That's silly, plenty of people still wear watches. Your hypothesis might hold for a small demographic of the younger generation who are particularly technically inclined, but even I know of multiple Microsoft and Amazon employees who would never be caught without their smartphones, yet still wear a watch; partly for the practicality and partly for style. And they need not be some gaudy Rolex to achieve that. On the note of practicality, I'm a bit behind the latest tech trends and only recently switched to a smartphone, but now I'm considering a watch for one simple pragmatic reason: watches don't have a maximum battery life of two days. Speaking of that, if this 'smart watch' has such limited battery, I imagine it'd be an instant deal-breaker for many people.

I thought about buying an old Sun or SGI box for kicks... the thing that killed it for me was that if I ran with any sort of regularity, it would be terrible power consumption. And it doesn't run anything useful to me that a newer, more efficient machine wouldn't run...

what best practices do /.'s use when they modify production code?"

Should be able to easily revertable

Had my hopes up, only to have them dashi'd. Ah well.

FTFY

I don't have a super old school story to tell, but me and my friends, we often think of ourselves as one of the last generations that didn't grow up with the Internet and computers surrounding every aspect of life. I'm 24 now and went through the public school system in Ontario, Canada between 1994 until 2005.
br> Around the age of five, my dad brought home a 486 DX with 8 MB of RAM. I quickly became the primary user of it. There were computers at school, even as early as second grade, but it was primarily a toy for learning math, playing with art programs, using Microsoft Works, and learning typing. In the second grade I had a reputation in class for being extremely proficient with the keyboard. I think I hit maybe 40-50 WPM, which was impressive for my age back then. Nothing really interesting happened with computers throughout elementary school.

Then in middle school, I was at a school kind of reputed for technology. We played with Flash, a lot of MS Office, and a lot of CorelDRAW, which was kind of like Adobe Illustrator. There was a 'web team' extracurricular activity, which consisted of maybe the top ten to fifteen computer geeks of the middle school. That was mainly doing a little bit of HTML and a Macromedia Dreamweaver. And a lot of Unreal Tournament in our off time. We got to stay out of the cold winters in the computer lab to play with computers. Around this time I was experimenting with Linux at home so I would often putty to my home machine and go on IRC, which lead most classmates to think I was some sort of computer hacker.

In high school, computer classes was actually a kind of step back compared to middle school. I don't think the mandatory classes ever went beyond MS Office. We also did some research for science classes and such using computer. In grade 11 was when you could actually take a course called "Computer Science." My teacher taught us Visual Basic. The focus was making a usable UI most of the time. Rarely was there any math or any theoretical CS involved. It seemed like the provincial curriculum didn't really specify what exactly this course was meant to teach because a friend at another school was learning basic AI concepts and programmed a tic-tac-toe game.

By the end of high school, the closest thing to real computer science we had done was a VB6 program was computed steps in the Goldbach Conjecture. Anyone who was truly interested in computer science had self-learned skills that far outstripped the curriculum. When I entered university as a computer science student, the difference was staggering. I had probably been in the top three most respected computer geeks in high school, but I was absolutely average when I reached my university. I thought I was a real ace at computer science before, but there, I realized I had only been a child who had just experimented with programming in utterly nonsensical approaches...

Started around 2002 with Redhat 5.2 and then some version of Mandrake. I had a 56.6k WinModem back then, which I couldn't use on either Linux distro. I found an old 28.8k hardware modem and hooked it up to that, but it wasn't very practical. About a year later I got broadband, so I went back to experimenting with Linux; can't remember which ones I experimented with but I ended up with Debian potato or woody for a few years, before I switched to Slackware for fun. I think the big motivation for my choice of OS back then was experimentation and learning about Linux.

Around 2006 I got a laptop which just was a nightmare to work with any Slackware so I mainly used Windows. It had become too painful to try to make Linux work on it, but I had access to Ubuntu and Solaris at my university's machines so it was not all bad. In 2009 I got a Macbook, and OS X does everything that I had once wanted from Linux so I've been sticking with that since then. And it is pretty, graphically. So in this 'era' of my OS choices, I was mainly driven by picking something that works for my needs, without being a pain to set up.

For work at an enterprise and as a research assistant I've also been using RHEL9 and Ubuntu, but that is not really by choice. If I threw away my Macbook and got a PC laptop today, I might go with Archlinux, since its orientation towards a simple design seems appealing to me.

Not having Facebook would seriously inhibit my social life. It is hard to avoid it when the vast majority of your social circle uses it to communicate and plan events. I try to limit what I share, what information I put on it, and avoid associating my other online accounts with Facebook, but I can't control what others put up about me...

The majority computer science students and professors at the two universities I've attended use Macs...

I've met a handful of programmers who had a liberal arts background (i.e. Classical studies) who did programming at a non-tech company. For instance, working in the back office of a retailer or a bank to code up some internal desktop apps, web apps, or create-remove-update-delete business apps. For these jobs, knowing trade-type of skills (i.e. some experience programming especially in the "trendy" technologies) I believe is adequate. However, these jobs may not always feel very rewarding, what some computer scientists might call "code monkey" jobs... As a computer scientist, I would say it'd be very good to get a degree in it to strengthen your understanding of the theoretical background, which will help you to get a deeper understanding, helping you to become a smarter programmer and likely open the doors to more interesting projects/positions.

So what if there's no girls in my major? It is possible to interact with people outside of your studies. If anything it brings a healthy balance to your life.

So am I expected to move to Chrome now so I can be part of some exclusive club to validate my IQ? Or move away from IE so people don't think I'm stupid? Maybe they should have called this study, "Chrome Users Are Most Insecure?"

At this point, the best way to keep their credibility from further deteriorating is to provide good reports on what is going on. E.g., not like PSN, more like Amazon. Currently that Azure dashboard doesn't even load for me... has it been slashdotted or something?

As an aside: whenever a cloud system goes down, people come out to rag on the reliability of the cloud. While I'm also annoyed by the marketing guys throwing around "just put it in the cloud!!" as much as anyone else, and agree some applications make no sense living in the cloud, I'd also like to point out that for some people, doing the admin work in-house results in the same amount or more headaches.

The prevailing trend in Canada seems to be drifting way from scientific research: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16861468

Each time I read a new article about my country, I become more and more ashamed to be Canadian...

Not sure how prevalent it is in the U.S., but in Ontario, Canada, "Software Engineering" is recognized as an official type of "Engineer" -- http://www.peo.on.ca/enforcement/Software_engineering_page.html. In Ontario, like the states that you mentioned, it is illegal to call yourself an engineer without being granted the title by the self-regulating engineering body of the province. In order to be granted the title you have to taken part in an engineering university program that's been accredited by that body, and then take some further ethics tests, and work for a while under an engineer who has x years of experience.

It is a fairly new 'discipline' in engineering and I went to such a "Software Engineering" program that is accredited. The thing is, I know zero people in my graduating class of about 90 who actually took the extra steps to become a professional engineer. Mainly for two reasons; a) It only has a meaning in Ontario, and most of the lucrative software 'engineering' jobs are not in Ontario, and b) Even in Ontario, its relevance for employment is fairly limited... approaching useless I would say.

OS X's desktop search was not useful for me out-of-the-box, but I found it pretty good after I changed the settings to limit its search scope so that it's not searching for everything under the sun. I limit it to searching only Applications, Documents, PDF Documents, and Movies, because that's all I search for. Now it doubles as a smarter "Run" function (a la Windows) and document opener.