Quite bluntly: you're all ready a sucker if you're thinking that way. You'll do much better in your future jobs if you learn how to say, politely, firmly and in calm way "That's not a possible time frame, we need to investigate the project further before we can judge how long it will take."
Take a day off, get some perspective. If it's all ready a month late, it won't really matter if it's not done on Friday. Managers who expect you to work extra hours in the day and the weekend for free don't deserve your respect, especially if they're not in the seat next to you doing exactly the same thing.
Maybe this is some bitterness coming out as I was made redundant from a company that I'd put a lot of energy in to, mainly due to poor management of the sales function. But really, looking back at late projects, when it comes right down to it an extra week or two really doesn't make any difference.
Given a 90% complete project it's very unlikely management will get rid of the person writing it when they'll have a further delay getting someone new in to pick it all up. The extra pressure and stupid deadline is just manipulation of the way you feel to try to guilt you in to working faster, even though that's likely to produce a worse product.
Pay for the assessment from the outside company, it makes it much easier for them to put some proper staff time in to it. You can usually do a deal that the cost of the assessment gets taken off the overall bill if they get the full project.
Also remember that the web company has staff that have experience working together, even if some of them are freelancers, they are likely to be freelancers the company has used before. An internal project which needs to hire people in will need to factor in the extra time that those people need to gel in to a team (and the management time that can help that happen.)
If the manager stuffed up that badly with the contracting company, what makes you think they'd have been any better with full time employees? It appears they chose the wrong company at the interview stage, and that makes it likely they would have done the same thing with a standard employee.
Yes, the contracting company was at fault, but the manager is still in charge of the project. If he/she isn't getting information back out of the contracting company, that should be ringing alarm bells well before the scheduled end of the project.
Basically: Yes, if you get enough links, but it would be much quicker if you had relevant places linking to you, especially with the right sort of text in the links or close to them.
Huh? What makes you say that? It is much more simple and functional than any competitors.
I find I prefer the interface of Fastmail. It doesn't use Ajax and it isn't as pretty, but I find it has stayed as my main e-mail client.
I like some of the things about GMail, like the labels, but I don't like the long delay when you first visit it while it downloads all the scripting, and I don't find swapping between sets of e-mail within labels particularly quick either.
This is why I've stuck with Fastmail - by keeping the interface simple I find it faster, and on the design front I find their interface slightly more usable.
The Mighty Boosh is very different from Little Britain, fortunately. I quite like LB, but I've found the recent series very repetitive and as the media seem to love them the comedians behind it are getting exposure absolutely everywhere (e.g. introducing Elton John at Live8.) I love Boosh and find it a lot funnier, and friendlier, than LB. You can't hate a show that loves ponchos.
The Boosh is highly surreal and odd, but delightful at the same time. Each episode is it's own little adventure in to madness. I think it's well worth a look, but you might want to try seeing a couple of episodes because some of them may appeal where others won't.
They are committed to providing the archives that they can make public on-line. However, they don't actually own lots of the shows that they broadcast, the copyright on those shows are owned by the production companies that made the shows originally.
I'll be very pleased to see some old BBC shows freely downloadable, but many of my favourites will be missing, because the BBC doesn't own them.
I thought the UK law was more about where the knives are.
i.e. you own a large kitchen knife and it's in the kitchen, no problem. You own a large kitchen knife and it's hidden up your jacket sleeve while you walk through town, big problem.
According to a Policeman I heard interviewed when the law was proposed, people who are transporting knives from place to place and have good reason to have them, e.g. chefs, halal butchers, will be OK as long as they have them in safe storage - i.e. wrapped in cloth or in a case at the bottom of their bag, not unwrapped at the top of the bag in easy reach.
This leaves grey areas, but then again it's going to cause a lot of problems for legitimate knife users if there aren't some grey areas if the bring the law in.
Yeah, go ahead and argue semantics like that with the Police, I'm sure they'll be really impressed. Besides, wouldn't they phrase it like "on the property"
I think having a hidden / obscured computer in the house isn't the way to go - it could be found and could be seen as suspicious, plus if they ask if there is any more equipment in the house and you/he says "No" then they find out there was, you're in big trouble immediately, even if the original case is bunk.
So, just use an off-site backup service. It's completely understandable why you would have one: in case your house burns down and all work is lost. You can give up all the computers in your house so they can be checked for evidence, then go and buy a new one and get all your work back immediately / over a few hours.
If you have Google as your home page, it automatically puts focus to the search box.
Now consider most people can't touch type and so don't look at the screen when they're typing in 'www.bbc.co.uk' or whatever. When they look up and realise what's happened they may as well just press return and get the results back, the only one of which is the site they want, then click on that. Otherwise they have to click in the location/address bar and re-type it, or cut and paste it up there (which many of the same people won't realise you can do from the search box.)
