I had largely the same experience at UC Berkeley, but I wasn't paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition. If I were going to an elite, spendy private school I would expect more in the classroom.

That said, teachers are only a part of the learning experience. I learned a lot of interesting things from the teaching assistants that helped with our large classes, and still more from random older students in our computer labs. One of the advantages of going to a ginormous research university is that there are a lot of really smart people that you can learn from outside of lectures.

Java developers aren't going to decide to switch to Objective-C to address 5% of the desktop market. Most of the Java developers I know prefer Mac hardware for its easy interoperability with Linux. If Apple kills the Mac OS JVM then we will be forced to switch to Windows. I don't see how this benefits Apple in any way.

I know I don't - I don't think there are a whole lot of them. After all, Objective C has no significant enterprise market and 5% of all desktops. The only software market they have a significant presence in is mobile apps, which is growing but is still pretty tiny. I don't see Objective C getting all that much traction unless Apple loosens their grip, and that doesn't seem very likely.

You should go to a supermarket with hotter, friendlier checkout girls.

I agree with your point, but given the popularity of RPGs that force the player to perform inventory management this task must actually be enjoyable to many gamers. It does force the player to make decisions about the relative worth of loot.

They're going to lock up everyone who tries to access internet porn? I doubt there are enough prisons in China to hold every man with a computer.

How can a company that is shaping up to gross 60 billion dollars a year and earn a 20% profit margin possibly not be at least partly evil?

Sadly I agree that many developers will put up with awful working conditions, but that is mostly because they are paid pretty well. I disagree that you don't need brilliant developers, but it can be difficult finding the right balance between folks that write "profound code" and folks that are willing to copy that code and finish all the required functionality. Software development is still growing rapidly, so any company that thinks their developers are willing to put up with anything to keep their jobs is going to lose out when the economy gets good and there are many jobs available.

If everyone followed your suggestion then developers would all work in the equivalent of a college computer lab - long tables with closely packed workstations and no personal space. I have never seen anyone try this, but even when companies use relatively small, open cubes it can be distracting to many developers. OTOH I have worked in a building where every developer had an office with a door that closed, and that didn't really help either since it made collaboration kind of tough. I think it is worth thinking about productivity when it comes to setting up an office. The incremental costs are not that high compared to the cost of even a single-digit change in a typical developer's productivity.

It can be difficult to determine the size of a program when you are first starting to write it. Obviously it would be faster to hack together a trivial program like "Hello World" in a simple text editor. IDEs are more useful when you are solving non-trivial problems, like maintaining a couple hundred source files and integrating dozens of external libraries.

That sounds like a project manager to me - an experienced professional with leadership experience that doesn't participate in the day-to-day work of the development team. The best sprints I have participated in have been facilitated by project managers.