Re:Suit and Tie do not make the programmer.
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Which group of programmers would you hire, a room full of suit wearing 9-5r's or a room full of cheesy-poof eating coffee drinking work around the clock for 3 days straight types (wearing god knows what).
Neither. I know from personal experience that when you try and work x days straight (actually, typically more than 10 hours in a day) you go from being productive, to making as many mistakes as actual code - to negative productivity where you introduce more bugs than actual working code and break existing functionality.
It is a myth that you'll get more work done by simply working more overtime. It's something our department learned the hard way. We were WAY more productive once we had a manager who refused to schedule work that would lead to overtime. We'd do MUCH more in a 40-hour work week than an 80-hour work week for many reasons: people were more alert, people were happier (they got to see their families and do their own thing).
Only if you're running older versions of BIND. Current versions of BIND can be easily chroot jailed and run as a user that isn't root (even the old, vulnerable versions could be run as non-root - a lot of the problem is that RedHat 6 installed BIND by default running as root).
I started with kernel v0.11 in about Jan 1992. There were no distros, save a boot disk, a root disk and the 'cp -r' command. You had to hexedit the kernel image to change the boot device. There was no init/getty/login!
The article says no reason was given. I doubt that's the case (they probably wouldn't tell journalists though).
Having been through the US visa process, I know how officious that lot can be. I have been refused a US visa twice (the visas were subsequently granted). To give you an insight to how assinine the US embassies can be, the first time was because they couldn't determine exactly how long I had worked for my company (I think it was refused under '221 (g)' (iirc)). Now they could have just phoned either myself up or the company up and asked.
Instead, I had to go to London, waste 4 hours sitting in the US Embassy in their "delicatessen" (they have this big square room, with about five subway-station-style windows at one end. First you line up to get a number. Then you wait for up to five hours until they call your number. There are newspapers in this room - these papers are all about moving to the US. The first half goes on about how terrible your country is and how wonderful the United States is, and the latter half is devoted to how they aren't going to give you a visa anyway. I kid you not!) Finally, my number is called. The officer asked one question. "How long have you worked for your company in the last five years?". I told them. >stamp stamp approved. A whole day wasted on a question that could have been answered by fax or phone without having to see me in person.
The second time I was refused was for a visa *that had already been approved* by the INS in the USA. We sent the forms into the US Embassy when I was back home. They refused it because one of the forms "was out of date". I downloaded the 'current form'. It was IDENTICAL IN EVERY RESPECT to the one they objected to apart from the date in the bottom. ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL in all the boxes, the layout, the information, everything but the blasted date on the bottom! It delayed me for a week and my company not only lost a week of my time, they also had to pay extra as I had to change my airline ticket. It's only the INS that do this - I've had quite a few dealings with another US govt. agency - the FAA. They haven't minded about different versions of the same form which differ only in date.
The INS is absolutely *abysmal*. It's even worse than the IRS because they have so little accountability. The people who vote don't care because they don't have to deal with them, and the people who have to deal with them aren't allowed to vote!
Having said that, I greatly enjoyed my time in the USA and I think it's a great country - so please don't take my rant as a rant against the US - it is not. It's a rant about the INS. The INS are the worst kind of bureaucrats, and I wouldn't be surprised if Skylarov has been delayed by some petty bureaucrat playing his power-games over a form with the wrong frigging date in the bottom corner.
Additionally, Frontier Developments are making a Wallace and Gromit game. How well it'll translate to a game, I don't know, but FD do seem to have some good animation stuff.
What do they do about pre-paid mobile phones? Where I'm from (Isle of Man) you can buy a Pronto SIM pack with cash, without giving your name or address - and you can top up the said Pronto Go account by buying the vouchers with cash. If the Police want to track a particular person by their mobile phone and they use prepaid, they are going to have to find out the target's phone number first.
The trouble is, if you're truthful about your history, Mickey D's turn you down as "overqualified" (in fact, virtually everyone in the always-available jobs turn you down as "overqualified").
Fortunately, I know someone who is two crew short in his digging-holes-in-the-road team where I can go should my contract renegotiation go tits up next month. And digging holes in the road is MUCH better paid than Mc.Donald's, even if it can be a bit cold and wet at times. (It also would mean I'd save the money on gym membership as I'd be getting regular exercise at work )
I don't consider houses a short-term (even though prices are going up right now). Unless you move to a vastly cheaper area (usually abroad) or own >1 house, increasing house prices doesn't help you - because when you move to a new house you end up buying one that has increased in value at the same rate as yours.
