Saying Eclipse is useless for free development is like saying Linux is useless on the Intel platform because the Intel microcode isn't free.
Shush, you'll start giving them ideas...;-)
Seriously though, you seem to be forgetting that you're talking about people who believe that all code should be free. It doesn't matter to these people that the free and proprietary JVMs will be indistinguishable (at least to Eclipse), they know that there's a difference.
Personally, I don't care; I've been developing in Java for a little over two years now, and have never had a problem that could've been solved by it being Free. You get the source to the core APIs with the SDK, and I don't do anything that would require the source to the JVM. If they care enough to spend their time developing something like this, though, good on them. I won't be using it myself, but I certainly have to give them credit for actually living by their principles.
As for the hardware, if it weren't so expensive and difficult to make, you can bet there'd be a Free x86 compatible processor available. As long as manufacturing costs are as high as they are, though, we're not going to see one. Again, I don't care - my P4 works just fine. Then again, I'm a little more pragmatic; I'm a professional coder, working on closed-source code (unless the client pays for the source too), so I can't afford not to be.
That really depends on when you last "dabbled" and what you were doing, doesn't it?
I've been developing Java code professionally for a little over two years now, writing server-side stuff for web sites. About half of us work under Linux, the rest using either Win2k or XP, deploying the code on machines running RedHat, and we've never had any trouble.
Of course, if you're talking about applets, then your problem isn't with Java, but with the browser producers' broken JVMs (especially the MS one, which simply isn't worth bothering with). Applets are only really of any use if you control the client environment, right down to being able to tell people to download a new JVM. No use for silly little toys on websites, but fine for more complex, bespoke stuff (although still a pain in the arse to develop, of course, especially if you're not used to creating GUIs).
many more people run BSD/Linux/OS X and can no longer play Windows games on their computers.
Yes, many more people now run non-Windows OSes on their PCs - but I very much doubt that that increase would account for even a small fraction of the drop in sales of PC games.
Most of the people who have switched to Linux/whatever are the sort of people who weren't playing PC games in the first place. If they were, they wouldn't have switched! Why would they switch to an OS that they can't do everything they want to with?
Personally, I'd imagine that falling levels of quality is one of the main reasons for the drop in sales. When was the last time you bought even a new PC game that didn't already have a patch out, or almost ready? Not only that, but I read an issue of PC Gamer recently (first PC mag I've read in ages), and of the dozen or so games they reviewed, only one or two scored above about 60%. When you're shelling out £35 (UK) on a game, you want a good one.
I think a lot of games companies need to sit down and think about letting the development teams finish their games, rather than getting them to market ASAP...
I bought my girlfriend a new PC a couple of weeks ago (a Packard Bell iMedia; 2.53GHz P4, 512MB of RAM, and damn-near *silent* - very nice). At the same time, more or less, I bought myself a motherboard, PSU, RAM and P4, to upgrade my own machine with.
I bought the PC pre-built because I could get it on finance; nothing to pay for a year, then pay the balance or make monthly payments at a hideous interest rate. I couldn't have done that buying components and building from scratch.
More than that - I run Linux at work, but have Windows XP running installed in a VMWare virtual machine, for two reasons:
a) I do (mostly) server-side web work, and so sometimes have to test stuff in IE
b) despite being a programmer working in Java and HTML/JSP, I still have to deal with Word documents
Point b) is by far the most important. Why would any business switch to an alternative, when they already own Word, and all their clients and partners use Word? If the alternative's import filters aren't 100% perfect, it isn't going to happen.
Tiny Personal Firewall does that too (or equivalent - I don't if it's actually an md5 check), and I'm pretty sure that Norton's firewall software does as well.
With reference to your first and third points, on the dialogue box you get when an update has been detected, there's a "Details" button that tells you exactly what has been found, what it does, etc - just as if you ran Windows Update manually.
