This client is not keen on having executables increase in size by 125% (e.g. from 500k to 1125k). We have warned them that this will result in a program that is hard to maintain as the tools become superannuated, and they have agreed that if issues develop, they will cover our costs of rebuilding on a more modern platform to get assistance from MS, but that they will then want the fix back-propagated. It is something to do with the size of their distribution media, I believe. While CD-ROM has been pretty much superseded by DVD-ROM, there doesn't seem to be a lot on the pipeline larger than 4.7GB.
No, they use SLM, which IMHO is only slightly better than VSS, and which seems, according to MS devs, to have as its sole advantage over VSS that it is CLI only and does not suffer the slowdowns of the visual windowed interface.
Not to say I am a rabid VSS supporter; I have considered switching. As with any system, of course, there is the cost of switching -- how much does it cost to import ten plus years of VSS data? If it could be done, I'd definitely be interested in switching to something better supported (read: FOSS)...
I won't argue about VSS' flakiness, but I will say that so far it has not failed us when we needed to revert. The flakiness starts when you want to do something less than straight-arrow, like split a project, and there a lot of the flakiness actually comes from the integration with the other VS tools. In my experience. Your mileage may vary.
We've found that going with the Latest and Greatest causes a lot of grief: M$ has elected to change a lot of the way version control works with their 2010 update to VSS, for instance, and as we still have clients who insist on the more compact executables produced by Visual Studio 6 (11 years old now), we cannot upgrade any further than VS2008. On my current build machine, for instance, I have every VS version between VS6 and VS2008, and I use every one of them for building some part of some product.
That said, some form of version control is critical. All it takes is one fumble-fingered tech erasing a project (which is what spurred our installation of a source control system) or one showstopper bug introduced into the shipping product with no record of how it got there, and you quickly learn the value of having backed-up old source versions.
Your shop shows all the hallmarks of the single-developer shop that grew without direction, as they all do initially. I'd strongly suggest that it would be in your interests to try and get at least minimal tools together... and to update to a recent Java before you start losing sales because of an outdated and now unsupported platform.
Ah, but the BB gun will not stop the interference unless you somehow manage to short out the bulb and pop the breaker. Instead you'll get a free-air arc...
It's much more likely to tell the tale if you ask the neighbor.
An associate of mine reported the same issue. In his case it was a failed security lamp that was trying to come on at sunset and failing; it was only when the ballast gave up after an hour and a half that his wifi -- and his AM radio -- came back. Note that many security lights are sodium arc or mercury vapor arc; not much is as hard on RF in general as a big fat arc.
One point that is made is that you don't need a lot of power on the control shaft. Well, frankly, I don't see that... it looks to me as though, in a load situation, the power to turn the planetary gear and thus the output shaft would have to come equally from the sun gear and the ring gear.
Looking at the video, I see there is an anchor plate for the drive motor on the left, which uses an eccentric post to drive something on a second plate; that something results in the two shafts that go through empty space to the third, output plate. We never got much of a look at what was on the second plate. If this is going to have any chance at working, there would have to be some sort of dynamic load balance on that second plate.
The proof, not seen in this video, would be to decouple the drive motor from the control shaft, which would theoretically stop the control shaft from moving and put the thing in full speed forwards. Then load the output by trying to stop it. If the control shaft starts spinning, you don't have a useful product.
Don't know. Apparently yes - I'm on FF and Win ATM. It put up the usual warning box, I alt-F4'ed, it started putting up the usual "Scanning progress" window, I alt-F4'ed again before it completed page load.
I suspect that if I had hit any of the handy close boxes within the window that it would have installed; FF unfortunately accepts click on page-defined button, generally, as permission.
Yeah, abuse me... just because I use FF on Linux to be safe, I assume everyone else does too. Yeah, any browser on any Linux distro will be safe, as will any browser on Windows with scripting disabled (good luck with that if you insist on using MSIE), and any OSX-based system... though it'll still hammer your browser on any OS if you have scripting enabled.
The site has paid ads, one of which apparently has been taken over by the XPAntiVirus people. If you visit the site, it will install malware, unless you are using Firefox and Linux.
