Posts by NibblyPig

BT to spell out contract price hikes in pounds and pence

Ridiculous

They want all the benefits of a two year fixed contract without the downside of locking in the price.

They should be forced to pick one.

Microsoft pushes for more women in cybersecurity

Erm

"When I sued Microsoft for gender discrimination in pay and promotions, it was because women are historically hired at lower levels and salaries than men and are promoted at a much slower rate," Luta Security founder and CEO Katie Moussouris told The Register. "Our careers languish despite better education, experience, and performance compared to our male peers. This is still true across every industry."

Yikes. Suing for something historic doesn't make sense. I can't sue you for treating me badly because 30 years ago you treated people like me badly.

Likewise, interesting how women suffer despite being *better* than men. Like this whole time, the industry has been suffering due to using, according to her, the inferior gender (men).

The article also neglects to mention that her lawsuit failed. So to assert those things as correct after losing in court trying to prove them to be true, is another yikes from me.

Google did an internal pay review to address the gender pay imbalance and found that actually it was favouring anyone that wasn't a man.

Food for thought.

Four women seek release from forced arbitration to sue Infosys for widespread gender discrimination

Be careful what you sign, contracts aren't just for fun.

Can't really understand why a company would release someone from a contract in order to let those people bring a lawsuit...

Perhaps the real issue is that the clause shouldn't be legal? I don't know the particulars about what they signed but I read all my contracts carefully and know exactly how much of the shaft I'm getting (usually ridiculous handcuff clauses that are technically not legal but are impossible to contest).

Women are 40% of Indian STEM grads and in just 14% of tech jobs. Not good enough, says VP Naidu

Cultural, perhaps

Can't speak for India itself but on my course 15 years ago there were only three women. One was Indian and she was smart and did well, graduated computer science, dated people in England, then immediately upon graduating got married to someone back in India and had three children and never worked again.

The way it happened kind of felt like it was a cultural expectation, especially since she was dating people in the UK but it all ended in an instant. I don't know if that was just a one off but it isn't the first time I've seen that kind of behaviour.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Couple of years ago I wrote an e-mail service connected to our application, and thanks to a fault, it got stuck in a loop sending error messages to my boss.

Kudos(?) to SendGrid, which didn't even wince under the sheer load of infinite e-mails, going to my boss's phone. It was an iphone, and couldn't even use it because the sheer volume of incoming mail rendered it inoperative, except for incessantly beeping new e-mail over and over.

I believe he took it into an apple store, where they were able to disable the e-mail client long enough for him to call me. Much to my relief he wasn't angry, just concerned. I switched off the service until it could be fixed, and when I looked through the source code, I saw my own TODO saying to implement something just in case it goes rogue. It was a startup, fast and loose, get the product out of the door so there were many such TODOs.

When I went back there four years later, for a brief bit of work, I found the same TODO staring me in the face, along with pretty much every other one I'd put in. Some habits never change.

Author of infamous Google diversity manifesto drops lawsuit against web giant

Re: re: evil Corp

Your chrome browser, the ad trackers linked to your IP, your wifi name/IP likely mapped and cross referenced with your android device, your google search history cross referenced with your browser capabilities, IP address, ad and tracking cookies, the google authenticator you use to log in, google maps, location services, the fact you set your dns to 8.8.8.8 one time three years ago because your ISP was having problems, your social media account crossreferenced with friends that have used your AP while visiting your house, or perhaps strangers that drove past your house with an android phone in their pocket. That one time you typed your password into google search accidentally. If you use Chrome, all of your passwords are probably saved onto Google servers anyway though. The presentations you write in google docs, that one time you google translated a document. Google calendar syncing your appointments with your google location history, plus things you bought like that sofa using Google Pay, not to mention your app store purchases. But you escaped on a nice holiday you compared the prices of using Google Flights, but it all became a lot easier once you installed a Google Home wiretap in your house, it was easier to hear than the one installed in your phone. But at least when you browse the news, in firefox, on your work PC, it's not linked to google, although hold on google AMP has replaced all the news sites with their own cached version. Plus your e-mail is on G-Suite, your files are on Google Drive, and the websites you use are powered by Google Charts. Your thermostat and home automation are powered by Google Nest, and your driving instructions come from Google Maps or Google Waze. Half of your mobile apps were written in Google Flutter/Dart, and many websites you visit are protected with Google reCapcha. At least you can unplug though and simply use your Android powered TV box. Or avoid TV and just kick back and go directly for some Google YouTube.

Re: Hmmmm

Amazing, I always imagined that there would be a term coined to describe what happened at Google with his lawsuit, which is a fascinating read for anyone that doesn't know exactly what went on.

TLDR is lots of discrimination and silencing of people's views when they did not fall in line. Plus this 'purity spiral' of social justice, forcing white males not to attend or speak at events, forced hiring of minorities and quotas, etc.

At the risk of starting a total poo storm, I think you're misinformed if you think he was a 'sexist dick'.

Pointing out gender differences and biased diversity hiring practices, which he produced when he was asked for feedback, is not sexist. We can't advance as a species until we acknowledge biological differences exist between men and women.

As for being offensive, you can offend *someone* with just about anything these days, people say "I'm offended" like it means they have some kind of rights that mean you have to change what you say.

Then again, in some circles it is offensive and sexist to say that men can't give birth. So I think we have a long way to go. Plus, people like yourself won't even consider it for discussion. It has to be shut down immediately with cries of 'sexism!'. Men are stronger than women? Sexism! I won't even look at the research! How dare you! You're probably an incel! This is the state of the internet. Then we wonder why happiness is going down overall for both genders, perhaps it is connected? But we can't look. Because if we find out it is, we'll be no platformed and called sexist.

If you google his position you'll find articles with reliable sources that back up what he has to say. Unfortunately, sometimes facts can be sexist, in the advanced 21st century that will probably one day be known as the dark ages.

Evil Corp wins again

We're number two! Microsoft's Edge browser slips past Firefox in latest set of NetMarketShare figures

Switched to Chromedge, never looked back.

Once upon a time, Microsoft were evil and Google were not evil, and we switched to Google to save us. Using IE to download Chrome as its only task became a popular meme.

Now, I use Chrome to download Edge, then wipe Chrome clean off my computer.

Google has become E-Corp, infesting every part of peoples lives and harvesting insane quantities of data which it links together.

I only wish I could de-google my phone.

Google with its anticompetitive practices made sites pretty much unusable in IE, hence one of the major reasons for shifting to Chromium. And even then, it deliberately gimps YouTube if your user agent string is ChromiumEdge.

"Do No Evil". Hah! They've become the monsters they swore never to be.

I just need to get my passwords out of Google and switch away from gmail now. It is ludicrous how much of my data goes through them.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

We tried to get Quake to run on some of the computers, but it errored saying it required a 'maths co-processor'! Whereas C&C ran fine. Go figure!