Besides, I really don't see the problem - even with all the patches available via Windows Update, there is still a fairly small number of possible md5sum values for each file. It wouldn't take long at all to compare the computed value with each of the known good ones, only flagging a warning if they all fail to match.
I'm sorry to hear of the problems you've had, but my experience is almost exactly the opposite. I run NVidia's drivers on Mandrake 9 on my Linux box at work, and it's rock steady.
I don't do a great deal of graphics-intensive stuff, but do generally play a few rounds of either Unreal Tournament or RtCW each working day (after hours, of course). I've not once had a crash, although occasionally KDE's screen locking button stops working after playing...
That's true enough, but you'll often find Microsoft Works bundled with new PCs (e.g. the one I bought a couple of weeks ago), and that comes with Word. To a lot of people, Word *is* Office, as they almost never use Powerpoint or Excel, don't think of Outlook as part of Office, and wouldn't even know what Access is.
Also, if you look around enough, you will find Office bundled with new PCs. They'll be the sort that cost a fortune, and come with a printer, scanner, etc, but you can find them.
True, but I do think there's a "whoa" factor to finding them, especially if you have to start changing the base and arranging numbers into squares, rectangles, etc.
Just because it's definitely in there somewhere, doesn't mean you'll definitely find it. Pi may be infinite, but you and I are not.
If pi is infinite, does this mean the amount of resources needed to calculate pi as accurately as possible is also infinite?
Unless it repeats, yes - it would take an infinite amount of time to write out an infinitely long number, let alone calculate one.
Why didn't Kanada just let his computer algorithm run for another year...
My guess would be that either Kanada, or someone higher up, set a deadline for the project. At that point, what you have, is what you have - no more calculation. After all, you have to stop at some point; if you're going to extend it by one year, why not 2, or 10?
Also, don't forget that the number has to be stored somewhere, whether in RAM or on disk; perhaps the machine simply didn't have the resources to calculate any more digits?
Either that, or he meant "struggling artists, working as waiters to make ends meet while waiting for their big break". It's something of a Hollywood cliche, I believe.
Re:The market frowns on Sun's 'monopoly potential'
on
Sun vs. OpenBSD?
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· Score: 2
Indeed; I still remember a time when PC keyboards didn't have Windows keys on them. I was thinking about that just the other day, in fact.
More than that, though, don't forget that most video card manuacturers work closely with Microsoft to ensure that their new chipsets support the features being implemented in the latest/next release of Direct3D. Of course this is a two way thing - I've no doubt that both parties say "we've this really cool idea that we need you to help us with...", but that doesn't diminish the influence they have on each other.
At the end of the day, if a feature supported in hardware doesn't make it into Direct3d, it isn't going to be (widely) used. (The same is true, to a lesser extent, of OpenGL, of course)
Also ignores the fact that with Linux, you can run everything in your company off of one computer, with terminals to that computer located at different physical locations throughout the company.
That sounds an awful lot like Terminal Server, which is available for Windows 2000; clients connect to it using remote desktop (there's even a client for Linux).
Of course, depending on what you're using the machine for, it may be impractical or impossible to share a central machine in that way. For example, where I work, there are 11 or so programmers all using JBuilder at once. You'd be looking at a machine with 6 or so gigs of RAM and quite a few very fast processors to deliver acceptable performance. Much cheaper to just buy us each a desktop and be done with it.
As others have said, I'd love to know where you're buying Windows from for $100.
I recently (in the last couple of weeks) upgraded my home PC, and as I was buying a motherboard, processor, etc, I was elligible to buy an OEM copy of Windows XP Professional. It cost me £116 (Sterling), which is roughly $180US at current exchange rates. The retail version was double this, and so would be about $360US. Obviously large OEMs would be buying Windows by the truckload, and so would be paying considerably less, but then PCs they bought wouldn't cost them $800 either.
