I completely agree with most of your points here except the bit about 'I am more thinking that the people who are angry are jealous that they did not think of it first'. A lot of people who work on GPL software are strongly against vendor lock in, and the iPhone platform is kind of providing an end run against GPL provisions and I think it does allow effects that the authors of GPL were probably trying to avoid. The original poster's conciliatory tone leads me to believe he would like to fit in with the spirit of the original developers, and not just simply follow the letter of the licence.
The problem is that the iPhone isn't an open platform. It isn't free to get apps into the store, which makes it tricky to release free as in beer apps. People strongly concerned with free as in both speech and beer stuff are probably not interested in a profit share system, but maybe would be interested in a bit of developer time. My advice to the original poster might be to contribute some effort back to the community if that's possible. You and the original developer of this game obviously share some interests, so there's a possibility that you'll share interest in some other project that could really use some developer time.
I've always taken the long term view of this sort of thing, which tends to be a very positive thing rather than the negative view you're suggesting. For example cars are built ever increasingly by robots rather than people. Looking at it positively, the people made unemployed by this process will be *freed up* to work on other productive things. Rather than being long term unemployed, they will go to work on the assembly lines for automatic vacuum cleaners or better medical scanners. The same process will continue there and they might get laid off from that job once production is more automated and they'll have to find a new job on the assembly lines for humanoid home helper robots or something else that we just don't have at the moment.
The workforce required for any given industry will shrink while maintaining the same productivity and the same contribution to society's wealth and so overall individual productivity will go up. Unfortunately, if you're the one at the bottom of the rungs where your job keeps getting automated, well I guess that sucks. The fact is that in the future there'll be ever less use for untrained and unskilled workers, so people will need to do their best to get trained and skilled.
Having said that, a life on benefits unable to find a job, is in most European countries at least, a vastly better life than even skilled workers from 100 years ago could have dreamed for.
Neat cursive is a bit of an oxymoron - it's designed to be quick to scrawl. I'm often at other people's desks scrawling notes on paper, or they're scrawling notes about what I'm saying. Neatness isn't an issue as long as it's legible. I only know one person whose writing isn't legible (rising to two if you don't have a magnifying glass).
I had always thought a garbage collector was just memory management anyway. Having garbage collection as a 'replacement' for destructors is not always that great. But dealing with files and network connections does take a bit more thought than dealing with blocks of memory anyway.
Regarding point b) my main work is writing real-time systems (well, PLC engineers might well complain it's not really real-time stuff...), and yeah issues like that make it very hard to use Java for the task. I have seen it done and I don't think it works well 100% of the time.
I guess the problem is an include is effectively including the contents of the file you specify, which like you say can be abused. You can stick C functions in a file that is included into multiple other files, which gives you multiple copies of the function. What you should probably have done is just included an extern declaration into the other files and only have one copy of the actual function definition.
In Java the includes are just telling the compiler where to look for stuff - e.g. including javax.swing.JPanel means you can just type JPanel in the rest of the code, instead of always fully qualifying that you mean javax.swing.JPanel. You can't make a lot of the mistakes you could probably make with includes.
But as with all the other problems quoted by the GP, I'm not sure any of them are big problems for decent programmers. And I've generally seen that bad programmers can cause havoc without resorting to anything as complex as dodgy pointer arithmetic. (Except I quite like garbage collection, since 99% of the time it means that programmers of any ability don't need to think about that aspect of the coding, thus saving time)
I always have this problem when I try and play a game online. I'm a very casual gamer - maybe 2 hours a month at most. Unfortunately as a result, whenever I play a game online, I'm usually playing people who beat me extremely easily. I've found on most games, it just drives me away as it's no fun, and clearly, the majority of people actually playing on line are very good, or are newbies who play for a few hours before getting bored and giving up.
I've often wondered why so few games seem to try to solve this problem. Maybe it's because as your post suggests, it increases the value of new games.
I think a lot of people don't want to see these kinds of budgets for games. This is part of the problem with the gaming industry having bought out the games reviewing industry. If I look at the major publications, I'd think these high budget AAA games were the best thing in the world, with nearly unanimous agreement amongst reviewers and customers.
But as soon as you reach out beyond that world, you see there are an awful lot of people that are talking excitedly about original but unheard of games from minor producers, built on modest budgets - often at lower sale prices.
