Comment I remember the old days... (Score -1, Troll) 525
It doesn't seem that long ago that if someone posted a duplicate story to slashdot they'd need to wait more than thirteen hours.
Have we really run out of other things to bash Microsoft about?
Ask Slashdot: How Does Your Company Evaluate Your Performance? 525
jmcbain writes "I'm a former Microsoftie, and one thing I really despised about the company is the 'stack ranking' employee evaluation system that was succinctly captured in a recent Vanity Fair article on the company. Stack ranking is basically applying a forced curve distribution on all employees at the same level, so management must place some percentage of employees into categories of overperforming, performing on average, and underperforming. Even if it's an all-star team doing great work, some folks will be marked as underperforming. Frankly, this really sucked. I know this practice gained popularity with GE in the 1980s and is being used by some (many?) Fortune 500 companies. Does your company do this? What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Comment "increased goodwill from users"? (Score 1, Insightful) 299
You can't be serious.
Comment I worry about vaccines for pleasure (Score 4, Interesting) 382
What if, in addition to the pleasure due to heroin, it also diminishes other sorts of pleasure?
This sounds like it could be a small slice of hell.
Comment Maybe... (Score 5, Funny) 249
Comment Re:Kinda Risky.... (Score 1) 680
Couple the heavy vaccination schedule with advances in food safety and constant household cleaning; these kids might have little besides flu and rhinovirus to train their immune systems, and that doesn't seem like a sustainable course.
You don't seem to understand that "training their immune systems" is exactly what immunizations do.
Comment Re:So (Score 5, Funny) 680
We are actively changing the fitness function for diseases to include "must be resistant to antibiotics, must be resistant to antivirals, must be able to infect even immunised people, etc", this will inevitably lead to bugs that fulfil these criteria... eventually.
By this logic, we should be expecting bullet-proof cattle and thresher-proof wheat any day now, not to mention hook-resistant fish and armored potatoes...
Comment Buy a mac, download virtualbox, run what you want (Score 1) 708
Done and done.
Submission + - Dennis Ritche dead at age 70 (theregister.co.uk)
pedantic bore writes: Dennis Ritchie, pioneer of C and UNIX, former leader of the Computer Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, and winner of the ACM Turing Award, is reported dead at age 70.
Dennis Ritchie was one of the inventors who, without much fanfare and almost no publicity outside of the field, revolutionized operating systems and programming languages. His influence is ubiquitious; C and POSIX are the bedrock of nearly all modern computing platforms.
Dennis Ritchie was one of the inventors who, without much fanfare and almost no publicity outside of the field, revolutionized operating systems and programming languages. His influence is ubiquitious; C and POSIX are the bedrock of nearly all modern computing platforms.
Comment Haters gonna hate (Score 1) 699
The Westboro people turn my stomach.
Comment I'm 50 years old, overweight and out of shape... (Score 1) 551
Comment Re:Publicity whore for a "scientist" (Score 1) 286
He ADMITS to being right ONLY 1% OF THE TIME. How is it possible we continued to pay attention to him!?!
Because when he was wrong he admitted it, rather than rushing to print. And when he was right, he was very, very right.
Comment Re:Publicity whore for a "scientist" (Score 1) 286
it's interesting that the Somali language has no word for autism,
People in Somalia probably have more urgent and pressing problems to deal with than naming diseases whose definitions are vague and poorly defined.
Comment The first one is always free (Score 4, Insightful) 240
Anyone who thinks that Google is doing this out of the kindness of their hearts is silly.
Google doesn't care whether you have high-speed access. They want to be able to trace your browsing and other internet usage habits, and they want to make sure they can serve up their ads in a way that minimizes the requirements on their resources.
Comment Well, at least they found something... (Score 2) 137
Finding the funding for an alien telescope array is the first step in actually finding the alien telescope array itself...