Other than that, I do agree - hardware prices have dropped a hell of a lot, even before taking into account increases in power and features, while software in general has remained pretty constant in price. For my upgrade, Windows was the second most expensive item, beaten only by the processor (P4 2.4B).
True, but they are not general purpose computers. They are designed to do one thing only - perform operations relevant to rendering 3D scenes. More than that, in fact - they are built to accelerate Direct3D and OpenGL operations specifically. Modifying the drivers might well allow you to do other cool things, but you'd almost certainly be better off doing those things with a normal CPU.
Other than that, while I sympathise with your sentiments, and to some extent agree with them, we don't really have much choice. The only fully working Linux drivers for modern graphics cards are closed source. By "fully working", I mean with complete, stable, fast suppot for all of the card's features. I'm pragmatic; if I've spent £200 on a new card, I want it to work properly. If that means using a close-source driver, so be it.
Finally, you seem not to realise that it isn't always up to the card/chipset manufacturers to open their driver source. NVidia, for example, is under NDA with several third parties over technology used in their cards and drivers. That means that they can't open the source to their drivers.
Don't assume that static buffers are ALWAYS wrong.
Indeed - generally, there's nothing wrong with static buffers. If you're going to use them, however, there is absolutely no excuse for not bounds checking access to that buffer. That is, if you know that the buffer can contain say 1000 characters, check anything you write to it to make sure it fits!
That's most of what's "wrong" with static buffers - that it's too easy to use them incorrectly. It's not entirely the fault of the buffer, though, that it's easily misused
Don't expect a 2x speedup or anything, even if your system is running heavily threaded applications.
You can't expect a 2x speed up even with 2 real physical processors - then, iirc, you tend to get a factor of about 1.8 increase.
HT is supposed to give you about a 25% increase in performance on desktop machines, or 30% on servers. I've not used an HT-enabled machine, though, so I can't vouch for those figures.
what about people who actually do need to hear from others in 3rd world countries?
Asia? Third-world? You do realise that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong are Asian countries, don't you? You know, those little backwater places that make most of the cool high-tech toys in the world? Hell, chances are a lot of the stuff in your PC is Taiwanese in origin, and Japan has stuff that you won't see in Europe or the US for years.
How many of you have found computer speed to be a major impedence on your productivity?
I have.
I write server-side Java code for a living at a web agency. Until recently, I had a P3 450 with 384meg of RAM, and it was too damn slow. I develop in JBuilder, and deploy my code using Resin (see caucho.com), and for complex sites it could take literally minutes for the server to start, then a couple more minutes per page in debug mode for the pages to be parsed and compiled. You're looking at 10-15 minutes to check to see if a one-line bugfix has worked, and hasn't had any unexpected side-effects, etc. That's 10-15 minutes of waiting, waiting, waiting, clicking a link, waiting, waiting, waiting, entering some details and hitting submit, waiting, waiting....
Extremely frustrating, especially if you're working late, especially when you know that 30-45 minutes spent going to the nearest high-street electrical retailer will buy you a machine 4 times as fast.
That's all before we even get on to the responsiveness of JBuilder...
I now have a P4 1.9GHz with 3/4gig of RAM, and the difference is incredible. JBuilder is much more responsive (feels like native code rather than Java most of the time), compile-run-test-debug cycles are much reduced, etc. This has a knock-on effect - people are generally happier and less fresutrated, stress levels are lower, there's less swearing (one or two of my colleagues regularly vented steam by hitting their PCs and swearing loudly) - work is all-round more enjoyable.
The bottom line is that anything that means that I spend less time waiting for things to compile, or startup, or whatever, is a good thing. Do not make the mistake of thinking that you'll never have a use for all that power; you'll find a use. The laser, for example, was sat around in research labs for years before anyone thought of anything practical to do with them. Now, practically every PC has at least one, not to mention hi-fis, DVD players, etc.
What I'm wondering about is if C&W is going through this in the UK as well (several friends of mine have complained about the cost of calls there)
[Disclaimer: I work for a wholly owned subsidiary of Cable and Wireless (a software house, nothing telco-related).]
