Wasn't Gmail the first to introduce the conversational layout? I remember the first time I saw it I was blown away over how simple the idea was yet how much impact it made on UX. Also, IIRC Gmail was the first to get Ajax right in a mail client, I remember being impressed when they embedded a GTalk client right there in mail. Then I think Google Calendar followed then docs with App Engine in there somewhere too. No matter your feelings on Google the company the software that sprang from Gmail is amazing.

In my experience, with young children your best chance at teaching them these things is to relate it to their current interest. My 4 year old is really into maps right now, he draws me one every day at his preschool. I've been showing him different maps and trying to relate the concept of directions etc. With his interest in drawing hopefully I can work in the alphabet at some point too. It's a tricky task to put things in terms a 4 year old mind and attention span can digest without overwhelming them.

just wait until they discover ( re-discover ) SNMP and all the hooks in there. Reminds me of the time our local news discovered, with horror, IRC.

I would add that developers who are interested in writing against Google Glass may consider the $1,500 price tag an investment in getting a lead on development.

I'm a fan of reactive programming, it's pretty neat. However, the article cherry picked the scenario that perfectly fits reactive programming. Furthermore, calculating a couple formulas is hardly complex, show me geographically distributed caches kept in sync with a few lines of code and I would be more impressed.

maybe the developer should fix it on their own time.

Unless I'm reading it wrong you're basically disabling webservices like making a SOAP call to a third party on behalf of the connecting user-agent. That's a non-starter for just about all companies that have at least one business partner.

if it can be prescribed then it can be medically necessary then it can billed to insurance/medicare/medicaid. this is a goldmine.

I made the jump from developer to team lead and now on to management. Good management is very very hard, keeping people on task, motivated, and managing burn out is really more of an art than science and I'm not even including dealing with different personality strengths/weaknesses and the various combinations thereof.

If you have a good manager or even just a not-bad manager let them know. It's a difficult position to do well and lots of folks who you respect see you as worthless.

So does your phone steadily run out of RAM as the chips are incinerated? ...I didn't know the batteries were that powerful either, I'm so far behind the times.

How many more companies have these contracts?

Seems like you can pick which vendor gives you the best value based on the use case of your application. Doesn't seem that absurd to me at all.

yeah when i started it was "here's your certs, here's the VPN server IP.. by and don't talk to me ever". I could see it being difficult for a non-tech person to get setup.

One other thing. I work on an Imac and use TunnelBlick to manage the VPN connections. I've had zero issues on a wired connection but sometimes have issues using wifi, the vpn connections will drop and then re-connect after a minute or two. There must be something weird in the office because when I take my mac home i have zero issues on wifi.

I'll answer as best as I can

> Please tell us more about your setup.
We're a Java office in TX with a remote call center in OR and a handful of remote employees ( Chicago ).

> What type of work does the company and you do?
I'm the director of development, we're a j2ee web application development shop with special expertise in Oracle

> Approximately how many users work like this?
All of us ~30

> Does this company operate primarily as a standard physical office environment, or is this a distributed(work from home) startup?
A couple of my developers work from home 3 days a week and most of ops ( the network guys ) work from wherever and, apparently, whenever they want. They're pretty hot shit, published authors, speakers at LISA, etc so they're left alone most of the time.

> Where are the servers, on-site, datacenter, cloud?
We keep our staging and UAT servers on site and colo for production + another colo for failover

> Approximately how many servers?
I have no idea, I know we have some serious SAN gear for the databases. We probably have around 50 virtual servers in our testing setup and maybe 20-25 production server clusters with an average of 3 nodes each. Some physical some virtual.

> What type of applications are used, web, small applications like QB, MS Exchange or SQL systems?
Web applications, we develop/maintain some very large rewards and loyalty programs for the big banks. RDBMS is Oracle, email and IM is handled through Zimbra, project management is handled with Atlassen Jira self hosted.

> What are the negative aspects of this system?
The only problem i've ever faced is the VPN endpoints not staying connected. VPN connectivity becomes mission critical because without it no work can get done. I don't know what they're using for the VPN server, I know ops is a big fan of OpenBSD so it wouldn't surprise me if that's what they are using.