Ronald Pofalla is know for his - how shall I put it? - errrm, ... lack of subtleness. How the _chancelors_ chief of staff can order a _police_ helicopter to do what's basically a military/state _intel_ job is totally beyond me though.
We have these nutcase scenarios where people seem to break every rule in the book just for the heck of it. At the G8 convention in Heiligendam we had high-tech tactical bombers helping out the police gathering intel on demonstrators. ... It raised a lot less of a stink than I would have hoped for.

My 2 cents.

Closely followed by games, television and modern movies. Although I couldn't give a specific order. Perhaps games come second to books, because they are interactive and thus can be more immersive than tv or movies.

My 2 cents.

Experiences depend on various things:
1) How well is the company doing?
2a) What products are their business model?
2b) If they're building a new product, do they have the cashn/ provide the cash to finance a prototype and the time it takes to develop a good product?
3) How good is the team / teamlead / project manager / internal pipeline / development method?

I've worked as a dev and later on as a Scrum Master for a gaming company on a product/prototype team. It was plain awesome. The lead was very good at taking the blame and sharing the credit and we had a lot of freedom and enough budget to build a proper team (devs, gamedesigners, artists, etc.). Then I switched departments after the product was cancelled - which is a normal thing btw., markets change all the time. The dept lead in the new department was a douche, there was infighting between my new teamlead and the head of dept. just as I came on board, the internal tool/product was crap, the tech used wasn't wanted throughout the company, etc. ... It sucked. I left 9 months later because of that.

So, as you see: It depends. If your friend get's a job with Blizzard, by all means, he should take it. With Blizzards track record of turning everthing they build into gold he'd be stupid not to. Blizzard is the Apple of the gaming world, I doubt a crappy team / dead-end crew exists for longer than a few weeks at Blizzard before getting torn to bits and reassembled into something usefull. But he should be prepared. A company like Blizzard has their pipeline designed right down to the color of the paperclip that comes with the weekly progress report. He'll learn professional software development alright, but I doubt many companies are as thorough as Blizzard - he'll have to move on to Lockheed Software Group or the folks that build software for nuclear power plants or something if a job change is not supposed to become a serious downshift.

Ever since my gamedev gig I've been working with web agencies. It's like moving from fine cuisine to McDonalds. Not a nice thing.

My 2 cents.

I moved from nerdy bat-belt over backpack to handbag for my EDCs. Seriously: Get a top-notch handbag or small messenger bag. Crumpler is good ... allthough I just see the german collection is by orders of magnitude better than the US one (???) - don't know what to make of that (Link is to the German collection with english copytext).

Another one, Freitag, is über-hip in Europe right now - they direct-recycle truck tarps, wasch them with rain-water and sow them into individual grungy cyberpunk-style pockets and bags. Entirely swiss-made btw. Sturdy, practical and very cool and fashionable. Popular with girls and guys alike over here. Cost a small fortune, but guaranteed no sweat shop work and about the most envionmentaly friendly you can get. ... A Freitag probably is going to be my next.

Not having my gadgets on me all the time in my bat-belt made me a more sociable person for that simple reason. You look cooler and you feel better not lugging your toolkit around with you all the time.

Bottom line: Ditch the bat-belt syndrome and get a neat rugged modern bag for your EDC - once you've gone through the initial withdrawal you'll feel much better. :-)

My 2 cents.

N-dimensional x-referencing will mess up your head, don't do it and don't try to do it, no matter what hightech gadgets you have access to.

To be honest, for this problem - especially because it's so n-dimensional - I'd deliberately choose *not* to use hightech but to stick with quality notebooks (Leuchtturm are my favourite) and a good pen/fountain pen (Lamy is my favorite) and rely on spacial memory ("Roughly where in notebook was I when we had that lecture?") which relates 1 to 1 to the sequence of your curriculum. You can use colored markers and sticky-tabs to sort things out when rehearsing/prepping. Once a notebook is full you even can get cute and write the contents table (Leuchtturms all have one + numbered pages).

This may seem low-tech, but nothing bets that when you have to memorize your stuff by heart and have to be able to recall it in an exam. You'll find stuff much faster than by using some computer UI. ... Let it be 10-30 notebooks when you're finally a medical doctor. So what? You can still photograph each page and digitally store it and metatag those images later on if you want to through them away someday. Or you can pay someone to do that. And do use top quality notebooks and pens. They are fun to use and take the boredom out of taking notes!

