*another* development stack... pity's sake, don;t we have enough already?

Now its just another thing that will pollute our systems - no longer will you install some shitty little app and find it pulls in all the Gnome libraries, now it'll pull in a heap of .NET ones and probably Gnome libs too!

The reason Microsoft likes it is possibly because of the sentiments in this article

Yeah, so now Linux people - you too can spend all your time rewriting in the latest cool new development stack, while Microsoft gets on with building whatever it was you used to build.

Add to that "developer mindshare" and we might just give up on anything decent, having to put up with crap like ASP.NET MVC Razor 5 with EF6.1 frameworks.. and if you don't know all that blackbox magic, forget trying to get a job.

There's a lot of people who will code in .NET because it purports to be easy, and they will use Visual Studio sooner rather than later, and then they'll find writing for Windows first is the norm, just for development.. and eventually they'll think why bother actually doing the little porting work.

so I'm not convinced its a good thing overall, even if it is good for me as I know that shit already.

Danish wind farms tend to be built out to sea, so.. good, fewer seagulls are an additional benefit.

However, wrt solar - the biggest problem is when the sun is shining. No use having a massive amount of solar panels if you need electricity during the night, or even at evening - most panels are set facing due south, whereas some should be set more easterly or westerly to get more sunlight as the sub rises or sets.

Still doesn't help at night though. Until we figure out a way to store energy, renewables will only be a part of the solution.

Unfortunately, as threads context switch the CPU has to copy the register data to memory and back again for the new thread. This means architectures with more registers switch slower. Some RISC CPUs with lots of registers switch even slower.

So more registers give with one hand, and take away with the other. I guess javascript doesn't get optimised as much as it could to take advantage of those extra registers like a C program will, and the benefit of properly filled caches will have an even bigger impact to performance than registers.

Still, 32-bit programs run fine.. I have nothing against a 64-bit firefox, its just that I think they could spend their limited time elsewhere for better impact instead of simply playing chase Chrome.

saving one the headache of installing two different Java runtimes

there is an optimal solution to this...... sucks if you *have* to run a java program though.

I use all the google services on chrome ... their products are just too annoying to use on other things,/i>

Google... the new Microsoft :-)

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!