Careers: Two U.K. researchers claim that "programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are certain to succeed," Nick Corcodilos reports in Does the camel have two humps? "It seems to me this could be used to test even people who think they already are programmers. Maybe they're not, eh?"

The news beat: Apple's new OS Leopard has already been hacked to run on Windows PCs, without Apple's consent of course. A mobile phone platform by Google is due in the middle of next year, according to reports, the goal of which is to make its apps and services as accessible on phones are they are on PCs. McAfee buys ScanAlert, a Web application security company that scans sites daily in search of vulnerabilities. And Microsoft unwraps its Oslo project to create a unified platform for integrating services and modeling.

Columnist's corner: Sometimes, what's obvious to the support professional is not so clear to technology users. A national support specialist for a major equipment manufacturer learned that lesson early on, and carried it along for the rest of his career. It all started on the phone with a man and woman who said everything had been fine up until a few minutes prior to their call. "There had been no error messages or error lights on the main processor unit," our Off the Record author explains in Computer Function 101. So, he started with the basics, or so he thought. Forty-five minutes later they asked for a break. Sure, but why? "The other guy just left with the flashlight."

Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 30, 2007 10:45 AM