1. Standardized IDE. Everyone use the same thing and you will be able to do builds, deployments, and fix bugs quicker. Eclipse/Zend/VC++ whatever.
That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Horses for courses. I was an Emacs guy until recently when I switched to Vim. We have a couple of other Vim people and an Eclipse guy here. Everyone gets by using whatever 'IDE' that they want. The IDE does nothing except provide them an editor. Forcing the same IDE on everyone is asking for reduced productivity.
Standardized build and deployment. ANT/Bash scripts/whatever
With this you don't need an IDE preference. We have Makefiles and Ruby scripts that do everything we need. SCM actions are mangled into scripts so branching, merging, etc are all handled and the right comments (according to our policy) are inserted into the repository. Releasing to production and staging servers is handled and everything works neatly.
If you get this part right you won't have the headache of forcing a GUI guy to edit code on the console and you won't have the loss of productivity when you get a console guy to try and use a graphical (read: crap) IDE.
Some of the programmers I have worked with may as well have been. There are some really shit programmers out there who learn a bunch of buzzwords, write a shitty GUI in Visual BASIC and convince dumb-ass HR n00bs that they are actually talented.
What proportion of your time is spent reversing in your car? Of all the miles/kilometres you travel, what percentage?
I reverse at least twice a day: out of the driveway and into the road on the way to work. And then after work out of the car park and onto the road. Interesting. It's only a small percentage of distance but it is still a daily thing.
How about fog lights?
Less value, and I experience 'frequent' fog (about once a fortnight during winter) and I don't have fog lights. Why lug around the extra weight when you can either stop driving during fog or drive extra carefully with the regular lights.
Anyone carry a spare tyre in their car?
You'll find that it's mandated by law. I have used the spare several times in my many years of driving. In fact, without it I would have been stuck in the middle of nowhere at least twice at around midnight. Tyres are fragile things and are quite easy to blow out - hence the reason for the spare.
It's very easy to not be fragile with your source code. Be mindful of what you commit to the repository. '$SCM diff' before you commit is an excellent way to verify that you're not committing something that is totally stupid (your codes to arm all the nuclear weapons in the world, for example).
Aren't you reviewing your changes before you commit them anyway? I would have thought that with SVN/CVS where branching/merging are a PITA that you'd be working on trunk most of the time so changes would require proper review before they were committed anyway.
All CACert does is verify that you have control of the domain name you're trying to get a certificate for before issuing a certificate
That's interesting. We have several paid-for certs at work and all they did was verify that we controlled the webmaster and root accounts and that the credit card was valid.
So, CACert is doing exactly what every other Cert authority does.
All that SSL proves is that the webserver you're talking to is really at foo.com. If you don't control the foo.com name you shouldn't be able to get the cert for it. If you put a man in the middle pretending to be foo.com then it will be detected.
All the Linux-based ones (decidedly few, admittedly) I have seen use the same DNS proxy (dnsmasq). I guess it's just not perfectly stable but I haven't seen a reboot anymore than once every few months.
I gave up on mine and turned it into a dumb PPPoE bridge. An OpenBSD box at the border handles the dirty guff of PPP sessions and NAT. Now my connection is perfectly stable and the modem never needs to be rebooted. To top it all off I trust the BSD box and the firewall I created on it more than I trust the router to do it properly.
However, the effect of radiation is cumulative, thus even moderate exposure to sunlight on a daily basis leads to increased risk of skin cancer
And from the article:
Dr. Sinervo said sunscreens have been used for years without adverse human health impacts, suggesting they are harmless to people while reducing the risks of skin cancer.
Now, we have an increasing rate of skin cancer and it worries the authorities. Is it perhaps that sun screen is the cause of skin cancer and that the sun is not as responsible as science would claim? Has anyone done that study?
I ask if they have any code that they are allowed to show me; I try and be specific about personal projects they've done and am pretty vocal about them not bringing in proprietary code.
A lot of potential candidates are just 'career programmers'; idiots who got a Uni degree then a programming job because someone said they'd earn good money. You can usually tell them because they're very eager to talk dollars (and usually far higher than market rate) at the first interview and they spin off a lot of current buzzwords completely out of context.
If you can't pick it at the interview they're usually also the ones who can't direct you to any code they have written outside of work. They claim NDA and all sorts of other things.
