They are all pretty good - thanks for the link. I think that the xerox logo update shows a touch of genius.

oDesk.com is getting a lot of hours of work done. (I'm signed up there as a supplier of software development services, but inactive at present) And their commercial model is (I think) 10% of the value of work done, so small jobs have small fees. Work can be hourly rate, or fixed price. Everyone has a reputation score, and the site provides online Tests that developers can take to show that they have skills in particular areas. And the customer gets to vet the workers, before the job starts. Gzep.

Broadcast power has the problem that the available energy drops off in a distance-cubed-ratio ratio (I seem to recall). So sitting on a mat/antenna is ok, moving it a metre away means the losses in the charging process are probably more than the power available at that distance. ouch!

how about test driven programming? if they write a test for each case that they code, and the test is valid, then they will see where the code fails... and fix it without losing face. even if someone else writes the test, the programmer could run them, see the results, and fix the problem.

G'day. I reckon Mr Molony had good idea, and is just trying to turn a frontier town into a society. Just wait until those ladies find out that the miners make 2 to 3 TIMES the national average wage, and accommodation is real cheap out there... thousands of guys, with lots of money - he'll get some.

My 20c worth... I have been using DNN for a few years now. On the basis that DNN was a bit slow and bloaty, the last site we built was done in pure asp.net. Now the customer wants to edit content themselves, and make it multi-lingual, and add pages themselves, and make some page content context &/or login sensitive... In short, we should have used DNN. If your customer is very likely to expand the specs, and your development team use microsoft tools, DNN is still a very good choice. You don't have to custom write modules to handle all the things the base system doesn't do, there are heaps of free and commercial modules already available online. Note about VB: if you use C#.net to write the modules, they work just the same! Trevor Mullen. Senior Software Developer Datamax Holdings P/L Australia.

Real answer. I'm in visual studio all day also, and find that one monitor is useable, but not very convenient. Recently the boss upgraded my monitors, to dual 19inch wide screen (from dual 17inch normal ratio) The widescreens looked really cool, until I discovered that scrolling source code was a pain in the butt! I rotated them to portrait mode, and jacked them up a bit with some old textbooks, and now have the equivalent to a 26inch monitor, but at near twice the resolution of most 26inch monitors. In visual studio I make the VS desktop almost the full width of both monitors. I run the code window on the left monitor (72+ lines of 10 point font code visible - large enough to not cause eyestrain) On the right monitor I leave the toolbox, properties box, solution explorer and sometimes the database explorer open all the time (pinned) for quick access. I got used to haveing an easy to use environment real quick!!! Unless the 30inch monitors are portrait mode, they will actully show you LESS lines of code than my setup! gzep. -- modified at 20:36 Monday 15th October, 2007

Stuart Dootson wrote:

What else....if you can find it, Harry Harrison's 'A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!' was a nice piece of 'alternate-world' fiction

I think I've still got a copy you can have for the price of the shipping... It was the only Harry Harrison story that I didn't like... Trevor.