Indias legal excecutive is basically "Judge Dredd" in real-life. Courts are so behind, murder investigations and convictions can take up to 25 years before even starting. The police solve this on their own to maintain order by staging "encounters" for people who've killed more than once. They basically find you, arrest you for something petty they can pin on you and then shoot you for resisting/trying to flee.

With such factually absolute powers for the police, they're bound to turn corrupt.

I'd say it's no surprise that in such a system an exposure of police corruption get's you killed mafia style.

A better PL, a Swift Book for free, a working pipeline with free (beer) tools ready to roll from day one and no-bullshit support for all the things the predecessor (Obj-C) supported.

That's all it takes to bring a new PL front and center for more than 1 week.
Apple knows how to build user experiences and that includes developers on their machines. ...

Now if only every software technology would take care of things the way Apple does and not promise things their toolkit can't hold for longer than a download and a first tryout.

Just saying.

We use our systems for mission critcal stuff. That means they need to be setup and maintained well. Which in turn means, a good system setup is as valuable as the system itself. ... Scratch that, it's actually more valuable. Which is why I only changed my tablet - which I use every day - after 4,5 years. My MB Air is from 2011 and my MacMini from 2007.

We know how to maintain systems and how to keep them bloatware free. And they're ahead of the curve by 2-3 years compared to mainstream anyway.

So, in the end, it's no suprise systems are in operation for a few years.

Did they have an actual engineer check the statics, weight durability, corosion and weather/temperature resistance/durability?
Or did they just have that artist draw different cute pictures of Rivendell-Style bridges and pick the prettiest/easyest to print?

I'd rather ask before I break my neck and drown crossing one of these. Just saying.

Aside of that: Neat project. This is where things are headed. I like the outlook of this.

A military project with multi-nation politics. Need I say more?

My cousing worked with airbus as an engineer, prepping the A380 for release, after the cableing debacle. No single responsible project lead with competence and a mandate, subcontractors 6 levels deep with the suits drawing out money at every level, nationalistic policing, etc.. A burocratic nightmare barely imaginable by the human mind.

Think Berlin Airport but with a bunch of EU nations thrown into the mix involving complex new machinery and avantgarde technology. Yeah, right.

Why garbage? Here's why:

1. Standards change all the time. What's the default value for that global? Depends upon the version. What? That global didn't exist when you wrote your code, so you can't check its current value to see if it affects you? Go fuck yourself.

No one cares. Nobody uses global anything since 4.x.

2. Libraries and APIs are added, replaces, and sundowned at will. Want to do an http redirect in the current version? Go fuck yourself!

No one cares. I can find all changes with 20 seconds on php.net, one of the best PL documentations every. The differences and deprecations and changes are listed per version. And they're a good laugh during a boring coding and debugging day. Especially those parameters and function names. :-)

3. Error handling. Look it up. Or, rather, the designers need to do that and then implement something sane, and do it consistently.

Yeah, right. Like you - or anybody else - uses error handling consitently, no matter the PL. *I* only use it when I don't know what to expect from the adjacent API. And then I usually leave the catch loop empty, except for some printed output or something.

We all know this: IT setups vital to work but so unprofessional words fail to describe it.

I would smack around the people responsible so hard, they would have their head still spinning when the IT setup has been completely redone.
I consider it bizar that taxpayers money and national security is put to risk by idiots running the parliaments IT.
This is material for some legal repercussions by the President of the Bundestag IMHO.
He should shaft the MPs so hard they never dare to do something like this again.

My 2 cents.

Lenovo Yoga 2 10" Android + 64GB SD Card
This is the computer I by far use most in my private time. Right now, riding on the train, in fact. I've just about stopped "lugging" my macbook air about. I don't use the MB Air anymore right now - moved all my E-Mail this. 18 hours of battery time, tons of movies and serials (watching agents of shield right now), 60+ books, especially those with 1000 pages or more, 6GB of music, awesome Games (The Wold among us f.e.). It's a state of the art mobile computer, one generation short of total convergence.

Moto G2
My fresh dirt-cheap high end cellphone. Definitely a computer, definitely my second most used one.

Lenovo W510
Refurbished and pimped out with 18 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD and Ubuntu 14 LTS - for serious web work and fiddling with FOSS. I'm pondering leaving the Apple Golden Cage (TM) - but am not quite sure yet. There are some pretty awesome software tools available for OS X, especially in the webdev dept.

Lenovo T400
Refurbished and bought as a cheap, small and quiet utility (web) server to fiddle with and run deployment and scripts on. Xubuntu 14 LTS.

2011 MacBook Air
Neat and trusty. Great device. The Yoga kicks it's ass in portability and battery time though.

2007 Mac Mini
Second-gen Intel Mac Mini. Very nice computer, still doing its work. But I only use it as a media center right now. It still runs Snow Leopard ... Tiger? Don't now. It has front-row though, and I use it with the remove a lot.

