Wow, recently we're swamped with MS spammers.

What are you doing with Access for a work? I don't even know where would be it useful at all.

None of those would help you out without a good debugger. I use all of those at work, yet the best combination to find bugs is to get the unit tests in to the debugger. TDD isn't a magic cure, it's just a good method to work in certain cases.

I use Qt Creator, it is great for C++ development in general. For everything else, I fire up Eclipse. Eclipse has its own issues, as it is written in Java, you can't expect the same performance as from Qt Creator for example, but it has the best plugin collection and perhaps most supportive community. Virtually all existing language is supported by an Eclipse plugin, and the number of existing ones will let you implement your own.

Also, I'm a great admirer of Emacs, which is my primary environment if I do some work remotely. I love to work with it, for C++, script languages, or just simply text editing.

If you're looking for something more similar to Visual Studio, I suggest you should also give a try to KDevelop. There are plenty of alternatives as you can see.

I wonder how would work that code colouring in a multi-thread environment too.

You must be very unbiased guy in general. No MS partisanship, whatsoever.

While I agree that the MS Visual Studio is a good IDE over all, there are better alternatives out there. The first real problem with it is that it's single-platform. You can't use it anywhere.
The extensibility is a bitch in VS. It takes too much time and effort to figure out it's API, and it's quirks. Not to mention the support for these retarded languages that VS supports, apart from C++ and C#. That is the only two that worth even to look at.
The debugger is great... except that the whole IDE is based around their own debugger, and you making a debugging interface in VS takes more time than any other IDE out there.
Visual Studio also very rigid on your project structure, and if you don't subscribe to their project file model, you are basically screwed.
Not to mention, that Visual Studio is a resource hog only running on very beefy configuration. Oh, and don't get me started with the useless packages that installs on your system for no apparent reason. Finally, if you want to do refactoring, you have to purchase an external tools, like VAX.

So, while it has some good features for which MS deserves a candy, overall it isn't that good, no need for jumping up and down like a puppy dog.

I would rather say communist concept rather than just simply Marxist but yeah, I'm very much aware. That's why I find it even funny that people who are the most vicious opponents of the ideas of Marx (or what they perceive as Marxism), endorsing the term capitalism, which implies that they also accept underlying communist concept of society (that society is shaped by the way it reproduces itself, namely, if wage work is the dominant form of production the society is capitalist).

In any case, since terminology is sort of always out of sync, as it is politically loaded, what I meant by being on capitalist basis, that the USSR, especially after Stalin took over, were that of a government forced modernization process to a state managed capitalism. The "Collectivization" was a major agriculture reform, that was aimed industrialize the agriculture, which in turn allowed to re-allocate the population to the emerging industrial sector. This process is comparable to those changes that went through in the previous centuries in many Western European countries but most intensively in the 19th century. My point is, and was that while many refer to the USSR as a fundamentally different economic model from capitalism, yet it clearly wasn't that different, and I even dare to venture the view, that the USSR was a significant stage of the Russian capitalist development.
Taking the original meaning of the term, communism is a movement against capitalism, not a settled set of ideas. Especially not the set of the social democrat ideas (state managed economy where everybody is a worker, and a bureaucracy that rules them all).

If you're comfortable in the European and Russian history, then you would know that it did work in many aspects!

1) It modernized the country in the industry and politics. What they performed was a forced shift from an economy based on agriculture to an industrial one.
2) It "freed" the population from the land completely, and first the party managers, and now capitalist oligarch can rule them by wages.
3) The zone of interest of the USSR expanded to reach even other continents, and even our huge satellite, so one has to admit it, that this is no little accomplishment for a country, that was ruled by Father Tzar not even hundred years ago.