I doubt that your friends are customers of Cable and Wireless, unless they're running businesses, and even then it's fairly unlikely. C&W got out of the residential 'phone service (and cable TV) business about 2 years ago, selling its stake to NTL for a huge sum of money (I forget how much, but it was billions).
Re:Wow! Communicating with others?!
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Y'know, you can be a team player, and communicate effectively with other people in the business, and be a good "corporate citizen" (whatever that's supposed to mean) without wearing a suit.
At the start of the year, I had to go to a client site for a meeting. I had been advised that they had a dress code, so I wore shoes, suit trousers and a shirt and tied my hair back (it was long then), rather than my normal boots, jeans and T-shirt.
The meeting went fine, everyone seemed happy, until I got back to the office. A few hours later, the project manager approached me rather apologetically, and told me that there had been a complaint about the dress standard of those of us who went to the meeting. Basically, they objected to us not wearing ties.
Funnily enough, my not wearing a tie didn't seem to affect my ability to get their project done on time, despite both the timescale and the budget being woefully under-estimated. Of course, I'm sure that they'd still rather it went over time and budget, but that we all looked the part.
Bottom line is, it's not the clothes that are doing the programming, it's me. If you want it done right, there are a few things I need, and one of them is to be relaxed and happy. Force me into uncomfortable clothes, and I'll be distracted, and so make more mistakes and take longer over my work.
I guess the biggest difference between the UK and the US is that the media isn't privately owned to quite the same degree in the UK as it is in the US, right?
Perhaps, but to the best of my knowledge, the only publicly-owned media in the UK is the BBC. All other TV and radio stations, and all newspapers, are privately owned.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying Eclipse is useless for free development is like saying Linux is useless on the Intel platform because the Intel microcode isn't free.
;-)
Shush, you'll start giving them ideas...
Seriously though, you seem to be forgetting that you're talking about people who believe that all code should be free. It doesn't matter to these people that the free and proprietary JVMs will be indistinguishable (at least to Eclipse), they know that there's a difference.
Personally, I don't care; I've been developing in Java for a little over two years now, and have never had a problem that could've been solved by it being Free. You get the source to the core APIs with the SDK, and I don't do anything that would require the source to the JVM. If they care enough to spend their time developing something like this, though, good on them. I won't be using it myself, but I certainly have to give them credit for actually living by their principles.
As for the hardware, if it weren't so expensive and difficult to make, you can bet there'd be a Free x86 compatible processor available. As long as manufacturing costs are as high as they are, though, we're not going to see one. Again, I don't care - my P4 works just fine. Then again, I'm a little more pragmatic; I'm a professional coder, working on closed-source code (unless the client pays for the source too), so I can't afford not to be.
That really depends on when you last "dabbled" and what you were doing, doesn't it?
I've been developing Java code professionally for a little over two years now, writing server-side stuff for web sites. About half of us work under Linux, the rest using either Win2k or XP, deploying the code on machines running RedHat, and we've never had any trouble.
Of course, if you're talking about applets, then your problem isn't with Java, but with the browser producers' broken JVMs (especially the MS one, which simply isn't worth bothering with). Applets are only really of any use if you control the client environment, right down to being able to tell people to download a new JVM. No use for silly little toys on websites, but fine for more complex, bespoke stuff (although still a pain in the arse to develop, of course, especially if you're not used to creating GUIs).
many more people run BSD/Linux/OS X and can no longer play Windows games on their computers.
Yes, many more people now run non-Windows OSes on their PCs - but I very much doubt that that increase would account for even a small fraction of the drop in sales of PC games.
Most of the people who have switched to Linux/whatever are the sort of people who weren't playing PC games in the first place. If they were, they wouldn't have switched! Why would they switch to an OS that they can't do everything they want to with?
