IT staff don't have to be technically minded anymore. I see it every day; dicks that say to themselves "I installed Windows once" (or worse, "I use Windows at home to write letters") apply for IT jobs. Their lack of real skill means they often ask for a salary figure that is... low. Of course they get the jobs.
Now, if you're after a client-side solution for Craplook, try SpamBayes. I have it at work (no thanks to senior management being invited to wine and dine with the Borg-team). It works OK if the user is willing to train it up a little. Seems in our outfit, most people are willing to use it and even happy to learn how to properly work it. It is also VERY accurate from what I have seen. I used to get thousands of spams, now I get one or two that doesn't get caught. It's also not very often that it mislassifies non-spam... probably one message a month that (I will admit) looks a bit spammy.
That would be nice. I love it when I watch Windows boxes on my network try and force themselves to be the master browser. What sucks is that I don't control those boxes and the people who do control them won't let me get in and hack the registry to lower their priority.
It becomes a PITA because every time some shit-box XP install comes up it forces an election, sometimes it wins, and the browse list disappears. It takes forever for the browse list to be repopulated with so many client machines on the network.
Good thing I don't use Windows file shares for anything!
It's interesting that this FIPS certification you speak of hasn't certified any OSS solutions. Funny, that! I don't trust that as far as I can throw it.
I'd go with the OSS solution any day. If you don't trust OSS you can grab the code, review it and compile it yourself to ensure that it is trustworthy. You can't do that with some black box certified by a government (read: NSA) funded agency that may or may not be certifying that their back-doors are functional! *adjusts tin-foil hat*
TrueCrypt works great. I haven't used it lately because I have nothing to hide from anyone and I couldn't afford the performance hit on my (now very dated) server.
Remember, encrypt everything if you're taking that route. The only thing that shouldn't be encrypted is the kernel and read-ony initrd images needed to boot and mount all the encrypted volumes. Most successful cryptographic attacks involve having some of the plaintext, and if anything gets dumped in unencrypted swap or temp space then they can retreive it even if you delete and wipe it!!!
Another vote for OpenVPN. Its flaws aside, it is the most reliable VPN software to use through a NAT device. I tried PPTP and IPSEC and both needed extensive configuration to make them even useable. OpenVPN was a matter of forwarding a single UDP port into the VPN server and it just works (TM).
Euphamisms: Managers are soft, girly people who don't like to hear bad news. Instead of telling each other bad news they sugar-coat it. The business is not broke. It is in a "temporary financial situation". Bob is not retarded; he is "developmentally challenged".
If you want a good read, get a copy of George Carlin's "When Will Jesus Pass The Pork Chops". It's not a religious book, but it takes a very intersting look at modern language, religion, and a few other things. It's a funny read, but also very serious.
I, personally, find this kind of speak offensive. It wastes my time. You invent a whole sentence to say what one word would have communicated effectively. You do all of this because you can't handle the cold hard truth and prefer it to be light and fluffy. What do you think? That by the time you're finished telling me that "due to company reallignment, you are not temporarily employment challenged" that I will have forgotten that I'm fired?
Buzzwords are the other type of management speak. Managers are not technical people. I do believe that in the exclusive manager club in the Bahamas there is a requirement for entry that says your technical IQ must be below 1. Managers read buzzwords in management magazines, and hear them at their exclusive manager clubs. It's usual that the buzzword is an inapt way of describing some piece of yesterday technology that some other manager is trying to sell by inventing a new name for it and convincing other managers they need it.
Of course, managers come back from their manager club in the Bahams and they quote these new words they've learned (as if to show off how smart they are that they can learn new words... 'adapt to new paradigms'?). They usually quote them out of context and in throwaway sentences, but insist that the company start implemnting these new things that they know nothing about.
I can think of an extreme case where I got a phone call (recently) from a colleague in another company. His manager had thrown a "technical" document for a device they were supposed to build. The document was actually 4 or 5 bullet points containing the latest marketing speak and buzzwords. In fact, one of the requirements was that the device must use "Socket something or other". Of course, something or other was the marketing name that Intel gave to one of their up-coming processor socket designs that nobody really knows about yet.