This is no small feast for capitalism because after all, by all means, it was explicitly capitalist country since the '20s, and even before the policies were that of a failed war-economic ones. Capitalism doesn't need free market, in fact, it only holds a certain illusion of "free" market anyway. Free markets in capitalism are always deemed to transform in to monopoly playground, which seizes the political system. In the case of the USSR however, it was the inherited bureaucratic structure that produced capitalism where there was little. If you take your time, and look up the ideological genealogy of Bolshevism/The Communist Party, you'll find that in fact, they were no more than a rather extreme version of social democracy, and communist/anarchists/radicals of all sorts were systematically eliminated, imprisoned, forced out of the country. Stalin's re-interpretation of Marxism-Leninism (that this radical social democratic theory, the top-down approach to the working class and communism as a Party led process, instead of a revolutionary movement) were only slight changes, in order to make the Soviet-Russian imperialism "acceptable", as the USSR external image as the agent of internationalism (which is, in many ways, just the same ol' lie creepily similar to the USA's line of bringing about liberty and democracy - both means that expanding the zone of military-political-economical interest).

For all intents and purposes, the USSR produced super-wealthy class, who at some point dissociate themselves from the ideological facade, broke away even from the illusion of managing this wealth in the name of the people. Economy isn't something of being good or bad. It is a tool in the hand of the powerful. In economic crises it is always the most wealthy who survives the transformation, those who actually create policy... economic policy.

One would think, that if they are such a good hackers, they just probably have a few Asian proxy over there, or perhaps even a host of Asian looking shells. Kaspersky has to call Section 9.

You actually did pay $71 for that game? I mean, I used to be a fan of Sim City in the old times, but I would never give that much money for a game that doesn't offer any short of the care that Blizzard put in to its games. Now, I have my beef with Blizzard over other behaviour, and with all software company selling EULs with binary blobs, but that's a completely different matter.

$71 for this crap is just nuts!

Check out your Windows EULA then. You're in for a surprise.

Yeah, but you know, this like cheering for a soft dictatorship in a harsh, murderous dictatorship. Sure, less people are murdered for their beliefs, yet the result is the same: people are oppressed. So, cheering for an other DRM scheme, which perhaps technically less obtrusive is still nothing, but cheering for a DRM scheme adds up to the consumer price in exchange to take your control away over the products you bought.

It's the same thing, that paying for a club, where you are constantly harassed by the security guys. Just because they are more polite in an other club, it is still harassment.

When I bought a game, I always made an ISO image of it in the first day. That way, you don't worry about scratches, and you won't loose it.

"Even though the capitalist class may own a large part of the economy, they are in practice rather powerless, since all their influence is ultimately bounded by the law, which in general tends to favour the short-term interests of people that do not invest significant amounts of money quite strongly..."

This part is so wrong on many account, that I have hard time to even choose where should I start.

Ahan. So let's be naive. They only have power in the production, they can lobby, fund politicians, these poor powerless people. But let's be less naive. They can afford bribery, they can bully governments to do what is only in the interest of them. In some countries, they go as far as hire entire gun squads to enforce their ideas. Law only restrict those who can't invest in the law. Anti-union legislation aims exactly to diminish everybody else's lobby power, because hey... it can only be the game of the bosses.

Democracy you say? Where's my equal say on the matters? I'm only asked on which corporate puppet will get a vote in the parliament, or whatever. After that, they do whatever pleases them and mostly it is their pocket. And who can stuff those pockets? Guess what, who can invest in politics.

Short-sightedness my arse. Democracy is when we can have a collective planning over what, how, and for what end are we producing. Money doesn't equal with merit. It's just money, the counter value of human labour.

Yeah, sure. Everybody can starve their family for making an investment on minimum wage. You're just being plain ridiculous.

" all are free to succeed and fail on their merits"

Oh yeah. There's that of course. Because the community provides everybody with the same education, same financial stability up until they grow up. But this is just one aspect. The other one is, that wealth is produced by the collective work of people. But as long as you're working for wage, you are not sharing this new wealth, the wealth is collected by the owner of the business. Thus for those, who collect this new wealth, the opportunity to collect more newly created wealth grows. Mathematically that means that the rest of the people are cut off from this new wealth. It's a zero-sum game that is rigged toward the owners of the capital.