I don't really have a problem with Agile development techniques. I have a problem with people who preach about them with religious fervor, always trying to convince others that Agile is the one true development methodology and all others are pretenders.
It's my feeling that Agile techniques probably work well for certain situations and problems, but they don't always work in every situation. As you point out, Using Agile methodology when building a jet airplane is probably not the best way to go. Which is not to say some aspects of Agile couldn't be put to good use even with that scenario.
One thing has become clear to me from years of reading Slashdot -- there are many different development environments. Anyone who thinks the techniques used in their little corner of the development world will be universally applicable is sadly deluded. This was recently revisited in the article questioning why people are still using C. The answer is that for some problem sets C falls somewhere between adequate and best language for the job. For other problem sets C is far from the best choice.
The same applies with Agile. In some situations it works very well. In others, not so much.
Fast - If the plan changes halfway through Agile development, how does that NOT result in the same discarding of work and starting over? In my experience it's very uncommon for non-Agile projects to change so drastically halfway through that you have to scrap everything done so far. Has it happened? I'm sure it has. But I'm sure something similar has happened to Agile projects as well.
Cheap - Your conclusion is only valid if priority and value are directly related. Due to the various priorities of different departments, I've not found this to be at all the case. The marketing guys might think it's imperative and of the highest priority that the product use whatever the latest designer colors might be. Does this add value? Not in my book.
Good - I fail to see how short development time necessarily leads to "good". As far as I can see, all it does is lead to doing things in bite-sized pieces. I'm not saying that's a bad idea, but it's been my experience that on any project of real substance it can be very difficult to break everything up into chunks small enough to complete in a week (or even two). We've tried this several times at my company and have always failed. Even with a two-week cycle it was very difficult to break things up into sufficiently small pieces.
I would also suggest that non-Agile development in no way insists on you juggling 60 features at once and not submitting any of them until they're all complete.
You obviously like the Agile approach, and that's great, but some realism in the implied criticism of other approaches would also be a good thing. The non-Agile developers aren't all dunderheads who do everything in the dumbest of all possible ways.
I'm afraid I don't see how online merchants have killed my choice of products. In my not so limited experience, the exact opposite is true. Most local stores have almost no product selection. This trend of reduced product selection was in place long before Amazon existed or Wal-Mart appeared in my local area. The selection of products in almost every category has skyrocketed with online shopping. I'm sorry for the local merchant who goes out of business as a result, but, as a consumer, I see this massive selection as a very good thing.
Even with the reduced selection, I don't see grocery stores disappearing any time soon. Same day delivery is not the same as the 20 minutes it takes to run to the local store and pick up the items needed for tonight's dinner.
Your experience may vary, but I go into my bank branch at least once a month. I will admit they don't have nearly as many tellers as they once did, but there's seldom a wait of more than a couple minutes -- considerably less than it used to be before ATMs and direct deposit -- they don't charge me to talk to a teller and the service is always top notch.
The problem you describe is shoddy development practices. This has nothing whatever to do with the language being used. No language is going to protect you from an organization that allows rushed code to go directly to a customer without code review, thorough unit test, integration test, and V&V testing.
Dangerous, crap code can be written in any language. It is not unique to C.
Teaching people to code in a particular language is relatively easy if they have the math skills. Teaching them the maths skills is hard.
I partly agree with the sentiment about learning to code in a particular language, but the bit about math skills is nonsense. I've been making a good living from coding (and design, test, specification, etc.) for almost 35 years. I've never once had to use math more complicated than what I learned in high school trigonometry. The vast majority of code doesn't require anything more complicated than the basics of add, subtract, multiply and divide. I'm not saying math skills don't come into play in some programming jobs, but suggesting skills at complicated math are a prerequisite for learning to code is just wrong.
Where I think many people go astray is in equating the learning of the mechanics of a language with having skill at programming. To a large extent the two are orthogonal. I might be able to teach somebody to speak English so they can do what's necessary in everyday life. This is not going to simultaneously make them a great author.
Lack of knowledge of a particular language is a temporary bump in the road for a good programmer. Complete knowledge of the ins and outs of Java will not by itself make someone a great Java programmer. I've spent far too much time cleaning up after "programmers" who were technically proficient in a language yet couldn't write "Hello world" in an elegant, maintainable way.