The function of a manager is to manage, not micro-manage.
There will be times that questions arise that need management input. Not often, but sometimes. When those arise, it is extremely irritating to have no manager present. However, that does not mean hovering over the developers' shoulders and adding to the pressure. Arrange pizza, yes. But apart from that, stay resolutely in the background, available to answer questions, but leaving the devs to their own devices.
I'd actually refer back to Robert Heinlein on this one. In Starship Troopers (the novel, not the wretched film) Lt. Rico, just after he gets his pips, is told by his CO that his wandering through the crew quarters is simply putting his men on edge. He should go back to his quarters, and when it was time to act, his sergeant would have his men ready for action.
I'd suggest that you do likewise, even to the extent of perhaps taking on some small, tedious task to take it off the plate of some dev, and keep yourself busy while you wait for the questions.
As many others have pointed out, the new printer comes with "starter cartridges" which contain less ink; in the case of a donated Dell inkjet I recently reluctantly accepted for the school where I work part time, the starter cartridge contains 5ml, instead of 25ml of ink. So for your $81 you would have bought possibly five times as many pages as you bought with your new printer.
That said: you are, in fact, causing significant grief to the companies making these printers by discarding rather than reloading. The company has adopted the Gillette marketing model: give away the razor, overprice the blades. It is almost certain that the printer costs more than $50 to make, so if you toss the printer you are hitting them in the bottom line.
On the gripping hand, the ecological costs of discarding the printer and buying new are significant. How much petroleum did it take to make the plastic that you would be dumping in the landfill, and transporting it to you?
The only truly sound way to approach this, once you have one of these printers on your desk, is to buy a single round of replacement cartridges and a refill kit. (The starter cartridges may have something in them that prevents them from being filled above the starter levels. To get full life out of a refilled cartridge you may have to start with a proper cartridge.) This not only prevents the printer hitting the landfill, but removes you as a source of ink-cartridge revenue from the printer manufacturer.
Way I see it, I'll take the pager and be on call, but the rule is, as I am a contractor, you pay standard-with-full-access rates, minimum 2-hour callout, every time that sucker goes off outside times I'm at the office. (You're paying already when I am at the office.) I bump my standard rates a bit to cover the possibility of interruption, if you want me to be available at any time. If I were an employee, any time that sucker goes off outside office hours, local labor laws say you have to pay me overtime, and a minimum of four hours if I get called into the office. I'd be willing to drop that to a minimum two hours of double time, from four of time and a half.
The fireman idea is flawed, because it is, in fact, not an on-call situation. You are paid for the time that you are on call, but you are actually in the fire hall while you are on call. Your shift ends, you close the door behind you, and nominally you are done. You don't have to worry about being waked up for an emergency call out, when you're off duty. It's much closer to the situation of a volunteer firefighter, who is on call 24/7 because there is nobody else and who is doing it basically out of altruism. Because of its volunteer nature, that doesn't apply either; you're not volunteering at your job.
Courts have said that they can fire you without recourse and rescind any bonuses if they hired you based on a bogus resume. And that has happened repeatedly. If they find out, you may never work again; at least not in that field. Not worth the risk.
Look at it this way: If you lie on your resume, the company is within its rights to fire you as soon as they find out, without notice and without recourse on your side, even if you are doing an excellent job, and the courts have said that the company can retract any bonus paid to you while you work for them. Altering your resume in factual areas is basically jeopardizing your employment for the entire time you work with the company that he finds for you, and potentially your entire future career. Elsewhere here there is advice to bring copies of your correct resume with you and hand them out if it turns out you are being interviewed on the basis of a fabricated one; that's a good start, as it covers your butt and warns that company against that headhunter.
is that it is an excellent way of solving yesterday's problems. This tree is a classic case in point; now that it has perfected this defence against the moa, the moa is no longer around. Hmm... maybe the defence worked better than expected?
At least, we do at the school. That's a 50-station network, and amounts to about $10 a year per station after the educational discount. $20/year per station without, but you get cut rates for longer terms. I'm quite happy with Avast.
At the business (20 stations, no AD when it was installed aeons ago) we used Trend Micro ServerProtect, which is no longer supported. That one was $800/25 stations flat fee and is still being updated.
