I don't know about this. My father is a scientist, and while he signs his correspondence as Sasha, he publishes under Alexander. As for метмах vs. матмех - it could easily be Perelman having a dyslexic moment, or the journalist misquoting. All these "clues" are so nitpicky... not worth a conspiracy theory IMHO.
You are right about nicknames though. I used it in a colloquial sense but the correct term would be a familiar form.
I really think that Joseph Gotlieb - your first link - is grasping at straws. For brevity's sake I will address his first objection even though I feel others are just as shaky.
[Objection #1: According to the interview, Gregory Perelman bristled at being addressed as "Grisha" by the media (Gregory/Grisha being similar to Robert/Robbie in familiarity). This could not possibly be true because he signed his own emails as "Grisha".]
This is a pretty big stretch. The Russian language defines 3 tiers of familiarity/address: a nickname for family/friends, a full first name for acquaintances of the same age, and a full first + patronymic name for everyone else. (This is similar to a French person being offended by an overly familiar "Tu" when a "Vous" is appropriate). Moreover, it is not uncommon anywhere to use a nickname in correspondence with friends and colleagues and a full name in more formal situations.
The forum discussion - your second link - is nothing more than a reference to Richard Feynman's auto biographical anecdote about the Nobel prize, followed by a bit of general bitching about journalists. One poster casts doubt on how Perelman and the interviewer connected (seems perfectly plausible to me that a Russian-Israeli journalist would connect to a Russian-Jewish scientist through his mom, whom he lives with, via the St. Petersburg jewish community). It really doesn't prove or even suggest anything of importance.
As far the claim that Russian bloggers couldn't track down the person who interviewed Perelman, well, I just spent a minute on google and found this: http://cursorinfo.co.il/news/novosti/2011/04/28/zatwornil/. Apparently, the Israeli paper was able to find the interviewer... not particularly surprising given that he had moved to Israel in the 90's.
I guess it depends on your definition of "done". If something is sorta slapped together in a way that is hard to read/debug or non-performant, to me that's not "done". So perhaps it's a matter of semantics.
Oh I get that (did read the whole thing) however conversely, couldn't it then just be titled, "Smart" with an explanation further down that smart people know that they have to get things done or else it's just talk? I mean, you can redefine and contextualize anything, but I think if you promote a slogan as strongly worded as Joel's quote below, you have the responsibility to make it complete without a further explanation.
The #1 cardinal criteria for getting hired at Fog Creek:
Smart, and Gets Things Done.
That's it. That's all we're looking for. Memorize that. Recite it to yourself before you go to bed every night.
He wants us to memorize a short slogan, and that slogan, in programming speak, is buggy and wasteful (wasteful in the sense that I described above, and buggy in that a smart gets-things-done a-hole will single handedly kill your project). Gets Things Done and Gets Along on the other hand is complete in and of itself.
There is one big problem with JS's paradigm of Smart and Gets Things Done that I never see addressed. It's right there in the title. If a programmer Gets Things Done, what does Smart add to the equation? Say you have a cat who habitually walks all over your keyboard and bangs out perfect code, every time. Do you really care?
No one would praise a program that takes 2 steps to do something that can be done in 1 step. So why does Smart and Gets Things Done get so much credit? I'd understand Gets Things Done and Gets Along much better.
I've seen several and they are underwhelming. Those photos of glowing curtains of color are taken from space, here on earth they just look like dim green glow (brief explanation below). You are not missing anything, I promise you.
Most of the energetic particles from the Sun are deflected around the Earth by the magnetosphere, but some get trapped. Electrons trapped in the Earth's magnetic field (the magnetic mirror effect) are accelerated along the magnetic field toward the Polar Regions and then strike the gases into the upper layer of the atmosphere, called the ionosphere. In the ionosphere, the speeding electrons collide violently with gas atoms. This gives the gas atoms energy, which causes them to release both light and more electrons. In this way, the gases of the ionosphere start to glow producing the spectacle that we know as the auroras.
Variations in colour are due to the type of gas particles that are colliding. The most common auroral color, a pale yellowish-green, is produced by oxygen molecules located about 60 miles above the earth. Rare, all-red auroras are produced by high-altitude oxygen, at heights of up to 200 miles. Nitrogen produces blue or purplish-red aurora.
For those of us waiting to learn what happened, the title is baity and misleading. A more accurate headline would be: "Rightscale outage: some speculation and customer service suggestions for Amazon".
At the time of writing Amazon has not yet posted a root cause analysis. I will update this section when they do. Until then, I have to make some educated guesses.
That pretty much sums it up. Well, that plus some contradictory lesson learned, such as The biggest problem was that more than one availability zone was affected, followed by, must have live replication across multiple availability zones.
It really depends on where you are. America's states are analogous to European countries, albeit with a common language. The cultures are very, very different.
People tend to forge their identities when they feel inadequate about their past. As an immigrant privy to no Americans present get-togethers, I see it all the time. The same people who lump all Southerners or Midwesterners into a overweight, bible thumping yokel stereotype, will froth at the mouth about Americans' ignorance of latest political discourse in their small corner of the world. People from predominantly white countries will claim that the US is less cultured because there is too much brown immigration. People who didn't have toilet paper back home will talk about the lack of museums. And so on and so forth.
My personal observation is, the majority tend to forget all the bad and remember all the good about their former home, and conversely, pick out all the bad and none of the good of their new home. It may be hard for you to believe because you are a rationalist, but it's very common.
I've moved about a dozen domains away from GoDaddy over the last year. The time savings (less spam, cleaner interface) well exceeded the effort involved.
I think it's rather impractical to attempt to guess a stranger's intent. Drblast responded to the article by quoting a hypothetical statement of his own ("if I were to say X") and then quoting a supposed statement from the article ("but apparently it's ok to say Y"). You can interpret that 10 different ways but why? Isn't it simpler to point out that the article never made statement Y in the first place?
Incidentally, I find the point you make - meritocracies aren't ipso facto diverse - worthy of debate. However I don't believe it's the same point as the parent.
There are exactly zero occurrences of the words "women" or "female" in the article. The only reference to gender at all is a brief and completely inconsequential mention of the fact that your typical Postgres hacker is, among other things, male.
Yet somehow you end up debating the veracity of, "Since there are so few women contributing to Postgres, it's obvious that it's not a meritocracy", a statement neither made verbatim nor in any way implied by the actual article.
Isn't it just a little crazy? Can a writer mention a simple fact without it becoming all about battle of the sexes?
He seriously saw this on one laptop and is accusing Samsung of a conspiracy?
He saw it on TWO laptops.
Not that I put anything above big multinational companies, but some due dilligance would be nice.
He called Samsung to report the issue and had Samsung supervisor confirm that keyloggers are knowingly installed on Samsung laptops in order to monitor usage.
You are right about nicknames though. I used it in a colloquial sense but the correct term would be a familiar form.