Joking aside - its always good practice to have electronic AND hard copies (optical disc, microfiche paper) of all critical data including copies off site. That way even if some hackers from somewherestan manege to totally trash the companies electronic systems the data can still be recovered.

And how do you plan on plugging in and interfacing all the 1980s peripherals to a 2015 PC exactly?

"It's sad that popular image makes Nokia only a failed handset company, and paints companies like Apple as great inventors of the market."

Actually Motorola built the first cellular phone but lets not let facts get in the way. And lets not pretend that Nokia made the decision to quit the handset business out of choice. They fucked up. Badly.

And for all the cries of "Well, Nokias doing nicely now thanks", which company out of Nokia and Apple currently has $178 BILLION of cash reserves in the bank? If Nokia management had been a bit bolder in the mid 2000s it could have been them.

I'm not a fan of Apple, but lets be realistic, they could buy Nokia outright and not really even notice the different in their bank balance.

... but it didn't get there for 24 hours.

Unfortunately there are plenty of managers around who think that the person who knocks off at 5.30 is not a "team player", regardless of whether they get their work done. And they'll reflect this moronic point of view in their review of the employee. Now you probably won't get fired for not working the hours, but you certainly won't be getting much of a bonus or promotion either in most large AND small companies if you don't.

Sadly this sort of long hours office culture is so well ingrained in the USA and UK (not so much in europe) that its going to be very difficult to change it anytime soon especially when as you say , some idiots think they're being heros by staying as late is possible.

I don't know what university you went to , but I had quite a number of girls in my CS classes and none of them had a problem interacting with the guys or the other girls and they all passed fine. Seems to me you've dreamt up some anti geek, anti male BS to suit your agenda.

Horseshit. Coding by its nature can be solitary activity, you don't need a "nurturing setting". You either like it and can do it or you don't and can't. Your post just sounds like a list of whining excuses for someone who wasn't up to it. Perhaps it you?

Spare me the feeble straw man attempt.

"Get your head out of your ass sometime."

I don't own a donkey. Oh, did you mean "arse"?

How come sexual discrimination seems to be a one way thing with the political classes? Can you imagine the fuss and uproar if someone dared suggest a National Center for Men & [insert vocation with not many men here]? I'm sick & tired of this hypocritical social engineering.

And? You can do that in C too - replace class with struct. However in both languages it might default to word size so better to use #pragma option to make sure it doesn't.

"If it's the NSA's job to spy on allies, why not change their damn job description or shut them down?"

Your naivety is touching. Countries have spied on their supposed allies since spying was invented - the french have almost certainly spied on the USA too. Its part of realpolitik. If you think this is new and unprecedented then its time you bought a ticket for the clue train.

They should have use AMD computers then!

"But try to take some of that away, reduce the grants, incomes and pensions to levels that the Greek economy can actually sustain, and all of Greek media starts being indignant about it, blaming Germany and Europe for all this shit."

Its much easier to blame someone else than yourself. I'd have a lot more respect for the greeks if they'd admitted they got into the eurozone by fraud and that their entire tax collection and benefits system is an unsustainable mess and needs to be fixed.

But they haven't and won't. They'll continue blaming everyone else like little children until the day comes when german turns off the money tap and then they're really fucked and no amount of whining will help them.

"I just pointed out that dbus written in C++ would be much faster then the C version: simply by avoiding the cache hits."

I read your comment and I see nothing to justify that position. Apparently you seem unaware of the existence of resizable arrays in C.

All true, except that C++ makes some things so much easier? Need a linked list of variable length strings that will be updated? vector in C++. In C you'll be rolling your own linked list and managing your own char* array memory using realloc(). Not hard for an experience C programming but still a lot messier than the C++ equivalent.