Friday, April 25, 2014

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GitHub boss quits after sexual harassment scandal

Posted: 25 Apr 2014 04:23 AM PDT

Tom Preston-Werner, a co-founder and former chief executive of GitHub has quit after an investigation into gender-based harassment cleared him of doing anything illegal practices but found evidence of errors of judgement.

Last month, Julie Ann Horvath, a software designer and developer at GitHub, publicly resigned, saying there was a culture of disrespect and intimidation of women at the company.

According to the New York Times, she claimed that there was mistreatment and bullying by Preston-Warner and his wife, who was not a GitHub employee. Horvath was the only female developer at GitHub when she was hired, and just two percent of people in the open-source software field are women.

Horvath's resignation attracted much attention in the tech community, as an example of the sexism and alpha-male culture in the tech business.

Chris Wanstrath, GitHub's chief executive and a co-founder, wrote in a blog post earlier this week that the company had conducted an investigation into the claims and found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment.

However, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment. He added that GitHub was starting initiatives led by employees and the human resources department to try to make it a more inclusive workplace and to ensure that employee concerns were dealt with appropriately.

Horvath responded to the announcement on Twitter said that "Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal," "Pushing women with strong opinions out of your company because they disagree with you is wrong" and "Leaving GitHub was the best decision of my life".

Preston-Werner admitted that he "made mistakes" but added: "We are prepared to fight any further false claims on this matter to the full extent of the law."

Horvath started a program called Passion Projects, at which a technical woman presents her work in San Francisco each month. GitHub had sponsored the project but signed it over to Horvath when she quit. She is restarting it within a new organisation called Playing with Possibility and expanding to New York and Chicago. 

Headhunters claim open season on British developers

Posted: 25 Apr 2014 02:21 AM PDT

The UK computer games industry is facing a brain drain as skilled developers pack their bags and head to the colonies.

The Daily Telegraph has warned that salaries across the pond in the former British colony of Virginia are much better than Blighty.

Research from consultants Procorre show that more than half of all online gaming job advertisements aimed at UK developers are for positions based in North America, while just 20 per cent are in Britain.

Mainland Europe is also more interesting for British developers and account for more than a quarter of  jobs advertised.

US companies are apparently rushing to recruit British gambling software developers as the country's laws against online betting are gradually relaxed and more games are needed.

In Canada, the drive to recruit IT professionals from the UK has been supported by benefits including tax breaks and refundable tax credits, which are available in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Quebec for online gaming companies.

Part of the problem has been the UK industry's success. London based King Digital is behind the mobile game Candy Crush and Scottish Rockstar North, which is responsible for the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Last April, Dundee firm YoYo Games doubled its staff to 50 to keep up with global demand for its "GameMaker: Studio" product, which is the world's most widely used video game development software.

Lisa Mangan, relationship manager at Procorre, said that for Britain to stay ahead, it will have to keep its skilled workers as there was a real danger the best and brightest will be head hunted by overseas firms who have deeper pockets and be prepared to pay more.

"The computer games industry makes a significant contribution to the UK economy and the Government is right to do everything it can to encourage these and other specialist IT consultants to remain in the UK." 

Whitehall investigates Wikipedia edits

Posted: 25 Apr 2014 02:19 AM PDT

The UK government is investigating how someone behind Whitehall's secure intranet made inflammatory changes to the Wikipedia page for the Hillsborough disaster.

Ninety six people died when fans were crushed to death during an FA Cup semi-final in 1989 at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield. A 2012 Independent Panel Report overturned the original verdict 1991 verdict on the disaster, with new inquests into the deaths currently being held.

According to the Liverpool Echo, the revisions to the Wikipedia page were made five years ago on the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, and again in 2012.

The changes to the Hillsborough entry on the online encyclopaedia include the phrases "blame Liverpool fans, "You'll never w*nk alone" and "You'll never walk again".

Government computers were also reportedly used to make alterations to the Anfield Wikipedia page, with the description of former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly changed from "He made the people happy" to "He made a wonderful lemon drizzle cake".