The people in this other group were perplexed, but apparantly the manager had picked up this buzzword at some manager club and decided that it was the next best thing and they had to have it, without even knowing what it was or did!
Anywho... my rant is over. Back to implenting a pardigm shift to better leverage the opportunity created by the incremental language enhancements promised by the senior managers.
The problem is not unpowered speakers. The RF from the phone can't impart enough power into the wiring to drive the speakers.
The problem is power amplifiers. You only need a small amount of RF to get on the low level signal lines and bam; it gets amplified. The thing with digital phones is that because they're a pulsed TDM signal there is energy (minimal) right down to DC which gets picked up, "demodulated" and amplified in your power amplifier.
The solution is keep your damned phone away from anything with a power amplifier in it. In fact, keep it away from CDRs, hard disks, credit cards, PDAs, etc. There is enough field strength to actually flip bits in flash memory and on hard disks when talking about GSM phones!!!
DECT isn't as secure as you may think. I never looked into it, but from what I've seen it's only designed to keep out casual snoopers, not someone with a small amount of computing power at their disposal.
Um nope. Am in the land down-under. Have a local outfit (www.internode.on.net) as my ISP. Runs rings around most everyone else.
And I know my ISP is putting my calls on the PSTN because I mostly make calls to PSTN numbers in my local calling area. Somewhere they have to end up on the Telstra network!
People have trusted their telephone lines for years.
It's easy for someone to listen in on your phone call. All they need to do is be in a position of trust between your handset and the other person's handset. You wouldn't even know they were there. Do you really trust all the line techs and the people who run the telecoms networks not to snoop on you?
Admittedly, it's not as easy to hijack a phone line unless you are in the same position of trust. VoIP makes stealing the connection a little easier. Software faults lead the way to security issues and the ability to break into VoIP servers or just do nasty things to the data on the wire.
I liken VoIP to having a cordless phone on your line. With the right equipment I can sniff a corless phone call and play back the parts of it that tell the base station the handset wants to make a phone call. DECT is a littler harder, but apparantly still doable. If you're still using a 30MHz FM cordless phone then the right equipment is available for tens of dollars at your local rat shack!
Phil Zimmermann recently released some encrypted VoIP software that solves the eavesdropping problem with a good level of security. I can imagine that phone companies and governments will soon be trying like shit to outlaw encrypted VoIP comms because it means all those wiretaps they are so fond of doing become useless.
I trust my VoIP provider, currently. I log into their SIP server which is at the other end of my DSL connection. They are also my ISP so I know my data never leaves their network except when it is put back on the PSTN. This also has advantages for downstream QoS (they implement it for their own SIP server) so I don't ever get dropouts.
Actually, I'd like to shake their hands. Receiving such a weak signal as a radio amateur proves that there is still a lot of life in the hobby. Kudos to the guys!!!
PS. The message said "All of your Voyager are belong to us"
Use OSS software and take out all the popup features.
That said, I don't have that problem except for the occasional webpage that forces a new browser window in a way that adblock, noscript and Firefox can't stop (don't ask, I don't know). Everything on my Linux box stays nicely hidden except when I need it!
First of all, the person in the original post CHOSE to work with a friend, but he didn't have to. So, you, as I am sure, would not pick to work with someone. Secondly, have you worked with someone who had a greater skill level than you? And did they act like it was a drag to educate you on, what they thought was the basics?
When I was learning I picked up what I could from the books I could grab from the library. When I got a bit more advanced and started to work with other coders most of them just threw books at me and told me to figure it out. I learned OK; it was better to have to figure it out myself even though it took longer I now have a better understanding of why things are done instead of just blindly repeating what some programmer told me way back when!
And thirdly, it is not know, from original post, whether the "newbie" is at the level where they don't know the basics. Considering that the person who posted is in grad school, and they are taking the same class, I would assume that the other person is also in grad school. So, the problem was the difference between the skill level, not i-am-working-for-google and you-are-just-picking-up-java-for-dummies-book...
