After seven years at a company, you must almost certainly have made plenty of friends there. Sounds to me like just one guy is being a dick.
Can't the reference simply be directed to a particular person within the company - someone with a higher opinion of you? Obviously, you've probably got to pick someone more senior than yourself, but where I work, if I'd fallen out with the CEO, there would be two or three senior project managers who I could direct the reference to instead.
Just give them a call informally to mention the situation you've been put in, and ask them not to mention the reference to the problem guy. This seems a much simpler option than escalating the situation further than it needs to be.
The fact is that most *nix users that I know haven't been near Vista. The real disaster for Vista is that lots of people who actually quite like XP couldn't stand Vista.
I switched to Vista on my main office PC, and also on my home desktop. I tried my best to use it for about 6 months - waited for SP1 to fix everything. When it didn't, I got rid of Vista on both machines, and even paid the extra £60 required to get XP instead of Vista on my new laptop.
Very interesting video, although I'm not convinced he means it is legal, just perhaps that they will not bother prosecuting people for non-commercial filesharing. Sort of like how it's illegal to ride a motorbike without a helmet, but I've seen people riding down the autopistes wearing a business suit and no helmet, straight past the police, without getting pulled over.
I applied for a job with Oracle in the UK after University - over 6 years ago now. The first thing I came up against was this online personality test.
I decided to be honest with the answers. Evidently not the right decision as I failed the test and they were not interested in talking to me (despite at that time being almost guaranteed a 1st class degree in CS from a top university).
Q: "You have to give up on some things that you start." A: "Strongly disagree."
This was one of the questions in the Oracle test - I put strongly agree. Occasionally new information appears after you've begun something, and possibly tells you that you're heading down the wrong path. You learn from this and start again.
Like many places, Spanish law has exemptions for private use, which probably makes removing DRM completely legal. However the owners are allowed to make copies only for private usage, with collective and lucrative uses not allowed. Sharing on P2P would definitely constitute a collective use.
Although as with almost everywhere else, P2P itself is not illegal.
Not being allowed to see the closing statement for your account is quite a big deal if you are unsure of the balance they want paying.
As ISP I once used had a £40 account closure fee. I couldn't find it written down in any of the paper sign up documents, although it was in online terms and conditions (which the sign up contract said could be changed at any time). I suspected it was illegal to really do that, in the UK at least, so I just put a bar on the payments and paid off everything except the £40.
With paper bills, they are sent to you to keep as long as you like. The e-bills direct equivalent would be sending you an email with the PDF attached. The physical equivalent of Verizon's policy is allowing you to visit their local office to see your statement, and pick up your own copy if you like. But when you close the account they lock the door - if you hadn't been in to collect your last bill, tough luck.
For those in the UK, it's interesting to note that the Sky+ HD box uses 36W in standby (well, mine does as measured by my power meter), which at UK energy prices works out somewhere around £36 / year to leave it in standby.
Extremely annoying since it you turn it off it can't record the programs you've scheduled to record. All my other consumer electronics stuff registered as either 0.1W or 0.0W in standby mode.
Well I've certainly just done that with the Fridge and Freezer I've just bought. In fact I didn't buy the nicer looking Budweiser drinks chiller I'd originally set out to buy because the big energy label on it showed it took 270KWh / year instead of the 115 KWh for the similar sized plain white one.
I can't think of any reason why I'd ignore energy ratings if they were available on TVs and other electronics.
I agree with you, but this may not be possible if you're working for a customer, rather than an internal project. I'm currently doing team leader work and responsible for giving work to the guys on the team, but even I can't get a decent spec.
I'm also getting incredibly annoyed at being asked to implement stupid specifications. But if the customer will not accept the advice I give, there is little I can do. The best I can do is try to shield programmers from criticism when the changes don't work operationally - frequently for reasons I put in writing to the customer.
And I'm not a salesman and don't want to be - I'm often suggesting simpler and cheaper alternatives that will do a better job, yet still ending up implementing an overcomplex and underperforming system.
