There are tools which would achieve the same thing (my preference is LaTeX and SVN, but I live in a world where things fall off the back of a donkey cart, not a truck!). Word isn't the best tool for documents that have multiple authors. Its change tracking is plenty woeful! I imagine that in a legal setting you want to know who made what change and when if you ever need to check the history of a document. Word doesn't even do that in a robust way.
before sending something out to a customer that I've written in OO, I check it on a machine that has Word or Excel or Powerpoint (whatever is appropriate) to ensure the formatting remains the same.
Why bother? Just convert it to PDF or print it to postscript. OO can render to both on any platform other than Windows. For Windows you need to install a generic PS printer driver for PS support. If you're sending documents to customers they generally don't need edit support. PDF allows for markup support if you want them to add comments or fill in fields. There should be no need to give MS formatted documents to people.
Mouse gestures have been around for a long while - I first remember them as a plugin for Firefox, but I'm sure they are older than that. Why is it that it takes some big wanker company to say "look at me, look at my bright idea all you dumb media n00bs" to get something publicised.
That said, I make sure to disable gestures - who wants a slight movement of the mouse to cause a click, or worse. Mouse gestures are dumb.
Nice to see someone recommending OSS. We have timecontrol at work (non free) and it's poo, activeX, windows only and poo. I hve a Windows box on my machine purely for doing timesheets now (well and for Outlook, but exchange has a web interface that works in FF on Linux).
I just find the interface to TC to be slow, clunky and not worth using. The old system ran nicely using Java in any browser. It was still poo, but bearable if you only ever booked to one or 2 projects. It's hard to find projects/codes to book to. First you have to select the project and it drops back to the main screen. Then, you have to open the codes window and look at the codes for that project. If you selected the wrong project and can't find the code you want you have to drop back and select a new project. It could all just be one bloody big list!!!
It's nice to see the Windows tax on everything just for a piece of shit software that gives very little gain over a much simpler solution in most places.
-- Use and recommend free software!!!
Re:At least stick it out to the year mark...
on
Work Unhappy or Move On?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If the job isn't what you signed the contract for (ie the position dried up and they moved you into another position) the contract is null and void. You are within your rights to quit and not have to pay them back (yes, I consulted a lawyer about something very similar a while ago). I'd go and get a lawyer and pay the money for a consultation. A lot give you the first 30 mins free anyway.
If you're unhappy, it's causing you undue stress. You don't need that. IF you stick it out you'll become bitter and that will show up at other interviews. If the job is so bad and it causes you too much stress you might even wind up sick. You don't want that either. Get out and find something more enjoyable. Work shouldn't have to be a chore. If it's not fun you're in the wrong job.
Problem is that any schmuck (TM) goes out these days and calls themselves a "network engineer". They're usually people who have very little knowledge of networking at any level but managed to get their Windows XP box to see their X-Box on a wireless network at home (usually with WEP or no encryption and some kind of zeroconf IP address allocation so they didn't really do any work anyway).
I hear horror stories from a mate who is a systems engineer. He continually fights against some moronic Windows bloke (the PFY, of sorts) who insists on rewiring the network to be more like he has at home (often bypassing the perimeter security in the process). Of course, who gets the blame when it all goes to shit? The person with the formal qualifications because he should have seen it coming and put more protection against it into place.
People with actual skills, experience and understanding of networking are few and far between these days. I work as a software engineer, but get asked all sorts of "networking" questions. I'm not a network engineer but I understand the concepts of networking.
You'll be in stiff competition with a bunch of untrained morons when you go out there. The morons will talk themselves up and be willing to work for peanuts compared to what you'd expect to earn. That's not to say you won't get a job, but it will be harder to find a job that really keeps you interested.
You want the heat in the house, but in summer you want it out. The fridge is actually more efficient it its cooling already cool air - so at the end of the day its' better all round!
Well in my place the fridge is in a nice recess in the wall. It fits rather snugly and the recess opens into the ceiling space. Means there is nice cool air in behind the fridge in the winter so we're not spending all that time cooling down air we already heated!!!
That the (maf)*IAA would resort to illegal tactics to catch people acting "illegally"...
Hmns... I for one welcome our new Alien overlords (a frontal lobotomy and rectal probe would be less painful than having to deal with the *AAs of the world). Fuck the corporations!
"Buy one, get one free" could mean buy one and get it for free. It's all a matter of interpretation.
