Australia. Also got notified by eBay that my account was compromised, and they reset my password. I'd never thought it'd happen to me :^)

I just logged in in my Gmail account to find a warning that my account has been accessed from China; apparently this has been happening quite a bit lately. Anybody else got hacked?

Faulty computer more likely. Lots of possible reasons: AMD CPUs made a couple of years ago sometimes have problems and overheat, cheapo RAM tends to randomly 00000000000000000break, about-to-die HDDs are veeery slow etc. If you run Notepad, everything can be fine because CPU usage will be low. You start a big fat IDE or a videogame, usage spikes and the problems start manifesting. Seen it quite a couple of times. Then again, VS is known to have performance problems with Intellisense with really big C++ projects.

Thanks :)

I hear you. Once I got decent (properly decent) at programming, I went to look for a junior position. I gave up after 2 years, as most of the interviews were quite insulting, at least here in South Australia; almost nobody asked any technical question at all. They tend to prefer people with degrees, even in the kind of companies you'd never expect that, and despite relevant experience, so I'd say getting a degree is a good bet. (but still a bit of a bet) But getting a job in IT (ie sysadmin) is quite easy, even I managed to get one :) lots of small companies need one, and they generally don't know much about 'em, so they'll pretty much hire the first guy who is confident and doesn't look too much like a slacker ;P Heck, the guy before me was an Indian, and they said he didn't got anything fixed. I dunno what it's like to work as a developer, though I hear most are unsatisfied, but I landed a job as an IT dude at a ~20 people company, and there I got to learn how a business runs. After a few months I discovered a big software need that the company had, which is quite badly fulfilled by current products, so I negotiated with my boss for me to spend most of my time at work on writing some better software for them to solve their problems, while I'd keep full rights and ownership of my software, and I got a pay rise. Two months later I recruited the manager there, who is a brilliant guy, to join my to-be company that will sell my soon-to-be-launched software. So it didn't turn out all that bad or lame after all. Hope it all goes OK. I guess you just gotto start somewhere, even if it isn't a brilliant or promising start...

Hello, I'm developing some client-server software, and the server side is running Linux, Postgresql and Python, the bottleneck will probably be the DB. The problem is, I don't know what sort of hardware to buy for my clients. Performance requirements are modest, but its reliability I'm worried about. A DIY job with my local PC shop can get me a quad-core 12MB L2 cache Intel, 8GB DDR3 Kingston RAM, and 4x500GB SATA 7500rpm WD HDDs (software RAID 0+1) with a $150 power source, extra cooling and a better case (from Thermaltake), and a $400 UPS, all of this should make it more reliable, and it costs less than $2k. (I've yet to do any stress-testing, but that kind of hardware should be able to cope with quite a beating) Then I looked at brand-name servers, like IBM X series, and Dells, and good God, the prices. If I want the same toys, I have to pay many times that amount. I understand that they have hot-swap, hardware RAID, and a nice badge, but what (else) on hell do they charge so much for? Is a Xeon with apparently the same performance specs as a normal Intel really worth a grand more? Dell must have gold-plated their keyboards, else I can't figure out why they charge ~70 bucks for a standard 104-key one, and a tape backup unit is around $700 :omg: My test server is a dual-core Intel with 2GB DDR2 RAM and 2x500GB 7500rpm HDDs (software RAID 1), hosting a low-traffic website, email and my software, for less than $500 (no UPS) and it never missed a beat since I installed it half a year ago. For a brand system with my performance specs (the quad-core set) I've seen quotes as high as 20 grand, so I must ask, CP folks: if you'd have to buy servers with roughly those specs, one for each customer, reliability is a huge concern, and higher server cost means less profit, would you pick DIY or brand name? Thanks for the help! :)

2GB on Vista, no problems, no slowdowns since I have this machine.

Azureus/Vuze is the best BitTorrent client I ever used, and its made in Java. Other than that, I can't name any other Java program that doesn't stink/is ridiculous. (no wordwrap in NetBeans?! Even notepad has that!)

I've been programming for 7 years, writing C and C++ for 4. Two weeks ago I got bored and within a week I wrote an assembler in C++ and a virtual machine/interpreter in X86 assembly for my own/custom instruction set that my assembler generates, the interpreter being my first real asm program. Worked flawlessly, speed was good. I am very happy today because, after more than a year searching, I finally found a job. I am now proudly in the possession of data entry job, paying some 12 or so dollars an hour. But hey, it pays. Programming never paid me. I only had a 3 week Java contract some time ago, that I got out of mercy because I was completely broke and the guy was nice enough to spare a few thousand dollars for a fellow Romanian in need. I gave up searching for a job as a programmer. In a weird twist, when I got home after getting the job, and checked my email, I see one saying that my application has been rejected, for the position of junior C++ programmer, absolutely no other requirement. I was not even called for an interview! Junior C++? After doing the above? Cheers to you, world, you strange and crazy piece of rock. There is only one thing that fuels my curiosity, though: who the hell did they hire?

Hello all

cpp.samurai wrote:

The only way to learn real programming is via books and Internet, that is if the person is interested enough to do it. But the onslaught of easy languages like C#/Java/VB don't make it easy.

Hell yeah! I'm 18, learned my way into programming mostly on myself. Started at 12-13 with Pascal. By accident I found about C++ (heh...) because that was the language required to use Ogre3D (that was about 3 years ago), and after I got the hang of it, I loved it! I now know/write C, C++, and if you give me a pen and paper and lots of time, I can understand an ASM program too :) About 25% of my code is C++ (mostly when dealing with wxWidgets or other GUIs), the rest is typically C, and a bit of Python for those quick-and-dirty scripts. Of course it (C++) had to be by accident/internet, who else would mention it inside the school... at least pascal did its job well for those early algorithm crunching days. Anyway, I couldn't get a job in the field, so I went out to get this thing everybody was asking for: a 'diploma'. These guys at my Uni, they're practically brain dead. VB and Javascript the first year, and only the Almighty Java for the last 3. C++ is not even MENTIONED. The thing they talked about in week 1? Object-oriented programming, and how it will its follower's souls, and destroy the non-believers. They were talking OOP to people who think programming is 'a bit like HTML'. But it wasn't even 'oh this and that paradigm', it was just hailing OOP. I should have know, as "Diploma in Software Development" does not contain the word "programming"... :doh: Another even more interesting thing is that most of my colleagues not only seem to not be gifted with the, err, necessary amount of neurons, but they don't seem genuinely interested either! So to me, the story seems to have TWO sides... Personally, I see this line in the programming world, and on one side, there's an ever-growing throng of "developers" how draw a button on a form, and create "rich web applications" from templates, and on the other, the ever-same-amount of real programmers. Perhaps this is not actually a bad thing, I don't know. Funny thing is, I do C and C++ today, but I still have 3 years to go until I will be an officially certified button-drawer. Some career choice, eh? :) Now where's the closest McDonald's? Cheers. PS: they're actually not completely lost. My math teacher is an old lady who did COBOL and knows, or knew, how to pro

Yeah, happened to me too some years ago, at an old PC. Have you tried using another monitor? Maybe if a friend has a new LCD one, you could give it a try, can't hurt...