistence, are coming back anyway, and they'll be fast, probably open source, and can be integrated in a hazy, drunken, weekend.

If you don't know the routine, it won't be funny anyway.

It's an easy way of excluding people under 40. Like when we talk about being afraid to visit Northern Ireland or getting nuked.

It was better with the credit buried. Those who know, know. There was this delightful, hopeful, uncertainty at first. "Is he going to pull a Louis CK riff? I think he is...yes!"

Then it was a matter of seeing if he was going to drop the ball (there were some fumbles) but maybe "x is awesome and nobody is happy" will be the aristocrats for a less obscene demographic.

So yeah, we can bitch about the 19 location-aware social cloud startups announced each day, but it's also good to get frickin' excited with what you can do for free with some stuff you download onto a laptop while on an airplane.

Imagine going up to your 8-year old self and saying,"You know that Atari 800 you love second only to your dog? Look at my PHONE! It could tell you the weather right where we are, without having to tell it where we were! I could look up what you were doing right now! Um, look at these birds going after these pigs!"

Mine was full of eels.

3, dude, Beagle Bros.

And BASIC is just FORTRAN for people who couldn't program and didn't have a real computer or pubes.

Thisity this.

You're not going to find out in six hours if you're willing to marry someone, but you may find out that they leave their dirty underwear on the floor, never wash dishes, have sex with goats, and don't think fart jokes are funny.

When they're standing there apparently thinking, I want them talking.

"What's going on?"

"Well, I can't remember the exact method name for this..."

"Eh, make one up that sounds close enough."

Then, if we have time, we talk about implementing MagicBeanFactory#dwim, but that's usually after my anti-pep speech of,"These are the things that may or may not piss you off about working here..."

What many candidates don't realize is that the hiring manager has probably gone through 1,000 or more resumes from recruiters or retained search agencies, phone screened 20-50, and interviewed 5-10 to fill one position.

"Pay me to contract on probation," sounds as if it's low risk for everyone, but it has stalled the pipeline for new candidates. It's not a reasonable request. If it were, then it would be a "contract-to-hire" position, and advertised as such.

I've walked candidates out because they've refused to whiteboard code. I'm very "hey, let's work out this problem together, and don't worry, I'm not going to compile the whiteboard, ha ha," so most people don't get too stressed out. If they do, that's where I step in and help them along, which is my job once they come on board as well, so they can get a feel for my style. It also helps separate the people with 10+ years of c, java, c#, and syntactically similar languages who can't differentiate between parens and braces, understand pointers, etc. The interview is where you can say,"would you do that differently if..." and see if the person has just had an interview brain fart or if they really don't know what they're talking about.

I've had a few candidates over the past 15 years or so that would just refuse to write any code. Certainly, I made the mistake of asking if they wanted to do some problem solving at the whiteboard, but I was flummoxed when the first guy (back at Amazon when interviewing at Amazon was perceived to be like interviewing at Google today) just said,"No."

And kept insisting. I'm a big believer in not wasting people's time, so I walked him out before he talked to the more senior people on the team, who were all working 24/7 to bring out (I think) auctions at the time. Looking back, it may not have been that big a waste of time. :-)

I hate to be that guy, but you're thinking about endonyms and eponyms.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exonym_and_endonym:

The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines:

Endonym: Name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language occurring in that area where the feature is located.

Exonym: Name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken, and differing in its form from the name used in an official or well-established language of that area where the geographical feature is located.[2]

For example, China, India and Germany are the English exonyms corresponding to the endonyms Zhongguo, Bharat and Deutschland, respectively.

Oh my, the miniature safe analogy was one of the methods I used to try to explain to my wife why messaging privacy was an issue. :-) "OK, I don't know the combination, I just have a bunch of safes with your name on them, and only you know the combination..."

I'm not so concerned about the "timeliness" issue on a sub-yearly scale. It was a throwaway possible benefit of using multiple keys, cryptosystems, and decentralized transmission. As one of the elements is compromised by advancements in the art, they can be deprecated in favor of a stronger one.

By timely, I meant that it would be less economical to slurp up everything with the goal of SNA on a cohort of college friends or whatever.

I'd like an increase in the reasonable expectation of privacy with email. I would of course comply with a legal demand, authorized by a judge in my country, to surrender cleartext emails that are on my systems or in my accounts. I would expect my partners in conversation to do the same.

What I do not like, and I think we agree, is the convenient slurping of all the traffic, storing that, and then mining it for correlations with "un-American" conduct.

What I've found to be a more useful explanation trying to explain "security" as we usually mean it is to get to the reason why I think people should have privacy from their government or the agencies to whom they willingly transmit information about individuals. We've come a long way in securing rights for people who are not white, christian (of accepted denominations), straight, men. We have a lot longer to go.

I am really quite uncomfortable with a HUAC-style group having access to all electronic communications. It was communism fifty years ago, it's obviously terrorism now, but it will always be some threat to "national security" that is used as an excuse to be proactive about looking for suspicious characters because of what crimes they may be inclined to commit.

(And I kept using my own boot-root installation on my first Linux box (which could now legally buy alcohol in the USA) until 2000 or 2001, when I tried this "Redhat" thing. :-))

It was an oft-quoted meme in the 80s and 90s (and possibly earlier) that all the seats on flights from the continental US to Hawai'i were reward travel.