There is a huge difference in skill levels in school. I went through with people whould wouldn't know a compiler from their kitchen toaster, and most of them were computer science grads. They don't know because they're never taught. They're given teaching material that says "enter this program, save it as example1.c, compile it with this command line" and they never learn to understand what's going on because they never do any work.
I'm sorry, but the tough love way is the best way for any person to learn because they have to actually pick up the problem and think about solving it instead of just blindly repeating the answers that others are telling them. Guidance is needed, but none of this hand holding that people have come to expect. If that makes me a jackass then so be it, but at least I can sit comfortable that the people who come to me for assistance are learning something rather than just being given an easy fix.
Catch a man a fish; feed him for a day
Teach a man to fish; feed him for a lifetime.
Well you can imply that if you want. It is also my experience that people who resort to name calling generally have no good foundation for a counter-argument and just want to have a say.
Now, where did I say I was a jackarse? I pointed out the fact that working with new coders is painful because they spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel instead of picking up a good reference and seeing if the wheel already exists. That means that I have to educate them on the fact that there is already a wheel and there's no point making your own.
Want to argue that having to do that ad-nauseum isn't painful then feel free to come up with a well constructed argument.
Want to (by implication) call me another offensive name? Don't bother!
Writing code with someone who is majorly less skilled than you is a real drag. They tend to want to reinvent the wheel for every common programming problem instead of pulling in standard libraries. They do this for even the most simple programming constructs (like isalpha(), isnum(), etc).
That unwillingness to reuse becomes painful becase you can see the project isn't getting anywhere. Meanwhile your partner has written hundreds of lines of code to solve menial problems that libc.a or libm.a already could have solved and not actually touched on the real problem you have to solve. Of course, they think they're making splendid progress because of all this code they've written.
A lot of the unwillingness to reuse comes from being scared of something they can't see the innards to. I often heard "but the document's don't describe $OBSCURE_CASE, I'd better write my own version that handles that case too" even though they could have just tested for $OBSCURE_CASE before the function call if they thought that it might occur.
Anyway. Good luck on your project, and try as best you can to get your partner to actually work on your project, instead of reinventing the wheel. Sit down and plan the whole thing out. Break it up into manageable chunks and agree how the chunks will talk. Hand out the chunks and start coding. Keep an eye on your partner and if you see them going off on a tangent pull them back into line and show them simeple ways to do things.
..that I have been saying for a while that software sucks. Most Windows software requires local admin rights to get anything done these days. So many wankers keep correcting me and saying "we run a large enterprise site and we don't need to give our users any admin rights".
What they neglect to say is that they also don't give their users anymore than a basic suite of apps like Office and a web browser. When the user needs more (specialised software) there is usually an uphill battle against some anal retentive Windows admin (who should have stayed in his parents basement) and the staff who need some software that needs local admin. Usually the BOFH wins and the staff are left going without, again.
Fortunately where I work they have realised this and we can pretty much do whatever we want. The admin understands that most users are savvy enough to not bollocks things, and most of the time things don't get bollocksed. I think I work for a bunch of wierdos though because they're the only place who will actually give me local admin on my box.
Also, fortunately for me, I admin a Unix server so the joys of Winbites don't come up to haunt me too often... yay!
I think that you should explain to your boss that giving users of moderate computing skill domain-level admin privs is just asking for trouble if a worm or virus makes its way into your network. Just explain that if they don't have admin rights then the damage is localised to their files on their pc. IF they have admin rights the damage can potentially spread to every PC in the enterprise VERY easily!
Get onto the software company and cancel the cheque/credit card payment. You wouldn't pay for a car that required you to leave your garage unlocked 100% of the time. Why pay for their shit software? For a "large" operation, they certainly sound like a two-bit shit box of a company!
I don't get motion sickness at all. I am fine in cars, boats, planes, showground rides, etc. Not a problem.
