There's nothing more authentic than reading about the Russian space program, and missing a grammatical article:

This totally made my day, and I couldn't continue reading it without a Russian accent.

(First, note there is an ellipsis, suggesting there are a lot more 9s after the decimal point ...) When he multiplies by 10, he's trying to add 1 more significant digit, so everything zeros out, but he is really only shifting the significant digits over, meaning for any N decimal places in (a = 0.999...), you've got one less digit to the right of the decimal point to work with when using 10a. 10a - a = 8.999... not 9.

I'm on an up-to-date Fedora 12 system, and the proprietary driver seg faults. It compiles fine, and it loads ... but X just crashes and leaves me with a black screen. Now I'm using the 'nv' driver in all it's crappiness. Being a work computer (with a geforce 6000 series card), I can't really justify fiddling with it all day, when I have more important stuff to work on. I love linux, and feel crippled in a Windows or Mac machine, but c'mon ... when will Linux be ready for the average user? Maybe some day when work is slow, I can try it again, but right now it seems like a time-sucking black hole, and I miss my wobbly windows.

I'd have to agree with this. The programmers I work with have probably never written a quick_sort() routine in their life, but surely they write code that implements a sorting routine somewhere.

We're in an age where, "There's an API for that!" and a complete newbie can jump in and make a program that functions fairly well. Not to mention the consumer base is progressively becoming content with mediocrity, especially when it comes to programs.

Finding people who can program in assembly language, or C is probably getting more difficult. Are they needed? Of course, but not nearly much as the many high-level coders that we need today.

Today, coders can get away with nested if/then/else structures that run 70+ levels deep, because it works, and computers are fast enough to where speed is negligible until a user complains about it, and only THEN is it addressed.

Ask around and see what coders today say about Big-O notation or memory management. They just don't need to care about those things any more.

Good question, but all I want to know is, "Will it blend?"

"Showing" them has proven futile. But, I did discover "hooks" yesterday on the server-side, and thought of perhaps restricting their ability to delete files. I'm sure I'll get more requests that way, but to expand on emeraldd's post, I'd feel better helping them on something the can't do rather than something they won't do. Of course, I'll have to leave that to his PM to decide if that sounds like a good idea.

Slow progress has been made. They don't use Tortoise, so I had a side-by-side comparison with the PM to compare features between it and the subclipse plug-in. Needless-to-say, I'm very impressed with the subclipse capabilities. We discovered lock stealing (which I couldn't find in Tortoise SVN), and I had him humor me by right-clicking on an entry in the "affected files" pane in eclipse's revision history view, and wouldn't you know there's an "export" option. I was worried at the beginning of the meeting, because he kept asking me, "How does Tortoise SVN interface with Eclipse?" Not until later did I think of a come-back of, "Kinda like how FTP interfaces with Notepad." Oh well. We're making subtle progress, I guess.

Thank you, everyone for your comments.

Well, I'm not sure either of us has been declared CM admin. He's a java developer using Eclipse with the Subclipse plug-in. My e-mail suggested a solution with Tortoise SVN, since he's running Windows. His PM runs linux, and I pointed to an alternative method with the command-line method in that same e-mail. Today, we discovered just how simple it was to do from the Eclipse IDE.

From my point of view, I feel a developer should own their code. If they want to make a branch, they just do it. If they want to merge that branch, they have the user interface in front of them that provides the capability. If I was a developer, I'd want that control. It's simply bizarre to me that there is some abstract line separating these tasks into a "development" and "administrator" domain. I can maintain the server, and the database that makes up the repository, and make sure it's backed up, but it doesn't sit well with me to start messing with their files.

What really bothered me is that he AND his project manager were claiming it was an issue with the "server". (I came in to find his PM getting "Working copy is locked ... " error on his linux machine, and had to explain what "working copy" meant.) Considering I took a two-week old working-copy, ran an "update" (without server errors), a "copy" from the previous revision (without server errors) and a "commit" (again, no errors) ... I fail to see how the server was at fault. For 3 years they've had some strange reluctance to embrace Subversion the way I expected.

http://www.shorewall.net/ - Once you use it, you'll never go back.

Actually, for proper "Russian Reversal" grammar, you need to make the subject singular (without articles), then fix the verb, and "you" has to be all caps, italicized and followed by exactly two exclamation points. Wikipedia

So it would correctly be: "In Soviet Russia, new overlord welcomes YOU!!"

Glad to be of assistance. :)