The template for the printable version of an article has changed a while ago, and now the article body is in a table. Unfortunately IE cannot properly print text inside table cell and it truncates the end of lines (I don't know about IE 7, but anything up to IE 6 has this "feature"). That means that the "printable" version of the article is not printable anymore. Please change the template so that the article body is not in a table anymore. Regards,

OGR

thanks, Yes, of course WinXP Pro. The server will be Win2003, but that is another matter. When it comes to Vista and future versions of Microsoft (and not many other companies are any better) products I'm a lot less enthusiast than you are about using them in production. Playing with the new technology is nice, like all games are, but I cannot see why the management would want to make the jump now. I know someone has to do it and if everyone would just sit back there would be not progress, but I also remember the good old times when a new version would: - be available reasonably close to the (first promised) schedule - come with all the promised new features - would be reliable before the magical 3rd service pack

OGR

thanks, and congratulations on becoming an uncle

OGR

thanks

OGR

I know this was discussed any number of times before, but I was not able to find the best thread for it: What would be the recommended specs for a decent* VS 2005 development machine? * - something that would be nice to use and get approved by management. The company I'm working for at the moment want to move away from a VB6 desktop environment towards a ASP.NET 2.0 one. Not much is clear at the moment, but it looks like the new "direction" would involve: - WinXP (all the client machines are Win2K or WinXP, and we'll still have to do support for existing apps for a long while) - ASP.NET 2.0 - SQL Server 2005 / Analysis Services / Reporting Services - BizTalk I suspect that the main questions would be: 1. Can we live with WinXP, or do we really need separate WinServer2003 machines for this? 2. How much memory do we need? 3. What would be the best license to choose? 4. What would be the minimal license? Thanks,

OGR

sorry, I probably didn't make myself understood: men are not "partially blind" (at least I'm not aware of it :-) ), they are a lot more "fashion blind" than the fairer sex. OGR

A lot of years ago I had to go through a medical exam for my (mandatory at the time) army service. Part of the whole thing was a color blindness test. What pretty much everybody thinks is "color blindness = cannot distinguish red from green". The test taught me a lot more on the subject. It consisted of something like 30 (at least) pages with very simple pictures of alphabet characters or digits made of colored blobs. Think of pointilism with large dots. And the color combinations were very varied, covering pretty much the whole spectrum. And to answer your question, only few of us came out of the test with a 100% result. On the bright side, unless you want to be an airplane pilot, males cannot name more than 5 or 6 colors anyway :-) OGR

code-frog wrote:

in an effort to tone/build muscle and trim body fat

and if you do it just for fun? OGR

Get rid of the ab-cruncher and do normal crunches: 1. make sure you do crunches and not situps! 2. practice 3 times a week, 50 increasing to 80 repetitions, in series of 10 - 12 repetitions with 5 seconds pause in between 3. maintain form: slow (up 1 second, hold 1/2 second, down 1 second), head and elbows don't move I don't know about "flat", but you'll get an improvement in a few weeks. The ab-cruncher is almost guaranteed to give you no return OGR

maybe they were thinking you wanted roaming? OGR

This is what they told us in highschool: "Money is a merchandise. What makes using money different from other forms of barter is the guarantee of the state on the value of the local currency." (Pretty much word for word, minus memory slips and bad translation :-) ) Which probably means: the money is worth exactly what the government says it is. And the goverment specifies it in terms of gold. Don't ask me where to find this information, but as far as I know this is a general rule, since the guarantee is mainly for international trade, not for you and me. From what I've been told, one of the strange results of this rule is that a state has the obligation to circulate a coin or bill for the 1 unit of its currency. 1 dollar or 1 euro might not sound that bad, but when a loaf of bread is worth 1,300 lei and even the public phones only use 100 lei coins ... I don't know if I understood your question correctly or if my explanation makes things any clearer for you, but I do have to ask this: who feels the need to vote for such a question? OGR

Pete Madden wrote:

While I agree that it isn't that simple I don't see why you would need to know this: Who invested the money into the project and assumed the risk of that investment?

Because the investor takes a risk and does it for a percentage, while you were probably hired on an employment contract, just like me and most of the others here. The investor had to work hard to come up with the idea and to prepare everything for the start of production, the employees only do their share for part of the time. The investor can lose everything while you might need to search for another cosy, no heavy lifting involved, 9 to 5 job. Who would take any risks if there would be no possibility of gain into it? The bottom line is: the profit margin is usually a lot less than you think and you were hired for a salary anyway. If you manage to make some very wealthy investor believe differently please let me know where to send my CV. OGR

Nishant Sivakumar wrote:

Far lower than in North America.

