Rawk! I'm in the Highlands area also -- I'm right down Virginia Ave and just go to work right up 10th st at Turner across from GA Tech. The commute is sweet -- can't beat 10 mins max.

I'm new to tipping in the US and was wondering how one tips when going up to the cashier in the front to pay a bill when using cash? I realize then when paying with a card there's a tip line printed out that one can use to pay a tip. But when paying with cash do we wait for the cashier to return the change and then give back a tip from that change? Or do we tell the cashier before hand what the tip to take out is before they calculate our total? The question also goes to paying for the bill via cash and the waiter takes it. Do we leave a tip after they return with the change, do we tell them when they take the cash to get change? ie. I'm pretty much looking for what is the standard thing to say/do when tipping via cash

I think the reason behind the required registration in order to view the source code was due to a problem with people running spiders which would try to download everything off the website, and as a result would load the server and make access to the website slower for other users. With the registration required to access downloads it would allow Chris to easily disable the offending account. There were problems with banning users by an IP address, etc.

I was reading this article: http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp[^] And it shows the following for regular joins: SELECT Employees.Name, Orders.Product FROM Employees, Orders WHERE Employees.Employee_ID=Orders.Employee_ID and then the following for INNER JOINS: SELECT Employees.Name, Orders.Product FROM Employees INNER JOIN Orders ON Employees.Employee_ID=Orders.Employee_ID They seem to always return the same results. Is there a difference between the two types of queries above? Or are they the same? Is there any performance reasons or any other reasons when I should favor one type of query above the other? Thanks!

Ah, I didn't know that! I learn something new everyday from this site! Thanxs. :-D

It takes a little more time (not a lot, but still) to remove the doc/view stuff out. Plus I think dialog based apps look much better and cooler than the SDI & FormView combo due to the recessed border look it has versus the "popout" borders of a dialog app.

Right, good point! That's one way of looking at the security aspect of it. But if you don't know many people and can't bring in a steady stream of clients then the financial security will be less than an employee being able to collect a paycheck every month regardless of whether or not the company has any clients that month. So the security is there if you've got a rolodex of clients that can keep you busy. But many people who haven't worked in the field for many years won't have that type of client list to call upon and would most likely be struggling just to make ends meet. I was in the latter situation when I first started consulting a while ago and almost wished I was an employee again.

What's the probability that once the first project ends they'll just make me redundant (as a cheap contractor)? Contractors are treated as contractors which are treated poorly by most companies as people for hacking out code. They are not valued as highly as employees and usually don't receive the same benefits such as health care, stock options, etc. The only thing that you do get though is the ability to bill at a high hourly rate and possibly the freedom to work your own hours. If you're not getting either of the last two and will only get a slightly high hourly rate and will have to come in at whatever times they tell you too then you won't be much better off than an employee. The other thing is that they may not even retain you after the first project, however, that depends on the company. You should be prepared to go looking for more work after the 9-12 months are over in case they find that they really don't need you anymore. It's much easier to get rid of contractors than employees. However, depending on you and your situation, this may be the change you need. Perhaps you're tired of the security and want some more excitement in your life and the ability to work with different companies on different projects. There may be huge gaps in between jobs so you have to be careful to always save money for the downtimes. But if you're main concern is security and benefits, which it currently seems like, then you're better off staying as an employee. Being a contractor and code/road warrior takes a lot of work but can be satisfying for a person that likes to live on the edge.

The first thing to do is to succinctly think out your idea. You have to know your market backwards and forwards, and also even more importantly who would be your competitors (and equally important who might possibly be a competitor later on). Write a one or two page marketing competitive advantage summary which touch upon the details above and your product/service's sustainable competitive advantage. Then go to your friends and family members first and ask them if they know of any entreprenuers that may be interested in what you're doing. You never know but some of them however unlikely may know of somebody. If they don't know of anybody then go to local business events. I don't know if First Tuesday (http://www.firsttuesday.com/[^]) meets anywhere where you're at, but that would be one good place to go to to try and find a partner. Forget about trying to get venture capital. Those guys will only work with people that have been referred to them that they know or if you already have a big reputation. You may, however, want to try angel investors by calling up rich families in the areas where you live but don't expect a whole lot of money from them. Also, you might just want to consider forgoing raising capital initially especially in this down economy and build a prototype first. After you have something that may work, then it may be easier to approach potential investors to help finance your idea. It may be hard to just ask for money with just an idea especially if they don't know you, so having a prototype to show would make it easier to sell your idea to potential backers. Good luck!

Get yourself a video game, a basketball, or something else fun that you would enjoy. And relish it as something you now have the time to do now that you've not only saved money but time as well from not having to go out every hour or so for a cigarette break.

