I'm a bit totalitarian about this. I believe that the web should be as CLOSE to the standard as possible. If there are alternatives that are better than IE6/7 now, then by Zeus make sure that people know about it if the page their viewing b0rks out.
I have hated having to code around problems of rendering with IE at the expense of other browsers which render closer to the standard.
Just my.02 euros (or whatever dominant currency we have now)
My position on this is that the manager is a troll and is a control freak.
I listen to a very large collection of music & podcasts at work.
If I had a manager actually state that as a position with the particular environs you mentioned I would be demanding a number of things: 1) segregation of the programmers to a more isolated area 2) segregation of anyone who is in sales to a basement office with sound proofing 3) scientific studies that the manager in question was not beaten up and stuffed in lockers in high school
Now while much of what I'm writing above may be construed as flame bait, I just posit it for laughs.
Seriously though, music and/or podcasts are some of the mechanisms I was using to deal with either utter silence (because my dev team was fairly isolated) or high volume sales people (after consolidation of the office employees after 1st round of layoffs).
I upgraded and promptly broke a couple of things.. the gdk/gtk pixbuf is going to be the biggest pain in the rear. That took out Eclipse 3.5.1 & Lotus Notes 8.5 (trust me... I'd rather use something else but that's what we use @ work).
There are a couple of other annoyances which I'm sure will be worked out in the near future.
Biggest gripe I have is GDM with the user picker like WinXP/Vista... I'm not real keen on exposing who's a valid user on the system.
Get a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter from your local computer retail store.
Hook the unit up.
If you have a linux box you can use GNU shred to write random data over the raw/dev/hd? device.
What I've done is run shred with 3 iterations of random data and a fourth of just zeros.
My former drives are more or less unrecoverable at that point... I don't know to what forensic recovery attempts might yield but it would be awfully expensive for the attempt.
I started with FORTRAN 77, learned C, Perl (purists just move along), C++, x86 Assembler, a smattering of high level languages in a survey course, THEN Java.
Without my background in the earlier languages the understanding of what Java does for the software developer is completely meaningless. In C/C++ you MUST have a working knowledge of memory management. Its crucial in whatever environment your in regardless of how much is available resource wise.
I've heard so many reviews that make the dyson vacs out to either be the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest disaster since the titanic. I'd be really surprised if there was anything other than the same type of review on a "roomba killer"
I made this move a little over 3 years ago. I was in a desperate situation in that my employer at the time was axing people left and right, good people too. I ended up getting dumped an entire bag of junk and work that I couldn't perform. My coworker, who was in an architect manager role had had enough and made the jump about 3 weeks prior. I ended up hooking up with the same contracting firm he went to and got myself under a W-2 employment agreement with them. He on the otherhand already had a 1099 corp established and was able to get the appropriate agreements in place for it. I personally didn't want to go through the motions of establishing personal health care, the 1099 corp, etc. It just wasn't something I could stomach at the time.
The jump was scary as all hell. I hopped on a new contract about 48 hours after leaving my former employer and started getting setup. Unfortunately, the position was not exactly as my account rep had conveyed with me. Nor was it as clear cut as the contractee's interview/position description stated. Needless to say, the first few weeks were a bit bumpy. I was able to establish a fairly good rapport with the client and things have been more or less peachy since. There is the temptation in some cases that, as contract, you will get paid overtime. I have to warn you. This is a blessing and a curse. When you do this stuff and go the extra mile, it sometimes becomes expected of you. While the extra money is nice, the long hours tend to really eat in to you.
In early June, after a couple of internal management organization shifts, I was under the impression that my contract was stable through the end of the year. Well 1 week into June, I was informed that I would no longer be needed in my current role after 30 June. Needless to say I felt that I had just been screwed over, my contract firm was outraged, and I was really starting to freak out as my, then, girlfriend (now wife) had just moved in. Money coming in was VERY important. Luckily, my contract firm has feelers in all over this particular company, they were able to secure me a position quickly in C++ land, which I wasn't overly proficient at as having programmed in Java for the last 4 years, but it was work. The way the agreement was inked, I would be paid as a salaried employee up to 40 hours, get 2 weeks vacation time, 5 sick days, etc. Overtime was a bit of a sticker. I have to work something like 6% overtime or some such garbage before I get paid for it. Since my earlier experience put a real pinch on me, overtime was going to be minimal at most if I could help it.
