Fanbois downvoting, eh?

Have you ever bothered to read the notes on Windows 7 updates? You'd be disgusted to realize how many of them "may require a system restart". Over half. WAY over half.

Same here, and that's on an *ancient* NVidia card (fanless 8600 IIRC) and a P4 3.8GHz with only 800 MHz memory.

Raw Debian had some issues with tearing prior to their latest driver updates from NVidia, but I've no doubt those issues have been addressed with their latest stable release (which has newer drivers.) Most of the tearing was with Flash playback, though -- VLC did a pretty good job with upscaled 720p videos.

Things may have improved, but you still have to reboot for far too many Windows updates for a daily update cycle to be anything other than frustrating as hell for most people. Microsoft used to be hated for that before "Patch Tuesday" was started. I guess they never learned their lesson, and are going to drag the public kicking and screaming back into the daily boot cycle.

What a shame they couldn't have learned their lesson and either started issuing patches that don't require reboots for the most trivial of changes, or stick with "Patch Tuesday" to minimize the pain for the user.

I was lucky enough to learn how to program in Neuron Data's toolkits before the 1.0 release of the GUI components were released to the public. I rode that gravy train for about 15 years before the market imploded, with a peak of $120/hr. in the mid-late '90s.

But I didn't choose that route -- I got lucky that something I knew well turned out to have relatively high demand (at least compared to the number of people who really knew that tool well.) I could just have easily been unlucky enough to learn one of the other two GUI toolkits that Northern Telecom was evaluating at the time.

On the database front, I missed out -- I was tasked with evaluating the first release of Ingres, and have never seen that product again in my entire career. Fortunately I was able to wrangle some Oracle work and training with my Ingres SQL experience, and from there sidestepped to Sybase ASE, DB/2 LUW, and SQL Server. But I had to work at becoming an SQL expert (cross-platform); with the GUI tools, I just got lucky.

On the major downside, most of my GUI experience is now useless because the only place you'll find Neuron Data left in are old legacy/maintenance-mode applications. There is no new work being done with Open Interface Toolkit.

http://citeseer.uark.edu:8080/...

They already have options that they worked on back in 1993.

putting QWERTY on the screen is stupid, you have to use a different input method, the clock face is the one that makes a lot of sense.

Because making it look for ANY device means I can insert another USB device and then disconnect yours.

Just set up a script on the machine looking for a specific USB device, start shutdown if the device is not present. This is pretty common stuff, hell my old Lenovo laptop has a smartcard slot in it that would do the same thing if the card was removed.

In fact if you look you can find the same thing all over the place for the last decade on many hacking sites, even back in the late 90's this kind of stuff was on the "scene" I had back to back modems in telcom rooms inside boxes that if the box was opened it dumped 110V into the modem logic boards so that when discovered they would self destruct.

Most "hackers" today probably dont even own a buttset.

It even syncs the disks before shutting down! v_v

Such a non-news story... omg, this this is "interesting" in so far as an odd tool that has little possible use(?)

Those who try to classify mere coding as "programming" are the same ones who think you can teach "anybody" to "program." The problem is they have too low-balled a viewpoint on what the art of programming is. Calling a coder a programmer is like calling an apartment painter an artist; the jobs are only vaguely related. Slapping paint on a wall is no more "art" or "talent" than coding is compared to programming.

I'm not talking about understanding the business; I'm talking about translating the chatter of those who do understand the business into algorithms, models, and architecture. I'm talking about having the knowledge to choose from the various platforms and frameworks available.

You can't just walk someone through a course and have them learn that. They have to have the passion to learn about those things on their own, and they have to have the talent to understand those issues and concepts.

You can teach someone to spew the buzzwords; that doesn't mean they know jack shit.

The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, says Edge, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned.

Competent, basic programming may be, but there is also an aspect of art and talent to it that can't be taught no matter how much the "we don't fail kids here" people might wish it weren't the case. Companies aren't looking for competent programmers -- they offshore those jobs. They're looking for the exceptional talent that can drive the whole process from top to bottom, including issuing the designs and models those "competent" programmers are expected to work from.

I may not believe in the "10x programmer", but I most certainly do not believe that just "anybody" can be taught to be good programmer. I don't believe that of anything except the most basic of manual labour jobs.