I'd be amazed if any product could meet the 99 to 100% perfect model even without a deadline. In my experience with business, scope creep is the norm and projects are never complete or on time. IMHO, if someone wants to become a "great" programmer, they need to have good business sense and know when and when NOT to code. I call these people Analysts and that's where most "good" programmers end up. Moderate to marginal programmers end up as Coders, and that's fine as long as they are not the ones developing specifications. Even the great programmers (analysts) are only that in a vertical market. If I took any programmer and dropped them into an alien development environment they would be terrible for months or years. I think that salary is balanced against the various levels of expertise, ability and business sense that is displayed. However, it never hurts to blow your own horn, or make a problem, then fix it, in order to get a raise.

I have to agree there! I've downloaded Linux distro's since before the 1.0 kernel and even helped support a SCSI device driver for a while. In every case there's some piece of hardware on my system that is not supported very well. Currently, it's my nVidia graphics cards. In the past it's been audio, video, printers you name it. I don't call these Windoes related requirement, I call these computing related. If I have a piece of hardware that I buy at Best Buy, it should be supported under Linux. Until the distro's get there, Linux will continue to be a geek OS. Sorry, but true.

Will this finally stop the morons that shine laser pointers at airplanes?

So, they're not banging the coconuts together, they are rubbing them together. That makes much more sense.

I really think it's Capitalism at its best! If Sun had been minding the business store and its marketing plan had been sucessful it would not be being eaten by wolves today. It's not reasonable to blame the EU or IBM either. The EU is looking out for itself (and European citizenry), and IBM is doing its job by killing off the competition.

Murdoch is constantly grandstanding! If it wasn't for the Simpsons, I'd be able to ignore Fox completely!

With all of the other ones you can just turn off the flow of money to get them under control. Banks on the other hand have your money and can control you. We need to change this!

Just what we need - more ways to mess up a browser. I thought we were supposed to be working towards standards not adding more extensions!

Absolutely change the drives every few years and not just to reduce the number of drives. As the drives age they will deteriorate - running or not. I had 10, 250GB and 320GB drives online with ripped movies. I left them running all the time. When I recently could not access one drive, I dumped them all into a 1.5TB RAID system. Now all of the "eggs" are in one basket, and I'm searching for a time and cost effective backup system.

I fully agree on the "don't optimise" part, but that only works when the library is decent. As we are talking about the bad old days, there was a time when bubble sort was the C library standard and quick sort was not even in the library. Knowing that quick sort is faster in most cases was an optimization. If a program was later recompiled against a library that had an optimized quick sort then the users quick sort "optimization" now becomes a liability. It's a lesson that it may always premature to optimize. A smarter approach may be to use an analyzer instead.

As to the OS's being ill prepared for multi-core that's probably true but I think the problem is not as described. I'm concerned about the comment that it's the developer's fault. To me, the fault lies with the chip vendor not providing multi threaded compilers that are simple to use. The Computer Science folks have hundreds of methodologies for effective multi threading. It's also pretty trivial for a developer to split the application into multiple parts based on usage: client UI, background tasks etc. When the compilers are available that allow simple and automatic assignment of the thread model to a core, the OS's and everything else will be much faster. This may be simplistic thinking, but it's at the level where the common developer can grasp it and use it. As a developer, I don't want to worry about how cores are being used - I just want my application to work. Until there's push from Microsoft and Apple to get Intel's compiler designers into gear, we'll keep having these discusssions.

Please let me restate the obvious - computers are not yet toasters. (I know you have an attachment...) Until PC's get to the point of open the box, plug it in and use it like a toaster, we will hear these sorts of stories. You may think the OS doesn't matter, but it does. Why to people use Mac's? EASE OF USE of course - if any computer is almost to the appliance stage it's a Mac. Windows PC's and Windows in general get knocked around, but in general Windows XP is pretty stable and easy enough for most anyone to use as long as they have a geek family member to support them. Even Mac has this support issue - witness Genius Bars at the Apple store - there's always a line there. As to using Linux, Ubuntu is easliy the most usable version especially if you didn't have to install it yourself. It can look like Mac or PC and run some fairly compatable software (Open Office), and I think probably with Wine, it could run the stupid Verizon disk too if that was needed to gen a password. (Forget the hardware issues). My point is, until we get to the toaster stage, the Personal Computer will still be geek territory. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but I hope it's a ways off as I can't retire yet.

Well, potty humor aside, it's pretty difficult to get a PC into the can with you, and if you've ever dropped your phone in "there", you stop bringing it along. Print will always have a place. I've been reading DDJ since its start, and am sad to see it go. Too bad not enough folks are willing to pay a decent price for in depth information.