In my experience their drug-use has nothing to do with their ability, as long as they're not serious abusers. What it does affect is the ability to compromise their integrity. If a "bad-guy" wants to harm a company and knows that a particular employee uses illegal drugs, that employee is open to being blackmailed.
I'm not sure what your definition of "abusers" is.
Ok, let's face it, people smoke drugs in every company.
I can think of a few companies who deal with top-secret army-related products, who (unknowingly) hire people who do drugs (I just made it sound like a bad thing?).
Any OS, any security product, and I believe that just about *any* software product had someone (or probably so many people) smoking drugs while writing code.
And yes, even "abusers" (i.e., people who smoke before/during work).
Now, when was the last time a company trash-talked another company/product by saying "their product sucks, because they employ a drug user"?
And even if that will ever happen, the company will fire that guy, and that's it.
You'll have to trust me on this one, I'm not comfortable saying where I worked, what projects had developers smoking drugs in, etc. -- which is exactly the reason why most people don't know about other people smoking drugs.
Programmers who do drugs only tell their drug-using-co-workers:-)
I don't think companies should expect programmers (i.e., people who are constantly under tons of pressure and work crazy hours) to always stay clean of drugs, sorry.
Do you work for Microsoft? Are you an HR person for a company who does drug tests?
(You're obviously way off, I develop for a well-known Linux distribution)
I'd also imagine that Microsoft would do drug test, but what bothers me more now is what kind of moron modded you up...
Like it or not, drugs are the boogeyman to lots of people. And drug use correlates to other behaviors generally considered undesirable in an employee. Thus it is sensible and economical to use drug screening in the hiring process. Some of the best (and most reliable) programmers I've met use drugs.
Why would I be afraid to hire someone just because he smokes a joint after work or during the weekend?
Or why can't these programmers work for a company, just because that company's HR people never tried drugs and/or have misconceptions about it?
I don't understand why these companies don't choose to treat these people as adults who know exactly what effect drugs give them...
I've seen programmers come half-baked to work and still produce awesome code -- and they never stole a dime from anyone, always finished their projects on time, etc.
I guess you've summed it up right: "drugs are the boogeyman to lots of people"...
Have you checked out http://www.bindows.net/ ? It's really cool. I do hope we could develop web-only AJAX applications, especially for rapid development of (psuedo) cross-platform applications. Bindows seems to do the trick, basically.
Where I work (and in many companies around Israel) it's already being used. When an employee calls a cellular number, it automatically uses a real cellphone on the same cellular network to make the call. This probably saves tons of cash for a big company.
I read that it's an Israeli invention (and patent) but I'm not sure. Does anyone know how it's called and who makes these things?
I wish I could find out how I could benefit from Dvorak. I wasted cash buying a Dvorak keyboard, plugged it in at home, and played around with it. The thing is, that I have a job (I am almost positive most people here have this thing, too). And I actually use more than just the computers at home and at work (there are also tons of computers/keyboards at work).
I can't just go around, buy tons of dvorak keyboards and replace them all over (and get people mad at me because I replaced the keyboard at the servers farm:))
So as much as I hate qwerty, and as much as I'd like to try out Dvorak, I just can't. We are surrounded by qwerty keyboards. I think it'd be hard to type very quickly in both configurations.
Any ideas on getting used to 2 different configurations?
IIRC the extension for moving tabs around is not supported by FF 1.0.
Your "bookmark all tabs in a folder" trick is not the same as Opera's feature. Opera also saves the tabs' order, and you can switch between several configurations. But thanks for the tip anyway.
As for recovering from crashes: I didn't find an extension for this, I'll look again. Unfortunately FF still crashes on me from time to time and I'd love to keep my tabs configuration.
Just one thing about extensions; I'm not a huge fond of them. Everytime I upgrade FF, I have to wait sometimes up to a month for my favorite extension to be "supported". If more features could be built-in rather than added as extensions, it would be much better.
But seriously, don't get me wrong, I love Firefox.