The next day, I left it on my front porch and the neighbor's 8 year old kid ( he had to weigh at least 30 kilos / 60 lbs ) stood on it and jumped up and down on it for 30 seconds trying to reach something. Not a scratch, dent, or crack. One of the rubber feet was squished to the point of losing adhesion and there were some footprints on the lid but the foot re-attached...
I would have to second the recommendation for Lenovo. The place I'm working used to be exclusively a Lenovo shop and I was very impressed with the engineering of the boxes. They originally gave me a very old Lenovo desktop that had been around the block a few too many times and was under-configured. The optical drive no longer worked. When the IT guy came to replace the CD and add more memory I couldn't believe how quickly he finished. Seriously, it couldn't have taken him more than 60 seconds to open the box, add the memory, pop out the old CD and pop in the new one.
That got me looking seriously at Lenovo. Shortly afterward I bought a Thinkpad W700 laptop that has seen near continual use for almost three years now. Last year I bought a Thinkpad X-series laptop so I had something a little easier to travel with than the behemoth W700. The W700 will soon be replaced with a W530. Nothing really wrong with it, but it's three years old and I'm dying to get one of those new Ivy Bridge i7 machines.
The Thinkpads aren't sexy. They're no-nonsense, well-engineered tools to get a job done. And equivalently equipped they cost a helluva lot less than a Mac.
The conclusion that BitTorrent traffic has "fallen" is not actually supported by the Sandvine report. They complicate things by reporting everything as percentages, but if you dig deep enough you find overall mean traffic is up 40% year-over-year. So, in reality, BitTorrent traffic has continued to GROW, it's just a smaller percentage of the overall traffic.
They actually make this point about Netflix in the report. Their share of peak traffic increased by only 0.2%, yet they point out that due to overall traffic increase this amounts to a 30% increase in absolute traffic associated with Netflix.
It is far cheaper for Comcast to host your computer at their location than provide the bandwidth to your house. Maintenance is a huge part of this.
By excepting their in-house streaming service from the cap, they're saying the overage charges are for external access, not for the last mile to the house. $200/TB for external transport charges is beyond outrageous.
The $1.15/TB was a mistake. I read it as Euro and it was actually GBP. So it's more like $1.40/TB. And Comcast is only charging 142 times this rate. My bad.
kimsufi.co.uk has these rates on their cheap dedicated server boxes. They are an arm of OVH.
It's sane until you look at the charge for going over the cap. I can lease a dedicated server where bandwidth beyond the 5TB monthly cap is $1.15/TB. Comcast's marginal bandwidth rate is $200/TB. Admittedly, Comcast may be paying a bit more for bandwidth than the dedicated server hosting company, but 173 times more? They're just sticking it to people who use more while trying to make it sound like they're being fair.
I recently went through several boxes of old family photos and digitized them. I learned a number of things in the process.
There are/were vast differences in the quality and longevity of different photo printing methods. Most of the photos that were about 50 years old had faded and color shifted, each, it seems, in its own peculiar direction. Trying to bring them back to proper color was a nightmare, not made easier by my lack of skill with Gimp. But some of the photos from 50 years ago looked like they might have been printed last week. The colors were still vivid. I have no idea what process was used on any of these prints, but it was very clear the process makes a world of difference.
Whatever you decide to do with the prints, I strongly recommend getting some archival quality sleeves to individually store them. Even if you then put them in an album, put them first in archival sleeves. The prints will be protected and will never again be exposed to fingerprints. They won't get scratched. They'll be reasonably well protected against UV fading. Then lock it all in a light-proof vault. Light is the mortal enemy of photo prints and even good quality UV protection will still allow some small amount of UV to penetrate. Keep the prints in a tightly sealed box and you should have few problems with fading.
Honestly, though, if you really care about preserving these for posterity, just keep them digital and use some kind of offsite backup. Know going in that you'll probably have to move them around several times over the years as companies come and go and technology changes. You may well have to convert them to different formats at more than one point. But the digital copy is almost certainly going to be more flexible and of better quality than any print.
I was responding to a message that said everything will be fine when human error is removed from the system. My intent was to point out that as long as humans and vehicles are allowed to mingle, human error can never be removed. Pedestrians will do stupid things. They'll have their mind on something else entirely and stupidly step off the curb into traffic. Kids will dash out into the street from between parked cars.
