Alien54 notes a blog posting by old hand Bruce F. Webster on the current state of affairs in hiring in IT, focusing on what he calls the Dead Sea Effect. "Many large IT shops... work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications... will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires. Instead, what happens is that the more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave -- to evaporate, if you will. They are the ones least likely to put up with the frequent stupidities and workplace problems that plague large organizations; they are also the ones most likely to have other opportunities that they can readily move to. What tends to remain behind is the 'residue' -- the least talented and effective IT engineers."

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CleverMonkey writes "I'm a town representative to a newly created municipal group creating a new type of telco. This group has formed to build and operate a FTTH network, and provide both triple-play services and access to other providers, to over 20 mostly rural towns in East-Central Vermont. The project is novel because of the size of the network (a cable pass down every road within 600 square miles), the low-density of the area served, and the public-ownership/private-financing model that is being used. Some of the towns included in this group currently have nothing beyond 14.4 dial-up on a good day. This project began as a grassroots effort in a couple of towns and the name they chose was ECFiber — East-Central Fiber — or sometimes the East-Central Vermont Community Network. We hope that this network will grow beyond one corner of this state, and we would like a name that is both descriptive and flexible. What would you name a community-owned, cutting-edge, G-PON fiber-optic network covering every remote corner of two-dozen contiguous towns?"

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theodp writes "PC World reports that DHS has extended the time foreign graduates of US colleges can stay in the country and work to almost two-and-a-half years, an 'emergency' change that drew kudos from Microsoft and other H-1B visa stakeholders. Looks like when Bill Gates says 'Jump,' the government asks 'How high?' Bill Gates's Congressional Testimony, March 12, 2008: 'Extending OPT from 12 to 29 months would help to alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage. This only requires action by the Executive Branch, and Congress and this Committee should strongly urge the Department of Homeland Security to take such action immediately.' DHS Press Release, April 4, 2008: 'The US Department of Homeland Security released today an interim final rule extending the period of Optional Practical Training (OPT) from 12 to 29 months for qualified F-1 non-immigrant students.'"

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I winced when I heard the quote that's making the rounds this week in the political blogosphere. I didn't like it because unlike the Rev Wright controversy, I doubt if much good can come from it, and because my guy, Obama, was, imho, wrong. By his own standards, the comment was wrong, and I hope he gets why.

To equate geography with intellect is as wrong as to equate it with race, ethnicity, gender or age.

It may be true that there are some people who live in small towns in rural America who are bitter and closed-minded, who have bad lives and blame the badness on illegal immigrants, gay people who want to get married, or conspiracies to separate them from their guns. (I've deliberately overstated Obama's quote, to be in line with what people who don't like him react to.) But it certainly isn't true of all of them, and as long as there's one good person living there, it's unfair, it's wrong to make general statements about the class.

This came home when, on Twitter, I said I thought he was wrong, and a correspondent from Texas suggested it may be because I come from Berkeley and people from Berkeley are more "insulated" from some reality they aren't insulated from in Texas. I could have responded by saying something generally negative about people from Texas, and that would be on par with the kind of discourse we've been having in the US for the last few decades. I didn't. We have spirited political discussions in Berkeley, which disproves the idea that you can predict the way someone thinks by knowing they come from here.

Now I like Obama because he rejects this kind of thinking. He wants us to look at black people, and consider the possibility that they're smart, caring people who value the good things we believe in, education, good health, being kind to others, etc. He wants blacks to look at whites and not see superficial good-weather friends, people you can count on, brothers and sisters even. I could go on. This is my philosophy too. And after the election of 2004, I wrote that this time the middle of the country was insisting, over the objections of the two coasts, that we have to work with them before we can go where we think we need to go (i.e. get out of the Iraq misadventure). A high price to pay to get us to listen. And did we listen? Well, in his awful quote, Obama said no -- we aren't. Because when you reject people as a class, that's what ignorance is built out of, literally, it's how you ignore what's real, and respond to your beliefs, which are usually fairly negative. It's the opposite of respect, and it's wrong.

