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Comment Wonder why women are so uncomfortable... (Score 4, Insightful) 572

by kevjava (#29835783) Attached to: Yahoo Offered Lap Dances At Hack Event

in the Information Technology field? This might go some way to explain it.

Did Yahoo not think that women engineers would be present at this event? They make up roughly ten percent of engineers as a whole. Furthermore, did they think that there was some way that women attendees would be perfectly comfortable watching other women objectified on a stage?

It's not that I mind women being objectified for money -- the women involved are handsomely rewarded for their parts in this business deal. I do mind people in my field saying that they do everything they can to make women comfortable in our field, then turning around and saying that they don't understand why anyone would be offended by this.

Comment Re:Thanks! (Score 4, Insightful) 216

by kevjava (#29266107) Attached to: The Myths of Security

But, the Schneier chapter isn't meant to piss him off, I have no beef with him whatsoever. I just think the fanboys do the world a disservice by not thinking for themselves, especially when they draw from material that's a decade old.

The thing is, you're not convincing me that the book is out of date. There is plenty of material in the Internet that is over a decade old and is still relatively current. I read the Cathedral and the Bazaar for the first time last month, and drew a good amount of benefit from its words, even if I'm not ready to swallow it whole. The Mythical Man Month shed quite a bit of perspective on project management in a field that our industry has fifty or so years of experience in, and yet we still do terribly at.

The principles of cryptography are still the same today as they were in the days of the Roman Empire and the Caesar Cipher, with all the bits about Alice and Bob with Mallory in the middle. Our toys are much more advanced today, and their rate of advance continues to increase, but just what is it that makes our pulling of information from a 10+-year-old book harmful?

I'm no Schneier "fanboy", and haven't actually read the book; I just genuinely want to know.
The Courts

Groklaw No Front for IBM 206

Posted by CowboyNeal from the killing-the-messenger dept.
A Groklaw Reader writes "After all the wild speculation SCO put forth about Pamela Jones, her alleged subpoena by SCO, and her recent vacation due to illness, we now have Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols writing to say 'Yes, there is a PJ.' In his own words, he says, 'Let me address this directly. Yes, Pamela Jones is a real person. I've met her several times [...] I consider her a friend. She is not a front for anyone.' Hopefully, this statement will be enough to put those SCO-induced conspiracy theories to rest."
Censorship

Submission + - Ethics of proxy servers

Submitted by
Mav
Mav writes: "I was recently asked to host a website for free in return for a lot of advertising. After querying them about how they knew the site would produce traffic they stated the site was going to be running PHPProxy (an open source web proxy). The traffic was a result of him and his contacts (nearly one thousand of them) using the site to bypass his school's firewall in order to view their MySpace pages and get access to their MSN messengers. Given all the attention social networking sites have recently received and the various laws attempting to block or control access to them I feel guilty and unsure making this available. Are there legal implications that I need to worry about? Could I be held liable if one of the students got in trouble? Most importantly, what's the moral thing to do?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft blasts IBM in open letter

Submitted by carlmenezes
carlmenezes writes: Arstechnica has an article on Microsoft's open letter to IBM that adds fresh ammunition to the battle of words between those who support Microsoft's Open XML and OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA. In the letter, general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paol write: "When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats." In contrast, the authors charge that IBM "led a global campaign" urging that governments and other organizations demand that International Standards Organization (ISO) reject Open XML outright.
Could MS actually be getting a taste of their own medicine?
User Journal

Journal SPAM: BTW: Iranian Dates 5

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Like every one in the known universe, Iran represents the date as day/month/year. Everyone, except the US who backwards talk do.

In Iran, it is the year 1385, and they don't use CE dates. Iran also rejects the Arab lunar calandar in favor of the Zoroastrian solar year, basing year zero on the hijira date 0 to define the beginning of the epoch.
Biotech

Stem Cell Research Paper Recalled 112

Posted by CowboyNeal from the making-the-grade dept.
MattSparkes writes "One of the best-known stem cell papers describes adult cells that seemed to hold the same promise as embryonic stem cells. Now some of the data contained within the paper is being questioned, after staff at a consumer science magazine noticed errors. It shows how even peer-reviewed papers can sometimes 'slip through the net' and get to publication with inaccurate data."
Mozilla

Submission + - Over 27% of Firefox patches come from volunteers

Submitted by
dolphinling
dolphinling writes: "Everyone knows the Mozilla Corporation makes a lot of money and employs a lot of people now. Google has full-time employees working on Firefox too, as do a number of other places. Yet despite that, in the six months up to Firefox 2 "27% of the patches to Firefox and Gecko and other key projects were submitted by key volunteers, [and] those patches represent 24% of changes made to the source code". What's more, those numbers only counted contributers with 50 patches or more, so the actual numbers are probably quite a bit higher. It's good to see that even as Mozilla does so well in the business world, it can still keep its ties to the community so strong."
Networking

How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis? 478

Posted by Zonk from the read-a-book dept.
lopy writes "First Google claimed the internet infrastructure won't scale to provide an acceptable user experience for online video. Then some networking experts predict that a flu pandemic would bring the internet to it's knees and lead to internet rationing. We used to think that bandwidth would always increase as needed, but what would happen if that isn't the case? How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage? Would you be willing to voluntarily limit your internet usage if necessary? Could you live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access?"
Space

Hayabusa To Begin Long Journey Back to Earth 92

Posted by Zonk from the any-mission-you-can-walk-away-from-right dept.
Sparky writes "Japan is planning to set the Hayabusa spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth next month after a delay of more than a year, but it's far from certain that it will get back safely. It was supposed to retrieve asteroid debris, but it's thought that a computer error prevented that from happening. A fuel leak means that its chemical thrusters are out of action, and the craft is relying on its weaker ion engines. The journey back will take 3 years, and the capsule will be on Earth in June 2010 — even if it is empty."

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