Neither one of those needs an AD server for its console, though they are both Windows based.
First, it was not cosmic rays; memory was tested in a lead vault and showed the same error rate. Turns out to have been alpha particles emitted by the epoxy / ceramic that the memory chips were encapsulated in.
That said: Quite clearly given your experience, Vista and Ubuntu load the memory subsystem quite differently. It is possible that Vista, with its all-over-the-map program flow, is missing cache a lot more often and so is hitting DRAM harder; I don't have the background to really know. I believe that Memtest86, in order to put the most strain on memory and thus test it in the most pessimal conditions, tries to access memory in patterns that equally hit physical memory hardest. But, what I have found is that some OSs, apparently including Ubuntu, will run on memory that is marginal, memory that Memtest86 picks up as bad.
As for ECC in memory... The problem is that ECC carries a heavy performance hit on write. If you only want to write 1 byte, you still have to read in the whole QWord, change the byte, and write it back to get the ECC to recalculate correctly. It is because of that performance hit that ECC was deprecated. The problem goes away to a large extent if your cache is write-back rather than write-through; though there will be still a significant number of cases where you have to write a set of bytes that has not yet been read into cache and does not comprise a whole ECC word.
That said, it is still used on servers...
But I don't expect it will reappear on desktops any time soon. Apparently they have managed to control the alpha radiation to a great extent, and so the actual radiation-caused errors are now occurring at a much lower rate, significantly lower than software-induced BSODs.
English speaker in a French-speaking area...
on
Hands Off
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not only does Parisian French have its own swear words, Quebec French does also, and they are different. Tabernac!
With a version number as high as 5 or 6, I at least would expect to have some history behind it, and if I saw that there was none, I would remove it from my list of possibles. A company that will lie about its experience will likely also lie about capabilities, and will be generally untrustworthy.
I might consider commercial software at v2.0, or v2.01, if I couldn't find a v1.0.
That said, if there is a related product, that would be different. For instance, Windows NT debuted at 3.1, because 16-bit Windows, which apart from its bitness was very similar, was then at 3.1. That I can accept. Grudgingly. (WinWord jumping from 2.0 to 6.0 because Word for DOS was already at 6.0? Nope. That's just stupid.) So if you are selling Widget 5.0 now, and you are bringing out SuperWidget, basically the same thing but significantly different under the hood where ye average user can't see it, SuperWidget could debut at 5.0 with only minor grumbling.
It is possible to install at least some versions of the Windows comm and FAX program from 01Communique in the root of a drive. This would be fairly common in the old Win31 days when you had multiple drives. At uninstall, you could select the option that would remove the program and all received and sent faxes. This option, rather than enumerating and deleting subdirectories where faxes were stored, would simply wipe the install directory... in this case, your entire drive.
I use a Kensington Expert 5.0 at home and another at work. I found that using a mouse, while the control could be as good, left me with unilateral bursitis, which is not good.
My father, who had the same problem, had started down that path with an Expert 3.0, which has only two buttons. Again, a good design, but after the buttons died the second time, he tried an early Kensington Orbit. That thing was horrible -- the ball is fine, but the buttons are down around the sides where you keep hitting them by accident. He gave up on that after a few years; I found it in the useless junk drawer with the dead Expert. I see that they have moved the buttons on the new Orbit to be out at the sides again, which looks like it will work a lot better.
One of my clients, who is quadriplegic, uses the Expert 5.0 with a mouth stick. I'm about to buy another Expert for his wife, who was using an early Logitech Marble until the rug-rat managed to break the wire.
My only complaint about the Kensington is that they are slow to get a driver out for the 64-bit operating systems. Connected to the 64-bit XP box, the Expert acts like a slow mouse. They also don't seem to have their drivers available for Linux, though it seems that Linux trackball support doesn't really require a custom driver; the adjustment range is wide enough that the trackballs can be accommodated quite neatly.
Slashdot Mirror
Appeared on Fark a couple days ago, with the comment that the (unprotected) camera they used to document the flight and fall also survived. So...