Can the car be programmed to react to these situations? Sure. Will it be able to tell the difference between a child darting out from between parked cars and a beach ball rolling into the road? In the former case avoidance of the obstacle at virtually any cost is the recommended course, even if it means swerving into oncoming traffic. In the latter, collision with the obstacle is of no consequence.
Will the computer know the beach ball, which is not an obstacle to be concerned with, is likely to be followed by an obstacle that needs to be avoided? Will the computer be able to detect children playing in a front yard and slow down just in case one of them does something stupid? How will it tell the difference between children playing and normal pedestrians on the sidewalk who warrant no unusual concern? People, well, some people, make these judgments instantly and continually while driving. Perhaps computers will be able to do it some day. But not today. At least not at a cost that makes it practical for in-vehicle use.
Human error will be removed from the equation not long after humans are removed from the equation.
Not all roads are limited access super-highways. I do most of my driving on surface streets. There is sufficiently little pedestrian traffic that one tends not to think about them, and just enough pedestrian traffic that forgetting about them becomes a big problem. Until you make it illegal for pedestrians to enter the roadway, there will be humans and human errors as parts of the equation.
We recently switched to allowing telecommuting 2-3 days a week. And let me tell you, it is Glorious. Those 2-3 days are the most productive ones I have, maybe because I'm comfortable and able to clearly think through issues, instead of being constantly interrupted by the asshole across the cube farm's ringtone or the loudmouth Sales guy on a call next cube over or a million other irritations at the office. And as far as the time-worn fears of slacking are concerned, honestly I have too much to do to slack off - any supervising manager would be able to tell pretty quickly whether or not their subordinates are abusing the privilege.
You're scratching at one of my pet peeves. Businesses hire (some) people for the express purpose of using their brains then put them in situations least conducive to that pursuit. A year ago the company I'm contracting at had a two-day conference where everyone in the department attended except me. I got more done in those two days on difficult tasks than I would have in several weeks' worth of normal days. No phones ringing. No copier beeping its head off. No hallway conversations. No co-workers dropping by to ask questions and interrupt my train of thought. I had no idea how disruptive to the thought process the normal cubicle work environment is until I spent those two days in what was effectively my own private office space.
If the home environment can be kept free of the distractions that are so common in the typical work place there is little doubt that those needing to make good use of their gray matter could easily be more productive at home.
Few people can write comedy, but if you can pull it off it will be a coup for you and your department.
There's an important point buried in here. You need to first ask yourself a question: Do I want to be the go-to guy in my department for presentations? If the answer is 'yes', then spend time trying to make it fun and exciting. If the answer is 'no', like the new husband asked to do the laundry for the first time, figure out a way to totally screw it up without making it seem like you did it on purpose. Make the presentation as dull and boring as you possibly can. Don't make eye contact. Don't look up to see if anyone has questions. Appear really nervous and uncomfortable (probably not difficult). Make it easy for your boss to say, "I guess public speaking isn't his thing." You'll likely never again be asked to do a big presentation.
You're making a distinction without a difference to the guy who lost his job and hasn't been able to drive for five years because a non-calibrated machine registered him at 0.08% when he was really at 0.06%. I'm sure it will come as great relief to him that it was the police who made the mistake, not the judge who didn't believe him when he said he'd only had two beers.
Use a macro to do the "Is this authorized?" check. Then use that macro all over the place. Use it in main loops. Use it in obscure parts that are seldom executed. Make it so hundreds of spots need to be patched for a crack to be really successfully.
With the dongles, at least with the ones I used, you could do both positive and negative checks. You needed to go through a sequence of steps to get the dongle to respond in the affirmative. Asking for status prior to that did not interfere with anything. So you do some of the sequence, check for a negative, do some more, check for another negative, etc., eventually performing the final sequence and checking for a positive. Then you reset and start over again.
The idea is not to use it as a boundary check but as something you're continually hitting with commands and checking the responses.
I have two thoughts on this. First, do you really want to work for such a place? I know jobs are in short supply right now and any job is better than no job, but I certainly wouldn't want to work anywhere that had an issue with me having a non-conflicting side business.
