Awesomely clearly explained context and subject matter. This is one of the reasons why c# is so nice to write in itself even if it's not very unixy.

Looking forward to scala myself.

"And not a single house blew down."

That's an F for the testers, then.

...their interpreters. Powershell isn't as backwards compatible.

Languages compilable to self-contained executables not installing anything extra on your computer (not a single file) are typically a lot more effort to work with - and the users can't just read the file to find out it's trustworthy to run.

Only exception to above rules I saw in comments here (pardon me for not linking, htc hero is really hard for this stuff) is the PAR perl exe packager. I'd jump to try that out if I developed for Windows.

I'd say keep it simple and avoid the colors. They bring extra complications and add no business value.

I admire your mad batch skills. How do you talk to the printers and send mail without extra dependencies, by having the script write out small com files to run, eh?

Oh, my ++ is really rusty on the conversion details to which this boils down to, but naturally this is an irresistible challenge, Fnord:

36 False Fnord
14 7 Fnord

Can't remember off the top of my head, but I'd imagine since we have a bool type, it'd render itself something sane such as "False" as a string, and stream:: would have the decency to prefer the string presentation to numeric; I could be miserably wrong and it could as well be either 0 or NULL (well, hopefully not that). Fnord.

I take it that truish to convention "class Fnord" would override the bool Fnord() in scope and create a Fnord by name Fnord. Fnord.

Then again, my eyes have to have been contaminated from some coding style guide, since they hurt from just looking at all those violations. Fnord.

Yes, I've completed my work at current customer and just biding my time. Fnord.

Now please tell me why I tend to land on non-programming jobs? Fnord.

This post contains no Fnords. Please keep the world safe for children and carefully dispose of any Fnord. Fnord.

There's water on moon, mars, europa, other bodies. We haven't yet even settled on the ethical price of human life. If it suddenly somehow became feasible to exploit those worlds, many of us would not care that some of us would see to it that we'd never notice signs of life there.

Did I mention Avatar yet? In real life we'd never heard about Na'vi.

It'd be great to have ethical guidelines; that would at least make people think about their actions. Get general public ponder it a bit. Fix Earth first perhaps? Environmentally acceptable solutions for getting out of the gravity well?

> I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.

I love pointless struggle! I could read it for hours.

Funny part is, all this fuzz about FTL goes on and on because people don't understand what time and distance are. Explain that, and the babbling stops.

Takers?
 

Oh yes.

Throw in "automate the acceptance tests" between the usage agreement and coding, just for good measure. Well, actually to free the developers from ever worrying whether they met the goals or broke any planned functionality again.

Really. It's not that hard:
- Expect for the commandline,
- Netcat for network,
- Selenium for web,
- Robot framework for graphical user interfaces.

Googleable, deadwooden and professional help are available on all of above.

It's a world I'd love to live and work in where programmers were engineers providing precise solutions to actual problems!

In my experience, after building sufficient trust in a team, good collaboration in software development and most of ICT administration only requires face to face contact every once in a while, such as beginnings and ends of sprints if that's how you organize. IRC or other such persistent communications channel is actually preferable to ensure continuous virtual presence of everyone concerned.

When things don't work and when you enhance your ways of working (such as in retrospectives), face to face contact is essential. Otherwise you need extraordinary trust between communicating parties or it will degrade, taking honest communication and traceability with it.

Say, doesn't most of free software development happen in quite a distributed manner? Maybe only rudimentary trust is required when there is low to no gain from cheating, motivations are pure and results are clearly visible?

Personally though, I find it really boring to sit in an office alone. Some company is great to have around. It keeps your mind open and makes it really easy to start pair work on small problems.

Currently I work on our own product with my boss as my sole team. Thus, I voted "Not As Many As I'd Like" :)

Those insensitive clods.

"In reality everyone is happy" is equally true.
 

Only if you tune your meter so that it covers the variation available rather than some idealistic edge of scale, you get variation. Such as people varying between misery and happiness, nobody quite stably at either end, as moods tend to be dynamic in living things. Then you can inspect people who tend more towards one end than the other, on a reasonable timescale, not whole life, since we do tend to learn and grow.
 

I know people from many walks of life from many places on Earth and do not perceive a clear correlation not to mention idea of causality (used to nurture one though) between how you live and your happiness or misery. Yes you have to have basic needs fulfilled, after that it's up to your ability to react constructively to your environment; a lot about communication and sympathy, it would seem. I'd risk a guess that those would even expand to one's success at work as well.
 

As usual, reality is rather more complex and boring than extreme one-liners :)
 

I agree (would mod up but gave up modding way back). However this is an interesting and probably reoccurring problem: extending the wealth of public net wisdom with precision data from local context (organisational or task-centric rather than geolocational).

A proxy adding local content into pages loaded from outside as suggested in Re:Solution by mcrbids would solve some of the problems you mention:

        * The wikipedia content will always be out of date
                * it's fetched from real sources in real time
        * Changes made to wikipedia content don't get fed back into wikipedia
                * this changes to risk of unintentionally publishing private information - how hilarious!
        * Trying to load the wikipeida DB locally is a headache due to its shear size
                * not done; could instead cover the whole of outside web with one solution.

This problem remains:

        * Creates confusion as to what is and is not company information

I guess you'd be best off injecting a (user-hidable) "widget" layer that would contain all the local information needed, thus providing clear separation of local and global content. Least breakage of existing layout that way, I hope.

I assume here that we restrict our proxy to embed HTML (possibly including Javascript) into well parsing HTML pages only, so as to avoid breaking things as much as possible - inevitable to happen sometimes anyway.

Updating the contents of another window based on browsed content would require either

        * a single sign-on solution to target references to correct user's desktop (seen in updaters of multiple applications views in medical solutions for instance) or
        * a browser-specific local hack to study each page url and content and to fetch related information from local database based on those.

OT, adding such meshing into Google Wave would probably prove an interesting challenge :) Think of doing it Right (tm), with private additions to documents and discussions getting saved and tracked on local servers while public parts would be passed on to public servers.

Count me in on any efforts, I've waited for those over ten years as well.

Those, a pair of data gloves and the laptop in my back pack that's already always there anyway.

For simpler tasks than Eclipse, a modern phone would provide enough of a CPU.

Prolonged battery life from walking movement powered generator or solar panel jacket.

Some reason for hiking.