A few minutes in front of any FPS and I'm experiencing the same symptoms. I've worked out why. It's the shit way they manage the perspective in the game. Things don't move like they should in the distance and really close up. I haven't seen a game that I can play for more than 1/2 hour or so...
You probably won't be able to play any FPS at all.
I work in a company that builds these things all day... there are cameras and microphones everywhere but there are also signs to that effect. Everything I do is recorded, and archived!
I would just politely ask the person who authorised the cameras (the boss?) why they think they need them and what they hope to achieve. They will come up with some crap excuse (they always do) that is based on some uninformed thing they read in some boss magazine.
Just push the issue politely until you demonstrate to them that spying on employees only demotivates them. If employees don't feel trusted then they won't be productive.
They do it to "stop" employees doing personal things on company time. The problem is that company time is the only time that other companies are open! Also, doing a few personal things over the day is a welcome break and refreshing. I work better when I can just do what I want; I get a lot more, better lines of code written with the freedom than I do with the authoritarian "thou shalt not..." directives.
Management here went through a phase of starting "thou shalt not.." and it was soon dropped when they realised that if they don't question what you are doing and only question the amount/quality of the end work they get better results.
Anywho, just point out to management the negatives of covert spying on employees and they might see the point. It's more likely given that they think they are "elite" that they will just ignore the employees as being dumb!
Others are skeptical saying that many new technologies, such as the printing press, bar-codes, and several others, have also created fears about the beginning of the end.
Barcodes and print can be covered. Credit cards and magnetic stripes have to be practically inserted into the machine to read em.... the field strength is too weak otherwise. If you keep em in your wallet your are safe.
All of the other technolgies that might be used to track your actions require you to willingly and deliberately use them. You don't have to use plastic to pay for purchasses is one example. Use cash.
With RFID tags, they can be read from within metres of you so anyone just passing by you on the street can access all of the tags on you if they like. Anyone outside your house can read all of the RFID tags on your household equipment, books, porno, etc and figure out a bit about you completely without your knowledge.
RFID is this technology that nobody really cares about except the people who would want to misuse it and the tinfoil hat brigade. Problem is that the tinfoil hat brigade will be made out to look like crackpots by the people who seek to abuse the technology.
Furthering my previous post, the FastTrace incorporates a lot of the video-security features you'd expect from a proper security system and includes hard-disk based recording of video.
There is no "sound barrier" no one sweet spot and no cancelling out everything else. If you think headphones are tiring you haven't spent enough on them. A few hundred dollars will get you the equivalent in headphones as $10k worth of speakers (and that's ignoring powering them). Spend a grand on headphones and you start getting up into the golden ear brigade in terms of sound quality.
Of course, for most of the slashdot crowd who would order their headphones from headphones.com you will always get ones that get tiring. Go to a good store and try them on. Spend an hour listening if they let you. The good stores will encourage that. If you feel ear fatigue any time within the hour, stop, take a break and try on another pair until you find a set that suits you.
You wouldn't rush spending money on your speakers; you'd listen to a whole bunch in a whole load of stores. Why are headphones any different?
On an aside, I have a panasonic DVD player that can encode 5.1 down to 2 channels for headphone listening. It does an amazing job of virtualising the surround signal. It sounds no different to listening on the 5.1 system I have and it doesn't bother the neighbours half as much.
I'm a hobbyist. I don't have a lot of spare dollars to spend on software to do this. For what I do the free version of Eagle works a treat. I don't really like its interface, but for the price it can't be beat.
I managed to get a trial version of protel99 working reasonably under Wine at one stage. It wasn't perfect, but it did enough for the simple things I do. You could try that and "upgrade" your license. Not entirely legal though.
The beauty of the trial version of protel (and modern Wine versions) is you can install it for 30 days, trash the separated Wien config you had for it, and reinstall the demo for another 30 days. If you don't do too much work that might be a reasonable comprimise (again, not sure of the legality of that).
I whole-heartedly recommend spending the $$$ on Eagle if you want to do more than the free version allowed.
