I had a similar thing. I live in Nevada, which is a right-to-work state (which I translate as you have no right to work), where they can fire you without notice or giving cause. In my case I had a new job lined up just after I was taking some vacation. Our Employee Handbook (the employment contract someone mentioned) stated three things: 1) They want at least 2 weeks notice if you are leaving voluntarily. 2) They may ask you to leave prior to your requested last day after giving notice. 3) Any accumulated vacation will not necessarily be paid to you upon voluntary termination. So while my new job wanted me to start at the beginning of August, I had already planned to take the vacation (a wedding cruise) months in advance for the last week of July. So I didn't give notice prior to the vacation, because I figured they might request that I leave at that point. Instead I waited until my first day back after the cruise. So I gave notice, brought a project and department manager up to speed on the Selenium project I had been doing for them. My manager had called a group meeting late that morning letting the group know I had given notice and all indications were that I would spend the next two weeks getting my customer support cases and the Selenium project transferred over. However, I got a call to go to a conference room at 4:30PM and they basically gave me my walking papers. My manager went back to my desk to get my stuff from it and bring it to me. Now other people at the company had given notice and were there for at least the two weeks, so we all knew about it in advance. The person that trained me for the support work when I started was one of them. However, I think I was let go more quickly because I was doing development work and they didn't want any security issues from me putting some type of malware into the code. That was the first time our group had ever done coding, so in my case I think it was a security issue. I think any developer might have to expect that, but I objected to them asking for 2 weeks notice yet not paying you accumulated vacation time or the remainder of the two weeks if they let you go sooner. They were a lousy company as far as how they dealt with their employees and that is just one such example.

Sounds like a good time to practice your documentation skills. Tell them that such a project can't be started until the XML to be converted into is fully documented so the two can be mapped for the conversion, which is perfectly true. That gets you time and a paycheck to looks for something better, plus you can add that onto your resume to show you accomplished something while there. A good workplace will respect that you can do documentation. A place that doesn't is not a good place to work.

I would be sure you have the Oracle JVM installed and not the Open JDK. Sometimes the features are not in sync between the official JVM and the Open version. Since the Oracle one is free, I always use it and remove the Open JDK.

15, which isn't the youngest I see here, but then it was in 1973. We had access to the LA City Schools HP 3000C and were locked into the Basic interpreter. Connected to it through an ASR-33 teletype via modem @ 100Baud. Programs were kept on paper tape, because we had no way to store files and we had a spare TTY to create tapes on. Aside from various class programs I wrote a version of the Star Trek game, plus we had a version of Life we kept trying to improve on.

An HP-2000C via modem using an ASR-33 teletype @ 110 baud in high school. It was available to some schools in the Los Angeles School District if there was an instructor to teach Basic programming (all we had). Programs were created offline on another ASR-33 using paper tape. We couldn't store files, so when done you had to output your program onto paper tape again after making changes or lose them. My first personal computer was a Commodore Kim-1 (6502) with an S-100 expansion board to add 8K bytes of static RAM. The terminal was a Compucolor 8001 19" color graphics terminal, which was an 8080 computer in its own right. This was in 1974 I believe. Mike

An A10 gives you quad core with decent graphics. Take a look at this one on sale at Fry's this weekend: http://www.frys.com/product/7412985#detailed[^] Here is another one: http://www.frys.com/product/7672387?site=sa:adpages%20page:P33_MON%20date:082613[^] I use one at work and have an i5 for my personal laptop. They are pretty equivalent in performance, but I believe the A10 has the edge in raw speed, where the i5 is a bit better with battery life. However the i5 is a 15.6" screen while the A10 is a 17", so that affects battery life, too.

I worked for a company where a small group of us had created a multi-user OS that ran on x86 CPUs. I had created the filesystem design and all of a sudden we ran into an issue where directory blocks where somehow being written to the wrong place in the directory. This wiped out the entries that had been in that block and created duplicate directories entries for the files in the block that had been copied. We couldn't figure out the root cause, because it happened so rarely and only some customers saw it more than once. I used a spare dword in the header block, which stored the allocation block numbers for the file data as well as file attribute info, and stored the block number for the directory entry it should be using. There were then checks made in utilities for directory listings and file searches that checked that the correct directory entry was being used and reported an error if it saw a mismatch. So now duplicate directory entries showed as bad entries when doing a directory listing, but it didn't do that until well after it had occurred. So I added a check in the write directory block routine to also do the check. It would generate an error if it had ever been told to write a directory block to a sector that did not match what was in the file header. This would only happen during a create, close, or delete operation. Once the code with that check went out the error never happened again. No fix was done. I had only created a check to report an error to catch it happening before it wrote to the wrong directory sector. I called it the Schrodinger's Cat bug. Just looking in the box prevented it from ever happening. Mike