Long and short of this is that you should really research your options and your current situation. If you can stick it out and look for a perm position, go for it. If you are willing to "eat shit" for a while, you may come up smelling like a rose. My experience may or may not be the same that many people have. If you are confident in your skills and are able to adapt quickly to fluid situations, then you may want to try your hand at it. Make sure though that you have enough banked up to cover shortages in hours (i.e. around christmas time where code freezes may be rampant and actual work may be scarce).
Hope my long winded telling of my last three years has not been over the top or wandering too much.
I've had to go through a couple of shooting matches with regard to this environment. I had to develop a WAP interface for mobile phones and trying to get normal common ground on the size of the interface was like pulling teeth. The problem with most businesses is that they don't understand (and in a lot of cases) don't care to understand why it won't work but that it/should/ work and that is it.
I can sympathize with anyone trying to access the web OTA.
You've seen the bumper stickers and the t-shirts. Or maybe you haven't. Being a rider myself I've had to wonder whether or not the sound that an auto or motorbike makes would really make a difference.
My old bike had a nice not overly loud aftermarket pipe on it. Having a v-4 engine in it, the stock silencer made it sound anemic. I put the can on more for aesthetics than anything else.
My new bike with an inline 4 is just whiny and I'm VERY thankful for the silencer on there and have no intention of changing it.
Those loud pipes you hear on big-twins (i.e. of the H-D or metric ilk) usually are so obnoxiously loud that it defeats the purpose and is generally just annoying.
Yeah you can hear them 6 miles away, unless of course you're on the highway doing about 70-80mph in your "cage" at which point, depending on the acoustics of your auto, might be completely drowned or damped out.
I've done weeks of 80-90 hours and was only productive probably 65-70 of it. Now in extreme cases I've been able to be productive say 90% of these situations, but it takes a lot of caffiene and mental prep during that time, not just tapping on the keyboard.
In 90% of the cases that overtime for me arises, it's due to managers completely blowing my timelines out of the water or undercutting my estimates to meet a political goal. Excessive overtime is the product of managers that caused the dot-bomb issue to arise. The mentality is that if you're putting in 160 hours for a two week period you're working hard and showing your dedication. Which as we al know is complete horse hockey.
I've been contracting/consulting through a third party. They've got me listed as a W-2 employee which simplifies things for me as well as gives me a 401k (with employer match) and health insurance. The down side is that at times the hours can vary all over the board.
Easiest way to figure out your salary equivalient as an hourly rate is to work on a 2000 year (basically 50 weeks of 40hrs/wk). Now since I'm as a W-2 I'm not sure what the increase would be to account for say health care, insurance, taxes, etc.
As long as the contract stipulates how overtime is paid (i.e. straight time, time+1/2) life is good.
Sorry if I'm rambling here. 3:46AM is quite early.
Last year, around christmas, I had a full on tech-related mental breakdown. During a tech support fit of rage helping two geographically separated family members setup their wireless networks (both of which I had bought for them as christmas gifts) I managed to desroy my own ill working 48x CDROM and destroy a cordless phone that had stopped giving me the ability to hang up. After this point I realized that I was done giving free technical support on things that seemed to never sink in.
I took a three month hiatus from it and let them suffer. After which point I set ground rules that my time cannot be spent running myself into complete nervous breakdowns over miniscule problems that they're having. The other ground rule is that I won't do techsupport about end of year holidays. Hopefully this will ease my end of year stress.
Now/THAT/ is what I was after. Personally I find IP address changes to be trivial (although it does tend to foul up node/ip locked licenses). I did not mean that NON-routable addresses (e.g. 192.168.1.x) or reserved addresses (e.g. 127.0.0.1) were not "portable". What I was trying to state is that a providers range of addresses (say some class C) x.y.z.?, you should not be able to take x.y.z.10, x.y.z.12, x.y.z.56 and say those are "mine" and pull them out to another provider.
Personally I think it would be insane to even consider the level of effort that would be involved with the logistics on this.
As a previous post stated though, attempts using (and excuse me if I don't have this correct, I'll go back and read it) BGP to manage the routes to the host was in play but the tables to do this were foiled by the sheer volume of records that had to be managed.
I've got a Game Card III Automatic shoved in one of my legacy slots...I'm not really using it perse but it's still in there. Was using it with my Thrustermaster F-16 FLCS Joystick on Descent 3. Haven't played that in a LOOOONG time.
Does anyone know if there infact/is/ a source browser, open source or not, that even remotely represents that gibsonian cyberspace/matrix style presentation???
