I can edit tens of thousands of lines of code in an instant with sed and grep without even "opening an editor." Through the miracle that is sh I can pipe stuff into my custom (very small and simple) C and sh tools to frob the code. Then I just type make to rebuilt it all and my unit tests tell me that it worked.

At the other side of the office, they're cursing and swearing and Microsoft(TM)(R) Visual(C) Studio Intergalactic Azure Edition For the Enterprise(R) because it's still importing the project...

Truly, you are at one with the Tao.

That's all you need. (OK, implicit with c is the c compiler, pre-processor, assembler, linker, disassembler and strace). The old timers knew what they were doing.

Advertising is marketing. But not all marketing is advertising.

For example, how did you learn about adblock?

Too many people want to get rich by selling apps and expect Apple to pay for the marketing of their apps for free on the App Store.

The App Store serves one purpose - not to promote your apps, but to make money for Apple.

If you want to go into business selling an app for iOS then you need to have some plan in place to market it. That doesn't mean sticking it on the App Store and hoping for the best.

If you can't afford to market your app (either by paying for advertising somewhere or just physically spending your own time promoting it) then you really shouldn't waste money or time to develop it either.

Indeed. The cloud fad is already starting to pop as executives find out "Holy fuck, you mean when something goes wrong there's no amount of screaming I can do to make them prioritize our service?" and other things that weren't in the brochure. "You mean we're on a shared infrastructure so when one of the other tenants gets DDOSed we're down too? "

Or (my favorite) "You mean to actually have high availability we have to spend almost double the quoted price to run identical machines in another geographic-zone"?

Emergency Diesel generators usually have compressed air starters. There is a tank of compressed air connected to the engine's cylinders to get it turning over. There is usually a powered valve holding the compressed air in. When the power fails, the valve opens releasing the air and the engine starts tuning over. Then the Diesel supply gets started (mechanical pump driven by the engine).

My main reason is that I don't see the point. What is so wrong with glasses than I should want to pay thousands to have surgery on my eyes just to "free" myself from glasses? I've worn glasses for most of my life, can't say they bother me (and they do come in handy as others have noted as added physical protection at times!). Can't be doing with contact lenses though. Went for a trial, couldn't even keep my eye open for them to put the test lens in, so that was the end of that. Ugh, actually putting something on to the surface of one's eye? *shudder* Mind you, I can't have laser eye surgery even if I wanted it - a few years back I gave in and went for a test. The eye surgeon did the usual sight test stuff, measured my glasses to determine an initial prescription setting to test, figured out the final tested prescription was suitable for laser surgery, and started filling out the paperwork. "Umm, what about this double-cvision?" I asked, still sat in the chair with the eye test gear clamped to my head. "Huh? Oh." came the reply. Turns out that they can't do anything about double-vision, so even after surgery I'd still need glasses. Kinda destroyed his whole argument for having it, really! (I was a bit concerned that he had not spotted the glasses had double-vision correction in them when he was analysing them, too - wonder what else he might have missed had the surgery gone ahead?)

Back in the day I remember someone in a programme on the telly referring to something that was out-of-order as "British Telecom."

82 million xBox 360 owners can't be wrong right?

And how many million people bought Kylie Minogue and Madonna records? They can't be wrong, right?

Chairman, CEO, CFO, CIO, Executive VP of Sales and Marketing and Executive VP of something to do with engaging the outsourcing suppliers with the starving peasants working 80+ hours a week for a pittance in undeveloped countries.

Considering the lousy end products I have to deal with on a daily basis, paying programmers more money won't improve the skillset. You want to be paid more money? Produce a better product.

When the PHBs conspire to make that (producing a better product) impossible, it doesn't matter what engineers you employ or how much you pay them.

The relentless push to cut costs, do "more with less," let the staff numbers dwindle through natural wastage and lack of vision, invent fantasy project schedules (requiring weekend, evening and holiday work) and no resources (what do you mean you need physical hardware to develop and test on? I just sold the test kit to a customer. It was revenue just begging to be had...) catches up with every company eventually.

My current employer is now in this state, and almost everyone (who knows anything) has left and I'm about to as well, however as far as the PHBs and VPs are concerned, everything's fine and dandy. Targets are at 100%, the share price has doubled and we're making a consistent profit.

The fact that tumbleweeds are blowing through Engineering hasn't quite registered...

It's the natural cycle these days. They call it "capitalism" but it's not the capitalism I understand.

I'd be pretty cnocerned about them too.

Train for Management, Business Administration and Making Tough Decisions(TM). There is no way that our corporate masters are going to outsource/offshore/automate their own cushy positions or let the great unwashed get their hands on the robots producing the goods.

Cutting yourself to prosperity doesn't work.

And how would you know, Mr Smartypants? Name one company that's lasted long enough to find out!