Hey, here's the "Things have gotten more expensive" crap. I guess it depends on your idea of crap. I'm going back to college to finish getting my degree at a local public university. I had one class that required 3 books and cost about $250. One band-spanking-new "lab" book, and 2 used textbooks. There is some serious bullshit going on with books, and it HAS gotten worse.

When I was at Purdue in '99, used books cost between $60 - $90 depending and new books were maybe $110. Now the used books cost $110 and are only in use 1 year so you can't even sell the stupid things back. It's a racket.

Maybe if GPS manufacturers hadn't disregarded the DOD requirements on GPS, the technology wouldn't mess with your GPS http://m.lightsquared.com/press-room/press-releases/gps-industrys-failure-to-comply-with-department-of-defense/

Imagine I bought a timeshare for 2 weeks a year and noticed that nobody was using the week after mine and I started planning 3 weeks stays. A few years down the road, somebody else shows up and wants to stay during that third week. What right would I have to be pissed?

Personally, I'm more concerned to find out that it's apparently really easy to knock out military GPS.... It seems like somebody would want to fix that rather than complain about spectrum usage. Just my 2 cents.

I got that one right too, although I did it more by process of elimination. At the time I was watching ST:TNG I didn't know who Kelesey Grammer was.

"There was a time when working part time over the summer would be enough to pay ALL college expenses"

I only started college in 1981, so maybe it was before my time. But that sure wasn't the case then.

College is essentially a full-time job for 9 months a year in the US. If there was ever a time when a part time job for 3 months a year covered a full time existence for 9 months, well, I sure missed out on that era. Perhaps that was part of the mythical 1950's that everyone seems to pine for, even though if you were 15 in 1955 you'd probably be 71 now - meaning the vast majority of the population wasn't around in the "good old days" of being terrified of nuclear war, the Communist Menace, etc.

I wonder if /. would post some stats on OS usage at /. by time of day (expect lots more XP during the day while we work for The Man), and browser usage? A percentage of the total so the /. corporate overlords don't think there's trade secrets being released (e.g., 20% XP, 15% OSX, 0.001% HURD, etc.).

I think it's great that people have been this creative with Minecraft, and I think it's cool that Minecraft is capable of doing it. On the other hand I question the usefulness of doing bigger and bigger things like this. Of course, this is coming from an adult with a job and a half who is also married and taking classes so I might be a little more judicious with my time.

I've never been a huge contributor here but I spend a lot of time reading Slashdot and I just wanted to say thanks!

I'd say you nudge him out of delivering code if you can, if your team can handle the load, by suggesting you can take that project on, in order to free him up for more strategic work - like vendor evaluation, training/skills development, a standards/process review, or whatever. Praise him when possible for anything he does that's NOT coding. Send notes to him and copy his boss that his standards review was excellent and you really appreciate his taking the managerial approach to making things better. Build a pattern of rewards for non-coding efforts. If that's not possible, or he won't give it up, then either rewrite his code before it hits production, (you will eventually anyway), or switch teams. That one's rough!