That's exactly what i've found about my (similarly crazy) three-fingered typing layout. I've already known fellow developers my age who've needed treatment for rsi... so far, I've avoided it.
Let me guess... the people having the problems were using a different printer from the people who had no problems.
Windows font metrics (and thus, rendering in Word) depend on the actual printer resolution. Yes, your truetype fonts will change size with different printers. The effect is subtle, but it causes changes in pagination and can cause things to overflow slightly in tables. Mac OS doesn't do this (and afaik, never has).
This is why Word may give you "Unable to retrieve printer information" if you are opening a document. What a terrible, terrible idea.
Unless it's changed in the last year, it's still a really, really bad ratio. It's probably up to 10% over the con. Certain niches have much better ratios, like LARPs.
I just checked, and for Frostburn (for instance), I could save $13 by buying it in hardcover form from amazon rather than buying the PDF. Sure, a PDF is more convenient in some cases, but this is ridiculous.
Ideally, I'd want some kind of subscription service. Let me sign up with DTRPG, authorize my credit card, and whenever a new book came out $5-$10 came off my card and I got the PDF right away. If they're worried about people pirating the PDF, a lower price would help that to... for $5 bucks I'd just give books away if I wanted to share the rules.
Great. You now have ONE PASSWORD you have to use everywhere. It's strong, but since you're using it everywhere, it is now vulnerable.
Any set of guidelines that only looks at one password is flawed. I have probably 20-30 different passwords for work alone. I have vastly more than that if you count all the accounts I have at different places. Yes, I can remember ONE PHRASE. I can probably even remember 20 phrases. I certainly can't remember 100 phrases and the mapping of which phrase maps to which account. It gets even worse when you add punctuation... do I happen to remember which pauses had commas?
Hmmm... he's going to learn more than one language anyway... who cares if the first one is limiting? I started with Commodore 64 Basic. THAT was limiting. I've learned a whole lot of others over the years, and they've all been limiting in one way or another. Trust me, Perl limits how you think in a whole bunch of ways.
When I just need my card balance, I check the web site. I haven't _called_ for my balance in 8 years.
When I call in, it's because I have a problem or a question that isn't answerable by automated systems. After spending the last few years exploring phone trees exhaustively before finally saying "Yep, they can't handle it" and getting to a rep, I'm perfectly happy to rate companies on how easy that last step is.
We have a reasonably friendly telecommuting environment. I'm a software developer/architect/team lead at a Fortune 200 company doing web application development for internal and external use. Here's what I've learned:
Most of the people I work with work from home one day every 7-14 days. It's so common one or two people in my immediate work group post WFH messages each day and nobody blinks an eye.
The fact that we have sites in St. Louis and Bloomington, MN working on the same projects makes this a lot more feasible. Most of the meetings I attend are over conference calls. There are days when I need to be in a meeting in person because the whole group will be there, but those are pretty rare.
"Needing to get stuff done" is a perfectly accepted reason to WFH. If you're working from home, it's sufficiently more difficult for people to hit you with drive-by demands that your productivity is much higher. This is true for business analysts, management, release management, but especially true for developers. If we have enough work to get done, developers tend to be about twice as productive working from home as we are in the office, and management recognizes this. On some extremely "aggressive" projects, I've been WFH 2-3 days a week with the encouragement of senior management.
Face time is still important. The offhand conversations, or things you overhear in cube land are important, as are the relationships you develop dealing with people on an ad-hoc basis. Some of my most important contributions have been to projects I'm not working on, but I wandered by a coworkers desk to shoot the breeze and found they were dealing with a problem I had an insight on, or that bouncing ideas off me allowed my coworker to get a new idea. This is an important enough thing we try hard to get people from the BLM and STL offices together to meet. We can't fund this for everyone, but right now in my role I'm looking at a trip up every other month. I don't necessarily have an agenda, but my management recognizes that there will be large value just getting me and the BLM folks together, even if we don't know what that value will be ahead of time.
Corporate infrastructure is vital. We've got VPNs, corporate IM, conference lines out the wazoo. Every developer has a laptop. That makes it a lot more feasible for people to WFH on an ad-hoc basis than it would be if we only had one individual working from home.
Telecommuting is a privilege to be earned. When you just start out with us, you won't be allowed to WFH much. Part of that is that there's a lag in getting the VPN set up. A bigger part is when you start out, there's so much to learn that you need low-latency mentoring that only face-to-face provides. But the biggest thing is that you have to show that you'll get stuff done. If you turn out to be an employee that needs babysitting, we'll frown on you working from home, but if you show you'll get the job done you'll get a ton of flexibility.