The great programmers will point you at websites, OSS projects or even email in a copy of the home automation controller they wrote for their own home with a note saying "It's mine, please respect that".
My advice to the OP is to work on a project in your own time that you can show the code to. It doesn't even have to be FOSS if you want to keep it close to your chest. Just find a task that you need done and that interests you and write some code to do it; even if it's only a few hundred lines of good code it's something you can show down the track.
I have a pet project that's been running for a few years (just for me, it's not public) and I've thrown in samples of code that I wrote from it. I also have a few image processing modules I wrote as part of my Ph.D research that I can demonstrate.
Check with your accounting department and ask them how long they, or the auditors, retain data, and how much of it they keep.
IIRC Tax laws require all records that involve 'your' taxation to be retained for 7 years just in case they decide to audit 'you' (and by 'you' I mean any person or entity who deals with the tax man). So, some of that retention is done by a legal requirement, even if that requirement is the case you might be audited in 6 years from now.
If you're getting headaches it's very likely that you have some kind of sight problem anyway. I used to work on all sorts of shitty screens until a year ago (30 years in the industry). I started getting eye strain and headaches as you describe.
It turns out that I (like many other people who don't realise it) am slightly long sighted. It's enough to make staring at something for a length of time uncomfortable and not enough to be noticed day to day while out and about.
Get your eyes checked first and foremost. Getting corrective glasses early can save a lot of need for them later.
Secondly, get a good screen. LCD or CRT but spend the dollars to get a good one. A good video card also makes a difference if you have an analog screen - the cheap-ass components in the output stages on cheap-ass cards to degenerate the signal.
When you've done all that you can play with colour schemes. My preference is for simple white text on black background. A few bright colours (orange, red, yellow, blue) to highlight certain things and I'm set to code for days without strain.
If so-called stupid people reproduce more, and we don't do anything to make everyone smarter, through widely available gene therapy or better schooling or whatnot, then we will eventually have far, far too many of those stupid people.
We already have far too many of these "stupid" people. They are everywhere. They have nothing better to do with their unemployment cheques than to spend the day drunk and in the sack, possibly reproducing!
And on a funny note, a Slashdot article where the members are all giving advice on what women want, and how to get women yet I don't think there's a single person who posted in this thread who has ever seen a real woman nekkid:p
Email all the customers on the list, telling them that the competitor has exposed their email address In some places I'm sure that's even a violation of several privacy laws/regulations and could get the competition in trouble if you point it out to the relevant places.
And back on topic: It's almost impossible to get the boss not to spam. I used to work for a sales-oriented person and he didn't give a shit. Spam pissed him off but he was first to spam a million people when they thought they'd get some money.
If you run your own mail server just make sure you configure it to drop any emails destined to more than a few recipients and possibly also drop the recipient list into BCC if there are more than one listed. You won't stop him spamming if he wants to, but you might be able to limit the damage he can cause.
Not all users want to receive emails that are nothing but a line of text and an MS-Word attachment, or that have text in cyan letters overlaid on a background of ocean waves crashing on the beach. I don't want to receive any MS Word attachments to emails.
That said, I'd much rather see a PDF if sharing it with formatting is so damned important to the sender. At least I can read PDFs and see the same thing they saw. That is a problem with rich text formats and Word attachments.
The biggest problem with making something like HTML mail a feature is that suddenly every schmuck feels that they MUST use this shiny new feature and you get just that; a bunch of emails with Javascript signatures that fade in and rippling animated GIF backgrounds and the like. Aside from the fact that it's hard to read and annoying it's also more to download, and some data plans (particularly mobile) charge by the kilobyte.
. In fact there is a TBird plugin to do the same thing automatically... Automatically; that is the point. There's no need to include that formatting in the email because the mail client can work out how to emphasise the different levels of reply based on the standard quote marker (greater than) in an email.
In fact, using HTML and trying do to it magically makes it harder for users who don't get HTML mails to read or to copy/paste out a relevant section into something else.
because wanting to use italics, underline, bold, fonts, etc., allows more expressivity? I was also going to say: if you can't find the correct choice of words to express your sentiment then you should consider going back to grade school and relearning your primary language. Expressing your position really isn't that difficult and you don't need a gazillion fonts and colours to do it.
