What's the default on Android? That was an utterly useless piece of crap. I assumed it was Chrome since it's Google... Firefox isn't much better though. So slow, no instruction manual (seriously, I can't figure out how to use it, how to customize it to get rid of accidentally added bookmarks, how to remove the default start page, etc). Then I have to pull out a magnifying glass to read any page that pops up anyway.

Firefox is amazingly slow on my phone. I stopped using it, it's pointless to even try. I will walk from the lunch breakroom back to my desk in order to look stuff up on the web in order to save time.

The ADS are the resource hogs! I am highly suspicious that this is the reason why there is no decent browser for my android, it's painfully slow even though the same wifi is fast and responsive on a real computer. Alternately it could be JavaScript since there's also no NoScript add-on, but I don't even know if JavaScript can run on smartphones... I'd really like to just get a dumb phone again, there's nothing at all smart or useful about the new phones unless you like to do twitter or facebook.

The maintenance is usually built into the cost. Plans during design may have been for 1 firmware patch/upgrade a year. However in practice this may change over time.

Or they factor in the cost of manpower to walk around to each pump and upgrade them versus the cost of adding in a network and the security subsystem to deal with a network and the cost of back office support services to manage the network and security issues, and then decided that the flunky with a laptop is the better solution. Sure, I agree it's not good to be the flunky in that case, but it's how so much of the world works.

Alternatively, you could say the manufacturer has done a good job of eliminating networks as a source of malware.

The yanks smart bomb people instead. Innocent people too if you're paying attention. Seriously, "the muslims" are not bombing people any more than "the christians" or the "the yanks" or "the russkies". If you think an Islamic extremist suicide bomber is the same as all muslims, then why aren't all white Americans the same as Timothy McVeigh?

The difference is that when some nut case looks like you then the gut instinct is to call them an anomaly, but if the nut case looks different from you then the gut instinct is to blame everyone else who looks like the nut case. The same applies even if they look like you but their church has a slightly theology, or they're in a different job, or from a different political party, etc.

If you have nothing to hide, then you don't need to wear clothes (bill provision to be added by the sunscreen manufacturing coalition). So if you see someone walking around with clothes and they're not uniformed police, they're probably a criminal and should be reported.

But its still hypocritical to campaign based upon local control while also deying local control.

And in many cases, the municipalities existed as political entities before the state.

Capital means money too, wealth or property, as well as uppercase. Thus a pun.

CD-ROM era may be closing, but the era of physical distribution is not. The cloud is a myth. Sure it may be used by the hordes but people who want security, privacy, safety, convenience, etc, will continue use physical storage. Computers and device will continue to require physical storage for decades to come. Just because the teens don't use something doesn't make it dead.

Does the editor allow you to see multiple windows of code at the same time? The thing I hate most about IDEs I've used is that they're using this bizarre MDI model, big file list or class browser on one side, command output or such at the bottom, menu bar and icons at the top, and one big space wasting code window in the middle. I want to see file A on the left and file B on the right while I'm editing file C in the middle.

The perfect IDE for me that might get me to use one:
- multiple code windows simultaneously
- not written in Java so it's fast
- does not try to second guess me
- lets me configure it fully, I want emacs keybindings dammit, not mock-emacs
- let me plug and play different components from different vendors. Don't force the vendor lockin or tool lockin. I want to replace the editor or the debugger or whatnot. And do not suggest that Eclipse can do this because it can not.
- get the pointless windows and GUI fluff out of the way when I am not using them. If I have a modern high resolution monitor then I want to get more stuff on the screen rather than just higher resolution fonts.
- don't force me to use its lame project management system, use my own Makefile or set of scripts (because no one's yet come up with a suitable replacement), don't do something moronic like assuming every file in a directory is a part of the project, don't insist on a directory layout style, let the user be in charge.
- make it easy to program instead of making me struggle locating obscure hidden menu entries
- don't make me point and click.

Get a good hint from Genera on the old Symbolics Lisp machines. A GUI designed by smart people for smart people.

Visual Studio when I used in a decade ago, was one of the worst IDEs I've seen. Ie, screwing up the project files so I had to fix them by hand in an editor , but many IDEs screw that stuff up when merging from source code control, a fault of using XML for unnatural purposes (to be fair, any useful purpose for XML is automatically unnatural). Extremely slow start up, slow run time, slow everything. Once it stopped being mandatory because we got an alternate way to build the projects most people on the team stopped using Visual Studio except as a basic editor, many stopped using even the class browser. People are able to create GUIs that are usable, however Microsoft hasn't managed that trick yet.

That's exactly who I was thinking of.

There's your problem DOS command prompt is a stretch to call it a "tool". Windows was not designed to make doing work easy. Switch over to Unix or Mac and get real work done with a real command line designed to get stuff done. Or install Cygwin on your system.

I've seen several embedded development systems for Windows out there that come with Cygwin or MinGW tools, even if they're under the hood.

Renaming functions is not that hard without an IDE. Or if you're good at using the shell with grep/xargs/sed you're good to go.

The thing is that IDEs can save you a few minutes in these cases if the function to be renamed is used across many files. However the IDE also sucks up a lot of your life in exchange; you're forced to use the IDE's idea of how projects should be laid out, they need to know every file you use (otherwise they can't search/replace), they're not happy when you use external build tools, many of them get confused if you use external editors (no IDE code editor is even remotely close to the usefulness of emacs), and sadly in this day and age, so many of them are just plain awful (none of the whizbang must-have refactoring features that people rave about, just a lousy editor with a lousy debugger). If the refactoring is so awesome then someone should come up with a tool to do that without the agony of using an IDE.

Another hint that many kids who follow behind Microsoft don't know. If you don't use Microsoft's stupid variant of Hungarian notation then you don't need to rename your variables if you change their type, so either don't use Hungarian notation or else use it the way it was intended to be used (prefix by the use of the variable and not the type).

Right now I'm forced to use an IDE based off of Eclipse for one project, because it is the only debugger for a particular chip unless we switch over to Windows. It's absolutely brutal to use. Sloooow, crashing a lot, a bit confused about ELF format, unintuitive, hours of wasted time trying to figure out what should be simple, and so forth. So it's the worst of Eclipse with the worst of unnamed vendor (starts with tee and ends in eye), and the vendor isn't even using it internally.