Even those with a strong sense of identity sometimes need comfort, or vent a bit, or be thankful etc.

Personally I pray to the classic Greek pantheon. Of course I know it's not real. But it's as good a way as any. So I thank Hera for the fact that I've got a healthy daughter, and I thank Hephaestus for a good day's work.

I don't give a shit that it's all imaginary. Thanks to science, I know that thankfulness and praying is proven to make people happier. And unfortunately, with my normal mood naturally below average, I do a lot of exercises like that.

Fact sheet positive psychology (PDF)

With this new iMac and its display, the Mac Pro is starting to look a bit bleaker. I actually think it starts to look a little weird.

Performance-wise, if you configure this iMac with the 4 GHz processor, you get the fastest CPU, at least 25% faster than the Mac Pro in single-threaded tasks according to this benchmark. Mac Pro still has Ivy Bridge-architecture Xeons.

And the current Mac Pro can't drive a 5K display, but it's true that it can drive up the three 4K displays.

So the Mac Pro doesn't really make sense anymore unless you need its graphics cards to support OpenCL applications, or you want the parallelism of 8 or 12 cores, or you need its ECC RAM.

Not as far as I know, but I'm not an expert.

I work at a scientific institute and the license costs of Matlab quickly explode if you need something beyond basic functionality. Since we work on the public's money, we haven't bought into Matlab.

Almost by itself, all scientists and engineers standardized on Python and NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib. There's a couple of people using Octave, the open source Matlab alternative, but that's very limited right now.

That's your solution. My solution is to never opt into the gamble in the first place.

I hadn't thought about that. I think you're right, that being married or not doesn't really change the premise of the article. It's still cheating, and it's still stalking.

Perhaps it's unthinkable in American minds, but here in the Netherlands, only about half of the people in solid relationships decide to marry. And there seems to be no set time for this either. More often than not, I've seen friends marry after their first child.

I'm not marrying, the odds are decidedly in favor of women. The Netherlands has the highest percentage of women working parttime. As a man, you'll be paying through the nose.

Yeah, maybe they listened to us! There was a board meeting in a hot tub on top of a huge black skyscraper, with hookers and blackjack. They were laughing and counting money and all of a sudden, a mobile phone goes off. Then a fat white old dude reaches over to the phone and says apologetically, "sorry everybody, gotta take this one, it's a client of ours".

Then there's maybe a second of silence and everybody laughs really hard. The prostitutes don't get it, but they laugh as well.

It's both funny and true :-)
And I happen to be okay in Perl.

Excellent comment, as usual.

That sounds like a pretty caustic view of the world. Firstly, the title says to be an expert, not about "succeeding" in anything. And secondly -- as I read it -- you're equating success with earning money in business.

My biggest successes don't have anything whatsoever to do with the success as you describe it:
- I've grown to be a software craftsman
- I have become a gentle and present dad
- I've learned to handle money well
- I can have a nice relationship with a pretty woman
- I've conquered a depression

But please go on, and start "networking" to gain some of that empty success.

Java is just as fast?

Can you explain to me why it takes a minute to start Tomcat and deploy its (single) WAR file? But when I start my C++ server, including all its daemons, it takes a second or two?

You had me at data integrity :)

Yes., way too much information. But funny as hell.

Come on. The Mac Pro requires you to spend big bucks. It's not too much to ask Apple follow Intel's roadmap with the Mac Pro.