Preparing an aircraft for takeoff is easy compared to medical care in one very important way. You prepare, and then when ready, you do the takeoff. I'm completely convinced that take-off and landing checklists are a great idea.
But do pilots look through a checklist to see what to do in an emergency, while the plane is falling out of the sky? Because I think that is a far more analogous situation to an ICU.
It might be a lethal mistake to give drug A if the patient has a rare condition X. It's easy to add a point to the checklist and say it would save 10 lives a year because 10000 people have X and 0.1% are given drug A. But the chances are that not giving the drug in time could also cause the patients death.
Well not only that, but huge sections of PC / server stuff is still written in C. MS Windows and Office I believe are both written in C / C++. Linux is written in C. Open Office is mostly C++. From troubles interfacing with it, I'd have to guess the core of SAP is written in C.
That's a selection of some of the biggest software products around for PCs and servers, and it's still written in C / C++ even today. Most of the stuff I do at work is C also.
Realistically proprietary code is hidden from view. If a company grabs a GPL library and includes it in the base of their software, the chances are no-one will ever be any the wiser. It's so easy to copy the library and remove the headers, putting a restriction on it seems silly.
The thing is, most people writing BSD software are probably professional software developers. Their basic income comes from writing software, and if there are good quality components ready to be included, fantastic - they can hopefully earn money a bit quicker.
> On that note, have fun with your BSD item creation. > I need code to put into my next software product.
This wont worry most BSD proponents the smallest bit. I've already got a job that pays well. Stuff I've done outside of the job is strictly hobby stuff. I've no need to make money from it, and if you can use it in a product you can make money from, you're welcome to it.
For that matter, if the product makes a load of money and you want some extra work doing with the BSD component, you'll probably find the original author can do the work cheaper and quicker than getting someone else to look through and learn the code.
I really have no idea how people think these things are a good idea. And my wife believes it too, for reasons that don't follow any logic I can understand or argue against.
I am disgusted by the continued push to detain suspects for weeks on end without proper evidence in terrorist cases. But it genuinely does have fairly wide support amongst the people I know. Even when the government has publicly abused half the anti-terrorist laws they have introduced, people still tell me I'm being ridiculous saying that the government could abuse this legislation.
It's apalling that it's only the privileged, unelected members of the House of Lords that are protecting the rights of the common people. I'm almost tempted to think democracy doesn't work - in the UK the democratic part of the government seems to have degenerated to a mob mentality, and I think the situation would be far worse if we didn't have a group that are immune from being voted out.
nf controls the number formats recognised by vim - the default is "octal,hex". You can also add alpha and it will increment letters alphabetically, but I like it to automatically find the next number and increment that.
Just about every version of gvim correctly interprets operating system cut and paste. Certainly the windows and Linux versions work fine as well. However I think many people (myself included) generally use normal command line vim through an ssh or telnet session.
Auto-indent isn't great for a C-style language - you are better off using cindent. This removes most of the needs to unindent - when you type a bracket, it will automatically unindent it to the correct place. It's also useful setting up a quick keymapping to disable indentation:
:set noai :set cindent :set pastetoggle=<F12>
With this, when you need to paste a few lines of code (operating system cut and paste, not vim paste), you just hit F12 before you paste to disable all auto-indent, and F12 after to re-enable.
Wow - I love it! Never even thought such a thing might exist. Although firefox by default has the forward slash for a quick search anyway, which I think is probably the most used vim command I'd use in Firefox.
Ctrl-A auto-increments the next number. qq q records a macro that can be run with @q
Combined these are very useful. I often find myself having to put stuff into case statements like:
case LOC_ERA01: case LOC_ERA02:... case LOC_ERA06:/* do something */
break;
Now I just write the first line and run 'qq yy p Ctrl-A q 4@q'
The thing I love about vim is how naturally I run those sorts of macros. It's just taken me ages to actually think of how to do it but it all seems to come naturally as you type.
