In my college program on electronics design, we actually did a lot of system-level programming on 8085 machines. We went so far as to build DAC converters to build volt meters out of computers. What it gave us was the ability to understand the basics of CPUs interacting with memory, signals, IOs, assembly language. That said, with two years of that under my belt, I am no closer to understanding any real-world programming that can get me a job, than had I not taken the class.

Yes, the basics of computers are much easier when you don't have massive clock frequencies adding insane complications to applications. No, programming has nothing to do with understanding what JMP does. Do I think it's valuable? Sure. Do I think it'll make any difference on whether you can call yourself a "programmer?" No way.

Ebay it, take the $150, and go buy a box better suited for what you want. Grab an AspireRevo, hook it up through HDMI, and you're only fronting $50 for something more useful and practical (at least, after Flash 10.1 comes out...)

God of War wasn't AO either, and you had to pound out a sex scene rhythm at one point... not just all sex is AO and removed, just explicit and graphic sex.

There are a lot of posts just like this, so I'll respond to this one.

Web code is simplistic, for sure, but how many hours have to be spent making a page render the same in IE4-8, Safari 2-3, Firefox 2-3, Opera, mobile browsers, etc.

I can code a beautiful page for any one, or maybe two, of those in no time. It's double the work or more to get it to render in all of them accurately. And all of this with solitary HTML/CSS/JS. Now I have be a DBA, I do program in C/Perl/Java/PHP, yet I have respect for the need to actually work knowledgably in HTML/CSS. It's not the code that's tough, it's how different the definitions of that simple code are across the ecosystem.

There's one other reason to choose NTFS: the file system is spread across the drive, versus having a localized FAT table. Unless the wear-leveling on the drive is good (and most controllers for USB sticks are more than sufficient for what they're designed for, but I wouldn't call "good," they're designed for price), you end up with very uneven wear on a finite-life product. Add in that the USB market takes the lowest grade of memory available, and I'd trust NTFS over FAT, generally.

That said, I still use FAT, because as long as my thumb drive works long enough to move my presentation from my laptop to my customer's, it's done its job. I don't expect it to have a long life, and I have an unlimited stream of new drives to play with.