I agree with the war on color. I liked Snow Leopard color here and there to Lion and Mt.Lion. The skeuomorphic doesn't really bother me as much as some people. I can't even spell it.

The only issue I have with your comment is whether Ive prefers color or drab. He did design the original iMac which was massive color in a beige box world. I suspect his taste changes with the times.

Time will tell.

The US is the sweetest marketplace in the world, by far. It was build by generations before mine and generations before theirs. It was fought for in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, The Pacific, Japan, and others. It's been hammered to the ground, yet Americans managed to bring it back to life, over and over. It was nourished and brooded over and caressed and cared for by generations. Americans for the most part, built the US marketplace, not Hondurans, not South Americans, not Europeans, not Russians.

That's why it matters where you were born.

The Nand2Tetris is a great resource and I am working through it myself. I wish there was something like this available when I started college 20 years ago. The start of our instruction centered around a variable, then loops, data types, etc. I assume it's because students could related to variables through Algebra. It worked well enough though.

Don't go to a technical school. Go to a state sponsored 4 year university. They're cheaper, better value, and your professors, if you impress them, have some really good in's into hiring companies.

Get your foundation there. Understand *why* companies are willing to pay you 6 figures. Understand the value of scalability and maintainability. Understand how to build a proper ERD. Understand your data structures and why coding something one way is inefficient and doing it another way will make it 1000 times faster. Become an engineer, not a mechanic.

Not true, you can have a single man operation that doesn't create any jobs. Look at all the contractors out there filling demand. Whether they file as an individual or as a business entity makes no difference.

>A binary file is significantly faster to parse and search then a big-ass text file.

Yes, but compared to the registry .ini files are only a fraction of the size. They may contain at most a hundred or so config items (and that's pushing it) versus thousands or tens of thousands. They're also cached (or should be) so it's a small hit on app open, then memory all the way.

>The registry also has a minor benefit that you can guarantee the syntax is valid.

I'll give you that. Strong typing is good.

>Apps are free to do whatever they want including writing .ini files... that soo many have chosen to use the registry for configuration should speak for itself.

Not really, especially after Microsoft recommended it and the Microsoft Certified program required it. I mean there was a whole book from MS Press about the registry. It made terrible toilet paper too.

>Configuration store is automatically safe against concurrent access..try rewriting a .ini file by multiple apps at the same time and let me know how it goes.

Why would I ever do that on a client? Remember, with the .ini setup, each app had it's own .ini (or several). If it was multi-user, each user would have an .ini file for their personal preferences.

>Today bulk registry operations can be fully transactional thanks to windows KTM.

That's fair, but if I need something to be transactional, I'll use a database. Drop a simple Access database with a table or two and you're golden for a stand-alone client app.

>Security ACLs per entry. .ini file security as far as the operating system is concerned is for the whole file.

That's fair, but it doesn't seem to be preventative. A lot of viruses attack the registry. All it takes is a user to click "OK."

At the time, Netscape pioneered the browser for the common guy. They started on *nix but brought the browser to Windows. Their IPO was the biggest skyrocket in history (at the time I believe). Shot up from 16 or so to 80 in a few hours. Netscape was the world's darling at the dawn of the public internet.

Microsoft was in denial of the internet's staying power and just thought it was a fad. They (not so) quickly realized their mistake and attempted to force their way into the market. At the time, the browser and web servers were really the only commercially viable product for software venders to get into the market.

They bought a company and labeled their product MSIE. To kill off netscape (which had started making servers using NSAPI technology) they bundled their browser in the OS, so now, Netscape had to compete with free. At the time, that was a very novel concept. Microsoft implemented ISAPI in IIS which was essentially the same thing.

In making custom HTML tags that only MS used, MS attempted to make the WWW a proprietary standard that MS controlled. Other browsers wouldn't render sites made using proprietary IE tags and they risked getting sued for implementing MS custom tag rendering algorithms in their browsers.

This also gave them a shoehorn into the server market. IIS/NT 3.5/4.0 was pretty horrible compared to Unix/Novell but they wanted to get into that market. (read: dominate). What better to serve proprietary IE tags than IIS.

No it's not, its a television station that plays music. MTV, Music Television, duh. Biff, is that you?

I know you are being funny, but the myth about teachers not working much is misguided. Don't forget they have to grade the papers, tests and quizzes after hours (for 30+ students x 5-6 classes); attend PTA meetings; attend parent teachers conferences; and attend after school activities. Also, they have to go to school a week earlier than the students to prepare for the year, they have to attend administrative meetings before and after hours, and to boot, most of them have to take some menial job during the summer just to make ends meet.

Also, teachers have to deal with sue scared school districts, so they can no longer do standard discipline like make students write sentences and hesitate for detention. Also, they can't kick out the criminals (because everyone has a right, not an opportunity for an education in this country) so it's awful hard to teach Algebra to 30 7th graders when 5 of them are disrupting every 5 minutes and there isn't anything you can do about it.

Oh, and all this requires a college education and a certification. It's a thankless job most of the time and gratifying sometimes only to be overshadowed a few minutes later. I should know, both my parents were teachers. My mother taught in a low income district for 20 years and my dad taught at a private school for 40+. The private school was much better because the disruptive students could be disciplined and expelled, but the pay was a lot lower for that privilege. This was 15 years ago, I can't imagine how bad it has gotten since then.

Thank goodness we didn't roll back the Bush era tax cut to pay for the last round of hysterical speculation by Wall Street.. Massive cuts in education on Main Street seem to be a much better prospect for the future.

I appreciate and agree with your premise, but the flip side to the coin, if I may is:

There are two types of programmers (to paint with a broad brush).

1. Those who got into programming because of the money.
2. Those who got into programming because it's fun and they would do it even if it wasn't their job.

The trick is, I'm #2, but let me tell ya, waking up at 6:30 am, getting dressed, fighting traffic to sit in a petrie dish office to write boring ass business logic for boring ass business apps which rarely amount to much more than glorified CRUD code with lipstick is pushing the "fun" a bit.

Just because I love programming doesn't mean I love programming boring ass shit, and there is a 90 percent chance the algorithms you need coded are boring ass shit.

Therefore:

If you have to be a whore, at least be a well paid whore.

Lefties learned to be ambidextrous ages ago. Where are those damn green scissors.

To be fair, their Visual Studio/.NET offering is really hot for PC-Clones. If only they weren't so bull-headed and ported it to *nix, they would probably dominate the industry. I understand they considered the idea of porting but abandoned it. I believe if VS was able to write Android apps, they would have already wiggled their way into mobile.

This is the correct answer. We also would have taken "offices."