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Comment Re:SbO: lame (Score 1) 265

"Open Source" doesn't buy you much. Sure, you can see what the program is "supposed" to do. But do you fully understand what the compiler does with it? Do you trust the compiler to be both bug free and non-malicious? I've filed far too many bugs against compilers to trust them to be bug free. Even if you assume they are, what about the compiler that was used to build your compiler? How do you know that the hardware on which the program is running doesn't leave it open to attack?

If you want "actual trust" you use machine code that has been proven correct running on hardware that has been proven correct and exhaustively tested. You don't care about whether or not the code is "open source". Most people don't require that level of paranoia, of course, nor can they afford the expense of doing such verification, but you shouldn't pretend that "publishing" or "open source" is magic security fairy dust.

Comment Re:In other words (Score 1) 566

Why on earth should any consumer be able to "tell you a single technical statistic about their smart phone like processor speed or even processor type?" It's wholly irrelevant to a phone's suitability. Either it works or it doesn't. Either it's enjoyable to use or it isn't. Either it's fast enough or it isn't. Either it has the functionality they need or it doesn't. None of those things are predicated on hardware specifications like processor speed or type. They're a function of both hardware and software, and exactly how the performance is achieved is totally irrelevant to the end user.

Comment Re:'Don't interview anyone who hasn't accomplished (Score 1) 948

"If your code is so generic that your employer is fine with it being published because it gives them no competitive advantage, then you're probably not worth hiring."

I'm exaggerating, of course, but it cuts both ways. Some of my best work is not open source, and will never be published, precisely because it's substantially better than publicly available tools, and my employer paid me well to write it for that exact reason. I happen to also have some open source and public domain work that I'm very proud of and can point an interviewer to, but it's easy to imagine that someone else might not, especially a more junior person.

Comment Re:Experienced only? (Score 2) 948

Except that you can't "do surgery full time with only the experience and training you got in medical school", which is why (in the US) surgeons go through a 5-7 year residency after medical school (often followed by a fellowship), during which time they work their asses off for less than my intern makes. After that point, they have a large body of work to prove their ability, and are able to get paid according to their skills.

I would be completely thrilled to hire someone fresh out of graduate school and work him 80 hours a week for 50k a year (after a year, he'd either be up. How many junior engineers would put up with that? I don't think you realize how easy we have it by comparison to surgeons.

Comment Re:Sucide rate? (Score 1) 537

The Wired article a published a month or two ago claims that the suicide rate at American colleges is higher than at Foxconn.

You are missing something: The suicide rates for the US which you're quoting are for entire lifetimes (the Americans had up to 70 years or so to decide to commit suicide)

What portion of the college-age population is over 70?

Comment Re:A better bet to short for 2014? (Score 1) 485

Apple has been sitting at (or around?) 4-5 billion in revenue for the better part of this last decade.

Apple's did $20B of revenue last quarter. That's considerably more than $5B/year, and it's grown considerably -- the same quarter last year revenue as $12B. It hasn't been "sitting" anywhere. Unit sales growth is something like 50% year over year.

Communications

Consumer Reports Gives AT&T Lowest US Carrier Rank 187

tekgoblin writes "Consumer Reports has just released results for consumer satisfaction across all US cell phone carriers. The survey covered around 58,000 Consumer Reports subscribers. Over half of the respondents who used AT&T used the iPhone when taking the survey. According to Consumer Reports, iPhone users were less satisfied with AT&T than other users with different phones. An AT&T spokesman responded by citing independent speed tests, as well as higher subscriber numbers and a dropped call rate within 0.1% of the industry leader." Update: 12/07 01:49 GMT by S : Corrected last sentence to indicate the 0.1% dropped call rate statistic is the difference between AT&T and another carrier, not 0.1% overall.

Comment Compared to the suicide rate in China... (Score 2, Insightful) 539

The factory in question supposedly employs 400,000 workers. The annual suicide rate in China (as reported by the WHO) is 16.7 per 100,000 people. That means that in a population of randomly selected Chinese the size of the factory workforce, we should expect to see 400000 people * 16.7 suicides/(100000 people * 1 year) * 5 months / 12 months = 27.8 suicides so far this year.

Can we conclude that assembling shiny gadgets makes it less likely that one will commit suicide? It meets the standards for publication...

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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