The famous "This is Anfield" sign was also altered to read "This is a sh*thole", while the Hillsborough memorial at Anfield was changed to include "nothing for the victims of the Heysel stadium disaster", a reference to the 1985 tragedy in Brussels in which 39 people died during a game between Liverpool and Juventus.

The changes were made from IP addresses within government departments, including the Treasury and the Office of the Solicitor General and the Office of the Solicitor General.

Cabinet Office thanked the Liverpool Echo for bringing the matter to its attention and the matter is being treated "with the utmost seriousness" and "we are making urgent inquiries".

"No one should be in any doubt of the Government's position regarding the Hillsborough disaster and its support for the families of the 96 victims and all those affected by the tragedy."

At the height of its success, the Sun newspaper was boycotted for years over its Hillsborough disaster coverage which it blamed on fans. 

Toshiba's OCZ Storage wants to kill off SATA for SSDs

Posted: 25 Apr 2014 02:17 AM PDT

Toshiba's OCZ Storage is hatching up a cunning plan to kill off SATA for storage by making improvements to PCIe hardware.

PCIe has been around for a while and it offers more bandwidth than SATA. While there are solid-state drives that use PCIe for this purpose, it has not really taken off because of video card requirements.

Toshiba's OCZ Storage has hatched up some bootable solid state drives which it claims can kill off SATA bottlenecks. It uses a high-speed PCI Express architecture coupled with a sophisticated workstation-grade RAID array that virtualises the SSD controllers.

Toshiba's OCZ Storage Solutions has come up with a PCIe-based RevoDrive 350. By using PCIe the drive can push 1.8 1.8GB/s in sequential performance transfer speed and 140,000 4K random write IOPS. The drive uses Toshiba's NAND memory built on the 19nm process node.

Daryl Lang, Senior Vice President of Product Management for OCZ Storage, said that the new RevoDrive 350 is uses Toshiba flash and OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 and can improve performance while reducing the burden on host resources.

"This next generation PCIe SSD is the ideal solution for performance-minded users looking to maximize both bandwidth and density for the complete gamut of gaming, content creation and workstation applications," he said.

OCZ claims its RevoDrive 350 can withstand up ot 50GB of host writes per day for 3 years, which is the length of the warranty.

The RevoDrive 350 is available 240GB ($530), 480GB ($830), and 960GB ($1,300) capacities with support for both Linux and Windows. 

Google+ bloke quits

Posted: 25 Apr 2014 02:09 AM PDT

The man who was behind Google's crack at social notworking has announced he has given up and is heading for pastures new.

Vic Gundotra was credited with building Google+ into the social network it is today, which means that it is probably his fault.

Gundotra appropriately announced his decision to leave Google+ via a post on the network, he didn't mention any bad blood, but said he was looking forward to the "journey yet to come".

At the moment no-one knows where he is going, or what he will do what he gets there. An anonymous posting on Secret three days ago revealed the Gundotra was interviewing. What that means is anyone's guess, but the suggestion is that he has been planning to leave for a while.

The dark satanic rumour mill has suggested that, Google seems to be backing away from the original Google+ strategy which was to force Google+ into every product. Google Hangouts will supposedly be moved to Android, and the Google+ photos team is "likely" to follow. With talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards Android as a platform.

Gundotra joined Google at 2007 and worked on Google Buzz, and then built the Google+ project from nothing. Gundotra worked at Microsoft before he joined Google and he worked on the team that built the web services foundation in the .NET framework.

Google's CEO Larry Page acknowledged on Google+ that he was grateful for all of Gundotra's hard work. "Vic cut his teeth on our mobile apps and developer relations, turning Google's disparate efforts into something great ... And, walking onto the stage at I/O last year, it was amazing to see developers so excited about Google. These were vintage Vic projects. Then Vic built Google+ from nothing. There are few people with the courage and ability to start something like that and I am very grateful for all his hard work and passion." Why use two words when 100 words will do?

Google+ has over 300 million users, but it has not managed to draw users away from Facebook or Twitter.

Page made it clear that the exit was nothing to do with Google losing interest in Google+ and said that the company would continue to invest in the social notworking project.

VP of Engineering David Besbris will be the interim head of social networking until they can find someone else. 
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