Well, I lived there six years, and for the first four I couldn't wait to leave, but grew very fond of it in the last two. Not the architecture or the public transport hostile, spread out grid system, but the cultural side of Milton Keynes appeared to be flourishing in that time, and appears to continue to do so.

Numerous art centres, live music venues and leisure facilities, an active centre of business of commerce, and engulfing and adjoining various very pretty, but relatively affordable towns such as Stony Stratford, Woburn Sands and Newport Pagnell. But perhaps that's a grass-is-greener view now that I'm stuck in a sleepy town in South Bucks. If nothing else, you could get the hell out of the place really quickly using the express train on the Euston line.

I think part of the cultural expansion is the financial vortex effect of London, pushing prices up throughout the home counties. It's about the first place outside the London ring of property inflation that the unsavoury artistic classes can afford. But I guess I shouldn't say any more, lest it becomes the next Hoxton...

Perhaps we could survive, but I doubt we could flourish in such a world.

Fruit flies like a Bacardi.

Shame about developers though...

Not seen any evidence of this, other than the lack of security updates for browser-plugin based vulnerabilities on Oracle's part. Out of curiosity, if you mean server side Java as well as client-side java, could you cite references? This is not to doubt there are big issues with the JVM, and the seeming sloth of response of Oracle to some of them - I'm just wondering what the vast amount of server-side infrastructure would do if the JVM were to be EOLed. In terms of relatively high performance, managed platforms, given Microsoft's flight from CLR, what are the alternatives? And why does Oracle seem so indifferent?

He was referring to liberals as the hissy-fit throwers, and actually casting Christians in a beneficent light. As a liberal I could report the former, but I believe too much in free speech. As an atheist with qualms about organised religion I do object to them taking over the role of the state, but I'm glad that someone is providing people with the means for self-education. As long as there is no interference on the subject matter (evolutionary biology for example) and no attempt to proselytize this is a good thing.

Seems an interesting idea for long recordings needed in a hurry, but the transcriber will be losing possibly important contextual cues by reducing the length of the utterance. Also, there is a great overhead per-person in terms of manual labour (waiting for audio to buffer, HCI interaction, etc). On the upside, it might be less dull to listen to shorter, more varied recordings than one long one. But it would suck to transcribe half a murder-mystery.

What he said.

39% market share ain't bad at all for a nearly twelve year old OS. Glad to see that a superior product (albeit rather bloated by default) has already overtaken it though.

This. In the music production world, VST and Audio Unit hosts on OSX are still transitioning to x64, as third party authors drag their heels. RPC proxies are required to run x86 plugins on x64 hosts, or vice versa. Basically all in-process plugin architectures get screwed over every time the architecture changes. And anything realtime-sensitive or processor-intensive gets hosed as rickety emulation layers are used as a shim. I guess the solution is to move to a server-client plugin architecture, and/or to provide GPL-friendly SDKs to allow Open Source authors to contribute extensions, which can be ported by volunteers to new architectures indefinitely. Ardour is certainly a very fine example of what can be done by a dedicated open source evangelist.

None of that was true even before the respective Apple products came onto the market.

Amen to that - my old Razr V2 was virtually indestructible.

This should be a prerequisite, but is half the battle with a lot of code. The rest is explaining how all those descriptively-named functions do what they do, why they do them in a specific way, and known issues and gotchas. But generally, the more human-readable meaning we can impart to the actual commented code, the more meaningful our stack traces, logs and diagnostics will be. The more code can be written in an easily human-readable form without comments, marking the intended purpose and context of use, the harder it is to hide (and write) buggy code. See BDD, where one defines pre- and post- conditions for every function. In an ideal world, we would express tasks in a precise declarative language, with the minimum of hints as to how to perform them, and the compiler/runtime would deduce the implementation. Unfortunately, Prolog and constraint programming languages have so far fallen short of this dream. In the meantime - the 'what' should be in the code, the 'how, why and watch out' should be in the comments.

As Oppenheimer once remarked "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Agree. I barely met anyone excited about 3D stuff, other than those with more money than they knew what to do with.