We were a big company. Every developer was responsible for unit testing of their software. It would only go to QA for system-level testing. If it failed, it went back to the developer to be fixed. We had a VERY low failure rate as a result! FWIW, I was the one who instituted this process.

NEVER! We only use our TV for DVD videos. No network connection, and no TV connection. KEEP OUT OF MY LIVING ROOM!

This person should get an award for reducing the noise on Twitter!

Why aren't these cables armored and buried underground? This is incompetence on the part of the cable providers, entirely!

My father was a cosmic ray physicist, one of the top in the field. He even invented a cosmic ray "telescope: to view these events! It was called meson manner. :-) He also had a lab on top of Mount Evans in Colorado that did the same. I still have sympathies for the graduate students that had to spend a winder there!

Never let school get in the way of your education! I suppose I am such. I studied engineering, languages, creative writing, English literature, statistical genetics, analytical chemistry, music theory - all to a graduate level. I have worked as an accountant, auto mechanic, software engineer, and serious improvisational jazz violinist. I am a published writer of articles and books in software engineering, and have a US Patent as sole inventor of a means to enable adaptive systems (systems that don't require programming to adapt to their environments - a form of AI). At least all of this keeps me from being bored! :-)

I don't even lock my phone these days. If the cops want to access your data, they will. At least, by not securing my phone, I can remote lock it down if it is stolen. With no lock, I think cops will be at a loss to access the phone. "What is your access key? Me: what access key?"

I was working for Nokia Mobile Phones when MS took it over. A week before the deal was complete, MS said that everyone would be kept on. Two weeks after the deal was complete, they laid off 20,000 of us! Yeah. MS is a predator! We were a division of Nokia that was serving over 100 million customers world-wide...

I would not purchase an iPhone if it were free... I trust Apple almost as much as I "trust" Microsoft!

So did I, and I agree.

Two weeks before Microsoft closed its takeover of Nokia Mobile Phones where I worked at the time, they assured all the employees that there would be no layoffs and everyone had a secure position. Two weeks after the takeover was complete, they laid off 20,000 of us... Our entire division was decimated and basically shut down. I wonder what happened to the 100 million customers we were serving?

The co-inventor of ethernet at PARC, Robert Metcalf, has been a friend of mine for 35 years. My sympathies to Thacker's family for their loss. I never knew him although I may have met him in the early 1980's in the Silicon Valley. As a commercial computer sales rep in the Valley back then I sold Robert the first 100 IBM PC's for his startup, 3-com. When I was an engineer in Boston in the late 1980's and early 1990's we would meet for dinner before IEEE meetings.

First offense, reprimanded certainly. If someone is good enough to finish their expected work load quicker than expected, then working on other stuff that benefits the company is appropriate. Personal projects should be done on personal time, and not using company resources! As a principal engineer at a tier-one company in the 1990's and 2000's I often had time after finishing my "work". That's when I was thinking and studying ways to improve our software and processes. When I got home, I would work on "personal" projects after dinner and playing with my cat.

I have, in my 35 year career as a software engineer, had one time estimation rule-of-thumb that has held up well. Take the best estimated time, double that, and add 10%. Never fails!

Fortran, then BASIC, then 8008 assembler, then C, COBOL, x86 assembler, SQL, Dibol, Snobol, Smalltalk, C++, ... Latest serious language is PHP.