As long as you subscribe, even if you don't use the ads features (set it to 0), you still see the mysterious future.

I've had it like that for years.

I'd let you use mine, if i could. :)

by our I mean our little(r) circle here

Ah, how the FortKnox circle has shrunk.

the drive I found in the office is throwing some errors too

When it rains, it pours.

I have a subscription, but i never use it. :) Adblock rids all the ads for me, and i only really come for journals anyway.

Too bad the drive died. I know how that feels. Norton Ghost saved me once.

There are some solutions though, including placing the drive in the freezer for a couple hours and trying again. Though, a search just found this that warns against it.

On a side note, i have mod points. Should be coming to a JE near you. (Someone seems to have modded us all up recently as it is.) Everyone, please point me to your posts even if your rating isn't less than stellar.

but most are actually very carefully aimed at a majority of users

Pandering to the public seems so fickle. Popular today means it'll require changing tomorrow.

Is the constant change really helpful, or are these studies done with blinders on, looking only for short-term gain?

I wouldn't touch WD.

WD basically invented the hard drive and used to be awesome. Then they started selling garbage. After having a number of their drives fail and seeing online reports of the same, i no longer consider them an option. Same story with Epson for printers. It make me wonder why these great companies decided to destroy the one thing they had: A brand that stood for quality.

What a pane glass can be.
Luckily, you had she.
Broke the phone unknowingly,
Now you're happy as can be.

host OS (Mavericks)

Have you looked at 10.10 (beta) yet? Looks like the community is split over whether it's ugly or beautiful.

Does the adapter being passive or active have anything to do with it?

Hell.. it takes a good 10 minutes to figure out what web site Sanjay "Shawn" Prakrameshi is trying to direct you to!

I got a call two days ago from these people. I strung them along until they gave me a web address to go to in order to download some software and run it on my computer. Then while they were expecting me to do that, I ran a WHOIS on the host and IP, found out who was hosting them (it turned out to be an American company) and I contacted their abuse team and reported the site as being fradulent. 24 hours later, their web site was shut down.

It also helps when you contact their abuse department, that you tell them you work for an antivirus company and you're going to add the IP address of the site to your blacklist. In many cases, there are hundreds if not thousands of web sites operating from the same IP. They will take quick action rather than have one bad customer cause 900 other customer sites to not be accessible.

I am not sure there's much advice us older programmers can give new developers because the industry is a lot different now.

In the old days we were often tasked with solving a problem, and we were more-often free to use whatever tools and technology were best, and we also thought of development environments as tools, which we could switch out if the application required something different. We also did all our own testing. I recently worked with a younger programmer on a project and it was miserable. He couldn't give me 20 lines of code that didn't have a bug in it, because he was dependent upon having some QA person test his work and an IDE that would hilight every mistake.

Nowadays there is so much abstraction going on in programming, people don't really seem like they're programming as much as they're using some sort of GUI development tool and plodding through innumerable amounts of API documentation and going on witch-hunts to try and figure out why something that's documented to work, doesn't actually work. I remember a big Oracle project I was on where my software wouldn't work properly and I couldn't figure out why. It took me several months of bitching on usenet to finally get a rep within Oracle contact me privately and tell me I wasn't crazy, they knew about the bug and just weren't acknowledging it. In the old days, there wasn't as much of that going on. Programming was simpler and less bureaucratic.

I think the reason there's no job security in programming is because basically, nobody's really doing any "programming" these days.

Modern programmers know less about machines and languages than they do APIs and UIs. Everything is so object-oriented and encapsulated, and there are so many square pegs developers are asked to fit into round holes, they're not really designing stuff as much as working on an assembly line sticking various parts-pieces together with no real sense of oversight of the big picture.

but should NEVER be part of a logical primary key.

I wouldn't say never. The odd case would be in the table held data by the minute or second or the like.

But, i share your adamant stand against it it nearly all cases.