I would also argue that as the person using the interface is getting what they want, it doesn't matter that they typed a URL in to the search box instead of the location bar. Surely good software is about helping the user get what they want, even if how they do it could have been done slightly more quickly if they'd used a different interface element.
It's quite common to be high up for matching terms for about a week, then disappear for three months or so. This seems to be normal behaviour for new sites and is nicknamed the Google sandbox and seems to have been confirmed by the patent application recently made public.
The sandbox is just an artificial lowering, so if you're a match for a rare term you can still be found quite easily.
But that definition is set in your country, and the internet isn't.
What is agreed on as acceptable to sell to 16 year olds in Holland is different from North America is different from Syria is different from Madagascar.
Generally the difficulties won't be on close-up pictures of sex, it'll be all the grey areas where everyone disagrees.
I like the idea of.movie and have wondered why they don't have one while watching trailers for a couple of years - all those blahblahblahthemovie.com domains being registered.
I'm glad to see.xxx has finally been agreed, although it's real use: making filtering software really easy, won't come unless all porn can be shifted on to that TLD, and I can't see that happening very easily. Not only would you have to force a move (presumably giving the domain for free at first) but also you get problems with what's seen as porn in different places. OK, a lot of porn is obviously that, but the borders of what is porn and what's a slightly provocative picture would cause lots of arguments that someone is going to have to deal with.
I had an Amstrad NC100 about 10-11 years ago. It was pretty good and lasted about five years of some heavy and some intermitent use.
It did have a few bugs though - Amstrad's standard dodgy keyboard driver, e.g. if you type 'wer' quickly it appends 't' on the end for you. It would crash very occasionally, which was annoying, and uploading my text through serial took an age.
It's got a version of BASIC built in, and some comms software so occasionally a mate would use it to log in to his Linux box through serial so he could kill an awkward process. So it gets some geek cred.
Even though it had it's faults, I did miss it when it finally broke. The simplicity, lightness and general robustness of it was great.
All the people I've met who worked at Amex hated it, so I can see why it would give you a bad impression, especially as that area of Brighton isn't particularly nice either.
That depends how you look at the figures. Google used to provide Yahoo's search results, so the 70% was Google + Yahoo search. When Yahoo went back to doing their own search results Google immediately lost 25% of that 70% - the section represented by Yahoo's results.
So, Google may have dropped 5%, but it depends how the data was collected, 5% could be their margin for error.
I was at a meeting with people from five European countries late last year, when they were asked which search engine they used they all said 'Google', when asked the year before it had been a mixture of Yahoo, Lycos and Google. Although a completely non-representative sample, it was interesting to see how Google is still taking over from other engines for some people.
Where on Earth did you get "Are you saying that Access is better than MySQL?" from? He didn't say use Access instead, he just said MySQL wasn't ready for the enterprise.
Just a vague guess, but perhaps he's suggesting PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase or MS SQL Server are more suitable for the enterprise instead. Or perhaps he's a DB2 fan or something.
Access isn't the only alternative to MySQL, thank god.
I've found the search on 10.3 to be OK. It's not as quick as Google Desktop on my PC, but then it searches a great deal more types of document. It is annoying that it doesn't seem to work for characters like $ and ?, so searching on PHP files can be a pain if you're after certain variables.
I'm finding Google Desktop relatively useless because most of my docs are in OO.o format, or old Works documents (.wps), neither of which it indexes. It also doesn't index my PHP or ColdFusion code at all, which means I still need to do a standard search on them when I'm looking for something odd. If GD comes out for the Mac, it'll have to be better than the version on the PC for me to use it.
Lots of people can't see a 60Hz flicker when looking directly at a monitor, however it will still cause bad effects such as increased tiredness and headaches.
This is due to the difference between the way the rod and cone receptors in the eye work. Cones are great for seeing colour and very small differences in definition, but lousy at refresh rate and in low-light conditions. Rods are much better in these areas and dominate peripheral vision, which is why you can see the flicker in the corner of your eye when you can't when looking directly at the source. It's also why if you look at a dim star directly, you can't see it, but if you look to one side you can - the rods can pick up the lower amount of light that the cones can't.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll be fine using OSX then, Silverlight all ready works on that (in Firefox and Safari), at least on 10.4
Quite bluntly: you're all ready a sucker if you're thinking that way. You'll do much better in your future jobs if you learn how to say, politely, firmly and in calm way "That's not a possible time frame, we need to investigate the project further before we can judge how long it will take."