Second, and more importantly, every place I've ever worked took an exceedingly dim view of people who lied on their application. More than once I've seen good employees disappear in a flash because the employer discovered they'd lied about education or job experience or past brushes with the law. Lying about your outside work will be grounds for dismissal.
In my admittedly limited experience, the subterfuge you recommend is not necessary. Just be honest about the situation. If your side projects are in an area that overlaps with your employer's business, then they have a legitimate right to refuse. If there's no overlap, then there's no legitimate reason for them to not make an accommodation.
I had a side business doing software for material handling. When a prospective employer showed me their IP/non-compete agreement we had a discussion about the situation. They had the lawyers modify the agreement to accommodate what I was doing. The result was we both understood each other's position and knew ahead of time exactly where the lines were drawn. In the end it turned out there was some conceptual overlap between the two endeavors, but this turned out to be to my employer's benefit as things I'd learned in my side business were directly applicable to my primary job. There was no conflict with customers because we were addressing completely different industries.
Dishonesty is not a good foundation for any kind of new relationship, but especially not for one with an employer.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
Good point, though the scenario you suggest is already happening. We simply don't (yet) pay tax on unrealized gains due to inflation. Realized gains due entirely to inflation still get taxed even though you have zero real gain.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a slippery slope the government would be well-advised to avoid. The only way to make this "fair" is for reduction in wealth to be given tax credits. Stock goes up, you pay taxes on the increase. Stock goes down, you get a refund on the reduction in value.
How do you think this would have played out when the market went into free fall a few years ago?
I've been writing QNX applications for over a decade. Not one of them contained a single line of assembly.
The OS is written primarily in C. There may be a few snippets of assembly here and there in the platform-specific sections. I've not exhaustively examined the source. The parts I've seen were written in C.
QNX is currently using gcc as the provided compiler, so C and C++ are readily available. Development is primarily done under Windows or Linux, cross-compiling to run on QNX. You can develop under QNX as well, but they don't have a recent version of Momentics (a QNX-customized Eclipse) that will run natively on QNX, so you're stuck with command line gdb. Under Windows or Linux you can use Momentics/Eclipse.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really have a problem with Agile development techniques. I have a problem with people who preach about them with religious fervor, always trying to convince others that Agile is the one true development methodology and all others are pretenders.
It's my feeling that Agile techniques probably work well for certain situations and problems, but they don't always work in every situation. As you point out, Using Agile methodology when building a jet airplane is probably not the best way to go. Which is not to say some aspects of Agile couldn't be put to good use even with that scenario.
One thing has become clear to me from years of reading Slashdot -- there are many different development environments. Anyone who thinks the techniques used in their little corner of the development world will be universally applicable is sadly deluded. This was recently revisited in the article questioning why people are still using C. The answer is that for some problem sets C falls somewhere between adequate and best language for the job. For other problem sets C is far from the best choice.
The same applies with Agile. In some situations it works very well. In others, not so much.
Fast - If the plan changes halfway through Agile development, how does that NOT result in the same discarding of work and starting over? In my experience it's very uncommon for non-Agile projects to change so drastically halfway through that you have to scrap everything done so far. Has it happened? I'm sure it has. But I'm sure something similar has happened to Agile projects as well.
Cheap - Your conclusion is only valid if priority and value are directly related. Due to the various priorities of different departments, I've not found this to be at all the case. The marketing guys might think it's imperative and of the highest priority that the product use whatever the latest designer colors might be. Does this add value? Not in my book.
Good - I fail to see how short development time necessarily leads to "good". As far as I can see, all it does is lead to doing things in bite-sized pieces. I'm not saying that's a bad idea, but it's been my experience that on any project of real substance it can be very difficult to break everything up into chunks small enough to complete in a week (or even two). We've tried this several times at my company and have always failed. Even with a two-week cycle it was very difficult to break things up into sufficiently small pieces.
I would also suggest that non-Agile development in no way insists on you juggling 60 features at once and not submitting any of them until they're all complete.
You obviously like the Agile approach, and that's great, but some realism in the implied criticism of other approaches would also be a good thing. The non-Agile developers aren't all dunderheads who do everything in the dumbest of all possible ways.
I'm afraid I don't see how online merchants have killed my choice of products. In my not so limited experience, the exact opposite is true. Most local stores have almost no product selection. This trend of reduced product selection was in place long before Amazon existed or Wal-Mart appeared in my local area. The selection of products in almost every category has skyrocketed with online shopping. I'm sorry for the local merchant who goes out of business as a result, but, as a consumer, I see this massive selection as a very good thing.