I would be in/HEAVEN/ with something like that at work.
Here's the thing. For MANY MANY years I've wondered why it is that CD's have NOT changed in price...PERIOD. 10 years ago when I got my first CD player as a HS graduction gift I was shocked that CD's were like 15-17$ US. Well guess what...I'm still paying between 15-17$US (sometimes more if they're trance imports). WTF is the deal with the record companies? I remember them saying "this new technology will replace audio cassette, and be cheaper than audio cassette in 5 years". That phrase was uttered sometime in the late 80's I think. Well when the hell is it going to happen?
P2P Networks allow me to get ahold of the miscellaneous track that I'm looking for, listen to it in it's entirity and then decide if I'm going to go and buy the CD. Otherwise I may just skip it and move on.
If the record co's get off our back and stop screaming "we're protecting the artists" and maybe just admit "we're protecting our huge wallets, making them bigger, and screwing the artists in the process" we'd probably be better off all around.
I had gone through this with a co-worker a number of years ago over an ODBC driver that had been released under GPL and due to the rammifications of the GPL we would not be able to use the software. now my memory is a bit fuzzy but I think we had contacted the author to re-release the driver under the LGPL (either Lesser or Library) which if my mostly roasted braincells keep telling me was written exactly for these types of scenarios. I don't have the exact details but you could look into it.
I think the driver was the openlink iODBC driver (which depending on which version you look at is under GPL/LGPL)...take a look at the following circa jan 1999
They know that they've been pegged with NUMEROUS security holes (god fobid there's a week that goes by that I don't hear about some hole in an MS product) and have hidden behind their EULA to clear them of any wrong doing.
Please oh please let someone find their EULA to be completely illegal and charge them with providing a route for 'industrial terrorism'
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit totalitarian about this. I believe that the web should be as CLOSE to the standard as possible. If there are alternatives that are better than IE6/7 now, then by Zeus make sure that people know about it if the page their viewing b0rks out.
I have hated having to code around problems of rendering with IE at the expense of other browsers which render closer to the standard.
Just my .02 euros (or whatever dominant currency we have now)
My position on this is that the manager is a troll and is a control freak.
I listen to a very large collection of music & podcasts at work.
If I had a manager actually state that as a position with the particular environs you mentioned I would be demanding a number of things:
1) segregation of the programmers to a more isolated area
2) segregation of anyone who is in sales to a basement office with sound proofing
3) scientific studies that the manager in question was not beaten up and stuffed in lockers in high school
Now while much of what I'm writing above may be construed as flame bait, I just posit it for laughs.
Seriously though, music and/or podcasts are some of the mechanisms I was using to deal with either utter silence (because my dev team was fairly isolated) or high volume sales people (after consolidation of the office employees after 1st round of layoffs).
I upgraded and promptly broke a couple of things .. the gdk/gtk pixbuf is going to be the biggest pain in the rear. That took out Eclipse 3.5.1 & Lotus Notes 8.5 (trust me ... I'd rather use something else but that's what we use @ work).
There are a couple of other annoyances which I'm sure will be worked out in the near future.
Biggest gripe I have is GDM with the user picker like WinXP/Vista ... I'm not real keen on exposing who's a valid user on the system.
Get a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter from your local computer retail store.
/dev/hd? device.
... I don't know to what forensic recovery attempts might yield but it would be awfully expensive for the attempt.
Hook the unit up.
If you have a linux box you can use GNU shred to write random data over the raw
What I've done is run shred with 3 iterations of random data and a fourth of just zeros.
My former drives are more or less unrecoverable at that point
I started with FORTRAN 77, learned C, Perl (purists just move along), C++, x86 Assembler, a smattering of high level languages in a survey course, THEN Java.
Without my background in the earlier languages the understanding of what Java does for the software developer is completely meaningless. In C/C++ you MUST have a working knowledge of memory management. Its crucial in whatever environment your in regardless of how much is available resource wise.
I've been using a logitech trackball in one incarnation or another going on over 10 years. Love'em way more than drag mice.
Will it suck or will it suck
I've heard so many reviews that make the dyson vacs out to either be the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest disaster since the titanic. I'd be really surprised if there was anything other than the same type of review on a "roomba killer"
That was /exactly/ the first thing that popped into my head when I scrolled past this and my sub concious registered it.
...
I was thinking what if they were to slow down the commercial feed so that if you're fast forwarding it that it would play at normal speed
I'm really stretching on that but I'm glad some people remember max headroom.
