Big tech is promotion obsessed. And as these companies grow they attract non-technical MBA armies who need to show value and are obsessed with ladder-climbing and promotion. Then projects like this are created. Google has 1 big fat money-making advertising business... and then some side-hobbies.

And after gaining some C++ experience with your defense contractor gig, move on to a high frequency trading firm doing C++ @ $350k per year.

FYI - any time someone suggests anything other than C, even *GASP* C++ here they get modded down to infinity and beyond. Enjoy the ride...

If enough people make a big deal about this in their forums, they won't be able to ignore it.

Heh? C# has been running on linux for a long time. It's called the mono project.

A language can't be fast or slow, that's up to the platform. I can compile java the language into a binary. Likewise I can run a C app in real mode DOS that requires expanded memory access and it would be very slow compared to an platform that has access to 64 bits of memory.

It was pretty tough to pirate CDs back then. CD burners didn't become prevalent much later. Not to mention that my 25 Mhz Packard Bell 486SX probably couldn't keep the burner buffers full.

You can't go through life as a condescending a-hole thinking everyone is an illiterate this or an idiot that. People skills are part of solving problems for people. It sounds like you're in the wrong career. You need to be in something where you will not come into contact with other people.

Nope. That's actually not how volcanos work. You can't just poke it with a needle and cause an eruption. There has to be enough geologic pressure to cause the magma to go through the surface. At best we might release some funny gases.

They don't any more. At most startup companies they can't afford a typical bureaucratic IT department. Many use cloud hosting to avoid up-front cap-ex in terms of data centers and the people that work in them. Developers are typically managing their own servers, their own NOSQL cluster, they bring their own iPhones, gPhones, xPads, etc. People are becoming increasingly more comfortable with technology and old-school IT departments are no longer enablers, but barriers as their mindsets and their technology pale in comparison to the consumer sector.

This is sort of the problem with SETI. We will actually be checking if they had an advanced enough civilization that could broadcast into space... 600 years ago. We have only had electrical power generation for 130 years.

People like to pretend that CS grads are working on operating systems kernels and developing new algorithms, but the reality is that most people on a day-to-day basis are working on a typical line-of-business record keeping system with reports that used to be done in Excel.

I have a 7805 voltage regulator next to me right now that does a fine job of stepping 12V into 5V at up to 1A without a heat sink. And that was a very cheap component. I imagine that one can do a lot more with more money or volume.

If google operated under this kind of thinking, they would index 1/10000 of what they do today. This is why startups are choosing the cloud in favor of real data centers with real traditional IT people.

Actually not all. I'm using C++. While new() doesn't work, creating a static instance of a class and using references works awesome. It's amazing the level of complexity you shove into those atmel processors (I went with a teensy).