This client is not keen on having executables increase in size by 125% (e.g. from 500k to 1125k). We have warned them that this will result in a program that is hard to maintain as the tools become superannuated, and they have agreed that if issues develop, they will cover our costs of rebuilding on a more modern platform to get assistance from MS, but that they will then want the fix back-propagated. It is something to do with the size of their distribution media, I believe. While CD-ROM has been pretty much superseded by DVD-ROM, there doesn't seem to be a lot on the pipeline larger than 4.7GB.
It's more "The client will pay for his decision."
No, they use SLM, which IMHO is only slightly better than VSS, and which seems, according to MS devs, to have as its sole advantage over VSS that it is CLI only and does not suffer the slowdowns of the visual windowed interface.
Not to say I am a rabid VSS supporter; I have considered switching. As with any system, of course, there is the cost of switching -- how much does it cost to import ten plus years of VSS data? If it could be done, I'd definitely be interested in switching to something better supported (read: FOSS)...
I won't argue about VSS' flakiness, but I will say that so far it has not failed us when we needed to revert. The flakiness starts when you want to do something less than straight-arrow, like split a project, and there a lot of the flakiness actually comes from the integration with the other VS tools. In my experience. Your mileage may vary.
We've found that going with the Latest and Greatest causes a lot of grief: M$ has elected to change a lot of the way version control works with their 2010 update to VSS, for instance, and as we still have clients who insist on the more compact executables produced by Visual Studio 6 (11 years old now), we cannot upgrade any further than VS2008. On my current build machine, for instance, I have every VS version between VS6 and VS2008, and I use every one of them for building some part of some product.
That said, some form of version control is critical. All it takes is one fumble-fingered tech erasing a project (which is what spurred our installation of a source control system) or one showstopper bug introduced into the shipping product with no record of how it got there, and you quickly learn the value of having backed-up old source versions.
Your shop shows all the hallmarks of the single-developer shop that grew without direction, as they all do initially. I'd strongly suggest that it would be in your interests to try and get at least minimal tools together... and to update to a recent Java before you start losing sales because of an outdated and now unsupported platform.
Ah, but the BB gun will not stop the interference unless you somehow manage to short out the bulb and pop the breaker. Instead you'll get a free-air arc...
It's much more likely to tell the tale if you ask the neighbor.
An associate of mine reported the same issue. In his case it was a failed security lamp that was trying to come on at sunset and failing; it was only when the ballast gave up after an hour and a half that his wifi -- and his AM radio -- came back. Note that many security lights are sodium arc or mercury vapor arc; not much is as hard on RF in general as a big fat arc.
One point that is made is that you don't need a lot of power on the control shaft. Well, frankly, I don't see that... it looks to me as though, in a load situation, the power to turn the planetary gear and thus the output shaft would have to come equally from the sun gear and the ring gear.
Looking at the video, I see there is an anchor plate for the drive motor on the left, which uses an eccentric post to drive something on a second plate; that something results in the two shafts that go through empty space to the third, output plate. We never got much of a look at what was on the second plate. If this is going to have any chance at working, there would have to be some sort of dynamic load balance on that second plate.
The proof, not seen in this video, would be to decouple the drive motor from the control shaft, which would theoretically stop the control shaft from moving and put the thing in full speed forwards. Then load the output by trying to stop it. If the control shaft starts spinning, you don't have a useful product.
However, the link to "some Slashdotter idle time" links to the New Scientist... and that seems to be where the compromise actually hit me.
Don't know. Apparently yes - I'm on FF and Win ATM. It put up the usual warning box, I alt-F4'ed, it started putting up the usual "Scanning progress" window, I alt-F4'ed again before it completed page load.
I suspect that if I had hit any of the handy close boxes within the window that it would have installed; FF unfortunately accepts click on page-defined button, generally, as permission.
Yeah, abuse me... just because I use FF on Linux to be safe, I assume everyone else does too. Yeah, any browser on any Linux distro will be safe, as will any browser on Windows with scripting disabled (good luck with that if you insist on using MSIE), and any OSX-based system... though it'll still hammer your browser on any OS if you have scripting enabled.