My 2 cents.

Apple is about fashion. iPhones are still selling like hot cakes, and people don't give a damn wether some Android device is more powerful. iStuff is hip, looks flashy, has a ton of accessories available and never will stop being hip, cool and well designed. It's like the Zippo Lighter or the Vespa Scooter.

To detail the Vespa example and why it comes to my mind: I just went looking at Scooters these days - Piaggios Vespa sells at least 700 Euros more expensive than the rest of the lot ... and that's with bargain deals. There are Scooters of simular quality from the far east, yet at my dealer of choice, of all 50ccm Scooters on display 25% of them were Vespas. Not Piaggio, but the actuall Vespa, in all colors and variants. They even got a new luxury model that sells for 7500$(!!), the Vespa 946. A friggin' 50ccm Scooter for 7500+$!!

And I tell you what: if I had the money, I'd probably buy one. You know why? I don't want to think about Scooters. I want mine to look cool and timeless and be fun to ride. Most people are like that when it comes to Smartphones and computing devices - I'm not, but then again, I'm an expert. With Scooters I'm not. I'm like "Oh, this one looks cool, rides nice and also comes in black & chrome and real metal. And you can get flashy jackets and gear with the same logo. I'm sold." There was a mechanical engineer there today with her 9 year old son. She didn't even look at the quality Taiwan models. It had to be a brown metallic touring Vespa with original Vespa topcase, 3500 Euros vs. 2000 Euros be damned. And I bet she has an iPhone for the same reason. It's like Levis vs. cheapo, Coka Cola vs. no-name Coke. People by the "original", no matter the price.

No, Apple isn't doomed by a long shot.

Apple has turned owning an iDevice into a fashion statement - an advantage that Oracle, MS and quite a few other companies would kill for. Unless Apple really screws up and breaks their *very* sophisticated product development pipeline - which I don't see happening - Apple will to just fine. Especially with gross margins still well north of 30%. Margins and mindshare even Oracle probably can only dream of, btw.

My 2 cents.

I think he got it wrong why we got lost.

It's not because we didn't or don't know. It's because software was free back then. Hardware was so bizarly expensive and rare that no one gave a damn about giving away software and software ideas for free. It's only when software was commercialised that innovation in the field started to slow rapidly. The interweb is where it was 18 years ago because ever since simply because people are busy round the clock 24/7 trying to monetise it rather than ditching bad things and trying new stuff.

Then again, x86 wining as an archtecture and unix as software model probably does have a little to do with it aswell. We're basically stuck with early 80ies technology.

The simple truth is:
CPU and system development need's its iPhone/iPad moment - where a bold move is made to ditch out decade old concepts to make way for entirely new ones!

Look what happed since Steve Jobs and his crew redid commodity computing with their touch-toys. Imagine that happening with system architecture - that would be awesome. The world would be a totally different place in 5 years from now.

Point in case: We're still using SQL (Apollo era software technology for secretaries to manually access data - SQL is a fricking END-USER INTERFACE form the 70ies!!!) as a manually built and rebuilt access layer to persistance from the app level. That's even more braindead than keeping binary in favour of ASM, as given as example in the OPs video-talk.

Even ORM to hide SQL is nothing but a silly crutch from 1985. Java is a crutch to bridge across plattforms because since the mid 70ies people in the industry have been fighting turf wars over the patented plattforms and basically halted innovation (MS anyone?). The sceomorphic desktop metaphor is a joke - and allways has been. Stacked windowing UIs are a joke and allways have been. Our keyboard layout is a provisionary from the steam age, from before the zipper was invented (!!). E-Mail - one of the bizarest things still to be in widespread use - is from a time when computers weren't even connected yet, with different protocolls for every little shit it does, bizar, pointless, braindead and arcane concepts like the seperation of MUA, editor and seperate protocolls for sending and recieving - a human async communication system and protocol so bad it's outclassed by a shoddy commercial social networking site running from webscripts and browser-driven widgets - I mean WTF??? etc... I could go on and on ...