Now I believe that Obama is a good man, and really believes the things he says, but he's tired, even exhausted from the campaign and he slipped and made a mistake. If we believe our Presidents don't make mistakes, surely the last 15 years, two terms of Clinton and Bush, convinced us that our Presidents are very human and they make lots of mistakes, some very big ones. So, making a mistake certainly does not disqualify Obama.

The other two remaining candidates, Clinton and McCain have made far worse blunders, and have retracted them, and we've let them off the hook. I wonder if it's possible for Clinton to get up and say, okay, can we call it even. I did something dumb with the Bosnia story, and Obama did something dumb with this story about rural people clinging to superstition. I know I'd respect HRC about a billion percent more if she could do that. And it certainly seems within the realm of possibility that McCain might. Check out this ad he did about discourse in the United States and see if it doesn't put a lump in your throat. It's worth playing every time it seems the Republicans are about to sling some mud.



Yeah I'm optimistic. I think some good can and will come out of this.

bigwophh writes "Liquid cooling a PC has traditionally been considered an extreme solution, pursued by enthusiasts trying to squeeze every last bit of performance from their systems. In recent years, however, liquid cooling has moved toward the mainstream, as evidenced by the number of manufacturers producing entry-level, all-in-one kits. These kits are usually easy to install and operate, but at the expense of performance. Asetek's aptly named LCLC (Low Cost Liquid Cooling) may resemble other liquid cooling setups, but it offers a number of features that set it apart. For one, the LCLC is a totally sealed system that comes pre-assembled. Secondly, plastic tubing and a non-toxic, non-flammable liquid are used to overcome evaporation issues, eliminating the need to refill the system. And to further simplify the LCLC, its pump and water block are integrated into a single unit. Considering its relative simplicity, silence, and low cost, the Asetek LCLC performs quite well, besting traditional air coolers by a large margin in some tests."

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Believe It Or Not, I Care About You writes "According to a new study in the British Medical Journal which examined the search results for various suicide-related search terms, the most common results supported or encouraged suicide. Wikipedia was one of the most prevalent sources of information, particularly on suicide methods, although the Wikimedia Foundation itself does not encourage suicide. Other studies have shown that media coverage has an effect on suicide particularly with respect to influencing the method chosen. Interestingly, this study notes that suicide rates actually decreased with increased Web usage in England, perhaps because support is readily available to anyone who wants it."

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Meredith sez,

There's a bunch of FUD going around the internets today about orphaned works, thanks to this article by Mark Simon of Animation World Network. He's urging artists to write their Congresscritters about eeeeevil orphaned works legislation and screaming about how it will effectively invalidate copyright for everyone except big evil registrars.

The problem? There is no such legislation before Congress (there was a bill in 2006, but it was never voted on; Marybeth Peters of the Copyright Office recently spoke before a subcommittee, but that's not a bill), and Simon is flat-out wrong about every concern he raises.

I've distilled his article down to six key misconceptions, and explained why each is wrong.

This is a really well-written piece. I've gotten a ton of email about Simon's bizarre rant, and it's nice to have a single, central place to point people to. Link (Thanks, Meredith!)

Dave Knott writes "The Canadian federal government has blocked the $1.3-billion sale of the space technology division of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates to Alliant Techsystems, a major US defense contractor. Industry Minister Jim Prentice is quoted as saying he is 'not satisfied' the sale will be a net benefit for Canada. MDA is Canada's leading developer of space-based technology, including the famous CanadArm and the recently installed space station robot Dextre."

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Greg Maletic's added another poster to his collection of wonderful fan-made attraction art for Disneyland rides; this one's for Space Mountain. Link

See also: Fan-made Disneyland attraction posters (Thanks, Greg!)

A Bitchmeme is something that happens on weekends when new stories are in short supply so ideas that otherwise would be buried on Techmeme rise to the top. Usually they're people complaining about something or other which is why they're called Bitchmemes and not Happymemes or Sarcasticmemes.

This week's Bitchmeme is about comments on blogs and where they belong, on the blog, or on an aggregator. For example, when this item is viewed through FriendFeed they will allow comments on it "over there" and I'll probably miss them unless I go look for them. I will certainly miss the comments on Shyftr which I have never heard of until today and have never used, but from what I hear it does the same thing. Is this a good or bad thing? Well if you like to know what people think it's bad. If you ask a question in a post, as I often do, you might miss some good info.

