Windows 3.0 was the first version I used to any significant degree. It looked so high-tech, though to 2015 eyes it looks like something from the old stone age. It did some cool stuff. It also gave us General Protection Faults, the predecessor to the Blue Screen Of Death.

For a long time I recommended Windows 98 to non-technical users. Some people claimed there was a USB implementation for Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion they were mistaken. My first exposure to Windows 95 was an early alpha (I worked for the evil empire at the time) that crashed and required reformatting the hard disc after attempting to reconfigure the mouse.

I was intrigued by some of the other options out there. I sent my resume to Quarterdeck - I thought DESQview was neat - but only got a thanks-but-no-thanks postcard back.

...laura

The IDE that works, is free/FOSS and runs cross-plattform is the best for me. That would be Netbeans for me, since I mostly do PHP. QtCreator looks neat aswell. And after Anjuta, CodeBlocks and whatnot crashing on Ubuntu for me or not being supported for OS X it seems like a good candidate for C/C++.

In fact, I'd go as far and say that not having a good IDE that runs on Mac, Linux and perhaps Windows is actually a dealbreaker for a new programming language for me.

Example:
Yesterday I came across Dart again and clicked through a few websites on it. I still have it in the back of my head and haven't dismissed it yet because - Tadaa! - Google offers a chrome based IDE for it. ... Couldn't say though that I'm all ready for this cross-compiled for JavaScript fad that's going on right now, so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

That's my take on IDEs.

We need more of this around the world. It can't be that people work 3 jobs and barely get by why others buy a new car every year or a new cellphone or whatnot and do no more important stuff than the cleaning lady or the cook. ... And no, shoving around papers or hacking up the next bazillionth Twitter or IRC clone or setting up the next Wordpress installation that's going to be totally abandoned 15 months in is not more imporant than cleaning. Emphasis mine!

If it's not worth paying 15$ it's probably not worth being done by a human in the first place and should be left or automated. And if you're not ready to spend 15$ but insist you have cleaning personell you're an asocial *sshole and ought to clean up your own dirt.

My 3 cents.

Newsflash!
Closing of ThePirateBay top level domains forces millions of users to search two minutes for an alternative bittorrent infosite.

Next up: Bag of rice falls over in China! Situation unclear!

Fiber is amply fast.

The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load 25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...

...laura

That is a *very* long story. I could tell a similar one about my father. ... Doesn't matter.

Just briefly: There are hardly any things I can discuss with my father - who is a type-a evangelical christian faith man, a charlatan and a fraud who took the easy way out of his responsiblities and who had the nerve to try and borrow money from me on my 37th birthday, after having left me and my mother to our fate when I was twelve. And countless other things of the same bizar proportions too strange to actually be believable. ("I'm praying for you ..." ... Yeah, great. Thanks a bunch, asshole.)

Also there are also things I can simply not discuss with my mother. There are things she never will appreciate and there are acknowlegements I will never get from her, no matter what I do. To deeply engrained is her feminist hate of men because of those who wronged her ... or she thinks who wronged her. I love her and she did her best. She says she tried as hard as she could and I believe her. There is actually literally nothing more you can ask from a parent. In that regard I got very lucky.

The thing im getting to is this:
It's most certainly an evolutionary and biological constant that some people have good parents, some people have so-so parents and some people have parents who are way in over their head with the parenting business. Think of how many children would simply die out of neglect just a few centuries ago. It's just a few decades ago when 12-year olds where expected to work 14 hours a day for a plate of food. It still is in some places of the world.

What I'm saying is this: If your burden happens to be having parents who you simply can't look up to anymore in this day and age, as a grown adult, it is time to move on. It's hard and I catch myself falling into relapse every once in a while, but move on I should. I try to associate with people I admire and I try to cope with the fact that quite a few things I learned from my parents are flat out wrong or at least based on a bias.

I try every day to move on, and so should you.

Little Tip: I've taken on the habit of calling my mother and my father by their first name about 15 years ago. It helps.

I also try to be the best Pop in the world to my daughter, that's a good thing to focus on aswell. I think I'm doing fine. Not perfect, but fine.

My 2 cents.

... take a look at mens rights groups.

Same here. My wife and I each carry one of those combo tools. She also keeps a can of pepper spray on hers as well ;)

What's on my key chain (besides keys)? A combination window punch/seat belt cutter. Because I live in Florida ;)

In your teens and early 20's you're partying hard with friends, getting laid, and making lots of good memories.

You got *laid* in your teens? Dude, WTF? What are you? Some bizar creature from outer space? ... You're definitely wrong here.

Unlike other methods (and I'm strechting the term "method" here), agile methods rely on excellent optimised and product oriented software production pipelines. This is how you should do it anyway, agile or not. But in my experience roughly 1 in 20 software shops implement even the flakiest of standardised production. Most of the time you still have to explain to people why they should use versioning.

The decision makers, sales people and IT strategists also usually have a very hard time commiting to a product and produktion pipeline. They want to sell whatever goes and have the devs sort it out, understaffed, ill-equipped and with extra weekends.

There are a few companies that have sales and technology and perhaps even industrial design/user experience all on par (Apple for example), but most companies that offer software development have no decision makers that understand even the faintest about software development.

Agile methods such as Scrum are the ones that expose the fastest wether you actually are doing professional development or if your crew is just a bunch of people faking it with poor gouvernment, bad organsiation and a sales and production team that don't communicate professionally with each other. IT mostly is a second and third afterthought with most companies and in such environments the best method won't improve development, no matter what.

If a PM can't tell a client from a server or Java from JavaScript and couldn't be bothered to understand why it is important to make a call and a final decision about tabs or spaces Agile will show how shitty your environment is in an instant. Waterfall (i.e. we don't know what we're doing but we're doing it anyway) will disguise that indefinitely, because there's no fixed model for accountability built in.

Bottom line: Until IT stops being the cellar child of the company no method in the world will professionalise development as it is desperately needed. We're still like medicine in the 16th century in that regard.