I have been in the dev businness for around 15 years, and the count goes: 1 company only. However, that company went through a bit more than half a dozen names thanks to various merging and acquisition: eXplora, Usweb, Usweb/CKS, marchFirst (ah those wild years 2000/2001), Unilog, Logica and now CGI.... I started in the UK, and lived there for 5 years and came back to my home country 10 years ago without resigning (I resigned in the UK to work for the same company but in a french branch). I'm currently serving my notice period, I'm moving on and will start working for a new employer who is not a ITS company.

I believe the issue goes even deeper than what the headlines can tell. For me it's not only a matter of hardware ownership, the neutrality of the Net should also include the liberty of speech and thought that every citizen of the world should enjoy. As an example, think about China, the hardware belongs to state owned companies, so do the censors that sometimes wipe out entire discussion threads or remove certain keywords deemed "sensible" for the government (tian an men as an example won't be found on the chinese version of google and they can't access the more freer world, except if they use something like TOR). There need to be some monitoring as in real life however, I d'ont think that should be the taks of the ISP to collect data and give them to any investigating bureau without any court order.

Well I guess that's evolution: freakin' shark with laser beams attached to their head --> killer dolphins --> RobotDog --> OCP / Cyberdyne.... sounds logical and goddamn freaky, but we are all living in the matrix or a dragon's dream anyway... we missed the "Steve Austin" step though...

Well...... they might not be able or willing to use it directly, but they can do worse... they can sell it to the Chinese....

The urkainians got dolphins instead... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/12/ukraine-navy-killer-dolphins-escape-lovesick_n_2862644.html[^] Problem, those beasts are so intelligent that they managed to escape......

I'm still using GOTOs, not in my C# / JAVA / C++ code but in my SQL Code. It is still very usefull in SQL for error handling, MS introduced the BEGIN/END TRY/CATCH structure but it is not portable on version of SQL older than 2005 and it is absolutely not portable "as is" on another SQL Engine and most of the customers I've worked for have that mandatory requirement to be able to switch engine as they see fit (even if 90% of them will never take that step and stick to MS SQL Server).

Ooops, my bad, you're right, I should have used the nickname "Rossbif" (the french way of pronouncing Rost Beaf) instead... thanks for rectifying my sentence (I've been away from London for too long...)

Actually, they were as close to beat the Brit as they were to beat the Welsh or the Italians for that matter. I'm french and I support the Blues, however I can see a lovely wooden spoon coming up this way because this season the Scots and the Irish are fighting for their meat....

Well actually, we do it ourselves in peer review sessions with lots of manic laughters, booze, mantras and faith.

Personnaly I use Nero BackItUp product, I paid for this app but I haven't been dissapointed. It is able to backup a whole system onto an external hard drive or even a NAS and to shutdown your computer and your NAS (if it supports ethernet power off request of course) without having your OS started. Install it on a bootable flash drive and that's it. IMO worth every pennies.

Hi there, I'd like to report this post in the "quick answers": ~~~!~~Barisal vs Sylhet BPL cricket Live Stream Online HD TV[^] instead of asking questions he advertises for online TV programs... Thought you'd like to know about it

Has been happening to me for the last two hours. I reckon I have tried to hit multiple times the submit button the frist it happened to me, and then I saw this serie of posts and resolved to hit the submit only once... and I get too many point awarded for one single hit..... I must have something like nearly 200 points too many on my reputation

Well, even if you hit the submit button only once, points can get awarded up to 3-4 times for one single answer.....

Well actually I have the same problem, even though my solutions are correctly submitted. And when I look at my reputation history I can see multiple lines corresponding to my answer and each time, points seem to be awarded and if I come back to the question page I can see my answer has been posted..... :doh:

Actually I found a piece of code very similar but using a C# switch case

switch(someEnumVariable)
{
case enumVal1: throw Exception("enumVal1");
case enumVal2: throw Exception("enumVal2");
case enumVal3: throw Exception("enumVal3");
default: throw Exception("Unknown enum value");
}

weirdly enough it looks like some kind of debugging technique..... but again the title of the forum says it all !!!!

Well actually you're not alone, that's my preference of naming too. Actually if a table doesn't have a natural ID column I feel almost olbiged to add one (either bigint or more recently uniqueidentifier). For other columns I prefer to use something closer to the real use of the column e.g.: FirstName LastName etc... and oh I really hate the habits developped by some developper or database designers: TBL_ for a table name COL_ for a column name _NU for a numeric column _CHR for a string column _DT for a datetime column etc.... (I think you can see the picture here) I really don't see the point in prefixing a table or column name with and indicator of the type of object, frankly when we start typing "SELECT * FROM " dont we know the next word will be a table name ? or that the list of words after the SELECT represents columns ? Now having a meaningfull prefix for a column name can help understand queries with joins and can save aliasing even if it means longer queries let's say than instead of having ID everywhere we have CUS_ID, ORD_ID, etc... then we don't need aliasing since we know for sure that CUS_ID comes from the Customer table and ORD_ID from the Order table.... As for the postfix representing the type of the column I'm completely clueless to its advantages, if you code against a database then you must known its structure, that means knowing the table names, the column names and their types !

My previous favourite: Verdana My current favourite: Segoe Sorry, I'm a desktop dev.....

Interesting, a playable 404, why didn't google think about it ?????

Well, don't listen to all that crap. You can answer to those people that a language is nothing more than a tool to use to build stuff. If they dislike VB, then that's their propblem, not yours. If the job requires to use an old, gnarly and obscure tool (not that's what I think of VB, I used to develop everyday using VB6 and VBScript, and contributed to great apps developped with it and I still nurture a foundness for that good old time :(( ) that they don't know, tell them it is no reason to make fun of you. No on should be laughed at because they did their job as per spec, nobody chooses what they really want to do (not at a corporate level at least, if you are an indie, that an other story). Walk with your head straight and keep your hight esteem of yourself. If you are able to develop in many different languages and they don't, then you're definitely better than them.

Tuples exist in various functionnal languages, F# has been mentionned but older languages such as lisp / caml / ocaml and other similar flavours had them already. It can be useful if you want to have lists of associated items without having to handle a dictionnary. i.e.: Dictionnary<string, BlueToothDevice> could be replaced by List<Tuple<string, BlueToothDevice>>, you keep the flexibility of a List object (AddRange, RemoveRange, ForAll and so on) and the capability of a dictionnary and the system of keys... Another use I quite like is when you design an API method that would like to return multiple values at once, as it is not possible, you can use Tuples instead: public bool DoSomethingUseful(int someValue1, string someValue2, ref double someExport1, ref shot someExport2) could be written: public Tuple<bool, double, short> DoSomethingUseful(int someValue1, string someValue2) thus eliminating the need to pass parameters by reference because the return value of a method is already used... I hope this post can help you make your mind about Tuples and their possible usage.