How about stones?

It's simply brilliant *tear*

1) Yes
2) Yes
3) Maybe :D

To be blunt, I have noticed a MASSIVE decline in the quality, intelligence, and desire to do a 'good' job in the companies I've been at over the last 5 years. The outsourcing boom chronicled so nicely in Office Space and the like has not done anything to improve the quality of tech work.

I would say good IT people are probably 1 in 100 or less - the rest are either grossly incompetent, lazy, or completely burned out by carrying 2-3 times the workload that should be expected of them.

Always-on, always-on-call lifestyles and mentalities have driven many of the good rank and file (those not totally into IT for whatever reason, but still competent and savvy) out into pretty much ANY other field.

Heck, I know 8 amazing IT people who left last year when they became the 'last one standing' after massive outsourcing or layoffs. They decided that they would rather open barbershops, bookstores, coffeeshops, or go to the business side.

The people left are just ghastly. (I'm generalizing - there are still some amazing people, it's just that the *ratio* is so bad)

It's working for me with Debian and Firefox - no user agent tricks or anything. Stupid article.

Exactly - I spent a year running a Y2K lab, constantly running through key dates so that programmers could test code. Stuff broke - stuff broke UGLY. It took months to get most of it working properly, and if the systems I was testing had broken?
People would have noticed. People would have sued.

Just add emacs :D

I kid I kid...

Wll, I'm so sorry I didn't have such an amazing god of Java around 10 years ago to do all this for me! It would have made *my* life easier!

On the other hand, I find people like you can talk the talk, but not walk the walk.

So why don't you gloat and feel happy, and I'll continue to point out that for *me* Java was a less efficient and productive language.

The whole point I was making was about subjective experience - I never claimed it was anything but my fault.

Entirely possible. I may at some point go back and review it, but essentially I had a huge local table (20,000 databases long, up to 20 rows wide) that was sortable by the user clicking on a column header. Therefore the sort is taking place completely based on the user's selection criteria. I think I used Swing Tables for the Java side, as they were quite the rage at the time.

Ahhh - but see, that doesn't fit the requirement. The requirement is that I have to populate the Auditor's Excel and Word docs (as noted by the 'SOX'), often already laden with random auditor formatting. AJAX and all is cute, but if it doesn't fit the requirement of 'Must be an Excel document', then it doesn't fly.

It's possible now with the improvement of ODF and such that I could gin up something, but again. More time spent when a *much* easier approach exists.

Sorry, I think DEC has that patent already... so I guess HP owns it now :D

"Patent for a method of developing innovations that result in bankruptcy"

You may be right here. I have, on many occasions, had to program reasonable size DB apps in both.

Java.makes.me.want.to.claw.my.eyes.out() .NET may only be truly on windows, but it's actually not so bad to code in. I wrote a DB reporting and maint. app in C# in roughly 2 weeks, the previous version of which in Java took almost 2 months.

Major things, IME that made the difference?
Crazy easy remote DB access (sure, neither are exactly rocket science, but .net was quicker and more flexible)
Easy installs - this had me from the start. I wasn't writing a web app, but a desktop app. The C# one was a breeze, the Java one a major headache
Attractive frontends - this will probably start yet another flamewar, but many of the java frontends are HIDEOUS
Performance when doing large dataset manipulations - for example, determining which server had the least free space, or which one had the most obsolete users. These are fairly trivial sorting tasks, but the java version took probably twice as long and more memory (in my implementation, which may well have sucked to be frank).
Support for dumping data into Excel and Word - this was a killer feature. I was able to generate SOX and sizing reports on the fly with C#. Java? No such luck. I never did get it working quickly and properly.

4x10 beats the heck out of 5x10, which is what I usually do :D

LOL - I had just foolishly *assumed* that by now Slashdot would get their stuff together.

And sadly no, I'm not that new. I started in 2000 or so, finally registered when it became too hard to track my posts :) I'm just naive enough to think they will eventually figure it out :D

What are they up to now, 7 digits?

Seriously. It's like Poe's law was invoked for this post.

I make a pretty good salary, but the work hours are crazy (I know I'm not the only one here doing MAJOR system work over Christmas), and the only real chances for advancement are into management (same as any other field).

Why a Debian logo instead of the Ubuntu logo?

While I don't agree with the 'bomb them before it's too late' theory, we agree about MAD.

That was the old way. The new way is limited high-speed tactical retaliation using standard munitions. Considering the threat posed to a small player (like NK) by even a single Carrier Group showing up in the Sea of Japan, I consider the new method to be very different than the old.

The threat of mass nuclear proliferation ('Global Thermo-Nuclear War' How about a nice game of Chess?) is less likely. The threat of nuclear war is probably far more likely, though... just because as you (and some random AC) pointed out, there are so many more people running around with nukes. World destroying? Probably not. Insanely dangerous? Yes.