You are making a mistake in assuming the Australian culture is the same as US culture. It's one our own commentators have actually started doing too.

Australia has never had the same views on freedom and rights that the US has. It has always been understood that there is a compromise between personal freedoms and state control. An example of this is that we don't have a Bill or Rights, we don't have a Freedom of Expression, in fact there are no "rights" in our federal law at all. (We are a signatory to the UN human rights convention and one of the territories has rights legistlation which complicates things a little, but in general when an Australian mentions their rights they have no idea what they are talking about).

So this isn't a recent tyrannical takeover and raising guns as an issue is completely irrelevant. Hell, we started has a prison colony where everyone had to obey orders and there has never ever been a serious movement of Australians employing violence against their own government. What we have is a misstep by a government regulator that has very little idea what it's doing. The IT press are whipping up the rage to try and ensure that this is an election issue, for at least a day or two. The major parties will probably move strongly to avoid it becoming a problem for them and the regulator will be put back in it's box for a few years.

I'm a programmer and electrical engineer with the kind of experience you are looking for. I've debugged UARTs, multi-device SPI, played with a fair few ATMELs and spent a few years with a small proprietary processor I've tried to scrub from my memory.

I am also finishing up my current contract in about a month. So (after a holiday) I will be back in the job market soon.

Unfortunately I'm not competent enough to figure out how to send a PM through slashdot.

So email me, ad454-5-lod at spamgourmet.com I would be interested in knowing what companies are looking for this type of expertise, even if it doesn't lead anywhere.

Metrics are useful, essential even. If you want to track the progress of a project you need some way of measuring it. If you want to be able to improve you estimates for the next project bid, you need to be able to figure out what happened to the last one. It's even useful as a management tool, right down to individual employees.

But announcing your metric and using it to directly reward or penalise employees is just stupid and not a proper reflection on metrics. It's like pouring coke in your eye and then claiming coke isn't good for anything.

Metrics provide a view into whats happening and allow you to gain insights into the process. Take lines of code, a widely reviled metric. You have two employees, one creates 4x the average number of lines of code, one creates 4x less than the average. The wrong next step is to praise the first employee and penalise the second. The right next step is to look into it further and figure out why. Is one producing standard template code like accessors while the other tackles hard problems, if so, is this desired? Does one have considerably superior tools allowing them to work faster? It may be that one coder isn't up to pace with the rest, a manager needs to be aware of that so that they can work around it or address it, but not by telling them to write more lines of code.

What I'm trying to get at is that they are indicators, like the smell of food suggests it's taste. A broad range of metrics provides an indication of the life of the project. However they should be triggers for further investigation, like system monitoring for a computer system. A manager should never should never use a metric to justify a decision. Employees shouldn't be aware of the metrics being used around them, not because it's a secret but simply because they shouldn't have to care.

I actually disagree. In most scenarios the roundabout self balances really well. The key failure condition for a roundabout is a steady traffic going straight through, enough to always fill the roundabout. When this happens the straight through cars fill the roundabout and starve the other lanes, you need cars going 3/4 of the way around to break the flow and allow the cars going across to get in. If the traffic flow is primarily straight through with a few cars coming in the sides this actually works fairly well. The few cars have to wait a while at the roundabout but most of the cars get through quickly. It's a bit like a traffic light that's green in one direction for five minutes, and in the other for 20 seconds. Where this falls over is when you have substantial flows coming from all directions but only one of the directions is going straight. The straight cars (going NS) lock it up for a while, when there's a break the EW cars get to go. If they are going straight they can establish a lock and push a fair few cars through. If they also want to go NS they don't lock the roundabout and the NS cars reestablish control. This is actually a fairly common peak hour issue and indicates a mistake by the traffic planners, or an increase in flow since the road was designed. Roundabouts, like most traffic devices, work better if people are occasionally kind. If there's someone waiting to break into the flow that's been there for a while they'll often be let in.

There are some really good changes going into 5.14. Worth highlighting for anyone with Perl experience.

The Array/Hash reference mess has been greatly improved. You can now perform most builtin operations directly on array references. So no need to mess around with dereferencing things all over the place. This is a huge improvement in the syntax surrounding complex data structures.

The eval exception handling mess has been cleaned up so that error handling modules such as autodie can function properly without strange corner cases.

I looked at exactly this problem and came up with my own custom solution.

I wrote a Perl script that queried IMDB, there are simple CPAN libraries out there. The highest rank search based off the filename was always the correct movie.

Then I pulled out the director, lead actors, proper title etc. Any details that you actually care about.

Finally I created the directory structure for each detail and put a hardlink to the file. The original files were all kept in a single flat directory for storage, symlinks would work just as well if you prefer.

The end product is exactly what you are looking for:
Media
-> Directors
--> Ridley Scott
---> Actual movie file 1
---> Actual movie file 2
--> Tim Burton
---> Actual movie file 1
---> Actual movie file 2
-> Actors
--> ...

