It was a weird language called "C-HyperText". :P

Nah, typo of course. But the first thing I thought after hitting submit was ".hypertext". :D

If by including the line "#include <stdio.ht>" before each and every call to a stdio function leading to hundreds of compile errors "interferes" with the job of a programmer, then yes. He was the single most incompetent fraud I've ever encountered in my life.

Sadly, it's a cultural thing. The first Indian I met was caught with a forged degree from a University he never went to. Over the years as I've gotten to work and know more Indians, I found an endemic culture of cheating on taxes, cheating on business deals, ripping off customers, degrees bought from diploma mills, and most recently, refusing to honour their own restaurant's gift certificates when you tried to cash them in.

Worse, every single one of these individuals bragged about how they "beat the system."

They don't worry that cheating is wrong, just about getting caught. :(

By the way, the thing they're distracting you from doesn't have to be some conspiracy theory craziness. It could be something as simple as fraud by the party's members, a bad economic report, a downturn in employment numbers, and so on.

There is also the "positive" spin some try to put on it: we're the only party that can protect you from this vague uneasiness!

Well, it's a consistent flaw with Windows 7 on this Lenovo box. I've repeatedly had to disable UEFI for driver updates; the graphics driver was just the first one I discovered the workaround for. What is surprising is that the reported error isn't listed in the Microsoft online error database with the suggested workaround of disabling UEFI while installing the driver.

You can easily distract the bulk of the population by raising fears of something they don't understand. Anything nuclear. Anything to do with computers. And so on...

The question is not "why" they do this, but what are they trying to distract you from?

When I tried to update the graphics drivers for my Lenovo laptop, I got undocumented errors and a rollback. Later, on a whim, I disabled UEFI, and the drivers installed with no problem. I re-enabled UEFI afterwards, and the system still runs fine.

So unless you trust your vendor to deliver absolutely PERFECT drivers that will NEVER need updating, you wouldn't want a system that prevents you from disabling UEFI.

Anyone who is designing such systems around "accurate time" hasn't got a freaking clue how to build such systems.

For example, when dealing with spacing on self-driving vehicles, you rely on radar or laser tracking to maintain the separation between vehicles, not some wildly inaccurate network message about the velocity and position sent by other vehicles.

Medical in particular baffles me. Who in their right mind would design a medical system that synchronizes with anything other than the patient's own body rhythms?

But hey, that's what happens when you get some simulation designers trying to apply their single-clock logic to complex systems. They don't think about how real systems work -- the problem isn't an inaccurate time value -- it's an inaccurate understanding of the problem itself.

hand.

Hand them a gun.

Time to clean the keyboard... :P

Take someone who is suicidal and crying out for help and to talk with their friends, and you block them from talking to anyone!

Why not just had them a gun?

As long as a database engine has stored procedures and a decent client binding library, I can make it go. I've worked with MySQL, SAP/Sybase ASE, DB/2 LUW, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server extensively over the years. There comes a point where you just know enough about the quircks and foibles of each of the databases to get around their particular issues and "just make it go."

People who bitch about the minor syntactic differences between the vendors clearly haven't really ported an application, because the differences in behaviour go far beyond syntactic sugar. Despite the ANSI standards, you can't just install the schema on a competitor's database and expect it to run an application properly without a lot of rework and restructuring.

Sure your basic table structures may remain compatible, but that's about it.

Every vendor has at least a few features that encourage "lock-in" by being incompatible with all their competitor's products.

I do have a rule about which databases I work with, though: if it doesn't have stored procedures, I won't use it. The performance benefits of complex stored procedures vs. logic in the client is just too dramatic to ignore and gloss over. Not to mention the fact that coding the logic in the client application is extremely verbose compared to any stored procedure syntax I've ever encountered.

Unless someone resurrects the "Space Orb" controller, I can't see any version of Descent as being much fun. It was my old Space Orb that made the game at all *playable*.

Ever hear of "developer editions"?

Nothing is "wrong" with it -- I just don't want to end up being a die-hard "next generation XP user" who is stuck on an obsolete version of the OS. If I can get on the newest edition for free, why not? At least that way the updates will keep coming for more than another year or two -- and most of my hardware is kept running for a decade before it gets replaced.

It was the cheapest i7 option out there, and gave me portability for when I want it. It's not like I'm running servers -- I just need to be able to check script syntax by *creating* the database instances. Performance is a non-issue.

Besides, if a single user can swamp a database even on a laptop, then the database isn't worth developing for. Don't forget -- even laptop hardware is nearly 1000 times as powerful as "servers" were when these products first came out.