I have had good experience with Amazon and I don't even live in the US. I don't get the free shipping but they are certainly good about getting things right. I like the fact that they don't bill you until they ship and that they can ship in staggered lots if you like, so if they don't have everything you order you get some now and some later.
Mod parent up... What's really funny is that he was 19 and she was 13. The last girl I went out with seriously was almost exactly 6 years younger than me (I'm 28). Nobody even looked at us funny. I'm not defending the guy - but it seems as you get older small things like age really become insignificant.
I think a lot of the "glory" in stories like this comes from the think of the children nazzis who want to use the children to push their agenda on the unsuspecting public. I'm just glad the judge agreed that MySpace isn't liable; what would they do if the same guy just walked up to random 13 year olds on the street? Would the sue the council for providing streets?
Yup, I knew that. So libgaim gives gaim all the same power as Adium but gaim does suck compared to Adium; it's the reason I really stick with Mac over Linux or Windows;)
Not such a bad idea, at least then they won't reuse all of it for their music/pr0n collections.
I think the best software to start with is Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium (I know, Mac only, but it's OSS and could be ported and is a sweet IM client), OpenOffice, Gimp, VLC (or mplayer with a GUI). Just to name a few. A good OSS music player (xmms or something) would encourage more use, as kids seem to want their computers to do that these days. Whack on a couple of OSS games (TuxRacer comes to mind) and see how you go.
I think how long before places start locking down their PCs so you can't run programs from external storage anymore. I don't think it will be too long. I already do this with the small number of PCs I administer because it's easier than having people install all sorts of nasties on them.
I don't mean to sound negative, but at 5 employees there couldn't be too many issues to track, really?
Perhaps just implement a policy that says all requests for change/work/whatever must be formally made by email. Prefix it with [TASK] or something equally dumb and you have a nice way of filtering it into a folder.
It's nice to want to spend the time and implement a flexible, sizeable solution but think of the time to maintain it down the track. For 5 employees is it really worth it? We have about 20 people doing coding/testing (and a handful of other managerial types) on site and we have 1 full time person to manage the issue tracker and source control. That's pretty much all he does (and the occasional IT fill-in when the IT guys take leave).
I taught a second-year engineering class to program PICs in 4x2 hour sessions. Most of these students wouldn't have been able to work out basic digital logic or write hello world in C even though they had done the courses.
The PIC's assembly language is simple enough and with a bit of hand holding they were working out how to read and write from memory locations, and turn on pins at the outpus. Teach them to work out what they need (peripheral interfacing) from the data sheets and most of them actually became pretty fluent at writing simple programs.
Nearly all of the class got competent enough to build a simple storage scope using the in-built ADC and an r2r ladder connected to one of the 8-bit ports.
That depends on how it's organised. Many are book-format PDFs and a lot are HTML renderings of the book format. A lot of time it's not easy to navigate to right part of an electronic book. Keyword searches show you hundreds of false entries and the page numbers in the index/contents don't actually match the page numbers that the viewer thinks. They're always out by a bit. HTML books often don't get illustrations or equations right.
I also prefer to have the desk reference open rather than a document on the PC. On the PC it means you have to bring it up over the top of other things in an already overcrowded workspace (and I have 3 large screens on my desk).
As for downloding, from what I've seen it's a considerable amount of effort to get something that's worth watching. On what I earn an hour I'd rather spend the hour at work then go and buy a DVD anyway. Suits me fine; I vote with my wallet. Pay for what I like, don't pay for anything else (and don't care to see/hear/read it anyway).
The only DRM that works is having movies that are large enough, that most people won't want to spend the time downloading them. (i.e. 24gb HD-DVDs.)
This works for books, even though people can read them for free in electronic form or at the book store. The reason people buy books is that they're nicely bound and easy to hold, take with you, etc.
I don't get into downloading movies - got better things to do than chase my tail with all the garbage files, encrypted RAR files that ask you to go to installspyware.com with Internet explorer to get a password only to find out that the file has some 60 year old movie you never heard of and now your machine is part of a botnet (no, I dont' do it but i know people who do).
There is huge diversity in books. You can go to a book store and find lots of different books on lots of different themes. There are a selection of mainstream authors that publish the same junk over and over, then there are the lesser known authors who publish unique works. People actually pay for that stuff. Also, technical references are so much better in book-bound form. Electronic and printed/ringbound just don't cut it for quickly looking stuff up.