No issues with duplicates or anything like that. No requirement for your media player to understand some sort of database. No problems sharing it across a network filesystem.

All less than a page of Perl. Unfortunately the code is currently inaccessible to me.

Jim Skinner President and CEO of McDonalds has been with the company for 39 years.

His predecessor, Charles Hamilton Bell, started as a burger flipper at fifteen and stayed with the company until his death.

So they exist, but I doubt there are many of them.

When you are spending so long doing something awkward it's normally worth sitting back for a few minutes and reconsidering the goal and approach.

Goal: Recover documents off computer.

Solution 1: Spend hours writing down key strokes and working blind.

Solution 2: Plug harddrive into another computer and retrieve files.

Solution 3: Use VGA mode or any Windows install disk to recover drivers.

Most of the time when you are working hard it's because you are doing it wrong.

I have issues with software engineering being viewed as a branch of engineering. In the modern workplace a software engineer seems to be applied to any sort of IT role.

A certified Engineering degree includes a compulsory ethics component (at least in Australia). Part of the compulsory professional development includes regular ethics training. It is also a component of the formal chartered engineering certification process.

That's not to say every engineer has the same view of ethics. Some design missiles and others design buildings. However all certified engineers will have thought through ethics of their actions and choices.

During one of the last tutorials before an electronics exam the lecturer was asked to explain a problem from a text book. There was a very noticeable pause when he read and realised the question. Enough to make all of us twig something was up.

Sure enough, the same question was in the exam with different values.

Not his fault though, the alternative, saying "I can't answer this question because it's in the exam", would have been even worse.

When it's busy our bartenders move in one direction (generally right to left) down the bar. With a group of them working each tends to have a patch with 3-4 people that they cycle through. The crowd basically operates as multiple queues and people frown on and block anyone trying to push through.

It's not uncommon, if you reach the front out of order, to indicate that the person next to you got there first. The bartender will then serve them before you. Most people would uncomfortable being served out of order like your example, even if it was at the bartenders discretion.

The tipping culture of the US makes me uncomfortable. Australian bar staff rarely get tips and don't expect it. Instead they get a liveable wage.

I strongly disagree, typing should be learnt by everyone and it is possible to teach it. Saying that it should be learnt at home is great in theory but doesn't work in practice. You could make the same argument about reading but we still teach it in schools because people don't learn it at home.

A proper typing course as part of the curriculum will get over 90% of the class up to at least 25wpm in a semester. That's touch typing and not looking at the keyboard. I know because I used to go to a school that ran them.

Once people have the basics regular typing will increase their speed. Expecting people to just pick it up leads to people two finger typing at 20 wpm with multiple errors in every sentence. Imagine the productivity boost for society if everyone in an office could actually type properly.

Wiring in a solar array to your household wiring is the work of professionals the same way wiring in a kettle is. Once it's common we will solve it the same way, you create a standard plug in a suitable location and just plug it in. The same thing is happening with roof lighting circuits. You used to have to get an electrician to wire each light in, now he puts a standard appliance socket near the hole in the roof and the light plugs in like any other appliance, now anyone can fit or change it.

5000 watts in a complete non-issue. In my country standard household circuits are 20 amps or 4800 watts. Often a 20 amp three phase circuit can be found in a house, that's 7200 watts. All these come with standard plugs that anyone can connect without qualifications.

He does have a problem with a bad password, there are some fairly clever javascript attacks that target exactly this situation, remote admin disabled and all.

The web browser is tricked to connect to a default router address (like 10.0.0.1) with a default login (admin/password1) and changes whatever settings it wants, perhaps just opening remote administration. Because the connection to the router comes from the local PC this isn't "remote" administration. There are few enough possible combinations that you can brute force the default login really easily and enough people with default set ups to make it very worth while.

If Verizon has all of their customers with the same router, the same network setup and the same password... it would be negligent not to do everything they could to help protect their customers.

Yes. When times are good you don't need welfare.

Now imagine you badly break your hand sailing. Your medical insurer points out a clause you didn't see before exempting claims from non-standard sports activities or some such. The initial medical costs take your savings and force you to sell your car. No longer able to work you sell the awesome condo and move into a small house in the suburbs, you are trying to rebuild your career but become really depressed. Due to your moodiness and the negative change in lifestyle your fiancée leaves you. No longer able drive and living so far out your social life takes a nose dive, you end up cut off from most of your friends and support network. You are now one of life's losers.

The above scenario is just a general pattern and there are lots of outs, most require someone external to inject a large amount of funds. The central concept though is that when something bad happens you are relying on a medical insurer to fix it all for you, an insurer who's company model requires them where possible to avoid doing just that. Having a government based safety net that doesn't have that motivation means you get fixed, it may take a few months but it doesn't end your life.

Also note that living in a condo with a good career means you and everyone around you is in this lucky situation. Someone who is failed by the system will fall out of that circle. Just because you and your friends haven't needed welfare doesn't mean you won't in the future.