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Funny, but my company did just mandate blaze orange shirts for all front line IT staff. I can't for the life of me figure out who thought that was a good idea.

Mine comes in Monday.

We can also wear Navy. I think I'm going to get an equal number of pairs of blaze orange and navy pants and alternate them daily.

Personally, I find it extremely condescending. I'm required to design and maintain hundreds of databases, several servers, write apps, troubleshoot network problems, manage million dollar projects, AND do desktop support for 2000 devices with 3 other IT people for $40K/year. And now this. No wonder I've thrown my hands up today and am now posting on slashdot.

Yes, I'm looking for a way out.

http://jobs.stackoverflow.com/

http://jobs.serverfault.com/

Your resume should look like this:

Designed and maintained over 200 databases, including:
* Customer whatsit thinghy, with 8,000 records, 30 fields, and 30 current users
* three
* other
* highlights

Designed, set-up and maintained 7 servers, including:
* Main NAS with 1.5T of data (including back-up to, network connections, ...)
* more
* highlights

Produced a number of web applications, including
* Some
* highlights

Managed projects worth in excess of $2 million, including
* Rollover to Windows 7
* Server upgrade program.
* whatever

Supported over 2000 devices in a small team of 4 staff.

*Don't* go out of your way to mention your salary (unless asked), and if you do mention it, make sure they know that you consider your current salary inadequate.

WPF still has some really crummy font rendering at small sizes tho. Compare Visual Studio 2008 which uses winforms, to the beta of Visual Studio 2010 which uses WPF. The difference is immediately obvious.

I know about WPF font rendering problems, I'm the one who created the Connect ticket for it. It literally hurts my eyes to look at a WPF 3.x app with dark text on bright background (the other way around it's more or less tolerable, which is exploited by Expression Blend).

Now, though, WPF 4 has a reworked engine that improves things a lot. It didn't make it in VS2010 beta1, but it is present in beta 2 (though there had been a few more tweaks since because of some known problems).

By the way, V2008 doesn't use WinForms. Or rather it does, but only for certain parts (e.g. the TFS bits), and they definitely don't make the majority. Most of it is actually hand-coded native Win32 UI.

WPF still has some really crummy font rendering at small sizes tho. Compare Visual Studio 2008 which uses winforms, to the beta of Visual Studio 2010 which uses WPF. The difference is immediately obvious.

I know about WPF font rendering problems, I'm the one who created the Connect ticket for it. It literally hurts my eyes to look at a WPF 3.x app with dark text on bright background (the other way around it's more or less tolerable, which is exploited by Expression Blend).

Now, though, WPF 4 has a reworked engine that improves things a lot. It didn't make it in VS2010 beta1, but it is present in beta 2 (though there had been a few more tweaks since because of some known problems).

By the way, V2008 doesn't use WinForms. Or rather it does, but only for certain parts (e.g. the TFS bits), and they definitely don't make the majority. Most of it is actually hand-coded native Win32 UI.

I don't see much advantage to extension properties personally. Covariance is coming in C# 4. I'm not sure what you mean by "class method return types" in regards to type inference.

C# has plenty of problems, but you haven't identified any of the serious ones IMO.

So when the linked site goes down you have some information about the content beyond bit.ly/ERFHUQ.

And when even supposedly tech-savvy people can't properly back-up their webpages, it's incredibly shortsighted to use a link that tells you nothing about the content.

Cthulu has already attacked Stack Overflow /. is next!

Incidentally, you can sign up for experts exchange and get access to the answers without paying. You just need to sign up as an expert and post some useful answers that help other people regularly.

I prefer the stackoverflow model where you take what you need and then get rewarded to give back (with points, etc).

I detest Experts Exchange for the single reason that when I desperately need an answer, I'm not in a position, time-wise, to build up a reputation on an information exchange site... however, I've visited and answered many questions at stackoverflow and been voted up... after I got the help/hints that I needed when I was desperate.

Then again, stackoverflow isn't in the business of restricting knowledge (that their users created) for money.

You want a Google "Custom Search Engine". Works great for me. Mine omits anything from Experts Exchange and prefers anything from Stack Overflow.

OMG, somebody fire this jerk.

Don't leap to conclusions like that. If he is an old-school C programmer, "macros" may just mean "constants".

If you have C++, you can do

unsigned int CUSTOMER_CODE = 486;

but in boring old C that would be

#define CUSTOMER_CODE 486

Now, if you are talking about something like these then I'm with you. Up against the wall!

Or of course he could be a LISP programmer. Because we all know that macros are what gives LISP its awesome bone-crushing power.

