ivenkys

It would be interesting to see if someone from SG or South Korea can chime in - i lived in SG 10 years ago and got 100Mbps downstream consistently.

Its actually one of the easiest O.S to install and work with when it comes to back-end servers for running network infrastructure type services (vpn, firewall, chat server, torrent server, dns, dhcp etc. etc.) - nothing comes close.

There is a specific / very specific case missing here - Working on the Trading Floor.

I have found that the general noise + energy level of a Floor gives you a natural high and it also drowns out individual Phone calls + conversations (which tend to be the most distracting). Additionally, in my case i only get interrupted via email and very rarely via IM, so it works for me.

Failing that - a quiet co-working space is best.

A good thing to have - better than the "assert" keyword in Java.

A definite plus move and the canny thing is locating it near the existing "Tech Triangle" - Shoreditch and moving Eastwards towards Stratford.

That part of London is cheap, well connected and has a large immigrant population. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in reality , but all the good signs are there.

Very nice site , quite fast.

One question - Is it a policy not to have the BSE or NSE not there, i could not find them under Asia.

My thinking is i would come to a site called Paisa.com looking for insights into the Indian markets - may be thats not the focus.

"Equally" is a loaded word but depending on the areas you work in, a software engineer can make a lot of money in Hedge Funds and IB's. The key differentiator is how "close" you are to the Front-Office.

My experience has been mainly with large/very large Financial institutions and this is almost always the case.

Manager gets money for Project , hires contractors , if project deemed successful , more money, more contractors , if project deemed failure , fire contractors move on. Cycle repeats.

Yes - he did cancel the Billion Dollar contract but not because I.T suddenly became a core competency. Non-front office facing I.T is being pushed to cheaper locations - primarily to Scotland and Southampton in the UK and is not considered a Core Competency , its outsourcing in a different form , its called IN-Sourcing.

The primary reason for the cancellation of the contract was the sheer amount of beauracracy IBM imposed. Their modus-operandi was - pick up staff who were working in "non-critical" areas and make them report to IBM managers. So now all-of a sudden if i need to get something from our DBA i can't walk upto him and ask him , i need to raise a request in a god-awful system which goes to his manager who would be sitting in a remote location in a different time-zone "managing" the work-load of the DBA who sits 5 feet away from me. In the majority of the cases for access to sysadmins and DBA's who were an integral part of your team before you now had to go through this route.

I will leave the readers to draw their own conclusions to this marvellous scheme.

I am not sure why this is not self-evident.

Practical Definitions: An Employee is part of the liability on a company's balance-sheet, its a cost to be pruned when the going gets tough. IN any large company worth its name he is just a number on the wrong side of the Balance Sheet, how good/loyal he is almost completely irrelevant.

A Contractor is a resource and his cost comes from the Project's budget. A manager's position is strengthened by managing ever larger(read costlier) projects , it is in the manager's interest to have more resources(read contractors). End Definitions.

Contractors by their very nature have no say in the corporate political power game thereby not threatening a manager's position. If something doesn't work out and its time for a scape-goat , contractors can very easily be dismissed , letting go of an employee is a much more onerous task.Given a choice a Manager will almost always opt for a contractor and to top it all of Contractors earn more cash.

Why would one want to be an employee in any large corporate entity ?

From what i know that was the original intention behind Slang and SecDB. Standardization of use across different departments and in some ways a way to subvert the politics.

Another day - another article on outsourcing. This is not particularly new or newsworthy i think. All kinds of grunt work across different industries will move to cheaper locations , its just inevitable.

I use both - Arch as a primary desktop and OBSD for my servers.

For all practical purposes you are correct.

I personally think of Arch as a collection of components loosely put together, you pick and choose what you want and they generally work together, there are no releases per-se, stable or otherwise. OBSD is a more coherently designed and engineered system, if you want a particular feature that is available in a new release , the logical way to get it is to update to a new release. If you don't want it , you can simply stay on your release and just apply the rare security patches that come through.

Sitting in your day-job having to use (a very flaky) ClearCase instance working on a monster code base that has no tests and has a non-deterministic build process. Think of the pay-cheque at the end of the month. Get paid, save/invest properly and use your evenings and weekends to work on "that" project.

Course, this is my personal motivational technique.

Mine : Remember a pay cheque goes a long way in alleviating the horrors of a corporate job. Not everyone can afford to be a struggling hacker waiting for the big pay-off.