karlmdavis

For many of the poorest families, having children is a way to generate more household income and a retirement guarantee of sorts. (Apologies for how callous that sounds.)

It seems to me that the birth rate has gone down nearly everywhere, as income has gone up. I believe that's likely to apply to BI as well.

  >  This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:
  >    Linux 3.2

For anyone else wondering, Ubuntu 13.04 has the 3.8 kernel and 12.04.2 has the 3.5 kernel (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack).

The primary difference is that JSON isn't considered executable-- at least not by any Java JSON libraries that I've seen; it's just data.

(Yes, non-executable data can still deliver a malicious payload, e.g. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms04-02.... It's just much less common-- presumably because it's a much smaller attack surface.)

> It's probably not a great model for fiction where you have to pay writers and real actors

Check out "The Vault" that I linked to above. Very reminiscent of Lost and (so far) of excellent quality. I gather from some of what I've read that they've received outside funding for the show.

I've been thinking a bit lately about how web video content is beginning to become "legitimate." With series like Geek & Sundry's Tabletop [1], Penny Arcade's "reality show" [2], and hidden gems like YouTube's The Vault [3], I'm starting to reach a point where I could even cancel Netflix and just watch online web videos.

My guess is, that five years from now, both Netflix and YouTube will look like networks or producers than just distributors.

[1] http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/episodes/ [2] http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/pa-the-series [3] http://www.youtube.com/user/VaultShow

> if I had a choice between jenkins and jenkins-clone-built-with-something-else, all things being equal I would choose jenkins-clone-built-with-something-else

What on earth for? It's not as if the Java binaries on a (non-multi-user) server somehow make it less secure.

> Cutting your deployment time is equivalent to saving a one-off cost.

No, cutting deployment times produces ongoing savings in two respects:

1) Time is saved on deployment every release. That may be a small amount relative to the engineering that goes in ahead of releases, but it's definitely not a constant: it's proportional to the number of releases. When one considers not just major-version-every-six-month releases, but also maintenance releases, hotfixes, patches, etc., the time savings is increased even more.

2) As Joel discussed in the post, there are lost opportunity costs when a team develops a feature and does not immediately release it. Presumably, those features are intended to directly or indirectly increase sales/revenue: the sooner they are released, the sooner they can begin making the company money. This money is proportional to the number of features/improvements.

Investing the engineering effort required to achieve a shorter release cycle doesn't always make sense, but it definitely always produces value proportional to elapsed time.

No, I won't leave Facebook entirely over this, but I did just uninstall their application on my Android device. I simply don't trust them to have access to my contact list.

Frankly, I didn't trust them much before: I'm sure they were mining it, which is not something I would explicitly consent to. However, now I no longer trust them to not break it, so I've removed their access to it entirely.

> So what motivation does Google really have, to throw resources at the problems facing paid-app economics?

The 30% cut they get of each app sale: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/...

If you're talking about the ASPM regression introduced in 2.6.38, it looks like it's been resolved in a patch that should drop in 3.3.

Here's a Phoronix article on the issue and fix that covers it in detail: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux...

And here's (what I think is) the corresponding bug for Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/760131

Please note that even though that Ubuntu bug is marked as fixed, the following comment on it seems to call that into question: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/760131/...

Either way, it sounds like it will be fixed in 12.04.

Simple ETL jobs are mostly just E & L: extract the data from one system, load it into another.

Where things get complex is in the Transform aspect of some jobs. Mapping disparate schemas is complex, often messy work. Especially when one (or both) sides of the ETL job have poor/no primary keys, foreign keys, or even are just "mostly standard" CSV files [shudder].

Also: some ETL jobs can get quite large. I know one guy who had to create an ETL system that continuously moved data from one 1200-table system into some other system. Crazy.

Do you have citations for your $5-$10 figures?

Also, you're neglecting to account for the money they're making from the Android market: apps, movies, books, etc.

I'm wondering whether this matches with the geolocation data that their non-Facebook statistics mechanisms are reporting. Are Facebook's more—or less—accurate than other options out there? Has anyone seen any studies or data of this?

Keep in mind, though, that even "friction" will eventually cause a team's productivity to drop down to 0. The amount of friction that a given team can tolerate depends on the team members, of course, but especially on the size of the team (see: Mythical Man Month).

There comes a point that even a tiny bit of friction, spread out over enough developers, eventually causes the marginal productivity boost of adding new devs to reach 0. That can happen even without friction, but the friction exacerbates the trend.

> Puppet in particular is so simple that you would want it even if you were managing a single box.

You know... that's so blindingly obvious, that it had never even occurred to me. I'm in the middle of a home "IT refresh" right now and I'm trying to update the obscene amounts of documentation needed on how to configure every little thing.

Your comment just gave me a "the code is the documentation" kind of moment; realized I'd much rather have all that documentation checked into a Git repo somewhere as automateable configs. Thanks!

Looks like they support importing from Quicken Essentials for the Mac [1]-- might be a good alternative for the author.

[1] http://moneydance.com/blog/archives/434

In addition to containing an interesting categorization of technical debt, this article explains the entire concept of such debt in a very clear manner. Much appreciated, as I know of some managers that could benefit from reading this.

I've got the same thing myself: allergic to uncooked carrots and most fruits (e.g. pears, cantaloupes). Started when I was a teenager-- actually figured out what was going on for the first time eating a bag of baby carrots. I've tried organic pears and didn't notice any of the usual burning/itching. Still afraid to start eating them on a regular basis, though...

Just a minor suggestion: I'd add a tooltip for the Featured Papers' topics/categories. The big two letter acronyms took me a second to decipher before I noticed they're all CS-related. Would probably be a lot more confusing once (/if?) you've added non-CS topics to the set, as well.

I was going to challenge the assumption in the question but it seems that it might actually be correct: PMs and BAs do seem to make a bit more, on average. [1, 2, 3] At least, if one trusts salary.com's figures-- I can never decide if I should or not.

Nonetheless, I don't think the salary differences there are huge, or unreasonable. While I'm passionate about the importance of excellent engineering, I think excellent project management (and to a lesser extent, business analysis) is just as crucial to a business' success. Coders (myself included) tend to focus on the technical challenges of a project to the exclusion of the "why" behind it. As an illustration, I'm reminded of the frequent articles here and on proggit about programmers who built some awesome sprocket, only to later realize that there wasn't a market or need for the sprocket.

There's also a lot of truth to lionhearted's point that programmers often aren't the best negotiators. His advice is awesome and of the best variety: encouraging folks to make themselves more valuable by actually generating more value.

[1] http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/Programmer-V-Salary-Detai... [2] http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/Business-Systems-Analyst-... [3] http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/Project-Manager-III-Salar...