135373951
submission
jmcbain writes:
The benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average, a selection of 30 companies that aims to represent US industries at large, is going to have its largest change in seven years. Notably, Salesforce will replace Exxon on the DJIA (and Amgen and Honeywell will replace Pfizer and Raytheon), marking the end of Exxon's 92-year stay on the index. CNBC notes that Exxon's removal is a sign of the times, "as the company — and energy sector broadly — falters, a weakness made all the more apparent by strength in technology names." Analysts observe that "five tech stocks — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook — are individually larger than the entire U.S. energy sector". But why is this change happening right now? It's apparently due to Apple's upcoming 4-for-1 stock split on August 31, which will significantly reduce the DJIA's exposure to the technology sector. “Basically Apple — by itself — took the technology [weighting] within the Dow down from 27.6% to 20.3%. It’s a significant decline,” Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC. “By adding Salesforce, you can come back to 23.1% of the Dow being in technology.”
128676280
submission
jmcbain writes:
In many societies, handshakes are a gesture of friendliness. How many times have you shaken hands when meeting new engineering professionals? Probably quite a lot. However, given what we've seen with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, it's time for a new way to greet people. According to a CNBC article, Anthony Fauci, the head advisor of the USA's task force on the coronavirus, says "I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you. Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country." Other scientists agree with Fauci. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group has been trying to put an end to handshakes for nearly three decades. He suggests tilting or bowing your head to greet another person like people did many decades ago. “When men greeted other people [back in the day], they raised tor tipped their hat,” he says.
127962296
submission
jmcbain writes:
When Facebook launched its Portal hardware product line for in-home video communication in 2018, people accused the company of being tonedeaf to the privacy uproar stemming from the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Tech reviewers almost universally dismissed the product, saying "No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV," "Trust Fail," and "Is it really a good idea to pitch people on a Facebook-powered camera and microphone in your home?" However, during this period of shelter-in-place, Facebook's previously-beleaguered product has found an opportunity to shine. CNBC reports that "with people stuck indoors and seeking the best way to stay in touch with family and friends, the Portal TV is completely sold out on Facebook’s website and from retailers such as Best Buy." Facebook further mentions that "We’re pleased that we can help people connect with family, friends and colleagues during this time."
121175384
submission
jmcbain writes:
In a blog post last week, Dan Amman, the CEO of Cruise Automation (General Motors' self-driving car division), laments the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of cars as we know them today. He says "here we are, living in a state of cognitive dissonance with exactly this — the human-driven, gasoline-powered, single-occupant car — as our primary mode of transportation". He notes that public transportation is still useful but ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are only contributing to the problem. He says the only way moving forward is self-driving cars.
94676743
submission
jmcbain writes:
Machine learning / artificial intelligence skills are in hot demand right now, and it's driving up already-high salaries Silicon Valley. "Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence", writes the New York Times, and "typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock." The NY Times notes there are several catalysts for rocketing salaries that all come down to supply and demand. There is competition among the giant companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, and Uber) as well as the automative companies wanting help with self-driving cars. However, the biggest issue is the supply: "Most of all, there is a shortage of talent, and the big companies are trying to land as much of it as they can. Solving tough A.I. problems is not like building the flavor-of-the-month smartphone app. In the entire world, fewer than 10,000 people have the skills necessary to tackle serious artificial intelligence research, according to Element AI, an independent lab in Montreal."
89391353
submission
jmcbain writes:
Are you a software programmer who voted in a recent Slashdot poll that a robot/AI would never take your job? Unfortunately, you're wrong. Microsoft, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, is developing such an AI. This software "can turn your descriptions into working code in seconds. Called DeepCoder, the software can take requirements by the developer, search through a massive database of code snippets and deliver working code in seconds, a significant advance in the state of the art in program synthesis." Another article describes program synthesis as "creating new programs by piecing together lines of code taken from existing software — just like a programmer might. Given a list of inputs and outputs for each code fragment, DeepCoder learned which pieces of code were needed to achieve the desired result overall." The original research paper can be read online.
85376041
submission
jmcbain writes:
The Verge reports that a security researcher at DefCon outlined a number of attacks targeting Samsung Pay, Samsung's digital payment system that runs on their smartphones. According to the article, the attack "focuses on intercepting or fabricating payment tokens — codes generated by the user's smartphone that stand in for their credit card information. These tokens are sent from the mobile device to the payment terminal during wireless purchases." In a response, Samsung said that "in certain scenarios an attacker could skim a user's payment token and make a fraudulent purchase with their card", but that "the attacker must be physically close to the target while they are making a legitimate purchase."
