Well, it is on topic, because it stands as counterpoint to mob programming.

Nice.

Here is a quick and dirty script I made to fix the "XX comments" Slashdot moved to out of the way balloons.

http://pastebin.com/1xUuuvtN

Just curious, because learning to code is simple if you have a computer. There are tons of free courses, development platforms, etc... offering MORE courses seems pointless, and misses the fact that there is plenty of access to education online.

So... in my mind, any effort to educate the masses (of any sex) comes down to providing that access through hardware. Not tablets (geez, useless as anything but an aid through which you might view books or videos), but desktops or laptops (laptops are more useful if accompanied by a dock and extra monitor), which will provide a decent development environment, and broadband access.

Educational guidelines, providing languages and technology tracks for students, based on a particular field of study in computer science would also be nice, as well as a central site where access to ALREADY FREE tutorials and courses can be searched and rated, as well as grouped under those lines of study. This provides assistance to everybody, not just some finite amount of students, or students of a particular sex or race. A section devoted to coding competitions (not just hosted there, but worldwide) would also go a long way to encouraging young developers.

Once such a site is established, then work on arming students with real, physical tools to make full use of it. This is where I'd spend the rest of the money. Deciding who gets those tools is more difficult. Some sort of basic aptitude in problem-solving skills and a grasp of basic programming concepts, as well as a genuine interest in the field of study should be prerequisites.

These things should be no-brainers, but what gets lost in all of these efforts directed at special groups is that they are battling cultures and often fail to provide a true path to success (i.e. they go for quantity over quality, only making the situation more dire for those that are good, because they have to fight the perceptions employers have of their 'group' as a whole).

Now, if you can start turning out good quality programmers, as an organization fighting discrimination, you have to educate employers (or set an example, I'm looking at you, Google, and your "do as we say, not as we do" example). That's not a program that targets 10,000 low income girls, though. It's a program that targets employers and benefits everybody.

Having outlined my course of action... where does the money go in these programs? I get the feeling most of it goes to a redundant effort to create online courses, which are provided to a fixed number of individuals (why? because reasons, that's why!), while a bureaucracy swallows up the money and touts its success. It seems ridiculous - because it is, but that is the logic employed by way too many of these sort of organizations. It looks good in sketchy press releases that contain virtually no real information, outside of the stated "goal". Hopefully, I'm mistaken. I'd love to see underprivileged kids (no matter the sex or race) get decent computers and given encouragement to learn computing skills (beyond playing video games), but the cynic in me knows better.

SourceForge should never have been considered a potential revenue stream... it should have been preserved as a community service project that enhances your standing in relation to those parts of Dice that do generate revenue.

Corporate execs are far too quick to forget that.

Lots of tech companies subsidize community service projects - this is great, but abusing these efforts, and trying to make a quick buck off them is a quick way to damage your reputation in the tech world. Building trust and admiration through such projects takes time and effort, and can be very rewarding to a company's bottom line, but when you betray the trust, it can quickly become a poison that no amount of time can heal.

Dice, you've gained a lot of people who will never forget this. Certainly, many of them were not exactly fans to begin with, but they will be vociferous and their influence WILL impact your bottom line. Trying to make that quick buck will cost you far more in the long run. I certainly hope whoever was behind this "idea" has been sent packing. The road to rebuilding your reputation will be a long and painful one.

So you are saying developers code in C# with fewer issues than those who program in Java and Javascript?

Wow, talk about missing an opportunity...

You should have used:

Yeah, those "benefits" make no sense.

C#, a relatively new language, has a massive library of solutions created for it, tons of open source code out there to leverage for everything from server applications to mobile games. Go and Swift? I'd be surprised if there is a tenth of a percent of the open source code out there as there is for C#, which is further dwarfed by C++ and again, by an order of magnitude by C code.

Of course, C# has a much larger ecosystem, which is also kind of the point.

As for hires who "know" Go or Swift... WTF? Why is it any sort of advantage to make your potential hiring pool smaller? That only means there will be far fewer competent candidates to hire for a job.

I got the same deal, it was on eBay a week or two ago, actually offered by NewEgg.

I just upgraded my son's boot drive from an Adata 120GB to this EVO drive. He's very happy with it so far. He's been doing more game and mod development with his "team" (lots of friends around the world) and the 120GB for the boot wasn't cutting it, even with a large data drive.

I had been considering only upgrading him to 240GB, but at the $0.30/GB price point, I couldn't justify a stopgap measure.

My own PC has 2x256GB Samsung 830 drives in a RAID-0 array for boot, and was quite pricey when I did it.

I expect prices to get below $0.25/GB soon, and probably below $0.20 by Black Friday.

I'm glad I'm not the only person do wonder about that.

Does it hook up to GooglyMoogly and the Black Bart Inference Engine? Can it plug-and-play with ZeekZek? What about compatibility with older ZanyBunch scripts?

My son still jumps into Minecraft, but always when he's hanging with his friends online.

Multiplayer is what made Minecraft a phenomena, because players share in the creation.

Vista was a disaster, but Win7 is basically Vista matured.

The reason Vista was a "bad" release had more to do with loopholes being plugged up (API calls that didn't care about missing security data structures suddenly needed them for example) and session separation breaking some apps that relied on multiple processes. The new signed driver architecture also made Vista seem horrible... but the same driver architecture worked fine with Windows 7, because by that time, manufacturers had caught up and were releasing pretty seamless 32- and 64-bit signed drivers.

Some of Vista's "lumpiness" was also the result of answering critics' complaints about security in the OS. Again, Win7 didn't change much.

Win8, on the other hand....

Yeah, I'm sure it will go over well in Europe.

This is 'murica, we need our CNCs to cut 3 inch plate steel.

Kind of ironic. Nikola Tesla fought to champion AC power, and the company named after him will bring Edison's dream of DC-sourced homes to reality.

WTF do they have to do with this case? This isn't a criminal proceeding, it's a civil matter.

This isn't about "protecting" Oracle (though there may be some $$$ influence involved), but rather more about protecting the copyright racket, strengthening it beyond the accepted scope.

APIs should not ever be copyrighted. Once you start doing that, it's only a matter of time before Disney copyrights all cartoon renderings of a mouse, or Nickelback gets to copyright all formulaic/generic rock.

Unfortunately... the Justice Department, likely at the behest of the White House, is intervening to influence copyright law and give corporations even more power. Ugh. It's like our government is pushing to see how far it can go to enslave citizens (the real, human kind, not the corporate nonsense kind) before they decide they've had enough of this shit.

I'd be inclined to chalk this up as a "First World Problem" but clamping down on technology denies everybody equal access. This is a serious infringement of our freedoms that will have a chilling effect on the progress of technology to help people in their daily lives everywhere in the world. It's not just about Java - it's about any programming language interface.