The higher you get, the more you need to be there. When you're an individual contributer, it's a lot easier to WFH. Heads-down coding is best done in isolation. But the higher you rise in the chain of command, the more meetings you're in, the more likely those meetings will be in person, the more you need to focus on relationships inside and outside your working group. I can still work from home once every couple weeks or so. My boss can, but slightly less often. My boss's boss? Not so much. The higher you get, the more your job is coordination and less individual contribution, and that means that you'll need to be there in person more often to know what needs help.
And in the meantime, they've wasted two weeks while you get around to their software, and then you've done it wrong because you don't know anything about the package they're trying to use.
If you complain about taking 20 minutes to image someone's HD, I'm surprised you don't complain about taking half a day or more to install all the custom software each person needs to do their individual research.
This is not a company with thousands of identical worker drones. Your perspective is incorrect here.
(Even at my rather large Fortune 500 company where there are IT controls in place, there's an exception process for development so that we can install our own software. Strangely, I haven't met anyone who has hosed their windows install and needed a respin. We do get them occasionally, but only when getting a new machine, new OS, or new hard drive.)
Hmm... at my company, NFS (as well as NIS) is banned. There are no networked filesystems on Unix boxes. I'm sure other companies have equally misguided policies.
They did offer a Linux thinkpad for a while. The TP A20 was offered... ISTR it came with Caldera. I don't think it sold well... it had lower specs than the A20p, which is why I got the p and installed Linux myself.
I'm seeing the same thing at my company. I tink we need to hire different auditors. The fact is, these auditors don't care about people being able to get work done, or how it affects the company, they just want to claim more and more things need to be changed because of SOX so they can keep billing their hourly rate.
It depends a lot on what company you're working at. The company I'm at has lots and lots of contractors, doing extremely core things. My immediate group is about 50% contractors, and my manager (before he stepped down because he hated it) was a contractor who'd been there 7 years. In terms of group events, we're usually considered just like employees, except for a very few corp-wide events.
Nope. That would make sense, but it's not the problem.
You can define a document with nice big margins which will print perfectly fine on two different printers, and it will STILL paginate differently, because for some reason Word adjusts the FONT METRICS based on the printer chosen.
I often find myself at Panera bread after work if I have an activity shortly afterwards, because I have time to kill, but not enough to drive home and then back across STL for my cooking class, dinner date, or whatever.
Well, we already have Common Lisp on multiple platforms. Unlike Centum, CL is intended to be fast. It doesn't make you throw all the real logic in DLLs to be fast.
And fix the rendering of the homepage in Firefox while you're at it.
To validate a simple email address, Jeffrey Friedl in his Mastering Regular Expressions book for O'Reilly writes an *11-page* regex.
That's not quite fair. That regex validates any RFC822 address, and the syntax allowed isn't simple. Validating things that are currently used is fairly easy, but there's a lot of historical baggage in RFC822 addressing.
Besides that, who wants anything but light-weight or at least, non-critical, data and applications to be out on the network. Gmail is a perfect network application, but my financial software or any number of other things? No thanks.
Online tax software has proven to be very popular over the last couple years, so not everyone shares your qualms.
So, you need a multitool that doesn't have a blade. I've never seen one that I'd consider useful, but that's because I consider a knife to be essential. 8^(
You should definitely upgrade at least to the LJ2xxx series. The LJ1xxxs are cheap, intended to be the barest entry to laser printing HP sells. You're trying to compare it to things like the LJ4, which were built for much higher volume business use. If that's the kind of printing you do, go with the LJ2xxxs or better.
Look at the estimated duty cycles on each, and you'll see that the LJ2xxx meets a much higher spec.
Consumer Reports actually has a lot of (sometimes unstated) opinion and assumptions in the target market for the products they review. I find I almost never agree with their reviews on tech gadgets, while I often do on cars.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what i've found about my (similarly crazy) three-fingered typing layout. I've already known fellow developers my age who've needed treatment for rsi... so far, I've avoided it.
You've spent weeks of work so far trying to make Java happy with the DST problems, and you don't think that's broken?
It's above team lead. One could probably get to manager without much trouble without a degree. But director and higher would be much more difficult.
Let me guess... the people having the problems were using a different printer from the people who had no problems.
Windows font metrics (and thus, rendering in Word) depend on the actual printer resolution. Yes, your truetype fonts will change size with different printers. The effect is subtle, but it causes changes in pagination and can cause things to overflow slightly in tables. Mac OS doesn't do this (and afaik, never has).
This is why Word may give you "Unable to retrieve printer information" if you are opening a document. What a terrible, terrible idea.
Unless it's changed in the last year, it's still a really, really bad ratio. It's probably up to 10% over the con. Certain niches have much better ratios, like LARPs.
I just checked, and for Frostburn (for instance), I could save $13 by buying it in hardcover form from amazon rather than buying the PDF. Sure, a PDF is more convenient in some cases, but this is ridiculous.