Just a note for the vim newbies. I went to Uni in 2002 and trained up in coding with Eclipse and Visual Studio. I'd never used vim or any other modal editor. After uni, I was sent to site for a few weeks on business without access to anything other than vim. It took a long while to get it, but now I'm a complete convert.
Eclise and Visual Studio are IDEs. Vim is a much better editor. Thankfully, both IDEs have a vim editor plugin to combine the best of both worlds. I'd never survive these days without a modal editor!
I'm moving my backups to hard discs for my media server, but not because I think they'll last longer, just for the convenience of using less discs to backup. A while back when I upgraded the server from 800GB to 1.6TB, on a RAID card without online capacity expansion, I had to re-rip everything.
Sitting there and swapping 200 DVDs isn't fun! And getting through the CSS encoding made each disc take a slightly annoying 20 minutes to copy to hard disc.
If the data is really important, you redo backups more frequently anyway. For stuff like my photos, which I couldn't replace if lost, I tend to rewrite the backups whenever there is an excuse. The earliest photos have now been on 4x CD-R, 32x CD-R, DVD-R and inkjet printed DVD-R. One more year and I'll have a good excuse to get a Blu-Ray writer:)
That's interesting maths, because it means that if you could ever get to 100% efficiency, a solar panel convering the lid of the laptop would be just about right to power the device.
But even with current technology, if my laptop at home had a solar panel built into the top, that could provide most of the power I need for it, as long as I leave it on the windowsill while I'm at work.
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After seven years at a company, you must almost certainly have made plenty of friends there. Sounds to me like just one guy is being a dick.
Can't the reference simply be directed to a particular person within the company - someone with a higher opinion of you? Obviously, you've probably got to pick someone more senior than yourself, but where I work, if I'd fallen out with the CEO, there would be two or three senior project managers who I could direct the reference to instead.
Just give them a call informally to mention the situation you've been put in, and ask them not to mention the reference to the problem guy. This seems a much simpler option than escalating the situation further than it needs to be.
The fact is that most *nix users that I know haven't been near Vista. The real disaster for Vista is that lots of people who actually quite like XP couldn't stand Vista.
I switched to Vista on my main office PC, and also on my home desktop. I tried my best to use it for about 6 months - waited for SP1 to fix everything. When it didn't, I got rid of Vista on both machines, and even paid the extra £60 required to get XP instead of Vista on my new laptop.
Very interesting video, although I'm not convinced he means it is legal, just perhaps that they will not bother prosecuting people for non-commercial filesharing. Sort of like how it's illegal to ride a motorbike without a helmet, but I've seen people riding down the autopistes wearing a business suit and no helmet, straight past the police, without getting pulled over.
I applied for a job with Oracle in the UK after University - over 6 years ago now. The first thing I came up against was this online personality test.
I decided to be honest with the answers. Evidently not the right decision as I failed the test and they were not interested in talking to me (despite at that time being almost guaranteed a 1st class degree in CS from a top university).
Q: "You have to give up on some things that you start."
A: "Strongly disagree."
This was one of the questions in the Oracle test - I put strongly agree. Occasionally new information appears after you've begun something, and possibly tells you that you're heading down the wrong path. You learn from this and start again.
The English is fine, just not the information!
Like many places, Spanish law has exemptions for private use, which probably makes removing DRM completely legal. However the owners are allowed to make copies only for private usage, with collective and lucrative uses not allowed. Sharing on P2P would definitely constitute a collective use.
Although as with almost everywhere else, P2P itself is not illegal.
Lost cause unfortunately - it's full of bottles for the baby and just one token beer bottle :(
Not being allowed to see the closing statement for your account is quite a big deal if you are unsure of the balance they want paying.
As ISP I once used had a £40 account closure fee. I couldn't find it written down in any of the paper sign up documents, although it was in online terms and conditions (which the sign up contract said could be changed at any time). I suspected it was illegal to really do that, in the UK at least, so I just put a bar on the payments and paid off everything except the £40.
