I work for a failing software company. We missed our IPO by about 2 months when the bubble popped. Now we're down from 500-600 headcount to under 80. What's nice about all the cuts and slowdown of business is that the hours are back to roughly 40 a week instead of the insane pace we had back in the boom.
That said, we have a COO and CEO that fly in every week from their homes and a CIO that sacrificed her family life for her career. So they don't have a lot of sympathy for a developer that needs to stay home with a sick kid 2 days a month. Still, our whole development organization is made up of about 75% guys with kids under 6 years old. I wouldn't change careers or companies any time soon.
NEW YORK, NY -- July 8, 1987 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc., introduced
today the Sun-4 family of 10-MIPS supercomputing workstations and
servers that give users the performance of a VAX 8800 system at
one-tenth the price.
...
Sun also announced that it will license the new SPARC architecture...
SPARC licensees announced today are Fujitsu Microelectronics,
Cypress Semiconductor, and Bipolar Integrated Technology. ...
Absolutely. Be careful. Even a "harmless prank" takes time to resolve. Pile up enough of those and you're just being a dick. Pile on a few more and you're facing a federal felony charge.
Shouldn't it say: "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0 MB".
You've got to get rid of your video card's fan. It will be loud...
My video card fan must have shot a bearing or something because it started whining hard. It took me a while to diagnose what was making the noise because I refused to believe such a loud sound could be coming from so far inside my case. Ripping the fan off stopped the noise and I've had no stability problems (no overclocking though, but good case cooling).
I have a Pentium M / Centrino BS laptop from Dell and it's louder than a quiet desktop. But it is a lot quieter than my older P3 laptop, mostly because they went to a large (40mm?) horizontal fan instead of a tiny (15mm?) vertical fan.
Re:Headphones are an even better solution....
on
A Silent PC Solution?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...the hum of it is loud enough that I sleep better with it off.
Have kids. Then there is no way is any PC noise going to keep you awake.
Start attending a user group or a vendor's seminars. They'll try hard to get you excited about their stuff and you'll see other people that are excited about their stuff.
Yes! I used a Psion 3a for a year and a half and it is an excellent small word processor. Once I broke a hinge, I replaced it with a Psion 3c, but the screen just isn't as sharp. I've tried a Psion 5, Windows CE, and Palms, but none of them could replace a Psion 3a (no backlight) for writing.
The company I work for has a forced ranking system...
competing against their peers... stab each other in the back...
The company I work for has a forced ranking system too. A few weeks after each quarter closes, we get to find out where we stand. It's a nice binary threshold though, so it doesn't matter if you're on top, just as long as you're above enough people.
How would you fight a forced ranking system at your job?
Just go. A four-month hole in a resume is nothing. It's easy to cover as well. I don't even list months on my resume. Plus, I'd be tempted to just list it on your resume. It makes you stand out.
After waiting a week for a restore: "The good news is that we're getting a new backup system.... The bad news is that your files are on gig 5 of a 4 gig tape."
While the SWT is pretty, it eats 120 megs of memory on my machine and a significant amount of CPU. The old standard BT client (whatever it's called) is more like 15 megs and much lighter on the CPU.
Actually, at work recently we've had a bit of a shootout among various XML DOMs. Our C++ code runs about 4 times slower than (my) tighter C code. But the amazing thing is that some Java code, with a highly optimizing JVM, has beaten my C by about 50%. Of course, we aren't counting startup time, but still, that sucker is fast. We think it comes down to the JVM being optimized for the P4 while the best I can do with Microsoft Visual C++ is optimizing for the Pentium Pro.
Most of my life I've gotten the advice to figure out what you love and find some fool to pay you for doing it. Now I'm not so sure. Go find a secure profession that will pay you well enough to live your life (hint: a life isn't what you do at work). Make sure there are enough opportunities that you can switch employers whenever you get sick of one. Then go do what you love. You're selling some of your life to your employer to finance the rest of your life.
Any suggestions for a technologically intensive field that doesn't require ungodly amounts of coding...
Become a software developer for almost any company. I often go a whole week without writing code. Sometimes they even bring in lunch or donuts for the meetings.
Marble Madness is the reason I got started with MAME and the reason I bought my first trackball. Now gigs of ROMs and 4 trackballs later, I still suck at Marble Madness.
Cool. Now I can boot WinPE and have all my cygwin tools available.
No, seriously, the best reason I've found to use this (over Knoppix or similar Linux/BSD's on a CD) is support for Windows-only hardware, like every wireless card I have.
...how annoying mouse clicks and keystrokes could be to someone who is trying to sleep.
Why, when I was in college, we were woken up by a friend using my PC (one of two on the whole floor) to print his paper on my daisy wheel printer. Sounded like a 50cal machine gun going off at 4am in a quiet dorm room. After that we started hiding the printer cable at night.
We try to play games in meetings. An easy one is to try to get laughter from a coworker at the worst possible moment. Harder is the "don't say a word" game. I'm the champ so far at that. Amazing that you can get invited to a meeting and go through the entire meeting without uttering a sound.
