kdawson - Slashdot User

Submission + - The real reasons companies won't hire telecommuters

Submitted by Esther Schindler on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @10:58AM

Esther Schindler writes: Those of us who telecommute cannot quite fathom the reasons companies give for refusing to let people work from home. But even if you don't agree with their decision, they do have reasons — and not all of them are, "Because we like to be idiots." In 5 reasons why the company you want to work for won’t hire telecommuters, hiring managers share their sincere reasons to insist you work in the office—and a few tips for how you might convince them otherwise.

Submission + - Carriers Won't Win the War on Netflix

Submitted by Nemo the Magnificent on Sunday February 09, 2014 @04:20PM

Nemo the Magnificent writes: A few days ago we talked over a post by David Raphael accusing Verizon of slowing down Netflix, by way of throttling Amazon AWS. Now Jonathan Feldman gives us reason to believe that the carriers won't win the war on Netflix, because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try. I just now exercised one such tool, NetNeutralityTest.com from Speedchedker Ltd. My carrier is Verizon (FiOS), and the test showed my download speed at the moment to be 12 Mbps. It was the same to Linode in NJ but only 3 Mbps to AWS East. Hmm.

Submission + - Blowing up a pointless job interview

Submitted by Nemo the Magnificent on Friday January 17, 2014 @03:16PM

Nemo the Magnificent writes: Ever been asked a question in a job interview that's just so abysmally stupid, you're tempted to give in to the snark and blow the whole thing up? Here are suggested interview-ending answers to 16 of the stupidest questions candidates actually got asked in interviews at tech companies in 2013, according to employment site Glassdoor. Oil to pour on the burning bridges.

Submission + - Emergent Gravity Disproved (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

kdawson

on Saturday August 27, 2011 @10:37AM

kdawson writes: "A paper up on the ArXiv claims to disprove the gravity-from-entropy theory of Erik Verlinde, which we discussed soon after he introduced the idea in a symposium late in 2009. Archil Kobakhidze says that experiments measuring the effect of gravity on quantum particles (neutrons in this case) match results expected from classical Newtonian gravity, not Verlindian entropic gravity. Here is Kobakhidze's paper (PDF)."

Submission + - Court overturns Mass law banning recording of cops (universalhub.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1 on Friday August 26, 2011 @08:19PM

schwit1 writes: In its ruling, which lets Simon Glik continue his lawsuit, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said the wiretapping statute under which Glik was arrested and the seizure of his phone violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Submission + - Is Process Killing the Software Industry? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @08:09AM

blackbearnh writes: We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice. And so is having 100% of your code reviewed. And 70% unit test coverage. And keeping your CCN complexity numbers below 20. And doing pre-sprint grooming of stories. And a hundred other industry 'best practices' that in isolation seem like a great idea. But at the end of the day, how much time does it leave for developers to be innovative and creative?

A piece on O'Reilly Radar is arguing that excessive process in software development is sucking the life out of passionate developers, all in the name of making sure that 'good code' gets written. TFA:"The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion. Disaffected programmers write poor code, and poor code makes management add more process in an attempt to 'make' their programmers write good code. That just makes morale worse, and so on."

Submission + - "The Hidden Reality" Draws Ire from Physicists (scientificamerican.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn on Monday January 31, 2011 @08:32AM

eldavojohn writes: Scientific American is running a piece by science journalist John Horgan attacking pop physicist Brian Greene's latest offering titled "The Hidden Reality." He's not entirely alone, Not Even Wrong backs him up and reminds us of a growing list of multiverse propaganda. The Journal of Nature ran a short piece trying to remind everyone that Greene's book is more theory than fact but apart from those three responses, the popular press seems to be gobbling up this tantalizing concept of a multiverse. NPR offers an excerpt while SFGate and The Wall Street Journal entertain us with interviews of the controversial Greene. The New York Times and Salon seem to think it's worthwhile with Salon even calling it "the science behind" the multiverse theory. The New York Times thought it worthwhile to give Greene an op-ed column. For better or for worse, Greene has certainly brought this great debate to the public's attention — similar to his exhibition of String Theory.

