(a) Five years* (b) Two years * And now that I have that extra week of vacation, I have more incentive to stay. :) The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Background: I have a friend who works for IT at a store chain. In fact this has been his only job ever.. in high school he was a bagger/cashier, later a store manager, and then after college went into IT which is what he does now. He has been looking for new jobs for a while, and has pretty good prospects with one employer. Naturally, they want references. The only problem is that his company's policy is not to give references. It seems in the programming/IT world this is becomming more and more of an issue. I guess employers fear retaliation for bad references so they don't give references at all, aside from simply verifying employment and stuff like that. Anybody else around here been through anything like this and have any advice? What are the best ways of getting professional references these days when your employer won't give them? This situation might be a bit unique... I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone besides this guy who's only worked at one company their whole life. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

I believe it is illegal for you to pump your own gas in New Jersey as well as Oregon. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

V. wrote: Especially the one with the truck is hilarious. When you hear it, it's even better! (and a little different) Yeah, it went more like " I was delivering this overpass and ran out of gas". :-D The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Unfortunately.. my home PC still has Windows 98. I have been thinking about upgrading to XP, I'd have to see if the machine will even support it, though maybe I can get by with some extra memory. Can't really afford to upgrade the whole computer right now. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Marc Clifton wrote: rather than the tool providing any specific feature that CVS is missing. I am not sure that this statement is correct. I know Subversion will revision not only files but also directories. (I may be wrong but I think CVS does *not* do this.) Depending on what you are doing, that can be huge. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Matt Gerrans wrote: What's the greatest animal? What's the greatest food? What's the best color? Cat, chocolate, green. Those were easy questions. :-D The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

So are you saying I should send any e-mails to you through Babelfish or something before sending them? :-D The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

That seems strange, and counter-productive. You should always be able to find out who somebody's manager is, becuase it's (unfortunatley) sometimes necessary information. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

DavidCrow wrote: far unable to find any songs by Garth Brooks or Tim McGraw. Why would you want to? :-D The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Wrong forum.[^] The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Perl? You wuss. I do everything in either assembly, batch files, or shell scripts. :-D The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

ahz wrote: LOL. You'd think this was 1985 or something. Don't be silly, they didn't have USB back in '85. :-D The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

One word: Eclipse[^]. Great development tool! The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

There are other JVMs though besides Sun (e.g., IBM.) The problem with .NET and embedded is that most embedded devices are NOT Windows. Many do run Linux, so maybe Mono will help. Many though run other special-purpose OSes. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Wha-huh - Java and C# are different? :-D Seriously though, yeah I technically first learned C# before Java, but have programmed much more in Java since (never really had a production product in C#, haven't really used it in a while) but they are definitely more similar to each other than either one is to C++... perhaps so much so that gripes I have/had with C# I also have with Java (for instance, not being able to rely on destructors becuase of the GC environment.) And philosophically C# and Java are similar. C# has the .NET framework libraries to provide a lot of standard funcionality; Java includes a lot of standard functionality built-in. But with C++ the standard library is fairly small - to get much done you either need third-party components or homegrown stuff. One big advantage Java has right now is it is much more cross-platform friendly. Mono might change that in the .NET world though, but it'll take time. The flip side, of course, is that C#/.NET does a better job of taking advantage of Windows-specific features. All and all I can't say I dislike any of them - they all have their place. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

And isn't this a verse in that song: "It's like a windmill on your migration day" :confused: :-D The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Nitron wrote: I got used to doing everything the MFC way, now it's like I'm stuck. There's the real problem. To kick the MFC habit, you could try cold turkey, but I was successful with the gum. (There's also a patch.) I've been MFC-free for four years now, and have never felt better! The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Granted, I am on the US side of the pond, but I used to work for such a company. Believe me, companies that invest significant amounts of money in research will keep that research closely guarded... they may not use patents at all to do this (I believe you have to make your information public to patent it anyway.) The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Notepad fails miserably when trying to open a Unix-style file. Personally, I prefer Notepad2[^]. The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.