This fear is why some of us back up our back-up drive. (just finished doing mine a few minutes ago). I still remember my wife's eyes rolling to the sky while I tried to explain why I needed to drop $200 on another portable drive.

I think I found something: "Sony, working with NTT DoCoMo has been spearheading the mobile phone wallet technology, or as it’s commonly known 'FeliCa'. This technology makes use of a RFID chip inside the handset which can communicate with special readers when the phone is placed near them. "

so true

Someone at my company heard that an insurance company in Japan is now giving their customers a sticker to put on their car that will automatically cause your cell phone to dial the insurance company if you hold the phone close to it. Of course, now my company wants a full report from me about how we can use this. Anyone heard of this before or know of any companies that might do this kind of thing? What the heck do they call it?

I would consider going to J2EE just to be more marketable. However, my current customers care about things like performance and applications being built very quickly. The J2EE runtime is a dog. All I ever hear about from J2EE fanboys is "but you can run it on unix". Except that at my company, it costs 5 times as much for a unix box.

Wow. Anybody else play it yet? Unbelievable game.

IE, we've had some good years together. I'm afraid they are over. I don't want to do it, but you've forced me to. I just accepted Firefox as the default browser. I feel like I've disowned one of my children. RIP

Why can't someone come up with a personal workflow engine to make my life a little easier. I'd love to be able to send and receive activities via email (have some sort of header in the email that the workflow application can use to determine it is an activity and add it to an activities list in an application) and allow me to build simple workflows to automate tasks. Is there already something out there to do this type of thing? (why is there no Google Workflow yet?) :-> I just want one application to handle my calendar, email, RSS, and workflow (hell, put a knowledgebase in it too). I could probably build some kind of outlook add-in to do some of this, but I'm far too lazy.

Is there a support group for people who are addicted to checking their Google Adword results? :doh:

"Keep in mind that breadth of computer science skills are far greater than skills required for software development. There generally is a scientific and mathematical basis to a Computer Science specialty, but the rote task for software building hardly carries scientific or formal basis." What a bizarre article. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~sahilt/research/SEMyths.html#1[^] -- modified at 0:24 Saturday 19th August, 2006

Excellent. Thanks

I seem to have a problem with regard to layout of the software I write, regardless of whether it is a web application or desktop (especially desktop). Deciding whether to use tabs, mdi, left menu bar, let alone how to group my functionality (what do I put on the tabs), etc. I can bring in someone who has no clue about software development and they seem to be able to just come up with it without any difficulty. Maybe I'm too close to the code and therefore just can't see things from a user perspective. Is there anything out there that will help me? :confused:

Here is my situation: I've been in IT for 5 years, and it has been good to me. I taught myself VB and ASP (no IT degree) and convinced (ok, I totally fooled them) a fortune 500 company into hiring me as a web developer, and I've been pretty successful, considering I really didn't know what the heck I was doing at first. I went from developer, to technical lead, to team lead, to engineering manager for 3 different groups (including Cognos Reporting and Siebel teams), and finally to Enterprise Architect. While I am not coding much at the moment, I am not convinced that I will completely give up coding. I'll still help write code for POC's and what not. I've used .NET (C#) for the past few years. I've been pretty successful not knowing C++. But I really feel like I've missed something. I didn't go to college, and I haven't been exposed to it much. Am I missing something in not going back and learning it? Has it been relegated to low level systems programming only? It seems like everything is going to be based on managed code going forward (at least in the enterprise). I feel like someday it is going to come back and haunt me that I don't understand memory allocation, pointers, and the like. To be honest, I don't feel like a programmer because I don't know C++. Am I being paranoid, or should I go back and learn C++?