By BeauHD from
Slashdot's bedrock-tradition department:
A user shares a report that details General Electric's rethinking of the annual raise. Bloomberg reports: "GE executives are reviewing whether annual updates to compensation are the best response to the achievements and needs of employees. The company may also scrap the longstanding and much-imitated system of rating staff on a five-point scale. Decisions on both issues may come within the next several months, spokesperson Valerie Van den Keybus said by phone." "We uncovered an opportunity to improve the way we reward people for their contributions," GE's head of executive development, Janice Semper, said in an e-mailed response to questions. It will involve "being flexible and re-thinking how we define rewards, acknowledging that employees and managers are already thinking beyond annual compensation in this space." In response to this news, ErichTheRed writes: First it was "stack ranking," the process where GE fires the bottom-rated 20% of the workforce every year. Now, a new HR trend may be brewing at GE that is destined to be copied by MBAs everywhere if it takes hold. Personally, in terms of cargo-cult HR trends, I'd take Google's open office nightmare over this one. What do you think this would do to employment stability if widely enacted? I can definitely see banks rethinking 30 year mortgages, for example...
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By manishs from
Slashdot's don't-write-it-off-just-yet department:
Chris O'Brien, reporting for VentureBeat: Making one of his biggest public appearances since returning to Pandora as CEO, Tim Westergren struck a defiant tone -- insisting that the company is not for sale and is, in fact, on the cusp of a reinventing itself. "We are on a path to do something big and something for the long-term," Westergren said when asked on stage about sale rumors. "Tha's why I got back in the saddle, so no plans for that." Pandora, with its Internet radio format, has been a music streaming pioneer. Founded in 2000, it survived the dot-com bust and enjoyed explosive growth following the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the ensuing smartphone era. Pandora's rise was capped by a big IPO in 2011. But as a public company, Pandora has struggled to show consistent profits and growth. It is often buffeted on one side by artists who claim they are not being paid fairly and on the other by new entrants such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon who offer on-demand streaming services.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's cut-down-to-size department:
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers want to replace transistors with vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes are nothing new, however the ones in development at Caltech's Nanofabrication Group are a million times smaller than the ones in use 100 years ago. "Computer technologies seem to work in cycles," Alan Huang, a former electrical engineer for Bell Laboratories, told the New York Times. "Some of the same algorithms that were developed for the last generation can sometimes be used for the next generation." Dr. Axel Scherer, head of the Nanofabrication Group, said to the New York Times on Sunday, "Ten years ago, silicon transistors could meet all our demands. In the next decade, that will no longer be true." He argues silicon transistors can only take us so far. Vacuum tubes, for comparison, use tiny metal tubes that can control the flow of electricity. They're especially intriguing to researchers as they can provide a better solution to silicon transistors as they can consume less power and take-up a much smaller footprint. The report mentions they have the potential to bring an end to Moore's Law, even if silicon transistors show no signs of disappearing. For example, Lockheed Martin published new cooling methods in March that could help cool chips with tiny drops of water. With that said, Boeing has invested in researching vacuum tube chips. They may appear in the aviation industry before 2020, but it's unlikely we'll see Caltech's research appear in smartphones anytime soon.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's persuasive-speaking department:
An anonymous reader writes: In response to Donald Trump's rhetoric, the "social news and entertainment company" BuzzFeed has decided to terminate an advertising deal with the Republican National Committee. The deal was for $1.3 million, a source close to BuzzFeed told POLITICO. The source said the reason was because of the website's employees. "[BuzzFeed could not countenance] having employees make ads, or working at the company and having our site promoting things, that limit our freedom and make it harder for them to live their lives," they said. The source said in response to whether or not BuzzFeed would rule out any Trump advertising: "In general, we have taken the position that we won't take ads for his presidential campaign." In a CNN article, RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer says, "Space was reserved on many platforms, but we never intended to use BuzzFeed." He added, "It is ironic that they have not ruled out taking money from a candidate currently under investigation by the FBI." The agreement between the RNC and BuzzFeed called for the GOP to "spend a significant amount on political advertisements slated to run during the fall election cycle," BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in an internal memo.
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By manishs from
Slashdot's in-the-meanwhile department:
An anonymous reader cites an article on USA Today: Selling a used, black-and-white printer through Craigslist seemed simple and straightforward to Doug Costello. It wasn't. What the 66-year-old Massachusetts man didn't know then is that he would spend the next 6 and a half years embroiled in a complicated and confusing legal dispute in Indiana over that printer, which, according to its buyer, was broken. He would find himself liable for about $30,000 in damages. He would pay a lawyer at least $12,000 in his battle to escape the legal mess. And it all started with a piece of hardware he sold online for about $40 in 2009. With shipping and other costs, the total was less than $75, according to court records.Gersh Zavodnik, the printer's buyer, has been described as "prolific, abusive litigant" who has brought dozens of lawsuits against individuals and businesses. He often asks for "astronomical" damages.
