Are they guaranteeing throughput? Then it's meaningless for most folks. It's like putting tires rated for 200 MPH on your care and assuming it will now go 200 MPH.

Presidents, governors and mayors all do this kind of thing -- call up private businesses and ask them to do stuff. The mayor may call a local business and ask it to reconsider withdrawing its sponsorship of the local youth baseball league. The governor might call up union leaders and senior management in a strike, particularly if it affects things lots of people need like transit or health care.

This is the exercise of *soft* power, of influence rather than of compulsion. Obama can't call Apple and compel them to change their stance. But he can call Tim Cook and *persuade* him, possibly with more success than Michael Lynton, particuarly given that the two may be having some kind of dispute. Ego *does* play a role in CEO decision making.

... gamergate is actually about ethics in quests?

I hate the way my friends' HDTVs make movies look like soap operas. I hated the last Hobbit which I saw in HFR/HD and the "look" completely ruined the film for me. The lighting used stood out like a sore thumb from the live action characters vs. the CG, the movement of the CG itself was horrible in many scenes.

And this film was no different. Ugh.

"Even Microsoft has orphaned you by going with HTML5 and JavaScript for Metro interfaces. "

Microsoft had Silverlight, which was designed to compete against Flash. When the mobile platforms exploded, and both Apple and Google said, "Fsk Flash!" Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Why continue to invest in a platform that wasn't going to be supported on the fastest growing market segment? If Microsoft had continued with Silverlight/WPF for Metro it would have been a ridiculously dumb technical decision. Going to HTML 5 and JavaScript libraries was the logical choice.

".NET is the Zune "

I believe the Zune platform was primarily C/C++, which currently blows Java out of the water for popular programming languages.

"Java is the iPod"

Lol, no. The iPod is C/Objective-C. Even the new stuff is Objective-C and Swift. Java is nothing to the Apple platform.

"Can't you see the writing on the wall?"

No, but I can see the Tiobe index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

Which sure seems to point out the exact opposite. Java is losing ground, .Net framework languages are gaining. Not 1-for-1 mind you, but the trend is opposite of your bemoaning.

As for the CEO you quoted, he doesn't appear to understand what it is that the .Net framework and the JVM are actually doing. Either that, or he is expressing an opposition to all high level programming languages (.Net and Java included). In either case, it doesn't really make your point for you other than noting that someone has drank the anti-MS coolaide and is making irrational decisions based on it.

-Rick

I'm thinking you may want to take a look in the mirror on accusations of denial.

Java is a good programming language, but seeing as how it has lost almost 50% of it's market penetration over the last 12 years while C# and VB.Net have both increased their market penetration significantly over the same time would imply that factually speaking, Java is not "taking over". If anything, it is being replaced.

Not necessarily by .Net languages, with the transition to mobile platforms Objective-C/Swift are taking the place of what would have historically been Java apps.

And even as you mentioned, PHP and Python are also replacing Java.

The point I would make is that having multiple programming languages available to us is GOOD! I prefer working within Visual Studio, but I am glad that Java exists. Because if Microsoft ever does go belly up, I'm going to need another mainstay to jump to. Likewise, if Java goes through yet another fragmentation, I like knowing that I can drop an increasingly convoluted support structure and switch to the .Net framework.

Options are good. We don't need, nor do we even want a "winner" in this market. If going open source opens another option to compete with Java on the LAMP stack, AWESOME! If Open.Net put's Java at risk, LAME!

Put the coolaide down, go share a beer with your fellow developers, C# and Java alike, and sit there ragging on the Fortran/Cobol programmers :P

-Rick

I actually use yellow tinted goggles after 6PM this time of year. The sunlight is so short and weak this time of year my sleep schedule gets totally messed up. When that happens in the summer I just get up in the middle of the night and work until bedtime, but that doesn't work here in December because there's not enough light during the day to get synced up.

So I try to go outdoors every day for an hour around noon, particularly if its overcast. And I wear those stupid goggles after 6PM, which is a PITA but beats lying in bed awake all night only to fall asleep at noon.

