They are in a play list. The problem occurs when it's done with a burn, it selects the Library playlist for some reason. I then have to click on the playlist I want to burn to do it again. It's just one extra click, not really a big deal, but what is the point of going back to the main playlist?
The big painted cake in the sky for software development has been user-driven requirements and giving the user what he asks for. After all, the user wont be happy with anything else right? Problem is 113% of the software users out there have no idea what they want, or can't get specific about it. The only REAL development that I've done this year has been driven from the inside, based on requirements and timelines put in place by developers themselves.
Most of the projects that came from the outside were requests to put hacks on top of other hacks that already existed in an organization. These were lacking clear specifications and were full of assumptions and caveats. Often the simplest solution had to be avoided due to a desire on someone's part to utilize a new, unfinished, poorly documented standard because it promised to be the next revolutionary trend in the market, according to it's shadowy working group. The assumptions and caveats usually ended up killing the projects, that and the limited value of the end result. Most of the time the non-technical manager type folks that initiated the project just got some other more exciting itch to waste money on, and went off to scratch it.
Spammers are just the sort of people who go about trying to sue everything they see, claiming damages for arbitrary amounts. They are the same kind of class of people who commit insurance fraud, lie on their income tax returns, punt babies, molest farm animals...
in foil fencing, people who constantly use the same attack/defence only beat opponents who don't yet know how limited they are. Any attack or defense can be deadly when executed with appropriate timing and speed (timing being most important, even slow attacks can land if the timing is right). But when that attack or defense is anticipated, it becomes much more difficult to pull off. Watching a potential opponent for a bout or two will give you a good idea of what they are likely to do. Novices usually try to pull some kind of move to get a point, and they try it on everybody. Same thing applies to fighting games, although there is much less skill involved... The problem with some fighting games is that the fighting engine does not properly balance attack/defense capabilities, allowing certain moves to be impossible or too difficult to defend against. Every attack or attack combination should have some kind of defense/counter attack. This is usually not the case in video games. (your defense options are: run away, or hit block) Fencing has developed over hundreds of years, fighting video games have not been around quite as long.
I wish they would get a usability person on the iTunes team. Every time a CD burn finishes I get dumped to the 'Library'. If I want to burn another copy I have to go through the click fest again to get the playlist, wait for the cd to init, click the burn button before it times out... Nevermind, I'll use Toast..
I'll get over it, and maybe forgive the author for using Windows. I've been using RedHat 9 on 2 machines, RedHat 7.3 on a few others, and OS X on 3 machines. One Linux box (at work) has been up for more than 9 months. The other (home dev box) has been up for maybe 4 months. The OS X machines have been running/upgraded without re-install since Jaguar became available. I have no stability problems with any of them, and I don't ever feel the need to re-install monthly. I don't really understand this impulse, maybe stability issues are forcing the author to re-install all the time? Seriously, if I had to wipe my hard drives and start over every month, I'd never have time to do anything.
OS X:
(Mostly audio stuff)
Logic Audio Platinum (DAW)
NI Battery (drum synth)
NI FM7 (FM synth)
ReFX Slayer (Elec.Guitar synth!)
VST-AU Adapter (AU wrapper for VST plug-ins)
A few other soft synths
Pro-tools
MacMAME (arcade game emulator)
Mozilla (safari still sux)
Keyword lists in Adwords should not contain trademarks or trade names that that the advertised company does not own, if the trade name or trademark identifies a competitor. Trade names that don't identify competitors should be allowed. Google does not have an automatic way of enforcing these kind of rules (if they do exist), something of this nature would require a lot of human intervention. Maybe Google should make the subscriber liable for trade name and trademark violations, that way competitors would have to sue the companies that are responsible for the abuse in the first place.
Maybe it's not practical from the manufacturers perspective, but motherboard, CPU and graphics card upgrades would be nice. Generally CPUs are hard wired to the board because it's cheaper and more compact. Also, what good would a CPU upgrade be without a faster motherboard? The biggest limitation I have with any machine is CPU speed and cache size. I don't want to spend $3000 for the fastest, biggest laptop, I just want a plain 12" with a buttload of cache and the fastest processor. I'd like to get a few more miles out of my 800 mhz iBook, thats all. Seems like a waste of resources to have to buy a whole new computer just to get an extra 700 mhz.
Wait all you want. What you need to do is get your wallet ahead of the hardware curve. Cause you know, once you buy a notebook, you're stuck with it. There's nothing to upgrade but the RAM. And maybe the hard drive.
