16 years ago I worked on/developed industrial control systems and the fact this industry hasn't moved anywhere on the security front is not surprising. At the time development was still 1970s-80s style, save the punch cards. Most of the software developers had never learned structured programming and would still argue against it a solid decade after their mainstream ilk gave up the fight. Their code style was pure 70s at best and pure chaos at worst when written by the EEs. The newest code was all written in a language that I thought was already in the dustbin of history 5 years before I got there. Network security was completely foreign to everyone there.

The equipment was extraordinarily-buggy on top of our highly-questionable software. I remember numerous long nights isolating and writing workarounds for bugs or code that defended them from the user. These black boxes were all selected by either EEs for electrical characteristics, MEs for physical mounting/environmental characteristics, or some combination of the two. Their prices were high and therefore they gained a strange aura among non-programmers for being infallable objects with exceptional engineering.

The funny thing is the last time I heard from a contact there my software was still in use cooking up parts and the company was still selling injectors using the same crappy DOS-based interfaces we had back then. Mind-boggling. Today I can hardly fathom software that remains unchanged for even a couple years due to the pace of change on the internet.

+1 on Blizzaks

I loved my Blizzaks when I lived in the snow country. I ran normal tires for years with good results (after all, where I lived you only had 5-10 days with snow on the ground to worry about in a normal year) until the year I did a project in Wyoming and decided it was a good idea to get snow tires. These tires are unbelievable, even on straight ice. They looked really weird, but their performance made me a believer.

You're missing the point and your first sentence is a blatant troll.

They're not writing software for the Mac or iPhone, they're using it as a tool to write platform-agnostic code. That's why I found the results so interesting: When given the option, they went for the best tool for the job, not for the cheapest tool in the box.

The second most popular operating system there among the software engineers is Linux on one of the other brands of laptop. This doesn't surprise me at all.

Absolutely. Unless a developer only works on Windows applications (rare these days), it's pretty likely that they run some other operating system in a VM. The switch to Intel was probably the smartest thing Apple did.

The problem is that they need to prove they're premium, which most will question. In pictures the build looks better than average Microsoft products, but overall doesn't look comparable to the iPad. Since they are using off-the-shelf components throughough they can't match the iPad in any spec (low resolution, worse battery life, heavier, etc) that depends on tight integration and optimization. I don't think it'll end up competing with Android devices in price, but I'd be surprised if the Surface sells much outside the dedicated fanboy community at their iPad-matching price.

They need to be somewhere in the middle, with more like a $100-150 premium over an Android tablet and some seriously killer applications to compensate for at least half of that premium. It's a tall order, but it isn't impossible. The Pro version will probably fall flat on it's face, no matter what they do. It will have some very limited niche uses in some small industry segments, but that's about it. If they can get the battery life up, price down, and developers interested in it, it has a small shot at becoming a common tablet used in medical settings, but it will be a steep challenge since the iPad has already made major inroads.

They're really late to the game and that's going to make it a lot harder to break in. Then again, stranger things have happened, but the only time it has happened for them in recent memory was when they made their competition look archaic (Xbox). I don't think this is the case with the Surface, so they're probably in for some serious disappointment.

Let's say you're hired somewhere that buys a new laptop for every new hire. Your choices are any off-the-shelf (not custom) laptop from Apple, Dell, HP, or Lenovo. Which would you choose?

Under these exact conditions with people from a mix of STEM disciplines, more than half will choose the MacBook. Over 90% of the software engineers choose Apple. The fact none of their software is specifically Windows-based probably helps, but it is an interesting situation and result. If I were in that situation (dream job - I'm a bit jealous of my friend that works there), I'd pick the Apple, too.

I could drive a manual transmission car while talking on a cell phone with no problems... Mind you, I usually didn't and tried to get out of it, but I could.

This could be another thing about Europe vs. US: 99% of US cars are automatic, 97% of European cars are manual. Your only option when renting a car there is often a manual. Most people I know in the US couldn't even drive one, let alone drive a right-hand-drive car with one. This barrier-to-entry probably further weeds out those least-suited to driving... Your last point is absolutely true: If you can't drive one without thinking about it, you probably shouldn't be driving.