That's terrible. I'm extremely annoyed when websites started talking to me, playing music, or starting some other noise making racket. They'll learn sooner or later how awful it is after they refresh their home page a couple of times.

I was happy with the outcome also, but all of the hype about the suprise twist at the end didn't too much live up to my expectations. All of the commercials, rumors, etc. floating around about the big twist at the end set me up to expect something bigger to happen in the end. Also, Fox was pretty cheap. They could've gave them more than just a million dollars. Maybe two million. That way it would've been an even million dollar split each. And even a million dollars isn't enough to retire on these days.... sigh, back to the cranking at the old cog and chasing the almighty buck :)

I'd go with both since MFC isn't going away anytime soon for companies that need the faster performance possible while still making it bearable to program (I get a headache thinking about WTL). And .NET will be widely used soon and perhaps even replace VB and some Java as the interpreted language of choice. As for proportions, put a greater emphasis on .NET. Teach .NET first since it's easier, then reserve maybe a 1/4 of the latter part of the course for MFC.

Usually open source proponents and contributors don't care about the money. Their main impetus is to just develop something for free without the shackles of capitalism and corporate politics interfering with bringing their ideas to fruitation. Typically, they receive their gratification by the knowledge that their users are benefiting from their work. Most of them have full-time jobs and never get to work on projects that actually interest them, or they're high school / college students. Open source is a way to develop those projects in their spare time and makes it easy to find other developers to join them in their pursuits. If you're thinking about trying to find a revenue model from Open Source, the only one usually available depending on the type of license the code uses is to ask for money if they want support. RedHat uses this business model. I'm not sure how successful that is though. To me it seems that developing a pay-for-support biz model creates a conflict of interest between the users and the developers. The users want easy to setup and use software, while the developers want to increase their revenue. So how would the developers increase income from the support revenue stream? By making the software harder to use and to setup. That in turn will force people to pay for support if they want to use the software. I think this explains why most of the open source software out there using this type of business model has non user-friendly programs. IMHO, they're just setting themselves up to fail due to this conflict of interest.

Figure out three major things that you think will make your users purchase your product. Then beat your customers over their heads with those three things ad nauseum until they get annoyed with your pestering and buy your product instead. If you're not a good salesman and are not good at pushing a hard sale then you may want to consider partnering with someone who's really outgoing, extrovert, and has a lot of energy. Bill Gates partnered with Steve Ballmer early on who's the cheerleader and main sales guy. Gates just mainly thinks of the strategy, features, etc. while Ballmer makes the sales most of the time. This is the reason Ballmer is now currently President, while Gates has switched roles to Chief Architect or something from being President.

I couldn't believe how emotional the players were getting with all of the taunting, shoving, and pushing going on. It was ridiculous of them to act so unprofessional, yet it was entertaining and fun for me. :)

I'm pretty much the same way and will only rate when I feel extremely strong about something that was said. Otherwise, it seems pointless to give a 3 for an average comment.

A UI with more features for interacting with MSDE than that offered in the VS.NET environment. I don't have SQL Server or the Query Analyzer and have to work with the UI in VS.NET which doesn't always work very well. For example, when I'm trying to run a stored procedure, the values don't sometime display in the database tool output window. Maybe you could capture the inputs from the osql command line and create a GUI around it. Sort of like how WinCVS does for CVS.

It seems IBM is expecting a whole lot from Rational over the years if they intend to get their 2.1 Billion dollar investment return back.

I agree with your sentiments about customer service. The lack of considerate and competent CSRs rests solely on the managers and executives of the corporations. A long time ago I got my first start in the IT industry by working at a technical support dept. Needless to say, most of the support people there were very rude and impolite. I was appalled that managment would let things like quickly hanging up on a customer to decrease the avg. call time stats was readily accepted. I suppose a lot of these problems were the result of a bad criteria for measuring performance when evaluation reviews came along. The priorities for the dept. was to get as many calls through as possible without them hanging up aftering being on hold, being on hold for more than 10 min., and keeping the avg. call time as low as possible. Everything else, like customer satisfaction and problem resolution was secondary to these other statistics. I think the problem to this solution is the mechanism by which employees are hired. I was reading a book about how Amazon.com got started, and Jeff Bozos (founder and CEO) as well as almost everyone else in the company (~20 ppl then) used to sit in on the interview of the customer service rep (CSR). Everyone in the company gave feedback on the candidate. They were intent on creating an eclectic group of CSRs from different fields who read widely. As a result, most of them could easily locate a specific book when the customer calling in just gave them a phrase or main plot of the novel and didn't know the title and/or author. So if companies would just expend a little bit more energy in first the hiring process to weed out the bad ones, then other things like giving good customer service, etc. will follow along.