reading the comments in this thread reminds me why i rarely read comments on slashdot.

mirah is java, with a friendlier type system and ruby-like syntax. like jruby, but without having to drag around a huge runtime library, or maintain language compatibility with a language with no spec (ruby).

mirah compiles directly to bytecode, just like java, so it's as fast as java. it has type inference, so types are still there if you want/need them. the syntax is a matter of religion and/or taste, i tend to like it. you also get the entire corpus of java frameworks and libraries for free.

i personally am _more_ excited about mirah than i am about jruby (or even ruby for that matter).

charles nutter is one of the main (the main?) guy behind jruby for those who (for some reason) think this is some sort of attack on jruby.

Most companies are cool with this. A lot of them like to hire right out of college so they get cheap labor for 2-3 years until the junior employees realize that they've gained enough skill to get paid more elsewhere. In some cases, this is short-sighted on the part of the employer. In others, it can make sound financial sense.

I've become more valuable exactly because I've hopped around a bit, myself. The company I work for now hired me years ago as entry level, never gave me a raise, so I left. I learned a bunch of new skills, and they sought me out and hired me back at a much higher salary. I'm much, much more valuable to them now than I was then, precisely because I went to work for other companies and gained a different skillset.

And it's full of misinformation:

1) The A5 is not meant to take on Atom. The A9 is.
2) The A5 is not architecturally identical to the A9. The A9 is an in-order, multi-issue core. The A5 is an out-of-order, single-issue core. The only thing similar is it has the Cortex A-series ISA.

What the A5 is is a CPU that completely obliterates the ARM11-derived cores, used in everything from NVIDIA Tegra to the Nintendo DS. It's an update of the ISA, and a more capable core, with better thermals. That's it. Whereas every low-end smartphone now has the same damn QualComm ARM11-based core, in a year, they'll all have the A5.

Unfortunately there are ongoing costs associated with developing a game client; it's not a one-time expense. I've talked with Linux advocates who think that it would be rather cheap to create and maintain a native Linux client, but I don't really buy that..

I think he's asking "would the people using the linux client be totally new subscribers or would they be people who used wine to play before?" Basically, reading between the lines, he's wondering if they can get away with having Linux users use wine, and at the moment, that seems to be the case.

Back when Blizzard's Warden program misidentified a bunch of cedega users as hackers, there was a fair amount of frank talk from cedega maintainers and blue posters (reps from Blizzard who post on the official forums) about cedega/wine and wow. Blizzard posters mentioned they would be tracking the use of wine/cedega (since it's possible to do so, though some douchbaggery from Microsoft made the wine maintainers put in some features that make it harder for programs to detect if they're running in wine). Also, cedega devs mentioned that they are in contact with Blizzard developers to ensure that cedega will run wow. Unfortunately, cedega has fallen by the wayside as their codebase atrophied, customer support became inadequate, and wine overtook it in compatibility and bugfixes, so I'm not sure what the status of all that is now.

They've done that before -- I remember filling out such a poll a few years ago. I don't really remember if it was for World of Warcraft, but it was a Blizzard game, at least.

I don't think they would. At least, I have no plans to stop playing.

My biggest flaw with the test was that they were testing multi-taskers ability to single task... Not their ability to multi-task. A good test for mutlitasking would be to press a button when a new odd number came up and say the vowel when a new vowel came up. Test self-reported multi-taskers and self-reported single taskers at multi-taskings... Maybe?

Seriously... I'm known in my company for being an HTML/CSS wizard, but I'm also a full fledged software engineer who can and does work on all the tiers. At least learn some of the services and Javascript/AJAX stuff -- without that, you can't do any real work. Heck, at least learn some common frameworks so you can apply your HTML into a JSP decorator or CodeIgniter template or something...

Unless all you want to do for a living is get paid $20/hour slicing up someone's PSD's. My company does use services like that. They're cheap. Particularly the ones who don't do any DHTML/JS.

I think it depends on where you were taught and who you were teaching. I've known both sane biology professors, and some who practically canonized Darwin as their patron saint. I agree with the Author's premise; there is too much religious zeal among many biologists. Religion is not science, and confusing the two is detrimental to both.

I say this as a deeply religious man, and a scientist.

The problem is, mot employees seem to cringe at the thought of any progress being made with technology.

Yes, it is a problem. It may be a problem born of closed-mindedness, but the problem is real nonetheless. That's why we're doing phased deployments. We're doing the technical people first, so the technical people can answer any questions people have. Then production, then copy and editorial, then marketing, then sales, and finally management. We've only got ~65 employees, and we don't have budget for a helpdesk.

I frankly prefer OOo Writer to MS Word, particularly 2007. It is, however, different.

You're absolutely wrong. This isn't "just a little bit of re-training". This is a big deal. The thing is, everyone uses MS Office. If someone can't do some little task, chances are they can ask one of their co-workers. You can't ever really under-estimate this kind of knowledge, and what it's worth. The cost of an entire corporation which is switching over all at once to a new piece of productivity software is quite high, in terms of productivity.

I say this as a low-level project manager who successfully convinced my company to move to OpenOffice 3. We're doing phased deployments, one team at a time, over the course of the next year, that way the whole thing doesn't grind us to a halt. We're sticking with Outlook, at least for now, but the rest of MS Office is going away, starting with Word. Why are we doing this?

1) cost
2) extensibility (plugin development)
3) stability of the ODF format

We've built some automation tools that leverage ODF to save us hundreds of man-hours per year. ODF is more elegant and stable than any of Microsoft's solutions, and so we built a whole stack of XSLT's and tools around it. We support MS Word formats, but only by running them through OO.o's conversion filters to ODF first.

If we didn't build this, the cost of switching to OO.o would far outweigh the licensing costs.

My guess is that as the economy manages to sort itself out over the next year or so you'll see a comeback in smaller individual stores, local/regional chains, etc. that provide MUCH better service. I think consumers are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to realizing that they need to think about things like after-sale service & support, and the big box stores simply don't provide that with any sense of reliability or consistency.

I wish you were right, but I think the opposite is true. I love local electronics/hi-fi stores. The masses won't go to them, however, because they typically don't stock the low-end, low-priced products, and can't beat Walmart on the prices. In a recession, people won't go for premium.

I'm a conservative Roman Catholic, who views homosexual activity as mortally sinful, and would prefer to live in a traditional Catholic monarchy where the monarch is answerable only to God and the Pope. I don't expect anyone on Slashdot to see eye-to-eye with me here, and this is not the point that I wish to debate.

I realize, however, I live in a modern, liberal, pluralistic republic, and will likely never get to live in a society that I want, therefore I am more than willing to compromise to be at peace with the rest of society. I feel in a secular republic, such as the US, the best solution is for the government to stay out of it -- best would be no legal recognition of marriage at all. Nor should it recognize anything resembling a civil union. Marriage, from a legal standpoint, should be built out of pre-existing contract law. Simple and elegant -- Catholics could have a standard marriage contract drawn up that would fit their framework, Jews could do the same, as could atheists, Freemasons, Jedi, etc. Employers would be free to do what they wish in terms of insurance -- if you don't like it, work somewhere else.

Unfortunately, this would require serious amount of changes at the federal, state, and municpal laws, including modifications to the US constitution. I would certainly support this sort of effort, though it is unlikely to ever happen.