This was one of my key take-aways from Dale Carnegie's classic, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. I've seen it mentioned on various reading lists for those wanting to go into the business world too.
Funny thing is, when recommending it to a friend, they mistakenly assumed from the title that it was a book of underhand tactics, which couldn't really be further from the truth. There's a lot to be said for being genuinely nice to others.
I think How to Win Friends is one of those books that you (you being someone in the supermajority of people who isn't naturally gifted at interpersonal relationships) know you should read but you avoid it.
Then one day, you are desperate and you read it and wonder "my God why didn't I read this sooner!"
I've avoided it for so long as it does look like it's either a manipulation guidebook or a social skills for dummies book. Your comment has convinced me to give it a go :)
I think a lot of folks today never get around to reading it because they assume it's old or outdated. (It isn't. Human psychology hasn't changed much since Dale Carnegie's day.) Alternatively, they read something sinister, or else hucksterish into the title. To be fair, the idea of "winning" friends implies a sort of gamesmanship. And the idea of "influencing people" can make one think of manipulation or politics.
The interesting thing about the book is that it can be read in either light: as a Machiavellian guidebook, or as an earnest how-to about the principles of mutual friendship. Carnegie probably intended the book to be the latter, however, and that's the spirit in which I read it. It is very much worth reading. People can do what they will with the information in the book, but I hope they do good with it.
> Funny thing is, when recommending it to a friend, they mistakenly assumed from the title that it was a book of underhand tactics
Most people I've told about this book have the same reaction, to the point where I suspect that Carnegie picked the title on purpose to get 'manipulators' to learn how to actually be good people.
Not sure why this has been posted. It looks to be an old list - far from 'ultimate' for 2014.
The .Net FOSS community has been gaining momentum in the past few years, with most new developments having moved to GitHub, which is where I would generally recommend people start looking for new libraries. Of course there are exceptions, but it is a good starting point.
Alternatively, NuGet seems to have become ubiquitous in the past few years too, so that's the other route for finding new libraries. (Incidentally NuGet seems to be having an outage today, but that is a rare occurence).
A list like this might have value for some people, but only with better curation to reflect what is still active today.
One problem with using Windows guests on Vagrant is how big they are. You can be looking at 20GB for a stripped down disk with just the OS. This can easily become prohibitive if you want to use more than a few VMs in Vagrant (not to mention the time copying all this redundant data).
Having read about differencing disks, they seem like the perfect solution to this problem, by allowing VMs to share the same parent disk, without needing to copy it (as each VM only needs to keep track of differences to the base disk). From what I've read of differencing disks, this seems like a no-brainer for Vagrant (but unfortunately my experience extends no further than what I've read).
Is there a reason Vagrant doesn't use this approach? Any plans to put this on the roadmap? It seems like this feature is supported by both VirtualBox and Hyper-v.
Differencing disks depend on some things in the core changing. These changes are under way already in branches of Vagrant and Vagrant 1.6 has a very good chance of properly using linked clones wherever possible.
Thanks for the super quick reply! I'm glad to hear I'm not completely crazy with this idea. Multiple 20GB images make my diddy little SSD cry, so this feature would be fantastic.
In the vagrant-libvirt provider (https://github.com/pradels/vagrant-libvirt) we already do this. When you import a box, we load the full QCOW2 disk image into a storage pool. When you create a VM based on that box, we create a new image that is linked to the original image and only stores changes from it. This makes creating new VMs noticeably faster and more space-efficient in libvirt compared to virtualbox. It would be great if other providers used this technique.
Try Linqpad for a scratchpad too. Don't let the linq name fool you - its great for general purpose fiddling about. It has been truly indispensable when developing on .Net.
It is designed to generate input for your code (the public surface by default) to determine whether it runs correctly. It can use code contract features in .Net to help inform whether your code is correct. It is great for finding those 'weird cases', and where you find a particularly interesting case, it is easy to add it as a test in your suite.
You can see it used (and play around yourself) through the browser here: http://www.pexforfun.com
We have our lift buttons on the outside. You choose your floor, and are directed to one of the 6 lifts available. This seems to confuse every visitor to the building, who will walk into the first open lift (that will have opened for someone else). They spend 5 seconds looking for the buttons, the door closes, and they're stuck going to a floor they never wanted.
However, as the buttons are on the outside, the designers clearly thought they would aid things where a large group all want to go to the same floor. Press the special people button, enter how many of you there are, and the lift system will optimise to ensure it doesn't needlessly stop at interim floors if you have filled that lift to capacity, or send you a lift already filled that wouldn't fit your group in.
So the trick is to say, even if you are a single rider (lifter?), that you are a party of 14, guaranteeing your lift won't stop at any other floor on the way to yours. An 'express mode', if you will.
Problem is, everyone working in the building seems to know this trick, and it does not scale. Whilst it might make the time in the lift shorter, I notice that the wait time for a lift appears longer (from observing those going to my floor who have done the trick before I then select the same floor normally). The real trick then is to use the lifts as they were intended. The irony is that all these 'super busy' types who are slowing everyone up are simply slowing themselves up too.
Then again, who was expecting a building full of lawyers and traders to behave like good citizens?
Funny thing is, when recommending it to a friend, they mistakenly assumed from the title that it was a book of underhand tactics, which couldn't really be further from the truth. There's a lot to be said for being genuinely nice to others.