Even with the reduced selection, I don't see grocery stores disappearing any time soon. Same day delivery is not the same as the 20 minutes it takes to run to the local store and pick up the items needed for tonight's dinner.
Your experience may vary, but I go into my bank branch at least once a month. I will admit they don't have nearly as many tellers as they once did, but there's seldom a wait of more than a couple minutes -- considerably less than it used to be before ATMs and direct deposit -- they don't charge me to talk to a teller and the service is always top notch.
The problem you describe is shoddy development practices. This has nothing whatever to do with the language being used. No language is going to protect you from an organization that allows rushed code to go directly to a customer without code review, thorough unit test, integration test, and V&V testing.
Dangerous, crap code can be written in any language. It is not unique to C.
Teaching people to code in a particular language is relatively easy if they have the math skills. Teaching them the maths skills is hard.
I partly agree with the sentiment about learning to code in a particular language, but the bit about math skills is nonsense. I've been making a good living from coding (and design, test, specification, etc.) for almost 35 years. I've never once had to use math more complicated than what I learned in high school trigonometry. The vast majority of code doesn't require anything more complicated than the basics of add, subtract, multiply and divide. I'm not saying math skills don't come into play in some programming jobs, but suggesting skills at complicated math are a prerequisite for learning to code is just wrong.
Where I think many people go astray is in equating the learning of the mechanics of a language with having skill at programming. To a large extent the two are orthogonal. I might be able to teach somebody to speak English so they can do what's necessary in everyday life. This is not going to simultaneously make them a great author.
Lack of knowledge of a particular language is a temporary bump in the road for a good programmer. Complete knowledge of the ins and outs of Java will not by itself make someone a great Java programmer. I've spent far too much time cleaning up after "programmers" who were technically proficient in a language yet couldn't write "Hello world" in an elegant, maintainable way.
The next day, I left it on my front porch and the neighbor's 8 year old kid ( he had to weigh at least 30 kilos / 60 lbs ) stood on it and jumped up and down on it for 30 seconds trying to reach something. Not a scratch, dent, or crack. One of the rubber feet was squished to the point of losing adhesion and there were some footprints on the lid but the foot re-attached...
On the laptop or on the kid?
I would have to second the recommendation for Lenovo. The place I'm working used to be exclusively a Lenovo shop and I was very impressed with the engineering of the boxes. They originally gave me a very old Lenovo desktop that had been around the block a few too many times and was under-configured. The optical drive no longer worked. When the IT guy came to replace the CD and add more memory I couldn't believe how quickly he finished. Seriously, it couldn't have taken him more than 60 seconds to open the box, add the memory, pop out the old CD and pop in the new one.
That got me looking seriously at Lenovo. Shortly afterward I bought a Thinkpad W700 laptop that has seen near continual use for almost three years now. Last year I bought a Thinkpad X-series laptop so I had something a little easier to travel with than the behemoth W700. The W700 will soon be replaced with a W530. Nothing really wrong with it, but it's three years old and I'm dying to get one of those new Ivy Bridge i7 machines.
The Thinkpads aren't sexy. They're no-nonsense, well-engineered tools to get a job done. And equivalently equipped they cost a helluva lot less than a Mac.
The conclusion that BitTorrent traffic has "fallen" is not actually supported by the Sandvine report. They complicate things by reporting everything as percentages, but if you dig deep enough you find overall mean traffic is up 40% year-over-year. So, in reality, BitTorrent traffic has continued to GROW, it's just a smaller percentage of the overall traffic.
They actually make this point about Netflix in the report. Their share of peak traffic increased by only 0.2%, yet they point out that due to overall traffic increase this amounts to a 30% increase in absolute traffic associated with Netflix.
I will get up and change the channel the old fashioned way for the rest of the day,
I would do that, but my TV doesn't have a channel changer on it. It's remote or nothing.
It is far cheaper for Comcast to host your computer at their location than provide the bandwidth to your house. Maintenance is a huge part of this.
By excepting their in-house streaming service from the cap, they're saying the overage charges are for external access, not for the last mile to the house. $200/TB for external transport charges is beyond outrageous.