This would fall in line with the fact that very smart people like Einstein, Feynman, and the like are/were able to visualize complex systems and ideas easily. 'Visual thinking' comes naturally to them. I'm not sure why this doesn't always translate into high mathematical talent. I've noticed that some very smart people are not able to calculate quickly or perform large calcuations without the help of paper or a computer They are able to plan out and model complex software systems in their heads, or design and understand complex mechanical systems and engineering problems easily. It seems like some people fall into the 'good at numbers' camp and others are in the 'good at language' camp. Not sure if this is related to their 'cache' size.
And you can bet the insured are paying for the re-insurance in the form of higher rates. Who re-insures the re-insurers? I'm guessing the further you get away from the insured, the less risk you take.
DirectX is more of a proprietary API than a standard. Microsoft has nothing to gain by supporting OpenGL, they like the fact that many Linux users still have a copy of Windows around to run DirectX games. DirectX is very cool as far as what you can pull off with it, I'm not sure if OpenGL is equally powerful. This game looks really good, I'd like to have a look at the code and see what can be done about an OpenGL port. (Maybe something is being done already?)
OR, maybe try running it in Wine?
There are lots of libraries for sound and graphics out there for Linux and BSD, it would be nice if everybody standardized around stuff like OpenGL.
One of the biggest problems the average user has with most open source software is that he can't figure out how to install or configure it. The open source java app I have been working on for 2 years has gone through a few different installers, none of which were very good. Even the ones that required licence fees that we tried out were crappy. Many open source projects require the user to compile and link the source code, sometimes even making users edit source code for configuration changes. This is either laziness or lack of resources on the developer's part, neither of which looks good from a user's perspective. Software that is distributed a binaries with install/run scripts are better, as long as you can provide scripts for each platform.
As developers, generally the first thing we do after downloading some new open source software is read the README file. Then maybe the GOTCHAS.. Most users won't or can't pay attention long enough to read the instructions in a wizard based installer, much less a 50+ README. Programmers tend to be fast readers in my experience, many other people are not. So, if you can, include a one click installer and make the program configurable at runtime through a nice, easy to understand GUI.
True, True, I completely agree. Stability and performance are extremely important measures of usability that can be compromised by the 'feature rush' of development. It's very important in all stages of development to make sure rigidity is not built in, that problems can be fixed quickly without changing or breaking existing code. Windows seems to crash even without strange boundry conditions in place, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I think if people continue to use and improve more modern programming languages and move away from archaic development practices, some of these problems will be easier to deal with. I have written complex Java applications which never once crash or lose data, but just the same some of them do occasionally throw unexpected errors. It takes more than writing test cases to catch boundry conditions, it takes lots and lots of user testing. I don't know how many times I have written lazy test cases thinking that they were complete and ended up finding problems that they did not take into account. Testable code can be difficult to write when there are time constraints.
BZZZ. Like in hidden folders? or 'click this link to show files I'm hiding from you, for your own good' folders? I disagree. It's simple, you have a 'root' user, and everybody else. Most of the time you are one of the everybody elses and you can run amok in your home directory all you like. When feel the need to hose the system, log in as root (ok, Administrator) and administrate away. Don't hide anything, I need to know where it is. But I don't always need to be authorized to launch that particular nuclear or delete the/bin folder.
Vulnerabilities are created by bad programming, they are not necessarily linked to ease of use. Linux can continue to become more and more user freindly without running into the same problems that Windows has. Applications can be integrated without opening up holes in common libraries. Linux developers can learn from the mistakes of the past (uh, windows) and make sure to avoid the patterns that cause holes in the architecture. Linux usability can continue to improve without needing to 'dumb it down' or 'userify' it as I would say. An example of annoying windows userification:
My Documents
My Pictures
My Music
etc...
The 'My' in those file names adds no value to the idea of a documents or music folder. Of course they're mine, they are on my goddamn computer! Oh, then there's that 'My Computer' link... How could My Computer by on My Computer's desktop??? These are the things I used to ask myself when forced to use windows to access the corporate email client (lotus notes, another boundless bastion of usability). In OS X, some nice usage patterns are applied to the default filesystem, but the 'userification' is avoided by a clean heirarchy with clear names:
System->Users->Documents
This makes sense to a novice as well as an experienced user. Userification can be classified as anything that does nothing to help novices and makes experienced users feel like they are working with a system designed for someone who is develomentally retarded from a technical aspect.