Because wanting to use italics, underline, bold, fonts, etc., allows more expressivity? And the 'standard' way to do that (and is supported by Gmail at least) is: *bold*/italics/ _underline_
I think you need to get your facts straight. Email is text-only. There's no great need to lay it out and format it like a bloody well polished journal article.
For what reason? For the 1% of users who don't use an HTML-capable email reader? No, because HTML email uses a lot more bandwidth, doesn't render the same in any two places, etc. Text only email truncated at around 72 chars per line is almost guaranteed to render the same no matter where the reader is.
Personally I've never understood the reason for sending dual plain-text and HTML copies in the same email. It's just doubling the bandwidth for something that can be trivially "downgraded" on demand. The first smart thing you've said. Why bother sending the HTML at all? I don't want markup and image linking in emails. If your document needs to be formatted exactly in a certain way there are better ways to get it there.
Why does email need all of the insecurity that comes with including a HTML rendering engine in the bloody mail client? I have enough trouble with virus and spam emails. I don't need the further risk to my health with the client actually being vulnerable to all that shit!
It is nobodies business to know whether, not to mention when I have first opened their e-mail (which is also, by the way, not the same thing as actually reading it). I actually worked in a company where the "boss" put in place policy that all emails will request a read receipt AND he started investigating using these shoddy services.
I was very quick to drop the receipt headers in our mail server and forcing all outgoing mail to go through it.
There's not much you can do when they invoke these shitty tracking services though. It just becomes a cat and mouse game of shut one down and another pops up in its place or they find a workaround for your block.
It's all a DOS even if they try and hide the DOS with that fancy bitmap screen at startup.
*tongue out of cheek* I actually had a customer return a computer when I was working at a computer store years ago. She was insistent she paid for Windows95 and none of this DOS crap. Any text at all on the console (BIOS, "Starting Windows", etc) was interpreted by the customer as DOS and she wanted a refund.
Didn't you wonder why they all have those pretty manufacturer logos full screen now until the OS removes them and puts up its own screen?
And many users actually ask why I run DOS on my brand new quad-core beast. They are bewildered that someone would use "DOS"... something about the high resolution text console scares them.
custom designed software where the sender of the data will need to agree to send the data in the correct format as well the receiver agrees to get the data in the correct format. I thought that was the point of standards? The router conforms to acceptable network standards. The OS is meant to conform as well. MS releases a new patch, it makes the OS start sending packets outside the standard. The router gets confused and crashes. Sure, the router needs to be more robust, but I'd say that is Microsoft's fault for sending invalid packets.
I have a fairly large network here with a lot of varied machines on it and my router never crashes. Add one SP3 box and bam, down it goes. I think it's fairly safe to say that MS have done something dodgy in SP3.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Standardized IDE. Everyone use the same thing and you will be able to do builds, deployments, and fix bugs quicker. Eclipse/Zend/VC++ whatever.
That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Horses for courses. I was an Emacs guy until recently when I switched to Vim. We have a couple of other Vim people and an Eclipse guy here. Everyone gets by using whatever 'IDE' that they want. The IDE does nothing except provide them an editor. Forcing the same IDE on everyone is asking for reduced productivity.
Standardized build and deployment. ANT/Bash scripts/whatever
With this you don't need an IDE preference. We have Makefiles and Ruby scripts that do everything we need. SCM actions are mangled into scripts so branching, merging, etc are all handled and the right comments (according to our policy) are inserted into the repository. Releasing to production and staging servers is handled and everything works neatly.
If you get this part right you won't have the headache of forcing a GUI guy to edit code on the console and you won't have the loss of productivity when you get a console guy to try and use a graphical (read: crap) IDE.
Unless you're both chimpanzees.
Some of the programmers I have worked with may as well have been. There are some really shit programmers out there who learn a bunch of buzzwords, write a shitty GUI in Visual BASIC and convince dumb-ass HR n00bs that they are actually talented.
To debunk your bad analogy
What proportion of your time is spent reversing in your car? Of all the miles/kilometres you travel, what percentage?
I reverse at least twice a day: out of the driveway and into the road on the way to work. And then after work out of the car park and onto the road. Interesting. It's only a small percentage of distance but it is still a daily thing.
How about fog lights?
Less value, and I experience 'frequent' fog (about once a fortnight during winter) and I don't have fog lights. Why lug around the extra weight when you can either stop driving during fog or drive extra carefully with the regular lights.