But the thing about owning your own house rather than renting is that your mortgage repayments aren't dead money like the rent is. You can never do *anything* with that rent money. It's gone forever. At least with the house, the only dead money is the interest part of your mortgage. Also - if times are a bit hard, you can rent a room out to a lodger to offset your costs. You can't generally do that with a rented place.
Funnily enough, I have some friends in the United States. They used to show up as just "Call" (on my Pronto cellphone service (Isle of Man)) but as of a couple of weeks ago, their number has started showing up on my cellphone when they called - so I think international caller ID is starting to happen.
It *IS* a DIY project - we did it in our chemistry lab. A bunsen burner, a crucible and suitable electrodes (that won't melt) are what's needed. You won't get a lot of sodium though.
An easier (less heat required) way of doing it is to use salt solution, and a mercury cathode (you get sodium amalgam - the sodium is dissolved in the mercury).
You can shape specific ports (with Linux anyway). On our network (which is bandwidth limited, and needs a reasonable amount left for an IPsec VPN between the offices), I have bandwidth-capped certain 'high traffic but not necessarily work related' ports. Read the LARTC HOWTO to find out how powerful traffic control can be (http://www.lartc.org). You can do other things like prioritize with the wonderful 'tc' command.
I think there's a lot of difference between the tools you use at home and the tools you use at work.
I'd be quite concerned - to use your doctor analagy - if a doctor didn't have the new-fangled diagnostic equipment at his professional workplace but I wouldn't be particularly bothered if all he had in his home medicine cabinet were over-the-counter drugs.
Similarly, if a programmer had a 266MHz machine at home, it wouldn't really be of any concern to me. Just like I don't expect a professional limo driver to own their own limo for personal use, when all they need is a Ford Escort.
Re:Putting things in Perspective
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
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· Score: 2
Actually - a 3GHz Intel machine is probably more than 30,000 times faster than the ENIAC. Consider how AMD and Intel chips get a different amount of work done with the same clock frequency - it's quite likely that a Pentium 4 gets a lot more done per clock cycle than the ENIAC got per clock cycle.
I lived in an apartment (ground floor) so there was no option for an exterior antenna. I tried one of those active ones too and it didn't really help much.
Yeah, and that's great if you're a socialist. Most Americans, on the other hand, would not be so happy with a $150 per year TV tax.
TV is not compulsory, you know.
When I lived in Houston, broadcast TV reception was incredibly poor. To receive more than about two (commercial-filled) channels with nothing on you had to pay Time-Warner about $40 a month for the privilege - or almost $500 a year. That's over THREE TIMES as much as the TV license in the UK for a fraction of the quality.
So - $150 for good quality TV that's worth watching, or roughly $500 a year for a bunch of crap? BBC tax or Time-Warner tax?
There's a portable version at www.newkind.co.uk if your platform can run Allegro (don't worry about Allegro barfing during the build on the x86 assembler bits - they are't actually required for things like X. I've got Allegro working happily on my Sun.) Elite: The New Kind runs happily on Solaris, Linux, Windoze and anything that's supported by Allegro.
"Oh, and one final thing: until GPS receivers have 1/100" precision _and_ accuracy, don't expect measurements taken using one to stand up in court-adjudicated property dispute."
Or that the systems used to determine the location are the same. I'm wondering if this whole mess is started because the old records are not using the same lat/long system as the new ones. GPS generally uses the World Geodetic System 1984 as a datum for lat/lon coordinates - anything using any other datum could be as little as feet to as many as miles off what the WGS 84 says a location is.
I hate the damned phone. I just don't like to call strangers (I'm fine about calling friends). I have this "calling strangers phobia". It's so bad I won't even call mail-order lines if they have a website where I can do the ordering.
I think many geeks share this particular phone-fear.
Having said that, I have been getting better recently. If I still lived in the States, I might have got as far as lifting the receiver, and dialing your number before putting the phone down just as I was going to dial the last digit. As a therapy, I finally bought a cellphone, and I'm using it to help overcome my fear of calling strangers on the phone.
The trouble with the cellphone is that I end up texting people instead of actually phoning them, so I'm not sure how effective it'll be...
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Neither. I know from personal experience that when you try and work x days straight (actually, typically more than 10 hours in a day) you go from being productive, to making as many mistakes as actual code - to negative productivity where you introduce more bugs than actual working code and break existing functionality.