Unless the above should have been in [sarcasm] tags, in which case, the immortal words of Miss Emily Litella apply. (grin)

I had to look that one up. "Never mind!" So now we know.

steveha

Oh yeah? Well http://stackoverflow.com/ !

And a nice OS? What are you comparing it to? Windows 3.1? Please tell me what is so "nice" about Windows CE compared to the wealth of other mobile OSes?

Better tools, better real-time support, better hardware support. You may want to read on the subject. For example, here or here

Always take a copy of your CV or resume to an interview: I've yet to be interviewed somewhere where the agency hasn't "tweaked" my CV in some way or another (and I've been on the receiving end as well - we were looking for a PHP programmer and the agency sent someone with a good looking CV - apart from the fact they had changed all mentions of Java to PHP: totally misrepresenting the candidate). Plus it's useful to have your own CV to refer to "just in case".
Alternatively, don't forget to promote yourself on sites such as http://linkedin.com/ and http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ - build up your own client base and get to keep the 10-25% the agency "skims" for just download bunches of CVs from job sites, adding their logo and sending them on.

"Linking", under the gpl, refers to compiled code only.

Linking, perhaps yes. But as for being a derivative work? Well, I googled around and couldn't find a definite answer on this point. There's a thread on stackoverflow that provides some commentary, but doesn't give a definite answer as to whether a javascript program that calls into a javascript library is a derivative work. There's also some commentary on Rock Star Apps. Amusingly, this same question was brought up in an article last year about ExtJS moving to the GPL.

The upshot? I wouldn't bet any money either way. In fact, I'm going to go ask the SFLC right after I post this comment.

If you're going to use a library, and you're going to modify it, why not share the benefits of your mods, and reap the benefits of other people fixing any bugs you may have introduced?

The issue here is that you have a company distributing software Foo under GPLv3 and under a proprietary license. I don't think they'll take your patches unless you assign copyright so that they can distribute the change in both versions.

Of course, if you don't assign copyright, then others who pull from the official GPL'd branch won't get them either. And even if you are contributing (indirectly) to proprietary software by assigning copyright, you're supporting a company that GPLs their software, so... which choice is better for Free Software in general? Well, that's a darn good question.

Installed Visual C++ 2008 Express not too long ago, wrote some code, compiled for debugging, so far, so good. Next step was to run the damned thing, this worked for a while, then mysteriously failed because it could no longer find its own stupid runtime DLLs.

Actually, this was really easy to solve, All I had to do was disable incremental linking, which should have been obvious to just about anyone

Links for the skeptic,

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/218747/msvcr90d-dll-not-found-in-debug-mode-with-visual-c-2008
• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/8f08777b-1c4d-4e10-89a2-f7bc95cf5e98/

Actually, in you followed the site,

Since you seem to want to "whip it out", I have over 7,000 reputation points and have been on the site since day 2 (having just missed the beta period when I decided to join). I have also been listening to the podcast long before Stack Overflow was live. I visit the site multiple times per day to answer questions because I enjoy doing so, and learning from other answers posted.

You would know that they seriously discourage questions with no real or definitive answer.

There are endless number of such things, such as "favorite programming cartoons", all sorts of methodology questions, questions on things like "should I use singletons" and so on. Some of them, in fact many of them are often voted up quite highly.

What is not tolerated by the site owners, and by proxy the community, are non-programming related questions. That is the forbidden zone.

Ask a question like "VI vs. EMACS" and your question will be immediately flagged as subjective, and probably deleted.

If you post flamebait yes of course it gets deleted. But a slight twist gets you a question with a number of upvotes and some good discussion from both sides of what historically has been an acerbic issue.

Since I follow the emacs tag closely I know there are a number of such threads there. So you see, subjective is totally fine - if it were not why would they make a separate tag devoted to it, and not a close reason instead? Remember that everything is there for a reason...

If you just take a moment you can easily verify what I say to be true - simply search on "subjective" and you'll get a big ol' list of things marked subjective. The highest upvote from immediate review is 839 votes, and most things on the list are upvoted. Subjective is far from meaning the question is not accepted by the community, it's just a way of indicating there is not one correct answer. Programmers can tolerate lack of solid answers as long as they are told so ahead of time.

Jon Skeet - the "top user who just passed 100k" - is an awesome guy, and that score is well-deserved. I had a pleasure of discussing things with him back when he was inhabiting microsoft.public.dotnet.* newgroups, before he moved on to StackOverflow, and he was already very helpful back then. On SO, with his nigh-unreachable (and steadily growing) score, he quickly got a kind of a cult following.