Opera even does it better. For example, if you load a page in a new tab, it colours the caption text of that tab when the page is done loading. You can move tabs around in opera (also available for FF with an extension). Also, Opera lets you save your current tabs and reload this configuration at any time. If it crashes, it loads all the websites/tabs that were open before. Very convenient.
I think FF would be better off stealing some ideas from Opera.
NOTE: I am currently using Firefox, but used Opera for the last few years. I personally still prefer Opera over FF, but generally prefer free/ppen source software.
They said optimizing. You are aware that Python sucks when it comes to speed? You should look at the python-dev mailing list about how many times people mentioned that Python is slow, especially for regular expressions. One time someone suggested openning a perl process from within Python. So think twice before suggesting slow languages.
NOTE: I personally hate Python, so I might not be too objective, but Python being slow compared to Perl is objective!
Why should the poor guy waste money in order to install WinXP? Doesn't Microsoft want people to install/update their product? And yes, they can do something: let pirated copies of WinXP update. Also, they should try this thing... What's its name... Oh, QA! I had the same problem: I am a linux user and I tried to install WinXP. After I installed it, I went to "windows update" right away. But while doing it, I got popups, I got "your computer will shut down in..." (I know, I know, shutdown -a, but still...). That's the most user-unfriendly experience I ever had with a computer/software.
Ok, I will contact you tomorrow. I just need to see how decryption could be handled from the client side. We can basically only install software, and also, people might use Windows... We use Linux.
I assume AES decryption should be more or less easy. How can I write software that transparently decrypts everything that gets in the ethernet card? How can it separate my stream from other packets?
You understood my problem. This is about a conference being viewed only by people who should view it.
There's a need to multicast it over the internet. Sometimes we can't send physical things (dongles, etokens, smart cards) to people (clients and staff will not wait for DHL to come if they're expecting an important conference).
I will continue reading your answers tomorrow, thanks a lot!
One thing I forgot, do you get QuickTime installed when you install Mac OS? All the companies in this competition act dirty (that's why we don't use their products, right?:))
I dislike MS, but... All MS are doing is giving their free software along with (hopefully not) your OS. It's like suing a computer seller for including a free keyboard of vendor X and not giving a chance to vendor Y. This, my friends, is competition. Sounds even fair for me. Now, there are other things that are honestly dirty that microsoft has done for us to talk about...
Even in the newest version of Word, hebrew still is problematic. For example, when you try to add something in english in the middle of your hebrew line; or when adding a phone number with a dash (+972-3-1234567) in the middle. And they want money for that, sheesh...
I was also asking myself why it's
"not scheduled to hit the streets for another two years, and which could quite easily stretch to three" if it's just a blacker windows XP version, with a bit more features (that I assume were written even before winXP was released:))
The only reason I can think about, is that it's because M$ are doing it, and they're taking their time...
I checked. It's a Dell optiplex, the only PCI card I added is an Intel ethernet card. I downloaded all the drivers from Dell, for this specific model.
Linux runs PERFECTLY on it.
I also update it, and run an AV (not that I trust these programs...).
Windows XP runs so slowly, I have no idea what they shoved to the kernel...
Anyway, Linux is/not/ ideal in my eyes (and yes, everything is hack-ish, in my eyes), and I use windows a lot for graphics (I adore Adobe Photoshop) etc.
But right now I prefer using Linux for most things.
I have a Win2K machine at home and it crashes like a maniac. It freezes on me a lot of times. I usually use Photoshop, nothing more. 3 days ago Internet Explorer didn't even run. When I shut down, it says "Saving your settings" for like 10 minutes.
I should mention that it's a pretty clean install, it's not full of junk or something (and even if it was full of junk, that's not a reason for it to crash).
Well, add Opera & mozilla to that list. I run a MySQL server on my computer for some of the workers in my office. They usually use it for their own experiments (I don't ask too many questions:)). Anyway, one time someone wrote a BAD query (I'm not sure what it was!) and my computer froze. I was in X, tried to switch to the console and kill MySQL... After 15 minutes I understood that I'd rather restart and not let the system swap... X crashed on me a lot of times, but the system kept running, that's true. This time my entire system was dead.