It is a myth that you'll get more work done by simply working more overtime. It's something our department learned the hard way. We were WAY more productive once we had a manager who refused to schedule work that would lead to overtime. We'd do MUCH more in a 40-hour work week than an 80-hour work week for many reasons: people were more alert, people were happier (they got to see their families and do their own thing).
In Britain, *all* incoming calls are free on cellphones (including pay-as-you-go service)
Although it would function perfectly fine, those with virtual webhosts without distinct IP addresses would be SOL.
Only if you're running older versions of BIND. Current versions of BIND can be easily chroot jailed and run as a user that isn't root (even the old, vulnerable versions could be run as non-root - a lot of the problem is that RedHat 6 installed BIND by default running as root).
The root servers run BIND.
I started with kernel v0.11 in about Jan 1992. There were no distros, save a boot disk, a root disk and the 'cp -r' command. You had to hexedit the kernel image to change the boot device. There was no init/getty/login!
The article says no reason was given. I doubt that's the case (they probably wouldn't tell journalists though).
Having been through the US visa process, I know how officious that lot can be. I have been refused a US visa twice (the visas were subsequently granted). To give you an insight to how assinine the US embassies can be, the first time was because they couldn't determine exactly how long I had worked for my company (I think it was refused under '221 (g)' (iirc)). Now they could have just phoned either myself up or the company up and asked.
Instead, I had to go to London, waste 4 hours sitting in the US Embassy in their "delicatessen" (they have this big square room, with about five subway-station-style windows at one end. First you line up to get a number. Then you wait for up to five hours until they call your number. There are newspapers in this room - these papers are all about moving to the US. The first half goes on about how terrible your country is and how wonderful the United States is, and the latter half is devoted to how they aren't going to give you a visa anyway. I kid you not!) Finally, my number is called. The officer asked one question. "How long have you worked for your company in the last five years?". I told them. >stamp stamp approved. A whole day wasted on a question that could have been answered by fax or phone without having to see me in person.
The second time I was refused was for a visa *that had already been approved* by the INS in the USA. We sent the forms into the US Embassy when I was back home. They refused it because one of the forms "was out of date". I downloaded the 'current form'. It was IDENTICAL IN EVERY RESPECT to the one they objected to apart from the date in the bottom. ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL in all the boxes, the layout, the information, everything but the blasted date on the bottom! It delayed me for a week and my company not only lost a week of my time, they also had to pay extra as I had to change my airline ticket. It's only the INS that do this - I've had quite a few dealings with another US govt. agency - the FAA. They haven't minded about different versions of the same form which differ only in date.
The INS is absolutely *abysmal*. It's even worse than the IRS because they have so little accountability. The people who vote don't care because they don't have to deal with them, and the people who have to deal with them aren't allowed to vote!
Having said that, I greatly enjoyed my time in the USA and I think it's a great country - so please don't take my rant as a rant against the US - it is not. It's a rant about the INS. The INS are the worst kind of bureaucrats, and I wouldn't be surprised if Skylarov has been delayed by some petty bureaucrat playing his power-games over a form with the wrong frigging date in the bottom corner.
What do they do about pre-paid mobile phones? Where I'm from (Isle of Man) you can buy a Pronto SIM pack with cash, without giving your name or address - and you can top up the said Pronto Go account by buying the vouchers with cash. If the Police want to track a particular person by their mobile phone and they use prepaid, they are going to have to find out the target's phone number first.
The trouble is, if you're truthful about your history, Mickey D's turn you down as "overqualified" (in fact, virtually everyone in the always-available jobs turn you down as "overqualified").
Fortunately, I know someone who is two crew short in his digging-holes-in-the-road team where I can go should my contract renegotiation go tits up next month. And digging holes in the road is MUCH better paid than Mc.Donald's, even if it can be a bit cold and wet at times. (It also would mean I'd save the money on gym membership as I'd be getting regular exercise at work )
I don't consider houses a short-term (even though prices are going up right now). Unless you move to a vastly cheaper area (usually abroad) or own >1 house, increasing house prices doesn't help you - because when you move to a new house you end up buying one that has increased in value at the same rate as yours.
But the thing about owning your own house rather than renting is that your mortgage repayments aren't dead money like the rent is. You can never do *anything* with that rent money. It's gone forever. At least with the house, the only dead money is the interest part of your mortgage. Also - if times are a bit hard, you can rent a room out to a lodger to offset your costs. You can't generally do that with a rented place.