You know, I think the way people respond to the bans actually makes them more dangerous than they were before.

From completely non-scientific personal observation: Before the ban in my state, I could pick out the distracted drivers easily because they had glowing objects in their hands on top of their steering wheels. They also had less distance to go to look forward then back at their screen, which made them relatively safer. Once it was banned, drivers became instantly better for roughly 3-4 months. Once they realized enforcement was lax and texting loopholes, the driving rapidly became distinctly worse than it was before the ban. Traffic is more severe, people failing to notice traffic lights became a common occurance, etc. The texters simply moved to texting down low, the headset crowd continued using their headsets, and others went to using speakerphone (which is arguably worse than holding a phone to your head because it's more mentally distracting. The net effect was worse and more dangerous traffic, though I would believe that accident rates are no higher because some fraction of drivers are more aware than those that have become even less aware.

Mind you, according to this study, I'm an exceptionally dangerous and reckless driver that should get into accidents at an above-average rate. Except, of course, that I don't.

Oddly enough, the best traffic I've ever encountered was in Europe, followed by remote rural driving. The latter is simply due to low numbers of cars, which agrees with Smeed's Law. The former, I believe, is because there's more barrier to entry for driving combined with excellent public transit and no public transit stigma - average middle-class people might live their entire lives without ever learning to drive, which reduces the number of cars on the road and allows realistic self-evaluation. This is what is missing from countries like the US.

Advanced mathematics is critical in certain spheres. However, in greater than 95% of software development positions you will rarely do anything beyond advanced algebra. The fraction of time you'll do anything beyond the simplest algebra will be well below 1% of your time.

What most programmers do involves a lot of string parsing and handling/formatting data from databases; these completely eclipse all forms of mathematics in business software. If you ever end up in web development you could easily go for months to years without touching anything more complex, mathematically, than incrementing a variable. For example: I built a fairly large web interface package that has no math of any kind. None. It parses strings and reads/writes files, chooses what to return to the browser based on header data (string parsing), etc. A later version had simple iteration of a couple values. It has a lot of regexes for data validation and processes/juggles some crazy arrays of strings. Eventually it needed to support a binary protocol, which required the most complex mathematics in the code: a modulo 256 checksum. Whatever pays the bills, I guess.

Trust me, either way you'll suffer on one side or the other. If you have the skills you'll end up on a series of projects where you never use them. If you don't, someone is sure to throw a problem at you that requires mathematics you don't know.

This is, sadly, the bleak reality in store for most software developers that must develop business software to pay the bills.

Was that some kind of dress code? In the pictures they're all wearing short-sleeve button-up shirts (white or plaid) with slacks, belts, pocket protectors (packed full of writing implements), and outdated (by roughly 3-5 years) ties.

I'm far too young to have seen the TV broadcasts, so I don't know exactly what it was like, but the pictures are pretty funny.

To the OP: Shirts should be button-up in solid colors or simple 2-color plaids. Pants should be chinos (currently pleats are out) in black or khaki (far more utilitarian than dress slacks but smarter looking than jeans). Wear a black leather belt if the shirts need to be tucked in (if the bottom of the shirt is not cut straight across, you must tuck it in). On casual days you can drop to a golf shirt, which must be tucked in (in spite of the cut of the bottom), and may be worn with jeans, but must be worn with a belt.

Seattle definitely there, in spite of Redmond. If I thought there was any potential for Silicon Valley to lose their dominance to another city on the west coast, my money would be on Seattle.

Phoenix is a second-tier city where you might be able to put data centers, but Boise, Reno, and Denver are almost certainly better choices for these due to at least two of the following: climate, physical internet backbone routes, and taxes.

I'd bet you've never been to Boston. While some have a nearly-unintelligible accent, they were far from abrasive. In comparison to New York or Los Angeles, the people in Boston are really nice. They're even generally nicer than people from San Francisco, in my experience.

I'd say their share of sharp technical people is at least comparable to Silicon Valley. The hacker universe seems to orbit around these two regions.

This makes perfect sense.

Where I live (top floor of a condo tower), there's not much that ever touches the outside of my windows. Even inside there's not much that could fall and break one. The biggest issue is birds running into them, which happens far more often than you might imagine.