The only people you hear complaining about piracy of movies (and music) is the *AAs who really only care about the huge-ass big budget mainstream (that is mostly the same formula-based crap over and over). The best DRM is make movies that people really want to pay for.
Don't they install safety valves on pressure vessels as mandatory equipment to prevent... explosion. Aren't volcanoes nature's own pressure release valve?
...of the dog that bit you. In my case that's usually Coopers Pale or Sambucca. If the day at work previously was really shit then it could even be tequila.
*NOTE* I don't really drink that much every night. There are just some times at particular points in the project when you say fsck it and piss on of a worknight with mates to forget about it all.
I just tried a 3G modem with my PC in a major city. There was a 3G signal for the phone, but the signal into the 3G card was flakey - it went up and down in speed like a yo yo and went on and off continuously. Wasn't worth the money for the service.
It can't reduce ping times in the real world - ping is almost entirely a function of the network bus, not the network card.
Sure, it could do neat things with the queueing so that ICMP echo to get it to the wire earlier, but you can do that in the OS anyway.
The one killer function you need in a NIC (gig and above) is the ability to calculate and verify checksums so the OS doesn't have to. A huge buffer on the card so it can do big bursts of DMA instead of lots of smaller ones would help too.
Those things would make all real world apps more snappy 'cos the OS wouldn't have to be continually wasting time doing them - it could be busy shuffling data to/from disk and doing things an OS is supposed to do.
There's stacks of Skype alternatives too - it shouldn't be hard to find the one that suits your needs. Skype works OK. FreeWorldDialup has video AFIK. MSN messenger, yahoo, AIM all have webcam-based conferencing. It's not always on, but it's certainly very close to it.
We had an interesting system at the uni where I studied. There was a teletheatre with a PTZ camera. Each pair of seats had a microphone with a switch and when the mic was switched on the camera panned to point at that pair of seats. When no mic was on the camera just panned and zoomed out to see the whole room. Very useful when the lecturer was at the far end of the world and needed to see the person who was asking questions, no so useful in a mass group discussion like in an office.
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there are always alterations
There are tools which would achieve the same thing (my preference is LaTeX and SVN, but I live in a world where things fall off the back of a donkey cart, not a truck!). Word isn't the best tool for documents that have multiple authors. Its change tracking is plenty woeful! I imagine that in a legal setting you want to know who made what change and when if you ever need to check the history of a document. Word doesn't even do that in a robust way.
before sending something out to a customer that I've written in OO, I check it on a machine that has Word or Excel or Powerpoint (whatever is appropriate) to ensure the formatting remains the same.
Why bother? Just convert it to PDF or print it to postscript. OO can render to both on any platform other than Windows. For Windows you need to install a generic PS printer driver for PS support. If you're sending documents to customers they generally don't need edit support. PDF allows for markup support if you want them to add comments or fill in fields. There should be no need to give MS formatted documents to people.
Mouse gestures have been around for a long while - I first remember them as a plugin for Firefox, but I'm sure they are older than that. Why is it that it takes some big wanker company to say "look at me, look at my bright idea all you dumb media n00bs" to get something publicised.
That said, I make sure to disable gestures - who wants a slight movement of the mouse to cause a click, or worse. Mouse gestures are dumb.
Nice to see someone recommending OSS. We have timecontrol at work (non free) and it's poo, activeX, windows only and poo. I hve a Windows box on my machine purely for doing timesheets now (well and for Outlook, but exchange has a web interface that works in FF on Linux).
I just find the interface to TC to be slow, clunky and not worth using. The old system ran nicely using Java in any browser. It was still poo, but bearable if you only ever booked to one or 2 projects. It's hard to find projects/codes to book to. First you have to select the project and it drops back to the main screen. Then, you have to open the codes window and look at the codes for that project. If you selected the wrong project and can't find the code you want you have to drop back and select a new project. It could all just be one bloody big list!!!
It's nice to see the Windows tax on everything just for a piece of shit software that gives very little gain over a much simpler solution in most places.
--
Use and recommend free software!!!
If the job isn't what you signed the contract for (ie the position dried up and they moved you into another position) the contract is null and void. You are within your rights to quit and not have to pay them back (yes, I consulted a lawyer about something very similar a while ago). I'd go and get a lawyer and pay the money for a consultation. A lot give you the first 30 mins free anyway.