An interesting background, too. He's working in Google (mostly developing in Java, so far as I know), and at the same time he's the author of one of the best advanced books on C#, and most of his SO answers tend to be C#/.NET related. That book is well worth the read of everyone who has to deal with the tech.

I didn't know karma-whoring could be so powerful. Weee! 100.000 points! I must be *great!* (My mom loves me...)

This looks a bit like a troll, but I'll bite. The person on Stack Overflow with over 100,000 reputation is Jon Skeet who also happens to write technical books which is part of the reason he has so much reputation on the site. There are a lot of questions on Stack Overflow relating to C# that were answered by Jon Skeet which is where all of those reputation points came from.

The way I read it when it first came out was, most of their feature requests were already in the product. So the ribbon was intended to (among other things) try to make it easier for people to find things.

You still have to know what you're looking for, and how Microsoft decided it should be classified. For example, to insert a new line of cells you don't look on the Insert ribbon - if you do, you'd see "Insert / Line" and be surprised when a graph pops up. It's not under Data, as in Insert a line of data. So I go to Home. There's an Insert option, but it's in the box labeled Cells. I don't want cells, I want a whole line. The "old way" was Insert -> Row, and the 2003 shortcut still works in 2007.

"Nine out of 10 feature requests we got for 2007 were already in the 2003 product," says Microsoft senior marketing manager Paul Coleman. "People just couldn't find them."

http://www.wired.com/software/softwarereviews/news/2007/01/72596

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/114467/is-microsofts-ribbon-ui-really-that-great-from-a-usability-perspective
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/maryb/2009/07/13/dont-like-the-ribbon-you-will/
http://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/note/666e1143-e735-4d8e-a98a-931fda130235/pivic/Tech
http://www.betanews.com/article/Top-5-obvious-feature-enhancements-to-Microsoft-Office-2010/1247509742/2
http://www.factplace.com/microsoft_onenote_12.htm

Sounds kind-of like this.

There is a discussion about the vulnerability on StackOverflow

Hi, here is the discussion:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1260591/about-mysql-gpl-and-lgpl
What do you think?

Cheers,

It was probably partly overwritten by spaces

wait.. you actually got modded interesting for pointing out what the summery said?

So spaces were stuffed into a field where binary zero should have been.

It was probably partly overwritten by spaces

I agree strongly with this. There was a long period where we could count on firefox, but not IE to render PNG files with transparency (boy, do I remember), or a large portion of the CSS spec. Didn't stop anyone from using transparent PNG files and standards-compliant CSS in their design if they wished, they just had to know that it wouldn't look good in IE (a show stopper for many). But IE e...v...e...n...t...u...a...l...l...y caught up.

It certainly did stop it. Sending GIF (which looked awful) to IE and PNG to other browsers was a pain in the proverbial.

Still when did IE catch up? IE8 still is not consistent in it's handling of gamma for PNG files, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/662616/background-colour-of-a-png-in-ie8 . Still some are having to do extra work to satisfy IE (I use PNG crush which removes gAMA chunks so it wasn't affecting me). They're nearly there with PNG only 13 years after the spec was finalised.

So will we have to do extra work for IE to show video properly until after 2022?

Specify one format that has to work (but allow as many as you like) for a proper compliant implementation of a HTML5 renderer, please.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/79884

The trick is to let these tricks play nice with the rest of your [program] including the used libraries and different runtime environments.

That's an issue with any std::malloc replacement, but this page claims that Firefox manages to work around it.

what's the keyboard shortcut to jump between header and implementation?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/706938/visual-studio-2008-macro-to-switch-between-header-and-source-files

I often have about 50 tabs open in Opera, and I can handle them just fine. Right now I have about 25 tabs open. Most of them are documentation (eg. mysql, posix threads) or work-related (lua binding tutorial, stackoverflow threads) or news (Slashdot!).

In Notepad++ I also have lots of tabs open. I need lots of tabs in order to do my work; I always have lots of things on the go. I like to have as much information layed out as possible, with everything I have worked on recently open and "stacked" much like papers or books would be on a real desktop. I guess I'm a very spacial thinker.

A few times I lost my Opera or Notepad++ sessions, and then I felt very lost.

Sounds a lot like this post on Stack Overflow.

Sounds a lot like this post on Stack Overflow.

Looks like this question is already answered at StackOverflow.com

This identical question can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741581/what-are-the-worst-working-conditions-you-have-written-code-in

if you're suffering from the lack of ponies, try StackOverflow, and its (possibly today only) Cornify button (select a question first, you might have to click it a couple of times).

