Seriously, if my phone isn't capable of doing whatever task I need to do, it means I probably need my full-on laptop anyway. Add in the fact that a tablet either requires wifi or requires cell service but can't make calls and it becomes obvious why the market is behaving this way.

So over my nearly 20 years in IT/CS, I've seen a few:

I worked for a large retailer. We migrated from an old frame-relay leased-line network to a much more capable multihomed IP-over-VPN configuration to connect all of our retail locations around the country back to HQ. This new system worked well. Our CIO retired, and a new one was brought in. CIO Magazine a year or so later had an article about "Satellite Internet, The Future?" Our CIO then "spontaneously" started lobbying to get us to scrap our efficient, inexpensive, high-bandwidth network for a satellite system.

I can't tell you how many projects I saw rewritten in Ruby on Rails just because that was the new hotness, only to be abandoned later when everyone realized that Ruby is awful.

I myself wrote a bunch of stuff in Erlang not because it was the best language but because that was the new hotness.

Two unchanging things I've noticed are:

A lot of time, the new hotness makes common problems go away or common tasks easier, but ends up making more complex things harder. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but people tend to get stuck in the model of thinking that the new technology has to be used for everything, and they end up shoehorning their complex projects into frameworks that aren't the best choice.

No matter what the new technology is, and no matter how fantastic it is, it's not going to replace C/C++ for systems-level work, and Python and Perl aren't going anywhere. Truly successful technologies have long tails.

I would genuinely appreciate any stories you have to share - not because I don't believe you, but because Slashdot has recently become so "angry white male" that it's depressing.

(I've been on Slashdot since 1998. I remember when article comments were a welcoming forum. Now it's yet another forum where "liberal" on its own is conisdered an insult and labeling someone as such immediately means they are no longer worthy of consideration.)

Heh, right, I mean...I guess I don't understand why one is rotated 180 degrees...It's not that important. :)

Reversed?

Go was developed in large part by Rob Pike who has a long history of concucrrency programming going back to Plan 9 from Bell Labs and earlier.

Some of his more interesting papers about concurrency are:

http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/n... (The Newsqueak Programming Language)
http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/n... (Newsqueak Implementation)
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/... (A Concurrent Window System)

You can even see some hints of what was to come in his paper outlining the design of the Blit terminal for Unix:
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs...

I read that as "eat chocolate" even after readreading it twice. I still would've been interested, though, since it's toxic to some mammals.

Greg Egan's stuff wouldn't translate well to the screen, I think. I absolutely love his work (Permutation City is one of my favorite books, and I loved Schild's Ladder, Quarantine, and all of his short fiction). The problem is that there's too heavy of a cognitive science/philosophical bent to them. You'd have to have a character sit down a monologue for a while to get everything out.

Make a Rendezvous With Rama movie, would ya?

Okay, here's the deal. I am passionate about computer science and programming. It's what I do, both for my job, and as my only hobby. I write code for open source projects, and I write code for work, and I design little one-off projects for my own entertainment.

I stayed up all night every summer growing up teaching myself how to code. When I go to the used book store, I go to the section and buy old computer science textbooks talking about esoterica (I'm the only person I know under 45 who knows any APL, for example). My bedtime reading last week was the Oberon System manual that I got off eBay for $5.00.

All this was despite the fact that I grew up in rural Texas and got my ass beaten on a daily basis for being a "geek". The fact that my family was the only non-Christian family in town meant that I couldn't go to the school administration for help; when I tried it turned into a "let's pray for you, son." And yet, I kept doing it because I was passionate about it.

And guess what? If you're that passionate about something, you'll do it regardless of what your peers think. You'll *make* it happen. We didn't have any money growing up, so I'd stay after school and work on the computers there. When we finally scraped up enough money to buy a used Commodore 64 in like 1992, I had that hooked up to an old black-and-white TV and taught myself 6502 assembly.

So yeah, I'm sick of people saying "it's someone else's fault that I can't do this." No, it's not. If you're passionate enough about it, you'll *make* it happen.

Except that in other parts of the developed world where ISPs are much more regulated, speeds have gone up and prices have gone down. So, you know, the exact opposite of what you said.

"I don't believe in hateful divisions on the lines of gender, race, heritage, etc, so therefore I'm logically going to vote for a party whose official platform includes denying women the rights to their own bodies, homosexuals the rights to marry the people they love, and actively attempted to limit access to democracy to people of color."

Look, when you've got a shit sandwich and a crazy guy who wants to shoot you in the head, well...shit sandwiches aren't that bad.

...and I'm never getting fiber internet. Certain parts of the city are completely ignored for infrastructure upgrades. We just spent $10 million putting bicycle repair kits and air pumps in the richer parts of town, while delaying the sewer installation in my part of town (we were annexed by the city in 2007 and were supposed to have sewers hooked up in 2012...it's 2014 and now they're saying they "hope" it'll get done by 2015). We spent another $1-2 million on "sharrows", which are little arrows that go in the roads to show that we should share those lanes with bikes. We also just spent something like $30 million finishing a bicycling bridge over Town Lake.

In other words, rich people in the south and southwestern parts of town get whatever they want on the taxpayer dime while people in the north and east have to put up with roads without sidewalks, failing sewer systems, and lackluster police protection. Yay.

KDE is too "busy". There's drop shadows everywhere and HUGE icons and constant distracting animations. Plus, it's the only desktop I've ever stat down at and couldn't immediately understand how to use it. What's an "Activity"? Is it a workspace? Without trying, I was able to get myself into a situation where I had zero controls on the screen and no idea how to get out of it. GNOME "just works".

As opposed to Libertarianism and "Fuck you, I'll fuck up all of the things we share because fuck you, I got mine"?