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Comment Dice plug (Score 5, Interesting) 348

by rwa2 (#49219849) Attached to: Obama Administration Claims There Are 545,000 IT Job Openings

Well, FTFA, they suggest a more realistic number might be in the 60,000s. Anyone who has been in the job market knows that for every unfilled IT job position, there are at least 10 contracting and headhunter firms like Dice vying to fill that job req for their "special client". So it's perfectly reasonable that we could see 10x as many job postings as actual positions available.

And even then, they say that with the inflated numbers, 17% of the IT workforce is unfulfilled. Which actually sounds about right since roughly about a fifth of all of my engineering teams in recent memory have been open job reqs to replace people who just left.

Anyway, contracting and headhunter firms are a big cottage industry grown up around IT nowadays, we're gonna have to hire more developers to make sense of all of this IT hiring data. Like the banks making more money by loaning each other money, we could make the IT job market even bigger by trying to optimize the IT job market! You should use Dice to help you sort through it all!

Dice! (am I doing it right?)

Comment Re:The elephant in the room.. (Score 1) 292

by rwa2 (#49216963) Attached to: Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates?

Nah, Dice is just inciting fear and confusion. It's good for their business to make hiring seem like an insurmountable challenge.

Seriously, there's an entire cottage industry set up around tech contracting. It used to be individual headhunters running around doing this stuff, but now it's much more organized and... permanent?

It makes sense in some respects... there's more flexibility in the workforce if you can contract out a lot of your labor for exactly what you need when you need it, and then send them back to the contracting pool when the project is done. No one really makes long-term investments in their employees anymore, since anything they learn they'll use to jump ship for higher pay elsewhere.

From the employee perspective... at least you're not fiddling with changing your insurance and junk every few years when you switch employers... and... well, that's pretty much it. But if things are more fluid, ostensibly the workforce can be better optimized between skills and jobs than if everyone were locked into a single employer / home mortgage / etc. for umpteen years.

Submission + - Book review: Data and Goliath

Submitted by benrothke
benrothke writes: Title:Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

Author: Bruce Schneier

Pages: 400

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Rating: 10/10

Reviewer: Ben Rothke

ISBN: 978-0393244816

Summary: Important defense of privacy & expose on the dangers of NSA domestic mass surveillance





In Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, author Bruce Schneier could have justifiably written an angry diatribe full of vitriol against President Obama and the NSA for their wholesale spying on innocent Americans and violations of myriad laws. Instead, he was written a thoroughly convincing and brilliant book about big data, mass surveillance and the ensuing privacy dangers facing everyone.



A comment like what's the big dealoften indicates a naiveté about a serious significant underlying issue. The idea that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear is a dangerously narrow conception on the value of privacy. For many people the notion that the NSA was performing spying on Americans was perceived as not being a big deal, since if a person is innocent, then what they have to worry about. In the book, Schneier debunks that myth and many others, and defends the important of privacy.



Schneier writes that privacy is an essential human need and central to our ability to control how we relate to the world. Being stripped of privacy is fundamentally dehumanizing and it makes no difference whether the surveillance is conducted by an undercover police following us around or by a computer algorithm tracking our every move.



The book notes that much of the data sharing is done voluntarily from users via social media and other voluntary sharing methods. But the real danger is that the NSA has unlawfully been conducting mass surveillance on Americans, in violation of the Constitution and other Federal laws. And with all of that, the book observed that after spending billions doing it, the NSA has very little to show for its efforts.



While the NSA has often said they were just collected metadata; Schneier writes that metadata can often be more revealing than the data itself, especially when it's collected in the aggregate. And even more so when you have an entire population under surveillance. How big of a deal is metadata? Schneier quotes former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden that "we kill people based on metadata".



The book spends chapters detailing the dangers of mass data collection and surveillance. It notes that the situation is exacerbated by the fact that we are now generating so much data and storing it indefinitely. People can now search 20 years back and find details that were once forgotten, often just after the incident occurred. Today's adults were able to move beyond their youthful indiscretions; while today's young people will not have that freedom. Their entire life histories will be on the permanent record.



Another harm of mass government surveillance is the way it leads to people being categorized and discriminated against. Since much of the data is gathered in secret, citizens don't have the right to see or refute it. Schneier notes that this will intensify as systems start using surveillance data to make decisions automatically.



Schneier makes numerous references to Edward Snowden and views him as a hero. He views Snowden's act as being courageous since it resulted in the global conversation about surveillance being made available. Had it not been for Snowden, this book would never have been written.