Having had a go at GTA4 and thinking it was just rubbish - and a big step down in fun factor from the lower budget GTA3, I'm moving away from a lot of the AAA games. Maybe the fact is these publishers shouldn't be taking a big risk spending $15M on a game...
I backup to more hard discs. I've been running RAID systems at home for a few years, and fairly recently replaced a 1.6TB array made up of 5 x 400GB discs, with a single 1.5TB disc. Also, I've suffered the failure of 3 500GB discs which I RMAed for replacement, but due to the timescales, went out and bought new drives before the replacements arrived.
So currently I have 3.5 TB of unused hard discs, which have become my backup discs. In primary storage, I've got the 1.5 TB disc and a 2.5 TB array, but I'm currently only using just over 3 TB of space, so I've got room to backup everything to hard disc. When I need more space, I'm a bit paranoid going beyond 6 discs in RAID5. Also there are currently 7 discs running which makes enough noise and uses enough power already. So I'm currently expecting to replace the 6 x 500 GB array with a 3 x 2 TB array, leaving me with an extra 3 TB of backup discs.
If your storage requirements are just growing incrementally, then old hard discs are very possibly something you'll have, and make a very good choice for the backups. But if you just throw together a 10TB array one day for fun, it's probably quite an expensive option.
I strongly agree with this. I only learnt Java at university, but there was I think enough theory that most of what I was taught was usable in languages I'd never looked at before. Which was fortunate since on leaving university, I immediately found myself programming in Pascal on OpenVMS, followed by C/Unix.
The only problems I came across switching languages is the standard libraries with different languages. Particularly Java and C# have huge standard libraries. However, I've often found that I'm just not good at remembering these libraries and what I try to do is remember the sorts of ways things work instead of exact function names and class heirarchies. When I'm writing a Java GUI application, I'll have the Java API docs open permanently, and the same in C#. Although I know the Java APIs pretty well, I find I can code most things in C# around 90% of the speed without knowing the libraries - generally googling for a java class name plus C# will point me in the right direction if I ever get lost.
While I'm only echoing the thoughts of the AC who has already replied, they've got a score of 0 while you're modded up. A few people at work have Acer laptops and the opinion overall is very good - extremely good given the prices. I mean I can imagine still holding a grudge after a poor experience with a Pentium 3 era machine, but 486s?
My cheapish Dell laptop had an option for the same screen - I think it's great.
I've also got the Sony Vaio P for on-call support work. That has an 8" 1600x768 screen (stuff I support was often designed for minimum 1024x768 resolution) - it's great but if I was using it for more than 10 minutes at a time, I'd need to increase the text size to avoid hurting my eyes.
I'm not entirely certain of this but it sounds like the separation between mainframes and servers is essentially that IBM produce servers that are backwards-compatible with their very ancient mainframes. I'm not sure that in the hardware there's any specific borderline between server and mainframe. From my own experience, a LOT of companies are still using ancient COBOL-era software to run their core business. It's been around for a long time and so the bugs are ironed out and it runs OK. Software doesn't rust, and there isn't a compelling reason to replace something that works OK. However, the hardware does rust and so at some point companies need to buy hardware that will run these ancient applications.
Sounds to me like IBM is reaping the rewards of continuing to support the stuff they did 30+ years ago. The high cost with switching to another platform is rewriting their old and business critical applications. And of course reluctance to do this means accepting a very high cost of new hardware, relative to other options.
I write applications, mainly on AIX as my day job, and the hardware is very expensive, but it's not uncommon for places to still have the same servers in place 10 or 20 years down the line. It's quite common 3-4 years after an installation has gone live to have the customers IT personnel on the phone asking about replacing the hardware, and generally the advice is that there's no need to. The cost can be triple the cost of mainstream hardware, but so is the lifespan, so I think on TCO terms, it's not that bad.
NB: the stuff we write is portable C so we're not tied in to AIX in any way - my current project is running on SLES 10 on cheap Dell servers. But the real expensive servers made by IBM / Sun / HP do seem to have a reliability factor that isn't matched by cheap hardware.
I think they are already considering practical issues in the current design. Not long ago, my brother was extremely excited to be working on a siphonic drainage system for this place, and the plans looked just like this concept. So already this isn't pure concept but has plenty of realism behind the design.
Lack of integrated graphics is a good point. Anandtech's article linked to by asliarun above suggests that LGA1156 is well designed to run with integrated graphics, based on having an internal PCIe controller.
