http://www.foxtel.com.au/xbox/default.htm

$20 for the basic package (which is quite basic), and $15 each for additional sets of channels like sport, movies, Showtime, and "entertainment" (random channels that didn't get into the basic package ;-).

This is not perfect. For example, Fox Sports will black out AFL and NRL games that they would normally show on cable, because they don't have Internet broadcast rights for those games. But it seems to be a fair start at giving people tired of paying hundreds of dollars for hundreds of channels, when they may only watch 7 or 8 channels that just happen to be spread across a few different packages, an alternative to cable TV. Completely unbundled pricing -- subscribe on a channel by channel basis -- would be ideal, and this isn't there yet, but maybe it'll help push things in that direction.

Good post title, BrokenHalo. I'll chime in with my two. 1987, my first full time job. I was a small ISV's UNIX guru. I wanted to remove everything under /usr/someone. I cd'd to /usr/someone and typed, "rm -r *", then I realized, hey, I know that won't get everything, better add some more, and the command became, "rm -r * .*". I realized, oh, no, this'll get .. too, so I better change it to: "rm -r * .?*". It took about 12 microseconds after I hit enter to realize that ".?*" still included "..". Yes, disastrous results ensued, even though I was able to ^C to avoid most of the damage, and I had the backup tape (back in the day, we used reels) in the tape drive just as users (other devs) began to notice that /usr/lib wasn't there. Yep, I have my own memories of red-facedly telling my boss, "oops, I did this, I'm in the process of fixing it now. Give me half an hour." In the future, "rm -r /usr/someone" did the trick nicely. Early 1990's, I was consulting in the data center of a company with 8 locations around the world. It contained the company's central servers that were accessed by about 700 users. Being a consultant, they didn't have a good place to put me, so I ended up at a desk in the computer room. Behind me was a large counter-high UPS that the previous occupant had used as somewhat of a credenza, and I carried on the tradition. That is, until the day I had put my cape on there, and the cape slid down and through one of those Rube Goldberg miracles caught the UPS master shutoff handle, pulled it down, and I heard about 30 servers (thank goodness there weren't more) powering down instantaneously. Amazingly, I lived, based on the ops manager pointing out to the powers that be that it was a freak accident and that others had been sitting similar stuff in the same place for years. The cape, however, was not allowed back in the data center. Fortunately, I've had better luck and/or been more careful over the past 20 years.

The parent makes an interesting point -- that searching is done on electronic devices by text, but not all of our memory cues which aid in searching are textual. I am absolutely sure that arrangement of information on a page, the presence or absense of a particular graphic, or the color of text (or, my highlighting of it :-) were all factors in how I remembered information when I was in academia and had to study for exams. And I made a bit of pocket money selling my color-highlighted and carefully indented/organized study sheets to other students studying for the same exams, too, so I wasn't the only one who found visual presentation useful. In the case of color, that entire aspect of visual presentation is missing on some electronic readers including the Kindle, thereby giving me one less memory aid.

To me, kernel and other generally-invisible platform internals *are* the sexy parts, because they require serious geek skill, and often a combination of both software AND hardware know-how to code around hardware bugs, meet perf targets, etc. If these parts don't work, that Flash game is going to have a hell of a time impressing anyone.

As a no-code tech, I'm feeling a bit inadequate here, but be that as it may. My radio is with me when I'm at home and whenever I'm out doing something where it's more likely than usual that I'll be out of cell contact (think bike rides in the countryside), just in case. I started declaring I wanted a license back in the 1980's. For a long time, I held out because I wanted one of the "real" licenses that required Morse Code, and I was simply having a hard time learning it due to lack of time to obsessively devote to it until I'd "gotten it". I finally got my no-code tech 20 years later. What helped push me over the edge: I was in Seattle when we hard our earthquake. Cell phones were down for hours, and (back then) the laptop I was using to access the Internet only lasted an hour and a half without power. No one else was home when it happened. I decided that an extra bit of communication redundancy *NOW* was better than no license at all until I qualified for one of the higher classes.

"nobody's going to have a single-quote character in their name" (hello, SQL injection attack)

Hey, I resemble that remark! And yes, it's resulted in chuckles over the years. Microsoft, DevelopMentor, random e-commerce sites... many have fallen to the Irish. When talking to security professionals, I introduce myself as "the woman whose name is a SQL injection attack", and it seems to help them remember me.

I don't think that's what's going on, because the government already makes H1B statistics available. They can't be hiding something that's already out there in plain sight. If you want to know how many H1B's have been granted to your least favorite employer, you can look it up! True, the statistics are a couple years behind the current year, but the statistics are THERE.