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IT staff don't have to be technically minded anymore. I see it every day; dicks that say to themselves "I installed Windows once" (or worse, "I use Windows at home to write letters") apply for IT jobs. Their lack of real skill means they often ask for a salary figure that is... low. Of course they get the jobs.
Now, if you're after a client-side solution for Craplook, try SpamBayes. I have it at work (no thanks to senior management being invited to wine and dine with the Borg-team). It works OK if the user is willing to train it up a little. Seems in our outfit, most people are willing to use it and even happy to learn how to properly work it. It is also VERY accurate from what I have seen. I used to get thousands of spams, now I get one or two that doesn't get caught. It's also not very often that it mislassifies non-spam... probably one message a month that (I will admit) looks a bit spammy.
That would be nice. I love it when I watch Windows boxes on my network try and force themselves to be the master browser. What sucks is that I don't control those boxes and the people who do control them won't let me get in and hack the registry to lower their priority.
It becomes a PITA because every time some shit-box XP install comes up it forces an election, sometimes it wins, and the browse list disappears. It takes forever for the browse list to be repopulated with so many client machines on the network.
Good thing I don't use Windows file shares for anything!
It's interesting that this FIPS certification you speak of hasn't certified any OSS solutions. Funny, that! I don't trust that as far as I can throw it.
I'd go with the OSS solution any day. If you don't trust OSS you can grab the code, review it and compile it yourself to ensure that it is trustworthy. You can't do that with some black box certified by a government (read: NSA) funded agency that may or may not be certifying that their back-doors are functional! *adjusts tin-foil hat*
TrueCrypt works great. I haven't used it lately because I have nothing to hide from anyone and I couldn't afford the performance hit on my (now very dated) server.
Remember, encrypt everything if you're taking that route. The only thing that shouldn't be encrypted is the kernel and read-ony initrd images needed to boot and mount all the encrypted volumes. Most successful cryptographic attacks involve having some of the plaintext, and if anything gets dumped in unencrypted swap or temp space then they can retreive it even if you delete and wipe it!!!
Another vote for OpenVPN. Its flaws aside, it is the most reliable VPN software to use through a NAT device. I tried PPTP and IPSEC and both needed extensive configuration to make them even useable. OpenVPN was a matter of forwarding a single UDP port into the VPN server and it just works (TM).
There are two main parts of management-speak.
Euphamisms: Managers are soft, girly people who don't like to hear bad news. Instead of telling each other bad news they sugar-coat it. The business is not broke. It is in a "temporary financial situation". Bob is not retarded; he is "developmentally challenged".
If you want a good read, get a copy of George Carlin's "When Will Jesus Pass The Pork Chops". It's not a religious book, but it takes a very intersting look at modern language, religion, and a few other things. It's a funny read, but also very serious.
I, personally, find this kind of speak offensive. It wastes my time. You invent a whole sentence to say what one word would have communicated effectively. You do all of this because you can't handle the cold hard truth and prefer it to be light and fluffy. What do you think? That by the time you're finished telling me that "due to company reallignment, you are not temporarily employment challenged" that I will have forgotten that I'm fired?
Buzzwords are the other type of management speak. Managers are not technical people. I do believe that in the exclusive manager club in the Bahamas there is a requirement for entry that says your technical IQ must be below 1. Managers read buzzwords in management magazines, and hear them at their exclusive manager clubs. It's usual that the buzzword is an inapt way of describing some piece of yesterday technology that some other manager is trying to sell by inventing a new name for it and convincing other managers they need it.
Of course, managers come back from their manager club in the Bahams and they quote these new words they've learned (as if to show off how smart they are that they can learn new words... 'adapt to new paradigms'?). They usually quote them out of context and in throwaway sentences, but insist that the company start implemnting these new things that they know nothing about.
I can think of an extreme case where I got a phone call (recently) from a colleague in another company. His manager had thrown a "technical" document for a device they were supposed to build. The document was actually 4 or 5 bullet points containing the latest marketing speak and buzzwords. In fact, one of the requirements was that the device must use "Socket something or other". Of course, something or other was the marketing name that Intel gave to one of their up-coming processor socket designs that nobody really knows about yet.