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I work for a failing software company. We missed our IPO by about 2 months when the bubble popped. Now we're down from 500-600 headcount to under 80. What's nice about all the cuts and slowdown of business is that the hours are back to roughly 40 a week instead of the insane pace we had back in the boom.
That said, we have a COO and CEO that fly in every week from their homes and a CIO that sacrificed her family life for her career. So they don't have a lot of sympathy for a developer that needs to stay home with a sick kid 2 days a month. Still, our whole development organization is made up of about 75% guys with kids under 6 years old. I wouldn't change careers or companies any time soon.
NEW YORK, NY -- July 8, 1987 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc., introduced today the Sun-4 family of 10-MIPS supercomputing workstations and servers that give users the performance of a VAX 8800 system at one-tenth the price.
...
...
Sun also announced that it will license the new SPARC architecture... SPARC licensees announced today are Fujitsu Microelectronics, Cypress Semiconductor, and Bipolar Integrated Technology.
Get her pregnant. For a while she'll sleep 20 hours a day.
Absolutely. Be careful. Even a "harmless prank" takes time to resolve. Pile up enough of those and you're just being a dick. Pile on a few more and you're facing a federal felony charge.
Shouldn't it say: "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0 MB".
If Outlook Express came with an IRC client this would have happened a long time ago.
My video card fan must have shot a bearing or something because it started whining hard. It took me a while to diagnose what was making the noise because I refused to believe such a loud sound could be coming from so far inside my case. Ripping the fan off stopped the noise and I've had no stability problems (no overclocking though, but good case cooling).
I have a Pentium M / Centrino BS laptop from Dell and it's louder than a quiet desktop. But it is a lot quieter than my older P3 laptop, mostly because they went to a large (40mm?) horizontal fan instead of a tiny (15mm?) vertical fan.
Have kids. Then there is no way is any PC noise going to keep you awake.
Start attending a user group or a vendor's seminars. They'll try hard to get you excited about their stuff and you'll see other people that are excited about their stuff.
Yes! I used a Psion 3a for a year and a half and it is an excellent small word processor. Once I broke a hinge, I replaced it with a Psion 3c, but the screen just isn't as sharp. I've tried a Psion 5, Windows CE, and Palms, but none of them could replace a Psion 3a (no backlight) for writing.
The company I work for has a forced ranking system too. A few weeks after each quarter closes, we get to find out where we stand. It's a nice binary threshold though, so it doesn't matter if you're on top, just as long as you're above enough people.
How would you fight a forced ranking system at your job?
Quit. Let a real man take your job.
Just go. A four-month hole in a resume is nothing. It's easy to cover as well. I don't even list months on my resume. Plus, I'd be tempted to just list it on your resume. It makes you stand out.
I've got just the product for this.
After waiting a week for a restore: "The good news is that we're getting a new backup system. ... The bad news is that your files are on gig 5 of a 4 gig tape."
While the SWT is pretty, it eats 120 megs of memory on my machine and a significant amount of CPU. The old standard BT client (whatever it's called) is more like 15 megs and much lighter on the CPU.
Actually, at work recently we've had a bit of a shootout among various XML DOMs. Our C++ code runs about 4 times slower than (my) tighter C code. But the amazing thing is that some Java code, with a highly optimizing JVM, has beaten my C by about 50%. Of course, we aren't counting startup time, but still, that sucker is fast. We think it comes down to the JVM being optimized for the P4 while the best I can do with Microsoft Visual C++ is optimizing for the Pentium Pro.
Most of my life I've gotten the advice to figure out what you love and find some fool to pay you for doing it. Now I'm not so sure. Go find a secure profession that will pay you well enough to live your life (hint: a life isn't what you do at work). Make sure there are enough opportunities that you can switch employers whenever you get sick of one. Then go do what you love. You're selling some of your life to your employer to finance the rest of your life.
I am entitled to make a backup!
I can't even count the number of times I've pulled an IS guy over to show him that pop-up alert like it's a real antivirus warning. They hate me.
Become a software developer for almost any company. I often go a whole week without writing code. Sometimes they even bring in lunch or donuts for the meetings.
Marble Madness is the reason I got started with MAME and the reason I bought my first trackball. Now gigs of ROMs and 4 trackballs later, I still suck at Marble Madness.
No, seriously, the best reason I've found to use this (over Knoppix or similar Linux/BSD's on a CD) is support for Windows-only hardware, like every wireless card I have.
Why, when I was in college, we were woken up by a friend using my PC (one of two on the whole floor) to print his paper on my daisy wheel printer. Sounded like a 50cal machine gun going off at 4am in a quiet dorm room. After that we started hiding the printer cable at night.
Just tell her that you're a big fan of Twisted Sister.
We try to play games in meetings. An easy one is to try to get laughter from a coworker at the worst possible moment. Harder is the "don't say a word" game. I'm the champ so far at that. Amazing that you can get invited to a meeting and go through the entire meeting without uttering a sound.