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Submission + - Researchers Find The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist (businessweek.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From the article: "For a real-life example of an actual worker shortage, Salzman points to the case of petroleum engineers, where the supply of workers has failed to keep up with the growth in oil exploration. The result, says Salzman, was just what economists would have predicted: Employers started offering more money, more people started becoming petroleum engineers, and the shortage was solved. In contrast, Salzman concluded in a paper released last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, real IT wages are about the same as they were in 1999. Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) would like to have more, cheaper workers,” says Salzman’s co-author Daniel Kuehn, now a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.”

Submission + - Sony Comes To A Screeching Halt Targeted By Massive Ransomware Hack (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: It appears that Sony has become the victim of a massive ransomware hack which has resulted in the company basically shutting down. An unnamed source has noted this, claiming that the company shut down after its computers in New York and around the nation were infiltrated. The source is an ex-employee of Sony Pictures who has a friend that still works for the company. According to the source's friend, allegedly, every computer in Sony's New York Office, and every Sony Pictures office across the nation, bears an image from the hacker with the headline "Hacked By #GOP" which is then followed by a warning. The hacker, or group, claims to have obtained corporate secrets and has threatened to reveal those secrets at 11:00 PM GMT tonight if Sony doesn't meet their demands. What those demands are and what is #GOP has yet to be determined.

Submission + - Attack Of The One-Letter Programming Languages

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: The programming world is fast proliferating with one-letter programming languages, many of which tackle specific problems in ways worthy of a cult following, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner in this somewhat tongue-and-check roundup of the more interesting entrants among this trend. 'A long time ago — long before Netflix, Hulu, and HBO battled for the living room — people went to the movie theaters for their weekly dose of video streaming. There were usually only two movies, and you couldn't choose the order. (The horror!) The double feature began with the big stars — the Javas and JavaScripts of the acting world — but then it got interesting. The second feature, the so-called B movie, was where the new ideas, odder actors, and weirder scripts found their home. Some proved rich enough with exactly the right kind of out-there thinking to garner significant cult followings — even break through to the mainstream. The programming languages with one-letter names are one such corner of the Internet. They're all a bit out there, with the possible exception of C. ... Each offers compelling ideas that could do the trick in solving a particular problem you need fixed.'

Comment Wealthy companies want ILLEGAL immigrants. (Score 1) 1

by Futurepower(R) (#48451541) Attached to: Obama's Immigration Reform and the Technical Workforce
Wealthy companies want illegal immigrants. They don't want immigrants, they want ILLEGAL immigrants, because people who only care about money want people who have little legal protection. The lack of protection means illegal immigrants will accept abuse. The "4 million undocumented immigrants" are illegal immigrants. The fact that they are given the name "undocumented" is intended to distract people from the fact that what they have done is illegal.

It seems to me that President Obama has shown that he is very weak. If rich people want something, he has a tendency to allow it. He has allowed a long list of things that are bad for the average U.S. citizen.

The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is that a child of alcoholics should not be allowed to hold a government position. An alcoholic told me, "No one like me should be president."

When Barack Obama's mother decided she didn't want to take care of him, she gave him to her parents, his grandparents, who were both alcoholics. See, for example, Obama likens grandparents to 'Mad Men' characters: "Grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who rose from secretary to bank vice president, began drinking more as her responsibilities grew."

Obama's father was a very self-destructive alcoholic, also, but he spent very little time with him.

President Obama is what is called an ACoA, an Adult Child of Alcoholics. There is a typical description of an ACoA in the article Barack Obama, Adult Child of an Alcoholic: The ACoAs, with their deep mistrust of people, have no loyalty to anyone. They are master manipulators. They live by the mantra, "What's in it for me?"

Once again, President Obama is showing no respect for the law. The U.S. government continues to help the rich get richer.

Submission + - Obama's Immigration Reform and the Technical Workforce (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: President Obama's announcement of an executive order to reform immigration was a big news item, but little was said about the order's impact on the technical workforce. “Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us?"
While there were no immediate changes to the H-1B visa system, there are changes to the Optional Practical Training and the National Interest Waiver programs that would make it easier for foreign workers to legally work in the U.S.

Submission + - Back to School: Steve Ballmer's Guest Lecture at Harvard's CS50

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GeekWire looks at the 'game film' from ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's guest lecture at Harvard's CS50, in which Harvard alum Ballmer touched on a wide variety of topics, including the LA Clippers ("500 times less complicated than Microsoft"), how his career started at Microsoft (BillG convinced him to drop out of Stanford Business School), his views on Net Neutrality, his favorite products ("Surface Pro 3 in modern days and Windows 1.0 in historic days"), and his 15-year-old's biggest concern about Dad leaving Microsoft (no more early access to new Halo releases). Ballmer was fairly subdued in the lecture and Q&A, but couldn't resist cranking it up to 11 for a CS50 intro. Ballmer, who was an applied math and economics major at Harvard, was visiting his alma mater to drop off a $60 million check to beef up Harvard's Computer Science faculty.