Personally, I'd imagine that falling levels of quality is one of the main reasons for the drop in sales. When was the last time you bought even a new PC game that didn't already have a patch out, or almost ready? Not only that, but I read an issue of PC Gamer recently (first PC mag I've read in ages), and of the dozen or so games they reviewed, only one or two scored above about 60%. When you're shelling out £35 (UK) on a game, you want a good one.
I think a lot of games companies need to sit down and think about letting the development teams finish their games, rather than getting them to market ASAP...
Sometimes it's just easier to buy pre-built.
I bought my girlfriend a new PC a couple of weeks ago (a Packard Bell iMedia; 2.53GHz P4, 512MB of RAM, and damn-near *silent* - very nice). At the same time, more or less, I bought myself a motherboard, PSU, RAM and P4, to upgrade my own machine with.
I bought the PC pre-built because I could get it on finance; nothing to pay for a year, then pay the balance or make monthly payments at a hideous interest rate. I couldn't have done that buying components and building from scratch.
More than that - I run Linux at work, but have Windows XP running installed in a VMWare virtual machine, for two reasons:
a) I do (mostly) server-side web work, and so sometimes have to test stuff in IE
b) despite being a programmer working in Java and HTML/JSP, I still have to deal with Word documents
Point b) is by far the most important. Why would any business switch to an alternative, when they already own Word, and all their clients and partners use Word? If the alternative's import filters aren't 100% perfect, it isn't going to happen.
Tiny Personal Firewall does that too (or equivalent - I don't if it's actually an md5 check), and I'm pretty sure that Norton's firewall software does as well.
With reference to your first and third points, on the dialogue box you get when an update has been detected, there's a "Details" button that tells you exactly what has been found, what it does, etc - just as if you ran Windows Update manually.
Besides, I really don't see the problem - even with all the patches available via Windows Update, there is still a fairly small number of possible md5sum values for each file. It wouldn't take long at all to compare the computed value with each of the known good ones, only flagging a warning if they all fail to match.
I'm sorry to hear of the problems you've had, but my experience is almost exactly the opposite. I run NVidia's drivers on Mandrake 9 on my Linux box at work, and it's rock steady.
I don't do a great deal of graphics-intensive stuff, but do generally play a few rounds of either Unreal Tournament or RtCW each working day (after hours, of course). I've not once had a crash, although occasionally KDE's screen locking button stops working after playing...
If you want Office, you have to buy a copy.
That's true enough, but you'll often find Microsoft Works bundled with new PCs (e.g. the one I bought a couple of weeks ago), and that comes with Word. To a lot of people, Word *is* Office, as they almost never use Powerpoint or Excel, don't think of Outlook as part of Office, and wouldn't even know what Access is.
Also, if you look around enough, you will find Office bundled with new PCs. They'll be the sort that cost a fortune, and come with a printer, scanner, etc, but you can find them.
True, but I do think there's a "whoa" factor to finding them, especially if you have to start changing the base and arranging numbers into squares, rectangles, etc.
Just because it's definitely in there somewhere, doesn't mean you'll definitely find it. Pi may be infinite, but you and I are not.
If pi is infinite, does this mean the amount of resources needed to calculate pi as accurately as possible is also infinite?
Unless it repeats, yes - it would take an infinite amount of time to write out an infinitely long number, let alone calculate one.
Why didn't Kanada just let his computer algorithm run for another year...
My guess would be that either Kanada, or someone higher up, set a deadline for the project. At that point, what you have, is what you have - no more calculation. After all, you have to stop at some point; if you're going to extend it by one year, why not 2, or 10?
Also, don't forget that the number has to be stored somewhere, whether in RAM or on disk; perhaps the machine simply didn't have the resources to calculate any more digits?
Either that, or he meant "struggling artists, working as waiters to make ends meet while waiting for their big break". It's something of a Hollywood cliche, I believe.
Indeed; I still remember a time when PC keyboards didn't have Windows keys on them. I was thinking about that just the other day, in fact.
