Are there any programming jobs you wouldn't take? Not because the jobs didn't pay enough, had poor benefits, or limited upside -- but because the work itself made you uncomfortable? Consider the tale of one freshmeat.net writer: Back in the old day...

Bruce Schneier is something of a legend in the computer security community. He's the author of the classic, oft-cited 1994 book Applied Cryptography, as well as several well-known cryptography algorithms.

As I grow older and even older as a programmer, I've found that my personal coding style has trended heavily toward minimalism.

I've seen a lot of people play The Computer Performance Shell Game poorly. They overinvest in a fancy CPU, while pairing it with limited memory, a plain jane hard drive, or a generic video card. For most users, that fire-breathing quad-core CPU is...