Xbox 360, last gen with Xbone Enclosure. Dirt cheap console, dirt cheap AAA games. I pondered getting a console for almost 10 years and picked this one up as the Xbone was out a few months. Very good deal.

At work:
27" iMac, refurbished. 24GB RAM

All in all I'd say I have to many computers and probably will consolidate the amount at my next hardware redo which happens every 4-5 years or so.

Dump your mail to mbox, filter and format the mbox dump with regexes, as to make it more readable.
Save it as a regular textfile.
Tell your successor he can search that for keywords if he suspects an answer in there.

That shouldn't take you more than a day or two, perhaps only 2 hours or so.

Any dev with a brain is going indie these days.

There's an abundance of dirt cheap/free (beer) softwaretools.
Hardware prices are negilible.
Networking makes it possible to find co-devs all around the planet.
Steam, Google Playstore and Apple Appstore are taking out the middle-men.

All the big publishers can do these days is kill off good studios and churn out the bazillionth CoD clone. They've abandoned innovation.

All major space games today come from teams of less than ten, such as No Mans Sky.

Limit Theory, one of the most interesting prospects, is from a single guy!.

Robertson is doing Star Citizen as a crowdfunded indie project - a big one, mind you.

Koji Igarashi left Konami and started a Castlevania follow-up/Rip on Kickstarter. The fans are drowning him in money and he has more creative freedom than ever.

Bottom line:
Indie is where the partys at nowadays. No one wants to work for EA and the likes.

The NSA fallout here is astonishing. We're a Type A Agency with me as prime IT guy/consultant for everything and a half-assed Wordpress Pipeline for web projects. We don't do big things but we do quite a few as Agency Project spinnoffs and sideprojects. What strikes me is how many customers specifically ask for hosting on German soil, Google-free tracking and such - even for projects where it shouldn't matter that much. The point is, they don't want to make them selves vulnerable in case of a data-breach. Germany privacy laws are pissy like that.

Bottom line:
The negative press the US IT industry has gotten with NSA and such has a measurable impact - I myself am surprised.

... where I thank god that I live in Germany. An abundance of colleges to choose from, all for free (except some trivial Semester fee that's well below 200 Euros that gets you rebated admittance to public events, a free public transport ticket and some other niceys along with it).

Fucking dig this: You actually *save* money if you are a student over here - even as a part-time student!! I'd pay less healthcare as a freelancer with cheap student rates (look up "healthcare" on wikipedia if you're from the US. ... SCNR) and my PT ticket is cheaper!

This is also one of the reasons I'm gonna get off my lazy ass and start a college CS track this year - it would be an insane freakin' waste not to. Just finished mit GED A-Levels with prime scores btw. for exactly that reason.

Tip from across the pond: You guys should help Lessig get through with his Superpac initiative and then redo some core parameters of your system - it's broken at to many places.

My 2 eurocents.

JS alone will get you nowhere. JS is part of todays web ecosystem. And developing for the web today is so hard, people doing it are either inexperienced and naive or - like me - sort-of specialized/focused in some vertical toolstack like LAMP + Wordpress + Bootstrap or something and never really happy with their results.

The problem is, that you have to know HTML5, CSS3, DOM perhaps some jQuery UI or HTML canvas stuff + UX + responsice webdesign + Typography & Layout + a workable set of backend tools (LAMP or such) to do anything usefull with JS. Which makes the whole thing basically impossible for an "entry level" developer to learn.

I suggest you find a team that has a working development pipeline, uses versioning (far to many webshops don't) and puts out good results and learn by doing.

As for JS in general - there's a lot of academic ragging on JS here, but most of it misses the point about JS entirely:
JS alone is like a mix of Python and Ruby made to look like Java (yeah, I know) and doesn't look very modern. However, what makes JS interesting is the fact that as a platform it is available basically anywhere. JS is todays PC of platforms. A toy, not taken seriously by anyone, but available for cheap/free everywhere. Which is why it is going to win in the long run, just like the toy-technology x86 did, eventually squishing every other architecture like a bug on it's way to total world dominance. In the early eighties, people would've laughed you out of the room for predicting that.

I personally wouldn't be suprised if JS eventually replaces PHP, Java and Co. on the serverside and takes over everything but system development on the clientside within the next decade or two. Be it natively or with languages that cross-compile to JS ... We already have a ton of those. Google is heading for bringing the second half of humanity online, and as far as I can tell, they're succeeding. Which in itself does put JS in a future-safe position.

JS, Browsers and the clientside webstack are a mess, but they are truely cross-platform, open and not controlled by a single entity. Very much like x86.

So no matter what you're doing, getting into JS at a professional level one way or the other isn't the worst thing to do.

My 2 cents.

If I catch a robot handling my book like shown in the video I'm gonna wreck it and sell it for scrap.
Or mod it into my personal coffee machine.