I do watch Rage from time to time, generally the Friday night edition since that's when the new musicians are given a chance. Unearthed would be about the only time I'd be interested in Triple J, but that's mostly because I find radio friendly pop / rock to be like nails down a chalkboard.

While Triple J is not as mainstream as Triple M / etc (so awful!) it is still a pretty mainstream radio station. You just have to see what songs get into the hottest 100 every year. I recall listening to it a bit before leaving for the UK in 1999, and when I got back I bought a car and tuned the radio to JJJ to see what they were playing. It was still Powderfinger, Regurgitator, and the like - new songs, to be sure, but a lot of the same old bands.

Sure, Triple J often gets the music a year ahead of the more commercial radio stations, and they do push lesser known artists - but it's still too commercial for my tastes (in general). I like watching Rage because I can just record 10 hours at a time, fast forward the crap - and save the good stuff for viewing later.

Triple J went mainstream a few decades ago. It's still mass marketed over hyped pop crap, but just more oriented at the 30 somethings.

That's only true if you're still using the same software. Software very rarely ever gets faster. The software to display the web based media rich mail we are used to receiving now is doing a lot more work than the old text based stuff. Gmail is also doing things in the background to keep you notified of events.

I do agree though, it shouldn't be a heavy application by a long shot. Most of the hard work should already be pre-built into the browser for general work and running a mail UI shouldn't require a machine 10x more powerful than it did in 1999.

As for not imaging bugs, well, I use gmail every day and have done for over a decade now (IIRC). I've found it to be a damn fine client and not actually run into any bugs personally. It's software, so it's bound to have some, but I'd expect that one bad enough to lay the smack down so badly on your PC would perhaps be noticed by the 10s of millions of other users and fixed.

Have you tried a bunch of different browsers to see how well it works in those? I use Chrome personally, so YMMV if you use IE / Opera / Firefox / etc.

Because a general purpose language is a bit like using a sledgehammer to open a walnut. You can do it, but there's better options.

Python / Javascript / LUA and other script languages don't have the performance needed and are needlessly more complicated than requirements.

The developers can create their own mini language which is fit for purpose and can be expressed in 10s - 100s of lines of EBNF. That can be fed into standard tools and a bunch of c++ code pops out the other end which can be used to compile or interpret as required.

Custom mini-languages are smaller, faster, simple to learn and fit for purpose. Can you imagine the world if Cisco used C# and .Net on all their equipment...

Since nearly all your email will still be sent to this server in plain text, I really don't see what you think you gain from this. The NSA spies on all of the mail transactions in transit. They will know what mail you have even before you do.

Wi Wáng

Facebook was pretty tolerable for me right until my 25th year reunion came up and all these people I vaguely knew at school started sending friend requests. Just knowing one person who is in that circle is enough to slowly get the entire lot to creep into your facebook profile via "perhaps you know this person".

My feed was filled with the vacuous, pointless drivel I had successfully avoided for the last 25 years. Sport bores the crap out of me, I don't like people's children and no I don't want you to post a photo of your "little angel" twice a week.

A lot of these people had 250-500 'friends' listed, that meant seeing a lot of friend of a friend posts in a place that was meant to help me communicate with actual friends. I was drowning in the noise and just as bad, anything I had to post was washed away by the noise of their 500 other "friends" (some had as many as 900+ friends).

Instead of improving communication between old friends and acquaintances it dumbed it down to the point of being intolerable. I trashed all the acquaintances, posted a note to the friends left, then a week later deleted them all and the account.

If someone has something to say to me they can email it directly to me. Otherwise, let it fall on the ears of the deaf crowds.

I ran my own mail server for years, and then realised I'd rather have google do all the pissing about for me while I got on with something useful instead. It's not too difficult to run a mail server for yourself, and if you are hosting some other crap already it's just a little extra work.

1. Register a new domain name for yourself. For maybe $10 / year you can be certain that no-one can ever take that domain name from you (unless some big company with a similar name just does exactly that).
2. Install Postfix or another decent mail server.
3. Install some anti-spam software
4. Install some web mail front end
5. Install the POP3 / IMAP providers.