More than that, though, don't forget that most video card manuacturers work closely with Microsoft to ensure that their new chipsets support the features being implemented in the latest/next release of Direct3D. Of course this is a two way thing - I've no doubt that both parties say "we've this really cool idea that we need you to help us with...", but that doesn't diminish the influence they have on each other.
At the end of the day, if a feature supported in hardware doesn't make it into Direct3d, it isn't going to be (widely) used. (The same is true, to a lesser extent, of OpenGL, of course)
Also ignores the fact that with Linux, you can run everything in your company off of one computer, with terminals to that computer located at different physical locations throughout the company.
That sounds an awful lot like Terminal Server, which is available for Windows 2000; clients connect to it using remote desktop (there's even a client for Linux).
Of course, depending on what you're using the machine for, it may be impractical or impossible to share a central machine in that way. For example, where I work, there are 11 or so programmers all using JBuilder at once. You'd be looking at a machine with 6 or so gigs of RAM and quite a few very fast processors to deliver acceptable performance. Much cheaper to just buy us each a desktop and be done with it.
As others have said, I'd love to know where you're buying Windows from for $100.
I recently (in the last couple of weeks) upgraded my home PC, and as I was buying a motherboard, processor, etc, I was elligible to buy an OEM copy of Windows XP Professional. It cost me £116 (Sterling), which is roughly $180US at current exchange rates. The retail version was double this, and so would be about $360US. Obviously large OEMs would be buying Windows by the truckload, and so would be paying considerably less, but then PCs they bought wouldn't cost them $800 either.
Other than that, I do agree - hardware prices have dropped a hell of a lot, even before taking into account increases in power and features, while software in general has remained pretty constant in price. For my upgrade, Windows was the second most expensive item, beaten only by the processor (P4 2.4B).
3D graphics cards are really powerful computers
True, but they are not general purpose computers. They are designed to do one thing only - perform operations relevant to rendering 3D scenes. More than that, in fact - they are built to accelerate Direct3D and OpenGL operations specifically. Modifying the drivers might well allow you to do other cool things, but you'd almost certainly be better off doing those things with a normal CPU.
Other than that, while I sympathise with your sentiments, and to some extent agree with them, we don't really have much choice. The only fully working Linux drivers for modern graphics cards are closed source. By "fully working", I mean with complete, stable, fast suppot for all of the card's features. I'm pragmatic; if I've spent £200 on a new card, I want it to work properly. If that means using a close-source driver, so be it.
Finally, you seem not to realise that it isn't always up to the card/chipset manufacturers to open their driver source. NVidia, for example, is under NDA with several third parties over technology used in their cards and drivers. That means that they can't open the source to their drivers.
Don't assume that static buffers are ALWAYS wrong.
Indeed - generally, there's nothing wrong with static buffers. If you're going to use them, however, there is absolutely no excuse for not bounds checking access to that buffer. That is, if you know that the buffer can contain say 1000 characters, check anything you write to it to make sure it fits!
That's most of what's "wrong" with static buffers - that it's too easy to use them incorrectly. It's not entirely the fault of the buffer, though, that it's easily misused
Don't expect a 2x speedup or anything, even if your system is running heavily threaded applications.
You can't expect a 2x speed up even with 2 real physical processors - then, iirc, you tend to get a factor of about 1.8 increase.
HT is supposed to give you about a 25% increase in performance on desktop machines, or 30% on servers. I've not used an HT-enabled machine, though, so I can't vouch for those figures.
what about people who actually do need to hear from others in 3rd world countries?
Asia? Third-world? You do realise that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong are Asian countries, don't you? You know, those little backwater places that make most of the cool high-tech toys in the world? Hell, chances are a lot of the stuff in your PC is Taiwanese in origin, and Japan has stuff that you won't see in Europe or the US for years.
How many of you have found computer speed to be a major impedence on your productivity?