Submission + - 34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive (csmonitor.com) 1

Submitted by cold fjord on Friday January 14, 2011 @01:40AM

cold fjord writes: A scientist has made a weird and and wonderful find:
It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something ... alive.

The Geological Society of America's current issue of GSA Today has the hard science paper.

Submission + - It's suprisingly hard to notice when moving object (harvard.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 07, 2011 @10:21AM

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at Harvard have found that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. In a paper published yesterday in Current Biology, the researchers present a new visual illusion that "causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static." The finding has implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots. Several videos demonstrating this striking effect can be found at http://visionlab.harvard.edu/silencing/.

Submission + - Hypersonic Radio Black-Out Problem Solved (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @07:28AM

KentuckyFC writes: Russian physicists have come up with a new way to communicate with hypersonic vehicles surrounded by a sheath of plasma. Ordinarily, this plasma absorbs and reflects radio waves at communications frequencies leading to a few tense minutes during the re-entry of manned vehicles such as the shuttle. However, the problem is even more acute for military vehicles such as ballistic missiles and hypersonic planes. Radio black out prevents these vehicles from accessing GPS signals for navigation and does not allow them to be re-targeted or disarmed at the last minute. But a group of Russian physicists say they can get around this problem by turning the entire plasma sheath into a radio antenna. They point out that any incoming signal is both reflected and absorbed by the plasma. The reflected signal is lost but the absorbed energy sets up a resonating electric field at a certain depth within the plasma. In effect, this layer within the plasma acts like a radio antenna, receiving the signal. However, the signal cannot travel further through the plasma to the spacecraft. Their new idea is to zap this layer with radio waves generated from within the spacecraft. These waves will be both absorbed by the plasma and reflected back inside the spacecraft. However, the key point is that the reflected waves ought to be modulated by any changes in the electric field within the plasma. In other words, the reflected waves should carry a kind of imprint of the original external radio signal. That would allow the craft to receive external signals from GPs satellites or ground control. And the same process in reverse allows the spacecraft to broadcast signals too.

Submission + - For Mac developers, Armageddon comes tomorrow (zdnet.com)

Submitted by kdawson on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @06:48AM

kdawson writes: David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'

Submission + - Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange (huffingtonpost.com) 3

Submitted by digitaldc on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @10:52AM

digitaldc writes: Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I (Michael Moore) am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

Submission + - Chrome OS's core concept: don't trust users, apps (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday December 10, 2010 @12:52PM

holy_calamity writes: Google's Chrome OS chiefs explain in Technology Review how most of the web-only OS' features flow from changing one core assumption of previous operating system designs. "Operating systems today are centered on the idea that applications can be trusted to modify the system, and that users can be trusted to install applications that are trustworthy," says Google VP Sundar Pichai. Chrome doesn't trust applications, or users and neither can modify the system. Once users are banned from installing applications, or modifying the system security, usability and more are improved, the Googlers claim.

Submission + - Remote Exim exploit in the wild (exim.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 09, 2010 @11:48PM

An anonymous reader writes: Exim users are going to have a long night ahead of them. Via the exim users mailing list, a user had his exim install hacked via remote exploit that gives the user the privledge of the mailnull user, which can lead to other possible hacks on a system. http://www.exim.org/lurker/message/20101207.215955.bb32d4f2.en.html outlines it.

Submission + - EasyDNS Falsely Accused of Unplugging WikiLeaks (easydns.org)

Submitted by kdawson on Thursday December 09, 2010 @11:17AM

kdawson writes: EasyDNS, a DNS and hosting provider, was mistakenly identified in press accounts as the entity that knocked wikileaks.org off the Net. It wasn't them, it was EveryDNS, a completely separate outfit. EasyDNS suffered a series of online reprisals as the false attribution spread. When WikiLeaks approached them to add to the robustness of their DNS support, EasyDNS said yes.

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