3% of all dinosaurs say that meteor-induced global climate change is a myth!

We're talking North Florida, here. Not as many retirees, more rednecks. Most of whom actually probably only would buy a pressure cooker for bomb-making purposes.

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.

Teach a man to fish, then charge him for use of your private lake for the rest of his life.

Whoa! Increased productivity means LESS labor to afford the products! Unless the producers artificially jack up the spread between cost-to-produce and cost-to-buy, the product prices go down, not up. Consider the difference between a high-end stereo system circa 1960 and now. The modern-day equivalents are much smaller, vastly more power-efficient, and produce much better audio quality for the dollar. About the only major downshift has been from furniture-quality cabinets to plastic boxes, but even the plastic boxes have a much better fit and finish than a 1960's plastic box. And you were a very unusual person indeed back then if you had a computer in your house (although I knew someone with an IBM S/360 in his basement in the mid 1970's. He ran a business with it, though).

The one case where it takes MORE labor to afford all these goodies is when the labor itself becomes devalued. Which does seem to be the way we've been headed for the last 20 years or so.

Actually, the peak decade for flowcharts was probably the 1960s. By the mid-1980s, Object-Oriented programming had pretty much rendered them obsolete, although they had been waning in popularity ever since Structured Programming became the norm in the 1970s, as flowcharts actually are most essential when you have spaghetti code. When code is more modular and/or more organized, other tools, such as Nassi-Scheiderman diagrams are more useful for covering all the potential decision paths.

The 1970s was the decade of the 4GL. The "Fourth Generation Languages" were supposed to be higher-level, more abstract frameworks (as opposed to 3GLs, such as FORTRAN and COBOL). Problem was, they did what they were supposed to do very well, but made doing the actual above-and-beyond things that people always demand very difficult indeed. Modern-day 4GL equivalents include such things as RoR and Spring Roo, which suffer from the same problems.

Python isn't really a higher-level language than Java. What it is is an example of the currently-popular idea that because it produces visible results more rapidly that it is "more productive". However, this speed in delivery comes from discarding much of the coding-time debugging that languages like Java demand. What is actually occurring is that you move the time-consuming parts of the job to some other part of the overall application lifecycle, just as OO programming languages moved more of the error checking to earlier parts of the lifecycle. For "one-off' hacking jobs, then, Python is a good choice, since you don't care about getting all the bugs out. For an ongoing production system, it becomes just another option.

In short, despite decades of trying, the net amount of work to develop an industrial grade system remains about the same. You can shift what phases the work is done in, but the total amount of work required is just about the same, regardless. And is likely to stay that way until we come up with a completely different way to get computers to do what we want.

Oh yes. In fact, the ideal Roomba room is spiral-shaped with star-like extensions.

Good point. What he actually did was get the necessary laws passed to make it legal. Most of the earlier presidents simply kept it under the wire.

Someday, however, I would not be surprised to hear the announcement of the Gene Wolfe Award.

Part of the genius of Gene Wolfe is the way he makes fantasy ambiguous - for example Soldier in the Mist. Where fantastic things happen, but the protagonist has brain damage, so the objective reality of the fantasy cannot be guaranteed.

Devil in a Forest is another good example. Neither of these works are what I'd call SF, however. At best, they'd be historical fiction.

I refuse to have anything to do with it unless it supports Rlyeh'an.

Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu ftagn!

The version number "has" to be part of the product name because different releases of the product can vary radically in both external (user-facing) and internal (codebase) characteristics. Tacking a version number onto the product name aids in supportability by attempting to ensure that all parties are, in fact, talking about the same thing. As a secondary characteristic, it makes it easier to document which features are available in what release, since the version number serves as a reference key.

Ideally, a major version number indicates a significant change, a minor version number indicates a feature release, and a semi-minor number a bugfix release. In practice, even in the best-regulated enterprise this sometimes breaks down.

Of course, you can use other versioning schemes - the SAS Institute preferred putting the release year into its version numbers. For most of us, however, Java 1.5 is an easier reference point to keep in mind than "Java Build #3722". Especially since it's not uncommon for unofficial builds to end up in the hands of preferred customers, which would wreck any attempt to only number the public releases.

s/u/\./

The problem with simply checking for "version >= X" is that sometimes X.5 breaks the app. The ideal approach would be to be able to certify later releases on an individual basis. However, that would require updating the app.

Bush set the precedent. That's what I cannot forgive. I pointed out at the time that aside from the fact that this kind of stuff was wrong in and of itself that administrations change and that a wise person does not prepare weapons for his enemies to use against him, but...

Fixed it.

If you could teach people to work together, that would be the foundations of communism. However, Communism in the real world had the cart and horse backwards, a lot of cynical hypocrites in charge (who weren't working together) and various other impurities.

Communism, like a lot of philosophies, would work much better if it didn't ignore human nature.