...is that there's so many to choose from!

If your company has an "IT Department", then the company too large. It is time to quit and go work for a smaller company.

I'm not touching the stuff until

• I see an assay of the fatty acids in the meat/fat. If there's too much PUFA, forget it. (Too much defined as >4%).
• I can get an 75/25 ground. Anything leaner is just not worth the trouble.

FTA: Smartphones and tablets are nothing more than computers, ...

Nope. They're appliances . People just want to turn them one and use them.

My understanding is that applications won't be able to see other users's files.

Sounds like UNIX to me. And, gee, that's been around for only 40 years.

Time will tell. But I doubt it. To do so would be to yield a great deal of the CM, stability, and especially the revenue generation that the platform is known for.

FTA: That means JavaFX is now supported on any device that offers a JVM.

Bzzt. Thanks for playing. There is one extremely important class of device that does not and will not ever offer a JVM.

When referring to a vehicle manufactured by BMW, the following rules should be used:

2 wheels: "Beamer"
4 wheels: "Bimmer"

FTA:

Step 1 is recognizing that your skills have a certain shelf life. Rather than fight it, IT professionals should consider that when planning their careers.

In fact, Vivek Wadhwa believes that colleges should tell computer science and engineering students that "between age 40 and 45 you'll hit your peak, so plan for it."

Thanks! I'll be looking closely at Armadillo.

Incorrect. Lion does indeed include the most awesome GUI administration tool in existence.

It's called Terminal.

The issues surrounding transitioning research S/W written by scientists into honest-to-goodness production systems are ones I'm very familiar with.

At my company, a lot of energy has been put into bridging the gap over the years with varying results. I believe that the root cause of the problem is that research S/W is not an end-product; typically for scientists the end-product is a research paper, white paper, proposal paper, etc., for which the S/W is only a tool for getting to the end-product. As soon as the experimental (or proof-of-concept) S/W returns the desired results, the software is considered "done".

In contrast, production S/W is often THE end-product for developers, so a lot more attention is given to robustness, re-usability, etc. All the standard thinking that you want to go into your production S/W.

One big issue for us is that the research S/W is almost always written in Matlab, while the production code is written in C++ and Java. The single largest source of bugs in our systems is porting S/W from Matlab to C++ or Java. (As an aside, please let's not talk about the Matlab 'compiler', nor Octave. -- we've already tried them both, and they're both performance hogs and also create SCM and CM nightmares).

We experimented with requiring that the research S/W be written in C++, but it was a disaster. The scientists couldn't get anything done, and the code was just awful. So, back to Matlab it was.

And, my experience is that people who I have a great deal of respect for, who I consider brilliant in their fields, holding PhD's, etc., have produced the crappiest Matlab code I've ever had the sorrow to read. My favorite instance was the use of these local variable names within a single function of research S/W that was considered "done" (true story):

i
ii
iii
iiii
iiiii
iiiiii

And, of course, little documentation as to the mechanics of the code. And believe me, it gets worse from there. Bear in mind that the code does indeed work for its particular purpose, and may well be ground-breaking in that particular research domain. But "done"? Ready for production? Not without a major porting effort (which is really a re-writing effort). The most mysterious thing to me, though, is that the scientists, for all their intellectual firepower, don't understand that it's a problem.

The solution we've converged on is to require our bizdev to be responsible for funding efforts to rewrite the research code and get it integrated into the product baseline. And, the bizdev types can't proclaim a particular capability "done" (eg., sell it to customers) until they've funded and executed those efforts. It took years of education to get to this point, but things are moving along much better then before.

Well, that's a bummer.

I just started using Google Body a couple of months ago, and it's fantastic.

Especially if you're about to have shoulder surgery.

Don't want to see this site disappear...

A piece of black tape over the camera.

We're moving back to make. Full disclosure: it was my idea to move to scons in the first place. Dammit.