Anyone carry a spare tyre in their car?
You'll find that it's mandated by law. I have used the spare several times in my many years of driving. In fact, without it I would have been stuck in the middle of nowhere at least twice at around midnight. Tyres are fragile things and are quite easy to blow out - hence the reason for the spare.
It's very easy to not be fragile with your source code. Be mindful of what you commit to the repository. '$SCM diff' before you commit is an excellent way to verify that you're not committing something that is totally stupid (your codes to arm all the nuclear weapons in the world, for example).
Aren't you reviewing your changes before you commit them anyway? I would have thought that with SVN/CVS where branching/merging are a PITA that you'd be working on trunk most of the time so changes would require proper review before they were committed anyway.
You are ugly and stupid,
Love from Linus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
All CACert does is verify that you have control of the domain name you're trying to get a certificate for before issuing a certificate
That's interesting. We have several paid-for certs at work and all they did was verify that we controlled the webmaster and root accounts and that the credit card was valid.
So, CACert is doing exactly what every other Cert authority does.
All that SSL proves is that the webserver you're talking to is really at foo.com. If you don't control the foo.com name you shouldn't be able to get the cert for it. If you put a man in the middle pretending to be foo.com then it will be detected.
Mine isn't, but it could be: http://www.soekris.com/
All the Linux-based ones (decidedly few, admittedly) I have seen use the same DNS proxy (dnsmasq). I guess it's just not perfectly stable but I haven't seen a reboot anymore than once every few months.
I gave up on mine and turned it into a dumb PPPoE bridge. An OpenBSD box at the border handles the dirty guff of PPP sessions and NAT. Now my connection is perfectly stable and the modem never needs to be rebooted. To top it all off I trust the BSD box and the firewall I created on it more than I trust the router to do it properly.
Well, the fact it could kill you means it's dangerous. To be dangerous isn't the same as to actually kill.
I _could_ kill you but that doesn't mean that I really want to, or will. Does that mean I am a danger to you?
However, the effect of radiation is cumulative, thus even moderate exposure to sunlight on a daily basis leads to increased risk of skin cancer
And from the article:
Dr. Sinervo said sunscreens have been used for years without adverse human health impacts, suggesting they are harmless to people while reducing the risks of skin cancer.
Now, we have an increasing rate of skin cancer and it worries the authorities. Is it perhaps that sun screen is the cause of skin cancer and that the sun is not as responsible as science would claim? Has anyone done that study?
I ask if they have any code that they are allowed to show me; I try and be specific about personal projects they've done and am pretty vocal about them not bringing in proprietary code.
A lot of potential candidates are just 'career programmers'; idiots who got a Uni degree then a programming job because someone said they'd earn good money. You can usually tell them because they're very eager to talk dollars (and usually far higher than market rate) at the first interview and they spin off a lot of current buzzwords completely out of context.
If you can't pick it at the interview they're usually also the ones who can't direct you to any code they have written outside of work. They claim NDA and all sorts of other things.
The great programmers will point you at websites, OSS projects or even email in a copy of the home automation controller they wrote for their own home with a note saying "It's mine, please respect that".
My advice to the OP is to work on a project in your own time that you can show the code to. It doesn't even have to be FOSS if you want to keep it close to your chest. Just find a task that you need done and that interests you and write some code to do it; even if it's only a few hundred lines of good code it's something you can show down the track.
I have a pet project that's been running for a few years (just for me, it's not public) and I've thrown in samples of code that I wrote from it. I also have a few image processing modules I wrote as part of my Ph.D research that I can demonstrate.
Check with your accounting department and ask them how long they, or the auditors, retain data, and how much of it they keep.
IIRC Tax laws require all records that involve 'your' taxation to be retained for 7 years just in case they decide to audit 'you' (and by 'you' I mean any person or entity who deals with the tax man). So, some of that retention is done by a legal requirement, even if that requirement is the case you might be audited in 6 years from now.
If you're getting headaches it's very likely that you have some kind of sight problem anyway. I used to work on all sorts of shitty screens until a year ago (30 years in the industry). I started getting eye strain and headaches as you describe.
It turns out that I (like many other people who don't realise it) am slightly long sighted. It's enough to make staring at something for a length of time uncomfortable and not enough to be noticed day to day while out and about.
