That's a wonderfully short sighted attitude you have there. My wife spent a year in training and getting certified in IT. She then started to work in what should have been an enjoyable and promising career, only to find very shortly that the attitudes of people she was working with/for put her off IT altogether. She was never incapable, she could investigate and implement a solution as well as anybody I have worked with in 20 years of IT.

Management would simply not assign a female to a technical job if they had a male available to give the task to. You can deny and sputter and posture all you like, but overall, that is the most common situation you will encounter. In the year or two my wife tried to get into IT, she was kept on the sidelines of the interesting or challenging work, while being dumped with all the support jobs, cos women are, like, really good at handling phone calls and stuff, you know.

Now she wouldn't go near an IT role again (but ironically has to depend on young inexperienced males for IT support in her current job).

Underestimated them again... “Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" actually means
"I didn't really want to do this, you know. I want to be a lumberjack"

Seriously, how often does a monkey have to dodge falling trees?

Lets see,
"...With more than 1,000 retailers and 17 million product offers..."
"Overall, this case is an isolated instance within the larger Bing cashback"

So we are supposed to believe that the blogger just stumbled across this? Or maybe had nothing better to do than compare prices with and without cookies, for more than 1000 retailer sites? My bullshit detector is still processing the "isolated instance" statement, results expected in soon...

Do all Americans get trained at school on the subject of appropriately stereotyping people into roles? Do you get told as you leave school what your job is going to be because of the stereotype you fit into? What I'm really wondering is, does everybody else in the world think that everybody working in software must be a 'geek'?

After 20 years in software development, I have worked with a few people that could be classified as geeks, but the majority of people were not. They did their job well, and most had a busy life away from the pooters also. Here in NZ you don't have to fit an American character profile to get a job in IT.

It seems these days many people want to feel different, and out there, and weird, as opposed to an older, more puritanical society in which most people wanted to just fit in and appear normal. This does not seem to be exclusive to computer workers. As for the examples in the article tho, my impression is that these incidents are more of an indicator of the decline in good management, as a good manager should monitor new employees and provide guidance, instead of letting bad behavior persist in the workplace.

But game manufacturers are now putting out software with dependency on a physX dll. The support sites suggest that it is (paraphrased) a bit like DirectX, you just have to install the latest version, and it is completely hardware independent.

If physX is in fact crippled and useless on my ATI based system, why should I have to install it to make a game run? Why are game manufacturers making software that is dependent on a specific hardware manufacturer's drivers? I thought that mentality went away decades ago.

I guess I haven't spent enough time learning to implement AJAX yet, but the first issue I have encountered is, you poke off your server request to do something clever on your page, but the user is still sitting there clicking on shit and trying to get on with using your page. The few instances where an AJAX callback seemed to be useful, the page really needed to be frozen to make the user wait for it to complete anyway. This must just mean that the pages should be designed differently (unfortunately I don't get to design them, I just build them to the spec) but AJAX will never bring a fat-client forms-based solution to the browser.

Personally I find that Half Life and Whisky make a good combination, up to a point, then I start fumbling the weapon reloads, missing the enemy, and eventually fall off my chair.