The only thing that isn't a total heap of shit is *nix as a system, and that's only because everything worthwhile being called Unix today is based on FOSS where we can still tinker and move forward with babysteps like fast no-bullshit non-tiling window managers, complete OpenGL accelerated avantgarde UIs (I'm thinking Blender here), workable userland and OS seperation and a matured way to handle text-driven UI, interaction and computer controll (zshell & modern bash).

That said, I do believe if we'd come up with a new, entire FOSS hardware arcitecture "2013" with complete redo and focus on massive parallel concurrency and build a logic-and-constraint driven touch-based direct-maniplation-interface system - think Squeak.org completely redone today for modern retina touch display *without* the crappy desktop - that does away with seperation of filesystem and persistance seperation and other ancient dead-ends, we'd be able to top and drop *nix in no time.

We wouldn't even miss it. ...

But building the bazillionth web framework and next half-assed x.org window manager and/or accompaning windows clone or redoing the same audio-player app / file manager / UI-Desktop toolkit every odd year from bottom to top again appears to be more fun I guess.

My 2 cents.

You're misunderstanding the question about leadership.

What they're actually asking you is 'Can you work overtime for free whilst delivering a steady 120% of output and wipping (i.e. "leading") our 5 other underpaid junior developers to do the same?' The talking down about 'lack of leadership' is an attempt to make you insecure and coax you into doing another extra few years of goodwill of being paid as a regular but doing the extra "leadership" work for free and be thankfull for the opportunity, even though you're experienced enough to know better, i.e. that it will lead nowhere other than into your next burnout.

I basically get the same stuff too in recent years - I'm 43 now, so everybody knows I'm old enough not to be bullshitted with crappy pay and goodwill promises anymore. It's a carefull balance of using my experience to my negotiation advantage and not scaring the employer away. (more details on that at the bottom)
Allthough my portfolio and my recommendations are so pimped out that they dare not ask me about lack of leadership experience directly, they try to put me down/cheap me out using other means, such as rather addressing me with informaly (in German) than formaly - which basically mount to 10 000 Euros/year less in salary ("We're all buddies here and we've got foosball tables too ...") or attempting to keep a straight face whilst noting that I don't have an academic rank (Note: I *do* have 27 years of programming experience and 10+ successful project in my field).

I've recently moved on to tell people right away that I want to work part-time (1/2 or 3/4ths of an occupation) for the equivalent pay, thus curbing stupid questions about "leading" (50+hrs/week for 40hrs pay). You get a little less money, have way more free time and don't have to put up with stupid questions, outrageous expectations, shitty production pipelines, dumb PMs, asshole co-workers, pointy-haired bosses or tickets that come in 20 minutes before closing hours.

In my last interview ws the first time I actually flat out told the employer that I'm not interested in foosball tables or party events and that I simply want to come to work, do my work, get paid, maybe bring in my experience if it is requested and mutually benefitial and otherwise go about my life. And low and behold, right now it looks as though I'm going to join the team. A team of fifteen, with aprox. 5-7 regular devs and no versioning in place and a lead who's nice but is so backwards I would let within 10 yards of any project ... gee, am I glad that that is not my problem.

My 2 cents.

Most people - I'd say way over 80%, perhaps even 90 or 95% - are simply to dumb and irresponsible to handle anything but the simplest of technology. To dumb to handle knives, cars or guns, to dumb to handle computers, to dumb to handle regular modern garbage correctly, let alone nuclear waste.
With computers the problems and trouble these people can cause is relatively limited, cars and guns not quite so but still in boundaries (allthoug these are quite big when looking at the problems with guns in the US or the death toll on the Autobahn).

However, there are few things invented by mankind that are equally or even more dangerous that nuclear technology. It is for this simple reason - the largest share of the general human population on this planet being to stupid for our technoligical advances invented by a very small minority - that nuclear power sources should be dismantled everywhere on earth, and not just in Germany. This tech and it's waste is a huge burden and mortgage for hundreds of thousands of years to come, and anybody seriously believing they can carry that responsibility should be looked away or at least kept away from making any meaningful decisions about anything technology related.

My 2 cents.

Professional map-maker putting extra effort into making non-crappy map makes better map.
News at eleven.

