I worked there briefly years ago back when they were EVSX. EVSX was in turn founded by folks from the Austin branch of Exponential Technologies, which ironically was a company based around making fast processors for the Apple clone market of the 90s (for extra irony given Apple's years-later switch to intel cpus, exponential tech apparently worked both in PowerPC and x86, with Austin focusing on the x86 branch of development). In a sense, this acquisition is kind of like full circle for the company. I wish them all the best; they are an extremely bright and friendly group who were great to work with. I ended up leaving for a job paying slightly more with less commute, but ultimately I wish I'd stayed on as the people were better to work with at EVSX.

I skimmed it. One of the authors of MySQL I presume self-agrandising and taking credit for "saving" MySQL even though none of Oracle's promises are legally binding.

Those two sentences are completely contradictory. :-)

So, um, I take it you didn't read the article?

Two years seems to be the developer half-life in most shops. By that point if you're worse than average they've canned you, and if you're better than average your responsibilities have grown to the point that you're spending as much or more time dealing with cross-team organizational bullshit as you are doing what you actually love (writing code) and hence wanting to quit. :) The thing is, I think every gig has problems, and often they're the same tedious set of problems, but people jump in the hopes that maybe, maybe the grass will actually be greener THIS time. (After a decade or two of corporate culture, further, it's all too likely that the truly idiosyncratic individuals will have accumulated enough capital and enough disgust with the system that they give it all the finger and go run a bar just to pick one prominent example.)

The other direct motivator that comes to mind is money. All too many shops hire you at a rate that approximates more-or-less-if-you're-lucky Market Rate for your skills and so forth, then want to give you sub-10% raises for ever and ever thereafter. Ergo it's easier to ramp your salary in tune with your experience by jumping periodically. This is perhaps most prevalent in the first ten years of a programming career as there are big deltas at roughly two and five and seven-ten years of experience as you start to [potentially] hop up the org chart some from junior to regular to senior dev.

So in short I think that getting fed up with a given situation and taking steps to change it for (hopefully, maybe not, probably not... but hopefully) the better is both normal and healthy. Or are you of the opinion that backing the same crappy horse for years is the best way to go through life?

If only that headline used "Nuking" instead of "Using" Outlook from Orbit.

My company recently switched from a really screwball lotus notes install to msexchange and thereby screwed every unix and mac user -- which is to say, 95% of the technical staff. Some of that I can't blame MSFT for, we do have some real chimpanzees on our email team, but the experience does have me shaking my fist in Redmond's direction even more than usual of late.

I use greylisting to reduce spam volume, and I whitelist outgoing mail servers for domains that a) have trouble with greylisting and b) publish SPF records. In other words, I use SPF given existing trust for a particular domain, but only if not relying on SPF causes problems. I thought I hadn't set up SPF records for my own (vanity) domains, but apparently I have... not that I particularly notice. It's just not a big deal.

A decent quality scientific calculator and enough training with it that they can start using to discover the joys of solving problems. I think I had my first solar powered scientific calc when I was about ten. A handful of years later in high school I moved up to a more complicated graphing model. I'm sad to say I don't have the original calculator but I still have the latter. It served me well through high school, college admissions exams, and then a bachelors degree in the sciences. Of course these days I write boring but comparatively lucrative line of business web apps, so the most complicated math I ever have reason to do can be done with gcalctool in simple mode. ;) I still feel a bit of a rush when I look at my old calc though; we had such times together. :D

I won't get into the emacs-vs-vi wars of TI/HP/whatever, but get them a solid useful tool that can be used for most any science endeavor and you'll have done them a favor, imho.

(And yeah this might not be appropriate for the 7 year old, but I'd wager the 9 year old is mature enough or on the cusp of it...)

My point isn't that Eve is a paragon of perfect architecture, it's that the system works. Geographic decomposition is not so flawed that e.g. it requires you to shard your game and set up server queues that ultimately piss people off.

I'm also not arguing that it's the only or best way to go, but it may very well be right for a particular game anyway.

Heh, no. I'm an MMOG server programmer, and I know a fair number of others, and a lot of us have backgrounds in distributed computing, with plenty spending time in academia before being lured into games. That game companies mostly hire people with game design degrees is a falsehood propagated by the institutions that offer those degrees. For one thing, there simply aren't enough people going through those schools to feed the industry's need for fresh meat; for another, the quality of programmers fresh out of any school is generally insufficient.

As for fundamental design flaws... eh. I've heard plenty of that kind of talk from (for example) Project Darkstar; it's easy to say that, it's a lot harder to actually do the research to understand all the options and the inherent flaws in each. Interestingly, even EVE Online - lauded for its one-world approach - uses geographic decomposition too, and it works just fine most of the time (and now they've got a system for dedicating special hardware to the corner cases).

I'll admit I have yet to hear anything positive about AMD/ATI's proprietary Linux driver, and it's been a while since anyone seemed to say nice things about the open source X.org driver either. Mine has integrated Intel graphics, and it works great; I can't play 3D games, but a) I program on this laptop, not game, and b) it runs Linux; how high should your hopes really be?

I previously had a T21, and yes, the keyboard was a little better - I guess your mileage may vary how much worse you think it is.

Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but the original poster seemed pretty clear about the intent to run Windows: this may bother you, but that doesn't mean it's a problem for someone else. For myself, I never intended to run Windows (much less Vista) on this laptop, but it seemed like an acceptable tradeoff for the rest of the laptop.

I hadn't thought about alternative keyboard layouts; that sucks. It's definitely something to take into account. Similarly I can't say anything about Lenovo support; definitely something else to take into account.

I'm typing this response from a Thinkpad R500 :-)

Thinkpad docks are solid and have been around a long time, as have hotswap bays; some stuff like memory card readers are already present. Ubuntu works very well with both suspend and hibernate, many models support dual monitors via the dock (I think mine supports dual external monitors via the VGA and DisplayPort connectors, but haven't tested more than one external monitor; according to documentation two external monitors via the dock aren't supported), and the built-in LCD's resolution is extremely reasonable at 1680x1050.

And, of course, the keyboard is one of the best in the business (although I've heard vi users complain about the placement of the Esc key, getting proper spacing between F1 and Esc on a laptop isn't easy).

You know the magic has gone out when everything is reduced to a dichotomy between miniscule speed increases and enormous manageability increases. Of course the answer is obvious when it's phrased that way; of course it's a false dichotomy. At the very least, "readability" is in the eye of the beholder; performance, usually a bit more objective.