The people in this other group were perplexed, but apparantly the manager had picked up this buzzword at some manager club and decided that it was the next best thing and they had to have it, without even knowing what it was or did!
Anywho... my rant is over. Back to implenting a pardigm shift to better leverage the opportunity created by the incremental language enhancements promised by the senior managers.
That was the best Futurama quote, ever!
The problem is not unpowered speakers. The RF from the phone can't impart enough power into the wiring to drive the speakers.
The problem is power amplifiers. You only need a small amount of RF to get on the low level signal lines and bam; it gets amplified. The thing with digital phones is that because they're a pulsed TDM signal there is energy (minimal) right down to DC which gets picked up, "demodulated" and amplified in your power amplifier.
The solution is keep your damned phone away from anything with a power amplifier in it. In fact, keep it away from CDRs, hard disks, credit cards, PDAs, etc. There is enough field strength to actually flip bits in flash memory and on hard disks when talking about GSM phones!!!
DECT isn't as secure as you may think. I never looked into it, but from what I've seen it's only designed to keep out casual snoopers, not someone with a small amount of computing power at their disposal.
Um nope. Am in the land down-under. Have a local outfit (www.internode.on.net) as my ISP. Runs rings around most everyone else.
And I know my ISP is putting my calls on the PSTN because I mostly make calls to PSTN numbers in my local calling area. Somewhere they have to end up on the Telstra network!
People have trusted their telephone lines for years.
It's easy for someone to listen in on your phone call. All they need to do is be in a position of trust between your handset and the other person's handset. You wouldn't even know they were there. Do you really trust all the line techs and the people who run the telecoms networks not to snoop on you?
Admittedly, it's not as easy to hijack a phone line unless you are in the same position of trust. VoIP makes stealing the connection a little easier. Software faults lead the way to security issues and the ability to break into VoIP servers or just do nasty things to the data on the wire.
I liken VoIP to having a cordless phone on your line. With the right equipment I can sniff a corless phone call and play back the parts of it that tell the base station the handset wants to make a phone call. DECT is a littler harder, but apparantly still doable. If you're still using a 30MHz FM cordless phone then the right equipment is available for tens of dollars at your local rat shack!
Phil Zimmermann recently released some encrypted VoIP software that solves the eavesdropping problem with a good level of security. I can imagine that phone companies and governments will soon be trying like shit to outlaw encrypted VoIP comms because it means all those wiretaps they are so fond of doing become useless.
I trust my VoIP provider, currently. I log into their SIP server which is at the other end of my DSL connection. They are also my ISP so I know my data never leaves their network except when it is put back on the PSTN. This also has advantages for downstream QoS (they implement it for their own SIP server) so I don't ever get dropouts.
Welcome our new Evil US overlords.
Actually, I'd like to shake their hands. Receiving such a weak signal as a radio amateur proves that there is still a lot of life in the hobby. Kudos to the guys!!!
PS. The message said "All of your Voyager are belong to us"
Damn flashblock is the ticket! Thanks!
Use OSS software and take out all the popup features.
That said, I don't have that problem except for the occasional webpage that forces a new browser window in a way that adblock, noscript and Firefox can't stop (don't ask, I don't know). Everything on my Linux box stays nicely hidden except when I need it!
First of all, the person in the original post CHOSE to work with a friend, but he didn't have to. So, you, as I am sure, would not pick to work with someone. Secondly, have you worked with someone who had a greater skill level than you? And did they act like it was a drag to educate you on, what they thought was the basics?
When I was learning I picked up what I could from the books I could grab from the library. When I got a bit more advanced and started to work with other coders most of them just threw books at me and told me to figure it out. I learned OK; it was better to have to figure it out myself even though it took longer I now have a better understanding of why things are done instead of just blindly repeating what some programmer told me way back when!
And thirdly, it is not know, from original post, whether the "newbie" is at the level where they don't know the basics. Considering that the person who posted is in grad school, and they are taking the same class, I would assume that the other person is also in grad school. So, the problem was the difference between the skill level, not i-am-working-for-google and you-are-just-picking-up-java-for-dummies-book ...