With paper bills, they are sent to you to keep as long as you like. The e-bills direct equivalent would be sending you an email with the PDF attached. The physical equivalent of Verizon's policy is allowing you to visit their local office to see your statement, and pick up your own copy if you like. But when you close the account they lock the door - if you hadn't been in to collect your last bill, tough luck.
For those in the UK, it's interesting to note that the Sky+ HD box uses 36W in standby (well, mine does as measured by my power meter), which at UK energy prices works out somewhere around £36 / year to leave it in standby.
Extremely annoying since it you turn it off it can't record the programs you've scheduled to record. All my other consumer electronics stuff registered as either 0.1W or 0.0W in standby mode.
Well I've certainly just done that with the Fridge and Freezer I've just bought. In fact I didn't buy the nicer looking Budweiser drinks chiller I'd originally set out to buy because the big energy label on it showed it took 270KWh / year instead of the 115 KWh for the similar sized plain white one.
I can't think of any reason why I'd ignore energy ratings if they were available on TVs and other electronics.
I agree with you, but this may not be possible if you're working for a customer, rather than an internal project. I'm currently doing team leader work and responsible for giving work to the guys on the team, but even I can't get a decent spec.
I'm also getting incredibly annoyed at being asked to implement stupid specifications. But if the customer will not accept the advice I give, there is little I can do. The best I can do is try to shield programmers from criticism when the changes don't work operationally - frequently for reasons I put in writing to the customer.
And I'm not a salesman and don't want to be - I'm often suggesting simpler and cheaper alternatives that will do a better job, yet still ending up implementing an overcomplex and underperforming system.
Preparing an aircraft for takeoff is easy compared to medical care in one very important way. You prepare, and then when ready, you do the takeoff. I'm completely convinced that take-off and landing checklists are a great idea.
But do pilots look through a checklist to see what to do in an emergency, while the plane is falling out of the sky? Because I think that is a far more analogous situation to an ICU.
It might be a lethal mistake to give drug A if the patient has a rare condition X. It's easy to add a point to the checklist and say it would save 10 lives a year because 10000 people have X and 0.1% are given drug A. But the chances are that not giving the drug in time could also cause the patients death.
Well not only that, but huge sections of PC / server stuff is still written in C. MS Windows and Office I believe are both written in C / C++. Linux is written in C. Open Office is mostly C++. From troubles interfacing with it, I'd have to guess the core of SAP is written in C.
That's a selection of some of the biggest software products around for PCs and servers, and it's still written in C / C++ even today. Most of the stuff I do at work is C also.
Realistically proprietary code is hidden from view. If a company grabs a GPL library and includes it in the base of their software, the chances are no-one will ever be any the wiser. It's so easy to copy the library and remove the headers, putting a restriction on it seems silly.
The thing is, most people writing BSD software are probably professional software developers. Their basic income comes from writing software, and if there are good quality components ready to be included, fantastic - they can hopefully earn money a bit quicker.
> On that note, have fun with your BSD item creation.
> I need code to put into my next software product.
This wont worry most BSD proponents the smallest bit. I've already got a job that pays well. Stuff I've done outside of the job is strictly hobby stuff. I've no need to make money from it, and if you can use it in a product you can make money from, you're welcome to it.
For that matter, if the product makes a load of money and you want some extra work doing with the BSD component, you'll probably find the original author can do the work cheaper and quicker than getting someone else to look through and learn the code.
I really have no idea how people think these things are a good idea. And my wife believes it too, for reasons that don't follow any logic I can understand or argue against.
I am disgusted by the continued push to detain suspects for weeks on end without proper evidence in terrorist cases. But it genuinely does have fairly wide support amongst the people I know. Even when the government has publicly abused half the anti-terrorist laws they have introduced, people still tell me I'm being ridiculous saying that the government could abuse this legislation.