Personally, after being in the developer/IT rat-race for 14 years now I'm recently experiencing a spike in 'bugging by recruiters' myself, just now when I'm ready to ponder a career change. I don't know what to make of it, most are lazy recruiters who want me to do their data entry job for them - nothing new here - but just these weeks I've had recruiters come back to me and actually report on the status of a given occupation (that's a rare one).

This is all just anecdotal and probably has to do with me adding a few buzzwords to my online profiles, but it's interesting none-the-less. The ratio of clueless/lazy/crappy-paid recruiters hasn't changed much though.

140x, baby. That's how you rolled with protable computing back in 1986. Yeah! ... Still have it's successor, the 1403H with 32 KB and cash-register strip printer, peek/poke hack manual, etc. Still running on two button-cells that are more than 15 years old. Have still to find a turing complete computer that beat that battery uptime.

I, however, am writing this on an MB Air with 4BG RAM, wich makes this 1000 000 x more memory.

Sorry, your rambling - that is supposed to be a question I presume - is a tad incoherrent. But I do think I catch your overall drift, so I'll chime in:

I think the overall issue is basically about programming languages. Wether it's some software runtime enironment or the other - in the case of JS Node.js just happens to be the first to revive JS on the serverside.

To the case:
Wether or not a PL takes over is dependant on things that usually have nothing to do with the PL itself. Once a PL is sufficient enough .... ok, scratch that. Take for instance PHP. PHP was a joke when it becam popular. 2 guys had a thing called Zend engine and they decided to craft it around a Perl based templating "language" that was becoming popular - mostly because Perl is quite bizar to handle and it was the most popular web scripting language back then. They built PHP 3 based on the zend engine, then a mod-php was added for the popular webserver Apache and the rest is history. All things went web, as a result we have PHP pissing into serious Java territory today. I remember when PHP was a joke and JSP seemed to be posed to rule the webworld for decades to come. That didn't happen, mostly due to political reasons. ...
Had Netscape released their webserver as FOSS back in the mid-90ies, we'd all be using JS as serverside language ever since, since JS was the serverside language on the Netscape Enterprise Server.

I think compiled languages are impractical for web environments, for reasons everyone can come up with, so that rules out C and C++. For every environment that is set up from scratch I can't think of a single expert that would recommend .Net. .Net exists because it banked on the existing Windows/MS legacy. The MS CLR may be a neat feat, but it is a MS lockin trap, and today it's mostly pointless, since abundant server power, virtualisation and simular things have made optimisation concerning multiple runtimes on one setup a non-issue.

This leaves us with JIT/bytecode compiled or interpreted languages. Here I see Java vs. all the rest (Python, PHP, JS, Ruby, etc.). It's basically Java vs. FOSS languages. Java *is* a FOSS language by now, but the problem is that Oracle is a very bad herald for FOSS Java, and the FOSS alternative, OpenJDK/SDK is bad/slow.

For the future of web I do see Node.js gaining lead position. Google put serious cash into aquiring V8 technology, improving it and putting it into Chrome. Flash was killed by Steve Jobs/iOS, pushing brilliant no-Flash-allowed devices (iPhones and iPads) into millions of end-user hands, so Google had to come up with a serious alternative. Hence JS/V8.

Not being stupid - selling software is *not* Googles business - they released the impressive V8 engine as FOSS, and some smart people put in the effort to port that engine to the serverside, where it is about to kick PHPs and Rubys ass, simply because it's at least as good as either of those *and* it is the same primary non-lockin language on the serverside as is on the clientside. Mind you, clientside JS only became popular once a guy wrote a famous blog article in which he renamed "doing important smart things with JavaScript" into "Ajax", which is a cool name and thus made JS on the clientside popular with a lot of people who formerly had no interest in looking into JS seriously. We have the same effect when some smart guy decided that plain Java objects weren't used and other things like EJBs were more popular simply because regular Java objects didn't have a cool name. So he named them Pojos (Plain Old Java Objects) and solved the problem. Any serious respectable Java toolkit today uses Pojos at its heart.

Bottom line: Wether a tech or PL catches on, gains traction and becomes the next big thing is usually rooted in issues one would not think as relevant right away - things like 'Does the tech have a cool name?', among others. That said, for the reasons stated above, I do think JS on the serverside (and thus Node.js in particular) does have a good chance of ruling the serverside future of the web. Add in nginx overtaking the conceptially dated Apache Webserver setups, and you have a safe bet.