But what we cast to the wind, someone will eventually gather for us. Before Technorati, all we had were referrer logs to find out who was talking about us. Technorati is a bit better. There will of course eventually be the equivalent of Technorati, which assembles in one place, all the comments about each blog post. Wouldn't be too hard to do.

But RSS 2.0, believe it or not, has a solution built-in, the <comments> element. If more blog publishing tools supported it, then FriendFeed et al could use it.

Let me walk through how it works.

1. Here's my RSS feed, and here's a screen shot showing the comments element on this post.

2. Here's an example of an aggregator that supports the comments element. If an item has comments, theres a little pencil icon next to it. Just click the pencil to go to the comments. Pretty simple, or so it seems.

Nothing more to it.

Those are my two cents.

PS: An example of a post of mine that ironically became a Bitchmeme. I say ironically because it was a bitch about how crap (e.g. that post) ends up on Techmeme cause of the cesspool nature of the so-called tech blogosphere. If you don't get the joke, don't bother, it's not actually that funny.

MrJones writes "In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the party."

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Boris sez, "A great video showing Bruce Sterling giving the closing talk at the conference 'Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign' in Potsdam, Germany. As usual, he creates a weird and wonderful vision of a technological and interface-driven future. The 'Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign' was one of the most important conferences on interaction design in 2007. All presentations from the conference are available as videos on the conference site."

Just listening to Bruce lay out the litany of devices that the mobile phone has replaced is a moment of sheer technological hilarity; and hearing him talk about why science fiction writers love talking computers (which all turn into Mr Clippy in the real world) is an eye-opening exercise in the difference between sensawunda and cognitive loading. Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

Today on Jon Taplin's blog, a sobering reality check on US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's irrational exuberance at the G-7:

Treasury Secretary Paulson, meeting with the G-7 Finance Ministers in Washington, tried to reassure them that the U.S. economic slump was only temporary.

He said he told his counterparts that checks from the stimulus package would go out in May and June and that they would add 500,000 to 600,000 jobs to the economy. He said that the federal government was helping more than a million homeowners keep their homes.

I worry that Paulson is engaging in reckless speculation about the future of the American job market. That somehow a flood of $600 checks next month from the government is going to lead to the creation of 600,000 new jobs is pure fantasy. That money is going to be used to pay down maxed out credit cards or keep cars from being repossessed. As Floyd Norris points out, the real jobless number (chart above) number for working men in America is not 4% but 13%. When someone gives up looking for work, the government no longer considers them unemployed–thus the huge discrepancy in the two figures.

Link

COredneck sends us a NYTimes story (registration may be required) about an Internet community solving a crime in less than 48 hours. An auto dealer in Calgary lends a car for a test drive — a 1991 Nissan Skyline GT-R. The test driver and another person don't return the car. The dealer then files a police report, but also posts a message about the stolen car on Beyond.ca, an automotive fan board. Many people who read the board keep their eyes out and find the car. They also use Facebook to find the suspect and his high school; and they use Google Maps to pinpoint the thief's location. They film the collar and post the video on Beyond.ca. The dealer says, "This guy has worldwide recognition for being a car thief for the rest of his life. The Internet is not going away."

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An anonymous reader writes "Industry regulator Ofcom, which yesterday launched the first phase of its review into public service broadcasting, is threatening to impose a tax on UK broadband ISPs to help resolve funding problems. The review covers all public service broadcasters, both publicly owned and commercial. Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards said: 'Public service broadcasting is at a crossroads. Viewers still want a mix of high quality UK-made content, but the traditional television model is not enough to meet all their needs. Today's proposals outline options for a securely-funded PSB future. Now is the time for a wide-ranging debate looking carefully and dispassionately at all the options.'"

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kylehase writes "CIO.com has a writeup about MySQL's 5.1 release planned for next week. Among the enhancements are many bug fixes from 5.0, some of which may increase performance 20% or more, as well as 'partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering.'"

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