pwaring

> Twitter aren't stupid

Twitter is run by people, and sometimes people make decisions which are, either at the time or in hindsight, stupid. The argument that companies won't do something because it will damage them has been proved wrong so many times in the past.

I'm not saying that this particular decision is stupid, but the idea that companies always act in some kind of enlightened self-interest make the right decisions to do so is just plain wrong.

The benefit of Scheme over C is that people are less likely to have experienced it before university/college. We were taught Java and C/C++ in CS, but the problem was that many people already knew them, so you ended up with a situation where half the students were bored and the other half had no idea what the lecturer was talking about.

You don't have to obligate them, if the CEO has a notice period but wants to leave early and the company is happy with that, they can always waive the notice period.

I'm so glad I live in the EU, where you generally don't see clauses like this (except within probationary periods).

"Certificates are only valid for a single domain, after all"

Actually that's not the case, you can get single certificates which cover different domains, using the Subject Alternative Name field.

How enforceable are they in other states? I know in the UK there have been a few test cases which seem to have resulted in the interpretation that you can only enforce one if it would otherwise be detrimental to the ex-employer (e.g. starting a new business or taking your contacts with you), otherwise people would find it difficult to move jobs within an industry because you'd almost always be going to a company who could be classed as a competitor.

Even if non-competes are enforceable, sometimes it will make more sense for a company to let an employee go straightaway anyway, rather than having them hang around twiddling their thumbs with no motivation.

"You work from home so you can put in 2 hours work, accomplish as much as anyone else did"

Agreed. I'm the only technical person in the company - if I went into the office every day I would spend half my time being asked to fix printers, 'can you just take a quick look at this?' etc. which would kill my productivity.

The other problem for me with 'being seen' is that I spend a lot of my time planning relative to writing code - e.g. for a major project I might spend half the time thinking about how to break down the problem into chunks which can be dealt with individually, then chaining them together for the final result. From an outsider's point of view, it would look like I was just sitting at a desk doodling all day. So it's actually better for me to announce a new feature every so often, because that output looks productive, whereas the process of producing it doesn't.

Having done home and in-office working, I've found that if it's a company of engineers (including managers with that background) then I prefer working the office, because I get to converse with like-minded people, and they understand that sometimes days can go by without churning out vast quantities of code. If I'm working for a company where the technical side is less central, then working from home tends to win out.

Presumably there are some advantages to remaining private since there are plenty of large US corporations which choose to do so:

http://www.forbes.com/private

I couldn't find any reliable sources for what the advantages were though.

It would also be good to extend the mentions beyond just codebreakers, including the Royal Navy personnel who boarded damaged U-boats in order to retrieve code books and other equipment, not knowing if the vessel would sink at any minute.

It's not just large businesses. About 1/3 of our users use IE7, although thankfully there's hardly anyone still on IE6. About 1/2 are still on XP (NT 5.1). Some of these are small companies with <10 employees.

"Uber large business and government is were the users are hiding"

Agreed. About 1/3 of our users - all of whom are insurers or brokers - use IR7

You could do it with Alpha Centauri - I seem to remember an article by Firaxis where they explained putting in this feature so they could tweak a parameter, set the AI off and see what effect it had.

I can reproduce it on my Ubuntu laptop (amd64 precise), so it definitely exists.

Can anyone view the MySQL bug report linked to from the email? I get 'access denied' each time I try.

It depends what version they are using. My local dev machine (using Precise) is vulnerable, so Slicehost customers running a more recent version than Hardy might be affected.

"In a dynamically typed language 201/2 will give you 100.5"

Not necessarily. Python gives 100, PHP gives 100.5, Perl gives 100.5, Ruby gives 100.

Edit: Versions are Python 2.7.3, PHP 5.3.10, Perl 5.14.2 and Ruby 1.8.7, all as shipped with Ubuntu Precise.

Will there not be a time lapse whilst you run bcrypt on all the existing hashes to update your users table? Given that bcrypt is intentionally 'slow', this might be a problem for applications with large numbers of users (albeit a one-off cost).

I agree that for small sites, changing the auth check and updating all the existing rows (and deleting/overwriting the old hashes) is probably the best solution though.

Card fees depend on how big you are though. Large UK supermarkets have no minimum purchase amount for credit cards, because they have the clout to negotiate a better deal. Facebook is probably big enough to do the same.

Not sure about 'best', but the way I go about it is to measure the total time required for an application to complete a task, then attempt to measure the individual components (time spent in PHP, data transfer, rending on client side etc.) and keep narrowing it down until you find the exact cause, such as a database query which requires optimisation.

"Identify bottlenecks" - I hope this is the first topic covered. There's no point in fiddling about with PHP if the actual bottleneck is the fact that you're sharing a slow connection with dozens of other companies or are hosted on the opposite side of the world to most of your customers.

Having said that, I'm looking forward to the book, as there doesn't seem to have been much on this topic since the O'Reilly books on scaling web applications (2006 I think).

Yes, FILE is less identifiable than file. All the letters are the same height and have similar shapes with all-caps, whereas lowercase letters have more variety and your brain can recognise the shape of words rather than looking at every single letter.

The Wikipedia page for word recognition has some useful links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_recognition

The closest PHP has to CPAN is PEAR (http://pear.php.net). It stalled for a long time, although development seems to have picked up a bit now that everything is on GitHub (https://github.com/pear/)

Unfortunately though, a lot of the papers that turn up in Google Scholar are behind paywalls. It is very expensive to get hold of academic papers if you don't work/study somewhere with an institutional licence (anything from $10 upwards per paper).

Thanks for the links - looks like the COBOL jobs are not promoted as much (I couldn't find any on the four bank sites I looked at) but still there, and reasonably well paid too.

You can write readable Perl, just like you can write secure PHP. The fact that a large number of people don't is not necessarily a failing of the language.

Is COBOL still used by banks? The people I know who work in two different major UK banks suggest everything is Java now, with Oracle as the preferred database solution.

Or maybe they want you to buy the print version? (I have a copy, but have never actually got round to reading it).

Global penetration is only useful if you can make money from it though, and it brings the problems of operating in multiple countries with different currencies, cultures, legal systems etc.

Lots of the companies referenced in the feature have stayed in their home market for a good reason.

Insider trading (and the wider 'market abuse') can be extremely difficult to prove. The FSA fines a handful of people each year, and prosecutes even fewer.

If firms chose not to trade, when they otherwise would have done (which seems to be the case here), based on insider information, that is nigh on impossible to prove.

You could, but that solution isn't of much help to someone with an existing .NET/SQL Server application. Making a few tweaks is probably a lot cheaper than a wholesale change to a different database server.