But still, unless LGA1156 is really *much* simpler and cheaper to build, I would expect that the existing LGA775 / Core 2 Duo / Core 2 Quad platform would remain the cheapest option for quite a while. By the time you'd think about LGA1156, it seems LGA1366 would be the one to go for.
The socket for Core i7 equivalent Xeons is the same LGA-1366, but the standard Core i7 only has one QPI link, so you can't use them in dual CPU configs.
I hadn't heard about LGA-1156, but I'm a bit suspicious whether it will really take off. I don't really understand now that Intel have launched LGA-1366 where is the room for a slightly lower spec socket. I wouldn't have thought a few extra pins in the socket is that expensive, and buying RAM in packs of 3 isn't that much of a problem - and it's optional anyway.
By Q3 when LGA-1156 is due, Core i7 will be already heading down into the mainstream.
When I was a kid (about 5) I wrote a letter adressed to Grandma Mary and posted it, and it got there! It was in the same village, but looking back I'm pretty impressed the postman took the trouble to find out who it should have got to (especially since there was no address or even a stamp!)
Windows Mobile seems to be one of those really weird things. I consider myself a techie, and I've had endless problems everytime I try and use one. My stepfather has fairly minimal technical knowledge but he's able to use it flawlessly, keep everything synchronised with ActiveSync (which has never once run successfully for me!) and even has no trouble installing new programs like MemoryMap.
I've had to get him to fix mine before and he managed it in two minutes. For absolutely everything else technical, he's the one asking me for help.
Agreed. I am writing a computer system for use in Spain. Most of the translations just go into a database of strings that the customer translates as and when.
I had to demo a couple of screens that had missing translations. I don't speak Spanish but I tried to do these in a mechanical style - just copying parts of translations that were already done. Most of them were slightly wrong in some way.
Also some small parts use hard-coded strings in javascript. I ran these through Google translate and asked them to point out any problems. There were only about 30 words / phrases in total.
I got complaints that on the date selector, March and May were translated as Marcha and Puede (March as in walking, May as in 'may I...'). And there were many complaints about shortened phrases - removing words such as 'of' is generally fine in English when pushed for space, but not in Spanish.
I apologise, you are correct technically. But when you buy a TV, you have to register your address, so that TV licencing can follow up with reminder letters and phone calls.
If you try to claim that you aren't using your TV to watch broadcast TV, they won't believe you (I can see why...) and will continue to harass you.
And one point I forgot to include in my original post is that you can't buy a TV just to watch ITV / Channel 4 / Five - in this case you have to pay for a BBC licence fee.
But you do have to pay a licence fee simply for owning a TV, even if it is only used to connect to a console, computer, DVD player etc and you don't want to watch the BBC channels.
Government rules give it a unique position that feels a lot like taxation (i.e. a very similar situation is that you have to pay road tax if you own a car).
NB just being devil's advocate here, big fan of the BBC myself!
You only have to read the comments on Slashdot to see that a lot of people with above average technical literacy massively mis-read the scope of the claims of typical patents. And having done this, they often then pronounce the patent 'obvious' and have a lot of ideas of what could be prior art.
As you say, when an average person looks at it, they could be expected to mis-read the scope of the patent in just the same way, but then not understand the obviousness of the ideas, or know of prior art.
So a lot of it is going to come down to the skills of the lawyers on each side of the argument. I guess this is why fighting patent cases in the court can get so expensive even if the technical side of the argument is often pretty clear to the Slashdot crowd.
I'm not so sure about that. They're going after device makers, and a lot of people that don't care much about computers do care a lot more about devices they plug in to their computer. People with Satnavs and Digital Cameras.
But it depends if the stories ever make it to mainstream press, with an understandable description of the problem.
I'd guess most people don't know what a filesystem is, and would lose interest if you mentioned one. But the fact is that MS is essentially saying you have to pay them a licence to make a device that will connect easily to a Windows PC, with the features expected by a normal user.
But this is kind of the opposite situation IMO. The OP should get good informal reviews from the majority of colleagues.