The $1.15/TB was a mistake. I read it as Euro and it was actually GBP. So it's more like $1.40/TB. And Comcast is only charging 142 times this rate. My bad.
kimsufi.co.uk has these rates on their cheap dedicated server boxes. They are an arm of OVH.
It's sane until you look at the charge for going over the cap. I can lease a dedicated server where bandwidth beyond the 5TB monthly cap is $1.15/TB. Comcast's marginal bandwidth rate is $200/TB. Admittedly, Comcast may be paying a bit more for bandwidth than the dedicated server hosting company, but 173 times more? They're just sticking it to people who use more while trying to make it sound like they're being fair.
I recently went through several boxes of old family photos and digitized them. I learned a number of things in the process.
There are/were vast differences in the quality and longevity of different photo printing methods. Most of the photos that were about 50 years old had faded and color shifted, each, it seems, in its own peculiar direction. Trying to bring them back to proper color was a nightmare, not made easier by my lack of skill with Gimp. But some of the photos from 50 years ago looked like they might have been printed last week. The colors were still vivid. I have no idea what process was used on any of these prints, but it was very clear the process makes a world of difference.
Whatever you decide to do with the prints, I strongly recommend getting some archival quality sleeves to individually store them. Even if you then put them in an album, put them first in archival sleeves. The prints will be protected and will never again be exposed to fingerprints. They won't get scratched. They'll be reasonably well protected against UV fading. Then lock it all in a light-proof vault. Light is the mortal enemy of photo prints and even good quality UV protection will still allow some small amount of UV to penetrate. Keep the prints in a tightly sealed box and you should have few problems with fading.
Honestly, though, if you really care about preserving these for posterity, just keep them digital and use some kind of offsite backup. Know going in that you'll probably have to move them around several times over the years as companies come and go and technology changes. You may well have to convert them to different formats at more than one point. But the digital copy is almost certainly going to be more flexible and of better quality than any print.
I was responding to a message that said everything will be fine when human error is removed from the system. My intent was to point out that as long as humans and vehicles are allowed to mingle, human error can never be removed. Pedestrians will do stupid things. They'll have their mind on something else entirely and stupidly step off the curb into traffic. Kids will dash out into the street from between parked cars.
Can the car be programmed to react to these situations? Sure. Will it be able to tell the difference between a child darting out from between parked cars and a beach ball rolling into the road? In the former case avoidance of the obstacle at virtually any cost is the recommended course, even if it means swerving into oncoming traffic. In the latter, collision with the obstacle is of no consequence.
Will the computer know the beach ball, which is not an obstacle to be concerned with, is likely to be followed by an obstacle that needs to be avoided? Will the computer be able to detect children playing in a front yard and slow down just in case one of them does something stupid? How will it tell the difference between children playing and normal pedestrians on the sidewalk who warrant no unusual concern? People, well, some people, make these judgments instantly and continually while driving. Perhaps computers will be able to do it some day. But not today. At least not at a cost that makes it practical for in-vehicle use.
Human error will be removed from the equation not long after humans are removed from the equation.
Not all roads are limited access super-highways. I do most of my driving on surface streets. There is sufficiently little pedestrian traffic that one tends not to think about them, and just enough pedestrian traffic that forgetting about them becomes a big problem. Until you make it illegal for pedestrians to enter the roadway, there will be humans and human errors as parts of the equation.
We recently switched to allowing telecommuting 2-3 days a week. And let me tell you, it is Glorious. Those 2-3 days are the most productive ones I have, maybe because I'm comfortable and able to clearly think through issues, instead of being constantly interrupted by the asshole across the cube farm's ringtone or the loudmouth Sales guy on a call next cube over or a million other irritations at the office. And as far as the time-worn fears of slacking are concerned, honestly I have too much to do to slack off - any supervising manager would be able to tell pretty quickly whether or not their subordinates are abusing the privilege.
You're scratching at one of my pet peeves. Businesses hire (some) people for the express purpose of using their brains then put them in situations least conducive to that pursuit. A year ago the company I'm contracting at had a two-day conference where everyone in the department attended except me. I got more done in those two days on difficult tasks than I would have in several weeks' worth of normal days. No phones ringing. No copier beeping its head off. No hallway conversations. No co-workers dropping by to ask questions and interrupt my train of thought. I had no idea how disruptive to the thought process the normal cubicle work environment is until I spent those two days in what was effectively my own private office space.
