Companies have no interest in paying more for people more skilled in software engineering. They want people who can "just write code." The medium-term to long-term consequences of writing unmaintainable, disorganized, undocumented code are almost never recognized by management. And even if they were recognized, we live in a short-term-profit world, where it is standard practice to run a project or company into the ground by releasing a shoddy product which holds together just enough to avoid lawsuits.

A company who values older developers is a company who values the quality and long-term viability of its products. Good luck finding one of those.

The .NET platform is leaps and bounds ahead of the Java platform in nearly every way.

When you're older and you've done tons of code maintenance, especially maintenance of code written by others, you'll realize Java's simplicity and lack of "features" are what make it superior. No language can guarantee maintainable code, but certainly having fewer means to write heinously complicated code betters one's chances. Syntactic sugar rots productivity the way cane sugar rots teeth.

Yeah, I know, I just fed a troll....

How nice of them. They apologized for calling Linux a cancer.

Still waiting for an apology for the OOXML atrocity. In fact, it's going to take a lot more than a few contributions and nice words to make me put OOXML and its enormously dirty dealings in the past.

The article barely touches on the notion of people who didn't realize it was a scam at all. It's obvious to us technical types, but I doubt it's obvious to non-technical people.

Most retail Windows PCs are loaded up with obnoxious adware that nags at every login. I got a brand new PC from Staples last year which had a MacAfee nagger installed in the startup sequence, and while I was eventually able to disable it, it took more than one try and considerably more effort than just one or two clicks. If it was nontrivial for me to banish, I have to believe non-technical users would just give up.

On top of that, anti-virus is pretty low-level, as software goes, so how many non-technical people will even know that it's not doing anything after they pay for it?

Okay, I see your point. Too much of the software supporting the web is not Unicode-aware.

Slashdot isn't the only site where I've had to make a conscious effort to avoid non-Latin-1 characters, because I fear it will break the underlying software.

With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue.

To what "bad unicode support" is the submitter referring? The Web has excellent Unicode support. Every browser supports just about every BMP Unicode character I can throw at it (except IE in Windows XP, but even that does at least a fair job).

As everyone's pointed out, emulators have already covered the preservation of things like Star Raiders.

What really needs preservation are (relatively) newer games buried by copyright holders. Games like "System Shock 2," "KISS Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child," and the PC version of "Turok 2: Seeds of Evil," all of which are no longer published and cannot be bought brand new anymore, leaving only eBay and warez as viable sources.

Reading the article, I see that Verizon is against this, so I'm probably for it.

I especially grimaced when I read this part:

[Verizon's top lobbyist said] "Rather than attempting to make the new world of broadband fit into the regulatory scheme of the old telephone world, the FCC should acknowledge that this is an issue Congress should address."

That's more transparent than usual, isn't it? In case it's not, I'll translate: "How are we supposed to have free reign to let America's infrastructure steadily decay, if regulation comes from someone other than the politicians we bought?"

Because of what they've encoded in the Private Use Area block at code point U+E0F2. Check STIXv1.0.0/Glyphs/STIXNonUnit.otf.pdf in the zip file to see it, and check the last link in the summary for the character's name. I hope that gets folded back into the Unicode Standard someday....

I just tried a couple quick tests of two irritating shortcomings which I had remembered off the top of my head: the <object> element and 'inherit' as a CSS property value.

They actually do work. So I retract my complaint. I can only offer the meager defense that I tried those things many times as various IE versions appeared over the years, including in recent years. But clearly not recently enough.

I keep hearing about how IE9 will support HTML 5. I would much rather hear about how it will fully support HTML 4 and CSS 2. I'll even settle for its supporting 95% of HTML 4 and CSS 2.

I keep hearing about how IE9 will support HTML 5 media elements like <video> and <audio>. I'd much rather hear about IE9 correctly rendering nested, cascading <object> elements as HTML 4 describes.

Get the HTML 4 stuff working before trumpeting about HTML 5 functionality, please. God knows you've had enough time.

Get over yourself. Sony pulled a stunt FIVE YEARS AGO.

And aside from the price of minor public outrage, they have paid virtually no price for doing it. (Forgive me if I don't view having to pay each affected customer $7.50 or a voucher for a free song download as a significant punishment.)

You're correct that completely avoiding Sony products is next to impossible, but that's hardly a reason to give up on trying to impose a punishment. Where choice exists, one can choose not to go with Sony.

The original plan was to base Java on Objective C, but as I understand it, the creators saw that widespread adoption of a brand new language was going to be an uphill battle, so they (wisely) chose to base the syntax on C++ to minimize the learning curve for the majority of existing developers, especially commercial developers.

Personally I would have preferred an Objective C syntax, but Java might have died a quick, obscure death were it not for the ease of transition from C++. Academic/technical ingenuity isn't worth much if no one ever uses your technology ... which kind of sums up many of Sun's issues.

As for the original Java interpreter, I've yet to see anyone write a faster one for a 486.

It's worth noting that Javadoc (when generated by Sun's standard doclet) provides a "No Frames" version as a link on every single page. I interpret this as the Java team's acknowledging that frames are so unpleasant that even in the rare case where they're used well, many people can't stand them.