If you're really hard core, you use a Das keyboard. None of the keys are marked, which keeps mates off the computer. Its spring loaded of course, but also features gold played contacts. But the real selling point, of course, is the lack of key markings.

I agree. In fact, I usually argue that computer science degrees are like getting certified as a steam engine mechanic. Of course, if you can fix steam engines, you have knowledge applicable to all sorts of things... But improvisation skills are key.

As linux market share grows I think there's going to be a bigger group of people building small specific programs and using stdin and stdout to communicate between them. On the other hand, whereas in the glory days of Unix simple text processing was quite common, the next few decades will probably revolve more around markup like XML or various rich text formats that play less nicely with sed and awk style operations. Nevertheless, I feel that many of the power users of windows will eventually become old school unix types, usin cut for example where they might have previously fired up Exel. Incidentally this is bad news for the bad guys. If people do move back to old school unix philosophy, many of the exploits that rely on monolithic, and therefore messy, programs will be obsolete.