Seconded. I'm running an RT-N66U and it's been rock solid, good range, good throughput. Haven't needed different firmware but I know it supports some options.

I had a 3700 and it worked great until the N reception on it was suddenly gone one day. That was annoying.

This is all about your definition of "dead". COBOL is "dead" in the sense that it's not being developed, it's not generally taught, and it's not generally used.

It's "not dead" in the sense that some people are still using it to do meaningful work.

The number of dead languages will vary considerably based on which definition of "dead" you use.

Speaking as a developer who works for a government, option 2 is rarely possible.

Keep in mind that the "government" is a collection of departments, branches, sections, or whatever you call them. Those are run by managers, which are run by more managers, which all have their own agendas, budgets, and powers to protect. Now add in politicians at the top, who change pretty regularly and have very different goals from everyone else.

So, in the best case scenario, at the start of a project everyone agrees on what it needs to do, what needs to be replaced, and everything else. You have specs, and you know what the goals are. Great! Then an election happens. New party in power, and priorites change. Now it has to do something else.

Oh, then a manager retires and a new one comes in. Now it has to do something else.

A new law is passed, now it has to do something else.

Someone changed their mind, and now it has to do something else. ... on, and on, and on it goes. This happens *all the time*. And that's if the people actually know what they want, which in my experience often isn't true in itself (like the Air Force ERP that didn't know how many systems it was replacing).

In a case where there is clear goals and strong management, #2 works great. Often times things just change too much and the only sensible way to accomplish anything is to go with #1 and do the project in smaller, more manageable pieces.

And a lot of the time, the contractor is utterly incompetent and more interested in billing hours than completing the job.

Let's not pretend that companies taking government contracts are good guys, here.

Is it? Go to a busy street corner and ask 100 people if they think Chess is a sport. The overwhelming majority will say no.

Chess is a sport in the same way that spelling bees are a sport - they're not. They are competitions with rules and winners though (like sports).

"real sport": Competitions I like watching on TV.
"fake sport": Competitions other people like watching on TV.

They did, and they also got a negative response from Blizzard (who own the relevant game). Faced with that, they wised up.

I think you can attribute this one to stupidity more than anything else.

This has already been changed: http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/...

There was a huge backlash on social media, which drew Blizzard's attention. Blizzard kindly made it clear that they didn't want their game being used in a male-only tournament, and the problem was fixed.

Slashdot is pretty far behind on this one.

That's great. Let me know when it's on a phone that people are actually buying.

There's a petition from a few thousand old developers that want Microsoft to restart VB6 development, despite how godawful that is.

Developers sucking has no restriction on new vs old.

Because the people that run Mozilla seem to have no idea what Firefox users actually want. That's the only explanation I can come up with for what they've been doing.

"Developers tell us that they are not sure how to start app development on the Web, with so many different tools and templates that they need to download from a variety of different sources."

So the plan of having too many tools to do development is to create another tool? Man, that's some awesome thinking right there. Reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/927/

It'll be coming real soon now. Chrome just came out with a 64 bit version, and the Mozilla policy is pretty much "copy anything Chrome does."

So, no worries!

Are you a girl? Great! Here's all kinds of grant money to help people make that happen.

Are you a boy? Get out of my classroom, if we have too many of you it will threaten our grant money.

That's "progress" for you.