It got the penetration because it was bundled with the OS. Netscape/Mozilla were far better than IE6. I previously had to use Selenium to do automated web site testing and nothing ran as slow as IE 6. Firefox 3.6 was 5 times faster and IE 7 was at least double the speed. Mike

My first computer was a Commodore Kim-1, which was a 6502 (1MHz!) Single Board Computer (SBC). I added an S-100 expansion board to it with an 8K static (!) memory card. I ran tiny basic on it, which you loaded using a cassette tape drive. I was still in high school, so that was either '73 or '74. I only had to solder the S-100 expansion and RAM cards, as the Kim-1 came assembled. I used a Memorex printer/terminal as the console until I got an Intercolor 8001 CRT (look it up, it was awesome for its time. 19" color terminal with an 8085 for a brain). I then built from scratch a complete S-100 Z80 (4MHz - no we were cooking!) with two 64MB dynamic RAM cards (bank switching anyone?). It sat in a Godbout (I may have spelled that wrong) rack mount case (I had a 5ft high rack) with an IMSAI front panel (watch the original Wargames movie to see one) and a Tarbell floppy controller with dual 8in Qume floppy drives (the fastest ever made). I later replaced the CPU with a Seattle Computer Products 8086 (8MHz - warp speed!), still using the 128MB of RAM from before and the IMSAI front panel. I had to write my own BIOS and drivers for the floppy disks (8in and 5.25") and hard drives (SASI - precursor to SCSI). I had four, count them 4, 15MB 5.25in hard disks on that system. That was back when you got a 5MB drive on a PC XT. That system was hot! All running DOS-86, which Microsoft bought and renamed to PC-DOS. That system was running almost a year before the IBM PC came out. Mike

I did it when working at Sun Microsystems and was very productive. It allowed me to communicate with people in Europe in the morning and China or India in the evening. Plus we had a VPN solution that made my system act like it was in the Menlo Park campus network, which was not possible within the office network. Code checkouts and checkins had to be done from there or they were terribly slow if you used an NFS mount across the WAN. Unlike a lot of VPN, I still had visibility of my local network devices, so I could print to my network printer. Since my home network was as fast or faster than what I had to share at the office with 75 people, I got better network performance as well. We also had a phone setup that allowed us to have an extension on the company phone network that could be directed to whatever phone you happened to be at, complete with voicemail. We could also get faxes and place outgoing calls so there was no additional costs you had to expense. My round trip commute was 3 hours before that, assuming there was no traffic problems. So putting in a 10 hour workday to resolve an issue was still less time than I used to spend when you figure in a commute. I turned the system on when I woke up and it stayed on until I went to bed, keeping me in communication for a good 12-16 hours per day. I know my productivity improved because I didn't have to allow for my commute time. The key was my office was at one end of the house, away from all other distractions. It probably didn't hurt that my boss worked in a different office than I did, so face time with him had always involved one of us traveling. Mike

My laptop had only 4GB, but it still ran Netbeans okay, usually with a FF browser up. With 8GB I often am running a VM with it, and the browser. For some classes I had I even ran Netbeans in the VM, which I only allotted 2GB (it was Linux) and it ran fine. It have used Java 6 and 7 for it, but prefer to use 7 (prettier JavaDoc output). Mike

The biggest issue I have found is how header files can change. I had to help port a large Solaris 8 suite that ran on Solaris 8 (X86 & SPARC), Linux, and Windows to just be on Solaris 10 X86. The major change was fuller (and strict) ANSI support as well as 64-bit versus 32-bit. Another change is that sometimes header files move, or what you want to use is now defined in a different header file. I have used VS 2008, 2010, and am starting to look at 2012 on Windows. However, I have also used the Netbeans IDE combined with GCC on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. I had one job where they used a very early VS ('96?) that was terrible! I did all my coding in Netbeans + GCC and only did the builds in VS when I had to generate code for that embedded platform. The current Solaris Studio IDE is really Netbeans IDE using the Sun/Oracle compiler as a backend. Netbeans can also use that compiler as the backend. Mike