I was quite pleased with the level. I actually expected either something very pedantic or something so easy that I would have a little weep.

If anything the main problem that I have is that I have met CS grads who might not do so well on that exam. I am not saying it is too hard but that the aforementioned CS grads sucked.

For some reason I have always had two problems with IPv6. One is that it offers me as an end user exactly nothing terribly tangible. Yes yes I know of the whole running out of addresses stuff but I have never contacted a server host who said, "Sorry we are out of addresses." My ISP has never said, "Sorry no more customers we are out of addresses." So why should the average user even give a crap.

The other thing that I have found is that without exception those who I have met who are pushing IPv6 remind me nearly perfectly (and in many cases were) the same Y2K people who told us that the world was going to end. They are grade A assholes. Thus it instantly makes me suspect that IPv6 has hidden surprises buried in it that will piss me off. So paternalistic shit that is "good for me" but in reality somehow allows some asshole admin to fuck up my traffic because his traffic has a higher priority or some such bullshit.

So my prediction is that when all is said and done there will never be IPv6 but someone is going to come up with IPG2 (Generation 2) that is chock a block full of things that we all want. Things where we will be happy to demand that our ISPs make the leap, things that get us out there to buy new networking gear.

IPv6 will basically become XHTML. Some will argue that this is impossible but WEP was pretty much tossed into the trash and everyone was onboard with the new things like WPA in a heartbeat. Not because it satiated the black heart of some pedantic network admin but because it was actually better.

Seeing that when I was young and my computer (VIC-20) was crappy, I hand wrote assembly on paper and then inputted it. So in the case where they are looking for Java solutions, give them handwritten bytecode.

Just finished 10 questions from a sample test: http://manatee.cc.gt.atl.ga.us/apExam/ and I would rate it as FizzBuzz*2. FizzBuzz would be in the lower half of difficulty.

If anything I was a bit slow taking it as I was looking for trick questions that weren't there. But I would say that someone who could pass that test would have at least the basic tools to go fourth and program.

Plus it is in Java which I haven't touched since 2000.

But once I looked it up the solution was completely obvious. The wikipedia entry suggests a linked list, while I was also thinking associative array.

Now my curiosity is demanding a sample copy of the test that I can take. Beyond not having memorized many of the terms I wonder how I would do after 20+ years of programming.

With these sort of tests I often worry that it is just Bulimia Learning where you have to memorize esoterica while never learning to actually program. For instance for you C++ wizzards out there can you answer this one: "What is the compl keyword for? And why is is needed?" Surely as an accomplished C++ programmer you know all the keywords, there aren't that many. (I had to look it up).

But if I look at a sample exam and find out it is all FizzBuzz then I will have a little weep for the children.

I didn't say that she was a republican, more that she is dresses like a little miss perfect young republican. I don't really see much difference between the two parties as I judge them by their actions not their words.

I find that democrats don't actually dress much differently but that republicans are a bit more consistent.

I might argue with you had I visited Yahoo in the last decade.

I have met many Oracle salespeople and she fits the mould perfectly. Young republican hair and clothing style. Uptight. Sleazy. Looks like she either uses you or ignores you if you aren't getting her a sale. And has that I arrived at 6am for work and thus am superior to you regardless of your actual contribution.

She recently had a kid and I am willing to bet that the kid is being raised by nannies.

Thus what kind of crap would she give about customers? Customers exist to be exploited for a better year end bonus. Great products are for the weak.

I hope that within the decade that your statement goes from funny to insightful.

When people ask me to help them get java working I say no bloody way. My simple theory is that Java in the enterprise might be a good thing but java on the home machine is just asking for trouble. To me Java has a perfect storm of people not wanting it. First is that Java must be regularly updated to keep it safe. But I don't trust these updates to not screw me over in some fashion, either through malware such as this or simply popping up at an inconvenient time. For instance I am often recording video tutorials. There is nothing worse than some software update popup showing up in the middle. Especially if it is one of these focus grabbing popups. But the java update is a total bastard as it keeps turning itself back on after I keep turning it off.

So I basically danced around my office when I read that chrome and firefox were pretty much killing Java as an extension/addon.

But adding malware to their install just makes me laugh at how stupid these MBAs are. Yes in the next few quarters they will make lots of money. But how many quarters before people will have significantly reduced their downloads?

Also for Yahoo, I hate Ask.com for their trashy approach to getting users. Make a great product and then people might come. Fooling them into coming is just scummy. So now people will lump Yahoo in with the various sites that over the years have tried to use deception as their marketing tool.

For those of you out there all touchy about Java, my comments are not about the Java language, but the java product.

Quite simply my Whois data has only been abused. I have received phony bills from fictitious domain registries. I have received threatening letters from companies that I was violating this or that. And then there is the endless spam. Except that this spam carefully exploits the data found in my whois data.

On the other-hand I don't know of anyone who benefited from whois data beyond curiosity.

There is exactly a zero percentage chance that I will ever use MongoDB in another project. On the surface it was great. I evangelized my friends about it and the whole NoSQL thing. But as time went by I realized that it wasn't made for people to use. Almost nothing was intuitive. For each new feature that I wanted I had to look up a tutorial and generally found a list of gotchas. If you design your project around MongoDB then it will work. But if you try to wrap MongoDB around your project then you are completely screwed.

Basically MongoDB halved the initial quarter of data storage design and programming. But as the project progressed the time spent screwing with Mongo went up exponentially until the project was shoved out the door and primary feature in version 2 was the complete removal of MongoDB.

I could make a mile long list of places the project stumbled. But a few key ones would be that there are no good data management tools for accessing a MongoDB. The second was that huge schema screwups were way too easy. It was very hard for programmers to get a mile high overview of how data being stored was being structured. That is a data layout was easy but putting the results into your head was really hard.

I am finding other NoSQL approaches are far superior. Things such as use of JSON, memcaches, MariaDB (or the excellent PostgreSQL) working together allows the project to dictate how things function instead of Mongo very quickly shaping the project architecture because of its marked strengths and weaknesses.

Redis is the environment presently being explored for version 4 and so far it is looking very interesting. But I am not joking when I say that at this point I would use access on windows as my backend datastore before I would use MongoDB.

Most of my computer friends write down the passwords but alter them in some pattern that works in their head. So ShittyIceCream8456 is ChapmansIceCream5684

I learned Objective-C so that I could deploy on iOS and otherwise wouldn't have given the language a second look. Then I discovered Cocos-2d which makes C++ on iOS, Android, etc very easy so boom I happily made the leap back to C++ and haven't looked back. There is pretty much zero chance that I will write more than a few dozen lines of Objective-C again in my life. There is also pretty much zero posibility that I will write any swift and I certainly have dodged the Java bullet for Android.

About the only problems that I have encountered are some artificial ones where some API features are cut off from me without a tiny bit of Objective-C or Java. But those tiny bits get wrapped in a C++ class and forgotten.

I don't know how many people that I know who use one of these things that I say over and over, it is just too juicy a target to hack. Way too juicy.