Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
The Almighty Buck

Trade Group: US Software Developer Wages Fell 2% Last Year 237

Posted by timothy from the ban-farm-equipment dept.
First time accepted submitter russotto points out the claim of industry group TechAmerican Foundation (reported by Computerworld) that "wages for the software industry are falling, not rising. Wages fell 2% to $99,000 in 2012." Averages are one thing; the article points out though that wages vary vastly within the industry, and that some jobs are harder to fill (thus, better paid) than others. An excerpt: "Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates, a research firm that also analyzes IT wage and employment trends, cited a number of reason for the decline in wages for software professionals. First, technology is becoming easier to implement without having an IT professional, he said. Also, the option of turning to outsourcing creates less pressure to increase wages. As the recession continues, companies continue 'to look at productivity and will often look to hire individuals who are lower cost employees,' said Janulaitis. That could include displaced baby boomer workers who have been out of work for some time and 'will take a lower paying job just to get back into the workforce.'"
AI

Poison Attacks Against Machine Learning 82

Posted by timothy from the think-zippy-the-pinhead dept.
mikejuk writes "Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are fairly simple but powerful machine learning systems. They learn from data and are usually trained before being deployed. SVMs are used in security to detect abnormal behavior such as fraud, credit card use anomalies and even to weed out spam. In many cases they need to continue to learn as they do the job and this raised the possibility of feeding it with data that causes it to make bad decisions. Three researchers have recently demonstrated how to do this with the minimum poisoned data to maximum effect. What they discovered is that their method was capable of having a surprisingly large impact on the performance of the SVMs tested. They also point out that it could be possible to direct the induced errors so as to produce particular types of error. For example, a spammer could send some poisoned data so as to evade detection for a while. AI based systems may be no more secure than dumb ones."
Crime

Wiretap Requests From Federal and State Authorities Fell 14% In 2011 64

Posted by samzenpus from the are-you-listening-to-my-conversation? dept.
coondoggie writes "Federal and state court orders approving the interception of wire, oral or electronic communications dropped 14% in 2011, compared to the number reported in 2010. According to a report issued by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts a total of 2,732 wiretap applications were authorized in 2011 by federal and state courts, with 792 applications by federal authorities and 1,940 applications by 25 states that provide reports. The reduction in wiretaps resulted primarily from a drop in applications for intercepts in narcotics offenses, the report noted."
Intel

Intel Ivy Bridge Processor Hits 7GHz Overclock Record 144

Posted by timothy from the who-ordered-this-keg-of-nitrogen? dept.
MojoKid writes "Renowned Overclocker HiCookie used a Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H motherboard to achieve a fully validated 7.03GHz clock speed on an Intel Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge processor. As it stands, that's the highest clockspeed for an Ivy Bridge CPU, and it required a steady dose of liquid nitrogen to get there. HiCookie also broke a record for the highest memory speed on an Ivy Bridge platform, pushing his G.Skill Trident X DDR3-2800 memory kit populated in four DIMM slots to 3,280MHz. Not for the faint of heart, the record breaking CPU overclock required that HiCookie pump 1.956V to the processor, according to his CPU-Z screenshot. The CPU multiplier was set at x63."
The Internet

Nicholas Carr Foresees Brains Optimized For Browsing 110

Posted by timothy from the think-different dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In the next decade, our brains are going to become optimized for information browsing, says best-selling author Nicholas Carr. According to Carr, while the genetic nature of our brains isn't being changed by the Internet at all, our brains are adapting 'at a cellular level' and are weakening modes of thinking we no longer exercise. Therefore, in 10 years, if human beings are using the Internet even more than they do today, says Carr, "our brains will be even more optimized for information browsing, skimming and scanning, and multitasking — fast, scattered modes of thought — and even less capable of the kinds of more attentive, contemplative thinking that the net discourages."" While Carr isn't making a case for Lamarckian evolution, the argument here seems weak to me; the same kind of brain change could be attributed to books, or television, or the automobile, couldn't it?

Comment Re:Server cold war (Score 2) 347

by batzo (#37402666) Attached to: Windows Server 8 Is A Radical Departure From Previous Releases

But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.

The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?

Ok, how about:
Boss comes to you and says something like:
"Can you tell me what version of windows is running on all of our machines, and what service pack they are on?"
"...and can I have that as a CSV?"