Get your eyes checked first and foremost. Getting corrective glasses early can save a lot of need for them later.
Secondly, get a good screen. LCD or CRT but spend the dollars to get a good one. A good video card also makes a difference if you have an analog screen - the cheap-ass components in the output stages on cheap-ass cards to degenerate the signal.
When you've done all that you can play with colour schemes. My preference is for simple white text on black background. A few bright colours (orange, red, yellow, blue) to highlight certain things and I'm set to code for days without strain.
There is only one thing that Chuck Norris is afraid of. It's the Model-M!
There's not a lot that a 2 year old can't destroy! I feel they are more powerful than a nuclear war.
We held a little ceremony here before. Carlin was a truly great man. A voice against censorship and generally against rampant stupidity as well.
May his memory live long and someone crop up and continue on in his great tradition of telling the 'system' to go fuck itself.
Excepting for the fact that he would have called you a fucking moron for even suggesting that there is an "up there".
We already have far too many of these "stupid" people. They are everywhere. They have nothing better to do with their unemployment cheques than to spend the day drunk and in the sack, possibly reproducing!
And on a funny note, a Slashdot article where the members are all giving advice on what women want, and how to get women yet I don't think there's a single person who posted in this thread who has ever seen a real woman nekkid :p
And back on topic: It's almost impossible to get the boss not to spam. I used to work for a sales-oriented person and he didn't give a shit. Spam pissed him off but he was first to spam a million people when they thought they'd get some money.
If you run your own mail server just make sure you configure it to drop any emails destined to more than a few recipients and possibly also drop the recipient list into BCC if there are more than one listed. You won't stop him spamming if he wants to, but you might be able to limit the damage he can cause.
That said, I'd much rather see a PDF if sharing it with formatting is so damned important to the sender. At least I can read PDFs and see the same thing they saw. That is a problem with rich text formats and Word attachments.
The biggest problem with making something like HTML mail a feature is that suddenly every schmuck feels that they MUST use this shiny new feature and you get just that; a bunch of emails with Javascript signatures that fade in and rippling animated GIF backgrounds and the like. Aside from the fact that it's hard to read and annoying it's also more to download, and some data plans (particularly mobile) charge by the kilobyte.
In fact, using HTML and trying do to it magically makes it harder for users who don't get HTML mails to read or to copy/paste out a relevant section into something else.
*bold*
I think you need to get your facts straight. Email is text-only. There's no great need to lay it out and format it like a bloody well polished journal article. For what reason? For the 1% of users who don't use an HTML-capable email reader? No, because HTML email uses a lot more bandwidth, doesn't render the same in any two places, etc. Text only email truncated at around 72 chars per line is almost guaranteed to render the same no matter where the reader is. Personally I've never understood the reason for sending dual plain-text and HTML copies in the same email. It's just doubling the bandwidth for something that can be trivially "downgraded" on demand. The first smart thing you've said. Why bother sending the HTML at all? I don't want markup and image linking in emails. If your document needs to be formatted exactly in a certain way there are better ways to get it there.
Why does email need all of the insecurity that comes with including a HTML rendering engine in the bloody mail client? I have enough trouble with virus and spam emails. I don't need the further risk to my health with the client actually being vulnerable to all that shit!
I was very quick to drop the receipt headers in our mail server and forcing all outgoing mail to go through it.
There's not much you can do when they invoke these shitty tracking services though. It just becomes a cat and mouse game of shut one down and another pops up in its place or they find a workaround for your block.
It's all a DOS even if they try and hide the DOS with that fancy bitmap screen at startup.
*tongue out of cheek* I actually had a customer return a computer when I was working at a computer store years ago. She was insistent she paid for Windows95 and none of this DOS crap. Any text at all on the console (BIOS, "Starting Windows", etc) was interpreted by the customer as DOS and she wanted a refund.
Didn't you wonder why they all have those pretty manufacturer logos full screen now until the OS removes them and puts up its own screen?
And many users actually ask why I run DOS on my brand new quad-core beast. They are bewildered that someone would use "DOS"... something about the high resolution text console scares them.
I have a fairly large network here with a lot of varied machines on it and my router never crashes. Add one SP3 box and bam, down it goes. I think it's fairly safe to say that MS have done something dodgy in SP3.