I have.
I write server-side Java code for a living at a web agency. Until recently, I had a P3 450 with 384meg of RAM, and it was too damn slow. I develop in JBuilder, and deploy my code using Resin (see caucho.com), and for complex sites it could take literally minutes for the server to start, then a couple more minutes per page in debug mode for the pages to be parsed and compiled. You're looking at 10-15 minutes to check to see if a one-line bugfix has worked, and hasn't had any unexpected side-effects, etc. That's 10-15 minutes of waiting, waiting, waiting, clicking a link, waiting, waiting, waiting, entering some details and hitting submit, waiting, waiting....
Extremely frustrating, especially if you're working late, especially when you know that 30-45 minutes spent going to the nearest high-street electrical retailer will buy you a machine 4 times as fast.
That's all before we even get on to the responsiveness of JBuilder...
I now have a P4 1.9GHz with 3/4gig of RAM, and the difference is incredible. JBuilder is much more responsive (feels like native code rather than Java most of the time), compile-run-test-debug cycles are much reduced, etc. This has a knock-on effect - people are generally happier and less fresutrated, stress levels are lower, there's less swearing (one or two of my colleagues regularly vented steam by hitting their PCs and swearing loudly) - work is all-round more enjoyable.
The bottom line is that anything that means that I spend less time waiting for things to compile, or startup, or whatever, is a good thing. Do not make the mistake of thinking that you'll never have a use for all that power; you'll find a use. The laser, for example, was sat around in research labs for years before anyone thought of anything practical to do with them. Now, practically every PC has at least one, not to mention hi-fis, DVD players, etc.
What I'm wondering about is if C&W is going through this in the UK as well (several friends of mine have complained about the cost of calls there)
[Disclaimer: I work for a wholly owned subsidiary of Cable and Wireless (a software house, nothing telco-related).]
I doubt that your friends are customers of Cable and Wireless, unless they're running businesses, and even then it's fairly unlikely. C&W got out of the residential 'phone service (and cable TV) business about 2 years ago, selling its stake to NTL for a huge sum of money (I forget how much, but it was billions).
Y'know, you can be a team player, and communicate effectively with other people in the business, and be a good "corporate citizen" (whatever that's supposed to mean) without wearing a suit.
At the start of the year, I had to go to a client site for a meeting. I had been advised that they had a dress code, so I wore shoes, suit trousers and a shirt and tied my hair back (it was long then), rather than my normal boots, jeans and T-shirt.
The meeting went fine, everyone seemed happy, until I got back to the office. A few hours later, the project manager approached me rather apologetically, and told me that there had been a complaint about the dress standard of those of us who went to the meeting. Basically, they objected to us not wearing ties.
Funnily enough, my not wearing a tie didn't seem to affect my ability to get their project done on time, despite both the timescale and the budget being woefully under-estimated. Of course, I'm sure that they'd still rather it went over time and budget, but that we all looked the part.
Bottom line is, it's not the clothes that are doing the programming, it's me. If you want it done right, there are a few things I need, and one of them is to be relaxed and happy. Force me into uncomfortable clothes, and I'll be distracted, and so make more mistakes and take longer over my work.
You should assume that whatever you send over your network link is publicly readable (if not always modifyable) and encrypt accordingly.
What good will encrypting your mails do you, when the Police have the power to demand that you surrender your keys, on pain of a prison term?
Mind you, if you're using the internet to send stuff you don't want Them to read, you're asking to get caught anyway...
I guess the biggest difference between the UK and the US is that the media isn't privately owned to quite the same degree in the UK as it is in the US, right?
Perhaps, but to the best of my knowledge, the only publicly-owned media in the UK is the BBC. All other TV and radio stations, and all newspapers, are privately owned.
Imagine if we measured in Kelvin, though... that would be confusing!
Please; just subtract 273:
>298K: t-shirt, shorts
293K-298K:t-shirt, jeans
etc...