Thanks to you and windcask and the friendly AC for volunteering advice. I left my computer off for a couple of days, disgusted with it, and maybe it sensed by scorn and was ashamed, because the bugger is quiet again. Hopefully it just had to work out some dust that had gotten way in there. I've never had a fan go on anything. But if does act up again I have things to try.

Something else comes to mind, that I never really paid attention to before. When I first start up the machine, one or more fans spins up to kind of a high speed, then after a couple of seconds comes back down to relative quiet. Hopefully it wasn't some temperature misreading fan speed modulating thingamabob.

SMB as Small and Medium-sized Business.

Being a fan of deterministic destruction (I love symmetry, and things working like clockwork), it was hard for me to "let go" when switching to a managed language. Instead of taking the candy out of the wrapper and throwing the wrapper on the floor temporarily, knowing that I (or the compiler) would be picking it up again right after finishing the candy, I had to get my mind to being at peace with just throwing wrappers on the floor and trusting that, if enough of them pile up such that no one can hardly walk thru the room anymore (!), some elusive maid who works whenever she darn well pleases will come by and clean the mess up.

Now you want me to get used to maidless littering, where cleanup doesn't happen until the universe is near crashing and God reboots it? (And I thought Java's GC's were long delays...) Persist every single intermediate step to external storage because the brave new future is non-deterministic wholesale VM recycling? (I don't even like the idea of my car cycling my engine in and out.) Gah! The madness, it just keeps growing. Programmers are messy and resource-piggish enough as it is; it shouldn't be encouraged even more.

I have a prediction: The business language of the future for large enterprises, eventually supplanting COBOL and Java, will be called VOMIT, for Virtualized Outhouse Machine Instruction Technology. It will have basically zero rigor and require little to no responsibility of the programmer. The code will look a lot like spattered hurl, will be about as planned and crafted as the same, and will require an enormous runtime to make any kind of semblance of sense out of the loose patterns of hastily tossed gibberish on the wall. Will make browsers' parsing of HTML tag soup look like child's play.

Java was invented by Sun because Wintel was the near-universal platform, and Sun had no revenue stream from it (i.e. no reason to buy expensive Sun hardware). That and, the language of small business being VB and that of big business COBOL, I think an updated language for the "I only care about solving business problems" crowd was conspicuously needed. Java would be advertised as the "programming language for the rest of us" (meaning non-technical developers) and at first appear very simple, until the layers were peeled away and all the enterprisey bloat and complexity and hyper-abstraction was added. It's a web browser plug-in language, it's a desktop language, it's a server language, it makes all your dreams come true. It's also a pig and only runs acceptably on big servers with plenty of resources, which, coincidently, was what Sun made their living creating and selling, imagine that.

The reason for doing Java nowadays is tripartite:
1) You do custom business applications, and
2) Managed languages are especially suited for this and result in greater productivity and robustness, and
3) Your business is too large for the SMB scale of .NET.

That is, hardware environment virtualization and language environment virtualization don't tackle the strictly same set of problems, and so they're not really interchangeable. For example I can't really add garbage collection to native code by running it in a VM.

Your new job is to manage outsourced developers doing 'monkey work'.

It is he who the company has doing the "monkey work", then.

"is there a one-click way to make a journal entry?"

There is if you put the following link into your "User Space" Slashbox:

http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=edit

Technology is vast and complex. Most people only know enough to have an opinion about a fraction of it. Contrast this with the body of Left-wing political thought. We're bombarded with the stuff every day of our lives. We've all been made excruciatingly aware of what the "recommended" set of opinions about things in general is. And so voila, it's something everyone can chime in about. Slashdot simply took their site, or rather followed it as it became, more and more "mainstream".

I have aged and become less crazy about principles like I once was

Do you instead mean your principles have changed to be about things less crazy to have strong principles over? As I've aged, I've become *more* crazy about principles. But they've never been about such mundane things as computer operating systems -- I've never fallen victim to the Marxist nerd fantasy I guess that computer software is some kind of epic battleground of good vs. evil. LOL

Nevermind -- I see that I started out with "Only...", and as you point out it's not just only that.