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Businesses

Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor 717

Posted by Soulskill from the unless-you're-part-of-a-really-terrible-branch-of-the-boy-scouts dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We've all had to deal with long, tough work weeks, whether it's coming in on the weekend to meet a project deadline, pulling all-nighters to resolve a crisis, or the steady accretion of overtime in a death march. It's fairly common in the tech sector for employees to hold these tough weeks up as points of pride; something good they achieved or survived. But Jeff Archibald writes that this is the wrong way to think of it. 'If you're working 60 hours a week, something has broken down organizationally. You are doing two people's jobs. You aren't telling your boss you're overworked (or maybe he/she doesn't care). You are probably a pinch point, a bottleneck. You are far less productive. You are frantically swimming against the current, just trying to keep your head above water. ... We need to stop being proud of overworking ourselves.'"
United States

The Death Cap Mushroom Is Spreading Across the US 274

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-the-schools dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Discovery News reports that the death cap mushroom is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica. It is spreading along the East and West Coasts of the U.S. and appears to be moving south into Mexico. 'When someone eats Amanita phalloides, she typically won't experience symptoms for at least six and sometimes as many as 24 hours,' says Cat Adams. 'Eventually she'll suffer from abdominal cramps, vomiting, and severely dehydrating diarrhea. This delay means her symptoms might not be associated with mushrooms, and she may be diagnosed with a more benign illness like stomach flu. To make matters worse, if the patient is somewhat hydrated, her symptoms may lessen and she will enter the so-called honeymoon phase.' Without proper, prompt treatment, the victim can experience rapid organ failure, coma, and death. But good news is on the way. S. Todd Mitchell of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California has treated more than 60 patients with a drug derived from milk thistle. The patients who have started the drug on time (within 96 hours of ingesting the mushroom) and who have still had kidney function intact have all survived. 'When administered intravenously, the compound sits on and blocks the receptors that bring amatoxin into the liver, thus corralling the amatoxins into the blood stream so the kidneys can expel them faster,' says Adams. Still, Mitchell cautions against the 'regular look"'of deadly mushrooms. 'They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'"
United States

Thousands of Gas Leaks Discovered Under Streets of Washington DC 292

Posted by samzenpus from the do-you-smell-something? dept.
First time accepted submitter gallifreyan99 writes "Researchers from Duke revealed today that they had discovered nearly 5,900 gas leaks under the streets of Washington DC, including 12 that posed a serious risk of explosion. And it's not just Washington: a gas industry whistleblower who is part of the team showed this was happening in cities all over America."

Comment This is precisely what the AWS API is for. (Score 5, Informative) 80

by gdek (#45556997) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Scientific Computing Workflow For the Cloud?

Because your workflow is likely to be customized to your tasks, it should be straightforward to write these kinds of tools yourself, with any number of available toolkits, based on what language you're most comfortable using.

There's the straight CLI: http://aws.amazon.com/cli/

And lots of sample code for the various SDKs: http://aws.amazon.com/code

Best to just dive in. If you have any development experience at all, even just scripting, you should be able to figure it out pretty quickly.

Comment Newsflash: Employers don't want to pay to train... (Score 1) 220

by SirWinston (#43644351) Attached to: A Case For a Software Testing Undergrad Major

Sorry, but this is just another in a long line of corporate pushes to strip away "real education" about science, math, the liberal arts, and culture from high schools and colleges and replace it with "vocational training" about narrow specialties so that they no longer have to pay for it. Fuck that; we need a well-educated populace. If we want a nation composed of poorly educated people working in virtual sweatshops to compete with an unlimited supply of both skilled and unskilled immigrants who drive down wages* to make those jobs less appealing to natives, we're sure well enough down that road by now without hitting the gas every time an employer wants new kinds of vocational sheep.

*: Harvard economist George Borjas has demonstrated conclusively that for every 10% increase in the labor supply, wages are driven down by 3-4%. Think about that every time someone says, "We need more [skilled/unskilled/whatever] immigration to compete." That job would pay more, and thus attract more Americans into that part of the labor market, and/or be subject to greater automation with skilled American operators overseeing it, if not for the already-high levels of immigration endemic in the given field.
Businesses

Submission + - Booth Babe's Life: High Heels, Long Hours, Leers (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: ""Booth babes," promotional models paid to showcase products, are ubiquitous figures at tech trade shows. Ever wonder what they think of their jobs? Well, it may not surprise you to learn that standing up for eight hours in heels isn't much fun. Some enjoy the work, while others don't enjoy being the subject of stares. And one model adds that "The industry is now moving towards making models show more skin.""
Virtualization

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What type of asset would you not virtualize?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With IT and Data Center consolidation seemingly happening everywhere our small shop is about to receive a corporate mandate to follow suit and preferably accomplish this via virtualization. I've had success with virtualizing low load web servers and other assets but the larger project does intimidate me a little. So I'm wondering: Are there server types, applications and/or assets that I should be hesitant virtualizing today? Are there drawbacks that get glossed over in the rush to consolidate all assets?
The Media

Submission + - Fox News Ties 'Flame' Malware to Angry Birds (foxnews.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: The title of this hard-hitting piece of journalism reads 'Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game' and opens with 'The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News — the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.' The rest of the details that are actually pertinent to the story follow that important message. The graphic for this story? Perhaps a map of Iran or the LUA logo or maybe the stereotyped evil hacker in a ski mask? Nope, all Angry Birds. Describing LUA as "Gamer Code," Fox for some reason (popularity?) selects Angry Birds from an insanely long list in their article implying guilt-by-shared-development-language. I'm not sure if explaining machine language to them would alleviate the perceived problem or cause them to burn their desktops in the streets and launch a new crusade to protect the children.
Businesses

Curt Schilling's 38 Studios Struggling Financially 158

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-big-leagues dept.
medv4380 writes "38 Studios, run by Curt Schilling, is having a hard time paying its bills and employees. The gaming community hasn't been happy with the company since the issue with an Online Pass for Single Player Content, which we discussed previously. Now, 38 Studios has bounced a check intended as a payment on its $75 million loan from the state of Rhode Island. If the company defaults, Rhode Island taxpayers will have to cover the loan and interest, which could total nearly $100 million."

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