There is a huge difference in skill levels in school. I went through with people whould wouldn't know a compiler from their kitchen toaster, and most of them were computer science grads. They don't know because they're never taught. They're given teaching material that says "enter this program, save it as example1.c, compile it with this command line" and they never learn to understand what's going on because they never do any work.
I'm sorry, but the tough love way is the best way for any person to learn because they have to actually pick up the problem and think about solving it instead of just blindly repeating the answers that others are telling them. Guidance is needed, but none of this hand holding that people have come to expect. If that makes me a jackass then so be it, but at least I can sit comfortable that the people who come to me for assistance are learning something rather than just being given an easy fix.
Catch a man a fish; feed him for a day
Teach a man to fish; feed him for a lifetime.
Well you can imply that if you want. It is also my experience that people who resort to name calling generally have no good foundation for a counter-argument and just want to have a say.
Now, where did I say I was a jackarse? I pointed out the fact that working with new coders is painful because they spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel instead of picking up a good reference and seeing if the wheel already exists. That means that I have to educate them on the fact that there is already a wheel and there's no point making your own.
Want to argue that having to do that ad-nauseum isn't painful then feel free to come up with a well constructed argument.
Want to (by implication) call me another offensive name? Don't bother!
Writing code with someone who is majorly less skilled than you is a real drag. They tend to want to reinvent the wheel for every common programming problem instead of pulling in standard libraries. They do this for even the most simple programming constructs (like isalpha(), isnum(), etc).
That unwillingness to reuse becomes painful becase you can see the project isn't getting anywhere. Meanwhile your partner has written hundreds of lines of code to solve menial problems that libc.a or libm.a already could have solved and not actually touched on the real problem you have to solve. Of course, they think they're making splendid progress because of all this code they've written.
A lot of the unwillingness to reuse comes from being scared of something they can't see the innards to. I often heard "but the document's don't describe $OBSCURE_CASE, I'd better write my own version that handles that case too" even though they could have just tested for $OBSCURE_CASE before the function call if they thought that it might occur.
Anyway. Good luck on your project, and try as best you can to get your partner to actually work on your project, instead of reinventing the wheel. Sit down and plan the whole thing out. Break it up into manageable chunks and agree how the chunks will talk. Hand out the chunks and start coding. Keep an eye on your partner and if you see them going off on a tangent pull them back into line and show them simeple ways to do things.
..that I have been saying for a while that software sucks. Most Windows software requires local admin rights to get anything done these days. So many wankers keep correcting me and saying "we run a large enterprise site and we don't need to give our users any admin rights".
What they neglect to say is that they also don't give their users anymore than a basic suite of apps like Office and a web browser. When the user needs more (specialised software) there is usually an uphill battle against some anal retentive Windows admin (who should have stayed in his parents basement) and the staff who need some software that needs local admin. Usually the BOFH wins and the staff are left going without, again.
Fortunately where I work they have realised this and we can pretty much do whatever we want. The admin understands that most users are savvy enough to not bollocks things, and most of the time things don't get bollocksed. I think I work for a bunch of wierdos though because they're the only place who will actually give me local admin on my box.
Also, fortunately for me, I admin a Unix server so the joys of Winbites don't come up to haunt me too often... yay!
I think that you should explain to your boss that giving users of moderate computing skill domain-level admin privs is just asking for trouble if a worm or virus makes its way into your network. Just explain that if they don't have admin rights then the damage is localised to their files on their pc. IF they have admin rights the damage can potentially spread to every PC in the enterprise VERY easily!
Get onto the software company and cancel the cheque/credit card payment. You wouldn't pay for a car that required you to leave your garage unlocked 100% of the time. Why pay for their shit software? For a "large" operation, they certainly sound like a two-bit shit box of a company!
I don't get motion sickness at all. I am fine in cars, boats, planes, showground rides, etc. Not a problem.
