If you haven't got a thick skin, get off the internet. People will disagree with you, contradict you, post things that make you uncomfortable or that you find downright revolting.

The world is not "your oyster." People who disagree with you and that you find disagreeable have every bit as much right to be there as you. And when you consider the fact that some people find your Bible quotes and homilies offensive (as do I), it soon becomes clear that it's impossible to please everyone.

If you only want to hang out with like-minded people, form a nice little coffee-clique of people and socialize instead of trying to find "happiness" on the 'net.

Muscle memory is ingrained after 30 years of using it...

It has nothing to do with "closed source." Show me what info is available when you do an "apt get upgrade". :P

BTW, that 20 hour job is running on a Core i7 mobile/laptop chip, not my P4. I shudder to think how long the P4 would take...

Working on my pet project. Having Eclipse start in under 10 minutes. Being able to run *all* my code manufacturing jobs all at once, instead of having to run three at a time on my laptop (the longest job takes 20 hours to run.)

Believe me, I could use the CPU power. I'm not an "average" user, just a broke one. :P

*drool*

'nuff said.

I'm still clunking along on a P4 3.8 GHz. I'd love a new box that fast!

Don't you know "Canada" means "Ontario" to those who live there?

Hell, they barely acknowledge Quebec's existence, never mind the rest of the country.

They said "fully loaded", not "entry level."

If you install the newer packages you want, who cares what the "default" package is?

Personally I'd much rather a distro that lets me choose which version of packages to install rather than shoving one down my throat randomly during updates of the system.

Granted, the Debian stable I run isn't full of the latest shiny, shiny, but it isn't causing update problems by rolling out new versions of packages, either. Both Debian stable and RedHat RHEL are focused on stability, not bleeding edge development. No one in their right mind runs production systems on untested versions of packages, and no one (not even banks) can afford to do constant regression testing on the latest releases of software just because it's "new."

I'm constantly surprised at how many people opt for downloading the "production" version of my own project, even though that really was just a peg in the dirt of functionality, not some big fancy schmancy roll-out that went through more testing than other releases. There are bug fixes and new features in the latest and greatest, but a lot of people don't want that -- they want that peg in the dirt, and are content to wait for an SP1 to get access to the new features and bug fixes.

Don't forget it can often take a few months to properly regression test software. It isn't just an issue of booting with the latest version and making sure it starts running -- it's testing how it responds to having network cables yanked, power flipped off hard, sometimes even yanking hardware components while a box is running. Serious servers aren't something you just push out after running them with a dozen users for a week.

System admins both old and new that are worth anything don't want things changing just for the sake of change.

It boils down to the old adage: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Which further boils down to something admins care very much about: stability and reliability. Changing something that's been in production for 5, 10, or more years just because someone decided to roll out the new "shiny, shiny" is not an effective use of the admin's time.

Last but not least, admins are often responsible for systems from multiple vendors. Having a unique configuration model for each system goes against the whole point of things like POSIX APIs and standardized startup processing.

Sure on a desktop or developer system, the difference is probably irrelevant. But when your main job is configuring and maintaining services on servers instead of just using a box, the arguments and priorities change for damned good reasons.

*sigh*

Look, just because a bunch of magazines decided that their "gamer" demographic was going to be teenagers and specific sub-genres of computing games doesn't mean their definition is anything other than marketing tripe.

But given how many people go around wearing overpriced clothing emblazed with the brand names of sporting goods companies, I'm not surprised that you suckered into the marketing hype.

What I've described is factual history. You can argue against it all you like, but you can't change facts just by being stubborn. If anyone "co-opted" the term "gamer", it's the gaming magazines and the kids who fell into their marketing traps.

China is no more "controlled from the center" than any other government-run country. They have local governments and bureaucrats, they have fiefdom cities, they have states/provinces. As with any other country, there is a hierarchy of management.

And unlike the communist days, there is little to no "central management" of resources in China any more, other than the government investing in large projects that would be studied to death and never approved here in North America.

People just seem to love bashing on China, but most of their "facts" are as outdated as they would be if they were to bash the Germans for being "Nazis" in modern times.

In other words, the people who just published this "study" have just realized that women who play trivial games on their cell phones are a much larger (and probably more profitable) demographic than their old focus on teenaged boys playing first person shooters.

Dude, you're missing the whole point. I'm not insulting people, I'm making fun of a business that was so foolish as to narrowly define their demographic instead of accepting the standard public-use definition of the term. Anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time playing games of any kind is a "gamer."

The term has been in use since before computer games were mainstream. Your local DnD league that runs 3 day sessions on the long weekends with only 4-5 hours of sleep a night are gamers. Your grandmother who plays bridge for 2-3 hours every day after lunch is a gamer. The people who play the computerized versions of old card, board, and strategy games for hours on end are gamers.

But, hey, I remember being young and using "cool" terminology that my parents disagreed with, too. Don't worry. Someday you'll be older, the kids of your day will try to redefine the use of the language, and you'll be on my side of the fence laughing at their stupidity. It happens to everyone.

And after you've seen a few generations of people trying to redefine the use of words to solely mean whatever is the latest technology rage, you'll shrug your shoulders, laugh, and realize it's all marketing shills through the centuries, trying to make a fast buck on the latest fad. It's a bunch of leeches trying to define a "demographic" so they can sell to it, and nothing more.

The "point" of Java is portability amongst vendors. It was never designed to be the fastest, most scalable, or most elegant language on the planet. It was designed to be portable.

And it succeeds at that goal, for the most part, so it is and continues to be used widely.

Don't confuse the extensions of the JEE environment or the various JCP packages with the core of Java's mission: running business code across diverse platforms.

Or have you forgotten Java's original tag line? "The Network IS The Computer." And the network includes all kinds of platforms.