Have a look at BlueJ http://www.bluej.org/ I think that java is a great language to learn programming and being based on C-style syntax, the transitions to C should be fairly smooth.

Its actually illegal to display swatika's in public in Germany and Austria.

Its the fricken $NtServicePacks in C:\WINDOWS that slows the whole damn thing down. But don't delete them manually, rather run "Disk Cleanup" and let it get sync the corresponding registry entries, so that windows can revert to its last known good configuration ... 3.1 IMO

The name is a bit crazy but its easy enough to use. http://www.bouncycastle.org/java.html

Oracles version numbers are notoriously bat-shit crazy ... Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.1.0

I love MS bashing as much as the rest of you, however the way I heard it was that it was a network issue. I work closely with the JSE, Johannesburg Stock Exchange, who happen to run on LSE's infrastructure. I heard that the root cause had to do with badly handled UDP packets in a cisco router, that had been patched the previous week-end.

I'm sure the dodgy government network would love that....

Here in Johannesburg South Africa municipality tried the same thing. When half a dozen subirbs started complaining about a water outage, they were told that it was advertised on the municipal web-page. I for one certainly will not be spending a day a week looking for notices from each and every new governmental / municipal / departmental website. There could easily be a designated central point into which notices could be posted, as a poster above hinted at. But for now, I'm more than likely going to assume the position of "Just because you can see it on your intranet, doesn't mean that it is publicised."

OK, I've done that too on a mainframe not the whole mainframe but a shared CICS region.
I was debugging a CICS/DB2 program using CEDF, and I knew that the problem was that a DB2 insert statement was returning -803 (Duplicate), so I wanted to overwrite the SQLCode with 0 (OK), after carefully stepping thru and getting to the right point in the program, I go to overwrite the SQLCode storage location with zeroes and *BAM* the CICS region goes down.
Damn now the whole team and I have to wait for the system programmers to start the CICS region up again.
CICS is up and I start my debug session again and a little while later at the crucial point *BAM* the CICS goes down again.
This time my phone rings ... its the sysprog ... I felt like a complete twat.

Listen i've been doing serious spreadsheet programming back since lotus 123, and I know that learning to sort is not that difficult, even if you haven't learnt it before. All you have to do is switch on the record macro function, and then click on the column that you want to sort, and then click on the sort button, and choose from ascending or descending.
See that was easy, 'Knuth said ;)

I'm quite impressed with Pixel Perfect http://www.pixelperfectplugin.com/