What I remember from accidentally using OpenJDK a few years ago... Apache Tomcat, one of the most popular servlet containers, did not work with OpenJDK. The first thing I do with any Linux server is remove OpenJDK and install the latest Sun (now Oracle) version of Java.

I don't know what the incompatibility was, and maybe they have fixed it by now. But I don't care enough about "freedom" to bother with OpenJDK.

OK, I've been using computers since the days of teletypes, and I've yet to get any virus, even on Windows. I used to run Norton AV on my old Windows machines, for about 10 years. Eventually I noticed it was doing nothing, except wasting CPU and harassing me about buying updated virus protection plans.

I suppose the time at work in the '90s when we got hit by a outlook macro virus might have counted, although I don't think I fell for whatever it wanted me to do. I also had a pirated copy of a game that tested positive for a virus on my Amiga, but I don't think my computer got infected.

As a life-long introvert... At one of the best jobs I ever had (in hindsight), I would go out to lunch with a group of coworkers almost every day (this was informal, not a company policy). These days, I'm a contractor at various places. In my current gig, the tech guys never talk much, don't go to lunch together or socialize, ever. I have no sense that I belong here. I think of this as a place I'll be leaving soon, when my contract ends.

Forced corporate "fun" is painful, but so is sitting alone at that lunchroom table. Don't give me any of that "time to recharge" bullshit, that is what I am doing all day when I'm coding or surfing the web.

It's bubbles, all the way down...

My Prius already has a rear camera, it is great. Should it be mandatory? I don't know, maybe.

I do know how to use my mirrors, and I double check everything. Yet, a child could walk behind my car, just as I am looking away. The back up camera could help in those situations. It is also quite useful for parallel parking, as I can tell exactly how close I am to the car behind me.

Sounds great, when can I get it? I live in a major US city, and it has been unavailable for a long time. Verizon keeps taunting me with FIOS offers in the mail, and then fails to actually deliver.

In over 20 years of employment, I've never programmed with any Microsoft language or framework (I've used Windows OS and Visual Studio, of course). At the moment, I've gotten 2 Java contracts in rapid succession, so I don't think that is going away any time soon.

Give me a fucking break. Had there been a "Texan on board with a pistol", there would have been 4 armed terrorists on each plane (and most likely, they would have exploited security flaws to ensure they had more and better guns than your hypothetical Texan Freedom Fighter)

The terrorists exploited a flaw in how we dealt with hijackers. It wasn't about a lack of guns at all.

This Java developer is using a Macbook Pro, and will continue to do so, as this announcement means little to me. I won't go into the details of why I prefer Macs, other than, I find the alternatives less useful to me.

My server development is done using the Sun/Oracle JDK, Eclipse, Tomcat and other open source frame works. My server apps run just fine with the Sun JVM, and the WAR/JAR executables can be copied to Linux or Windows Server, where they run just fine, with no problems.

I did once develop a GUI client app using the Apple tools, it wasn't so hot.

The only thing that will make me abandon Macs would be the unlikely move of restricting what apps can be installed, as on iOS devices.

As an experienced J2ME developer... The real pain was not "writing apps for individual handsets", it was dealing with all the undocumented bugs and "novel" interpretations of the J2ME spec. A game coded perfectly to the J2ME spec might run great on one family of handsets, and crash mysteriously on others, or even fail to launch.

Other major nightmares included: undocumented (and radically different) threading models, sound (which was not a part of the original J2ME spec), memory management and networking. And then you had to squeeze everything into a tiny JAR limit for the crappiest phones (64K when I started, later upped to 100K).

Did I mention that each phone (of which there were hundreds) was potentially different, and almost completely undocumented?

I will add too, as a former iPhone developer, that your provisioning profiles that let you run your own apps expire. They seem to have a duration or 1-2 months. I had a job interview a while back, so I put my apps onto my device, now I am getting warnings every day.

That said, developing for iPhone is a dream compared to J2ME and Brew.

Tell that to Rush Limbaugh.

What is missing from this picture? How about the biggest budgetary sacred cow, defense spending? Plus the cost of 2 wars of occupation. End just one war and there will be more than enough money to fund NASA.

As a programmer who worked on J2ME cell phones for 4 years... Pretty much every phone I looked at allowed you to download apps to it from your own server, with no involvement of the carrier. Now if you were planning to SELL the app, you had to play ball with the carriers to get on their decks. You could, in theory, have built your own payment system and sold apps off your own pages (and, somehow marketed your apps independantly)

That said, J2ME programming was a nightmare, and dealing with carriers was infinately worse than any of the problems dealing with Apple. Their deal is actually quite sweet in comparison, and the tools are light years better.

Well I am a shy, anti-social geek. And my son has been diagnosed with mild Aspergers. I think my problems are a bit less severe, and he may grow out of the worst problems. When I was in school in the 70s, no one understood Apergers, so I was just labeled as a loner.