And that's pretty much it, except you now have to admin all that crap - which admittedly isn't much work, but it's more work that nothing, which is the amount of work needed to own an online mail account.

Oh yeh, almost forgot. If you ever decide to switch off that mail - make damn sure you have updated every single email address you use for logon to every damn website because you sure as fuck can't get a "reset password" mail sent to that email address once you shut down the server.

I have changed the terms of our arrangement. Pray I do not change them again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE

Nope, simply that he wouldn't even bother to remember the name for a peon such as yourself and your mail is too boring to even scan by the NSA ^.^

There's something wrong with your machine if having gmail open is even remotely noticeable on your CPU. I have 20 tabs open right now in chrome, including gmail, and the total CPU use for all 20 is still 0% of my CPU.

Open up your PC case and check inside to see if someone has replaced the gubbins with an old Commodore 64.

People who want to use it as a well known public address for others to send mail to them, like me. I've had a gmail account under my real name since the early days when it was invite only. I make that address public on my blog, web sites, quite a few forums, etc.

Despite the fact it should now be in every spammers database in the world I get almost no spam at the address thanks to the spam filters.

I have Gmail / YouTube / Google+ / Twitter / Facebook all in my real name. It's never been an issue, and in fact it's an advantage since I tend not to act like a complete fuckwad or douchebag on those accounts.

Given you can just opt out of the google+ thing, I really don't see any reason to even care.

If your current hardware is so crap that it can't run IIS and a SQL instance on idle without causing your recordings to buffer under run, then you really should throw that old Pentium II out and buy a current gen PC.

You're not going to be doing a rebuild all on 1,000,000s of lines of code while working with your DAW, so it's not even an issue.

As for background processes...I have 158 of them running right now and the only two who are above 0% utilisation are the system idle process and IAStorDataMgrSvc, which is probably running some long stupid windows task just at this time. Neither SQL nor IIS ever appear above 0% unless I am actually requesting web pages off them that have database queries at the time.

Finally, the sort of web development that is done with PHP has zero compile time and anything done with Java should happen so fast you barely even notice it.

I'm currently working on a project using the CryDev FreeSDK, which means I am working with about 300,000 lines of code, a huge amount of which are header files. A full compile of all of that takes about 10 minutes. Incremental compiles are done in seconds.

It's a storm in a tea cup, just get the tools and try it out before you worry about virtualisation or any extra crap you don't need. If it doesn't work you can uninstall them quickly enough. I typically run Photoshop, Mudbox, 3DS Max, World machine, CryFreeSDK Editor, CryFreeSDK runtime (1+), VS 2012 (up to 3 copies at once), and a host of other software - all without skipping a beat.

Just make sure your machine has 8GB+ RAM and fast hard drives. Any decent developer machine is going to handle far far more work without dropping frames than you are expecting.

As for users, make sure they don't have admin access. They shouldn't be able to do anything at all to your work if you don't give them admin on the machine.

My money is on it being the boilerplate code that formed the main event loop of every Windows program recently.

  int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
  {
      MSG msg;
      while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0)
      {
          TranslateMessage(&msg);
          DispatchMessage(&msg);
      }
      return msg.wParam;
  }

Good old Accenture. I remember having to work with those clowns on the London Stock Exchange website. Our small company had been running it since day 1 but due to a deal between Accenture, Microsoft and HP we were slowly being pushed out of our position. They decided to let the Accenture guys handle running the website which led to a few funny events, the best of which were:

1. Our team noticing the website had stopped serving pages for price information. We rang their team who were supposedly monitoring it 24/7 and told them. They asked what they should do...uh, so I said "Just IISReset the server, it should come back up". Their highly paid tech then asked me..."how do I IISReset it?"...oh god, no!

2. Accenture wanted to push a change out to part of the site. They let their best and brightest do the work. Instead of copying over the files he somehow managed to delete the 15 minute delayed price site. They then tried to blame that on us, but when I mentioned in the emergency meeting that we no longer logged on to perform maintenance and we could simple check the security log to see who did it they clammed up.

3. The same idiot who deleted prices went and deleted the entire website by mistake. We laughed, a lot.

What's that old line..."Accenture, taking the freshest recruits straight from college and putting them in charge of your billion dollar enterprises." :D