Reminds me of this Muse video

Unfortunately music video producers are useless at science, he falls through and keeps going! Not only that, the video is much less than 42 minutes long.

Seriously? Have you looked at the CVEs for Java severside anytime recently?

http://www.cvedetails.com/prod...

For example:
The Double.parseDouble method in Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in Oracle Java SE and Java for Business 6 Update 23 and earlier, 5.0 Update 27 and earlier, and 1.4.2_29 and earlier, as used in OpenJDK, Apache, JBossweb, and other products, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via a crafted string that triggers an infinite loop of estimations during conversion to a double-precision binary floating-point number, as demonstrated using 2.2250738585072012e-308.

or an oldie that you'll appreciate given your criticism of C/C++ :-)

Integer overflow in the embedded ICC profile image parser in Sun Java Development Kit (JDK) before 1.5.0_11-b03 and 1.6.x before 1.6.0_01-b06, and Sun Java Runtime Environment in JDK and JRE 6, JDK and JRE 5.0 Update 10 and earlier, SDK and JRE 1.4.2_14 and earlier, and SDK and JRE 1.3.1_20 and earlier, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (JVM crash) via a crafted JPEG or BMP file that triggers a buffer overflow.

Simple fact: *nothing* is as secure as you think, that's why you have to design your architecture with layers in mind. This applies to Java just as much as any other platform.

I doubt its to make profit, lower costs so more people can benefit from justice... but that's hardly a bad thing.

I imagine it'll be an online way to submit forms and evidences by both parties (in a back-and-forth manner) which will be ruled upon when all the bits are uploaded.

The small claims court works pretty well, and it perhaps the model for the rest of the judiciary, but then the lawyers wouldn't be able to stretch out the case with bullshit and legalities to collect fees for longer.

dismiss the case with no ruling... because no one was deemed at fault

I just wonder what outcome you expected given those two statements?

I agree, but I think the reason some people do it is to do with some politicized ideology (usually left-wing) where established norms are broken down for entirely unjustified and selfish reasons.

Here in the UK we see the effects of this kind of new-think in the horrendous sex scandal in Rotherham, where its more important to be 'on message' than it is to deal with things. I know we can rewrite such sentences to be gender-neutral but again, this is allowing 'them' to affect our behaviour and way of thinking.

So I don't think this is pendulum swinging, but "political correctness", or attempted mind-control by people who want us to be afraid of what we think - for fear of being attacked for not conforming to their new reality. Pendulum swinging is where we have all-women shortlists or special girls-only STEM education programmes, reasonable to some extent I suppose as such are well-intentioned.

I may have put all that in too-conspiracy-theorist terms though, shows how difficult it is to discuss these things.

and hopefully they will be able to teach English to these kids, and Bill and Melinda too.

As my (female) English teacher used to say "He embraces she", as in the masculine form refers to both sexes, similar to how we refer to ourselves as mankind, not womankind.

As yes, I know its some stupid politically correct bastardisation of he language to use feminine pronouns like this for some sort of awareness brainwashing similar to New Think, but that only serves to demonstrate a sense of exclusion of boys in such writing.

Not at all, someone has to maintain the legacy systems that pay for the cool, new rewrites.

And keep updating the legacy system when the cool, new rewrite gets scrapped for being way over budget and way under features.

Ahah! suddenly the reason for getting more women in IT is clear.

Oh no, don't get me wrong - I understand the interpersonal issues involved in such a thing, but then I have also worked on government IT and understand the stupid "it says in the contract" where you cannot deviate from what they wanted even if you and your immediate contact agree it needs to be changed!

I was just suggesting that, with the lack of effective leadership a code monkey has to do what he's told, and cannot realistically make it work without backing from someone who should be providing the kind of leadership that creates and manages the relationship with the customer.

In my example, I built the relationship myself as no-one was happy with the situation. In other circumstances, I may not have that opportunity and then I'll have to do what I'm told regardless.

I find the ones who rush to use the new stuff are the ones who never quite managed to make anything with the old ones. The grass is always greener but also they can blame their lack of progress on the tools.. obviously *this* time it'll be different, just once they've had the right training and given enough time.....

Its when I was offered a job to make a system cope with the customer's increased load that I realised how damaging this is - it was written in Erlang, Ruby and Scala.

Or because some people can't cope with another variation on C++.

They're just tools guys, all these languages coming out, its just like making slightly different style hammers, only hammers don't need any training or lengthy experience to develop decent skills to use.

In such cases you take the requirements document and fulfill it exactly. Then , when the customer says "but its broke and doesn't do.." you pull out the requirements and say "it does everything you asked us to do, anything further is additional development and will be billed accordingly".

Why else do you think government IT contracts cost so much? Why else do you think Agile was invented?

The core problem is that the customer doesn't know how to achieve successful delivery, they need to be educated in fundamental agile processes, of iterative development to evolving requirements (and by evolve, I mean "as the customer figures out what they want".

I used to have similar problems with a customer, but fortunately I had a contact who knew the business. When I received the stupid requirements, I'd phone him and ask what they really meant. Then I'd develop what he said and deliver it to the customer who was always happy, not matter how far from the written spec it was (it helped that my contact was a senior guy at the customer or it wouldn't have worked)

They could actually do that if they gave us something other than "Like" to show support. - like condolences, sympathies, or some such that shows support for the person but doesn't comment upon the situation itself (or even implies that the situation is negative).

Sortof, I find that the situation is:

You work on technology X for a while, you learn it inside and out, and you expect everyone else who is "qualified" knows what you know. but they moved on from that technology a couple of years ago and now only want to develop in Java/Erlang/Ruby/Node/Scala (* delete as applicable as depending on which year this decade you were hiring).

even more mature technologies like .NET are stuffed full of so much churn that no-one really has time to become a master of any of it. Like my mate who was brought into a ASP.NET shop, he learned their tech stack, then one day noticed the trunk had changed a lot, so went to ask the architects who said "oh yes, we decided to move forward with our DB tech, so we're using a repository pattern now". So he goes and learns all about that, does some work on a branch, then goes to merge and... its all changed again. So goes to see the architects who say "ooh no, we decided repository pattern wasn't good enough so we've changed to using entity framework". Now that shop was just stupid, but to a lesser extent this is what is happening all over the industry.

For example, this guy is getting burnt by it.

Whilst I agree that change is necessary to keep things progressing, we're almost in a throwaway culture in ITT where everything we ever did is not good enough and has to be replaced. While there are forces pushing against this (for example, all the people who want to do the big rewrite now know its a bad idea) we still have change via refactoring and flavour-of-the-month tech patterns and frameworks pushed at us.

Only when the industry gets the idea that stable is a good thing and making products is what we should be focussed on doing (ie not changing tech all the time) will this industry be as good career as the other engineering professions.