Take a day off, get some perspective. If it's all ready a month late, it won't really matter if it's not done on Friday. Managers who expect you to work extra hours in the day and the weekend for free don't deserve your respect, especially if they're not in the seat next to you doing exactly the same thing.
Maybe this is some bitterness coming out as I was made redundant from a company that I'd put a lot of energy in to, mainly due to poor management of the sales function. But really, looking back at late projects, when it comes right down to it an extra week or two really doesn't make any difference.
Given a 90% complete project it's very unlikely management will get rid of the person writing it when they'll have a further delay getting someone new in to pick it all up. The extra pressure and stupid deadline is just manipulation of the way you feel to try to guilt you in to working faster, even though that's likely to produce a worse product.
A couple of things to add...
Pay for the assessment from the outside company, it makes it much easier for them to put some proper staff time in to it. You can usually do a deal that the cost of the assessment gets taken off the overall bill if they get the full project.
Also remember that the web company has staff that have experience working together, even if some of them are freelancers, they are likely to be freelancers the company has used before. An internal project which needs to hire people in will need to factor in the extra time that those people need to gel in to a team (and the management time that can help that happen.)
If the manager stuffed up that badly with the contracting company, what makes you think they'd have been any better with full time employees? It appears they chose the wrong company at the interview stage, and that makes it likely they would have done the same thing with a standard employee.
Yes, the contracting company was at fault, but the manager is still in charge of the project. If he/she isn't getting information back out of the contracting company, that should be ringing alarm bells well before the scheduled end of the project.
Basically: Yes, if you get enough links, but it would be much quicker if you had relevant places linking to you, especially with the right sort of text in the links or close to them.
He's also just launched a new website - getInstance() and has lists of his articles on there, and a blog that looks like it'll be useful.
I find I prefer the interface of Fastmail. It doesn't use Ajax and it isn't as pretty, but I find it has stayed as my main e-mail client.
I like some of the things about GMail, like the labels, but I don't like the long delay when you first visit it while it downloads all the scripting, and I don't find swapping between sets of e-mail within labels particularly quick either.
This is why I've stuck with Fastmail - by keeping the interface simple I find it faster, and on the design front I find their interface slightly more usable.
And he was in a TV show before the movie, just in the UK and without all the heavy cyberpunk themes.
Obligatory Wikipedia link
Ahh, those were the days... Channel 4 was really innovative and hadn't fallen in love with reality TV shows.
Gotta agree with you, good to watch, not good to live. Nooo thanks.
The Mighty Boosh is very different from Little Britain, fortunately. I quite like LB, but I've found the recent series very repetitive and as the media seem to love them the comedians behind it are getting exposure absolutely everywhere (e.g. introducing Elton John at Live8.) I love Boosh and find it a lot funnier, and friendlier, than LB. You can't hate a show that loves ponchos.
The Boosh is highly surreal and odd, but delightful at the same time. Each episode is it's own little adventure in to madness. I think it's well worth a look, but you might want to try seeing a couple of episodes because some of them may appeal where others won't.
They are committed to providing the archives that they can make public on-line. However, they don't actually own lots of the shows that they broadcast, the copyright on those shows are owned by the production companies that made the shows originally.
I'll be very pleased to see some old BBC shows freely downloadable, but many of my favourites will be missing, because the BBC doesn't own them.
Damn, some of us really are trying to make a marshmellow-cornered world where we don't need any personal responsibility.
I thought the UK law was more about where the knives are.
i.e. you own a large kitchen knife and it's in the kitchen, no problem. You own a large kitchen knife and it's hidden up your jacket sleeve while you walk through town, big problem.
According to a Policeman I heard interviewed when the law was proposed, people who are transporting knives from place to place and have good reason to have them, e.g. chefs, halal butchers, will be OK as long as they have them in safe storage - i.e. wrapped in cloth or in a case at the bottom of their bag, not unwrapped at the top of the bag in easy reach.
This leaves grey areas, but then again it's going to cause a lot of problems for legitimate knife users if there aren't some grey areas if the bring the law in.
Yeah, go ahead and argue semantics like that with the Police, I'm sure they'll be really impressed. Besides, wouldn't they phrase it like "on the property"
I think having a hidden / obscured computer in the house isn't the way to go - it could be found and could be seen as suspicious, plus if they ask if there is any more equipment in the house and you/he says "No" then they find out there was, you're in big trouble immediately, even if the original case is bunk.
So, just use an off-site backup service. It's completely understandable why you would have one: in case your house burns down and all work is lost. You can give up all the computers in your house so they can be checked for evidence, then go and buy a new one and get all your work back immediately / over a few hours.
If you have Google as your home page, it automatically puts focus to the search box.
