Indeed. Someone needs to do a study of how harmful to the environment all the horrible marketing Javascript running on web pages is. It's about the only thing that pegs my CPU when my computer is in "normal" use now ( "normal" being "what normal people do with a computer", because "what programmers do with a computer" is often a little more intense.)

I'm not someone who so far has joined with the ad-blocking movement, on the proviso that websites need *some* way to keep the server running, but I'm getting really close.

Only because the Scutters had a better union....

Yup, it's true.

They even have campaigns against public shitting.

They all do this. It's illegal for them to spy on their own populace, so they have the intelligence agencies of other countries do it, and then "share intel".

He's a kernel lieutenant. Which means that he's one of the guys that Linus Torvalds trusts to shepherd patches into the main line of the kernel. In other words, he's one mean code-farmer. Not your average user.

That was going to be my response... I think rolling release is probably a good idea, having lived through the nightmare of enormous organizations that spend 4 or 5 years upgrading from Windows XP / IE6 to Windows 7 and the huge inertia of all that. The shitty old mire of horrendous hacks that you have to dig through to move this sisyphean rock of organizational code, and then everything breaks anyway because no-one actually tests things *properly* when they do their migration plans.

An environment that carefully migrated each change and made sure they all worked is clearly the alternative.. but it only works if you adopt practices like actually enforcing that *automated* tests are run for all the apps that your organization depends upon, if only for the reassurance value it provides to risk-averse upper management.

They'll eat the other 79 species of mosquito in Florida that are NOT human disease vectors that will happily occupy the ecological niche departed by Anopholes

There must be an option for this, because it's set when you install the Inbox app, which offers to suppress your GMail notifiers (otherwise, same problem, two pings for everything).

The GMail app now lets you add servers for other protocols as separate accounts that get managed in the same app.

Exchange client on Android isn't horrible.

This is because the ability of other apps to integrate with Exchange is getting too good.

Just like if you understand the World of Warcraft protocols you can make your own WoW server, if you understand how to integrate with Exchange well, you could build a server that mimics it.

That would be the end of a big cash cow for MS. Better that they have an Outlook app on platforms that they don't want to push than give up the revenue stream of Windows Server and Exchange Client Access Licenses. Once they have Outlook available for everything, they can subtly break the protocols for everything else, and when people complain, they can just point at the Outlook app.

They just unified the front ends for mail into the GMail app.

I use Exchange through the GMail front end now. Means I don't have to fiddle about running multiple apps and switching between windows.

Likewise you can add IMAP servers, etc.

> difficult to dump a piece of data to the disk without converting it into text first

Sounds like you need to add some pickle

I won't use VB.NET because it would destroy my VB6 knowledge to use something almost, but not entirely, completely different.

Nope, the default is machine code, p-code is an option.

Older VBs compiled to bytecode (p-code) by default, but the compiler for VB6 produces proper executables. p-code is a selectable compile time option (along with some optimizations and the ability to disable some checks).

What it does do it LINK to a runtime. Most of the datatypes are in there, the arrays are bounds checked, etc. The performance of VB datatypes are responsible for most of it's reputation as slow - in particular it's string handling (it lacks an inbuilt StringBuilder type).

If you're aware of it's limitations, you can do some good stuff with it. It's ideal for small (or even large) GUI apps, with a few libraries to replace some it's more egregious emissions you'd even call it professional.

What it's not is modern, object-oriented, possible to get documentation on the web (easily - the best source of documentation is the last MSDN Library disk set that contained it's docs).

The main thing you have to do is...

* Turn on indexing service
* Configure it to index unknown file types
* Turn it off again (presuming you have it off)

Now the basic file search will look in files with extensions it doesn't grok when searching for text. Insane that this option isn't in the advanced search panel.