I made this move a little over 3 years ago. I was in a desperate situation in that my employer at the time was axing people left and right, good people too. I ended up getting dumped an entire bag of junk and work that I couldn't perform. My coworker, who was in an architect manager role had had enough and made the jump about 3 weeks prior. I ended up hooking up with the same contracting firm he went to and got myself under a W-2 employment agreement with them. He on the otherhand already had a 1099 corp established and was able to get the appropriate agreements in place for it. I personally didn't want to go through the motions of establishing personal health care, the 1099 corp, etc. It just wasn't something I could stomach at the time.
The jump was scary as all hell. I hopped on a new contract about 48 hours after leaving my former employer and started getting setup. Unfortunately, the position was not exactly as my account rep had conveyed with me. Nor was it as clear cut as the contractee's interview/position description stated. Needless to say, the first few weeks were a bit bumpy. I was able to establish a fairly good rapport with the client and things have been more or less peachy since. There is the temptation in some cases that, as contract, you will get paid overtime. I have to warn you. This is a blessing and a curse. When you do this stuff and go the extra mile, it sometimes becomes expected of you. While the extra money is nice, the long hours tend to really eat in to you.
In early June, after a couple of internal management organization shifts, I was under the impression that my contract was stable through the end of the year. Well 1 week into June, I was informed that I would no longer be needed in my current role after 30 June. Needless to say I felt that I had just been screwed over, my contract firm was outraged, and I was really starting to freak out as my, then, girlfriend (now wife) had just moved in. Money coming in was VERY important. Luckily, my contract firm has feelers in all over this particular company, they were able to secure me a position quickly in C++ land, which I wasn't overly proficient at as having programmed in Java for the last 4 years, but it was work. The way the agreement was inked, I would be paid as a salaried employee up to 40 hours, get 2 weeks vacation time, 5 sick days, etc. Overtime was a bit of a sticker. I have to work something like 6% overtime or some such garbage before I get paid for it. Since my earlier experience put a real pinch on me, overtime was going to be minimal at most if I could help it.
Long and short of this is that you should really research your options and your current situation. If you can stick it out and look for a perm position, go for it. If you are willing to "eat shit" for a while, you may come up smelling like a rose. My experience may or may not be the same that many people have. If you are confident in your skills and are able to adapt quickly to fluid situations, then you may want to try your hand at it. Make sure though that you have enough banked up to cover shortages in hours (i.e. around christmas time where code freezes may be rampant and actual work may be scarce).
Hope my long winded telling of my last three years has not been over the top or wandering too much.
I've had to go through a couple of shooting matches with regard to this environment. I had to develop a WAP interface for mobile phones and trying to get normal common ground on the size of the interface was like pulling teeth. The problem with most businesses is that they don't understand (and in a lot of cases) don't care to understand why it won't work but that it /should/ work and that is it.
I can sympathize with anyone trying to access the web OTA.
You've seen the bumper stickers and the t-shirts. Or maybe you haven't. Being a rider myself I've had to wonder whether or not the sound that an auto or motorbike makes would really make a difference.
My old bike had a nice not overly loud aftermarket pipe on it. Having a v-4 engine in it, the stock silencer made it sound anemic. I put the can on more for aesthetics than anything else.
My new bike with an inline 4 is just whiny and I'm VERY thankful for the silencer on there and have no intention of changing it.
Those loud pipes you hear on big-twins (i.e. of the H-D or metric ilk) usually are so obnoxiously loud that it defeats the purpose and is generally just annoying.
Yeah you can hear them 6 miles away, unless of course you're on the highway doing about 70-80mph in your "cage" at which point, depending on the acoustics of your auto, might be completely drowned or damped out.
I've done weeks of 80-90 hours and was only productive probably 65-70 of it. Now in extreme cases I've been able to be productive say 90% of these situations, but it takes a lot of caffiene and mental prep during that time, not just tapping on the keyboard.
In 90% of the cases that overtime for me arises, it's due to managers completely blowing my timelines out of the water or undercutting my estimates to meet a political goal. Excessive overtime is the product of managers that caused the dot-bomb issue to arise. The mentality is that if you're putting in 160 hours for a two week period you're working hard and showing your dedication. Which as we al know is complete horse hockey.
I've been contracting/consulting through a third party. They've got me listed as a W-2 employee which simplifies things for me as well as gives me a 401k (with employer match) and health insurance. The down side is that at times the hours can vary all over the board.
