It sounds like the proper support for renaming that's new in this release is a step in the right direction. I assume branching is still really copying in Subversion though, which I recall being problematic in earlier versions where you needed to know at what point you'd branched from to do merges.

Everyone and their brother seems to have moved to Git

I've seen a lot of proprietary development moving to Mercurial, but haven't heard of anyone moving to Git. The latter seems to be much more popular for Open Source stuff.

We never intended for a support contract to be required to keep JDK 7 up to date

Then provide bloody YUM and APT repos for easy upgrading on RedHat, CentOS and Debian based systems. Even Adobe can manage that for the poxy Flash plugin.

I vaguely recall that at my first job some users used to hide games by renaming them as the first revision of a genuine work file. Then the sysadmin got wise to it and deleted all revisions, so users started naming them a.out or whatever the VMS equivalent was for the default linker output.

Scotland which like it or not is physically joined to England however for the sake of political correctness we will call him Scottish. Following that "logic" Voltaire was German, since France is physically (well, geographically) joined to Germany. Or if you meant politically joined, then I guess that makes Ghandi English since India was politically joined to Great Britain when he was born.

Since when did Slashdot become horribly biased in supporting Israel?

It's a US website, and having witnessed first hand how fucked up the teaching of history and reporting of foreign affairs is in that country I'm not surprised that it's biased. As an example, a couple of years ago a new book on the Anglo-American war of 1812 was published. It got a write up in a US paper where it was lambasted for not repeating the mantra that the British started the war. In actual fact, the documentary evidence proves that it was a war of aggression by the US that attempted to annex Canada while the British were struggling against Napoleon. The plan backfired, as the poorly organised US land forces were repeatedly defeated by determined Candian colonials backed later by hardened troops from Wellingtons Iberian army. Meanwhile the Royal Navy ravaged the US coast unopposed and Royal Marines torched Washington in revenge for similar actions by US forces at the start of the war. The war was subsequently portrayed as a victory by the US, despite achieving nothing more than a status quo ante bellum (the British could have pressed for concessions by threatening to use further forces freed up from the Napoleonic wars, but saw the whole thing as a sideshow and were content with the resultant treaty). The US maintained plans for annexing Canada as recent as the 1930s, and there was even strong public opinion in favour of putting the plan into action in the first two years of the Second World War.

Yup, branching and merging in SVN sucks. The original author even admitted that the existing support is incomplete (). Use a better version control system such as Mercurial and Git from the open source world, or Perforce and Plastic SCM from the proprietary world. Do not use Accurev. I repeat, do no use Accurev.

I'd suggest not vacuuming. A layer of dust and fluff will prevent the Bungle's Finger that most discerning burglars leave from adhering to the carpet.

Bollocks. CSS was designed to separate styling from structure in web pages. It does this admirably, and only needs to be a declarative language to do so. This prevents a lot of "clever" hacks that including conditional or flow statements would have encouraged. It's the same reason why statically typed languages are better than dynamic ones - since the tooling and compile time checks can be much more comprehensive and optimisation is easier - but clueless twats prefer the dynamic ones, since they don't understand the downsides or foolishly think they are so good they wont screw up. Improved programmer productivity claims for including flow statements in CSS (or using dynamic languages) are crap as well, since while a programmer might find it easier to cobble together something that just about works, chances are very high that it will be harder to maintain.

AMD even ...

The stability issue was on 48 core systems. That would be something like a ARM Bulldozer setup if it only had four sockets, and that's certainly not a "little thing".

I recently replaced ten halogen GU10 type bulbs in my house with LED ones, and the website I bought them from stocked dimmable ones. They even had replacements for the twelve G9 bulbs that we have in one room, which is great as the non-LED ones blow at a rate of roughly one a month and are very inefficient. We have an energy meter, and our daily consumption of electricity has roughly halved since replacing all the old incandescent and halogen bulbs.

And PA-RISC hits the 20th anniversay for the 64 bit version on three years time. Was always intrigued by that architecture, but only got to play very briefly with a HP9000 server.

Simula 67 was standardised in 1968. ANSI Common Lisp dates from 1984, and the OO implementation it includes (CLOS) was a relatively recent development at the time. CLOS is also a hack, although Lisp bores try and pretend it isn't by claiming the omissions make it "more poowerful".

Strange fortune cookie or whatever else that quote at the bottom of a Slashdot page is called:

To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy. -- MIT Assasination Club

Seems somewhat awkward given events in Boston over the last 24 hours.