My 2 cents.

Seriously, I don't get the fuss. The industrial world has been overdue for a change in tactics for at least 3 decades, and the problems in society around the globe reflect humanity pursuit of things that can't work the way they used to anymore.

These are the facts (and we all know them, either intuitively or by plain analysis):

1.) We are reaching peak capitalism.

2.) Our jobs are going away, either to robots or the poorest of the poor on the planet ... and *then* to robots.

3.) We are about to reach a worldwide abundance of material goods. The last pieces of production society are on the way out.

4.) Most of our societies follow rules which, under the circumstances described above, seem bizare, arcane and silly. Each society and country has it's on set of soon to be totally pointless behaviours, but they all have them. The US has their evangelical cristian stuff, Germany spends 4.7 billion man-hours per year in traffic jams (seriously) and I don't even know where to begin in describing the bizar notions and pressures the Japanese society puts on people.

Let's face it: Most of us here on slashdot (I consider the average IQ here on /. measurably higher than average) would do the same if they hadn't developed some sort of psychological survical skill or found a nice warm place in the 9-5 jobworld where they can play with computers all day.

Bottom line: This is a totally normal reaction to environment, especially if you haven't had the luck to be introduced to stoic or zen philosophy or something simular in your teenages which might help you cope with the bizar theater going on around us in everyday life, including people presuring others to 'get a real job' and 'do something usefull'.

My 2 cents.

... Ok, ok, hear me out: Yes, it is true, our knowledge is quite impressive to a degree, in some fields, the technological high-culture we've built these days has a significant positive impact on overall global wealth and power over the forces of nature in general, etc. jadajada ...

but:
How many things are there that really can count as a significant cornerstone of out civilisation?
- Electricity
- Internal Compustion Engine
- smithery/metal works
- arabian math & british navigation, astrology
- the wheel
- knowledge of basic hygene, virii, bacteria and genetics aka medicine
- chemistry
- experience with various modes of agriculture (4-field agriculture and nitro-ferilizer), carring crops and fruits from one continent to the next (the south-american potato definitely brought europe and the western civilisation forward) ... and a usefull overview of the laws of physics and some neat applications of those (flying, solid-state transistors, etc.)
- nuclear power

So what gives?

ICE - I'd say the internal combustion engine we could to without. Overall it has done more or at least as much damage than good, imho.
Electricity - that one definitely rocks. No other tech has brought us as far ahead as electricity.
Chemistry - not quite sure what to make of this. I'm leaning toward 'not-so-good'. Petrochem definitely has done more harm than good, I'd say. Don't like the polution. Basic knowledge of chemistry, especially in the field of medicine is neat, no doubt.
The Wheel - neat. Very usefull.
Modern Agriculture - modern agriculture sucks, however, if the insights would be applied correctly, we'd live in paradies in this area
Metal - tools: nice. means of transport: nice. Jewlery: ok. Weapons, large machinery, modern production, etc.: bad to not-so-good, imho.
Arabian math - very nice. A strike of genius, if you ask me.
Astrology - Usefull, but only to a certain extent. The past 150 years were more of pasttime in that field. Don't need to know about radiation to admire the stars.
Medicine - Very neat. Allthough I'd argue chemical medication hasn't improved that much since the 1960 - some diseases have been tackled since, but they were specifically targeted by an army of well/globally organised scientists - nothing regular humans with common sence couldn't to again. And diseases change all the time, this is an ongoing battle.
Physics, basic laws of nature - neat, very usefull.
Nuclear power - not needed, does more damage than good, especially in the hands of 99,9% of humans who are to dumb to handle it. This is one of the things I'd want *removed* from our knowledge.

All in all I'd say that in a well ordered society this knowledge could be rebuilt in 6-8 generations, roughly 200 years. Not that difficult. ... Once we have moved away from playing angry birds on smartphones to building AI to solve Big Problems (TM) that may be a totally different picture though. Then again, those big problems wouldn't be there if humanity had shown a little more brainpower while advancing in tech so fast.

Our knowledge has done far more damage than it should have, and to me it is apparent that overall inteligence isn't sufficient enough to handle todays technology correctly. A little more moral and mind training and another century or two of entlightenment before moving into hightech would've been better for humanity.

My 2 cents.