When I first started telecommuting I set up rituals to tell me that I was at work. I would get up, get dressed, head around the corner to a deli to eat breakfast, and return home to my office and that was my "commute" by which I got into the working mindset.

These days, none of that matters. Telecommuting is normal for me and I'm just as effective getting up, grabbing a coffee and heading to the office in my PJs as I was with the whole ritual. What works best for you will depend on your own personality.

However, one thing that I have found extremely important is to not just communicate, but OVERcommunicate. When you meet an important deadline, don't just tell your boss, mention it on the the department-wide mailing list. Chime in on on things like office arrangement discussions where you don't actually care who gets a window or not. The thing is, BE NOTICED. The first time I was telecommuting I learned that half the office thought I had quit, because they never saw or heard from me any more. My collaborators on any given project knew what I was doing, and knew how I was contributing, but no one else did. They weren't blowing my horn, so when raises and benefits came around, they were rewarded but I wasn't.

These days I keep up a steady correspondence with numerous folks at the office and make sure to let everyone know when I think I've done good. In return, there has been much greater recognition of what I've done for the company, and now on the occasions when I actually visit the office, no one says "Who's He?"

I love how the poster saw no need to mention which country or nation was doing this test. Must be Brazil. After all, there aren't any other countries connected to the internet, are there?

The thing is, most folks *live* in reality, and they can not only spot when you have given up attempting it, but it hits them on the head and breaks any verisimilitude you try to put in a game. Like I have had to tell any number of artists hired to do game design, it is FAR easier to write a system that is logical, consistent and simulates (as far as technology allows) reality, and to put in special overrides where something special is supposed to happen, than it is to write something that is designed to be totally 'Hollywood' and surrealistic, and then have to somehow get things like fires and waterfalls and natural phenomena to just 'act like they should'.

Maybe its because the world of programming has changed a lot in the last 20 years, but I fear that, despite my vast experience, I'd fail the HR test mentioned above. I've worked for a lot of small companies in the last 20 years, the vast majority of which have cratered and don't exist any more, so I don't have any existing products or code that I can point to as mine. The few bits that are still around, are covered by NDA, so I'm not at liberty to do more than say "I worked on that." Hardly something that an HR person should simply take my word on. References are also an issue. Do you still have valid contact info for a manager you worked for 7 years ago? For the most part, I don't.

I have contributed to a few open source projects over the years, but its been small patches here and there. Mostly I've been too busy doing paying work to work on stuff for free. This isn't to say that I have an objection to open source work, far from it, but for me being able to put food on the table has always had first priority.

I have run a small personal web server from time to time. Typically I have half-a-dozen different domains hosted on a single server. Things like individual domains for my company, my personal projects, and side projects which aren't yet ready for prime time. With HTTP, this is easy, as one can look at the requested URL when serving web pages and handle any request for any domain that is being supported.

HTTPS doesn't support this. The best you can do is have a single 'main' HTTPS domain, and redirections to other encrypted ports for your second-class domains. Its not pretty.

There is a protocol called HTTP+SSL that would allow multi-hosting, but last I checked it was mostly non-supported.

Its not the speed of the typing that matters, its the cognitive load. If you're spending all of your time trying to remember where the '}' key is, then you'll find it hard to keep your loop invariants invariant in your head. This leads to bugs.

If you type with two fingers, but can do it without looking or thinking about anything other than your code, then it doesn't much matter how fast you go. On the other hand, if you achieve incredibly coding speed by concentrating on your fingers, your code is sure to suffer.

I agree completely. You think they could at least have copied the first few lines of the Wikipedia article about them:

"Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. which uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization."

Would that have been too hard?

Actually, I'm dealing with just this problem lately. Its not so much that my eyes are going (although now that I'm 45, I find I do prefer larger text) its that I am working on a project that is supposed to be used from across a room. There is a very large set of program in both the Windows and Linux worlds that are incapable of working on a desktop running at 640x480 or even 800x600 resolutions. I've even found ones that can't be used at 1024x768.

