Play is in a bit of a transition, however. The 'new' play is Play 2, and it's still missing a lot of functionality when you start to dip under the hood and try to build out a real application (as I did over the last week or so). A number of basic features around DB integration, user management and other 'core' features aren't where they were in Play v1.

I ended up going with Python and flask for the early stages of my app, and figure that I can worry about moving back to Play 2 as/when it's ready and needed. As long as the backend database and model is the same it shouldn't be that painful a transition and prototyping with Python is *quick*.

Note that the above comments apply to the Java side of things, it's different if you're working with Scala as it uses different underlying technologies.

I suspect that Microsoft doesn't care much about linux one way or the other; if users want to tweak a BIOS option and run linux it won't bother them.

However, I wonder if Microsoft is looking at the far more lucrative fact that those with Windows 7 and Vista licenses will be forced to buy a new Windows 8 license or else run an "insecure" setup. It gets rid of a problem that they've had for years where users upgrade their hardware and keep their old OS around.

Seems like a massive money spinner in the medium term for them.

Yep that'll be Cherenkov radiation.

And some people have this funny belief that true freedom applies to everybody. If I write code under a free license then everyone should be free to do with it as they will, no restrictions. Otherwise it isn't free: in "protection from" Vs. "freedom to" the freer one is the one with the word "free" in it. Doesn't seem so hard to understand to me.

In-memory data storage is fine as long as it isn't primary data storage. Yes it's faster but there are a lot of downsides as well. The most important is that it isn't easy to share between servers (a close second is that it's hard to replicate to a remote site for disaster recovery purposes) so each server needs to have its own copy of the data and there needs to be some way of keeping all that data in sync.

The alternative is to have good old "traditional" storage sitting where it always sits and when the servers boot up or start their processing they load in the appropriate data set from the storage in to memory. This gives you all of the benefits of the fast in-memory processing without worrying about all of the downsides you create by using it as primary storage. So the memory isn't storage, it's cache.

So the real battle that will take place is not between hard disks and memory, it will be between RAM and SSDs.

No, the basic rules are:
      - Don't post sensitive user data on public sites

The rest is damage limitation.