How do you calculate it? Per number of registered cars, per distance travelled, per time spent in traffic? Plus you have the rate of mortality per number of accidents... Not all statistics would tell you the same thing. I rememer reading somewhere the US was leading by far in the rate of accidents, but it is largely to do with the fact that people are doing a lot more travel. The "unnatural" figures were Greece and Portugal, close to the US figures and twice the European average. As someone that drove through Greece I can fully understand why. OGR

Yes, it's called an amputation :-) Don't even think about it, losing a lot of weight in a short time: - doesn't last. You'll put it all back in no time. - can be very bad for your health, especially your heart. And if you want to skip meals (bad idea anyway, you should aim for a life style you can maintain for the rest of your life), dinner is the one you should choose. Breakfast is essential and lunch is a very good habit :-) Try to find things you will enjoy or not miss much: get extra regular exercise ("regular" is the important word here, it doesn't need to be hard), replace part of the excess coffee, soft drink and chocolate bars with water. Avoid stupid fat-free, sugar-free, whatever-free diets. The trouble is that your body gets used to your "current fat level". Any variations are "analysed" and "acted upon", but weight increases are usualy accepted. Any weigth losses, on the other hand, are perceived as "dangerous" (less resources to use in emergencies). The result is that you'll get cravings and stress on top of the fact that usual diets are based on missing things you enjoy. You need to make the change gradual and allow your body to get used to the new state. best of luck OGR

no you don't. on the other hand: - contraception was not illegal - few kids born in those times are still up for adoption I have a colleague and friend who tried to adopt a second child (this happens in Australia. They already have a daughter of their own but health issues don't offer more pleasant alternatives) The amount of trouble he had to go through brought back kind memories of the dictatorship you mentioned (I left Romania in '99). My friend failed in the end. It took him more than 2 years to give up, and it's not like there are no kids needing adoptive parents here in Australia. The only problem is that he cannot blame it on Ceausescu or dictatorship. OGR

ahz wrote:

so what you're saying is if I "copied" the Mona Lisa painting using my own paints and canvas and then uploaded a digital copy of it to the internet, that should be allowed?

If you paint your own version of Mona Lisa and try to sell it as being the original the (justifiable) charge would be fraud and not copyright infringement. But I'm fairly sure (I'm just a bad programmer, not a lawyer :~ ) that if you try to publish a photo of the original in a book or article you have to get the approval of the copyright owner. Since the lyrics of a song are something a lot simpler than Mona Lisa, I'd say a transcript is a good enough copy to raise copyright issues. Put it another way: you could buy an audio version of your preferred book and you write down the content. Do you think that should be allowed? OGR

Kevin McFarlane wrote:

Yes, it seems to be the Java "house style." My best friend from uni who's also a Java guy uses this style too. Though he also used it in C++.

I never understood the connection between language and coding style. Unless, of course, the language itself disallows / discourages specific constructs, like using spaces between function name and opening bracket in Python or Ruby. I remember a couple of Microsoft training courses I was on. On the C# training course we were told, under pain of death, to use "RaiseEvent" and not "FireEvent". Never mind, a couple of months later, during the ASP.NET course, it was "FireEvent" all the way. At least they had the good manners not to make it a big issue out of it. But the saddest thing was that a couple of "experienced" programmers asked (and they were a 100% honest!) "why?". To my mind, the coding style only has to do with consistency, readability, testability (try debugging multiple statements on the same line and see how you like it) and clarity (see Joel On Software for a few interesting points about this aspect). And, as long as the compiler/interpreter understands it, what do I care about "house style"? Just imagine that the conventions would change for each different literary style (Yes, I know, programmers only ever read IT manuals and sci-fi, but still...) OGR

It's 4 and 5 for me. And I would fail a candidate for (1 or 3) and (1 or 4). OGR

bob16972 wrote:

Whats tedious are people who just blindly accept that everyone should remain calm while Microsoft ruins our programming careers.

MS ruining my/your career? You must be joking! The worse their products are, the harder they are to use. The easier it is to make the difference between a good developer and an also-run. It is crappy products that make you an expert, you don't get any bonus points for being able to use the remote of your TV set. Apart from that, I fully agree with you. OGR

Daniel Turini wrote:

Joel sometimes writes good articles. But sometimes, he's shallow. As in this case. Do you know where this reasoning leads to? ... Then, see if your customers agree with this cost analysis.

I'm sorry, but I think Joel was right on this one. Your example looks great, but it's extreme and it doesn't apply here. The cost-benefit analysis should be done by any supplier, and his article explains how he did it in his case. The only trouble is that it has to be done properly. Ford obviously didn't. Because, no matter what decision do you reach after the analysis, some people will be less than thrilled. you just have to make sure you make unhappy fewer people and/or less influential one. I'm not very excited when I get the wrong end of such a decision myself, but that is not because the idea of the cost-benefit is faulty. Maybe someone applied it badly or I'm just too small a fry. OGR