You:
gc machines.txt | % { gwmi win32_operatingsystem -computer $_ } | select __SERVER,Name,OSArchitecture,ServicePackMajorVersion,ServicePackMinorVersion | export-csv .\report.csv
Boss: Actually, can I have that in html? I need to put that up in a web site
You: OK..here you go
gc machines.txt | % { gwmi win32_operatingsystem -computer $_ } | select __SERVER,Name,OSArchitecture,ServicePackMajorVersion,ServicePackMinorVersion | convertto-html > report.html

I find that you can do things in PS that are a pain in bash (e.g. get a list of processes started within the last hour)

Comment Re:Minimum experience required... (Score 2) 349

by batzo (#37343102) Attached to: British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market

It doesn't help that most of the supposed IT people that I interview are woefully inept when it comes to anything above desktop support work. Even the staple (Windows) exam questions like "What are the 5 FSMO roles" or "How would you recover a failed domain controller" or even "What are the stages of name resolution" usually result in blank stares. Once you start getting into more complex questions such as the pros and cons of running different systems in virtual environments they mostly just give up entirely.

A lot of these people are contractors that are sent by reputable agencies as "the best they have to offer" and are asking £300-£350/day or more. Frankly I'm amazed that the unemployment rate for them isn't much higher, I can only assume that most of the time they either don't have to interview or get interviewed by someone just a little worse than they are.

Let me see...

FSMO roles:
PDC emulator
Schema master
Domain naming master
RID master
Infrastructure master

Recovering a failed domain controller?
I'm going to assume it's a replica DC and connected by a reasonably high bandwidth link, and your NTDS database isn't too big, and you have other functioning domain controllers :) I'm also going to assume that the failure is some kind of hardware failure (say: hard disk + mirror failure)
1. Seize any FSMO roles hosted by this DC (probably also worth checking that it's not the only DC configured for DNS scavenging, etc and move those roles well)
2. perform metadata cleanup (using ADUC if 2K8, or ntdsutil if 2K3 or below)
3. repair machine
4. reinstall windows + required patches
5. dcpromo as replica ...
6. wait for replication
7. ???
8. profit
Security

HBGary Federal Forces Aaron Barr Out of DEFCON 65

Posted by samzenpus from the we'd-rather-you-not-say-anything dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr says he will withdraw from a planned appearance at the DEFCON conference in the face of threatened legal action over his plans to take part in a panel discussion there. Barr notified DEFCON organizers on Wednesday that he was withdrawing from the Aug. 6 panel discussion after attorneys representing HBGary Federal threatened to file an injunction against him if he did not withdraw from the panel immediately. The incident is just the latest in a series of conflicts between Barr and HBGary Federal following attacks by the anarchic hacking group Anonymous on February 5."
It's funny. Laugh.

Pranksters Post Giant Windows Logo On Hamburg Apple Store 249

Posted by timothy from the city-named-after-a-delicious-sandwich dept.
theodp writes "Working calmly in broad daylight and filming their efforts for YouTube posterity, a fake construction crew attached a large Microsoft Windows logo to the black facade of a soon-to-open Hamburg Apple Store. Neat hack in the MIT vein, but next time the crew might want to take along a pic of the Windows logo — with the adrenaline flowing, some of the colors got rearranged and were hung upside down."

Comment Re:Use automation for automation (Score 1) 427

by batzo (#36055078) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Moving From *nix To Windows Automation?

Having deployed both in an enterprise, I can say that if you're trying to automate imaging, go with Bladelogic. If you're trying to automate package deployment/policy, go with HPSA. Bladelogic has a great feature - it has a custom PXE server that keeps track of the state of the OS install, and changes the boot so that you can set your servers to network boot, and once they're installed, Bladelogics PXE server will make it us the HDD. This is fantastic, compared to HPSA where you need to dink around to make things happy.

ymmv

HPSA does this too, you just need the MBC extension...
Security

The Myth of the Superhacker 305

Posted by CowboyNeal from the scourge-of-the-internet dept.
mlimber writes "University of Colorado Law School professor Paul Ohm, a specialist in computer crime law, criminal procedure, intellectual property, and information privacy, writes about the excessive fretting over the Superhacker (or Superuser, as Ohm calls him), who steals identities, software, and media and sows chaos with viruses etc., and how the fear of these powerful users inordinately shapes laws and policy related to privacy and digital rights."

Slashdot Top Deals

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. - Fred Brooks, Jr.

Close