The difference with Microsoft is they already have a bunch of big freaking data centers (Azure) that they're renting out to other people, so on launch dates and other spikes, they can leverage that without it being dedicated to the Xbox.

We have some things in one of our internal products that require the user to actually type the word "YES" in a fieldnto get it to Continue.

They still manage to do it "accidentally".

We don't know what sort of development you're doing or diagrams you're talking about.

If they're design diagrams, why are you printing them? Spreading a diagram across "pages" is painful when you're trying to read online and have essentially infinite zoom capabilities. If he wants to do single-page diagrams in four-point font, click that little "+" or drag the slider and zoom in on the part you want to see.

Unless his code doesn't work, or someone assigned you the task of cleaning his code up, I'm not sure why you're complaining. Guess what - real world code, especially internal code, sucks.

I work on a C/Unix code base that dates back to 1986 - a time of 80286 processors and Xenix. It's grotesque. There are globals everywhere to deal with lack of stack space, it's K&R, and each programmer had their own idea of "correct" tab stops, so the first thing you do is play with that until things look like they line up in the function you're working in. It might be different elsewhere in the file.

There's code that hasn't been executed (we hope) since the early 90's, but we leave it unmolested until we're actually changing that file for other reasons. Then, and only then, do we consider carefully excising it - because if you change it, QA has to test it before it's deployed to roughly 15,000 systems scattered around the globe with poor network connectivity back to the main office.

Maybe you're not cut out for maintenance programming and dealing with someone else's code base. Most people fresh from school aren't very good at it and want to "fix" everything. I suspect that's who you are.

That's fine in school. You and your classmate were peers with a comparatively objective "supervisor" (professor.)

This is the junior guy telling the senior guy his work is sub-par. Not likely to go as well.

Until I went back to work (was home for 10 weeks - sabbatical plus 1 week vacation plus 1 week paternity leave) I was as good or better than my wife at all of that stuff.

I no longer am because as baby changed, the person who was there all the time learns the new tricks.

It kind of sucks.

I hate the women who look at you like you're incompetent, or think of you as "babysitting", or even offer to help you with the baby.

I'm not babysitting. I'm taking care of my daughter.

I can change her diaper in under two minutes and make her happy again if she's mad in about thirty seconds. If she's really really crying it might take a full minute.

Leave us alone, nosy grocery store ladies.We're fine.

I had a reply all typed out then found yours. So I cancelled it.

Even with a c-section in the mix, my wife was in good shape after about a week. The first few days were pretty rough but c-section with some other medical issues.

I got to spend 10 weeks home at full pay thanks to sabbatical, vacation, and 1 miserly week of paternity leave. It was great and I loved feeding and changing her.

There's also this stuff called formula, it's kind of pricey but my wife needed to get back on her meds. My petite princess is doing just fine on it.

As far as I'm concerned, you're a sucker if you're not collecting credit card points. There's no paperwork, you just use the card and points accrue. If they're Chase points, you can use them at a penny a point at Amazon with no fuss, just register the card and click on "use my points" at checkout.

Every bill that I can put on that card goes on that card, and I never pay cash if I can pay credit. I wind up hundreds of dollars a year ahead and it's just free money.

Just to be clear, I never carry a balance, and therefore never pay interest, with one exception.

We (wife and I) bought a condo for her mother to live in. About a third of that went on a cash advance on one of the cards, and we've been shuffling it around between zero interest offers as the offers expire and someone else offers zero percent for 12+ months. That money's costing us a 4% transfer fee when we transfer it, typically every 12 - 14 months, which I view as good, since it's basically impossible to get a loan against the condo thanks to Fannie and Freddie's rules. There are very few real direct lenders left, and they're not interested in "investment" properties.

(Since you're Australian, I'll explain that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are pseudo-governmental organizations that effectively control the entire mortgage industry in the US. If your loan doesn't meet their guidelines you're not getting a loan.)

For expenses of this sort, absolutely.

Minor use of the "Hey, can you pick this up at Staples?" sort isn't unreasonable.

My total credit card limit (across multiple cards) is somewhere in excess of $100K.

That's a couple in the mid 30's then a few more in the 10 - 15 range.

The cards actually in my wallet total maybe $30K, not counting the company "green AmEx". I have no idea what limit might be on that. It hasn't been used in years.

Of course there's hardware. There's always hardware. Computer software runs on hardware. There isn't some magic Star Trek alien cloud of pure energy where it runs. It's chips and circuit boards.

Unless you are running applications directly on real actual hardware you have an OS. Just because you call the application isolation mechanism a "virtual machine running under a hypervisor" instead of a "program running under an operating system" doesn't mean they're fundamentally different things.

It's just a matter of semantics as to what you call it. Apparently the current fashion is to call a new OS a hypervisor instead of an OS. Probably because it's easier to sell people on a new hyervisor than it is to sell them on a new OS when we already have so many of those.

I'm with you except maybe pull ups. Depending on arm length and body type that can take a LOT of strength.

Hahah.

True though. My daughter's around 30 pounds and I have visible arm muscles now that I never had in my life.

"teenaged" was generous. He's a few months shy of 12. The talk was more about how

* I'm sorry that the filtering software apparently broke and let him see all that stuff, because he really isn't ready for it (and he isn't. He's very immature.)
* I can see everything he searches for and every web site he goes to.
* the general internet isn't a good source for actual information about sex and bodies and so forth.
* the filter WILL still let him do "safe" google image search, so he can probably still see scantily clad women and maybe the occasional body part that slips past, and I won't give him grief about those searches - in other words, go ahead and search for "hot ladies" but not "5th grade girls having lesbian sex" or "ladies shitting in the snow".
* anything he wants to know he can ask me and I won't mock him and I will come up with a good answer
* Don't do this sort of thing with his friends - he's a year behind in school, so he's older than his friends, so if they get caught he's going to get blamed.
* and finally, the mechanics of the sex act (at the "tab A fits into slot B" level) which he claimed was news to him, despite clearly having seen more pornography than I saw before I was about 25.

It was generally hideous for all involved, which may be sufficient to keep him out of it for a while.

1. Install logmein (logmein.com) - the free edition is just fine.
2. Make your mom a standard user. Non-administrator.
3. Create an "Admin" account. Do NOT tell her the password.

It's working so far for my mother-in-law. Her old computer was so badly infested that I just gave up and gave her one of my spares. (She had no reload media.)

Now, even with her teen grandson surfing porn (yes, I caught him at it, yes, we had a long talk about it but I doubt he's stopped) it seems to be clean.

She has Windows 7. Maybe it won't work as well with XP.