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I'm not sure what your definition of "abusers" is.
Ok, let's face it, people smoke drugs in every company. I can think of a few companies who deal with top-secret army-related products, who (unknowingly) hire people who do drugs (I just made it sound like a bad thing?).
Any OS, any security product, and I believe that just about *any* software product had someone (or probably so many people) smoking drugs while writing code.
And yes, even "abusers" (i.e., people who smoke before/during work).
Now, when was the last time a company trash-talked another company/product by saying "their product sucks, because they employ a drug user"?
And even if that will ever happen, the company will fire that guy, and that's it.
You'll have to trust me on this one, I'm not comfortable saying where I worked, what projects had developers smoking drugs in, etc. -- which is exactly the reason why most people don't know about other people smoking drugs.
Programmers who do drugs only tell their drug-using-co-workers
I don't think companies should expect programmers (i.e., people who are constantly under tons of pressure and work crazy hours) to always stay clean of drugs, sorry.
(You're obviously way off, I develop for a well-known Linux distribution)
I'd also imagine that Microsoft would do drug test, but what bothers me more now is what kind of moron modded you up...
Why would I be afraid to hire someone just because he smokes a joint after work or during the weekend?
Or why can't these programmers work for a company, just because that company's HR people never tried drugs and/or have misconceptions about it?
I don't understand why these companies don't choose to treat these people as adults who know exactly what effect drugs give them...
I've seen programmers come half-baked to work and still produce awesome code -- and they never stole a dime from anyone, always finished their projects on time, etc.
I guess you've summed it up right: "drugs are the boogeyman to lots of people"...
Have you checked out http://www.bindows.net/ ?
It's really cool.
I do hope we could develop web-only AJAX applications, especially for rapid development of (psuedo) cross-platform applications.
Bindows seems to do the trick, basically.
mod_perl is fast enough.
It's also fast enough for Amazon (they use mod_perl with HTML::Mason AFAIK).
Where I work (and in many companies around Israel) it's already being used.
When an employee calls a cellular number, it automatically uses a real cellphone on the same cellular network to make the call.
This probably saves tons of cash for a big company.
I read that it's an Israeli invention (and patent) but I'm not sure.
Does anyone know how it's called and who makes these things?
I wish I could find out how I could benefit from Dvorak.
:))
I wasted cash buying a Dvorak keyboard, plugged it in at home, and played around with it.
The thing is, that I have a job (I am almost positive most people here have this thing, too).
And I actually use more than just the computers at home and at work (there are also tons of computers/keyboards at work).
I can't just go around, buy tons of dvorak keyboards and replace them all over (and get people mad at me because I replaced the keyboard at the servers farm
So as much as I hate qwerty, and as much as I'd like to try out Dvorak, I just can't.
We are surrounded by qwerty keyboards.
I think it'd be hard to type very quickly in both configurations.
Any ideas on getting used to 2 different configurations?
IIRC the extension for moving tabs around is not supported by FF 1.0.
Your "bookmark all tabs in a folder" trick is not the same as Opera's feature.
Opera also saves the tabs' order, and you can switch between several configurations.
But thanks for the tip anyway.
As for recovering from crashes: I didn't find an extension for this, I'll look again.
Unfortunately FF still crashes on me from time to time and I'd love to keep my tabs configuration.
Just one thing about extensions; I'm not a huge fond of them.
Everytime I upgrade FF, I have to wait sometimes up to a month for my favorite extension to be "supported".
If more features could be built-in rather than added as extensions, it would be much better.
But seriously, don't get me wrong, I love Firefox.
Opera even does it better.
For example, if you load a page in a new tab, it colours the caption text of that tab when the page is done loading.
You can move tabs around in opera (also available for FF with an extension).
Also, Opera lets you save your current tabs and reload this configuration at any time.
If it crashes, it loads all the websites/tabs that were open before.
Very convenient.
I think FF would be better off stealing some ideas from Opera.
NOTE: I am currently using Firefox, but used Opera for the last few years.
I personally still prefer Opera over FF, but generally prefer free/ppen source software.
