You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code.

Maybe. On the other hand, this is called empowerment. Development horsepower is moving downhill. Power is moving out of the hands of the top developers into the hands of the merely mortal developers. And out of the hands of the merely mortal developers and into the hands of the power users. Here are some other things that are different today vs. the golden days of yore:

1. Empowerment of users. A lot fewer programmers are needed to get tasks done than used to be required. A huge portion of tasks users can now handle for themselves using spreadsheets, databases such as Access or their VB equivalents. Quite a few of the programming tasks I did professionally when I started 20 years ago are no longer needed, made no longer necessary by things such as label printing programs, easy to use mailmerge functions in word processors, and so on.
2. Software usability, and GUI. Back in the day, every single program needed documentation to come with it to explain how to use it. Today, most software is so easy to use that if you don't intuitively know how to accomplish what you want to do, it's pretty much crap. There are exceptions to this rule, like CAD programs and photo editing software, but mostly, software is way easier to use today than it used to be.
3. Programmers were forced to optimize their code, it wasn't like they had a choice. When you're working with 64k or 640k of main memory and bankswitching the rest of your memory or whatever, you kind of need to optimize your code. The difference in productivity between that kind of thing and what we to today is staggering. Today I write software by assembling modular bits of subprograms together rapidly, string it together with this or that, and wham, it's working. Back in the day, everything had to be written from scratch.
4. Radical productivity differences. Developers are radically more productive than they used to be. Things that used to take days or weeks to do are routinely done in hours now. Things that are considered routine today we didn't even attempt to do back in the day. (Example: Today, computers from different companies exchange data all the time easily and efficiently using webservices. Compare that to the nightmare of integration and taking forever or not getting done at all that EDI used to be.)

Sure, we use more memory now. And yes, it's easier to code than it used to be. I wouldn't say that drag and drop ide's are the be-all end all today, though. Non-gui development environments are just as popular as they used to be, don't you think? I'm thinking of Ruby on Rails, Django...

It's not a troll, it's informative-- from the perspective of explaining how trademark law works. The mod who marked it troll may not like it, but this is what the trademark law is about.

Did they actually implement the ranking now?...I remember the outrage a few weeks after the release, where players tried to deduce the formula for the ranking, and found out that your contribution score is actually a random number...

Yes, they did. You and the grandparent are both right, though. For "normal" world event quests, the ranking was based on your contribution, plus the bonus factor of how many times you've done it without getting the special goodie bags. Taking keeps, however, was done based on the random situation you described. Made for a pretty bogus situation.

There may be a market, but it's most definitely a dying market.

...fed up with Windows, and find the various fragmented releases of Linux to be too daunting...

The vibrant Linux community, with all of its options, daunting, while the OS/2 community which died like a decade ago before BeOS was even around, looks better? If your shit needs OS/2 to run, that is what we call obsolete. Port it to Linux. If that's too daunting, find a vendor that sells stuff made some time in the last ten or 15 years.

Oh and Oracle's core DB business? Hmmm, I could have sworn they'd moved beyond that, strategically acquiring Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA and now Sun in recent years - employing an army of consultants to compete with IBM's.

The Peoplesoft acquisition is to a great extent all about strengthening their position in the database market. They bought Peoplesoft, announced that the Peoplesoft product is pretty much dying, and you should start thinking about converting to Oracle Apps (Oracle's ERP offering built on top of Oracle DB which competes against Peoplesoft). Peoplesoft runs (ran?) on multiple databases-- the user had a choice. Oracle Apps is built almost entirely on PL/SQL stored procedures, and will never, ever run on any other database than Oracle.

Those acquisitions you mentioned (at least the Peoplesoft one, the only one that I have been closely involved with personally) are moves designed to kill serious competition and consolidating the marketplace. It's designed to acquire new customers to lock in. It's not about increasing a portfolio of knowledge and capability.

That's a little harsh. The original article was vague about how they arrived at the numbers. He showed his work and provided some references. His number was a small fraction of ubuntu's estimate. Then that sparked some conversation about why it might be so radically different-- for example pointing out that the number of people isn't necessarily the same as the number of installs. It's called contemplation, or discussion. Contemplation and discussion may annoy you enough to just bag on all topics of discussion, and that is called trolling, or being a douchebag.

Not the phones. But otherwise yes.

If I had modpoints, I mod you both trolls! Watch it!

2007 called, and they want their phone back!

In all seriousness, though, iPhone and Android are rapidly changing the landscape of mobile devices and computing and inter-personal communications in general. Nokia's pretty much going to get left in the dust, unless their Android products catch on.

With regard to Macs, the world is changing to a more platform-neutral world, where Macs work as well as any other kind of computer. Actually, Mac laptops make better Windows machines than any other laptop I've ever used. Mac laptops have an impressive market share.

I realize you know all this, and are just pointing out that iPhone isn't the dominant phone. But 2007 was about mobile phones. 2010 and beyond is about mobile computing devices.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you don't live or work in the San Francisco area.

As someone who has a few years experience after graduating college, getting laid off due to budget cuts, and recently finding a new job, I can say that the hiring managers like you are horribly taking advantage of the bad economy.

Not so much. For every hiring manager like him who doesn't believe in discriminating against people that are overqualified, there are a bunch of do discriminate against people who are overqualified.

In 2001 after the dotcom crash, I was overqualified for most things that were available, desperate for any job. I started dumbing down my resume, posing as a more entry level position. People just didn't want to take a high power person and accept them into a low paying job.

My advice is to have something very specific that is compatible with the needs of who you're applying for. For example, I wanted to break into the telephony business. So I went and did a bunch of stuff with Asterisk (using softphones, because I couldn't afford to buy real hardware). I built some things that itnerested me, specifically phone sex dating sites. I was able to demonstrate that to the company I was applying to, and landed a really fun job. This was a few years ago, when people still used phones.

Figure out what interests you, and start building something you can demonstrate and talk about during your interviews, something that applies specifically to the class of job that interests you. And in the mean time, figure out how to live ultra cheap: no car, learn to cook beans and rice and make awesome burritos for $0.70USD per serving and so on.

It's the natural state of many animals. The fact that it's not the natural state of affairs for humans is central to what makes us human.

Exactly right. Or to look at the flipside: In the C64 era, I often heard old timers talk about "kids these days! You just bring your computer home and plug it in! If you really want to know something about computers, build it yourself, like I had to do with my Altair and my Heathkit!" If you look at Popular Science from the 1950's it isn't even talking about computers much-- just a lot of radar, radio, and general electronics. Most people today don't know the first thing about RF, but that was all the rage then.

And before that, people probably raged about losing the art of sword mastery with the advent of guns. And on and on.

Nostalgia is great and all. But on a C64 I'd write a FOR/NEXT loop from 1 to about 400 to do a 1 second delay. Write that in C, or heck, Python or even javascript and see what happens. Computers are mind blowingly faster now. Plus, think of the wonders youngsters can learn Google now-- everything from the details of bestiality to the finer points of making explosives with things from the garden supply store. Or even useful things like honing their skills in other languages, or connecting with other cultures from their laptop. Get a grip people: it's better now than it was then!

You're right. But 1920x1080, with 2 or 3 monitors isn't unreasonably expensive to get. And it's getting cheaper with each passing month. I've got my main monitor at 1980x1080, plus 2 monitors on the sides of that slightly smaller. It's cost effective and reasonable to get multiple monitors. It's harder to use the screen real estate effectively than it is to get the real estate.