ivenkys

It would be interesting to see if someone from SG or South Korea can chime in - i lived in SG 10 years ago and got 100Mbps downstream consistently.

Its actually one of the easiest O.S to install and work with when it comes to back-end servers for running network infrastructure type services (vpn, firewall, chat server, torrent server, dns, dhcp etc. etc.) - nothing comes close.

There is a specific / very specific case missing here - Working on the Trading Floor.

I have found that the general noise + energy level of a Floor gives you a natural high and it also drowns out individual Phone calls + conversations (which tend to be the most distracting). Additionally, in my case i only get interrupted via email and very rarely via IM, so it works for me.

Failing that - a quiet co-working space is best.

A good thing to have - better than the "assert" keyword in Java.

A definite plus move and the canny thing is locating it near the existing "Tech Triangle" - Shoreditch and moving Eastwards towards Stratford.

That part of London is cheap, well connected and has a large immigrant population. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in reality , but all the good signs are there.

Very nice site , quite fast.

One question - Is it a policy not to have the BSE or NSE not there, i could not find them under Asia.

My thinking is i would come to a site called Paisa.com looking for insights into the Indian markets - may be thats not the focus.

"Equally" is a loaded word but depending on the areas you work in, a software engineer can make a lot of money in Hedge Funds and IB's. The key differentiator is how "close" you are to the Front-Office.

My experience has been mainly with large/very large Financial institutions and this is almost always the case.

Manager gets money for Project , hires contractors , if project deemed successful , more money, more contractors , if project deemed failure , fire contractors move on. Cycle repeats.

Yes - he did cancel the Billion Dollar contract but not because I.T suddenly became a core competency. Non-front office facing I.T is being pushed to cheaper locations - primarily to Scotland and Southampton in the UK and is not considered a Core Competency , its outsourcing in a different form , its called IN-Sourcing.

The primary reason for the cancellation of the contract was the sheer amount of beauracracy IBM imposed. Their modus-operandi was - pick up staff who were working in "non-critical" areas and make them report to IBM managers. So now all-of a sudden if i need to get something from our DBA i can't walk upto him and ask him , i need to raise a request in a god-awful system which goes to his manager who would be sitting in a remote location in a different time-zone "managing" the work-load of the DBA who sits 5 feet away from me. In the majority of the cases for access to sysadmins and DBA's who were an integral part of your team before you now had to go through this route.

I will leave the readers to draw their own conclusions to this marvellous scheme.

I am not sure why this is not self-evident.

Practical Definitions: An Employee is part of the liability on a company's balance-sheet, its a cost to be pruned when the going gets tough. IN any large company worth its name he is just a number on the wrong side of the Balance Sheet, how good/loyal he is almost completely irrelevant.

A Contractor is a resource and his cost comes from the Project's budget. A manager's position is strengthened by managing ever larger(read costlier) projects , it is in the manager's interest to have more resources(read contractors). End Definitions.

Contractors by their very nature have no say in the corporate political power game thereby not threatening a manager's position. If something doesn't work out and its time for a scape-goat , contractors can very easily be dismissed , letting go of an employee is a much more onerous task.Given a choice a Manager will almost always opt for a contractor and to top it all of Contractors earn more cash.

Why would one want to be an employee in any large corporate entity ?

From what i know that was the original intention behind Slang and SecDB. Standardization of use across different departments and in some ways a way to subvert the politics.

Another day - another article on outsourcing. This is not particularly new or newsworthy i think. All kinds of grunt work across different industries will move to cheaper locations , its just inevitable.

I use both - Arch as a primary desktop and OBSD for my servers.

For all practical purposes you are correct.

I personally think of Arch as a collection of components loosely put together, you pick and choose what you want and they generally work together, there are no releases per-se, stable or otherwise. OBSD is a more coherently designed and engineered system, if you want a particular feature that is available in a new release , the logical way to get it is to update to a new release. If you don't want it , you can simply stay on your release and just apply the rare security patches that come through.

Sitting in your day-job having to use (a very flaky) ClearCase instance working on a monster code base that has no tests and has a non-deterministic build process. Think of the pay-cheque at the end of the month. Get paid, save/invest properly and use your evenings and weekends to work on "that" project.

Course, this is my personal motivational technique.

Mine : Remember a pay cheque goes a long way in alleviating the horrors of a corporate job. Not everyone can afford to be a struggling hacker waiting for the big pay-off.

I for one would pay good money to get a response like this.

He points out the errors,the incorrect assumptions and offers pointers of what to do. The general standard of discourse on most mailing lists tend to be quite a bit lower than this.

There is almost a sense of inevitability to all of this. The best and the brightest leave , the foot-soldiers get cut and the company culture/technology dies a slow,quiet death.

Sad but inevitable.

Not wanting to sound like good old days but "Seems weird" is about right , the voting patterns in the last year has been very different.

Relevant comments and topic submissions that you would think were of interest to "Hackers" just don't seem to get upvoted enough and in many cases simply drop out. This could be a sign of the changing demographics.

This seems to be a good heuristic , find out the ratio of the doers versus middle-managers , the higher this number is the better it is.

One other company that exhibits this nimbleness ala Apple despite its size is Goldman Sachs. From personal experience , among other things , GS gets this ratio right where it counts.

Inspirational stuff.

While agreeing with what you say - i would like to add one caveat - only if you are working in a Business Critical (read Front Office) role.

I can see a few use-cases where this can be quite useful especially if easy to use.

To me the more interesting aspect of it is the - Complete open-source , idea-open and source-code open. For a startup looking for funding (applying to YC) , this is new, i wonder how it would gell with the investors.

This is really a good and potentially very disruptive idea. It would be interesting to how far he can take this and monetize this.

I am going to take him up on his offer. I have specific requirements and i have a working prototype of the same , it would be interesting to see what he makes of it (provided of course he takes me up on it.)

No one is doing something more mind-numbing than me.

Waiting for I.T Support to give me Admin rights on my PC to get something/anything working.

This article doesn't say anything new that hasn't been said before and has been said better many times.

YES, outsourcing "almost" always doesn't work.

"taking on the problem head-on" - my reading of this was just the opposite.

They are attempting to put a different spin on the whole issue , its not that the phone has a faulty antenna or you are "holding it incorrectly" - its that we display incorrect number of signal bars, nonsense.

A correct- taking the problem head-on approach would be - "We apologize for the mistake and are aiming to rectify it in the next software update. Thank You."

More likely to be a combination of Python, C and/or Java. ITA uses a lot of C and Java as well.

This is the right approach.

If an interview is like dating/flirting then you don't start by asking the prospective partner about their life philosophy you start by talking about the weather.

"Amazingly enough, some candidates have actually failed this..." - that is just sad.

"Apparently the state-of-the-art is to have buttons for every floor to be outside the car, in the lobby." - Not sure if this is state-of-the-art but i used such a system in Singapore 10-12 years ago and it works very well. The only flaw is the lone-ranger problem who has to go to a floor no one else has to. In peak hours, such a person may/will have to wait for a much longer-than-usual amount of time.

Where is the "Take it For a Test Drive" , "See how it works" - Something along those lines. With new "webapps", its important to show the features,L&F that you bring to the table upfront without having to sign-up.