The particular pair I use (Uvex S1933X) cost only $8 and are, surprisingly, optically pretty good. There's slight distortion at the edge-of-field but they're fine in the center of the field. They don't actually block much blue light, but by looking at color swatches I've determined the cut off violet quite dramatically. When I put them on, all those irritating "blue" LEDS (which are actually violet) simply disappear. You can be looking straight at one with these puppies on and you'd never know it was lit, much less annoyingly bright. Subjectively, my eyes feel less tired too, although the lenses need frequent cleaning.

Another thing I find useful is a word processor called FocusWriter. It can edit ODT files, but it ignores all the color styling and hides all the Windows controls. The intent is to eliminate writing distractions, but I find it useful to eliminate blue-violet light exposure. I set the display background to black and the text background to amber, and those are the only colors on screen. I'd pay good money for an epaper ereader with an amber backlight. As for tablets, Amazon's Kindle App doesn't give you any nighttime-friendly options; the best is black text on sepia, but it's far too bright. Moon+ Reader is a good alternative for ePub files; Cool Reader is a GPL'd ebook reader that can be configured for comfortable nighttime reading, although it's UI isn't quite as polished as Moon+ Reader.

Most of our problems with MEB have been tied to the WebSphere and SVN integration features. The devs have been working with the tools team to get it worked out, so I'm not in the details on each issue. But I was getting reports of "delayed for 2 hours due to MEB" pretty much daily from multiple projects and teams. The department as a whole, across ~40 developers, has viewed the upgrade as severely negative and it has sparked talks of switching to Eclipse and other tools.

I'd agree with you on the databases being orthogonal. I was just pointing out that the parent's point about .Net requiring SQL Server was factually incorrect. While I strongly prefer SQL Server because the tools that are included, and the 3rd party tools available, make certain aspects of software development, release management, and debugging sooooo much easier. Oracle has many similar tools, but again, the price is a tough pill to swallow, and in my experience, they don't have the same UX polish that MS has put together in the SQL Server tools. When the Free Toad fork went out of active development 10 years ago and it's still considered one of the better tools to work with Oracle through, it kinda says something about the quality of tools available to Oracle.

I believe you are correct on SharePoint, at least I've never implemented it on anything other than SQL Server, and giving it's reliance on in-document searching and the MS text search engine, I'd be very surprised to find out that it could run on a different back end.

There is an affinity as well between IIS and .Net. I believe you can run .Net sites off of Apache on Windows, but I would wager you would have a much lighter support community.

And while Mono and the MS Open initiative are breaking the affinity between .Net and Windows, that relationship will always exist. At this point though, I'm much less interested in WPF. Not because there is anything wrong with it (Honestly, a true vector based layout engine is soooo much better than dealing with flow based layout of HTML), but because the war is over, Web killed the desktop app. There are very few scenarios where a desktop app is still necessary, especially in the LOB environment that the majority of development is involved.

Don't get me wrong, Java is a great language. Not drinking the coolaid here. I'll jump to PHP or C++, or Java as the project requires. But Visual Studio is by far the strongest, most stable, and feature rich IDE available on the market.

-Rick

This is only true in an extremely narrow scope of costs analysis.

Yes, Eclipse is free, unless you are using My Eclipse or any other paid tool for additional functionality. At $150 a year for a subscription license, it's still not as expensive as Visual Studio Pro's $680 price tag.

And across a team of 20 developers, I'm going to blow $10k on licenses (assuming I'm not getting a volume discount or maintaining a Silver/Gold partner status).

But there are other costs. For example, my team just upgraded to the latest version of MEB. To call it a cluster-fuck would be an understatement. All told across the team, between the upgrade itself, and issues with the new IDE we spent 200+ hours of labor. We took 1 guy off of his project and had him become the "MEB issue guy" and he spent 2 weeks just walking around helping other devs when they ran into issues with the IDE and build. Figure it costs the company on average $50+/hr for labor on my team. This one upgrade has cost us even more than the $10k in additional license costs I would have paid for VS2013.

