this is true. I can;t see how following the bandwagon of Chrome actually makes things better with Firefox. Multi-process architecture... I've not really noticed a problem with the threaded one, and Firefox already sticks flash objects in a separate process. So what's the real draw... except "well the guy down the road has one so we have to have one too".

64bit... again, bragging points about how many bits you use, no functional difference to anyone. Its like when I gave the 32 bit version of Visual Studio to a colleague and he complained that he wanted the 64 bit version.... there is no 64 bit version because it isn't needed. Its just the typical knee-jerk reaction that 64 bits is somehow essential for everything, not just those programs that really do require it.

Which of course applies doubly for a multi-process browser!

Ah that brings back memories - the IBM documentation bibles I had for OS2 programming were bliss. If I needed to know *anything*, I looked it up.

Today, its a combination of intellisense guesswork, google and trial-and-error coding :-(

I'd like to say that going back to the old days would be good, but we have too many languages, too much refactoring in APIs, too many 'cool new things'. No-one could go back to the concept of building on top of what is already there in a stable, mature manner (well, except the Linux guys, but then look at what's going wrong with systemd to see it infecting even them!)

To all: if you want productivity, you need to stop with the churn. Spolsky said it right when he talked of all constantly changing APIs from Microsoft. Summary: it helps Microsoft, not you:

You forget how many people have lost their jobs ot cheap er workers. You forget how many H1B visas are demanded by US tech companies because "they can;t find skilled staff" hours after firing a load of skilled employees.

See, programming is a new form of menial work. Why bother hiring me at huge salary when you can hire someone with a degree from a 3rd world country to click the right menu options in an IDE and cut and paste code they find on Google? The results are roughly the same, it sortof works, and that's good enough to get it shipped, sold and bonuses handed out to all executives.

The trouble with "dumbing down" programming to "make us more productive" is simply that anyone can be productive with the tools, even if they barely know what they are doing. Net result - many more cheaper workers. At least in the old days employers knew they needed some competent people as well as the less skilled. Now, they just don't care as the less skilled can do a reasonable job by themselves, even if their code looks like it should be a DailyWTF site all of its own, no-one in charge ever looks at it.

no, option 2 only works if the dictator is benevolent - if not, then other options should be chosen.

Turns out the worst option is democracy, but its also the best compared to all the others.

Personally, I like the checks and balances of several people who have power over each other in a circle - like a chairman 'owns' the chief executive but otherwise has no power, the ceo 'owns' the product direction, and introduce a third (the users?) who have control over who gets to be chairman. Between them, they are always in fear of losing their job unless they keep the other group happy... hmm, maybe I just think fear is the best and only way to keep the people in charge honest :-)

only the ones that make no profit whatsoever, no sir, none, its all been taken up by purchasing IP from our, erm,, a company based offshore.

its not size that matters, its how you use it.... or so I'm told :)

Florida is a big place, if it has the kind of diversity in its cultures as the poster described, then so what if its geographically tiny or like the Siberian steppes?

If his point is valid re diversity, then why nitpick over some subjective quantity, especially when 'huge' can be applied to geographically small things such as my back yard,

Paying 30 cents for a dollar doesn't seem like a lot... but $300,000,000 is quite a bit.

Keeping 70 cents per dollar doesn't seem like a lot... but $700,000,000 is loads!

30% isn't that bad all in all, what high taxes mean is that the companies put the prices up to compensate so the retained income after tax is enough to maintain the company. If the tax dropped to 20% then the company would just find it had more leeway to reduce prices and be more competitive.

So high company taxes hurt the consumer, but then if corporate taxes were low, the consumer would have to pay more tax to pay for all the things we take for granted. So all in all, its a complex juggling act to balance the economy and ultimately it makes little difference overall.

Transfer pricing involves a company selling [stuff] to its subsidiaries at market cost

yes, and it is a sensible means of not paying tax twice... however....

If you transfer your IP from the US company to the Dutch company at $1, and the Dutch company transfers the same IP to your Australian company at $1bn. You'll find that the Dutch company makes a huge profit and the Australian one makes no profit at all.

And as the Dutch company can record the profit, but not pay tax on it until some other criteria are met that the tax buys take pains to avoid, nobody ends up paying tax!

I guess the guidelines are just that - non binding "best practices" that you "should" follow but can just ignore if you feel like it. Which these scammy companies are doing. Maybe the answer is just to make them mandatory, or maybe its just to scrap the whole concept of transfer pricing and tax the buggers twice!

Ok, not quite *that* kind of tourist location.

I know people who have taken jobs in the NW of England to be near the Peak District national park, and a friend of mine really wants to move to the SW "riviera" area - but alas the only jobs there are "wiping tables or wiping bums". There are plenty of very pleasant places to live and work, but the tech jobs are all in the worst places imaginable, all clustered together like being in a business park next to Oracle and Microsoft somehow justifies the hell of it all.

I agree, whilst a simple fizzbuzz program can weed out the truly incompetent or pure scammer, anything beyond that is just luck based on the developer or the interview. People think differently in interview situations anyway, so a test is usually a very poor means of determining their ability, especially with unfamiliar tools and environment.

One place I interviewed for set me a test of doing some code review, they gave me a visual studio project and asked me what I thought of it - not only could I demonstrate my thinking about the obvious bugs and style issues (by style I mean the class called 'Class1' etc) but I could show that I did know enough of what I was talking about to show I wasn't over-exaggerating my ability. I thought this test made sense for an interview and I'd recommend it.

Besides, beyond basic capability, the most important factor is their personality and if they fit in your team. The best coder is no good if he can't work with your other employees!

I always wondered why tech offices were located in the centre of some crappy city or soulless business park (eg Winnersh in Reading, sigh).

If I had a big company to set up somewhere, it'd be in an area usually frequented by tourists - there are enough people wanting to move from their shitty rat race commute that they would want to relocate to a nice area. And you'd have the side benefit of having a trapped workforce who would never want to relocate back to their grimy city commute days.

Even Paul says its not too good (without saying "its too underpowered"):

so its not really enough to browse the web with the addons one expects nowadays (and I assume heavy javascript web pages) and do anything else, and he goes one to say you have 10gb storage free. You'll have to carefully manage that once you store a load of music or movies on it.

no, true... but then Google doesn't expect you to pay regularly to continue to keep accessing your files (first year free).

I would say that a lot of Google services have not been closed but morphed into a different product - Wave was the start for functionality now in Google Docs for example.

That would be here

Na, there's always been a few open source projects in MS, I think they're semi-official projects that someone started and released in a way to sell more of the tools.

Wix was the first, it is an xml-baased editor that creates installer packages.

Then they did ASP.NET MVC Razor 5 (or whatever its called) which is basically a web-site project template with some 'magic' framework code. I think this ships with Visual Studio now.

And now they have OneGet... fair enough. I doubt anyone at Microsoft will be too unhappy its open source, its not exactly critical to the base platform, but it keeps the consumers of Windows happy - and they have already bought Windows so the Microsoft suits are happy too.