System admins both old and new that are worth anything don't want things changing just for the sake of change.

It boils down to the old adage: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Which further boils down to something admins care very much about: stability and reliability. Changing something that's been in production for 5, 10, or more years just because someone decided to roll out the new "shiny, shiny" is not an effective use of the admin's time.

Last but not least, admins are often responsible for systems from multiple vendors. Having a unique configuration model for each system goes against the whole point of things like POSIX APIs and standardized startup processing.

Sure on a desktop or developer system, the difference is probably irrelevant. But when your main job is configuring and maintaining services on servers instead of just using a box, the arguments and priorities change for damned good reasons.

*sigh*

Look, just because a bunch of magazines decided that their "gamer" demographic was going to be teenagers and specific sub-genres of computing games doesn't mean their definition is anything other than marketing tripe.

But given how many people go around wearing overpriced clothing emblazed with the brand names of sporting goods companies, I'm not surprised that you suckered into the marketing hype.

What I've described is factual history. You can argue against it all you like, but you can't change facts just by being stubborn. If anyone "co-opted" the term "gamer", it's the gaming magazines and the kids who fell into their marketing traps.

China is no more "controlled from the center" than any other government-run country. They have local governments and bureaucrats, they have fiefdom cities, they have states/provinces. As with any other country, there is a hierarchy of management.

And unlike the communist days, there is little to no "central management" of resources in China any more, other than the government investing in large projects that would be studied to death and never approved here in North America.

People just seem to love bashing on China, but most of their "facts" are as outdated as they would be if they were to bash the Germans for being "Nazis" in modern times.

In other words, the people who just published this "study" have just realized that women who play trivial games on their cell phones are a much larger (and probably more profitable) demographic than their old focus on teenaged boys playing first person shooters.

Dude, you're missing the whole point. I'm not insulting people, I'm making fun of a business that was so foolish as to narrowly define their demographic instead of accepting the standard public-use definition of the term. Anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time playing games of any kind is a "gamer."

The term has been in use since before computer games were mainstream. Your local DnD league that runs 3 day sessions on the long weekends with only 4-5 hours of sleep a night are gamers. Your grandmother who plays bridge for 2-3 hours every day after lunch is a gamer. The people who play the computerized versions of old card, board, and strategy games for hours on end are gamers.

But, hey, I remember being young and using "cool" terminology that my parents disagreed with, too. Don't worry. Someday you'll be older, the kids of your day will try to redefine the use of the language, and you'll be on my side of the fence laughing at their stupidity. It happens to everyone.

And after you've seen a few generations of people trying to redefine the use of words to solely mean whatever is the latest technology rage, you'll shrug your shoulders, laugh, and realize it's all marketing shills through the centuries, trying to make a fast buck on the latest fad. It's a bunch of leeches trying to define a "demographic" so they can sell to it, and nothing more.

The "point" of Java is portability amongst vendors. It was never designed to be the fastest, most scalable, or most elegant language on the planet. It was designed to be portable.

And it succeeds at that goal, for the most part, so it is and continues to be used widely.

Don't confuse the extensions of the JEE environment or the various JCP packages with the core of Java's mission: running business code across diverse platforms.

Or have you forgotten Java's original tag line? "The Network IS The Computer." And the network includes all kinds of platforms.

Those "suits" you refer to included every major hardware vendor on the planet. Java was only sold as a silver bullet for portability, not speed, not efficiency, not scalability, but solely for it's ability to be shifted from one vendor's platform to another's.

When it comes to straight forward business service and batch job processing, it succeeds admirably at that goal, which is rather rare for what you claim was a "silver bullet."

The "problem" is that all kinds of people have visions of Java doing this, that, and the other thing, ranging from the addition of database bindings that don't allow for stored procedures to 3D graphics. Java's "problem" is that it's gradually becoming too much of a "kitchen sink" instead of staying focused on what it was designed for: portable business programming.

You're the one who's confused. There is no "mancave" involved in gaming, except for reclusive pimply-faced acne victims in Momma's basement.

Over the years "gamer" has evolved from meaning someone who played pen and paper rule-based, card, or board games to include video games, and all the sub-genres thereof. The typical portable device nowadays has far more CPU and graphics power than the 386's that ran the Doom series, never mind the original Atari or Nintendo platforms.

It's only *kids* who think "gamer" has anything to do with a particular style of game or a particular demographic. Gamers are of all ages, genders, and races. But, hey, if you're convinced that "gamer" means pimply faced male playing first person shooter wargame on My Favourite Platform, knock yourself out. You're wrong, of course, but I've learned many years ago you can't convince people who "know they're right" of anything.

Your sounding defensive and looking for hatred where I read only a statement of facts. Facts don't hate. Gamers are people who play games. Period. End of story. The phrase has never meant "teen aged boy."

Clearly you've never worked anywhere but the US if you think that.

No matter where you live and work in the world on a visa, you'll be expected to pay the local income and sales taxes on the money you earn while working there.

Nonsense. I buy my cannabis from mom & pop growers who only sell enough to cover their costs of growing their own. I also grow a little (very little.) There is no "black market" or "organized crime" involved at all.

My sole advice to myself when I started out would have been to buy Microsoft stock.

More than buying a house, a car, or anything else, I started out when Microsoft was a penny stock and could have cleaned up big time just by investing a few grand in their stock instead of a car. :P

If you can't plug it in, you're not getting online here.

One Wifi device with encryption enabled slows down my router so badly that it has trouble resolving domain names. Screw that.

Under Debian with KDE, most of my menu items describe what the application does rather than using it's name. So at least at the foundation of a huge number of distros, there is no excuse for relying on the "cute" names application developers have come up with.