Just release it. Once public, it become prior art and cannot be patented by someone else. After a period of time (~ one year), you can't patent it yourself anymore either.

You know, for a website that loves to pontificate about patent law every 10 minutes, Slashdot and its editors sure don't seem to know jack shit about the subject..."

(DISCLAIMER: If one of the various "patent reform" bills makes it through Congress and becomes law, and the U.S. moves from a "first to invent" system to a "first to file" system, then all this will probably change. But that's not the state of things right now.

Ultimately, you can either be a PM or a developer. I agree with other comments, that trying to be both simultaneously invites failure. That said, it seems like most careers in I.T. involve "stepping sideways" into something along the way.

I'm more accustomed to seeing this flow in the opposite direction... people who start off as developers, yet later in their careers step into management, hands-off architecture, pre-sales support, etc. However, there's no reason why you can't flow the other way. You would have a hard time being taken seriously at something truly hardcore, like development of compilers, kernels, or large enterprise back-end systems. However, who are we kidding... **most** of the JavaScript coders I've ever met were HTML designers who gradually stepped into development, and a ton of PHP or Ruby guys just kinda stumbled into it with no Computer Science background at all.

However, if you want that career path... you ARE going to have to "shit or get off the pot", and say farewell to being a PM (at least in the sense that most people use that job title). A true PM stays the hell out of the codebase, although you can pitch yourself as having "team lead" experience if you want to leverage that background. As far as making the transition, do the same thing any other entry-level programmer would do. Pick up a degree in the evenings, or maybe some certifications (they can matter a little bit at the entry-level). Dive into an open source project, so you have some resume code floating out there. Make your company aware that you want this transition, and be prepared for the fact that you likely will need to change companies for it to really stick.

Also be aware that you may be talking about a pay cut at first, because you're going from being an experienced PM to an entry-level coder. However, senior coders make more money than PM's... so you can be better off in the long run as far as that goes.

Good luck.

There's a Bitcoins joke in here somewhere...

Hmm... it's been a few years since I last threw Mint in a VM, and at that time it looked even more newbie-oriented than Ubuntu itself. Maybe I'll grab the latest LiveCD and tinker around a bit to see where things stand today.

It's interesting to read the responses to this post... the consensus of which seems to be, "Who cares? You can always install it".

In the past, I've seen Slashdot go ape-shit because the window controls were moved from the right to the left. People are incensed about an auto-hide launcher bar on the left side of the screen. Then Canonical basically replaces their decent apt wrapper with a dumbed-down version of the Apple App Store... and people barely shrug.

I just don't get it anymore. I'm in my mid-30's, and feel like an old man. I simply don't understand OS or UI design best practices in the year 2011, or how people today come about the preferences that they have. Personally, I'm the opposite from the majority here. Bring on the appley-googley imitation crap if you must... I adjust pretty quickly to minor cosmetic changes intended to keep things fresh. However, I get frustrated by rapid changes to the defaults of actual system management.

If there were a distribution which leveraged Ubuntu's excellent apt repository, yet was intended for power users (rather than dumbed-down even further like Mint), then I would jump ship in 5 minutes. Yeah, I can change all this stuff manually in Ubuntu... but defaults matter. Why would I want to spend a freaking hour trying to make every new install act like Hardy Heron?

THIS IS THE GREATEST EXAMPLE OF HYPERBOLE ON SLASHDOT EVER!!!!!

But seriously... customs officials at any of the world's borders make bigger busts than this all the time, for trafficking actual physical goods. For that matter, taking out a single Somali rowboat would be a bigger "piracy bust" than this.

Lame, editors.

I agree that 60 hours of WORK per week is probably hyperbole... but the spirit rings true. When I was in my 20's, all I had was work and leisure. Period. As I shifted into my 30's, I now have wife and family. I'm active in church, and a couple of civic organizations. I have more home maintenance chores, because I now own rather than rent. I started learning a musical instrument, because when you get older you want to tackle some of those "one of these days..." life goals. Etc.

So, yeah... I may work just a hair over 40 hours a week, but I feel like I have 80-100 hours per week of stuff going on. Life's just different from what it was in my 20's.

On the other hand, I just noticed that he titled his post "Paradigm shift". Actually, you can mod *down* for that.

This sums it up. Everyone else can stop now.

This summary reminds me of every dumb phone I've ever received from incompetent I.T. recruiters, as they mindlessly read off buzzwords...

Recruiter: Do you have "JEE"?
Me: Yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "Java"?
Me: That's included in the previou... oh, nevermind. Yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "Oracle"?
Me: Yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "SQL"?
Me: That's part of...... yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "agile"?
Me: Oh fuck my life...

Nothing personal, but this is exactly what I was talking about in terms of "Hello World" mindshare.

High memory usage (7) and slow startup times (3) are legitimate complaints about large-scale Java applications. However, compilers (4), build scripts (1), and some sort of container system (6) are simply par for the course in any large-scale enterprise environment. To make the Gee-Wiz-Webby-2.0-Hello-World stuff scale to industrial-strength levels... companies have to either break off the most intensive operations to be handled by a JRE (e.g. Twitter), or write their own traditional compiler for the language (e.g. Facebook).

Config files are a hassle (2), but frameworks like Spring and Hibernate have been moving toward annotations and config-by-convention for years. No matter how you slice it, if you're using dependency-injection or any sort of modern design practices, then that wiring information has to be maintained SOMEWHERE. If you're not used to maintaining that information, then that just says you haven't worked on any large-scale applications. Speaking of which, frameworks (10) are bad?!? Even the Hello World stuff is all based on frameworks, e.g. Rails for Ruby, Symfony or Cake for PHP, Django for Python, Grails for Groovy, etc. People stopped throwing their homegrown Perl scripts into "/cgi-bin" back in 1997!