Schneier does a good job of showing how many of the methods used by the NSA were highly questionable, and based on extremely broad readings of the PATRIOT ACT, Presidential directives and other laws.



The book notes that not only has mass surveillance on US citizens provided extremely little return on the tens of billions of dollars spent; the very strategy of basing security on irrational fears is dangerous. The book notes that the many US agencies were faulted after 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing for not connecting the dots.But connecting the dots against terrorist plots is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible given current computing techniques. Given the rarity of these events, the book notes that they current systems produce so many false positives as to render them useless.



Schneier straight-out says that ubiquitous surveillance and data minding are not suited for finding dedicated criminals or terrorists. The US is wasting billions on these programs and not getting the security they have been promised. Schneier suggests using the money on investigations, intelligence and emergency response; programs whose tactics have been proven to work.



Schneier makes many suggestions on how to stop the mass surveillance by the NSA. His biggest suggestion is to separate espionage agencies from the surveillance agencies. He suggests that government surveillance of private citizens should only be done as part of a criminal investigation. These surveillance activities should move outside of the NSA and the military and should instead come under the auspices of the FBI and Justice Department, which will apply rules of probable cause, due process and oversight to surveillance activities in regular open courtrooms. As opposed to the secret United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance courts.



Schneier notes that breaking up the NSA is a long-range plan, but it's the right one. He also suggests reducing the NSA's budget to pre-9/11 levels, which would do an enormous amount of good.



While Schneier comes down hard on mass surveillance, he is also rational enough to know that there are legitimate needs for government surveillance, both law enforcement and intelligence needs and we must recognize that. He writes that we must support legitimate surveillance and work on ways for these groups to do what they need without violating privacy, subverting security and infringing on citizens' rights to be free of unreasonable suspicion and observation.



The book concludes with a number of things that can be done. At the personal level there is a lot people can legitimately do to stop sharing so much personal information. But for most of them, the long-term benefits may lose out to the short-term gains from sharing their information on social media, with retailers and more.



The book also notes that much of the problem stems with federal agencies since keeping the fear stoked is big business. For those in the intelligence agencies, that is the basis of their influence and power. Schneier also lays some of the blame on the media who stoke the irrational fears in the daily news. By fixating on rare and spectacular events, the media conditions us to behave as if terrorism were much more common than it is and to fear it far out of proportion to its actual incidence.



This is an incredibly important book. Schneier is passionate about the subject, but provides an extremely reasonably set of arguments. Superbly researched, Schneier lays out the facts in a clear, concise and extremely readable manner. The book is at times disturbing, given the scope and breadth of the NSA surveillance program.



This is the perfect book to take with you on a long flight. It's a compelling, read, and important book and a major wake-up call. The NSA knows all about you via its many total information awareness programs. In Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, Bruce Schneier provides the total information awareness about what the NSA is doing, how your personal data is being mined, and what you can do about it.



While the NSA was never able to connect the dots of terrorists, Schneier has managed to connect the dots of the NSA. This is a book that must be read, for your freedom.







Reviewed by Ben Rothke

Comment Re:Kinda like... (Score 2) 181

by rwa2 (#49194297) Attached to: Musician Releases Album of Music To Code By

eh, I find my own favorite music too distracting, then I start thinking about other stuff and skipping forwards and messing with the playlist. So I find it the least effort to just have a good internet radio stream going on in the background.

Most of them I discovered here on Slashdot, even.

Groove Salad on http://somafm.com/ (many other streams there worth trying too, most of my favorite songs are from Lush, but GS is the best coding stream)

Sleepbot on http://sleepbot.com/ for a wide variety of background ambience that's not necessessarily music

Nectarine http://scenemusic.net/ for video game / tracker stuff

Those are my go-to options for keeping my tempo up through the long nights.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why there is not a campaign against "Cloud Exclusive Hardware" ?

Submitted by martiniturbide
martiniturbide writes: Today we can see a lot of hardware that is being sold that only works only against a cloud. There are many examples, like the Belkin NetCam HD+ (wifi webcam) that only works if you run it against their service (by seedonk) and if you don’t want to use their cloud, this hardware is useless. This is happening with a lot of new hardware and it does mean that you get the device cheap for being locked to their cloud, you are paying full price for this devices. On the internet there are just little groups trying to hack some of this hardware, but the consumer does not seems to care that if the manufacturer discontinue the service the hardware will be useless. Why there are no complains against this kind of hardware on the internet? Is it useless to fight “cloud exclusive hardware”? Should we care about it? Or we are so used to disposable hardware that we don’t care anymore?