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By manishs from
Slashdot's not-the-best-moment department:
Ron Amadeo, reporting for Ars Technica (edited and condensed): Nest CEO Tony Fadell wasn't officially "fired" from Nest, but it certainly feels like it. In just the last few months, Nest has had to deal with reports of an "employee exodus," a string of public insults from Dropcam co-founder and departing Nest employee Greg Duffy, news that even Google supposedly didn't want to work with Nest on a joint project, and fallout from the company's decision to remotely disable Nest's deprecated Revolv devices. [...] It's hard to argue with the decision to "transition" Fadell away from Nest. When Google bought Nest in January 2014, the expectation was that a big infusion of Google's resources and money would supercharge Nest. Nest grew from 280 employees around the time of the Google acquisition to 1200 employees today. In Nest's first year as "a Google company," it used Google's resources to acquire webcam maker Dropcam for $555 million, and it paid an unknown amount for the smart home hub company Revolv. Duffy said Nest was given a "virtually unlimited budget" inside Alphabet. In return for all this investment, Nest delivered very little. Two-and-a-half years under Google/Alphabet, a quadrupling of the employee headcount, and half-a-billion dollars in acquisitions yielded minor yearly updates and a rebranded device. That's all.
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By manishs from
Slashdot's fake-it-if-you-can't-make-it department:
Svetlana Blackburn, a former senior finance manager for Oracle claims that the company has fired her for not "inflating" revenues in its cloud services division. She alleges that her bosses had instructed her to add "millions of dollars of accruals" for expected business "with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers." Oracle eventually inflated the numbers without her assistance, anyway, she adds. From NBC News report: The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by former Oracle senior finance manager Svetlana Blackburn, also revives longstanding questions about proper accounting when software and computer services are bought on a subscription basis rather than as a single package, analysts said. Those questions are becoming more urgent as companies including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP race to transform their businesses for an era in which customers no longer own and operate their own information technology systems and instead lease computing services and software from cloud vendors using vast data centers.A spokesperson for Oracle says that Blackburn's claims are wrong, adding, "We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct."
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By manishs from
Slashdot's think-different department:
In a world where there's an app for nearly every product and service, the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) still rely on its website to serve its customers. "But why?" You ask. Ben Terrett, former head of design at GDS outlined some of the reasons in a recent interview. He said the problem with mobiles apps is that they require a lot of commitment and resources. Apps are "very expensive to produce, and they're very very expensive to maintain because you have to keep updating them when there are software changes." He concludes that government services are much better off with responsive websites (websites whose layout and design adapt in accordance with the device it's being accessed on). "If you believe in the open internet that will always win," Terrett said, adding that responsive websites are also much cheaper to build and maintain. Another benefit of responsive websites is, he adds, that when you want to push an update, only one platform needs to get updated. From the report: Key to the GDS' approach is designing for user needs, not organizational requirements, Terrett says. "That is how good digital services designed and built these days. That is how everyone does it, whether that's Google or Facebook or British Airways or whoever." The problem is that public sector agencies tend not to design with citizens in mind. "Things are just designed to suit the very silos that the project sits in, and the user gets lost in there," Terrett adds.According to estimates, the move to go the responsive website way has saved them $8.2B in four years.
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By manishs from
Slashdot's another-day-another-hack department:
Accounts of over 100 million users of VK.com, Russia's largest social network is being traded on the digital underground. A hacker who goes by the alias "Peace," listed the date for sale on a dark web marketplace. Vice's Motherboard publication reports that it received a dataset of over 100,544,934 records from Peace. From the report: According to Peace, the passwords were already in plain text when the site was hacked, and were not cracked at a later date. Peace is selling the data for 1 bitcoin, or around $570 at today's exchange rates. Out of 100 randomly selected email addresses from the larger dataset, 92 corresponded to active accounts on the site, Motherboard found. A Russian friend contacted by Motherboard confirmed that the password was correct.The report adds that the actual hack occurred between 2011 and 2013, and that Peace has data of another 70 million users that it isn't selling right now.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's phreaking-out department:
The CEO of Endgame, Inc. is calling for an "offensive mindset" to defend enterprises from hackers. An anonymous reader quotes Nate Fick's article on Quartz:
Rather than relying on imperfect prevention techniques, or waiting for a breach to happen and then reacting to it, defenders need to 'turn the map around' and hunt proactively for the attackers in order to root out adversaries before they have a chance to do real damage. This is the next frontier of cybersecurity... the vast majority of cybersecurity spending is still going to prevention and perimeter security. Prevention is necessary, but it's not sufficient and it certainly doesn't justify 90 cents of every security dollar...
The government has already figured this out. Across the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and other forward-leaning agencies, this proactive hunting is already happening, and it's becoming more widespread. Enterprises need to embrace the same mindset.
Fick points out that despite $75 billion on enterprise-level security spending, more than three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies have been breached within the last year.
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