rbourke

You mean you don't 'consciously' think about work... your brain is actually still joining dots in the background 24/7... unless you stop it by using drugs!

Software engineers (and many other information workers) are lying to themselves if they think this is even possible (to segment).

Proof: a large number of breakthrough designs / problem solving occurs when I am in the shower, on the toilet, or lying in bed going to sleep... it has long been proven that information workers are solving problems 24/7 365.25 days a year - you are never paid 'by the hour' for your work - your brain is solving problems 24/7 non-stop.

Indeed, this is precisely why allowing staff to work from home and minimizing enforced 'attendance hours' works.

You want to blur the lines between work and life... quite simply because they are already blurred. It's like the infamous 80s/90s Waterfall SDLC - it's like trying to make the waterfall run uphill (all projects end up Agile in the end). So why fight the inevitable - you are only stressing yourself by doing that (as proven by the evidence in this article - the 'segmentation seekers' are trying to achieve the impossible!) - and it is medically proven that stress causes cancer, diabetes, heart disease... and death (2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine). Corollary to that: blur all of life and live healthy and happy, or attempt to segment and suffer stress and die painfully.

sockjs is better than socket.io if you're into WebSocket (streaming support etc).

Jpap invented a new more efficient JPEG codec - even faster than hardware encoders that use less efficient codecs. Also I think you can optimize hardware usage of iOS devices at the assembler level - it is not as locked down as Android.

The effectiveness of vaccines rely on 'herd immunity', that is: you need more than 90% of a population immunised to stop a disease spreading (as vaccines are never 100% effective)(also varies according to vaccine types/adjuvants and disease contagiousness)

So by not vaccinating your self/dependents you are actually extremely selfish as you are benefiting from herd immunity whilst at the same time avoiding the (small) side reactions each vaccine may have. This is one of the most selfish things you could ever do.

I.e. even within North America there are many different accents that would be foreign to others living elsewhere in North America.

Back in Australia there are many distinguishable accents - many I detest; yet just because I find them foreign in no way make me racist.

There is a fine, but definite, line to cross for a comment to be racist, and pg did not cross that line.

The author fails to interpret the word 'foreign' correctly and thereby fails in building a convincing main argument.

In this case, 'foreign' is not synonymous with overseas.

A foreign accent is any accent that is foreign to your brain - and obviously there is a multi-dimensional spectrum of 'foreign-ness'.

The author has erred in his judgement, however I can see now why other non-native-English speakers would easily make the same mistake.

The irony of misunderstanding a topic about the importance of communication!

100% agree with pg on this (and no I don't always agree with everything)...

Most problems in life are as a result of miscommunications and associated false assumptions, whether they be in business, marriages, or friendships.

Anything you can do to increase the fidelity of communication quite simply: must be done.

Before I read the news about this I was about to write my first ever blog post about the symbiosis between DNA health and pair programming - the link between the two... have a guess?! Quality of communication.

You see there is ongoing debate amongst the Agile software development community as to what methodologies are most helpful; test-driven-development, refactoring, code reviews, static code analysis...

I maintain that that start-ups have the edge mainly because there is more pairing (pair-programming / pair-design / pair-refactoring / pair-testing) than there currently is in most software shops - and the reason this is so effective is the boost it gives to communication...

Now the DNA angle you ask, well in 2009 a team won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for proving that chronic stress inhibits the brain from releasing Telomerase that repairs the Telomeres that protect the end of your chromosomes during cell-division (crossing over). Guess what causes most workplace stress - miscommunication... and in software also the fact that you are often unfortunately forced to work alone. Start-ups force you to work together and that is why you are healthier and live longer and, incidentally, write better software ;-)

...probably some bot-net-master out there rubbing his hands together going 'ok, well that proves the cyber-weapon works... now time to find some paying customers :)'

I vaguely remember reading that they (the Ericsson patents) were included in the latest VSDL2 specs.

Could be rolled out as part of the NBN pending Australia's election result.