Easiest way to figure out your salary equivalient as an hourly rate is to work on a 2000 year (basically 50 weeks of 40hrs/wk). Now since I'm as a W-2 I'm not sure what the increase would be to account for say health care, insurance, taxes, etc.
As long as the contract stipulates how overtime is paid (i.e. straight time, time+1/2) life is good.
Sorry if I'm rambling here. 3:46AM is quite early.
Last year, around christmas, I had a full on tech-related mental breakdown. During a tech support fit of rage helping two geographically separated family members setup their wireless networks (both of which I had bought for them as christmas gifts) I managed to desroy my own ill working 48x CDROM and destroy a cordless phone that had stopped giving me the ability to hang up. After this point I realized that I was done giving free technical support on things that seemed to never sink in.
I took a three month hiatus from it and let them suffer. After which point I set ground rules that my time cannot be spent running myself into complete nervous breakdowns over miniscule problems that they're having. The other ground rule is that I won't do techsupport about end of year holidays. Hopefully this will ease my end of year stress.
Now /THAT/ is what I was after. Personally I find IP address changes to be trivial (although it does tend to foul up node/ip locked licenses). I did not mean that NON-routable addresses (e.g. 192.168.1.x) or reserved addresses (e.g. 127.0.0.1) were not "portable". What I was trying to state is that a providers range of addresses (say some class C) x.y.z.?, you should not be able to take x.y.z.10, x.y.z.12, x.y.z.56 and say those are "mine" and pull them out to another provider.
Personally I think it would be insane to even consider the level of effort that would be involved with the logistics on this.
As a previous post stated though, attempts using (and excuse me if I don't have this correct, I'll go back and read it) BGP to manage the routes to the host was in play but the tables to do this were foiled by the sheer volume of records that had to be managed.
Thanks.
This is not WLNP! IP's are NOT portable and should not be interchanged like phone numbers. Oh the hell this would unleash.
BTW FIRSTPOST!
Someone captured a sentinel right off the screen of The Matrix and just slam dunked into a plexiglas case. Sweet!
Could just see it...
...
"honestly officer, my contacts turned totally black when I hit I-285. I couldn't see a thing, but I could still talk on my cell phone so I did."
I've got a Game Card III Automatic shoved in one of my legacy slots...I'm not really using it perse but it's still in there. Was using it with my Thrustermaster F-16 FLCS Joystick on Descent 3. Haven't played that in a LOOOONG time.
Does anyone know if there infact /is/ a source browser, open source or not, that even remotely represents that gibsonian cyberspace/matrix style presentation???
/HEAVEN/ with something like that at work.
I would be in
same deal...nuff said
Here's the thing. For MANY MANY years I've wondered why it is that CD's have NOT changed in price...PERIOD. 10 years ago when I got my first CD player as a HS graduction gift I was shocked that CD's were like 15-17$ US. Well guess what...I'm still paying between 15-17$US (sometimes more if they're trance imports). WTF is the deal with the record companies? I remember them saying "this new technology will replace audio cassette, and be cheaper than audio cassette in 5 years". That phrase was uttered sometime in the late 80's I think. Well when the hell is it going to happen?
.02 yen.
P2P Networks allow me to get ahold of the miscellaneous track that I'm looking for, listen to it in it's entirity and then decide if I'm going to go and buy the CD. Otherwise I may just skip it and move on.
If the record co's get off our back and stop screaming "we're protecting the artists" and maybe just admit "we're protecting our huge wallets, making them bigger, and screwing the artists in the process" we'd probably be better off all around.
just my
I had gone through this with a co-worker a number of years ago over an ODBC driver that had been released under GPL and due to the rammifications of the GPL we would not be able to use the software. now my memory is a bit fuzzy but I think we had contacted the author to re-release the driver under the LGPL (either Lesser or Library) which if my mostly roasted braincells keep telling me was written exactly for these types of scenarios. I don't have the exact details but you could look into it.
I think the driver was the openlink iODBC driver (which depending on which version you look at is under GPL/LGPL)...take a look at the following circa jan 1999
What happens with add-on boards for the PC like the WinTV-PVR which can essentially turn your PC into a DVR?
Microsoft chargeable of aiding and abetting?
They know that they've been pegged with NUMEROUS security holes (god fobid there's a week that goes by that I don't hear about some hole in an MS product) and have hidden behind their EULA to clear them of any wrong doing.
Please oh please let someone find their EULA to be completely illegal and charge them with providing a route for 'industrial terrorism'