Another thing to avoid would be a completely disgusting default color scheme and cartoony window decorations. But these things have little to do with real usability. Integrated applications and clean, intuative interface controls are much more important. Ease of installation and configuration of OS components and applications is very important. There is no reason why improving any of these things should introduce vulnerabilities. As long as these features are not being hacked into the system in a ass backwards fashion, there should not be a problem.
There really is no excuse for this kind of bad engineering. It's not as if computer science is not well understood (we created it after all).
Do the government and Diebold both have no idea how to engineer and test a relatively simple vote counting system? How did it get 'confused' by a large number of candidates/votes? How was this system tested?
Um, well the system worked fine until it tried to do more than 2 things at once, then it borked..
Software quality assurance usually involves load testing, apparently something they neglected. Looks like the guy who hacked the whole thing in BASIC was also the QA engineer.
I just add another node to the cluster! Seriously, an iBook with it's RAM maxed out has no further upgrade capabilities. (or any apple for that matter)
Thats one of my biggest complaints (Mr. Jobs! pay attention.) about apple hardware. Why not design a more modular component based system? Maybe because it costs more, profits less? I think apple could make an upgradable model profitable. (Ok, nobody makes laptops very upgradable becase the chips are all hardwired to the board. At least they could make CPU upgrades for the tower systems)
!! your boss is a tool. If a MS sales person walked into our server room, you can bet I would go out to the lot and remove all the tires from his car. How a fortune 500 company can say 'hey, lets go all microsoft today!' and actually do it is beyond me. We do have some MS.NET pundits in the organization, but looking at what they were previously working on, it might have actually been an improvement. (Their systems were/are still based on PICK Basic and the PICK OS, no idea what they are doing with.NET)
I would have just quit. I can't handle looking at the windows desktop for more than a minute, much less have to interact with it.
We have been looking into a Windows specific problem with slow compilation. If we are not pre-compiling JSP on Windows, initial page loads can take up to a minute or more on windows, where on linux they take 5-10 seconds to compile (same server hardware). Don't know if the it's the JSP engine's JSP->Servlet dynamic compiler or the java compiler itself on windows platforms, but something is taking lots of time (have not tried real profiling yet). We jokingly suspect that the OS is just not allowing things to happen quickly (JVM wants to spawn a thread? It can wait....) but this is just a joke... right? There would not be intentional performance bottle necks built in to effect the JVM specifically, would there? Is it unintentional, a direct effect of a bad design somewhere in windows or the jvm/compiler implementation? Or is it just bad code somewhere else? (what, dont look at me. My code is perfect...)
Ok, I have no hope that this settlement and our problem are related, time to dust off the profiler and do some actual work...
I will choose no career for life. Except maybe 'Pirate of the High Seas'. Now thats a career. Well, until I finds me a worthy vessel, I think I might try my hand at smithing for a while. I'm going to need plenty of swords, daggers, pistols, etc..
Anyway, my point is, don't think you are stuck with on career. This aint Japan 10 years ago, you can switch careers as often as you like. I was an auto mechanic 4 years ago. That got old fast. So did IT. (thats not to say programming, just programming IT)
Lots of dissatisfied folks may have initially been interested in science and areas of science that involve computers but ended up in IT jobs, far from their original aspirations. I know I started out in gaming and now I'm working on business integration/process management software. Gaming was exciting and interesting, involving lots of different disciplines - art(from sketching to 3d models and rendering), game engine stuff (graphics, physics, AI, scripting languages), networks and client/server apps. IT generally does not involve art or science much at all, at least not anything I would consider art or science (unless you consider icon design fine art). Also, IT programmers are not insulated from the corporate world at all, we tend to work in close proximity to the lawyers, sales people, managers and other people who do little to encourage creativity. I mostly miss the art/creativity side, dont get to scratch that itch much in business software. If only this stuff would just write itself...
christ, I usually have a big knife in my pocket or clipped to my belt. I can't imagine them being illegal, I use mine at least once every day and don't need any excuses to have it. I've never killed anyone with it. I also usually have other weapons nearby, but those are probably illegal, and for a good reason. I wonder what they would say about the two handed sword I like to carry around in New South Wales. If I install a USB flash ROM in the hilt, do you think they would let me carry it in public?