The site has paid ads, one of which apparently has been taken over by the XPAntiVirus people. If you visit the site, it will install malware, unless you are using Firefox and Linux.
The function of a manager is to manage, not micro-manage.
There will be times that questions arise that need management input. Not often, but sometimes. When those arise, it is extremely irritating to have no manager present. However, that does not mean hovering over the developers' shoulders and adding to the pressure. Arrange pizza, yes. But apart from that, stay resolutely in the background, available to answer questions, but leaving the devs to their own devices.
I'd actually refer back to Robert Heinlein on this one. In Starship Troopers (the novel, not the wretched film) Lt. Rico, just after he gets his pips, is told by his CO that his wandering through the crew quarters is simply putting his men on edge. He should go back to his quarters, and when it was time to act, his sergeant would have his men ready for action.
I'd suggest that you do likewise, even to the extent of perhaps taking on some small, tedious task to take it off the plate of some dev, and keep yourself busy while you wait for the questions.
As many others have pointed out, the new printer comes with "starter cartridges" which contain less ink; in the case of a donated Dell inkjet I recently reluctantly accepted for the school where I work part time, the starter cartridge contains 5ml, instead of 25ml of ink. So for your $81 you would have bought possibly five times as many pages as you bought with your new printer.
That said: you are, in fact, causing significant grief to the companies making these printers by discarding rather than reloading. The company has adopted the Gillette marketing model: give away the razor, overprice the blades. It is almost certain that the printer costs more than $50 to make, so if you toss the printer you are hitting them in the bottom line.
On the gripping hand, the ecological costs of discarding the printer and buying new are significant. How much petroleum did it take to make the plastic that you would be dumping in the landfill, and transporting it to you?
The only truly sound way to approach this, once you have one of these printers on your desk, is to buy a single round of replacement cartridges and a refill kit. (The starter cartridges may have something in them that prevents them from being filled above the starter levels. To get full life out of a refilled cartridge you may have to start with a proper cartridge.) This not only prevents the printer hitting the landfill, but removes you as a source of ink-cartridge revenue from the printer manufacturer.
Rule is, you want work, you pay for it.
Way I see it, I'll take the pager and be on call, but the rule is, as I am a contractor, you pay standard-with-full-access rates, minimum 2-hour callout, every time that sucker goes off outside times I'm at the office. (You're paying already when I am at the office.) I bump my standard rates a bit to cover the possibility of interruption, if you want me to be available at any time. If I were an employee, any time that sucker goes off outside office hours, local labor laws say you have to pay me overtime, and a minimum of four hours if I get called into the office. I'd be willing to drop that to a minimum two hours of double time, from four of time and a half.
The fireman idea is flawed, because it is, in fact, not an on-call situation. You are paid for the time that you are on call, but you are actually in the fire hall while you are on call. Your shift ends, you close the door behind you, and nominally you are done. You don't have to worry about being waked up for an emergency call out, when you're off duty. It's much closer to the situation of a volunteer firefighter, who is on call 24/7 because there is nobody else and who is doing it basically out of altruism. Because of its volunteer nature, that doesn't apply either; you're not volunteering at your job.
Courts have said that they can fire you without recourse and rescind any bonuses if they hired you based on a bogus resume. And that has happened repeatedly. If they find out, you may never work again; at least not in that field. Not worth the risk.
Look at it this way: If you lie on your resume, the company is within its rights to fire you as soon as they find out, without notice and without recourse on your side, even if you are doing an excellent job, and the courts have said that the company can retract any bonus paid to you while you work for them. Altering your resume in factual areas is basically jeopardizing your employment for the entire time you work with the company that he finds for you, and potentially your entire future career. Elsewhere here there is advice to bring copies of your correct resume with you and hand them out if it turns out you are being interviewed on the basis of a fabricated one; that's a good start, as it covers your butt and warns that company against that headhunter.
And get the class to help. Contributions count towards the class grade, of course. http://en.wikibooks.org/
is that it is an excellent way of solving yesterday's problems. This tree is a classic case in point; now that it has perfected this defence against the moa, the moa is no longer around. Hmm... maybe the defence worked better than expected?