If you're unhappy, it's causing you undue stress. You don't need that. IF you stick it out you'll become bitter and that will show up at other interviews. If the job is so bad and it causes you too much stress you might even wind up sick. You don't want that either. Get out and find something more enjoyable. Work shouldn't have to be a chore. If it's not fun you're in the wrong job.
Problem is that any schmuck (TM) goes out these days and calls themselves a "network engineer". They're usually people who have very little knowledge of networking at any level but managed to get their Windows XP box to see their X-Box on a wireless network at home (usually with WEP or no encryption and some kind of zeroconf IP address allocation so they didn't really do any work anyway).
I hear horror stories from a mate who is a systems engineer. He continually fights against some moronic Windows bloke (the PFY, of sorts) who insists on rewiring the network to be more like he has at home (often bypassing the perimeter security in the process). Of course, who gets the blame when it all goes to shit? The person with the formal qualifications because he should have seen it coming and put more protection against it into place.
People with actual skills, experience and understanding of networking are few and far between these days. I work as a software engineer, but get asked all sorts of "networking" questions. I'm not a network engineer but I understand the concepts of networking.
You'll be in stiff competition with a bunch of untrained morons when you go out there. The morons will talk themselves up and be willing to work for peanuts compared to what you'd expect to earn. That's not to say you won't get a job, but it will be harder to find a job that really keeps you interested.
You want the heat in the house, but in summer you want it out. The fridge is actually more efficient it its cooling already cool air - so at the end of the day its' better all round!
Well in my place the fridge is in a nice recess in the wall. It fits rather snugly and the recess opens into the ceiling space. Means there is nice cool air in behind the fridge in the winter so we're not spending all that time cooling down air we already heated!!!
Sex? Who gets that? Porn looks better with all the lights off anyway...
That the (maf)*IAA would resort to illegal tactics to catch people acting "illegally"...
Hmns... I for one welcome our new Alien overlords (a frontal lobotomy and rectal probe would be less painful than having to deal with the *AAs of the world). Fuck the corporations!
"Buy one, get one free" could mean buy one and get it for free. It's all a matter of interpretation.
I have had good experience with Amazon and I don't even live in the US. I don't get the free shipping but they are certainly good about getting things right. I like the fact that they don't bill you until they ship and that they can ship in staggered lots if you like, so if they don't have everything you order you get some now and some later.
Mod parent up... What's really funny is that he was 19 and she was 13. The last girl I went out with seriously was almost exactly 6 years younger than me (I'm 28). Nobody even looked at us funny. I'm not defending the guy - but it seems as you get older small things like age really become insignificant.
I think a lot of the "glory" in stories like this comes from the think of the children nazzis who want to use the children to push their agenda on the unsuspecting public. I'm just glad the judge agreed that MySpace isn't liable; what would they do if the same guy just walked up to random 13 year olds on the street? Would the sue the council for providing streets?
Yup, I knew that. So libgaim gives gaim all the same power as Adium but gaim does suck compared to Adium; it's the reason I really stick with Mac over Linux or Windows ;)
Not such a bad idea, at least then they won't reuse all of it for their music/pr0n collections.
I think the best software to start with is Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium (I know, Mac only, but it's OSS and could be ported and is a sweet IM client), OpenOffice, Gimp, VLC (or mplayer with a GUI). Just to name a few. A good OSS music player (xmms or something) would encourage more use, as kids seem to want their computers to do that these days. Whack on a couple of OSS games (TuxRacer comes to mind) and see how you go.
I think how long before places start locking down their PCs so you can't run programs from external storage anymore. I don't think it will be too long. I already do this with the small number of PCs I administer because it's easier than having people install all sorts of nasties on them.
My memory is a little rusty (pun intended) but Rusty Russel did this with the Linux firewall code, did he not?
I don't mean to sound negative, but at 5 employees there couldn't be too many issues to track, really?
Perhaps just implement a policy that says all requests for change/work/whatever must be formally made by email. Prefix it with [TASK] or something equally dumb and you have a nice way of filtering it into a folder.
It's nice to want to spend the time and implement a flexible, sizeable solution but think of the time to maintain it down the track. For 5 employees is it really worth it? We have about 20 people doing coding/testing (and a handful of other managerial types) on site and we have 1 full time person to manage the issue tracker and source control. That's pretty much all he does (and the occasional IT fill-in when the IT guys take leave).
