Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Landlords, ISPs Team Up To Rip Off Tenants On Broadband (backchannel.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Eight years ago, the FCC issued an order banning exclusive agreements between landlords and ISPs, but a loophole is being exploited, leaving many tenants in apartment buildings with only one choice of broadband service provider. The loophole works like this: Instead of having an exclusive agreement with one provider, the landlords refuse to let any other companies than their chosen providers access their properties, according to Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford, who wrote an article about the issue.

Submission + - Playing politics with agile projects (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Politicians would be utter failures as agile project managers, writes David Taber, and for all the reasons you might imagine, but mainly because they wantonly make promises they have no hope or thought of keeping. But then he gets into the political attributes successful project managers need. And that's where things get interesting because, while he points out that agile was 'conceived of as a way of bypassing bureaucracy and internal politics,' the attributes he says are required for success are pretty much the worst of the political behavior we've all witnessed in our organizations. For example:

A key success factor for agile projects is the ability for every team member to talk expectations down at every possible juncture. Agile should inherently involve frequent 1:1 contact with users: use that time to lower expectations! Without this habit, the inevitable scope creep and the impulse to believe “of course the system will do X for me” will get you.

Is it any wonder why users hate agile.

Submission + - Why 6 Republican Senators Think You Don't Need Faster Broadband (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: 'Broadband in the United States still lags behind similar service in other industrialized countries, so Congress made broadband expansion a national priority, and it offers subsidies, mostly in rural areas, to help providers expand their offerings,' writes Bill Snyder. And that's where an effort by the big ISPs and a group of senators to change the definition of broadband comes in. Of course, the ISPs want the threshold to be as low as possible so it's easier for them to qualify for government subsidies. In a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, dated January 21, 2016, the senators called the current broadband benchmark of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream 'arbitrary' and said that users don't need that kind of speed anyway. '[W]e are aware of few applications that require download speeds of 25 Mbps.' the senators wrote, missing the simple fact that many users have multiple connected devices.
Censorship

Submission + - Google Reveals 'Terrorism Video' Removals

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Google has revealed it removed about 640 videos from YouTube that allegedly promoted terrorism over the second half of 2011 after complaints from the UK's Association of Chief Police Officers. The news was contained in its latest Transparency Report which discloses requests by international authorities to remove or hand over material. YouTube had also rejected many other state's requests for action. Overall, Google summed it had received 461 court orders covering a total of 6,989 items between July and December 2011. From those, it said 68% of the orders were complied with. Google added that it had received a further 546 informal requests covering 4,925 items, of which it had agreed to 43% of the cases. The BBC article lists some examples of videos that were either terminated or allowed to stay.
Businesses

The Worst US Cities To Work In IT 538

Posted by timothy from the hmm-if-atlanta's-on-the-good-list dept.
bdcny7927 writes with an excerpt from CIO.com to inspire some caution before your next job switch: "IT workers have their choice of many great US cities for work and play (Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle), but what are the cities that you probably should avoid? Here's a very unscientific, highly subjective and unapologetically snarky list of our least favorite US tech job locales."
Perl

Submission + - You Used Perl to Write WHAT?!

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Developers spend a lot of time telling managers, "Let me use the tool that's appropriate for the job." (You can insert the "...everything looks like a nail" meme here, if you wish.) But rarely do we enumerate when a language is the right one for a particular job, or a very very wrong choice.

After all, every programming language has its strengths—and its weaknesses. James Turner, writing for CIO.com, identifies five tasks for which perl is ideally suited, and four that... well, really, shouldn't you choose something else?

This is the first article in a series which examines what each language is good at, and for which tasks it's just plain dumb. Another article is coming RSN about JavaScript, and yet another for PHP... with more promised, should these first articles do well."

Slashdot Top Deals

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. -- James Bryant Conant

Close