Slashdot Mirror
They are in a play list. The problem occurs when it's done with a burn, it selects the Library playlist for some reason. I then have to click on the playlist I want to burn to do it again. It's just one extra click, not really a big deal, but what is the point of going back to the main playlist?
The big painted cake in the sky for software development has been user-driven requirements and giving the user what he asks for. After all, the user wont be happy with anything else right? Problem is 113% of the software users out there have no idea what they want, or can't get specific about it. The only REAL development that I've done this year has been driven from the inside, based on requirements and timelines put in place by developers themselves. Most of the projects that came from the outside were requests to put hacks on top of other hacks that already existed in an organization. These were lacking clear specifications and were full of assumptions and caveats. Often the simplest solution had to be avoided due to a desire on someone's part to utilize a new, unfinished, poorly documented standard because it promised to be the next revolutionary trend in the market, according to it's shadowy working group. The assumptions and caveats usually ended up killing the projects, that and the limited value of the end result. Most of the time the non-technical manager type folks that initiated the project just got some other more exciting itch to waste money on, and went off to scratch it.
Spammers are just the sort of people who go about trying to sue everything they see, claiming damages for arbitrary amounts. They are the same kind of class of people who commit insurance fraud, lie on their income tax returns, punt babies, molest farm animals...
These folks are about as useful as giraffe tits.
in foil fencing, people who constantly use the same attack/defence only beat opponents who don't yet know how limited they are. Any attack or defense can be deadly when executed with appropriate timing and speed (timing being most important, even slow attacks can land if the timing is right). But when that attack or defense is anticipated, it becomes much more difficult to pull off. Watching a potential opponent for a bout or two will give you a good idea of what they are likely to do. Novices usually try to pull some kind of move to get a point, and they try it on everybody. Same thing applies to fighting games, although there is much less skill involved... The problem with some fighting games is that the fighting engine does not properly balance attack/defense capabilities, allowing certain moves to be impossible or too difficult to defend against. Every attack or attack combination should have some kind of defense/counter attack. This is usually not the case in video games. (your defense options are: run away, or hit block) Fencing has developed over hundreds of years, fighting video games have not been around quite as long.
I wish they would get a usability person on the iTunes team. Every time a CD burn finishes I get dumped to the 'Library'. If I want to burn another copy I have to go through the click fest again to get the playlist, wait for the cd to init, click the burn button before it times out... Nevermind, I'll use Toast..
I'll get over it, and maybe forgive the author for using Windows. I've been using RedHat 9 on 2 machines, RedHat 7.3 on a few others, and OS X on 3 machines. One Linux box (at work) has been up for more than 9 months. The other (home dev box) has been up for maybe 4 months. The OS X machines have been running/upgraded without re-install since Jaguar became available. I have no stability problems with any of them, and I don't ever feel the need to re-install monthly. I don't really understand this impulse, maybe stability issues are forcing the author to re-install all the time? Seriously, if I had to wipe my hard drives and start over every month, I'd never have time to do anything.
OS X:
(Mostly audio stuff)
Logic Audio Platinum (DAW)
NI Battery (drum synth)
NI FM7 (FM synth)
ReFX Slayer (Elec.Guitar synth!)
VST-AU Adapter (AU wrapper for VST plug-ins)
A few other soft synths
Pro-tools
MacMAME (arcade game emulator)
Mozilla (safari still sux)
Keyword lists in Adwords should not contain trademarks or trade names that that the advertised company does not own, if the trade name or trademark identifies a competitor. Trade names that don't identify competitors should be allowed. Google does not have an automatic way of enforcing these kind of rules (if they do exist), something of this nature would require a lot of human intervention. Maybe Google should make the subscriber liable for trade name and trademark violations, that way competitors would have to sue the companies that are responsible for the abuse in the first place.
Maybe it's not practical from the manufacturers perspective, but motherboard, CPU and graphics card upgrades would be nice. Generally CPUs are hard wired to the board because it's cheaper and more compact. Also, what good would a CPU upgrade be without a faster motherboard? The biggest limitation I have with any machine is CPU speed and cache size. I don't want to spend $3000 for the fastest, biggest laptop, I just want a plain 12" with a buttload of cache and the fastest processor. I'd like to get a few more miles out of my 800 mhz iBook, thats all. Seems like a waste of resources to have to buy a whole new computer just to get an extra 700 mhz.
Wait all you want. What you need to do is get your wallet ahead of the hardware curve. Cause you know, once you buy a notebook, you're stuck with it. There's nothing to upgrade but the RAM. And maybe the hard drive.
