Not true. My Logitech C7 serial-mouse still works like a charm. True, the plastic is meanwhile a little yellowish, but other than this in fine working condition.

Same here. An old IBM MF2 keyboard dating back to 1988 is still in use. And in case it breaks, there's a spare in the cupboard. Those keyboards were built like a tank to last - and about as heavy. I think meanwhile the keyboard weighs more than the computer it's attached to.

No, I'm not Wally, but he's my hero. From the whole Dilbert comics, Wally's attitude is the most practical, although Alice's with her unrandom violence has also lots of appeal. Unfortunately, this tends to be too much physical work to implement.

This might be a difference in work-place culture, but whenever I choose a job I always only considered the fixed salary part for comparison. If I was happy with that, the job is ok. If I need some bonuses to make a decent living, it was re-negotiation time. The nice consequence of this is, that I don't care much about the rigmaroles with performance reviews to decide on the bonus. That makes me very relaxed and whatever comes in is just a nice bonus and nothing I really need. In the end by not caring, I swim along with the average, but I still can tell them to get stuffed if the idiocy becomes too rampart. And being the one to stand up and voice what everyone is thinking sometimes makes you popular or someone to be consulted beforehand.

In the companies I worked for, the more formal and stupid the system was, the easier it was to gamble. I liked best the system with self-defined yearly goals, where the road to success was in the skill to formulate impressive sounding goals where the non-performance was hard to verify. Or to be part in projects that get shut down because of reorganisation before being delivered. That never got me top rates, but before going through the hassle of digging through the bones for some real data average success and bonus (or slightly above average, if I bickered too much about my valuable contributions) was assumed independent of the actual performance.

For me that gives the best results for a minimum of exposure to the whole idiocy.

Does anyone have some link how the system is supposed to work?

It's all nice and fine to have the back-end sorted out, but what about the data gathering about what people really eat? Do the propose to have everyone implanted with an oesophageal monitor to detect evil burgers or chocolate input?

First, if your employer starts to play such silly games, you have a problem. If you're already I trouble with them anyway, the only reasonable thing to do is to consult a lawyer familiar with such matters and follow his advice.

In case you don't want to sue them and leave the company anyway, the only reasonable position is to let them have whatever they already have in hand. You can't take it from them anyway. Now to get back at them, produce some legalese statement that the code has been produced as ad-hoc tools for personal use of the creator and as a proof of concept. That those tools haven't be developed adhering to the relevant coding standards and not ready for productive use. Whatever the company does with that, they accept them as is and won't hold you liable for any thing bad happening as a result from using those tools in any way and that they will protect you from any liability claims resulting from any of your involvement with this software. Also add that this software needs to be reviewed and made ready for commercial use by qualified software engineers - which by coincidence you aren't, you're just a dumb L3 admin. If you feel nasty, add a NDA for good measure too. That won't help you, but is another hassle they'll have to resolve.

Make those statements broad enough, mention liability often enough and require a legal binding signature from the company on the contract. That will make sure that the legal department will get hold of the document and you won't have to hand over the code any time soon now. Even worse, any action in the matter on their side might be considered affecting the negotiations and review of the legal department. If they try to pressure you, write a naive question to legal asking about the progress. Bosses really hate to involve the legal department when they try to get things done.

With this, you won't get any money for the time already spent, but the company won't get the code either. You're in the comfortable position that you're cooperative and just want to handle this properly and protect you from claims. Nobody can fault you for not helping them and still, they don't get anything useful.

If they're really stupid enough to sign the document, you hand over those parts they don't have yet. Make sure you strip all useful structure, variable names and comment from it and run it afterwards through a code beautifier to make it look structured again. It's important that you don't touch files they already have, changing those would be obvious bad faith.

Now, things like those work in reality only when someone is maintaining the system. With the signed document, you as a L3 can't really be involved with that tool in any way in the future, you officially lack the skill. This has to go via software development. If the don't have any of those or can't bother them, you might want to suggest that a freelancing friend might provide the necessary skills - at slightly above the the going market rates for software consulting. I'm certain, you'll find a way of handling the doing in the future.

All in all, a company playing such silly games must be pretty stupid.

The It business is small, so try to avoid burning bridges. Leave a good impression behind.

In your case I would take the new job, but discuss with your new employer that you will have slow start (4 days a week for 3 months) and offer your old employer to act for those 3 months as a consultant for one day per week. Then make the damn sure your spend the rest of your time in getting your replacements up to speed.

When working with reasonable people a reasonable solution can be found.

As to asking your current employer for a raise, I doubt that will help much and you won't get the improved quality of life with the short commute to work.

The original blurb:

It might not be fair how blacks fare, but I'm certain, they're not getting faired

There's bigger Arduinos available.

Yes, they have twice as much RAM and the same processing speed. The Ardiuno Mega are the way to go if you run out of I/O ports. If you run out of processing power or memory as you do if you want to process audio or video data, do any but the most basic networking, the whole Arduino platform is the wrong solution to your problem. You need something bigger, like a solution based on an ARM processor or the Microsoft gimmick.