A few minutes in front of any FPS and I'm experiencing the same symptoms. I've worked out why. It's the shit way they manage the perspective in the game. Things don't move like they should in the distance and really close up. I haven't seen a game that I can play for more than 1/2 hour or so...
You probably won't be able to play any FPS at all.
I work in a company that builds these things all day... there are cameras and microphones everywhere but there are also signs to that effect. Everything I do is recorded, and archived!
I would just politely ask the person who authorised the cameras (the boss?) why they think they need them and what they hope to achieve. They will come up with some crap excuse (they always do) that is based on some uninformed thing they read in some boss magazine.
Just push the issue politely until you demonstrate to them that spying on employees only demotivates them. If employees don't feel trusted then they won't be productive.
They do it to "stop" employees doing personal things on company time. The problem is that company time is the only time that other companies are open! Also, doing a few personal things over the day is a welcome break and refreshing. I work better when I can just do what I want; I get a lot more, better lines of code written with the freedom than I do with the authoritarian "thou shalt not..." directives.
Management here went through a phase of starting "thou shalt not.." and it was soon dropped when they realised that if they don't question what you are doing and only question the amount/quality of the end work they get better results.
Anywho, just point out to management the negatives of covert spying on employees and they might see the point. It's more likely given that they think they are "elite" that they will just ignore the employees as being dumb!
Others are skeptical saying that many new technologies, such as the printing press, bar-codes, and several others, have also created fears about the beginning of the end.
Barcodes and print can be covered. Credit cards and magnetic stripes have to be practically inserted into the machine to read em.... the field strength is too weak otherwise. If you keep em in your wallet your are safe.
All of the other technolgies that might be used to track your actions require you to willingly and deliberately use them. You don't have to use plastic to pay for purchasses is one example. Use cash.
With RFID tags, they can be read from within metres of you so anyone just passing by you on the street can access all of the tags on you if they like. Anyone outside your house can read all of the RFID tags on your household equipment, books, porno, etc and figure out a bit about you completely without your knowledge.
RFID is this technology that nobody really cares about except the people who would want to misuse it and the tinfoil hat brigade. Problem is that the tinfoil hat brigade will be made out to look like crackpots by the people who seek to abuse the technology.
Furthering my previous post, the FastTrace incorporates a lot of the video-security features you'd expect from a proper security system and includes hard-disk based recording of video.
http://www.adpro.com.au/
Nonfuckingsense!
There is no "sound barrier" no one sweet spot and no cancelling out everything else. If you think headphones are tiring you haven't spent enough on them. A few hundred dollars will get you the equivalent in headphones as $10k worth of speakers (and that's ignoring powering them). Spend a grand on headphones and you start getting up into the golden ear brigade in terms of sound quality.
Of course, for most of the slashdot crowd who would order their headphones from headphones.com you will always get ones that get tiring. Go to a good store and try them on. Spend an hour listening if they let you. The good stores will encourage that. If you feel ear fatigue any time within the hour, stop, take a break and try on another pair until you find a set that suits you.
You wouldn't rush spending money on your speakers; you'd listen to a whole bunch in a whole load of stores. Why are headphones any different?
On an aside, I have a panasonic DVD player that can encode 5.1 down to 2 channels for headphone listening. It does an amazing job of virtualising the surround signal. It sounds no different to listening on the 5.1 system I have and it doesn't bother the neighbours half as much.
I'm a hobbyist. I don't have a lot of spare dollars to spend on software to do this. For what I do the free version of Eagle works a treat. I don't really like its interface, but for the price it can't be beat.
I managed to get a trial version of protel99 working reasonably under Wine at one stage. It wasn't perfect, but it did enough for the simple things I do. You could try that and "upgrade" your license. Not entirely legal though.
The beauty of the trial version of protel (and modern Wine versions) is you can install it for 30 days, trash the separated Wien config you had for it, and reinstall the demo for another 30 days. If you don't do too much work that might be a reasonable comprimise (again, not sure of the legality of that).
I whole-heartedly recommend spending the $$$ on Eagle if you want to do more than the free version allowed.