At least, we do at the school. That's a 50-station network, and amounts to about $10 a year per station after the educational discount. $20/year per station without, but you get cut rates for longer terms. I'm quite happy with Avast. At the business (20 stations, no AD when it was installed aeons ago) we used Trend Micro ServerProtect, which is no longer supported. That one was $800/25 stations flat fee and is still being updated. Neither one of those needs an AD server for its console, though they are both Windows based.
First, it was not cosmic rays; memory was tested in a lead vault and showed the same error rate. Turns out to have been alpha particles emitted by the epoxy / ceramic that the memory chips were encapsulated in.
That said: Quite clearly given your experience, Vista and Ubuntu load the memory subsystem quite differently. It is possible that Vista, with its all-over-the-map program flow, is missing cache a lot more often and so is hitting DRAM harder; I don't have the background to really know. I believe that Memtest86, in order to put the most strain on memory and thus test it in the most pessimal conditions, tries to access memory in patterns that equally hit physical memory hardest. But, what I have found is that some OSs, apparently including Ubuntu, will run on memory that is marginal, memory that Memtest86 picks up as bad.
As for ECC in memory... The problem is that ECC carries a heavy performance hit on write. If you only want to write 1 byte, you still have to read in the whole QWord, change the byte, and write it back to get the ECC to recalculate correctly. It is because of that performance hit that ECC was deprecated. The problem goes away to a large extent if your cache is write-back rather than write-through; though there will be still a significant number of cases where you have to write a set of bytes that has not yet been read into cache and does not comprise a whole ECC word.
That said, it is still used on servers...
But I don't expect it will reappear on desktops any time soon. Apparently they have managed to control the alpha radiation to a great extent, and so the actual radiation-caused errors are now occurring at a much lower rate, significantly lower than software-induced BSODs.
Not only does Parisian French have its own swear words, Quebec French does also, and they are different. Tabernac!
With a version number as high as 5 or 6, I at least would expect to have some history behind it, and if I saw that there was none, I would remove it from my list of possibles. A company that will lie about its experience will likely also lie about capabilities, and will be generally untrustworthy. I might consider commercial software at v2.0, or v2.01, if I couldn't find a v1.0. That said, if there is a related product, that would be different. For instance, Windows NT debuted at 3.1, because 16-bit Windows, which apart from its bitness was very similar, was then at 3.1. That I can accept. Grudgingly. (WinWord jumping from 2.0 to 6.0 because Word for DOS was already at 6.0? Nope. That's just stupid.) So if you are selling Widget 5.0 now, and you are bringing out SuperWidget, basically the same thing but significantly different under the hood where ye average user can't see it, SuperWidget could debut at 5.0 with only minor grumbling.
It is possible to install at least some versions of the Windows comm and FAX program from 01Communique in the root of a drive. This would be fairly common in the old Win31 days when you had multiple drives. At uninstall, you could select the option that would remove the program and all received and sent faxes. This option, rather than enumerating and deleting subdirectories where faxes were stored, would simply wipe the install directory... in this case, your entire drive.
I use a Kensington Expert 5.0 at home and another at work. I found that using a mouse, while the control could be as good, left me with unilateral bursitis, which is not good.
My father, who had the same problem, had started down that path with an Expert 3.0, which has only two buttons. Again, a good design, but after the buttons died the second time, he tried an early Kensington Orbit. That thing was horrible -- the ball is fine, but the buttons are down around the sides where you keep hitting them by accident. He gave up on that after a few years; I found it in the useless junk drawer with the dead Expert. I see that they have moved the buttons on the new Orbit to be out at the sides again, which looks like it will work a lot better.
One of my clients, who is quadriplegic, uses the Expert 5.0 with a mouth stick. I'm about to buy another Expert for his wife, who was using an early Logitech Marble until the rug-rat managed to break the wire.
My only complaint about the Kensington is that they are slow to get a driver out for the 64-bit operating systems. Connected to the 64-bit XP box, the Expert acts like a slow mouse. They also don't seem to have their drivers available for Linux, though it seems that Linux trackball support doesn't really require a custom driver; the adjustment range is wide enough that the trackballs can be accommodated quite neatly.