Indeed, garbage collection is a wonderful thing.

like you're stating, sometimes it truly is the best solution to have multiple technologies in place, as long as they're smartly used. If not, you end up with a maintenance nightmare.

Amazon.com is a great success story and an example of using different technologies well, and it came about because they got their architecture correct. It started as a single C++ app talking to a backend, and that wasn't really going to scale well. I've heard that a single page on Amazong.com might talk to 100+ different services. In some places they use java servlets, in others they use Perl/Mason.

I've seen smaller companies with hybrid systems due to evolution or the top-down "we need to recode this but don't have a full budget." They tend to have real problems and the technology drags down the rest of the business. In a team of 5 people, it's hard to hire when you have 2-3 different technologies. When you're larger that's less of an issue, as you can have people devoted to an area of your software pile that is in the language or set of technologies they are good at.

Are you talking about C or C++?

This isn't directed at you, it's just a peeve of mine and I know I'm going off, but hey it's a faceless forum with people using aliases so it's all crap anyway.

When someone says "should" and talks about how things are "wrong" it usually leads to things sucking and ultimately being either more scarce or more expensive.

In the 70s the people of America via the US government said "gas SHOULD be cheap" and lo and behold it was so. And of course we ran out and had to ration.

In the 70s the people of America via the US government (sort of, it was really a private insurer with friends in high places) said "health care SHOULD be cheaper for people" and lo and behold the HMO act was created thus forcing employers to carry HMO options along side their other plans. And of course everyone thinks healthcare sucks here now (and it's more expensive than ever, but that's largely because the American people via Federal and State government say "these tests and these procedures SHOULD be covered for everyone no matter what, but that's a different story).

In the 90s and early 2000s the American people via the US government said "everyone SHOULD be able to have a house, that the mothertruckin' American Dream and we want people to stop dreaming about it and have it already" and wow holy crap look what happened there. House prices went up like crazy because of all the artificial/subsidized demand, we ran out of houses so we built shitloads of them so people could buy 2 and 3 and speculate, and pop goes the bubble and it's major suckage.

Everyone that thinks they know everything: please just stop saying SHOULD already and live in the world. Or just say it LESS.

Also, I don't think it's time to slow innovation in laptop batteries with standards yet. Cos like in 4 weeks someone might come out with a battery that uses different substances and requires (or can have) a different formfactor that could change the game, and it might have completely different voltage, charging, etc requirements and then what?

forgot link http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=4877869

As I posted back here.

Why not just develop a model off it - update players, generate a number between 1 an 3500, if it's 7, disable the blu-ray drive. With say 5 million Ps3s out there, that's an extra $250k in revenue every release, it trickles in so it can't be tied to any one release, and there ya have it. Free monies.

I almost lit my Ps3 on fire and put the video of said arson on youtube, now I'm glad I waited, maybe they'll repair it for free after all. Bastards.

Didn't all this same crap get said when Windows went from 16 to 32 bits?

I got one of these phone calls in my inbox literally as I was reading this. It's from someone that got the popup on nytimes.com, covered on slashdot earlier.

The person's claim is that they knew better, but it looked a LOT like Vista UAC etc, and that he was using Firefox and the way it was scripted it was very hard not to run it. He said he actually brought up task manager, killed Firefox, and when he re-ran Firefox, the same exact thing happened so he thought it was some crazy new MS security thing and that he had some kind of infected Firefox, so he clicked ok on a dialog, was expecting it to allow him to save the EXE, but instead it downloaded it an ran it.

Not sure I believe that very last part, but I personally just verified the rest of it on another site installing the same malware, and wow yeah, it's really hard to just make this thing go away. Try closing the firefox tab, it brings up a popup that makes it hard to make a decision about what to do because of the way its worded, then I finally killed Firefox, and when I ran it next time, sure enough it brought the same page back up (I guess this is a feature of Firefox in case it crashed you can get right back to where you were) and I had to download the exe to get out of it without going into configuration files.

Energy pricing is different in different places. Also, poster said "silly made up numbers" like 3 times.

Is a blackberry a smartphone?
AT&T:
BlackBerry Personal plus Tethering $60

How about a "PDA?"
AT&T:
PDA Personal plus Tethering3 $60.00

http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/popup/dataconnect-comp-table.jsp
AT&T is just the first carrier I happened to look at. But I think they offer tethering for smartphones. Really expensive tetherting, but tethering.

Microsoft invented AJAX. Just look what it's done for /.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/10/69316 - paragraph 5.

(I developed a CMS back in 2000-2001 which required IE 5.5 and later 6 on the back end that made heavy use of pre-Ajax "ajax", so I happen to share Wired's view. In 2006 or so it was changed to use the new ajax "Standards" (which appeared in 2005) and that was great because for some reason Microsoft's solution required Java on the client and they were required to stop shipping Java etc etc...)

I guess you think advertisers should learn from pretend made up stories?
http://www.snopes.com/business/market/babyfood.asp

At least you act really smart about everything... The actual vista/7 interface: 1. Hit the windows key 2. Type something like the name of a program or a control panel or a keyword related to what you want 3. Usually - hit return, or sometimes cursor down or maybe refine search
that's all you need. Seriously. Try it. And it works even better under 7 than vista cos they tagged everything.

Holy crap. Sony + RealMedia is like the worst of all worlds, and that annoying GoogleUpdater is right up there, so perhaps this will be like a trinity of evil. Google has long since crossed over into BigLargeEvilCorporation-dom, kitchy slogan aside.

Right, it's supplied to the user against whom the takedown was performed, BUT the notice is also covered by the DMCA, so...