I taught a second-year engineering class to program PICs in 4x2 hour sessions. Most of these students wouldn't have been able to work out basic digital logic or write hello world in C even though they had done the courses.
The PIC's assembly language is simple enough and with a bit of hand holding they were working out how to read and write from memory locations, and turn on pins at the outpus. Teach them to work out what they need (peripheral interfacing) from the data sheets and most of them actually became pretty fluent at writing simple programs.
Nearly all of the class got competent enough to build a simple storage scope using the in-built ADC and an r2r ladder connected to one of the 8-bit ports.
That depends on how it's organised. Many are book-format PDFs and a lot are HTML renderings of the book format. A lot of time it's not easy to navigate to right part of an electronic book. Keyword searches show you hundreds of false entries and the page numbers in the index/contents don't actually match the page numbers that the viewer thinks. They're always out by a bit. HTML books often don't get illustrations or equations right.
I also prefer to have the desk reference open rather than a document on the PC. On the PC it means you have to bring it up over the top of other things in an already overcrowded workspace (and I have 3 large screens on my desk).
As for downloding, from what I've seen it's a considerable amount of effort to get something that's worth watching. On what I earn an hour I'd rather spend the hour at work then go and buy a DVD anyway. Suits me fine; I vote with my wallet. Pay for what I like, don't pay for anything else (and don't care to see/hear/read it anyway).
The only DRM that works is having movies that are large enough, that most people won't want to spend the time downloading them. (i.e. 24gb HD-DVDs.)
This works for books, even though people can read them for free in electronic form or at the book store. The reason people buy books is that they're nicely bound and easy to hold, take with you, etc.
I don't get into downloading movies - got better things to do than chase my tail with all the garbage files, encrypted RAR files that ask you to go to installspyware.com with Internet explorer to get a password only to find out that the file has some 60 year old movie you never heard of and now your machine is part of a botnet (no, I dont' do it but i know people who do).
There is huge diversity in books. You can go to a book store and find lots of different books on lots of different themes. There are a selection of mainstream authors that publish the same junk over and over, then there are the lesser known authors who publish unique works. People actually pay for that stuff. Also, technical references are so much better in book-bound form. Electronic and printed/ringbound just don't cut it for quickly looking stuff up.
The only people you hear complaining about piracy of movies (and music) is the *AAs who really only care about the huge-ass big budget mainstream (that is mostly the same formula-based crap over and over). The best DRM is make movies that people really want to pay for.
That can't be good [TM].
Don't they install safety valves on pressure vessels as mandatory equipment to prevent... explosion. Aren't volcanoes nature's own pressure release valve?
...of the dog that bit you. In my case that's usually Coopers Pale or Sambucca. If the day at work previously was really shit then it could even be tequila.
*NOTE* I don't really drink that much every night. There are just some times at particular points in the project when you say fsck it and piss on of a worknight with mates to forget about it all.
Tell that to dubya and he'll change the system in a heartbeat.. The war in Iraq failed to prove how big his is!
I just tried a 3G modem with my PC in a major city. There was a 3G signal for the phone, but the signal into the 3G card was flakey - it went up and down in speed like a yo yo and went on and off continuously. Wasn't worth the money for the service.
It can't reduce ping times in the real world - ping is almost entirely a function of the network bus, not the network card.
Sure, it could do neat things with the queueing so that ICMP echo to get it to the wire earlier, but you can do that in the OS anyway.
The one killer function you need in a NIC (gig and above) is the ability to calculate and verify checksums so the OS doesn't have to. A huge buffer on the card so it can do big bursts of DMA instead of lots of smaller ones would help too.
Those things would make all real world apps more snappy 'cos the OS wouldn't have to be continually wasting time doing them - it could be busy shuffling data to/from disk and doing things an OS is supposed to do.
There's stacks of Skype alternatives too - it shouldn't be hard to find the one that suits your needs. Skype works OK. FreeWorldDialup has video AFIK. MSN messenger, yahoo, AIM all have webcam-based conferencing. It's not always on, but it's certainly very close to it.
We had an interesting system at the uni where I studied. There was a teletheatre with a PTZ camera. Each pair of seats had a microphone with a switch and when the mic was switched on the camera panned to point at that pair of seats. When no mic was on the camera just panned and zoomed out to see the whole room. Very useful when the lecturer was at the far end of the world and needed to see the person who was asking questions, no so useful in a mass group discussion like in an office.