Ideally, I'd want some kind of subscription service. Let me sign up with DTRPG, authorize my credit card, and whenever a new book came out $5-$10 came off my card and I got the PDF right away. If they're worried about people pirating the PDF, a lower price would help that to... for $5 bucks I'd just give books away if I wanted to share the rules.
Great. You now have ONE PASSWORD you have to use everywhere. It's strong, but since you're using it everywhere, it is now vulnerable.
Any set of guidelines that only looks at one password is flawed. I have probably 20-30 different passwords for work alone. I have vastly more than that if you count all the accounts I have at different places. Yes, I can remember ONE PHRASE. I can probably even remember 20 phrases. I certainly can't remember 100 phrases and the mapping of which phrase maps to which account. It gets even worse when you add punctuation... do I happen to remember which pauses had commas?
Why limit yourself early on?
Hmmm... he's going to learn more than one language anyway... who cares if the first one is limiting? I started with Commodore 64 Basic. THAT was limiting. I've learned a whole lot of others over the years, and they've all been limiting in one way or another. Trust me, Perl limits how you think in a whole bunch of ways.
When I just need my card balance, I check the web site. I haven't _called_ for my balance in 8 years.
When I call in, it's because I have a problem or a question that isn't answerable by automated systems. After spending the last few years exploring phone trees exhaustively before finally saying "Yep, they can't handle it" and getting to a rep, I'm perfectly happy to rate companies on how easy that last step is.
And in the meantime, they've wasted two weeks while you get around to their software, and then you've done it wrong because you don't know anything about the package they're trying to use.
If you complain about taking 20 minutes to image someone's HD, I'm surprised you don't complain about taking half a day or more to install all the custom software each person needs to do their individual research.
This is not a company with thousands of identical worker drones. Your perspective is incorrect here.
(Even at my rather large Fortune 500 company where there are IT controls in place, there's an exception process for development so that we can install our own software. Strangely, I haven't met anyone who has hosed their windows install and needed a respin. We do get them occasionally, but only when getting a new machine, new OS, or new hard drive.)
Hmm... at my company, NFS (as well as NIS) is banned. There are no networked filesystems on Unix boxes. I'm sure other companies have equally misguided policies.
They did offer a Linux thinkpad for a while. The TP A20 was offered... ISTR it came with Caldera. I don't think it sold well... it had lower specs than the A20p, which is why I got the p and installed Linux myself.
I'm seeing the same thing at my company. I tink we need to hire different auditors. The fact is, these auditors don't care about people being able to get work done, or how it affects the company, they just want to claim more and more things need to be changed because of SOX so they can keep billing their hourly rate.
It depends a lot on what company you're working at. The company I'm at has lots and lots of contractors, doing extremely core things. My immediate group is about 50% contractors, and my manager (before he stepped down because he hated it) was a contractor who'd been there 7 years. In terms of group events, we're usually considered just like employees, except for a very few corp-wide events.
Nope. That would make sense, but it's not the problem.
You can define a document with nice big margins which will print perfectly fine on two different printers, and it will STILL paginate differently, because for some reason Word adjusts the FONT METRICS based on the printer chosen.
I often find myself at Panera bread after work if I have an activity shortly afterwards, because I have time to kill, but not enough to drive home and then back across STL for my cooking class, dinner date, or whatever.
That should justify cheap cracks.
Think of it as evolution in action.
Well, we already have Common Lisp on multiple platforms. Unlike Centum, CL is intended to be fast. It doesn't make you throw all the real logic in DLLs to be fast.
And fix the rendering of the homepage in Firefox while you're at it.
To validate a simple email address, Jeffrey Friedl in his Mastering Regular Expressions book for O'Reilly writes an *11-page* regex.
That's not quite fair. That regex validates any RFC822 address, and the syntax allowed isn't simple. Validating things that are currently used is fairly easy, but there's a lot of historical baggage in RFC822 addressing.
Just in case you (or someone else) hadn't noticed, Order of the Stick does have hardcopy coming out! Order from here.
Besides that, who wants anything but light-weight or at least, non-critical, data and applications to be out on the network. Gmail is a perfect network application, but my financial software or any number of other things? No thanks.
Online tax software has proven to be very popular over the last couple years, so not everyone shares your qualms.
So, you need a multitool that doesn't have a blade. I've never seen one that I'd consider useful, but that's because I consider a knife to be essential. 8^(
You should definitely upgrade at least to the LJ2xxx series. The LJ1xxxs are cheap, intended to be the barest entry to laser printing HP sells. You're trying to compare it to things like the LJ4, which were built for much higher volume business use. If that's the kind of printing you do, go with the LJ2xxxs or better.
Look at the estimated duty cycles on each, and you'll see that the LJ2xxx meets a much higher spec.
Consumer Reports actually has a lot of (sometimes unstated) opinion and assumptions in the target market for the products they review. I find I almost never agree with their reviews on tech gadgets, while I often do on cars.