Slashdot reader jbmartin6 summarizes a new article from Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute: An academic study challenges the notion that "some programmers are much, much better than others (the times-10, or x10, programmer), and that the skills, abilities, and talents of these programmers exert an outsized influence on that organization's success or failure."

Instead, the author shows productivity variation is often a result of poor-performing outliers and some wide variation in individual's productivity from day to day. Once these factors are eliminated, the gap between top performers and normal performers isn't that great, and there is a very small supply of consistent top performers anyway. This result has a lot of implications for how software teams and projects are managed.
The article concludes that "while some programmers are better or faster than others, the scale and usefulness of this difference has been greatly exaggerated....

"Rather than try to label programmers with simplistic terms such as 'best' and 'worst,' the most motivating and humane way to improve average performance is to find ways to improve everyone's performance."

sciencehabit writes "For the first time, synthetic biologists have created a genetic device that mimics one of the widgets on which all of modern electronics is based, the three-terminal transistor. Like standard electronic transistors, the new biological transistor is expected to work in many different biological circuit designs. This should make it easier for scientists to program cells to do everything from monitor pollutants and the progression of disease to turning on the output of medicines and biofuels."

novenator writes "Since the corporations MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa have been trying to shut down the cash flow to the Wikileaks project, those who wish to donate have been having trouble finding a way to help out. The social media/micropayment site Flattr (run from Sweden) continues to leave the channels open."

An anonymous reader writes "...the rule, which will be voted on during tomorrow's FCC meeting, falls drastically short of earlier pledges by President Obama and the FCC Chairman to protect the free and open Internet. The rule is so riddled with loopholes that it's become clear that this FCC chairman crafted it with the sole purpose of winning the endorsement of AT&T and cable lobbyists, and not defending the interests of the tens of millions of Internet users."

Julie188 writes "If Netflix loves open source, where's the Linux client? Last week's post from Netflix on its use of open source has gotten a lot of coverage from the tech press. Too bad nobody's called the video giant out on its hypocrisy: They benefit greatly from open source, but really don't care to let their customers do the same."

Max Hyre writes "In a 4-4 decision, the US Supreme court let stand the Ninth Circuit's decision that the First-Sale Doctrine (which says once you buy something, the maker gets no say in what you do with it) only applies to goods made in the US. That Omega watch you bought in Switzerland last year? It's yours now—forever. You can't sell it without Omega's permission."

In today's episode of As WikiLeaks Turns we learn that WikiLeaks's main web site is back up less than 10 days after EveryDNS terminated the domain name over stability concerns. A 16-year-old Dutch boy suspected of being involved in the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa has been arrested. But Dutch teenagers aren't the only Assange fans in the news. Many top journalists in Australia have sent a letter(PDF) to Prime Minister Julia Gillard today to express their support of WikiLeaks. The Sydney Police have written their own letter however to organizers of a pro-WikiLeaks rally saying that the police oppose a planned demonstration. Finally, special correspondent for The Times, Alexi Mostrous and freelance reporter Heather Brooke were given permission by the judge in the Julian Assange trial to post Twitter updates about the proceedings.

Hugh Pickens writes "Joshua Brustein writes that, according to a survey by Forrester Research, the amount of time people spend on the Internet has increased 121 percent over the last five years with Americans now spending as much time using the Internet as they are watching television. And while people younger than 30 years old have spent more time with the Internet than television for several years, Forrester's survey shows that this is the first year that people in older age groups are doing so as well. Forrester's survey also shows a significant increase in the number of people using the Internet to watch streaming video with 33 percent of adults surveyed this year saying they use the Internet to watch video, up from 18 percent in 2007. However the rise of the Internet is not necessarily leading to a drop in television consumption because the Internet, and particularly the mobile Internet, simply creates more opportunities for people to consume media, says analyst Jacqueline Anderson with younger viewers increasingly comfortable with the Internet as the place to watch their television. 'For the younger population, the TV is still important, but where they're getting that content from is changing,' says Anderson. 'For the generations that are coming up, that's where we're going to see the cut.'"

Another day, another dozen WikiLeaks stories, several of which revolve around money. PayPal has given in to pressure to release WikiLeaks funds, though they still won't do further transactions. Mobile payment firm Xipwire is attempting to take PayPal's place. "We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to." PCWorld wonders if the WikiLeaks' money woes could lead to great adoption of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency system we've discussed in the past. Meanwhile, Representative Ron Paul spoke in defense of WikiLeaks on the House floor Thursday, asking a number of questions, including, "Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?" The current uproar over WikiLeaks has prompted Paul Vixie to call for an end to the DDoS attacks and Vladimir Putin to break out a metaphor involving cows and hockey pucks.

An anonymous reader writes "As details emerge about the Federal Communications Commission's controversial proposal for regulating Internet providers, a provision that would allow companies to bill customers for how much they surf the Web is drawing special scrutiny. Analysts say pay-as-you-go Internet access could put the brakes on the burgeoning online video industry, handing a victory to cable and satellite TV providers. Public interest groups say that trend will lead to a widening gap in Internet use in which the wealthiest would have the greatest access."

According to the Los Angeles Times, "The federal government wants automakers to install back-up cameras in all new vehicles starting in late 2014. The plan, announced Friday, received a strong endorsement from insurance industry and other analysts and is likely to get some level of support from car manufacturers. ... The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that, on average, 292 fatalities and 18,000 injuries occur each year as a result of back-over crashes. The agency said children and the elderly were the most common victims. About 44% of the fatalities in such accidents are children and 33% are people over 70, it said. NHTSA said its proposal was designed to keep drivers from running over pedestrians who might be crossing behind their vehicles. It could also prevent parking-lot bumper thumpers. The camera systems show motorists what's behind them via a video display on the dashboard. They typically feature a bell or alarm that alerts the driver if an object is within the camera's field of view."

Khyber writes "Hackers: 2 Sony: 0 — that's the current standing score now that the X3 team have successfully performed a jailbreak on the official 3.50 PS3 firmware, allowing homebrew applications and more to be enabled. Here's a video of the jailbreak in action."

An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN. The project is called P2P-DNS and according to the project's wiki, this is how the project is described: 'P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A hidden (and hardware password protected, by means of required special values in processor registers) debug mode has been found in AMD processors, and documented by a reverse engineer called Czernobyl on the RCE Forums community today. It enables powerful hardware debugging features long longed for by reverse engineers, such as hardware data-aware conditional breakpoints, and direct hardware 'page guard'-style breakpoints. And the best part is, it's sitting right there in your processor already, just read the details and off you go with the debugging ninja powers!"

VValdo writes "After over a month of relentless hacking, genius scotty2 has finally smashed the G2's notorious emmc-read-only-on-boot mechanism, which had been incorrectly characterized in the press as a 'rootkit.' The hack involves several steps — first achieving 'temp root' through a fork bomb exploit, then running a specially crafted kernel module that power-resets the read-only emmc to bring it up in read-write mode. Finally, the bootloader is re-flashed, which permanently removes the read-only on subsequent boots. The whole process is expected to be automated by tomorrow."