Selfish question: how do you get a gig like this? I'm absolutely sick of working for corporations and startups!

It was offered to me by a recruiting company. I thought it was a pretty sweet score especially since I was bones of my arse poor after the previous startup I was at had collapsed leaving me ridiculously in debt.

I don't think you realize how much it costs to put a satellite into space. 2 hours of quick coding probably should be validated by a few different eyes.

Oh shit we're not talking about satelite firmware lol. Thats waaaay above my paygrade. We're talking about firmware on a little piece of hardware that shits weather measurements out a satelite dish to a satelite. Its expensive because bandwidth is ridiculously expensive for remote serial over satelite type guff.

Yeah "Where do I hide a body" is an old Siri joke from launch. You used to be able to ask her that and she'd give you locations of nearest mineshafts, dumpsters and so on. It was just a bad taste demonstration of the backend search powers.

I call bunkum on this, and if it IS true, I'd personally want to send a "friend of the court" submission that its a pretty famous joke search and doesnt necessarily prove anything.

The GPL doesn't proscribe that "You must GPL the end result" it says that you are infringement and must not distribute. The way out is to GPL or hash out some agreement with the Licensors (GPL authors) of some sort, but relicensing simply is not automatic, as frusturating as it might seem.

In my average IT class, we started with 20% females and finished with about 5% females.

I.e. they dropped at a higher rate. Most were not obsessed with computers enough to excel.

Yeah thats not what women actually say about why the drop out. Most report getting harrassed, creeped on and treated like weird aliens, and then finally ignored when they try to participate by the males in the classes and eventually shit just gets uncomfortable for them.

Instead of guessing why women graduate outcomes are not as expected how about we actually look at the source and ask women instead of doing exactly what they complain about and ignore or deprecate their experience.

After all, what the f*** would us guys know about what its like to be a woman unless we ask.

Its more than just the ties. I work in a government science department that does really amazing and meaningful work tracking animal populations, building climate and weather models to assist firefighters and policy makers (protip: We're in trouble, regardless of what the crusading economists seem to think ) , and coordinating a vast network of parks and wildlife reserves. This is *really* enjoyable work and 1000 times more rewarding than "Yet another corporate intranet for 'sell-cyanide-to-kids-dot-com".

But hand in hand with that is an insane bureacracy. Recently I was asked to make some changes to software to throttle back satelite data rates from remote weather stations in the australian outback from every 2 minutes to every 15 minutes. The satelite data was insanely expensive and the modelling isn't fine tuned enough to warrant data points every 2 minutes (This is for predicting fire behavior during fire-season bushfires) even if we wanted it to be. So we set up the changes and tested it, and waited for the new firmware to be pushed out to the new sites. But no, its a government, anything "simple" is suspicious, so instead it must go through user acceptance testing , a layer of consultants , various committees and of course the various sub-departments must engage in their customary fight over who pays for it. It was 2 hours work and it will save $10K a month easily. But six months later its STILL not even at user acceptance testing whilst the beancounters fight over budget.

Its amazingly demoralizing.

Not to mention that there is a tonne more datasources than just weather stations.

But more to the point climate science has tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of scientists , most post-doctoral, most physics trained, so not just "opiniated geology undergrad" or "crusading economist" trained, and all are in pretty broad agreement that theres a lot of thermal and kinetic energy coming from anthropological sources and that energy has to go *somewhere*.

Quite different to a handful of optimistic experimentalists getting their press release misquoted by the worlds press.

Do you also type "Micro$oft"?

Grow up.
Typical AmeriKKKan! Fuck you dad.

Aproximately 1000 years ago, in a galaxy far far away, I learned my trade on VMS on an old Vax mainframe doing cobol. Horrible horrible stuff. But it was a rock solid operating system with features that you just don't see anymore, and more to the point having the code out there so coders can see another way of doing operating system far from the Unix or windows mainstream has a lot of value in and of itself.

Heck maybe people might port it around (Difficult job though. The old VMS had a .... unique...... way of doing things with its register marks and bizaro addressing modes) which could provide options for people who want to utilize VMSs ultra-secure design.

what the DOJ failed to do.

Well not quite. The DOJ proposed splitting microsoft in half. Chinas solution to corruption tends to involve ventilating the CEOs brain with lead, 15 minutes after the judge declares "Fuck this guy!".

The only one who seemed to be advocating caping bill G here was probably ESR, because ESR is kind of a mentalist (RMS doesnt do guns)

It's not a marketplace, it's a lottery for developers.

Or at least for our clients. I cottoned on *very* early that the SAFE money isn't in the app store, but in writing apps for others. Usually poor schmucks who believe their "Floppy duck clone will corner the market if only they had a coder". At first I was pretty OK with this, after all no one else in my hometown was doing it, and I could easily clock $4K a week ($12K for 3 weeks development with contracts back to back) and dude these where pretty good apps. But after a while it sort of started to feel like I was taking people for a ride by not explaining the market to these people. In the end I decided to stop doing social networking apps simply because they almost NEVER succeed , and I started insisting that they needed to start on a marketing plan with a professional *before* the contract starts (Since marketing considerations DO in fact drive it). This was all to protect my clients and ultimately my own reputation (Sometimes when an app fails in the market the client will blame the coder and thats BAD for reputation, even if its just total unfair nonsense).

And in the end I was lucky to get $500 a week because the work dried up as people moved to less ethical mass-production offshore developers who wouldnt say unpleasant things like "You need to spend some money on a marketing plan first" or "I dont feel comfortable spending your life savings on yet another facebook clone"

Yeah, I work for the government now. Somehow this feels more ethical.

Assuming that ripping your own CDs is actually legal.

As long as you don't distribute it, its totally legal. No doubt about it.

I don't even know how you would violate the law with this thing. It'd probably involve a custom firmware.

A "combined score" for speed and ratio is useless, as that relation is not linear.

Typing at 70 words per minute, slashdot poster declares quantity over time measurements meaningless.

How does PostGreSQL compare?

I work at a large government department with stupidly large scientific datasets being thrown in and out of databases and we're migrating as fast as we can from Oracle to Postgres. The only thing we can't really shake is bloody Oracle financials and a few crufted old Java apps that we don't have the code to rewrite.

Postgres handles beautifully, and on some things even better although on some nasty multi-join type things Oracle will still beat it.

But it doesn't even matter because we can just throw more hardware at it infinitely cheaper than the extortion racket that Oracle pricing represents.

MariaDB is surprisingly competent too and in fact even has a surprisingly complete GIS implementation (Although PostGIS is the gold standard as far as we are concerned). Just avoid the Oracle branded one (MySQL), its not as well tuned, doesn't play nice with packaging systems and is generally posessed of the Oracle odour.

Actually a Judas-virus approach would be perfect since its already clear that the body seems unable or unwilling to kill the virus, its free to move into place to knife its buddies. And if the body does decide to start killing the viruses, well all the better really it means the body now realises HIV isn't something to keep about!