In my experience, IDEs run roughly the same on Windows as on Linux. Not a lot of difference here.

The reasons for developing on Windows are mainly:

• Giving each developer a PC/laptop is much cheaper than giving them a Sparc workstation.
• Company email/documents are based on MS office software. If you develop on Windows, you only need a single machine.
• For a web application, you still need to test on IE from time to time.

Don't forget Lotus Notes. IBM has some very large accounts using that.

OTOH, Groupwise is on the way out.

AFAIK, PHPMyAdmin doesn't have its own security. The user/password is passed to the MySQL server. If they were able to create databases without a password, it would seem that MySQL was installed without a password for the mysql admin user. During installation, MySQL asks to set a root password. A long time ago, this was not the case.

This would seem that they had a very old MySQL setup and they never changed the password.

Back when I was in college (1995), I subscribed to a few LISTSERV mailing lists. Over the years, they moved to other platforms or disappeared.

I can't even remember which lists.

It's pretty obvious what would happen when MS buys Yahoo!:

• Search is already handled by Bing, no change there.
• Mail is migrated to hotmail/live.
• Flickr, groups: MS doesn't have an alternative for those. They'll add in a lot of developers to port it to Windows servers.
• Zimbra either gets spun off, or is killed.
• Most Yahoo! technical staff leaves while the BSD infrastructure is replaced by Windows.

In 5 years time, nothing is left of Yahoo!

Also from Belgium, using the regular ISP DNS.

No problem accessing thepiratebay.com. www.thepiratebay.com forwards to depiraatbaai.be, which points to the same site.

Manual memory management is tedious and error-prone. You need to add your destructor calls in all the right places, taking into account all possible program flows. Any mistake results in a memory leak or a crash.

Not if you have shared objects.

And you still don't understand the environment you're working on? That's sad.

In Belgium, you only have to use the blinker when exiting the roundabout, not when entering (makes sense: it's the only way to go).

If only drivers would learn to do that...

On a roundabout, cyclists are often in a car's "dead angle", where the driver can hardly see them.

Also, the PPro is the basis for the Pentium II, III processors. It's one of Intel's most successful CPU designs. It was so good that Intel went back when they ran into problems with the Pentium 4. (Creating the Pentium M and Core 1 processors.)