A big screen is a software developer's best friend!
And if 22 inches of diamondtron technology aren't enough, with some OSs you can drive two monitors @ the same time, using, for example, a Matrox G400 dual.
Don't work all the time! If you don't get fun from your environment, you'll soon become a boring, limited, uninteresting person! I am always in good company :)
2020: 21 million software developers
Back in 1950, there were 100 software developers, worldwide. Mostly, they were people doing research for the successors of the computers used during the 2nd World War. Remember that computers played a much more important role on the great War against the nazis, than most history books report: after all, if it wasn't for the british coming up with an algorithm that decrypted the german communications, Hitler would probably have achieved his goals. But the United States' bombers also used a very sophisticated bombing technique that required high altitude flying and straight level routes, that were computed with great accuracy... and so on... Wars fought for up to 50 years ago, were won by the side which made better use of the available computational power!
10 years later, in 1960, it is estimated that there were 10000 [10 thousand] software developer jobs, worldwide. Despite being a "ridiculous" [low] number, it surely represents a tremendous increase.
Think so? Well, in 1980 there were 2 million programmers, worldwide. And because these people were highly concentrated in countries like the USA, Canada, Great Britain, France, URSS and Japan, it becomes obvious that the 80s were the greatest boom époque for the binary nerds.
10 years later, less than 10 years ago, in 1990, that number less than quadrupled, to 7 million dudes, worldwide.
In 2000 there will be 10 million people working on software development, but such a number hides millions of related jobs, on advertising, designing, writing, etc...
It is estimated that we will be 21 million, by 2020...
Object Oriented Programming [OOP] != more productivity
Some recent software conferences, brought to light a disturbing fact: one of the strongest points of OOP, code re-usability, is hardly being well exploited by most software companies.
Despite code reuse being a current policy for most of the "sharks", as 3D engines and highly popular APIs show, the fact is that OOP doesn't translate to higher productivity. $ Managers noticed that the extra time that OOP brings, is being employed in more sophisticated projects, instead of flowing to NEW different products.
Of course that is great: if it wasn't for this refinement, we would not have 3D audio, spectacular 3D, force feedback control, and so on... :)
Always go for a monitor with BNC inputs: picture quality is obviously better, using them.
Abandon the mouse! Any trackball is better than a dusty mouse! Logitech has the best trackball I know... but it is now out of production :(
Again my trackball! You know, I simply didn't have better pictures for this article...