And it was purely because "other" people in the company (Fortune 100, big place) weren't allowed to listen to music because they had to listen out for the phone. He also didn't like that it looked like we weren't working as teams.

For me, music works because I have my best ideas when I'm not directly thinking about a problem - I have a very short attention span so music fills the gaps and stops me getting distracted onto something else.

At my work (3M - number 7 on here: http://www.ratemyplacement.co.uk/), we get our IT interns to generally come in and do support / content management related activities to begin with, but with the expectation that they'll move beyond that after 2-3 months and then spend 20-40% of their time doing project work equivalent to what a new graduate / any other employee would do. In recent years we've had interns working on developing website translation software that they proposed themselves (saving us several hundred thousand dollars per year), software license management / reduction and loads of other things.

Find out from the company at the start whether they're expecting you to have an open-ended project activity or whether you really are just the tea boy / doing incident management / desktop support. Emphasise to them that the internship you're looking for is a key part of your education and also your decision as to whether you would consider a graduate position with them. Companies spend a fortune on recruiting grads, so if we can just hire the interns we've had once they've graduated, it saves us time, money and potentially the disaster of hiring an unknown who turns out to be useless.

Nightly builds, if they were released every time:

Bun
Bun
Bun
Bun
Meat
Meat
Bun + Meat
Bun + Meat
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
GHERKIN!
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt++
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt+++++
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt + Tomato
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt + That Other Stuff
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt + That Other Slightly Better Stuff
Quarter Pounder With Cheese

As an IT Manager for one of the 100 biggest companies in the world, I couldn't give a flying f*ck about the inbetween. All I want to know is what we're getting. And if it breaks a part of our fundamental application stack, we'll complain or won't use it. If I want something in the release, I'll lobby for it. If you want to be part of the IE development cycle, sign an agreement with MS to be a part of it, then you'll get the alphas and beta.

Total non-story.

.. that thinks that modding their XBOX is a legal, entirely brilliant thing to do that has no repercussions. As has been said, for hobbyists there are kits already out there that don't involve modding. And if you do have to break the TOC for modding, then you're likely to be interested enough to have both a Dev / QA box (that you're modding on) and a Production box (unmodded to ensure your creations will work for all). I agree that hardware should be free. And in this case, it is. It's entirely free. Just don't try and connect some random hardware that you've soldered all manner of crap onto to someone else's network. You wouldn't allow that on a corporate network, so why should MS have to allow it on their gaming network?

And is there any chance you can bring in some statistics as to how much, on average, a law firm makes in fees on winning a class action versus their fees for handling an individual case for the same action? Class actions are a valid form of law that absolutely have their place. Those who choose to use them are not neccessarily that valid a form of ethical lawyer.

Maybe they noticed but seeing as you clearly didn't care to write your evaluation properly or take it seriously, they ignored both the evaluation form and you as an employee for a few years. Next time take some responsibility for your own evaluation instead of dicking around and then maybe they'll be willing to invest some time in you.

"It costs a licensing fee. It has more security liability than pretty much any other choice." Yes, it does when it's hooked up to internet with no protection. That isn't this case. I may be entirely wrong, but isn't it the case that an unconnected (except for a highly secure private network), fully patched Windows XP machine is no easier to break into that an equivalent Linux / OSX machine. "Linux costs nothing to license. BSD costs nothing to license. Windows costs something. That's an added, unneeded cost." The licensing fee means you can blame them when it's their fault. If you want to blame someone else with Linux for a fundamental OS security issue, you'll still need to license it for a cost. That's why Red Hat make money. "Because there aren't lots of dev tools for Linux that run on a normal desktop computer?" Original question was wrong. Who cares, as long as the development tool does the job effectively. "How is it easier to develop an ATM on Windows than on Linux? They both have tons of tools and myriad experienced developers and companies. Linux is probably better optimized for appliance uses and has a larger share of the appliance market than Windows, making it easier to find companies to work on it." Because they've been doing it for years so it's far easier to port from old Windows to new Windows rather than rebuild the whole things from scratch. There may well be a new, better technology, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper to regression test against a newer version of an existing platform than it is to rebuild for an entirely new one.

It's only going to work when all I have to do is plug in the TV that I've just bought and it'll immediately hook up to Digital TV (Freeview in the UK), then I plug in my network connection and it immediately connects to Hulu, YouTube and others and offers them as channels. Until then, how the hell are the majority of people in the next 20 years (40+ years old) supposed to do it?

Strikes me that the rule about not being allowed to charge for addons might be something that has come out of stories like this - iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service.

If there are loads of add-ons out there that a lot of people have paid a lot of money for, it kind of limits what Blizzard can do with the Wow add-on API. If they, for example, do something that disables or breaks an add-on that has been bought by 500,000 players for $10 a piece, they'd come under huge pressure to reinstate the functionality in the API, even though they themselves make nothing out of it and it costs them time and effort to do it. It'd also be a major PR issue.

Purely to avoid that risk (i.e. having to support API functionality for someone else's financial gain), I think I'd ban paid add-ons as well.

How did someone miss that opportunity? :-(

I have never, ever had a good experience of a version x.0 from IBM, or many other vendors in fact. I'd rather pluck out my own eyes than risk another one of them.

Quite a lot of vendors deliberately start at x.1 just to avoid this.

Marketing is about dealing with perception and addressing it. If the marketplace has a perception that x.0 versions are buggy and nasty, the marketers need to deal with it.

At least it shows that your marketing team are tied into the beliefs and opinions of the marketplace.