It's apalling that it's only the privileged, unelected members of the House of Lords that are protecting the rights of the common people. I'm almost tempted to think democracy doesn't work - in the UK the democratic part of the government seems to have degenerated to a mob mentality, and I think the situation would be far worse if we didn't have a group that are immune from being voted out.
q1 (not qq1) starts recording a macro called 1.
Just noticed my original post came out wrong, damn HTML tags! It should have said qq <commands> q.
The first q is record macro, and the second is the macro name (I just find q is the easiest name), and the final one is to stop recording.
I use them all the time also.
nf controls the number formats recognised by vim - the default is "octal,hex". You can also add alpha and it will increment letters alphabetically, but I like it to automatically find the next number and increment that.
Just about every version of gvim correctly interprets operating system cut and paste. Certainly the windows and Linux versions work fine as well. However I think many people (myself included) generally use normal command line vim through an ssh or telnet session.
Auto-indent isn't great for a C-style language - you are better off using cindent. This removes most of the needs to unindent - when you type a bracket, it will automatically unindent it to the correct place. It's also useful setting up a quick keymapping to disable indentation:
With this, when you need to paste a few lines of code (operating system cut and paste, not vim paste), you just hit F12 before you paste to disable all auto-indent, and F12 after to re-enable.
Wow - I love it! Never even thought such a thing might exist. Although firefox by default has the forward slash for a quick search anyway, which I think is probably the most used vim command I'd use in Firefox.
Ctrl-A auto-increments the next number.
qq q records a macro that can be run with @q
Combined these are very useful. I often find myself having to put stuff into case statements like:
case LOC_ERA01: ... /* do something */
case LOC_ERA02:
case LOC_ERA06:
break;
Now I just write the first line and run
'qq yy p Ctrl-A q 4@q'
The thing I love about vim is how naturally I run those sorts of macros. It's just taken me ages to actually think of how to do it but it all seems to come naturally as you type.
Just a note for the vim newbies. I went to Uni in 2002 and trained up in coding with Eclipse and Visual Studio. I'd never used vim or any other modal editor. After uni, I was sent to site for a few weeks on business without access to anything other than vim. It took a long while to get it, but now I'm a complete convert.
Eclise and Visual Studio are IDEs. Vim is a much better editor. Thankfully, both IDEs have a vim editor plugin to combine the best of both worlds. I'd never survive these days without a modal editor!
I'm moving my backups to hard discs for my media server, but not because I think they'll last longer, just for the convenience of using less discs to backup. A while back when I upgraded the server from 800GB to 1.6TB, on a RAID card without online capacity expansion, I had to re-rip everything.
Sitting there and swapping 200 DVDs isn't fun! And getting through the CSS encoding made each disc take a slightly annoying 20 minutes to copy to hard disc.
If the data is really important, you redo backups more frequently anyway. For stuff like my photos, which I couldn't replace if lost, I tend to rewrite the backups whenever there is an excuse. The earliest photos have now been on 4x CD-R, 32x CD-R, DVD-R and inkjet printed DVD-R. One more year and I'll have a good excuse to get a Blu-Ray writer :)
Nero has a test utility, but I've not really found the results to be all that useful.
I get similar results from both unreadable discs that are 8 years old and stuff that I think is high quality Verbatim discs burned this year.
My biggest oh @*(! moment was logged in as root, pressing escape-k-enter to repeat my last command ('vi hosts').
Unfortunately another user was also logged in as root, and 'rm *' appeared on the command line.
That's interesting maths, because it means that if you could ever get to 100% efficiency, a solar panel convering the lid of the laptop would be just about right to power the device.
But even with current technology, if my laptop at home had a solar panel built into the top, that could provide most of the power I need for it, as long as I leave it on the windowsill while I'm at work.
Does the Mail have a gallery of these "experts" on standby to give a comment as required for the scare of the day...
From that comment, I'd assume you've never read the Daily Mail. But then you seem to have a list of their recent headlines.
Oh I see, you *think* you're being sarcastic!