This would fall in line with the fact that very smart people like Einstein, Feynman, and the like are/were able to visualize complex systems and ideas easily. 'Visual thinking' comes naturally to them. I'm not sure why this doesn't always translate into high mathematical talent. I've noticed that some very smart people are not able to calculate quickly or perform large calcuations without the help of paper or a computer They are able to plan out and model complex software systems in their heads, or design and understand complex mechanical systems and engineering problems easily. It seems like some people fall into the 'good at numbers' camp and others are in the 'good at language' camp. Not sure if this is related to their 'cache' size.
And you can bet the insured are paying for the re-insurance in the form of higher rates. Who re-insures the re-insurers? I'm guessing the further you get away from the insured, the less risk you take.
DirectX is more of a proprietary API than a standard. Microsoft has nothing to gain by supporting OpenGL, they like the fact that many Linux users still have a copy of Windows around to run DirectX games. DirectX is very cool as far as what you can pull off with it, I'm not sure if OpenGL is equally powerful. This game looks really good, I'd like to have a look at the code and see what can be done about an OpenGL port. (Maybe something is being done already?) OR, maybe try running it in Wine? There are lots of libraries for sound and graphics out there for Linux and BSD, it would be nice if everybody standardized around stuff like OpenGL.
One of the biggest problems the average user has with most open source software is that he can't figure out how to install or configure it. The open source java app I have been working on for 2 years has gone through a few different installers, none of which were very good. Even the ones that required licence fees that we tried out were crappy. Many open source projects require the user to compile and link the source code, sometimes even making users edit source code for configuration changes. This is either laziness or lack of resources on the developer's part, neither of which looks good from a user's perspective. Software that is distributed a binaries with install/run scripts are better, as long as you can provide scripts for each platform.
As developers, generally the first thing we do after downloading some new open source software is read the README file. Then maybe the GOTCHAS.. Most users won't or can't pay attention long enough to read the instructions in a wizard based installer, much less a 50+ README. Programmers tend to be fast readers in my experience, many other people are not. So, if you can, include a one click installer and make the program configurable at runtime through a nice, easy to understand GUI.
True, True, I completely agree. Stability and performance are extremely important measures of usability that can be compromised by the 'feature rush' of development. It's very important in all stages of development to make sure rigidity is not built in, that problems can be fixed quickly without changing or breaking existing code. Windows seems to crash even without strange boundry conditions in place, and there is nothing you can do about it. I think if people continue to use and improve more modern programming languages and move away from archaic development practices, some of these problems will be easier to deal with. I have written complex Java applications which never once crash or lose data, but just the same some of them do occasionally throw unexpected errors. It takes more than writing test cases to catch boundry conditions, it takes lots and lots of user testing. I don't know how many times I have written lazy test cases thinking that they were complete and ended up finding problems that they did not take into account. Testable code can be difficult to write when there are time constraints.
HMM, usability == not crashing? well, its a start.
BZZZ. Like in hidden folders? or 'click this link to show files I'm hiding from you, for your own good' folders? I disagree. It's simple, you have a 'root' user, and everybody else. Most of the time you are one of the everybody elses and you can run amok in your home directory all you like. When feel the need to hose the system, log in as root (ok, Administrator) and administrate away. Don't hide anything, I need to know where it is. But I don't always need to be authorized to launch that particular nuclear or delete the /bin folder.
Vulnerabilities are created by bad programming, they are not necessarily linked to ease of use. Linux can continue to become more and more user freindly without running into the same problems that Windows has. Applications can be integrated without opening up holes in common libraries. Linux developers can learn from the mistakes of the past (uh, windows) and make sure to avoid the patterns that cause holes in the architecture. Linux usability can continue to improve without needing to 'dumb it down' or 'userify' it as I would say. An example of annoying windows userification:
My Documents
My Pictures
My Music
etc...