Comment Re:It's not the PC microphone ... (Score 1) 95

by rwa2 (#49185035) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Wireless Microphone For Stand-up Meetings?

Ha, thanks, awesome insight coming from "Ungrounded Lightning"!

On some of the systems we put a neutral current eliminator to try to "fix" the 60Hz buzz coming off of improperly grounded computers. I think it was overkill for what we were doing, because by that point we had given up trying to use internal audio cards for some of our rackmount computers and were using SoundBlaster Live! USB audio dongles where we couldn't use digital audio, which made most of our system noise problems go away. But it would be nice to have an affordable NCE for some applications, like being able to run amplified speakers from my phone or laptop while they're charging.

In my car I get alternator noise if I try to charge my phone while it's playing music to the aux input. I can make it go away by using a Qi wireless charger instead of plugging in the USB directly... with the added bonus that I'm not fiddling with trying to plug my phone in while I'm driving. Another way to make the alternator noise go away is paradoxically plugging an inverter into the accessory port and using a standard 120V AC wall wart USB charger with the phone. (shrug). Next car will probably have a bluetooth head unit, which I'm sure brings on another set of annoyances.

Submission + - Demand for Linux Skills Rising This Year (dice.com) 2

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: This year is shaping up as a really good one for Linux, at least on the jobs front. According to a new report (PDF) from The Linux Foundation and Dice, nearly all surveyed hiring managers want to recruit Linux professionals within the next six months, with 44 percent of them indicating they’re more likely to hire a candidate with Linux certification over one who does not. Forty-two percent of hiring managers say that experience in OpenStack and CloudStack will have a major impact on their hiring decisions, while 23 percent report security is a sought-after area of expertise and 19 percent are looking for Linux-skilled people with Software-Defined Networking skills. Ninety-seven percent of hiring managers report they will bring on Linux talent relative to other skills areas in the next six months.

Comment Re:The corporate solution (Score 5, Informative) 95

by rwa2 (#49176927) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Wireless Microphone For Stand-up Meetings?

Heh, I used to do multi-conference room / theater AV integration for large defense companies. The number 1 problem was always audio.

1. Test. Test test test. You can get almost any cheap thing working well if you bother to test and tune everything BEFORE the meeting. The most expensive thing can fail for silly reasons if you don't bother to test everything BEFORE the meeting (usually because some executive schlupp dials into both the audio bridge and VTC MCU at the last minute). Then freeze the configuration. Yeah, good luck freezing the configuration with engineers and tinkerers running around.

2. POTS sucks. Maybe some telephony devices are able to negotiate better than 8kHz 8-bit audio sampling if their codecs match up, but you're better off going with something with VTC-quality audio using H323. Most VoIP teleconferencing lines don't bother trying to beat POTS audio quality. So even if you have a nice Polycom phone that does good AEC and NC, you're still going to strain to hear what's going on.

3. Speakerphones suck. Most of them don't bother doing good AEC and NC. Get a good bluetooth or USB headset. Gaming teamspeak headsets are relatively cheap. As long as it's digital, so they don't introduce any analog amp noise from the system.

4. PC/laptop microphones suck. I don't know why no one bothers to test them to the same level as your average cheap dumbphone speakerphone. They pick up all kinds of system electrical noise, and rely on software to do any AEC or NC, which adds more latency. About a quarter of the people in our daily standup have laptop microphone fails on Google Hangouts or Skype each day. Most end up dialing back in from their smartphone when that happens.

Anyway, all that said, our current standup room setup consists of a Google Hangouts room on a permanently-fixed Mac mini with a $50 "Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone" and Logitech USB camera attached to it (the USB audio coming in from the Logitech camera was deemed insufficient, even for the small room we had it in.). For remote participants, I've had good experiences with extended use of the $200+ Jabra PRO 9470 Mono Wireless Headset, which is switchable between PC and POTS/VoIP phone use, but a simpler/cheaper bluetooth headset would probably work just as well paired with smartphone/PC.

And set up an echo server for everyone to test their setups. https://support.google.com/cha... . Or at least go to http://www.onlinemictest.com/ or something. Did I mention you should test?

I'm also looking forward to someday playing with Amazon's Echo thingy someday, since for $200 it seems to have a lot of the technical audio features of more expensive audio conferencing systems:
http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/
assuming it will be able to act as a simple bluetooth speakerphone instead of only for all of the other AI junk they're cramming into it.

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