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Businesses

Ask Slashdot: Best Practices For Starting and Running a Software Shop? 176

Posted by Soulskill from the have-a-lot-of-patience dept.
An anonymous reader writes: I'm a systems architect (and a former Unix sysadmin) with many years of experience on the infrastructure side of things. I have a masters in CS but not enough practical exposure to professional software development. I'd like to start my own software product line and I'd like to avoid outsourcing as much as I can. I'm seeking advice on what you think are the best practices for running a software shop and/or good blogs/books on the subject.

To be clear, I am not asking about what are the best programming practices or the merits of agile vs waterfall. Rather I am asking more about how to best run the shop as a whole. For example, how important is it to have coding standards and how much standardization is necessary for a small business? What are the pros and cons of allowing different tools and/or languages? What should the ratio of senior programmers to intermediate and junior programmers be and how should they work with each other so that nobody is bored and everyone learns something? Thanks for your help.
Encryption

ISPs Removing Their Customers' Email Encryption 245

Posted by Soulskill from the aggressively-anticonsumer dept.
Presto Vivace points out this troubling new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer's web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the U.S. and Thailand intercepting their customers' data to strip a security flag — called STARTTLS — from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco's PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.

Comment Re:What about electronics? (Score 5, Informative) 145

by riT-k0MA (#47878567) Attached to: X-Class Solar Flare Coming Friday
I contacted the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory a few minutes ago. Here's what I got from them:
Please be advised: the data is for South Africa, which is closer to the equator. Places closer to the poles will experience slightly stronger conditions.

Two CME's are heading this way. Precise time of impact not yet known. They should hit 12-13 September (South African Standard Time). Conditions should clear by Saturday afternoon SAST.

CME1:
Glancing blow. No need to worry about it, unless you have a satellite in space.

CME2:
Direct hit on earth.
GPS satellites are expected to be affected.
Communications equipment will probably be affected.
Transmission lines are not expected to be affected.
Electronics are not expected to be affected.
News

Low-Carb Diet Trumps Low-Fat Diet In Major New Study 588

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can-pry-my-cereal-from-my-cold,-dead-hands dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports on a new study (abstract) showing that low-carb diets have better health benefits than low-fat diets in a test without calorie restrictions. "By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass — even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity. While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat. They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing,' Dr. Mozaffarian said. 'Your balance of lean mass versus fat mass is much more important than weight. And that's a very important finding that shows why the low-carb, high-fat group did so metabolically well.' ... In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides — a type of fat that circulates in the blood — plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group. Blood pressure, total cholesterol and LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, stayed about the same for people in each group."
Businesses

Comcast Training Materials Leaked 251

Posted by Soulskill from the how-to-be-a-jerk-in-3-easy-steps dept.
WheezyJoe writes: The Verge reports on leaked training manuals from Comcast, which show how selling services is a required part of the job, even for employees doing tech support. The so-called "4S training material" explicitly states that 20 percent of a call center employee's rating for a given call is dependent on effectively selling the customer new Comcast services. "There are pages of materials on 'probing' customers to ferret out upsell opportunities, as well as on batting aside customer objections to being told they need to buy something. 'We can certainly look at other options, but you would lose which you mentioned was important to you,' the guide suggests clumsily saying to an angry customer who doesn't want to buy any more Comcast services." Images of the leaked documents are available on the Verge, making for fun reading.

Comment Re:inb4 (Score 1) 200

by riT-k0MA (#47695215) Attached to: Involuntary Eye Movement May Provide Definitive Diagnosis of ADHD

Having inattentive ADHD can be very painful. You can really honestly want to just do it. But as soon as you start, you find yourself either getting overcome with immobilizing dullness, or you simply can't help but to jump to some other "temporary" distraction like surfing the www, to get yourself perked up. Only to discover later that the whole day is shot and you've accomplished nothing.

That's more or less how I feel, except that it actually 'hurts' (the best way I can describe it) to concentrate on 'boring' tasks.

Comment Re:What Type (Score 2) 90

I know you were making a joke, but before 1986 surgery (including major surgery) on infants was routinely performed without anaesthesia (they used a paralytic to keep the infant still), as it was thought that anaesthetic were harmful to infants and infants did not have a fully developed nervous system necessary to feel pain. For the same reasons infants and children were denied pain medication.
Turns out that not only do infants feel pain like adults, but they still felt the pain from surgery as adults. The pain and trauma never went away so most of these adults suffer from a form of PTSD.

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