I've been in situations where I've been on the other side of the table to this, and lost developers 'cos they got a better offer. I've been as mad as hell about it, not because they've walked, but because I took my eye off the ball for long enough for the problem to develop...the irritation was with myself, not the guy walking. As it happens, the one guy I lost that I _really_ didn't want to was back 12 months later - when he and I finally worked out the issues that he'd been suffering in the first place.
The first thing I would do is wander into your boss' office, shut the door and have an off-the-record conversation with him/her. Explain the issues and tell them why you're considering moving and what needs to change. Be careful to phrase this as a "We have a problem, how can we work to solve it?" conversation rather than a "I'm leaving unless you fix these problems" conversation otherwise it sounds like blackmail. The fact is, you do feel some loyalty and obligation to your company and/or co-workers....so give that some rope and see what happens.
If the company you're working for has any sense and if you're any cop (and your boss is worth his salt), then they'll find a way to work with you to make you comfortable to stay. If not, or if you don't feel you even have the kind of relationship where you can have that closed door chat, then walk, you're losing nothing.
Note that opinions and attitudes to work vary widely across the world; you'll hear the mercenary "Do what's best for your money" at one extreme and the "Stay, it can't be that bad" at the other. The fact is that you have to do what's right for you, but you should always be able to look your ex-colleagues and bosses in the eye when you meet them in the pub later...
Quite happy to chat further on this if its useful, but
I second the DS1052E. It's a great little scope and it's got nice measuring facilities, fft (not so interesting if you're doing digital, I guess) and a fair bit of USB connectivity which I haven't explored in enough depth. That includes the ability to dump screens to a memory stick or print them via PictBridge. It also seems to have decent support communities around it. Having grown up on TEK I don't find it at all constraining - hell, if you don't like it, sell it on eBay for more or less what you paid for it.
DAVE
The article is unclear, probably 'cos the journalist was. By 'colour coding' I'm pretty sure they mean Frequency Division Multiplexing which allows multiple wavelengths to be used on the same fibre. Obviously, since these are optical systems, this effectively means different colours (although often outside the range of human sight, and I don't advise you looking down one!) which is the way practitioners typically talk about it.
FDM has been in use for a long time as a way of hugely expanding the capacity of existing fibre infrastructure and became possible once we'd got light sources which could be tuned for a specific frequency.
....any ISP that thinks Google isn't playing fair should just not allow connections to the Google Empire for their customers.
Then we'll see how long it takes for the free-market to self correct. I give it about 30 days, most of that time being required for the ISP to staff up their disconnections department.
....for carrying out questionable science.
The effect of the recent IPCC Glacier mis-statements and the University of East Anglia 'mistakes' is to give people who would 'like it to not be so' to have a grain of sand around which to crystallize.
I make no claim as to if climate change is upon us or not, but it is ESSENTIAL that the science is revisited and made rock solid (or completely disproven)....in the meantime we have to progress on a path of caution -- which effectively means continuing to reduce carbon emissions IN CASE they are causing the problem...putting our collective fingers in our ears and singing la-lala-la isn't going to solve anything.
Jeez, politicians have enough difficulty making sensible decisions already, we're not exactly helping by not giving them accurate information on which to make those decisions, are we???
I find all of this very frustrating. Not because I have anything in particular to protect (indeed, I can think of very little that is that important that I would object to a reasonable law enforcement official taking a look at it), but because of whats happened to us in just under seven years.
The agenda of the terrorist is -not- particularly to kill people, it's to get their agenda into the front of your mind and to encourage you to bend to their point of view in order to stop the pain. Now, it so happens that killing people does that quite well, but just how many times in the past seven years were -you- affected directly by a terrorist, and how many times were you affected by the window-shopping measures put in place to "protect us from terrorism"? Every time we lose another liberty, the terrorists get another point....not to mention the number of very dubious practices that we accept now in our day to day lives because they allegedly make us safer.
I'm tired of this. Security and protection of the populace is done in back rooms with a low profile, not by folks with machine guns stomping around in airports for PR purposes while punters shuffle, barefoot and half naked, through some electronic gizmo that is then monitored by a human being with a statistically proven error rate in the order of 5% while wondering if they're going to be allowed to keep their own property when they get to the other end.
I feel a dammed sight safer flying through a European aiport than any US one, that's for sure although europeans are starting to succumb to the 'visible security' mantra now....I saw a great case of this yesterday - one lane in three through security at the airport had an electronic explosives sniffer, the other two had conventional scanners....trouble is, you get to chose which queue you join!!!
We seem to have lost the understanding that you don't have to knacker peoples rights to have a good level of protection. We need to stop helping people with abhorrent agendas keeping them in the front of our minds, and the best way to do that is to stop eroding hard earned freedoms in the name of terrorism protection.
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Paul Erlich