76215999
submission
jmcbain writes:
I am an software engineer for a client-server user account system handling both Web and smartphone clients. I have been searching for definitive and crystal-clear best practices for managing user account and password data using open-source software, but I have only cobbled together a complete picture from dozens of websites. I currently have a system that sends passwords over SSL and performs bcrypt hashing for storage and authentication checking at the server side. Is that good enough? The recent Ashley Madison breach and the exposure of MD5-hashed passwords (as opposed to bcrypt) has me worried again. Can someone please suggest a definitive, cookbook-style Web resource or book on how to use open-source software to handle user passwords for multiple client-server scenarios? I would like answers to questions such as: Where do I perform hashing (smartphone/web client or server)? What hash algorithm should I use? How do I store the hashes? How can clients recover forgotten passwords? etc.
75169935
submission
jmcbain writes:
In April 2015, Dan Price, the CEO of online payments company Gravity Payments based in Seattle, announced that all employees would have their salary bumped up to a minimum $70,000. Slashdot covered this news. Since that time, however, things have not gone well. Some employees quit because they felt it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises. Furthermore, after reducing his own salary from $1M to $70K, Mr. Price is now renting a house ‘to make ends meet’. On an unrelated note, Mr. Price's brother, who is a co-founder of the company, is suing him.
69714687
submission
jmcbain writes:
Today, Apple reported its financial results for the quarter ending December 31, 2014. It posted $18 billion in profit (on $74 billion in revenue), the largest quarterly profit by any company ever. The previous record was $16 billion by Russia’s Gazprom (the largest natural gas extractor in the world) in 2011. Imagine how much better Apple could be if they open-sourced their software.
62388659
submission
jmcbain writes:
According to an article on Recode, Apple and IBM have announced a major partnership to bring mobile services to enterprise customers. "The deal calls for IBM and Apple to develop more than 100 industry-specific applications that will run on the iPhone and iPad. Apple will add a new class of service to its AppleCare program and support aimed at enterprise customers. IBM will also begin to sell iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will devote more than 100,000 people, including consultants and software developers, to the effort. Enterprise applications will in many cases run on IBM’s cloud infrastructure or on private clouds that it has built for its customers. Data for those applications will co-exist with personal data like photos and personal email that will run on Apple’s iCloud and other cloud services."
60762587
submission
jmcbain writes:
At WWDC 2014 today, Apple announced Swift, a new programming language. According to a report by Ars Technica: "Swift seems to get rid of Objective C's reliance on defined pointers; instead, the compiler infers the variable type, just as many scripting languages do. ... The new language will rely on the automatic reference counting that Apple introduced to replace its garbage-collected version of Objective C. It will also be able to leverage the compiler technologies developed in LLVM for current development, such as autovectorization. ... Apple showed off a couple of cases where implementing the same algorithm in Swift provided a speedup of about 1.3X compared to the same code implemented in Objective C."
34873775
submission
jmcbain writes:
I'm a former Microsoftie, and one thing I really despised about the company is the 'stack ranking' employee evaluation system that was succinctly captured in a recent Vanity Fair article on the company. Stack ranking is basically applying a forced curve distribution on all employees at the same level, so management must place some percentage of employees into categories of overperforming, performing on average, and underperforming. Even if it's an all-star team doing great work, some folks will be marked as underperforming. Frankly, this really sucked. I know this practice gained popularity with GE in the 1980s and is being used by some (many?) Fortune 500 companies. Does your company do this? What's the best way to survive this type of system?
32592241
submission
jmcbain writes:
Scott Thompson, Yahoo!'s CEO who was hired on January 4 of this year, was found to have lied about his CS degree from Stone Hill College. Investigation from an activist shareholder revealed that his degree was actually in accounting, and apparently Thompson had been going with this lie since the time he served as president of PayPal's payments unit.
5182725
submission
jmcbain writes:
In an op-ed piece for the NY Times, Robert X. Cringely asserts that nothing good will come out of the ongoing war between Microsoft and Google: "The battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google's Chrome Operating System — a direct attack on Microsoft Windows. This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It's just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check."