Now consider most people can't touch type and so don't look at the screen when they're typing in 'www.bbc.co.uk' or whatever. When they look up and realise what's happened they may as well just press return and get the results back, the only one of which is the site they want, then click on that. Otherwise they have to click in the location/address bar and re-type it, or cut and paste it up there (which many of the same people won't realise you can do from the search box.)
I would also argue that as the person using the interface is getting what they want, it doesn't matter that they typed a URL in to the search box instead of the location bar. Surely good software is about helping the user get what they want, even if how they do it could have been done slightly more quickly if they'd used a different interface element.
It's quite common to be high up for matching terms for about a week, then disappear for three months or so. This seems to be normal behaviour for new sites and is nicknamed the Google sandbox and seems to have been confirmed by the patent application recently made public.
The sandbox is just an artificial lowering, so if you're a match for a rare term you can still be found quite easily.
But that definition is set in your country, and the internet isn't.
What is agreed on as acceptable to sell to 16 year olds in Holland is different from North America is different from Syria is different from Madagascar.
Generally the difficulties won't be on close-up pictures of sex, it'll be all the grey areas where everyone disagrees.
I'm glad to see .xxx has finally been agreed, although it's real use: making filtering software really easy, won't come unless all porn can be shifted on to that TLD, and I can't see that happening very easily. Not only would you have to force a move (presumably giving the domain for free at first) but also you get problems with what's seen as porn in different places. OK, a lot of porn is obviously that, but the borders of what is porn and what's a slightly provocative picture would cause lots of arguments that someone is going to have to deal with.
I had an Amstrad NC100 about 10-11 years ago. It was pretty good and lasted about five years of some heavy and some intermitent use.
It did have a few bugs though - Amstrad's standard dodgy keyboard driver, e.g. if you type 'wer' quickly it appends 't' on the end for you. It would crash very occasionally, which was annoying, and uploading my text through serial took an age.
It's got a version of BASIC built in, and some comms software so occasionally a mate would use it to log in to his Linux box through serial so he could kill an awkward process. So it gets some geek cred.
Even though it had it's faults, I did miss it when it finally broke. The simplicity, lightness and general robustness of it was great.
Indeed, one of the less grim parts of Brighton, especially on a Wednesday night.
All the people I've met who worked at Amex hated it, so I can see why it would give you a bad impression, especially as that area of Brighton isn't particularly nice either.
We've become known for "high-tech media savvy" because of the large number of new media companies down here, bolstered by efforts like the free wi-fi network on the beach (between the two piers, well, the pier and the remains of the other pier.) And in various pubs, the active new media community (including companies, freelancers, and organising groups)
There's lots going on here, it's just the surface of Brighton is quite grimy and in parts rather grim, so you don't see it immediately.
That depends how you look at the figures. Google used to provide Yahoo's search results, so the 70% was Google + Yahoo search. When Yahoo went back to doing their own search results Google immediately lost 25% of that 70% - the section represented by Yahoo's results.
So, Google may have dropped 5%, but it depends how the data was collected, 5% could be their margin for error.
I was at a meeting with people from five European countries late last year, when they were asked which search engine they used they all said 'Google', when asked the year before it had been a mixture of Yahoo, Lycos and Google. Although a completely non-representative sample, it was interesting to see how Google is still taking over from other engines for some people.
Where on Earth did you get "Are you saying that Access is better than MySQL?" from? He didn't say use Access instead, he just said MySQL wasn't ready for the enterprise.
Just a vague guess, but perhaps he's suggesting PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase or MS SQL Server are more suitable for the enterprise instead. Or perhaps he's a DB2 fan or something.
Access isn't the only alternative to MySQL, thank god.
I've found the search on 10.3 to be OK. It's not as quick as Google Desktop on my PC, but then it searches a great deal more types of document. It is annoying that it doesn't seem to work for characters like $ and ?, so searching on PHP files can be a pain if you're after certain variables.
I'm finding Google Desktop relatively useless because most of my docs are in OO.o format, or old Works documents (.wps), neither of which it indexes. It also doesn't index my PHP or ColdFusion code at all, which means I still need to do a standard search on them when I'm looking for something odd. If GD comes out for the Mac, it'll have to be better than the version on the PC for me to use it.
Lots of people can't see a 60Hz flicker when looking directly at a monitor, however it will still cause bad effects such as increased tiredness and headaches.
This is due to the difference between the way the rod and cone receptors in the eye work. Cones are great for seeing colour and very small differences in definition, but lousy at refresh rate and in low-light conditions. Rods are much better in these areas and dominate peripheral vision, which is why you can see the flicker in the corner of your eye when you can't when looking directly at the source. It's also why if you look at a dim star directly, you can't see it, but if you look to one side you can - the rods can pick up the lower amount of light that the cones can't.