If the home environment can be kept free of the distractions that are so common in the typical work place there is little doubt that those needing to make good use of their gray matter could easily be more productive at home.
Few people can write comedy, but if you can pull it off it will be a coup for you and your department.
There's an important point buried in here. You need to first ask yourself a question: Do I want to be the go-to guy in my department for presentations? If the answer is 'yes', then spend time trying to make it fun and exciting. If the answer is 'no', like the new husband asked to do the laundry for the first time, figure out a way to totally screw it up without making it seem like you did it on purpose. Make the presentation as dull and boring as you possibly can. Don't make eye contact. Don't look up to see if anyone has questions. Appear really nervous and uncomfortable (probably not difficult). Make it easy for your boss to say, "I guess public speaking isn't his thing." You'll likely never again be asked to do a big presentation.
You're making a distinction without a difference to the guy who lost his job and hasn't been able to drive for five years because a non-calibrated machine registered him at 0.08% when he was really at 0.06%. I'm sure it will come as great relief to him that it was the police who made the mistake, not the judge who didn't believe him when he said he'd only had two beers.
Use a macro to do the "Is this authorized?" check. Then use that macro all over the place. Use it in main loops. Use it in obscure parts that are seldom executed. Make it so hundreds of spots need to be patched for a crack to be really successfully.
With the dongles, at least with the ones I used, you could do both positive and negative checks. You needed to go through a sequence of steps to get the dongle to respond in the affirmative. Asking for status prior to that did not interfere with anything. So you do some of the sequence, check for a negative, do some more, check for another negative, etc., eventually performing the final sequence and checking for a positive. Then you reset and start over again.
The idea is not to use it as a boundary check but as something you're continually hitting with commands and checking the responses.
I have two thoughts on this. First, do you really want to work for such a place? I know jobs are in short supply right now and any job is better than no job, but I certainly wouldn't want to work anywhere that had an issue with me having a non-conflicting side business.
Second, and more importantly, every place I've ever worked took an exceedingly dim view of people who lied on their application. More than once I've seen good employees disappear in a flash because the employer discovered they'd lied about education or job experience or past brushes with the law. Lying about your outside work will be grounds for dismissal.
In my admittedly limited experience, the subterfuge you recommend is not necessary. Just be honest about the situation. If your side projects are in an area that overlaps with your employer's business, then they have a legitimate right to refuse. If there's no overlap, then there's no legitimate reason for them to not make an accommodation.
I had a side business doing software for material handling. When a prospective employer showed me their IP/non-compete agreement we had a discussion about the situation. They had the lawyers modify the agreement to accommodate what I was doing. The result was we both understood each other's position and knew ahead of time exactly where the lines were drawn. In the end it turned out there was some conceptual overlap between the two endeavors, but this turned out to be to my employer's benefit as things I'd learned in my side business were directly applicable to my primary job. There was no conflict with customers because we were addressing completely different industries.
Dishonesty is not a good foundation for any kind of new relationship, but especially not for one with an employer.
Good point, though the scenario you suggest is already happening. We simply don't (yet) pay tax on unrealized gains due to inflation. Realized gains due entirely to inflation still get taxed even though you have zero real gain.
This is a slippery slope the government would be well-advised to avoid. The only way to make this "fair" is for reduction in wealth to be given tax credits. Stock goes up, you pay taxes on the increase. Stock goes down, you get a refund on the reduction in value.
How do you think this would have played out when the market went into free fall a few years ago?
Last I looked there were 100 Senators, with the Vice President presiding over the body and able to vote in case of a tie.
I've been writing QNX applications for over a decade. Not one of them contained a single line of assembly.
The OS is written primarily in C. There may be a few snippets of assembly here and there in the platform-specific sections. I've not exhaustively examined the source. The parts I've seen were written in C.
QNX is currently using gcc as the provided compiler, so C and C++ are readily available. Development is primarily done under Windows or Linux, cross-compiling to run on QNX. You can develop under QNX as well, but they don't have a recent version of Momentics (a QNX-customized Eclipse) that will run natively on QNX, so you're stuck with command line gdb. Under Windows or Linux you can use Momentics/Eclipse.