Just call up an ally at the company (there must be someone who would qualify), explain the situation and ask if they would mind providing the reference directly - skip out the manager making the threats, and HR if necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree with most of your points here except the bit about 'I am more thinking that the people who are angry are jealous that they did not think of it first'. A lot of people who work on GPL software are strongly against vendor lock in, and the iPhone platform is kind of providing an end run against GPL provisions and I think it does allow effects that the authors of GPL were probably trying to avoid. The original poster's conciliatory tone leads me to believe he would like to fit in with the spirit of the original developers, and not just simply follow the letter of the licence.
The problem is that the iPhone isn't an open platform. It isn't free to get apps into the store, which makes it tricky to release free as in beer apps. People strongly concerned with free as in both speech and beer stuff are probably not interested in a profit share system, but maybe would be interested in a bit of developer time. My advice to the original poster might be to contribute some effort back to the community if that's possible. You and the original developer of this game obviously share some interests, so there's a possibility that you'll share interest in some other project that could really use some developer time.
I've always taken the long term view of this sort of thing, which tends to be a very positive thing rather than the negative view you're suggesting. For example cars are built ever increasingly by robots rather than people. Looking at it positively, the people made unemployed by this process will be *freed up* to work on other productive things. Rather than being long term unemployed, they will go to work on the assembly lines for automatic vacuum cleaners or better medical scanners. The same process will continue there and they might get laid off from that job once production is more automated and they'll have to find a new job on the assembly lines for humanoid home helper robots or something else that we just don't have at the moment.
The workforce required for any given industry will shrink while maintaining the same productivity and the same contribution to society's wealth and so overall individual productivity will go up. Unfortunately, if you're the one at the bottom of the rungs where your job keeps getting automated, well I guess that sucks. The fact is that in the future there'll be ever less use for untrained and unskilled workers, so people will need to do their best to get trained and skilled.
Having said that, a life on benefits unable to find a job, is in most European countries at least, a vastly better life than even skilled workers from 100 years ago could have dreamed for.
Neat cursive is a bit of an oxymoron - it's designed to be quick to scrawl. I'm often at other people's desks scrawling notes on paper, or they're scrawling notes about what I'm saying. Neatness isn't an issue as long as it's legible. I only know one person whose writing isn't legible (rising to two if you don't have a magnifying glass).
I had always thought a garbage collector was just memory management anyway. Having garbage collection as a 'replacement' for destructors is not always that great. But dealing with files and network connections does take a bit more thought than dealing with blocks of memory anyway.
Regarding point b) my main work is writing real-time systems (well, PLC engineers might well complain it's not really real-time stuff ...), and yeah issues like that make it very hard to use Java for the task. I have seen it done and I don't think it works well 100% of the time.
I guess the problem is an include is effectively including the contents of the file you specify, which like you say can be abused. You can stick C functions in a file that is included into multiple other files, which gives you multiple copies of the function. What you should probably have done is just included an extern declaration into the other files and only have one copy of the actual function definition.
In Java the includes are just telling the compiler where to look for stuff - e.g. including javax.swing.JPanel means you can just type JPanel in the rest of the code, instead of always fully qualifying that you mean javax.swing.JPanel. You can't make a lot of the mistakes you could probably make with includes.
But as with all the other problems quoted by the GP, I'm not sure any of them are big problems for decent programmers. And I've generally seen that bad programmers can cause havoc without resorting to anything as complex as dodgy pointer arithmetic. (Except I quite like garbage collection, since 99% of the time it means that programmers of any ability don't need to think about that aspect of the coding, thus saving time)
I always have this problem when I try and play a game online. I'm a very casual gamer - maybe 2 hours a month at most. Unfortunately as a result, whenever I play a game online, I'm usually playing people who beat me extremely easily. I've found on most games, it just drives me away as it's no fun, and clearly, the majority of people actually playing on line are very good, or are newbies who play for a few hours before getting bored and giving up.
I've often wondered why so few games seem to try to solve this problem. Maybe it's because as your post suggests, it increases the value of new games.
I think a lot of people don't want to see these kinds of budgets for games. This is part of the problem with the gaming industry having bought out the games reviewing industry. If I look at the major publications, I'd think these high budget AAA games were the best thing in the world, with nearly unanimous agreement amongst reviewers and customers.
But as soon as you reach out beyond that world, you see there are an awful lot of people that are talking excitedly about original but unheard of games from minor producers, built on modest budgets - often at lower sale prices.
Having had a go at GTA4 and thinking it was just rubbish - and a big step down in fun factor from the lower budget GTA3, I'm moving away from a lot of the AAA games. Maybe the fact is these publishers shouldn't be taking a big risk spending $15M on a game ...
