This is usual in the .Net culture. People use "Not Invented Here" rather than leverage existing stuff because it makes them look all clever plus Microsoft give people no guidance at all that is worthless.
In both the .Net and Java arenas which I've been heavily involved in since they both hit the market, I've never had to piddle around with hacks like this and I've chucked out very public stuff that handles 10 million requests an hour.
He designs stuff that looks pretty, but you can't open it to isolate power or replace the battery easily.
It's dangerous. Having watched my MacBook Pro go up in flames and nearly take my house with it, I have first hand of how awfully designed Apple stuff is from a safety and engineering point of view.
Also, I want to replace my iPod battery after 3 years (Nano 4th gen). Can I? Nope, not without special tools, high risk procedures and a flipping soldering iron.
Yes it does. I download ALL my google docs contents weekly in a zip file using their export tool. I regularly shift documents between word, excel, google docs and openoffice all the time with few if any problems.
I can't bring myself to get rid of my circa 2008 Nokia 6303 phone and my circa 1995 TI92 calculator. They just work, even though they are both "not state of the art".
With respect to the 486/33: in about '03 my hefty desktop blew up leaving me with an old compaq pentium 100. That did me for 3 months running NetBSD with no major pain. In fact it gave me more time to do other things so I got more done at the end of the day. It wasn't any less productive than the 1.8GHz P4 I had at the time believe me.
That genuinely probably is true and is not a cherry picked statistic.
I reckon it's due to the highway drifters, who are reckless idiots. They are probably using their blackberries to organise drifting events which inevitably result in accidents.
I don't get it - I've had the same screwdrivers since I was 15. Why would you just throw a lot of knowledge and a perfectly good tool out?
If you know what you are doing, C is perfectly safe.
If you don't know what you are doing, even the safest language is a grenade without the pin in.
I've written a few web apps which are just inetd spawned C which shifts JSON out with printf's and handles POST data as a hash table. Utterly simple and surprisingly scalable.
In both the .Net and Java arenas which I've been heavily involved in since they both hit the market, I've never had to piddle around with hacks like this and I've chucked out very public stuff that handles 10 million requests an hour.
Stackoverflow is an engineering misnomer.