Comment Overall effect of phytoestrogens: Still unknown. (Score 2) 252

by Futurepower(R) (#48442385) Attached to: Doubling Saturated Fat In Diet Does Not Increase It In Blood
"... consuming so many phytoestrogens than men are growing boobs."

From the National Institutes of Health, a free PDF: The pros and cons of phytoestrogens. The author considered 308 scientific sources and came to the conclusion that not enough is known to indicate that phytoestrogens are good or bad for humans.

Comment Who gets the $314 million? (Score 1) 161

by Futurepower(R) (#48439045) Attached to: Mozilla's 2013 Report: Revenue Up 1% To $314M; 90% From Google
It would be very interesting to know who gets the $314 million every year.

During the same years that easy Google millions have been pouring in, Mozilla Foundation has become much more sloppily managed, it seems to me.

Firefox has become much less stable in the past few years when many windows and tabs are open for a long time. The most recent version crashes without activating the crash reporter. Instead of fixing the crashes, Mozilla Foundation has prevented reporting of them.

Apparently Mozilla Foundation is trying to discourage the use of the Thunderbird email client. The newest version of Thunderbird, 31.2.0, has the Save-As bug. All file saves are Save As, and suggest a different file name than name with which the email was saved before. The Save-As bug has been reported, but no new version has been released, giving the impression that the bug is deliberate.

Other obvious bugs were introduced into Thunderbird. For example, the fields for email addresses are much more difficult to read.

Pale Moon has been removing some of the issues in their FossaMail version of Thunderbird. I haven't tested it to see if the Save-As bug is fixed.

Submission + - Malwarebytes forums compromised (tidbitsfortechs.com)

Submitted by toygeek
toygeek writes: Just a few minutes ago, I received an email from Malwarebytes notifying me that I'd have to change my forum password next time I logged in. On November 10th their Invision Power Board based forum was compromised. Yes, it can happen to anyone! There are several lessons that can be learned, as outlined in my blog post below:

Submission + - fake Price Comparison fools Walmart (clarkhoward.com)

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: People are reportedly creating fake Amazon pages to show fake prices on electronics and other items. In the most heavily publicized cases, Walmart was reportedly duped into selling $400 PlayStation 4 consoles for under $100.

Here's how this scam has played out: The perpetrators create fake Amazon pages and show these fake listings to Walmart cashiers (and ultimately to store managers) in an attempt to con them into matching the phantom prices.

Comment Bad management. Discouraging use of Thunderbird? (Score -1, Troll) 400

Yahoo has been terribly managed, and Mozilla Foundation is rapidly getting worse.

It appears that Mozilla Foundation is trying to discourage the use of the Thunderbird email client. The newest version of Thunderbird, 31.2.0, has the Save-As bug. All file saves are Save As, and suggest a different file name than saved before.

Other obvious bugs were introduced. For example, the fields for email addresses are much more difficult to read. The Save-As bug has been reported, but no new version has been released.

If many windows and tabs are open for a long time, Firefox now crashes in a way that does not cause a crash report to be sent.

Submission + - Debian Votes not to Mandate Non-systemd Compatibility

Submitted by paskie
paskie writes: Voting on a Debian General Resolution that would require packagers to maintain support even for systems not running systemd ended tonight with the resolution failing to gather enough support.

This means that some Debian packages could require users to run systemd on their systems in theory — however, in practice Debian still works fine without systemd (even with e.g. GNOME) and this will certainly stay the case at least for the next stable release Jessie.

However, the controversial GR proposed late in the development cycle opened many wounds in the community, prompting some prominent developers to resign or leave altogether, stirring strong emotions — not due to adoption of systemd per se, but because of the emotional burn-out and shortcomings in the decision processes apparent in the wake of the systemd controversy.

Nevertheless, work on the next stable release is well underway and some developers are already trying to mend the community and soothe the wounds.

Comment IMO: Deliberate, no accident. (Score 1) 550

"The best analogy in the Windows world for systemd is the Win95 registry..."

The Windows registry was designed to make it very, very difficult for people to make copies of software to use on another computer. The Windows registry was intentional obfuscation, and very much against the needs of users, because of the huge amounts of time it takes to understand and fix problems with the registry.

A comment below says, "SystemD is RedHat's version of embrace and extend." That seems a better explanation. The way it is being done is certainly deliberate. Starting a big hassle that damages the reputation of Linux is certainly against the needs of the users.

It seems that the entire U.S. culture is becoming more adversarial. For example, there are health care insurance policies that are written in such a way that the insured will not understand that they aren't being fully covered.

Companies are deliberately over-billing. Many people cannot afford the time to find all the ways they are being treated badly.

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