One might think that the answer would be to go to a much higher resolution and then tweak all of the various menu- and font-size settings to make things large enough to read. This also doesn't work as those exact same programs often seem to have hard-coded assumptions as to font sizes and one regularly discovers menus which only show the first 3 characters of each entry. Plus, many windowing systems don't seem to provide the kind of user settings needed to configure things for this kind of environment.

While one can (and I do) blame the authors of these program for sloppy coding, there are a very large number of such programs, which can only lead me to think that the OS APIs for handling this stuff in a clean way are far too cumbersome to use correctly.

The first mistake is assuming you have to motivate them. These are creative types. They probably already have all the motivation they need. What you have to do is protect them from the myriad DEmotivational elements of a typical business bureaucracy. That includes arbitrary rules, useless reports, endless meetings, unstable management, constant interruptions, and so on. The list is virtually endless, but just ask your staff and I'm sure they can easily tell you what the most demotivational element is in your office.

So we fix this ... how? The fact that people are idiots is not news, but the fact that efforts to educate them seem to be going backwards is an issue!

Probably a firmware problem. Try substituting another character, such as '@,' before you read it, and then transform it back again in your brain. I assure you that commas are a normal part of an English data stream.

There's plenty of research to suggest that packet loss is not the most attractive indicator of congestion, not merely because it involves losing data, but because it comes very late in the development of an instability. Under congestion, router queue depths go up, and you get observable latency spikes. To exploit this observation effectively you need to timestamp packets, of course.

As many others have noted, there's a second issue with TCP, which is that it is hell-bent on in-order delivery, which is an utterly pointless property for almost all modern applications—not just file sharing, but web applications as well. And it conspires to absolutely hog buffer memory on modern fast long-haul pipes, where to deliver data serially you need hundreds of megabytes in window—hundreds of megabytes that, absent TCP, could already be committed on disk.

TCP is semantically well-suited only for interactive login. UDP is the protocol of choice for everything else. It is just unfortunate that good congestion control algorithms are tricky to write, and that the socket paradigm doesn't provide a good vocabulary for packetisation. These two conceptually orthogonal problems have conspired to shut out the superior solution in almost every domain.

I just don't see a lot of mass appeal for a game that involves handing out disaster-relief supplies or carefully negotiating power-sharing deals in shaky democracies.

Goodness knows but it sounds like more fun than a simulation of getting shot in the head. What's with gamer types? The entire FPS genre is based around situations that any sane person would do anything to avoid!

Except for one thing. If you have a camera in their bedroom, it's a solid bet that they have badgers and gerbils and tasers and schoolboys and a blow-up doll of Margaret Thatcher. No blackmailer and no moralistic weirdo has less to hide than the average person.

Indeed, universal access to what goes on in everyone's bedrooms would be a very good thing, since 99.999% of us would be able to calm down and realise that everything we do is utterly, utterly normal.

The moralists wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

The dangerous thing is information differentials: if they can spy on you, but you can't spy on them. If we can watch the watchmen, no problem. At least, it's surely better than what we have today.

With your too-large belly you have a higher risk at heart disease, but I guess you don't mind your insurance company finding out about it and charging you a higher fee...

Or, of course, you could have socialised medicine, like a civilised country. I find this american horror of universal health care fascinating, because it's based on a complete misunderstanding of the mechanism of insurance. The point of insurance is not to minimise your premiums (if that is what you want, just cancel the insurance altogether), but to spread the risk—and amortise the overhead—across the largest possible base. Therefore, universal socialised medicine is the optimum solution.

Of course, there's still the small problem of managing the health care system to keep it efficient, but as a matter of fact, in the US today, you can see that market forces are no better at this than a typical socialist bureaucracy seems to be—no matter what the propagandists might be telling you.

But in any case, my real point is that if you are worried about privacy reductions driving up the cost of health care, then it's time to change the system. Indeed, when you think about it, if the health providers know more about your lifestyle, maybe than can then do more to help you keep your health. Just a thought....