Won't that slow down population growth? Isn't that desirable?

I have several personal drives in a storage shed, that end up there as secondary backups when I upgrade the drive in a system. It's always about 5 degrees warmer in the shed than it is outside, so 110F+ in the summer. I'm guessing that the ones that have been out there for 5 years, both SSD and spinning platter, are probably toast now.

Do taxis even have seatbelts? I don't recall ever having put one on in the back of one.

He's famous in pop culture because of the film, that's because most of us are uneducated knuckledraggers.

Glad you were able to upgrade the systems to Java8. It seems like the client didn't know that it matters and didn't have any strong opinions on the subject.

Clients often are unaware that they have relevant information, and don't seem to volunteer it easily.

If you haven't begun the work yet, and wish to see if your potential market can meet your software requirements, you need to do a bit of research. Engineering doesn't get to define what customers you can go after, that's the real job of a Marketing department and ideally begins long before Engineering has even thought about the problem. Engineering can certainly respond to Marketing with budgets and schedules.

I'm often forced into lame technical decisions so we can cast a wider net for compatibility with customer environments or to support a few obscure customer requirements because their business has been given a weight above what their initial orders might imply.

(note: I work in the silicon industry, it's tough to be agile there. Because some of our requirements get baked into hardware design about a year in advance of the SW work)

s/it's/its/

I should probably proof read the English in my posts instead of only the C. Although I do care more about being a programmer than being literate.

Is that really much different than defining a function in C called index() on a BSD compatible platform that assigned that common name to it's standard library?

echo > t1.c
void index(void) { }
EOF
gcc -c t1.c
t1.c:2:6: error: conflicting types for ‘index’

You can ignore the 18K Android platforms, almost all of them are disposal and every year about half of them become too small of a fraction to be relevant to most businesses.

Google's problem is they gave Android OEMs enough rope to hang everyone.

Pro business tip: Survey your potential customers before starting a project to gauge what the requirements are.

For example:

When was your infrastructure installed or last received a major system-wide upgrade?

A. earlier than 2006
B. 2006-2011
C. 2011-2014
D. later than 2014

(A=Java 5, B=Java 6, C=Java 7, D=Java 8) These are all rough guesses, not absolutes, but if you ask enough other questions and survey enough potential customers it makes a real difference when planning. It's good to know in advance if supporting some obscure requirement is worthwhile, sometimes the extra business you would get is not enough to justify the development costs. (it would have to be a very tiny amount of business or a very high costs for that to really happen, but a programmer can dream can't he?)

A few well pointed questions can help you get a sense of what software requirements are customer is going to have.

If you aren't coding against requirements, what do you code against?

It's all ARMv8.

I used to write Pascal, qbasic, x86 asm, and C in study hall with a pen and paper instead of studying. Then type it in when I got home. It was good practice, my goal was usually to not have a lot of compiler errors so I could see the results of my program right away. Usually the graphics stuff is what tripped me up and needed a lot more debugging on a live machine, but getting the boiler plate and basic structure done in study hall was a good motivator.

Compared to a full SmallTalk environment, Delphi always seemed like the little brother who wants to do everything his big brother does, except can't because his arms and legs are too short.

My favorite IDE is a computer. When I wrote programs without a computer it was much harder. (I wish I was joking)

I have an App for that.

No! we can't let kids find out how the world actually works. The legacy we're leaving them is too embarrassing. It would be best to insulate all of our children in a bubble forever.