Oh and the $200 iPhone 6 would be 16GB, $300 for 64GB. I don't have a smartphone and don't have any real perspective on how important that space is. If I'm not crazy about the idea of paying extra for storage space I'm not sure I'll need, would it make sense to get a Galaxy so that I could just use a microSD card if I ever needed more space?

Unless you want to load up with tons of music or you take tons of pictures and never xfer them anywhere you'll never have problems with 16 gigs.

You'll be happy with any of those phones imo

Any of you folks try hackerrank for some practice? I needed a break from iOS programming so I jumped on that for a bit. Pretty cool site. A lot of the problems are just huge wtf - I don't get it. Perhaps it's something that I will understand once I take data structures.

Good info thanks...

Play around with iTunes before buying an iPhone imo. I would not still own an iPhone had I done this one simple trick.

Gizmo gets it and has no problem walking me thru it, but I'm absolutely astounded at how it's not a one second thing to drop a single song onto your phone. It's the year twenty-****ing-fifteen. What is this ****?

Oh please... iTunes is like a glass of ice water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AX...A&spfreload=10

This is mind-blowing:

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-hands-on

This apparently comes from the inventor of Kinect

Just wait until Magic Leap does a public reveal

I always hated itunes.

maybe it was good at some point, i always used to use winamp to get music onto my ipods, until they made that not doable

so, is it true that as a c++ person, at least for the time being, I'm pretty much stuck with the command prompt/console? no gui stuff on the immediate horizon? that's the way the new teacher made it seem

Check out Qt for c++ gui stuff.
http://qt-project.org

As an amateur programmer, I hate IDEs.

Some days i'll just use nano and program in the terminal for javascript.
I do not know why the default spaces for tab is so huge in nano, went longest time without finally setting it to 4.

I agree on some issues. But instant compilation (Java) was a game-changer.

Before NetBeans and Eclipse we had to use horrible expensive slow IDEs like JBuilder and Together-J. Ugh.

My work bought 5 licenses of XML Spy at $5k apiece. All we ever used it for was to pretty format our XML. LOL

Are you talking about GUI for programming or creating GUIs in C++? The prof is feeding you a line in both directions. Seems likely to me that he discouraging you from using an IDE to start, which I totally agree with.

Creating GUIs, on the other hand, is the armpit of programming.

Have you tried vim / emacs for c++ programming?

Also regarding the masters discussion a few pages back, I'm stuck in the same position as the original poster. 1.5 years out of school at microsoft right now. I can have my masters paid for, but I'm not sure if it would even help my career at this point. Had I done it right out of college, I may have been able to be hired at the next level, but I was a led to be promoted after a year anyway so that doesn't even give me an edge.

I guess it ultimately comes down to if the knowledge I can gain from my masters would be that much more useful than the knowledge I gain from work that it would be worth giving up a years worth of salary. At this point I'm not looking into pursuing my masters but it seems very counterintuitive that going back to school (for free) could actually hurt your career growth.

well, we have to have our code work in visual studio, officially. That's like the basic requirement. So they point us in the direction of free VS versions, like express or the free student full version.

i think i was just hoping at some point we'd have some more visual feedback on our projects. If that isn't the case in programming that's fine, just another silly preconceived notion to dispel.

Qt is one alternative and it has its advantages. Learning curve is fairly short, online documentation extensive, easy to use IDE, and multi platform, and highly portable between Windows and Linux (Android too but I haven't verified that but probably true). The free version is good. Of course it is not compatible with VS.

Another is Win32 using the Windows message loop (which VS supports of course). Charles Petzold wrote this book that is pretty much a classic Programming Windows on writing Windows GUI code at the Win32 level. You'll get an excellent perspective on how GUIs function at the OS API level.

Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) is an alternative I guess. It doesn't seem to be that well supported by Microsoft now though. Just my view.

Not one person could write the code to format the xml or was that thinking non existent?

I don't know. My boss just seemed to want to get an IDE for every language that we worked in. We also paid a lot of money for Dreamweaver, JBuilder and Rational Rose. Year 2000 corporate thinking.

I've always wondered when I take a step back from the corporate world and look in.

I get the general impression that someone somewhere must think that it is ok or the approach to running a company is by hiring managers that have no skill in the actual field they are managing.

But that must not be... surely it would be better to hire managers that are as valuable in programming as managing people. Or maybe I have the impression wrong from what I've read on the web and experienced.

Peter Principle ftw plus the idea of risk aversion (nobody ever got fired for buying IBM) and the idea that money allocated for a budget needs to be spent (use it or lose it).

My manager was a programmer. It's just that corporations didn't get or trust anything open-source in 2000. Weblogic, Oracle, IIS, Solaris - every platform or dev tool you used had to be something you paid for, had a support team, and you could sue if something went wrong.

I used XSL-FO to generate PDF reports and had to jump through a lot of hoops with our compliance department to prove it was "safe". I think ultimately we just took it off the list of 3rd-party software used in our app (while still using it) and the problem went away.

Also this was the clinical trials department of a healthcare company - which adds two more layers of hoops you have to jump through - HIPAA and ISO Series 7 for clinical trials (or something like that, I don't even remember anymore).

Has anyone ever managed to take down the army of Oracle lawyers? Has anyone ever successfully sued a software company for creating bad programs and software?

I just searched "Therac-25 lawsuit" and came up empty-handed. I'm trying to think of any case at all that would have a higher reasoning for a lawsuit.