Looking forward to my Fool Story achievement!

there's a couple more flavours, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/395763/is-a-software-engineer-a-computer-science-major/396348#396348

I agree. Get thee to a wiki.

There's a pretty sizeable collection of funny/clever server names on Stack Overflow here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/262657/the-coolest-server-names

Yah, I got exactly that when I asked if there was a Linux-based app that does Gantt charts like MS Project..

So why do you waste your time talking to retards instead of (say) using google to search for 'linux gantt chart' and find something like this
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/191997/which-gantt-chart-project-management-tool-would-you-recommend-for-linux
and giving the several alternatives a try? You could probably do a quick 'is this crap or is it promising' type evaluation of several alternatives in a couple of hours. E.g. I had a quick fiddle with Ganttproject and it looked OK, the full version includes msproject import/export and comes in a variety of packages for Linux/Windows/Mac.

It seems like this method requires jailbreaking. Here's another reference.

lol. So your question is really: "why should I bother with this Linux thing when Mr Ballmer gives me all the nice feel-good, happy development tools I need to do Windows-only GUIs"?

Here is a question from a quite pro-C# site concerning WPF.

Swing was a "failure" because it was slow, and required Java. Not enough people wanted to move to Java to get that cross platform feature, to be honest x-platform hasn't been too much of an issue until relatively recently, just shows how far Linux has come in the last few years.

Stack overflow took an interesting approach, and only uses OpenID. They don't even have a non-OpenID option. Proprietor Jeff Atwood discusses some of the tradeoff at his blog.

I don't believe this is correct. If you explicitly and validly release a copyrighted work into public domain, then it leaves your control permanently. Everyone has the exact same rights to the work as yourself.

Depends on which laws (countries) you are talking about, SO has a pretty good question/answer about it:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/219742/open-source-why-not-release-into-public-domain

• what-is-the-single-most-influential-book-every-programmer-should-read
• top-100-best-software-engineering-books-ever

But programming book lists crop up all over the place. In this Stifflog interview with Yegge, Torvalds, Hansson, Norvig, Thomas, Van Rossum, Gosling, Stroustrup and Bray the interviewees mention their favourite books (of the most popular I think only K&R and Programming Pearls weren't on your list).

Many people have Knuth's Art of Programming on their shelves (but it's harder to find people who have read all of it).

One of the Kernel Hacker Bookshelf series on LWN recommends Unix Internals.

One of the consultants who taught at my University said that the Mythical Man Month and Peopleware were good. I've read these too and can also recommended them (although they are more about managing programmers rather than programming per se). The consultant also recommended Design Patterns (although he said not to read the book cover to cover but rather to just be aware of them so you could refer to them later).

Reddit has a Must Read Programming books thread.

I've heard the "Dragon Book" (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools I think is the 2nd edition) being talked of favourably.

What is the single most influential book every programmer should read? thread on Stackoverflow.

Many people seem to recommend reading Godel, Escher, Bach...

Joel Spoolsky's list of books every programmer should read.

Maybe someone will collect the 20 most popular books into one easy to read post rather than the scattershot of links I've given you here...

No hash, even the very worst, is reversible. The reason for this is that an infinite number of input strings will produce the same, finite, output string. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/330207/how-come-md5-hash-values-are-not-reversible for more information.

Throwing hardware at a problem means the writer failed to use his sysadmin staff to do basic capacity planning while there wasn't a problem.

The writer is Jeff Atwood, who runs Stack overflow, a web site that has become quite popular since it launched this year. For sites like that, I think the best approach is to start small (i.e. cheap) and expand as needed.

If you think otherwise, tell me: how would you do capacity planning for a new website with an unknown growth curve?

You might want to help extending this question Stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371463/is-there-an-alternative-to-the-slashdot-news-site

It doesn't (yet) cover general IT questions, but for programming questions, StackOverflow is meant to be a better, and free, alternative to Experts Exchange.

Have you tried http://stackoverflow.com/ Seems to be a good place for answers.

Dear slashdot editors,

slashdot.org is not stackoverflow.com.
The articles and discussions here are not searchable in a sane way. Your recent attempts to mimic stackoverflow are just a waste of everybody's time because all those little tidbits that people post get lost in the internet noise immediately.

We know you're bit desperate for traffic these days. But this is not the way to go.

I wonder why such FAQs are still posted on a site like Slashdot. We now have a great repository for exactly this kind of questions:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=regex&sort=votes&pagesize=15