They said optimizing.
You are aware that Python sucks when it comes to speed?
You should look at the python-dev mailing list about how many times people mentioned that Python is slow, especially for regular expressions.
One time someone suggested openning a perl process from within Python.
So think twice before suggesting slow languages.
NOTE: I personally hate Python, so I might not be too objective, but Python being slow compared to Perl is objective!
Why should the poor guy waste money in order to install WinXP?
Doesn't Microsoft want people to install/update their product?
And yes, they can do something: let pirated copies of WinXP update.
Also, they should try this thing... What's its name... Oh, QA!
I had the same problem: I am a linux user and I tried to install WinXP.
After I installed it, I went to "windows update" right away.
But while doing it, I got popups, I got "your computer will shut down in..." (I know, I know, shutdown -a, but still...).
That's the most user-unfriendly experience I ever had with a computer/software.
Ok, I will contact you tomorrow.
I just need to see how decryption could be handled from the client side.
We can basically only install software, and also, people might use Windows...
We use Linux.
I assume AES decryption should be more or less easy.
How can I write software that transparently decrypts everything that gets in the ethernet card?
How can it separate my stream from other packets?
You understood my problem.
This is about a conference being viewed only by people who should view it.
There's a need to multicast it over the internet.
Sometimes we can't send physical things (dongles, etokens, smart cards) to people (clients and staff will not wait for DHL to come if they're expecting an important conference).
I will continue reading your answers tomorrow, thanks a lot!
One thing I forgot, do you get QuickTime installed when you install Mac OS? :))
All the companies in this competition act dirty (that's why we don't use their products, right?
I dislike MS, but...
All MS are doing is giving their free software along with (hopefully not) your OS.
It's like suing a computer seller for including a free keyboard of vendor X and not giving a chance to vendor Y.
This, my friends, is competition.
Sounds even fair for me.
Now, there are other things that are honestly dirty that microsoft has done for us to talk about...
"Fog Creek Software is an equal opportunity employer and supports workforce Diversity."
:)
I don't fall for that anymore
Even in the newest version of Word, hebrew still is problematic.
For example, when you try to add something in english in the middle of your hebrew line;
or when adding a phone number with a dash (+972-3-1234567) in the middle.
And they want money for that, sheesh...
I'm with you.
I was also asking myself why it's :))
"not scheduled to hit the streets for another two years, and which could quite easily stretch to three"
if it's just a blacker windows XP version, with a bit more features (that I assume were written even before winXP was released
The only reason I can think about, is that it's because M$ are doing it, and they're taking their time...
I checked.
/not/ ideal in my eyes (and yes, everything is hack-ish, in my eyes), and I use windows a lot for graphics (I adore Adobe Photoshop) etc.
It's a Dell optiplex, the only PCI card I added is an Intel ethernet card.
I downloaded all the drivers from Dell, for this specific model.
Linux runs PERFECTLY on it.
I also update it, and run an AV (not that I trust these programs...).
Windows XP runs so slowly, I have no idea what they shoved to the kernel...
Anyway, Linux is
But right now I prefer using Linux for most things.
Weird.
:)
I have a Win2K machine at home and it crashes like a maniac.
It freezes on me a lot of times.
I usually use Photoshop, nothing more.
3 days ago Internet Explorer didn't even run.
When I shut down, it says "Saving your settings" for like 10 minutes.
I should mention that it's a pretty clean install, it's not full of junk or something (and even if it was full of junk, that's not a reason for it to crash).
What is your trick? Share with us!
Well, add Opera & mozilla to that list. :)).
:)
I run a MySQL server on my computer for some of the workers in my office.
They usually use it for their own experiments (I don't ask too many questions
Anyway, one time someone wrote a BAD query (I'm not sure what it was!) and my computer froze.
I was in X, tried to switch to the console and kill MySQL...
After 15 minutes I understood that I'd rather restart and not let the system swap...
X crashed on me a lot of times, but the system kept running, that's true.
This time my entire system was dead.
So I stopped saying that Linux doesn't crash...