Take a look at Microsoft's for example, and take a look at the salaries offered (for those of you who know MS salary levels). And then factor in a good portion of Wipro and other Indian contracting firms requesting H1B's for positions in Redmond, as also likely working at MS. Given how desperate MS is for staff that they'd be importing that many workers, it doesn't make sense that there'd be more than 1-2% tech unemployment in this area, but there is. Still, I don't think that's what Google and Apple don't want others finding out.

Google/Apple/others MIGHT think (for example) that they're carefully crafting their image to every country they serve, and that a country hearing google only has 7 people on staff from that particular country might feel a bit put out and find reason to, maybe, make a search deal with a competitor who offers more employment to its countrymen. This would be the kind of logic that would lead someone to claim that divulging that information would be too much of a window into strategy.

Gender, I can't explain as easily. But one look around the annual Microsoft "MVP Conference" occurring in downtown Bellevue, WA this week (near MS) tells me that if they're primarily male, they're not the only ones. So I'm not sure why it'd be an issue, except that it could be as simple as preventing someone from being successful with the argument that, "If you divulged your gender mix, why won't you divulge your racial mix?".

Parent wrote the $64,000 question: Why would the exact same list of services running under svchost.exe use different amounts of memory when reported by two different versions of Process Explorer?

Plausible answer: because one of the versions of Process Explorer has a bug, and the other either does not, or has a different bug.

I had the same thought after doing similar math. Saving that many more lives == that many more mouths to feed. People die of starvation every day, particularly in the kind of under-developed countries that might be most deficient in their vaccination programs. I'd like to know what the plan is to keep the people saved from death-by-disease, from dying of starvation when villages of 150 become villages of 250 due to the increased life expectancy of residents. Reducing the expected population increase rate through birth control seems one way to do it.

Still, it's an impressive goal. I can think of many worse uses for that level of financial commitment, can't you?

Parent article said: No, most programmers in the US work for companies who CLAIM they are classified as "exempt". There are specific legal requirements for such classification, and the truth is that the vast majority of programmers _do not_ meet them.

Mod parent up. IT tech support staff working primarily from troubleshooting guides, attorneys reviewing documents, and other "professionals" have found to be misclassified as exempt from OT. It certainly appears to be the case that there are more jobs classified as "exempt" than there are jobs that are really exempt from OT compensation. Note that the specifics of the laws vary from state to state.

IANAL, and I last looked at this a while back, but I believe that when looking at a particular incidence of possible misclassification, you match the situation against both federal and applicable state laws, and whichever laws are more favorable TO THE EMPLOYEE apply. In some cases, exactly what you do on the job (not your title, but your actual duties) in IT may be the deciding factor. (Please check that before relying on it, of course. But I'm tossing it out there in case it's useful to someone.)

Grandparent MemoryDragon wrote:
I refuse to work in an industry which has a history of abusing its own employees up to levels where it becomes dangerous for your live.

Parent post replied:
Are you serious? Dangerous to their lives? [...] THEY ARE DESK JOCKEYS, get some fucking perspective people, for fucks sake.

The author of the parent post clearly gets out too much. :-) Lucky him.

For the benefit of those who've never had the experience, I'll explain. After you've done a 390 hour month followed by a 340 hour month followed by a 370 hour month, in an effort to complete something that will save your employer hundreds of millions of dollars (don't ask, please), you are tired enough that yes, your well-being and possibly your life is at risk.

This isn't an over-dramatic comment, just reality. It's difficult to eat well, it's impossible to sleep well, and the combination wears you down. You start doing things like misinterpreting traffic signals when crossing the street, your physical systems go into overdrive (high blood pressure, heart racing, etc.) because your body doesn't have the chance to adequately recover at night, and sometimes you aren't the best judge of whether it's safe enough to try to get yourself home from the office or whether you'd better crash on the floor for a few hours before navigating roads.

I've done the 90-100 hour weeks for months at a time. I've done the 72+ hour weeks for years at a time, after the 90-100 hour weeks, with no break in between. And I haven't been in the game industry since 1984. Sometimes it's just part of the job. The trouble (as is mentioned in the article) is when it doesn't end in I've had the distinct pleasure of having management srecommend to me that I go out on disability if I wanted a break from the 72+ hour weeks and months of 90-100 hour weeks, because they simply weren't going to assign me only the amount of work I could get done in 40 hours.

[ FYI, I lost significant golden handcuffs when I left that employer. I wonder if that's at all a factor at Rockstar. ]

And for those of you who think this is just another sign of how screwed up the US is, the Japanese have coined a term, karoshi, for death-by-overwork in their country.