I backup to more hard discs. I've been running RAID systems at home for a few years, and fairly recently replaced a 1.6TB array made up of 5 x 400GB discs, with a single 1.5TB disc. Also, I've suffered the failure of 3 500GB discs which I RMAed for replacement, but due to the timescales, went out and bought new drives before the replacements arrived.
So currently I have 3.5 TB of unused hard discs, which have become my backup discs. In primary storage, I've got the 1.5 TB disc and a 2.5 TB array, but I'm currently only using just over 3 TB of space, so I've got room to backup everything to hard disc. When I need more space, I'm a bit paranoid going beyond 6 discs in RAID5. Also there are currently 7 discs running which makes enough noise and uses enough power already. So I'm currently expecting to replace the 6 x 500 GB array with a 3 x 2 TB array, leaving me with an extra 3 TB of backup discs.
If your storage requirements are just growing incrementally, then old hard discs are very possibly something you'll have, and make a very good choice for the backups. But if you just throw together a 10TB array one day for fun, it's probably quite an expensive option.
I strongly agree with this. I only learnt Java at university, but there was I think enough theory that most of what I was taught was usable in languages I'd never looked at before. Which was fortunate since on leaving university, I immediately found myself programming in Pascal on OpenVMS, followed by C/Unix.
The only problems I came across switching languages is the standard libraries with different languages. Particularly Java and C# have huge standard libraries. However, I've often found that I'm just not good at remembering these libraries and what I try to do is remember the sorts of ways things work instead of exact function names and class heirarchies. When I'm writing a Java GUI application, I'll have the Java API docs open permanently, and the same in C#. Although I know the Java APIs pretty well, I find I can code most things in C# around 90% of the speed without knowing the libraries - generally googling for a java class name plus C# will point me in the right direction if I ever get lost.
While I'm only echoing the thoughts of the AC who has already replied, they've got a score of 0 while you're modded up. A few people at work have Acer laptops and the opinion overall is very good - extremely good given the prices. I mean I can imagine still holding a grudge after a poor experience with a Pentium 3 era machine, but 486s?
My cheapish Dell laptop had an option for the same screen - I think it's great.
I've also got the Sony Vaio P for on-call support work. That has an 8" 1600x768 screen (stuff I support was often designed for minimum 1024x768 resolution) - it's great but if I was using it for more than 10 minutes at a time, I'd need to increase the text size to avoid hurting my eyes.
Well it certainly sounds safer than a 50 litre tank of explosive liquid.
I'm not entirely certain of this but it sounds like the separation between mainframes and servers is essentially that IBM produce servers that are backwards-compatible with their very ancient mainframes. I'm not sure that in the hardware there's any specific borderline between server and mainframe. From my own experience, a LOT of companies are still using ancient COBOL-era software to run their core business. It's been around for a long time and so the bugs are ironed out and it runs OK. Software doesn't rust, and there isn't a compelling reason to replace something that works OK. However, the hardware does rust and so at some point companies need to buy hardware that will run these ancient applications.
Sounds to me like IBM is reaping the rewards of continuing to support the stuff they did 30+ years ago. The high cost with switching to another platform is rewriting their old and business critical applications. And of course reluctance to do this means accepting a very high cost of new hardware, relative to other options.
I write applications, mainly on AIX as my day job, and the hardware is very expensive, but it's not uncommon for places to still have the same servers in place 10 or 20 years down the line. It's quite common 3-4 years after an installation has gone live to have the customers IT personnel on the phone asking about replacing the hardware, and generally the advice is that there's no need to. The cost can be triple the cost of mainstream hardware, but so is the lifespan, so I think on TCO terms, it's not that bad.
NB: the stuff we write is portable C so we're not tied in to AIX in any way - my current project is running on SLES 10 on cheap Dell servers. But the real expensive servers made by IBM / Sun / HP do seem to have a reliability factor that isn't matched by cheap hardware.
I think they are already considering practical issues in the current design. Not long ago, my brother was extremely excited to be working on a siphonic drainage system for this place, and the plans looked just like this concept. So already this isn't pure concept but has plenty of realism behind the design.
Lack of integrated graphics is a good point. Anandtech's article linked to by asliarun above suggests that LGA1156 is well designed to run with integrated graphics, based on having an internal PCIe controller.