The 'My' in those file names adds no value to the idea of a documents or music folder. Of course they're mine, they are on my goddamn computer! Oh, then there's that 'My Computer' link... How could My Computer by on My Computer's desktop??? These are the things I used to ask myself when forced to use windows to access the corporate email client (lotus notes, another boundless bastion of usability). In OS X, some nice usage patterns are applied to the default filesystem, but the 'userification' is avoided by a clean heirarchy with clear names: System->Users->Documents This makes sense to a novice as well as an experienced user. Userification can be classified as anything that does nothing to help novices and makes experienced users feel like they are working with a system designed for someone who is develomentally retarded from a technical aspect. Another thing to avoid would be a completely disgusting default color scheme and cartoony window decorations. But these things have little to do with real usability. Integrated applications and clean, intuative interface controls are much more important. Ease of installation and configuration of OS components and applications is very important. There is no reason why improving any of these things should introduce vulnerabilities. As long as these features are not being hacked into the system in a ass backwards fashion, there should not be a problem.
There really is no excuse for this kind of bad engineering. It's not as if computer science is not well understood (we created it after all). Do the government and Diebold both have no idea how to engineer and test a relatively simple vote counting system? How did it get 'confused' by a large number of candidates/votes? How was this system tested?
Um, well the system worked fine until it tried to do more than 2 things at once, then it borked..
Software quality assurance usually involves load testing, apparently something they neglected. Looks like the guy who hacked the whole thing in BASIC was also the QA engineer.
I just add another node to the cluster! Seriously, an iBook with it's RAM maxed out has no further upgrade capabilities. (or any apple for that matter) Thats one of my biggest complaints (Mr. Jobs! pay attention.) about apple hardware. Why not design a more modular component based system? Maybe because it costs more, profits less? I think apple could make an upgradable model profitable. (Ok, nobody makes laptops very upgradable becase the chips are all hardwired to the board. At least they could make CPU upgrades for the tower systems)
!! your boss is a tool. If a MS sales person walked into our server room, you can bet I would go out to the lot and remove all the tires from his car. How a fortune 500 company can say 'hey, lets go all microsoft today!' and actually do it is beyond me. We do have some MS .NET pundits in the organization, but looking at what they were previously working on, it might have actually been an improvement. (Their systems were/are still based on PICK Basic and the PICK OS, no idea what they are doing with .NET)
I would have just quit. I can't handle looking at the windows desktop for more than a minute, much less have to interact with it.
We have been looking into a Windows specific problem with slow compilation. If we are not pre-compiling JSP on Windows, initial page loads can take up to a minute or more on windows, where on linux they take 5-10 seconds to compile (same server hardware). Don't know if the it's the JSP engine's JSP->Servlet dynamic compiler or the java compiler itself on windows platforms, but something is taking lots of time (have not tried real profiling yet). We jokingly suspect that the OS is just not allowing things to happen quickly (JVM wants to spawn a thread? It can wait....) but this is just a joke... right? There would not be intentional performance bottle necks built in to effect the JVM specifically, would there? Is it unintentional, a direct effect of a bad design somewhere in windows or the jvm/compiler implementation? Or is it just bad code somewhere else? (what, dont look at me. My code is perfect...)
Ok, I have no hope that this settlement and our problem are related, time to dust off the profiler and do some actual work...
I will choose no career for life. Except maybe 'Pirate of the High Seas'. Now thats a career. Well, until I finds me a worthy vessel, I think I might try my hand at smithing for a while. I'm going to need plenty of swords, daggers, pistols, etc.. Anyway, my point is, don't think you are stuck with on career. This aint Japan 10 years ago, you can switch careers as often as you like. I was an auto mechanic 4 years ago. That got old fast. So did IT. (thats not to say programming, just programming IT)
Lots of dissatisfied folks may have initially been interested in science and areas of science that involve computers but ended up in IT jobs, far from their original aspirations. I know I started out in gaming and now I'm working on business integration/process management software. Gaming was exciting and interesting, involving lots of different disciplines - art(from sketching to 3d models and rendering), game engine stuff (graphics, physics, AI, scripting languages), networks and client/server apps. IT generally does not involve art or science much at all, at least not anything I would consider art or science (unless you consider icon design fine art). Also, IT programmers are not insulated from the corporate world at all, we tend to work in close proximity to the lawyers, sales people, managers and other people who do little to encourage creativity. I mostly miss the art/creativity side, dont get to scratch that itch much in business software. If only this stuff would just write itself...
christ, I usually have a big knife in my pocket or clipped to my belt. I can't imagine them being illegal, I use mine at least once every day and don't need any excuses to have it. I've never killed anyone with it. I also usually have other weapons nearby, but those are probably illegal, and for a good reason. I wonder what they would say about the two handed sword I like to carry around in New South Wales. If I install a USB flash ROM in the hilt, do you think they would let me carry it in public?