For the wise a single word is enough, indeed GPL was intentionally made to be contagious and Bill was right to bash it in that respect. GPL makes software indeed more free for the general community, but MIT-like licenses make the software more free for the developer himself.

I am not saying that GPL is evil or worst than MIT-like licenses, there are some classes of software that are better to be licensed GPL and others that are not. I am against the zealots who say that everything should be GPL though.

But GPL is indeed cancerous, intentionally so. Interacting with GPL code is a mine field if you don't want to GPL your code as well, there was no lie in that.

Just to make the point more obvious:

Plants vs Zombies 1: paid game, huge following, considered classic.
Plants vs Zombies 2: free-to-play game in the worst sense. Never heard anybody saying they liked it, probably got more cash than the first one. But it pretty much killed the franchise reputation of game-design mastery.
Plants vs Zombies 3: Will probably be f2p too, but even worse in the micro-transactions. Nobody will care much about PvZ anymore.
Plants vs Zombies 4: Will be the last entry and it will fail to revive its former glory.

You are absolutely correct, but it bares saying that not ALL free-with-microtransaction games are like that. Dota2, Team Fortress2, Path of the Exile, League of Legends are all good examples of free to play done right (although League of Legends does dip somewhat into the time-wasting nonsense you mentioned, not enough to break the game though).

I always thought that JITC was meant for making code portable. The runtime (openjdk, oraclejdk, yourmomsjdk, etc) may or may not JITC at runtime, it is up to the runtime. The code written for a VM is itself portable to all VMs that conform to the spec.

This is all fine for Java, but C# only runs in Windows and it only has a single runtime (I don't think microsoft cares about Mono much), which kinda makes this point moot. On the other hand ARM windows phones are taking off...

MBps is hardly useful comparison unless you plan moving large files around (most people don't). For general use a low seek time is far more important.

There are other uses for 16GB of RAM, if you have to run multiple virtual machines for instance. I myself have 16 gigs on my home pc, mostly because it was cheap, but it also allows me to run two games at the same time, which is useful for some kind of games (turn-based, MMOs).

Hey that is interesting, I have a system here where I store small amounts of JSON data as text column, since I don't have to query that text column it is not a problem for me (although I have to deal with missing values by hand), but how would you go about querying data from those types of "document-store" columns?

What does NoSQL mean for MariaDB? Without context it is just another buzz word.

The only thing I know about MariaDB is that it is a fork of MySQL created because Oracle is Evil.

Thank you, that was the point I was trying to make.

Graphics Programming Black Book is like the Dragon Book(s) or Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, but for graphics.

And if you don't know about at least one out of those three you may return your diploma back to your university.

The guy is the patron saint of common sense. One would think that common sense would not need a patron saint, being, you know, common...

I actually use an eSATAp SSD hard drive frequently. I have an OS installed on it and used it to work and bring it to home when I need to do home office, avoiding having to bring the whole laptop.

I went with eSATAp because:
1) My work and my home computers both have eSATAp ports
2) My work computer does not have USB3.0
3) No need for cases/enclosures to hold the circuitry necessary for USB hard drives (it is far more portable).
4) Theoretical higher performance (and lower latency) compared to USB2.0

I have not measured performance of eSATAp vs USB2.0 or USB3.0, but the SSD is blazing fast running on eSATAp. If you have more info on performance of USB3.0 vs eSATAp I am interested (latency in special is more important when running OSs on external hdd), if I ever change computers on my work I might go for a USB3.0 case.

But you are right, eSATAp days are counted, the upsides are not worth the extra port if USB3.0 can provide almost (or better) as good performance. eSATAp ports work as a USB2.0 port as well, but nobody (except me I guess) uses the SATA part, it is hard to justify their inclusion. You have no idea how hard it was to find a eSATAp cable...

Well but at least they put the tech to good use, google docs for example started after an acquisition. Google docs is very useful in my life (but I don't put anything that I would rather keep private there).

Interesting, I have been following the d3 news but I did not know that, where did you get this info? Also you have any reliable place I can look into the mechanics of the stats for patch 2.0, most sites are out of date now.