*sympathy* You can't even call her up to the union like we did the cleaning lady... *LOL*

Takes a big man to call someone a liar over the internet with an anonymous user post, asswipe. You wouldn't have the BALLS to do that to my face.

It had nothing to do with a melange of overpriced and useless crap in the pages...

I hate to tell you this, but most people who've worked support in manufacturing and office environments have similar stories. I spent close to two months getting paged by Northern Telecom in Bramalea, ON for a manufacturing system failure on the shop floor at 2-3 AM most days per week. It was only by deciding to hang out for an entire night watching the area that I found out it was being caused by a cleaning lady unplugging the network bridge to plug in her radio while cleaning the area.

So seeing as I have one of those stories myself, I find them a lot easier to believe than most of you kids do.

I feel sorry for all of you south of the border. Verizon was, without exception, the worst telco I ever dealt with as far as internet goes. When Canada was rolling out DSL and cable like crazy, Verizon in Delaware was offering up 28.8 dial-up. No options. No choices. That's all you could get. You couldn't even use a 56K modem because they used the high compression voice codecs on their lines, and you couldn't get a data line. You couldn't even get ISDN if you were willing to pay for it. :(

$80K in the early '90s was serious money.

Bullshit.

Those jobs I lost paid $80K/yr. and were undercut by Indian sweat shops paying their people $20/hr. without overtime.

Both Canada and the US have no shortage of tech workers. What they have is a shortage of companies willing to pay the prevailing wage, benefits, etc.

I've lost three jobs over the years to "lowest price" bidders -- every single one of which was an Indian-run sweatshop bringing in their workers from overseas and working them to death without paying overtime.

I worked in the US on temporary visas for up to three years at a time (annual renewals), spending over 12 years in the US in total. Was I ever sponsored for residency? Of course not -- then I'd have had some rights and freedoms. The money was good, and I don't regret the time I spent there, but I'm firmly on the side of the anti-H1-B crowd -- it's all a scam to benefit the bottom line of big business, not a legitimate shortage of skilled workers.

Bingo! At least one person gets my point! :D

I can't think of a single thing I do or would want to do with a computer that doesn't have some sort of toolkit, library, framework, or other component out there to get a "leg up" on doing the work, unless you're only doing the most basic and simplistic pieces of code or presentation. In the case of HTML, that means a text document without images, video, or sound; never mind "active" components of the interface via JavaScript.

The hardest lesson to learn as a programmer is that "not invented here" is code for "I am too arrogant to use someone else's solution."

Microsoft just jumped the shark. Big time.

There is no way in hell I would "upgrade" from 7 to an OS that requires subscription fees. The only reason I have it instead of Linux on the laptop is to run a couple of database products that I couldn't get going under Debian. If I could get Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server to run under Debian, there wouldn't be a Windows Virus in this house.

First you "legislate" that pizza is a "vegetable", now you're going to vote on whether science is real?

You're insane down south. Absolutely, completely, 100% bonkers.

Your point about vendor lock-in is pointless. There was a time when computer classes were taught using terminal-based systems, and everyone had to use the school computers, much as chemistry students have to use the school's labs.

You kids. So damned spoiled nowadays.

Man, that's a blast from the past. In my first year of university back in fall of '82, we used the PL/C subset of PL/1. Kind of a shitty language for introducing people to programming, but I'd been coding BASIC and assembler (Z-80) since I was 14, so it was mainly an issue of learning syntax for me.

So laughing at the expected arguments and flame wars that are about to ensue is "trolling"? I said nothing to actually start an argument.

Methinks you need to look up the definition of the word...