Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.
More at the source: Can a single bottle of soda decimate your company? Absolutely.:

objectivemarketer.com

Never Use Hotmail Inactive Webmail as Your Secondary Email Account | Smarterware

One button to merge all duplicate contacts: “Posted by Dominik Marcinski, Software Engineer

Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You’ve been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we’ve added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the ‘Find duplicates’ button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don’t want merged), and hit the ‘Merge’ button.

If you’ve been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now’s the time to do it. As we’ve written about previously, you can sync your contacts to a wide variety of devices (including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, SyncML, etc). So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks.

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Let’s stop talking about “backups”: “

Is your desktop backed up?

Did you backup that server?

Are your backups on a different machine?

Do you have offsite backups?

All good questions, all best practices.

But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.

And that’s when you discover that:

• The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost
• The server had enormous amounts of configuration information stored in the IIS metabase which wasn’t backed up
• The backup files were being copied to a FAT partition and were silently being truncated to 2GB
• Your backups were on an LTO drive which was lost with the data center, and you can’t get another LTO drive for three days
• And a million other things that can go wrong even when you “have” “backups.”

The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore. If you’re running a web service, you need to be able to show me that you can build a reasonably recent copy of the entire site, in a reasonable amount of time, on a new server or servers without ever accessing anything that was in the original data center. The bar is that you’ve done a restore.

Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn’t drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

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Dubai debt crisis: Why Egypt’s economy may benefit / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com

Adaptive Project Management Using Scrum