Maybe you should have stuck to using just one hand? :)

I've purchased two barrel-bottom-scraping androids so far (not this model), with the expectation that that should be able to satisfy very basic needs like ebook reading.

I was wrong.

These 'landfill android' devices garbage in every possible way. Battery life is so poor that you can't even even expect it to last a day on stand by. Yet performance is so poor that you have to wait a good several minutes just for the damn thing to boot up, so forget about quickly pulling it out while on the bus to read a few pages.
And the wifi is so bad that it can't pick up a signal unless you have a router in the very same room, and even then you somehow don't get full bars.

The only use I can see for this class of devices, is in BDSM scenarios:

Master - Check my email, slave!
Slave - Yes Master, thank you master! Oh, I can't connect to the server!
Master - Are you telling me that you're failing me, you miserable wretch?
Slave - Nuh Matha! Ih I puf mah tong oh he corneh, wifi worgs!
Master - Good slave! Now play Words With Friends!
Slave - *whimper*

Thank you. I apologize as well, as my original message was prematurely dismissive. So in that respect I deserved some chastising because I should have spent a little more time researching before I commented.

That being said, as developers we are being bombarded by so many new things on a regular basis, there simply isn't enough time in the day to get involved with more than a handful. But this definitely looks like it's worth taking a closer look at. Apparently Netflix made a Java version available too.

Incidentally, have you ever been here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

That's my goto page to show people how inundated we are.

You make your points very well and I found your post to be very informative However, the conclusion of your post is unreasonably harsh, for a variety of reasons.

Despite having been around for a long time, it has never really caught on. I had never heard of reactive programming until this particular article appeared, and I've been doing software development for a long time. To me that means it is nowhere near as good in practise, as it sounds in theory. Maybe it was too impractical to implement before now, who knows. But the fact remains that it is up to proponents such as yourself to *demonstrate* the value of this new method and how it is superior to current methods. And based on my moderation score, it's clear that I'm not the only one who is dubious about this new method.

Your accuse me of having a lack of understanding and imagination. I will grant you the former to an extent, but I challenge the latter. I can hand you a clump of mud and say, "You can build a skyscraper with this, if only you had the imagination!". Of course, then you could try building a mud skyscraper only to have it tumble into a pile of mess.

I am one of those people that becomes intensely skeptical, the instant someone starts to go on about how the latest new technological whatchamabob will make our lives easier, increase productivity, cure world hunger, etc., Simply put, I will not waste my own time and energy imagining the possibilities, when you have not yet demonstrated that this new methodology is even fit for purpose. Perfect example: People were falling over themselves about how fantastic Ruby on Rails was. Twitter even wrote their entire backend with it.... Only to have to rewrite their entire backend in Java, because it turned out RoR had very poor scalability.

And now here you are, describing this wonderful new implementation of reactive programming by Microsoft. A proprietary implementation by a company whose name is a synonym for 'ulterior motives'. While this has nothing to do with the technical merits of reactive programming, it goes a long way to getting people interested enough to look at it. I simply don't trust anything that comes out of Microsoft. From stealing work from supposed 'partners', to subverting industry standards bodies, they have a long and well documented history of screwing over *everybody* to get what they want. Even if reactive programming is as good as you say, I absolutely will not trust Microsoft's implementation of it.

But thank you for the brief intro into reactive programming. It does sound interesting, and I will have to do additional research on it to find out more.

I can see this being useful for problems that are extremely linear and require extreme parallelization on large quantities of data, but that's about it.

I've done this 'methodology' many times using Excel. I did it because I I needed to give the spreadsheet to other people, and wanted to avoid having Office nag about 'potentially dangerous VBA'.

It makes it very easy to see *exactly* how your data is flowing, which is a bonus. It also uses a *lot* more ram because you are now maintaining a permanent block of memory for every single operation, for every different piece of data you are coding against. Of course, the second you get a cyclic dependency, the whole thing blows up.

But this method of 'programming' was a natural and convenient extension based on how Excel (or any spreadsheet) operates. Nothing more.

Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone now-a-days is trying very hard to come up with new methodologies and paradigms and web 6.5isms, so they can get their 5 minutes in the lime light?

http://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/11641/could-there-be-a-backdoor

This kind of thing would be ripe for abuse, but how many times have we heard/read about police chases which result in massive collateral damage and people getting killed?

I'm torn, but this seems like a really good thing for police to have. Especially if it can be directed so that it only affects the target.

Every time I see articles like this, I feel compelled to bring up the solution I'm using, which is (so far) the single best solution I have been able to find.

It's called 1Password. Runs on Mac, Windows, Linux (read only I think), iOS, Android, and has plugins for all major browsers.

It records your login details for you, has a password generator that you can customize in various ways, and stores an AES encrypted archive on dropbox so that all your devices can sync together.

Now I can safely create new logins everywhere with abandon, because I'm not afraid that if one service is compromised (*cough*Adobe*cough*) I'm not afraid something else is at risk.
It can generate passwords up to 50 characters in length with your choice of number of digits and symbols. It can even make easily pronounceable passwords if you need, and avoid ambiguous characters (eg O (oh) and 0 (zero) ).

It's a little pricey, but IMO it's worth every penny because there is no other product out there that is this easy to use, AND supports so many platforms all at once.

I don't think the number of slashdot readers who know how to do that have decreased. What I think HAS decreased, is the number of slashdot readers who actually care enough to do it.

You get to a point where, even as a born and bred high-level techie, you just want shit to work because you have more important things to do. I am one of those people. That's why I switched to Mac. All the power of linux, but also with support for commercial apps, it works exactly as I expect it to, and I don't worry about some errant update blowing everything out of the water.

I tried setting up an HTPC in my living room. It was a complete joke. I tried like, 5 or so different distributions, and not a single one had the ability to easily manage multiple monitors AND correctly route audio through SPDIF without me having to go through command-line contortions.
So I abandoned the whole thing and am using an old macbook that I had. With a couple clicks I can switch between mirrored or extended display, and spdif audio kicked in as soon as I plugged in the cable. Done.

I don't understand why linux people are so obsessed with reinventing the wheel 50 billion times. No one is ever satisfied, and none of the implementations shape up into something decent. It is, quite frankly, embarrassing.

This should be filed under "WTF were they thinking?"

I can just see it now:

"Mirror mirror on the wall.... Who makes the smelliest poops of them all?"

I concur. I have a 15" 2011 MBP. I've already upgraded the ram to 16GB, and replaced the HD with a bigger one.

I guess all we can do is wait and see what happens. Unless something tragic happens, I expect this machine to easily last me several more years, so I have lots of time. When Apple discontinued the 15" MBP with replaceable bits, I was beyond disappointed.

What's downright embarrassing, is that the currently descrete graphics chip they put in the current generation only barely outperforms the one in my 2 year old unit!

If I'm going to pay a premium price, then I demand premium quality.

I totally see what you're saying. The problems you are describing are a lot like the issues that, say, IBM tried to solve with Lotus Notes. And it makes sense.

To be honest, I had never even heard of MarkLogic until this whole blowup happened, so I think I will have to look into what it can do. Up till now I've only been seeing silly nonsense like MongoDB, and the overarching theme of NoSQL has been that performance trumps integrity. I'm glad there's at least one company out there that is talking sense.

Likely to punish in several other indirect ways? Very much so.

In other words, asynchronous updates. How does a NoSQL solution solve this problem better than all the other dozens of middleware packages out there? (eg: MQ Series, Vitria, etc)

I'm not trying to be snide... this is an honest question. I'm trying to understand what problem NoSQL solves that hasn't been solved before. I'm one of those people that doesn't subscribe to the idea of just because something is new, it's automatically better.

That's because there was little separation between applications and data back then. There was little fundamental distinction between databases and applications back then. There were some attempts to do so, but even then the data structures and communication focused on specific data structures which could be used for certain classes of application, but the second you tried to use said databases for other types of applications, you had a heck of a time making it work.