There's even ARM boards which are compatible with Arduino shields, etc.

The're also the NetDuino which is pin-compatible and can be programmed in C# and the .net environment. The pin-compatibility with Arduino-shields isn't that much of an advantage. It's just a bunch of TTL signals going from the processor directly to the pin on the connector. With only few wires and no other components, those shields can be connected to most other platforms. And many of the really interesting things come as break-out boards, where you need the wires anyway.

If the low-powered Arduinos are so popular it's probably because people figured out you don't need much RAM or processing power to do what people are using them for.

Exactly. The Arduino is competing with the PIC and the small TI processors. Compared to those, getting stared and having first successes is far easier and the Arduino community provides lot of support for beginners.. Just plunk down $30, download and the software, connect te board with a vanilla USB cable and try the hello world blinking program.

The Microsoft thing doesn't play in that niche. It's more for small web-appliances, goofing around with audio or video displays or autonomous robotics that need more processing power than the Arduino can provide. And for those applications, it could become a success if the whole solution provides enough benefits for the costs and Microsoft manages to get the community going. Both things that Microsoft hasn't been very good at in the past, but they might get it right this time.

From the image of the breakout-board, they seem to mostly use standard ports which makes adding your own beak-out modules cheap and easy.

Yeh, it's an "arduino killer", why else would it have been made?
Stop playing fucking semantics to ignore the truth of the situation.

Going by above statements, you probably don't know anything about the Arduino except the the name. The Arduino is a simple cheap and very limited 8-bit micro-controller, where important part is the limited costs (below $30 to get started) an easy way to hook it up to the computer and a moderately useful development environment where even hobbyists can switch things easily. The big limitations of the Arduino is very little RAM and very little processing power.

This platform by Microsoft doesn't even play in the same league as the Arduino. It costs 5 times as much and can do many things the Arduino even can't dream about, things like handling audio or video data. This product should be seen more as a contender against the small ARM platforms, Propeller and similar. And then, it's similar priced than those.

Will it succeed? I hope so.
Will it push out the Propeller or some ARM products? Perhaps
Will it push out the Arduino? Definitively not.

Nothing really surprising in the article, but the best quote from it is this:

From the original article:

Unfortunately the author doesn't go into the consequences of this observation. If one person can become wildly more productive with some tool, his work will simply be devaluated so that his higher productivity doesn't earn him more than the stick gatherer.

It was this case with teamsters of old, who probably were able to do 30 to 50 km a day with an ox-cart. Now a lorry-drivers transports 100 times as much 20 times as far away in a day, but they still are paid as measly as teamsters of old. What was gained for those teamsters who figured out to become 2000 times as productive? Nothing. Same pay, work still sucks and they aren't better of after a day of work.

Same with most other businesses that improved due to technology. The first generation who figured out how to become more productive reap some benefits from it, but after that, the improved productivity becomes the norm and people will toil on as usual. At the end of the day, the time people spent at work is paid, not their productivity. If the produce much, the value of their product is just reduced proportionally.

Before people didn't meet face to face, communication will be inefficient due to cultural differences and the fact that it's a lot harder to relate to an email-address than to someone you spent an evening having beers. Even simple things like Yes or No have very different meaning in different countries.

What seems to work well is to have at least one big team meeting per year where everyone meets in one place. Even if the meeting itself might not be that productive, the face-to-face time is crucial. Also, if close cooperation on some topic is necessary, specially in the start-up phase, plan to send some team-members to other sites to work together for a week or two in the same office. This investment will prevent a lot of communication problems later on.

Next, make sure you have plenty of short time goals which can be easily tracked and checked. This makes it harder to get distracted and communication problems will be identified earlier on.

And if you're the team leader, make sure you have enough individual communication one on one with your team members. If you communicate with them only as a group, you start to see them just as interchangeable ants and they'll sense of this.

If a game makes practice easier or more enjoyable, why not use it? In the end, it's the acquired skill that counts, not the way you got it. And if the game teaches you a usable skill, it definitively isn't stupid.

The Wii and the various dance games started this trend by making players move and exercise. Now Ubisoft wants to introduce formal music teaching and practise via a game. Well it seems that simple games are getting too shallow and the game industry is poaching time honored ways to waste time from other domains, which have proven to offer more or less unlimited levelling capacity.

I just can't wait to hear people talk about how easy it was to beat the Bon Jovi level but that they're stuck on that evil Habanera Flameco boss before they can get to the Mariachi level.

What a piece of clueless high-school optimism this project is.

They wrap the innards of a netbook into the a casing regular size casing. Look at the space wasted on the fastenings for the screen bezel and the additional thickness added by all those thick plastic sheets between motherboard and keycaps. With that much space and weight wasted, at least they could have gone on the full eco-trip and made the casing out of cardboard or recycled wood. They totally miss the main selling point of a laptop: Small and light.

At least the project leadress was blond and pleasant to look at. But to improve the video, they should have cut the scenes where the geek or the invention appeared.

To sum it up: rather worthless - except for blondie if one is attracted to the type.