Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Privacy

Submission + - Job Seekers to Employers: Stop Yer Online Snooping (cio.com)

Submitted by
onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: "Employers are increasingly trolling the web for information about prospective employees that they can use in their hiring decisions. Consequently, career experts advise job seekers to not post any photos, opinions or information on blogs and social networking websites (like Slashdot) that a potential employer might find remotely off-putting. Instead of cautioning job seekers to censor their activity online, we job seekers and defenders of our civil liberties should tell employers to stop snooping and to stop judging our behavior outside of work, writes CIO.com Senior Online Editor Meridith Levinson. By basing professional hiring decisions on candidates' personal lives and beliefs, employers are effectively legislating people's behavior, and they're creating an online environment where people can't express their true beliefs, state their unvarnished opinions, be themselves, and that runs contrary to the free, communal ethos of the Web. Employers that exploit the Web to snoop into and judge people's personal lives infringe on everyone's privacy, and their actions verge on discrimination."
Enlightenment

Submission + - 9 Reasons Why Developers Think The CIO Is Clueless

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Finally, a Forrester analyst who understands the attitudes of software developers. Mike Gualtieri identifies nine behaviors managers need to steer clear of or risk being labeled "clueless" — from control freak tendencies to being a vendor puppet.

My favorite, however, is point #8: "the CIO collaborates to death," in which Gualtieri opines, "And, if you never watched Star Trek then you shouldn't even be a CIO.""
Programming

Do Women Write Better Code? 847

Posted by CmdrTaco from the better-than-me-at-least dept.
JCWDenton writes "The senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They'll intersperse their code ... with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. The code becomes a type of 'roadmap' for others who might want to alter it or add to it later, says McGrattan, a native of Ireland who has been with Ingres since 1992. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, 'they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,' she tells the Business Technology Blog. 'They try to obfuscate things in the code,' and don't leave clear directions for people using it later. "
Space

Submission + - How NASA Brings the Phoenix Mars Mission to Web (cio.com) 1

Submitted by
lgmac
lgmac writes: ""On May 25, NASA's Phoenix Mars lander will enter the Martian atmosphere at nearly 13,000 miles per hour, complete a complex seven-minute series of events, then land on the red planet to begin a three-month mission to explore Martian soil and ice. Some 500,000 people are expected to watch this on the Web: Few will be more interested than Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and one of the IT leaders responsible for making sure all the images and video from this high-profile mission get managed and delivered to NASA staffers and the public without a hitch." Take a look at her content management challenges and what she's using to solve them."
Programming

Submission + - Cisco' to open-source new messaging protocol

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Do you use SOAP, CORBA or EJBs? You might want to take a look at Etch, writes James Turner for CIO.com. It's language-, platform- and transport-agnostic, and Cisco is planning to release it as open source.

Certainly, it offers some technical benefits:

In addition to a simplified configuration, Etch also promises less overhead over the wire, compared to SOAP. In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip, company officials stated.


And the open source part? Cisco is in the process of deciding what license to use. "The intent is to use a less restrictive license than GPL, perhaps Apache or Mozilla. This is to allow commercial developers to incorporate Etch into products without licensing issues. A final announcement on the licensing decision will be available in the next month.""
Security

Submission + - What a Botnet Looks Like

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "CSO has an annotated, zoomable map of real botnet topologies showing shows the interconnections between the compromised computers and the command-and-control systems that direct them. The map is based on work by security researcher David Voreland; it has interactive controls so you can zoom in and explore botnets' inner workings. Some of these are kind of cool, in a geeky way.

Hackers use botnets for spamming, DDoS attacks and identity theft. One recent example is the Storm botnet, which may have comprised 1 million or more zombie systems at its peak.

As with any networking challenge, there are good (resilient) designs and some not-so-good ones. In some cases the topology may be indicative of a particular botnet's purpose, or of a herder on the run."
Businesses

Submission + - What If Yoda Ran IBM?

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "The big vendors beat down the doors of large companies to get business, but a small-company gets the brush-off. One CIO wonders how to harness the powers of the Force, and get some big-company expertise to help the little guy.

Yeah, this is written from the boss's point of view (because, duh, it's a CIO who wrote it), but it certainly applies to anybody working in a smaller company who needs attention from a big vendor (for sales, tech support, whatever):

Herein lies the problem. Just because Sequoia is a $25 million dollar organization (in revenue), that does not exempt us from some of the same challenges that larger organizations endure. Although $25,000 may not seem like a large amount to IBM, imagine if they had many customers similar in size to Sequoia.


This guy's solution? "Let's imagine (with apologies to George Lucas) what Yoda might do if he were running a large consultancy....""
Christmas Cheer

Which E-Commerce System Will Fail This Season? 63

Posted by Zonk from the big-of-a-dire-prediction dept.
Esther Schindler writes "Every year, there's some retailer whose e-commerce or supply chain fails. And it's a big deal, since the holiday shopping season can make or break their year. The IT challenge encompasses everything from server scalability to supply chain management to search engine optimization to database cajoling to business integration to... well, come to think of it, just about everything. To explore this, CIO.com has a big package of articles examining "Black Friday" and its implications, entitled E-Commerce and Supply Chain Systems Gird for Black Friday. Topics covered include online shopping and holiday IT failures. Despite all this—and at least ten years of industry experience in e-commerce sales—we all just know that someone will make yet another big mistake. I wonder who it'll be this year?"
Christmas Cheer

Submission + - Which e-commerce system will fail THIS season?

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Jingle jingle. Every year, there's some retailer whose e-commerce or supply chain fails. And it's a big deal, since the holiday shopping season can make or break their year. The IT challenge encompasses everything from server scalability to supply chain management to search engine optimization to database cajoling to business integration to... well, come to think of it, just about everything. Yet, "in the high-stakes season of holiday shopping, so much can—and has—gone wrong for retailers, airlines and others."

Online shopping is expected to top $33 billion this year, up 21 percent from $27 billion in 2006, according to a study from Forrester Research and Shop.org, a professional group for online retailers. Eleven percent of the 2,521 U.S. consumers surveyed said they would do at least 75 percent of their holiday shopping online.


CIO.com has a big package of articles examining "Black Friday" and its implications (complete with a red bow on top) full of seasonal IT joy, all rolled up in E-Commerce and Supply Chain Systems Gird for Black Friday. It includes several articles, including:

Despite all this—and at least ten years of industry experience in e-commerce sales—we all just know that someone will make yet another big mistake. I wonder who it'll be this year?"

Slashdot Top Deals

Time to take stock. Go home with some office supplies.

Close