But still, unless LGA1156 is really *much* simpler and cheaper to build, I would expect that the existing LGA775 / Core 2 Duo / Core 2 Quad platform would remain the cheapest option for quite a while. By the time you'd think about LGA1156, it seems LGA1366 would be the one to go for.
The socket for Core i7 equivalent Xeons is the same LGA-1366, but the standard Core i7 only has one QPI link, so you can't use them in dual CPU configs.
I hadn't heard about LGA-1156, but I'm a bit suspicious whether it will really take off. I don't really understand now that Intel have launched LGA-1366 where is the room for a slightly lower spec socket. I wouldn't have thought a few extra pins in the socket is that expensive, and buying RAM in packs of 3 isn't that much of a problem - and it's optional anyway.
By Q3 when LGA-1156 is due, Core i7 will be already heading down into the mainstream.
When I was a kid (about 5) I wrote a letter adressed to Grandma Mary and posted it, and it got there! It was in the same village, but looking back I'm pretty impressed the postman took the trouble to find out who it should have got to (especially since there was no address or even a stamp!)
I don't think he is trolling. The fact is the story is reporting this as a new feature. If it's not then there's a problem with the story.
Windows Mobile seems to be one of those really weird things. I consider myself a techie, and I've had endless problems everytime I try and use one. My stepfather has fairly minimal technical knowledge but he's able to use it flawlessly, keep everything synchronised with ActiveSync (which has never once run successfully for me!) and even has no trouble installing new programs like MemoryMap.
I've had to get him to fix mine before and he managed it in two minutes. For absolutely everything else technical, he's the one asking me for help.
Agreed. I am writing a computer system for use in Spain. Most of the translations just go into a database of strings that the customer translates as and when.
I had to demo a couple of screens that had missing translations. I don't speak Spanish but I tried to do these in a mechanical style - just copying parts of translations that were already done. Most of them were slightly wrong in some way.
Also some small parts use hard-coded strings in javascript. I ran these through Google translate and asked them to point out any problems. There were only about 30 words / phrases in total.
I got complaints that on the date selector, March and May were translated as Marcha and Puede (March as in walking, May as in 'may I...'). And there were many complaints about shortened phrases - removing words such as 'of' is generally fine in English when pushed for space, but not in Spanish.
I apologise, you are correct technically. But when you buy a TV, you have to register your address, so that TV licencing can follow up with reminder letters and phone calls.
If you try to claim that you aren't using your TV to watch broadcast TV, they won't believe you (I can see why...) and will continue to harass you.
And one point I forgot to include in my original post is that you can't buy a TV just to watch ITV / Channel 4 / Five - in this case you have to pay for a BBC licence fee.
But you do have to pay a licence fee simply for owning a TV, even if it is only used to connect to a console, computer, DVD player etc and you don't want to watch the BBC channels.
Government rules give it a unique position that feels a lot like taxation (i.e. a very similar situation is that you have to pay road tax if you own a car).
NB just being devil's advocate here, big fan of the BBC myself!
You only have to read the comments on Slashdot to see that a lot of people with above average technical literacy massively mis-read the scope of the claims of typical patents. And having done this, they often then pronounce the patent 'obvious' and have a lot of ideas of what could be prior art.
As you say, when an average person looks at it, they could be expected to mis-read the scope of the patent in just the same way, but then not understand the obviousness of the ideas, or know of prior art.
So a lot of it is going to come down to the skills of the lawyers on each side of the argument. I guess this is why fighting patent cases in the court can get so expensive even if the technical side of the argument is often pretty clear to the Slashdot crowd.
I'm not so sure about that. They're going after device makers, and a lot of people that don't care much about computers do care a lot more about devices they plug in to their computer. People with Satnavs and Digital Cameras.
But it depends if the stories ever make it to mainstream press, with an understandable description of the problem.
I'd guess most people don't know what a filesystem is, and would lose interest if you mentioned one. But the fact is that MS is essentially saying you have to pay them a licence to make a device that will connect easily to a Windows PC, with the features expected by a normal user.
But this is kind of the opposite situation IMO. The OP should get good informal reviews from the majority of colleagues.
Just call up an ally at the company (there must be someone who would qualify), explain the situation and ask if they would mind providing the reference directly - skip out the manager making the threats, and HR if necessary.