Precisely. I don't think I have purchased or even seen a game in recent years that did not come with a listing of prerequisite hardware/software.

If you entered into a purchase, received the goods, then stopped payment, I think Steam have every right to put a hold on the account you used until further information was received. What were you expecting, an apology from them because you didn't read the hardware prerequisites for a product you purchased?

If you don't dick them around, they provide a pretty damned good service.

Mankind has been selectively breeding animals for favoured traits, including behaviour, for thousands of years. All we will need is cattle bred to come running up to any humans it sees, calling out eat me eat me.

I have a kerosene fuelled soldering iron somewhere in my tool pile. Was planning to use it for some artistic sculpture work sometime. Of course it still relies on availability of a suitable fuel.

More important to know, I think, is somebody like a friend of mine, who could set up a blacksmiths workshop with the most primitive resources we could find. Tools and machining facilities would one of the most sacred crafts mankind would need to retain - after medical capabilities and healthcare knowledge. Tools and equipment for the purpose of large scale food production would be next.

NHS England had a program (I believe it still has a green light) to train around 50000 healthcare workers to code their own solutions, not to send them on a new career path, but so they can set them developing software at the same time that they are performing their healthcare duties for the population - Code4Health

So how hard could it possibly be?

And yet I dropped off several roles from my earlier employment history (on advice from somebody making my CV more attractive) and then got turned down for jobs by people saying I didn't have enough experience!

28 years doing damned good software solutions and now nobody really cares about code quality any more. Those who mentored me in my early years would be spitting if they were still around to see the state of IT now.

But they don't help your speling at all.

Well the last part was something about a goat, and the first part was something to do with a broom handle, so maybe your boss was explaining the relative trade value of your equipment requirements.

And yet employers seem to discriminate heavily against people who have not been working with the latest version of .Net, and expect us to pass tests on the most obscure and arcane features of .Net 4.5, many of which as far as I can tell, will probably never be required in basic web solutions anyway.

Oh, and I didn't get a particular job because I didn't have SSRS experience! Laughed my arse off at that one.

I'm not a regular C++ programmer or user of Qt, but as a casual observer it seems that the mobile/embedded APIs in Qt 5.2 could provide a fresh new approach for Android and other mobile platforms. However they are steering clear of easy webkit use, altho there are ways to fiddle around with JNI to get a web interface of some sort, and there are hints at Qt WebEngine (based on the Chrome engine) maybe being available in Qt 5.3 (or only in the enterprise version?). Blogs and new releases seem to vary.

I am a little curious about how well QML and the widgets UI tools can be used on Android, and whether these would be a better alternative to embedded web views for some solutions. Some of the tutorial examples seem straight-forward enough and run ok on my phone anyway.

As I said, I'm not using or experienced with C++, but when I occasionally feel the temptation to take it up, Qt 5 is looking like a good way to start. I would be interested to hear what general opinions are on where Qt is at at where they appear to be heading with embedded APIs and such.

I can't help feeling that a large majority of the crap apps were created by people who had just installed the SDK's etc and completed the first few tutorials on how to access bits of the API. Acceptance into the app store is really the problem, there should have been some kind of check and a requirement to explain why your implementation of a compass is different than the 250 existing compass apps on the store.
Seriously, filter out the tutorial example code and see how many apps are left.

I noticed a QR code on a pack of pork at the local supermarket and thought hey maybe they have some useful information related to this.
Scanned the QR with my phone and got sent to a full sized web page that would have looked busy on a desktop monitor, and had absolutely nothing viewable on a mobile screen.
Eww well... they have taken the first stumbling step anyway.

heh, you don't take into account paranoid players, who act as if there is a bad guy behind every wall. I just naturally use that strategy :)

I wouldn't mind notification as I slide the key in, such as "Would you like to remove the device from the diagnostic port before driving?".
I'm sure the technician with a legitimate purpose will be able to handle a few extra steps in activating diagnostic systems.

I work for a Fortune 500 company which is a microsft gold partner, but they made us sign some crap agreement that all MSDN resources are to be used at work on their equipment only, so at home I learn and tinker with mostly non-microsoft technology which is not and never will be accepted for use by my employers (their loss). Their reasoning mystified me until we learnt that it was just a policy created by the IT management to make their job easier, so quite unrelated to the company-wide misunderstanding and total under-utilization of their developer resources.

Of course, I will need to be extra creative and put something out there to show potential new employers that I know some of this technology, if I decide to get a job using it in a non-MS environment, as I have not been using it in the workplace, but it still gives pleasure to learn and investigate alternative tech.

Well one aspect to consider is, keeping a bunch of staff tied into using some proprietary internally developed tools could also be isolating those staff from gaining any experience with current tools out there in the market and in use by many/most future employers. I am stuck in a situation like this myself, where any chance to get a new job will rely on me learning new development tools in my own time on my home PC, then trying to convince somebody that this is the same as workplace experience with the tools.

Out of consideration of your staff and their career development, they should be able to at least keep up with knowledge and preferably hands on experience of real world tools. Of course, some employers don't give a toss about such things.