Probably. But they DO cover more services. Bare MS licensing gives you not much more than the OS. Now add IIS support, Exchange, Office in every machine, etc. RHEL gives you an OS plus e-mail server, web server, directory server, virtualization, and all the free goodies packaged in RHEL. ALL WITHIN SCOPE OF THE SUPPORT CONTRACT.

That's exactly why you don't qualify for the job of investment banker. They're trained to make educated guesses. Depending on the mood, they may swing the number for better or worse. Also, that's why stock prices are so volatile.

Cleary you work in a f*cked up company. If your believe employees wake up every morning thinking "how can I make things worse at work" please shoot yourself. Trust is an integral part of managing people - else you're bound to suffocate yourself with micromanagement.

The thing is I'd be crucified if I charged my customres for the x.1 release - as Microsoft intends to.

I did. And it messes things up. That's why I asked.

Is TFA talking about the Linux or Windows thread and scheduling not good enough for 4+ cores (so your programs no matter how good designed will not benefit from more cores), about being damn hard to split, thread and join tasks, or both?

My "Java path" would be as follows:

J2SE: Duh! Forget Eclipse/Netbeans for now, use Notepad++ or Vim as you need to get a grasp for classloading, packaging, etc.

JDBC, then Hibernate, then JPA: These are the standard when talking about persistence. Now you can use Eclipse/Netbeans.

Tomcat/JSP/Servlets: The building blocks of web development.

Swing/threads: only if you need to develop local apps.

Those should give you the "Average Java Developer" sticker. Now it depends of where you're heading. If it's large enterprise, J2EE application server's basic services like authentication, integrated web server, EJBs, CMP, JSP/JSF, etc.

If it's "lighter" web development struts is good if dealing with legacy apps; spring or seam excels at newer apps.

I personally favors Seam since it leverages Java standards - I like to call it "J2EE done right". And the main leader, Gavin King is working to create a Seam-like J2EE core technology like he did with EJB3. It's a plus when dealing with corporations.