I don't know what to say about "wordy" (9) or "curly brace" (8) complaints. That stuff is subjective... these traits were simply adopted from C, the primary language for doing real work prior to Java becoming the primary language for real work. However, the final item (5) is by far the dumbest on this list. I don't mind a manager who "loves a language they don't have to use". I hate managers who see the shiny graphics on the Ruby or Rails websites, spend 15-minutes walking through the hello world Rails tutorial, and then start pushing it because they magically feel like a programmer too! All things considered, "disrespecting your job" is a hell of a lot better than "thinking they could do your job".

I can name at least dozen "scripting" languages that run atop the Java Runtime Environment. About half of them have been around for nearly a decade. The most popular non-Java scripting languages (e.g. Ruby, Python) started creeping into the enterprise by way of their JRE implementations (e.g. JRuby, Jython). Nevertheless, apparently the ultimate "Java Killer" is going to be... yet ANOTHER language running atop the Java Runtime Environment! Developed by the company behind the JBoss, one of the top-5 Java application servers. And Seam, one of the top-5 Java application frameworks. Apparently, Java "dies" in the same manner as Dr. Who...

I get it. I understand why these posts are so popular, and why Slashdot runs at least one per week. Compared to Ruby on Rails or whatever... Java is relatively verbose, and it's more cumbersome for newbies to write their first Hello World app. Of course when you're working on real-world enterprise projects, with large developer teams and significant codebases, then much of that cumbersome stuff makes life a lot easier. But many people online are closer to that Hello World end of the spectrum, so a language's "Hello World experience" drives message board mindshare. Plus, there is the evil-Oracle thing on top of that. So Java sucks. Java's dying. I get it.

Except that it's not. At least not anytime soon, and not until you can show me a credible replacement that doesn't have "Runs On The JRE!" as its main selling point. I'm sure that something will come along eventually, but hell... in the realm of core business logic, Java only just surpassed "legacy" languages such as COBOL and C++ within the past few years! Moreover, the best contenders for "Next Big Thing" are JRE-based languages such as Scala, for which fundamental Java knowledge makes you more productive. Hell, even *off* the JRE, I would argue that being a top-class Ruby or Python developer requires as much computer science knowledge as with Java. Once you get beyond the Hello World stage, the idea that "scripting" languages are easier to learn is a fairy tale.

All that being said... I'm poo-poo'ing the hyperbole in the title, and not the content itself. It's nice to see another strongly-typed language on the JRE besides Scala. From what I see in the slideshow, this Ceylon thing looks like a "me too!" version of Scala, which has an 8-year head start. However, the Seam framework from RedHat has always been a rather "me too!" competitor to Spring also. Even though I've worked more in the Spring camp, I've still benefited from Seam because it pushes Spring to stay ahead. Maybe Scala can benefit from this competition also.

Take a scale.

On one side of the scale, place a million dollars (relative to the annual revenue of Oracle).

On the other side of the scale, place the value of maintaining some kind of redirect for the millions of links that will never completely go away. Then place the value of keeping the domain out of the hands of anyone who might use it in a way detrimental to your interests. Last but not least... place the fact that "sun.com" is embedded in the DTD's and XML Schemas for virtually all Java technology, and it would take decades to fully migrate away from and decommission all that.

This is so stupidly lopsided, the scale would break. Oracle will never do this. Maybe the point is simply that this domain name has a high appraisal value... but even that is not particularly interesting (*every* three-letter domain has a high appraisal value). This "story" is only here because any lazy filler involving Oracle, Microsoft, or the other standard villains is always good for a few clicks and advertising impressions.

Exactly. Every week or two, some variant of this "story" is cut-n-pasted by an editor who either doesn't know any better... or who does know better and posts it anyway to attract ignorant eyeballs. Clueless people love reading and ranting on this issue... because it involves:

1. 1) A company that everyone hates (Oracle)
2. 2) A subject that almost everyone here hates and almost no one here understands (patents)
3. 3) A language (Java) that most people here never quite trusted in the first place, either because:
   1. a) They're C/C++ old farts, and think it's for young whipper-snappers
   2. 2) They're PHP/Ruby whipper-snappers, and think it's for old farts, or
   3. 3) They're Richard Stallman

... what are you kids TALKING about? It seems like most of the replies on this branch of the thread are about convergence between phones and PC's, and eventually using productivity apps on your phone. Who on earth wants to use a 3-inch phone to manipulate a spreadsheet, type in a word processor, or anything beyond the most specialized niche of data-entry for any extended period of time? Even tablet devices are poorly-suited for such tasks.

The intended purpose of a smart phone is not content generation or productivity. Their purpose is to read stuff (e.g. important email, directions to the restaurant, etc), and to play Angry Birds... until you've finished your car trip or boring meeting, and can return to your PC. You might tap a one-sentence reply to an email (with crappy grammar and capitalization), or enter the name of the restaurant, but that's about it for productive data-entry.

The limitation behind this is not the number of CPU cores in the device, nor its power budget. The limitation is the form factor! Duh! You can cram a supercomputer into the thing... yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen. Now, the idea of docking stations for your phone (or perhaps a standard docking port for phones on your PC) does sound like it could be useful in some circumstances... but I'm highly skeptical of full-blown "convergence".