Funnily enough, I have some friends in the United States. They used to show up as just "Call" (on my Pronto cellphone service (Isle of Man)) but as of a couple of weeks ago, their number has started showing up on my cellphone when they called - so I think international caller ID is starting to happen.
It *IS* a DIY project - we did it in our chemistry lab. A bunsen burner, a crucible and suitable electrodes (that won't melt) are what's needed. You won't get a lot of sodium though.
An easier (less heat required) way of doing it is to use salt solution, and a mercury cathode (you get sodium amalgam - the sodium is dissolved in the mercury).
You can shape specific ports (with Linux anyway). On our network (which is bandwidth limited, and needs a reasonable amount left for an IPsec VPN between the offices), I have bandwidth-capped certain 'high traffic but not necessarily work related' ports. Read the LARTC HOWTO to find out how powerful traffic control can be (http://www.lartc.org). You can do other things like prioritize with the wonderful 'tc' command.
Don't worry - I was asked if we spoke English in the UK "or do we just have an accent" by a particularly dumb blonde in Texas!
I know somewhere where they blocked port 22. The solution? Run sshd on a port that's not blocked on the remote machine.
I'd be quite concerned - to use your doctor analagy - if a doctor didn't have the new-fangled diagnostic equipment at his professional workplace but I wouldn't be particularly bothered if all he had in his home medicine cabinet were over-the-counter drugs.
Similarly, if a programmer had a 266MHz machine at home, it wouldn't really be of any concern to me. Just like I don't expect a professional limo driver to own their own limo for personal use, when all they need is a Ford Escort.
Actually - a 3GHz Intel machine is probably more than 30,000 times faster than the ENIAC. Consider how AMD and Intel chips get a different amount of work done with the same clock frequency - it's quite likely that a Pentium 4 gets a lot more done per clock cycle than the ENIAC got per clock cycle.
I lived in an apartment (ground floor) so there was no option for an exterior antenna. I tried one of those active ones too and it didn't really help much.
TV is not compulsory, you know.
When I lived in Houston, broadcast TV reception was incredibly poor. To receive more than about two (commercial-filled) channels with nothing on you had to pay Time-Warner about $40 a month for the privilege - or almost $500 a year. That's over THREE TIMES as much as the TV license in the UK for a fraction of the quality.
So - $150 for good quality TV that's worth watching, or roughly $500 a year for a bunch of crap? BBC tax or Time-Warner tax?
I'd rather have the BBC tax than you very much.
Actually, Ceefax (Teletext) is still going. Most TVs in the UK support teletext, and it comes with the broadcast TV signal.
How can he be so poor as to not...but be flying to Europe with a Mac laptop?
:-)
It's because he OWNS a Mac laptop and is flying to Europe that he hasn't got enough left to afford payware games
The classic space game, Elite.
There's a portable version at www.newkind.co.uk if your platform can run Allegro (don't worry about Allegro barfing during the build on the x86 assembler bits - they are't actually required for things like X. I've got Allegro working happily on my Sun.) Elite: The New Kind runs happily on Solaris, Linux, Windoze and anything that's supported by Allegro.
"Oh, and one final thing: until GPS receivers have 1/100" precision _and_ accuracy, don't expect measurements taken using one to stand up in court-adjudicated property dispute."
Or that the systems used to determine the location are the same. I'm wondering if this whole mess is started because the old records are not using the same lat/long system as the new ones. GPS generally uses the World Geodetic System 1984 as a datum for lat/lon coordinates - anything using any other datum could be as little as feet to as many as miles off what the WGS 84 says a location is.
What do you expect?
/.
Slashdot isn't about Windows. If Slashdot was a Windows-centric (not UNIX centric) site, it would be \. and not
You're damned straight there.
I hate the damned phone. I just don't like to call strangers (I'm fine about calling friends). I have this "calling strangers phobia". It's so bad I won't even call mail-order lines if they have a website where I can do the ordering.
I think many geeks share this particular phone-fear.
Having said that, I have been getting better recently. If I still lived in the States, I might have got as far as lifting the receiver, and dialing your number before putting the phone down just as I was going to dial the last digit. As a therapy, I finally bought a cellphone, and I'm using it to help overcome my fear of calling strangers on the phone.
The trouble with the cellphone is that I end up texting people instead of actually phoning them, so I'm not sure how effective it'll be...