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Submission + - The Schizophrenic Programmer Who Built an OS to Talk to God

Submitted by rossgneumann
rossgneumann writes: Terry Davis, a schizophrenic programmer, has spent 10 years building an operating system to talk to God. He’s done this work because God told him to. According to the TempleOS charter, it is "God’s official temple. Just like Solomon's temple, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God's oracle is consulted." God also told Davis that 640x480, 16-color graphics "is a covenant like circumcision," making it easier for children to make drawings for God.

Submission + - Buzz Aldrin wants to help chineses to go to the moon 1

Submitted by perplexing.reader
perplexing.reader writes: Buzz Aldrin is offering his help to China to help them on their own lunar landing program, he told to a group of brazilians journalists.
From the interview: "People can react in two ways. Or they say, 'he lost his mind and decided to help the enemy,' or say, 'he's doing as a private citizen what the US government should be doing.' I hope that most understand this second way ".
Original source in Portuguese http://mensageirosideral.blogf..., google translate https://translate.google.com/t...
Businesses

Researchers Say the Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist 454

Posted by Soulskill from the just-like-a-healthcare-system-that-everyone-enjoys dept.
Beeftopia sends this excerpt from an article at BusinessWeek: "There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV." ... The real issue, say Salzman and others, is the industry’s desire for lower-wage, more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. "It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor," Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011 review (PDF) by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had "fragmented and restricted" oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. "Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor," says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.

Submission + - Tech Companies Stoking Fears of Talent Shortage to Get Cheaper Labor?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Things subject to the Tinkerbell effect, explains Wikipedia, exist only so long as we believe in them. Need a real-life example? Well, while President Obama believed it was necessary to take executive action to expand the controversial OPT STEM visa work program (his wealthy dining companions are still hungry for something more), Businessweek is reporting that The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist. “There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers. So, why then would Tech Companies Stoke Fears of a Talent Shortage? “It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor,” argues Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook and Microsoft would like to have more, cheaper workers,” adds Daniel Kuehn, a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.” Asked what evidence existed of a labor shortage, a spokesperson for Facebook e-mailed a one-sentence statement: “We look forward to hearing more specifics about the President’s plan and how it will impact the skills gap that threatens the competitiveness of the tech sector.”

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 + - A rock star needs a agent... (newyorker.com)

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: ... so maybe a rock star programmer needs one too. As described in this article, the 10X talent agency , which got started in the music business, isnot your typical head hunter/recruiter agency. "The company’s name comes from the idea, well established in the tech world, that the very best programmers are superstars, capable of achieving ten times the productivity of their merely competent colleagues."

Comment Rumors of new hybrid varieties (Score 1) 323

by braindrainbahrain (#48399849) Attached to: MARS, Inc: We Are Running Out of Chocolate

I read somewhere (I lost the source) that one solution being worked on is to develop a new variety of the cacao tree that is more productive. Seems there has been some success in that except that the cocoa produced by the new trees tastes like crap. Like tomatoes and corn, expect the new variety to displace the current one resulting in a lesser quality product being accepted as "normal".

Submission + - JavaScript and the Netflix User Interface (acm.org)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: Alex Liu is a senior UI engineer at Netflix and part of the core team leading the migration of Netflix.com to Node.js. He has an article at ACM's Queue in which he describes how JavaScript is used at Netflix. "With increasingly more application logic being shifted to the browser, developers have begun to push the boundaries of what JavaScript was originally intended for. Entire desktop applications are now being rebuilt entirely in JavaScript—the Google Docs office suite is one example. Such large applications require creative solutions to manage the complexity of loading the required JavaScript files and their dependencies. The problem can be compounded when introducing multivariate A/B testing, a concept that is at the core of the Netflix DNA. Multivariate testing introduces a number of problems that JavaScript cannot handle using native constructs, one of which is the focus of this article: managing conditional dependencies."

Submission + - Cisco exec: Turnover in engineering no problem (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The engineering reorganization currently underway at network giant Cisco Systems is intended to streamline product development and delivery to customers. That it is prompting some high profile departures is an expected byproduct of any realignment of this size, which affects 25,000 employees, says Cisco Executive Vice President Pankaj Patel, who is conducting the transformation. “People leave for personal business reasons,” Patel said in an interview with Network World this week. “Similar transformations” among Cisco peers and customers “see personnel change of 30% to 50%.”

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