In this particular poaching agreement you're looking at compression of 5-10% at most. So it's fairly modest. I suspect salaries were not the key reason for the agreement. This is more about disruption of timelines because of overheads like ramp up, training and recruiting. There's also a bit of ego about loosing a resource to a direct competitor. You get things like Balmer breaking stuff when he finds out it's Google poaching talent.

All that being said, the core reason these companies went with anti-poaching agreements was because non-compete agreements have very narrow and limited scope in California.

It's also worth noting that the DOJ hammered all of these companies years ago. It was settled and the practice stopped. In fact the only reason the class action suit could go forward was because of the discovery from the DOJ. For the most part employees would never have the means to get access to the smoking gun in civil court.

From Ed response to Steve Jobs:

"Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal. [...] Palm doesn't target other companies -- we look for the best people we can find. l'd hope the same could be said about Apple's practices. However, during the last year or so, as Apple geared up to compete with Palm in the phone space, Apple hired at least 2 percent of Palm's workforce. To put it in perspective, had Palm done the same, we'd have hired 300 folks from Apple. Instead, to my knowledge, we've hired just three."

Tech employees have no reason to sign onto those agreements unless there was a buy-out for early termination. Although that's typical in C level employment contracts I think you'd be hard pressed to get executives to offer them to rank and file folks. Even if they are stellar performers.

I would assume not for long unfortunately. It's also quite likely the feds will gin up some very expensive to defend gun charges against the husband.

The French were caught red handed spying on US soil. They are on the list of known states that have been caught infiltrating the US Gov't. It's not a secret, but it's also not something the US goes out of the way to point out either.

Here in the US countries like France are heavily restricted from operating and managing US entities that have ties to US security and law enforcement operations. (Bio-metrics, AFIS, Facial Recognition, Crypto, Official Identity and Credential Solutions, etc.) Because they are foreign? No. Because they have been caught spying on the US.

The only different here is the US isn't flopping over and whining like a European Soccer player about a little spying.

I asked Jimmy directly about this in a pretty even handed way when he did the Slashdot interview questions back in August. He responded:

" Things have mostly stabilized. It's still not a crisis, but I still consider it to be important. One of the most exciting developments is the visual editor, which I hope will bring in a whole new class of editors who were turned off by the complexities of wikitext."

More or less he dismissed the premise that there was a problem in the first place, and any issues that are left could be handled with a better editor UI. Now, I do think the Wikimedia editor needs work, but Jimmy is kidding himself. Maybe he'll get a new rush of editors when they release the new UI, but I'm not convinced they'll stay.

I would recommend the new MFC-9340CDW. (or the slight cheaper 9330CDW if you don't care about Duplex scanning). Good print quality, strong network printing options. Wireless, Wired, PC, MAC, Android, iOS, Airprint, Google Print, etc. Also supports Scan to PC, Scan to Mail, Scan to Drive/FTP, etc.

I'm a firm believer in weight telling you a lot about printer quality. Some SOHO printers are as light as inkjets. They have poor paper handling and print quality because corners were cut. That is not the case with the Brother models I listed. It's well built, doesn't have a lot of flex in the case and I have yet to have a jam.

The 9340CDW has a street price of $399, which blows away comparable HP and Xerox printers with those feature classes.

"40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!"

You couldn't pay for a 4 year degree as a support specialist. Maybe as a high end administrator, but what an employer would look for is specialized commercial training and certification. I personally think a 2 year community or technical college program is more than enough for these types of positions.

On the other hand, I don't have a degree and it hasn't stopped me from becoming a senior programmer and architect.

The US gov't buys plenty of things made in China. That's not the issue. Buying equipment from Huawei is buying products from Palantir (a CIA funded technology company). They are both companies with close ties to military and intelligence gathering.

Still, when the US Gov't does buy from China they do prefer to source it from companies like Foxconn, which are Taiwanese owned.

I think it's just a matter of unintended consequences. They will ultimately gain permission to use them for journalistic purposes. But the number of times you need to use a drone for a hard news story is pretty limited. On the other hand the number of ways you can you a drone as part of your paparazzi business is endless.

I think way too much emphasis is placed on having the absolute fastest CPU/GPU and the biggest battery. If you look at phones like the Moto X and the iPhone 5S they offload the mundane everyday tasks to ultra low power processors. The end results is they aren't firing up the big Ghz SoC as much as they can get significantly more battery life from smaller cells. We need to get away from the spec chasing.

What people don't realize is the private sector contractors in Gov't IT have little to do with regular private IT contracting. In order to gain these contracts you need to basically game the formula used to award the contracts. It's a bit more complicated than just having the lowest bid. A lot of it has to do with things like the number of Phd and Master degree workers you have to offer. This often leads to staffing composed of people who have unrelated degrees or people who are from diploma mills.

The Obamacare IT is no more or less messed up than any other gov't system of recent times.

Sadly, Obama can't just raid Silicon valley for some top tier talent to make a new system. That's illegal. Instead the contracts go to companies you've likely never heard of that specialize in sucking off the gov't teet. I'm sure 1/2 the budget was wasted making a 5000 page technical specification document complete with overdone pie in the sky UML diagrams no one understands.

That's the way things will continue so long as the contracting process doesn't take into account the previous success of the contractors work force.

Charles Nutter did a presentation on JRuby when it first came out. He runs the Fibonacci sequence over and over again. The JVM does it's optimization magic on the execution and pretty soon it's exceeds the native ruby execution speed.

All? No. We had all sorts of ways a SWIFT message would have been generated. Java, .Net, Mainframe (FORTRAN or COBOL), iSeries (COBOL or RPG). It really depended on the application. Most large banks still use a mainframe for domestic banking and will use a highly customized version of software (i.e. IBM HOGAN). They are unlikely to change working code to something else so long as they are still on the mainframe.

On the other hand, most mainframe banking applications only talk a single currency. So all the international stuff is newer stuff. It's also pretty common to see credit unions and community banks on newer software.