And that's not even getting into the data side of the house. Our Oracle license cost an arm and a leg compared to our SQL Server licenses. And .Net apps have no problem what so ever connecting to any data source you have. If there is a connection driver for it, .Net can connect to it. SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Lotus, almost all of the NoSQL databases. And with Entity Framework I get the power of persistent objects without the hassle of crap fest of Hibernate.

Java is a great tool. And it blow MS/.Net out of the water for cross-platform development, no questions asked. But when it comes to LOB applications, working with the .Net stack is just so much easier.

Now, if you're getting into super high performance stuff, ditch Java and .Net and move back in to the realm of C. Although, I'd still rather use VS2013 for C development ;)

-Rick

"EVERYONE WHO SAYS ANYTHING RACIST IS A REPUBLICAN."

This is not an accurate statement.

It is however accurate to say that individuals that are racist are statistically more likely to vote republican.

I would like to believe that the majority of Republicans are not openly racist. But the fact that the majority of open racists are Republicans isn't really up for debate. I'd link a bunch of research studies that show it, but I'm on the work network ;)

In addition to the racist issue, there is also the privilege issue. And with lower minority participation, the Republican party definitely skews in favor of those with privilege.

-Rick

And it turns out that it wouldn't be the first time the firm did this. Sony started out as a radio repair shop in a bombed-out department store.

They don't weigh, not because the rule doesn't apply, but because people don't go very far above the limit often enough to bother breaking out the scales. Take a look at the thing. Even if it weren't a cannon, I think they'd break the scales out for that.

Neither necessarily follows as a consequence of personhood. Children cannot be held liable in civil suits and in most cases very young ones cannot be held criminally responsible, not because children aren't human, but because they can't reasonably be expected to take a responsible, independent part in human society.

Welfare for animals is not a consequence of animal personhood, but a consequence of humans taking animals from their natural environment. Once you have custody of an animal, by the norms of our society you are responsible for that animal's welfare. When I catch a fish which I don't plan to release, I pith it with a sharpened screwdriver, not because the fish has human rights, but because letting an animal die a slow and painful death when it's easy to kill it quickly and painlessly is needlessly cruel.

Well, what about people with aphasia? Do they lose their human status because they can't use language? Also, when reasoning about the abstraction capabilities of great apes it's important not to reason from assumptions. I've had the good fortune to work with primate field researchers, and there's good reason to believe that chimpanzees (for example) plan ahead; this necessarily involves a concept of "self" and "other", "now" and "in the future", all of which I think can reasonably be called abstractions, in fact I'd say they're the key ones. "Freedom" means nothing to an animal that has no concept of self or future.

It's seems perfectly plausible to me that an adult great ape might be a "person" but a blastula with a couple of dozen cells is not, nor a one ounce fetus at the end of the first trimester. The baby's brain at birth will weigh more than a dozen times that at birth.

The interesting thing is when researchers did plots of estimated ages of paleolithic skeletons, the population showed exponential decay from the age of maturity. For modern populations in advanced societies the # deaths vs. age of death curve is relatively flat until you start getting into the 60s and 70s.

What this tells you is that paleolithic people didn't die from age related causes. They got picked off by accident, mishap, violence or infections that cut down people in their prime, so it made no difference whether you were 16 or 30, your chances for surviving another year were the same.

So this kind of makes sense; he's looking to move into a population which does not die from age. It's the kind of thing that makes intuitive sense, but often doesn't pan out. What *might* make sense is a counter-intuitive move: fasting, or intermittent fasting where you fast on alternate days. This reproduces the way paleolithic people consumed calories: not three meals a day on the clock, but feasting after a kill and making

Taking HGH is just proof that having money doesn't make you smart or well-informed. He is going to need that cancer cure soon if he keeps that up. His plan is like pouring oil on a smoldering fire and hoping they develop really good fire extinguishers soon. It also seems very un-paleo to me. Paleolithic people went through periods where they had plenty of HGH (feasting) and periods with low HGH levels (fasting). Some researchers believe the fasting period confers many aging related health benefits.