One data, please!

About the time it started getting called "Java EE" instead of "J2EE" they started stripping out most of the requirements for redundant default configurations. Some of the complexity is gratuitous, sure, but a lot is because it attempts to let developers handle more complex situations or scaling requirements (horizontal and/or vertical). I used to scoff years ago at some of the layers and knobs, until I found myself needing to use them, then I thought "these guys were smart to think of this in advance".

There are worse things than having a codebase -- already somewhat sanity-checked by the compiler, mind you -- that you can drop into an application server along with a small configuration file, and it can just plug into your preferred vendor, your preferred database, your system/user/network configuration.

I've played with a lot of frameworks and written others. Regardless of hype or abstract quality (and by the way I used to really detest Java as a language; now it's down to a mild dislike as they've improved it and things like Lombok have come along) it turns out I can just sit down and get work done with it and to some extent it helps my projects be "the right way" out of the box for later growth, and I have to respect that.

Are you really lumping Ron Paul and Paul Ryan in the same category? And claiming Ron Paul supports corporate welfare?

This is an old lesson, learned long ago. Check out jwz's story of the "bad attitude" mailing list, though I'm sure there are older instances with more serious consequences.

NapkinLAF

On the contractor side, clients for some reason think the spec should be free and want to pay only for delivered code.

And I want a pony.

Where the deer and the antelope play

So why can't they move their feet out of the fire by verifying the public key themselves and uploading it into their own Gmail account?

No registrar can beat the verification of me pasting the public key from my own server and verifying the fingerprint out-of-band.

You need to do -a blargle to get it to avoid just sending a request to the running session. I'd say the behavior isn't ideal but this is at least a workaround that lets me have multiple profiles running for dev/test/browsing.

Haha well played sir.

Just saw this today with a friend of mine in response to an insane client of ours: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emdzsz_XvfA

I have. In fact I've deployed Firefox and other Mozilla applications to tens of thousands of users. I built the configuration and packaging environment, as well as some tools for us to manage site- and role-specific autoconfigs. A coworker of mine spent a lot of time in the JavaScript autoconfigs themselves and came up with some pretty impressive automations.

I can see how you might want GPO support if you're into it but for us it was great that we could deploy variants of one single file and support all 4 major OS platforms in use within our organization. We were able to provide preview releases of new Firefox builds that hadn't yet been tested with all the corporate apps and users could switch between them. As far as locking the settings or preventing auto-update, both of those tasks were both trivial and obvious.

Honestly Firefox and the rest of the products were fine to configure. The hassles really came a bit from what you'll have trying to automate any large organization, and most especially the politics from middle managers arguing about whether we could just push the update yet. Oh, the politics.

This is the fault of game " 'UI' 'designers' " who insist on drawing their own things instead of using system widgets. At best they act like the designer's preferred platform no matter where the application is running. More likely, they only approximate the coarsest features of the thing being emulated and leave the user with a constant feeling of frustration.

Really? You have to develop your own scrollbar?

(Scrollbars are actually a good example. I should note that this idiocy is now making its way into Web "design", where thanks to the "everything should be a tablet" crowd, you start to see people making custom scrollbars that hide unless you happen to mouse over the right place, and are too thin to grab with the mouse.)

On the other hand, it turns out there's this.

As of late I've been noticing and commenting to friends about a growing disregard for spelling, grammar, and proper English as a whole. In school I was taught to never use contractions when writing a "professional" piece; I see that constantly now.

The problem is that your classes conflated a particular style (not using contractions) with basic rules of quality writing (spelling, grammar, and proper English). As a result, when you complain about the latter, people assume you are talking about the former and write you off as a dinosaur.

This is an unfortunate consequence of the arrogance of the last generation of English teachers. If, however, you're in fact using the latter to complain about the former, you're part of the problem and not the solution.

spell out any number ten or lower

This rule is harmful and it enrages me.

It seems to me that "Tweetspeak" and shorthand common to texting and Facebook messaging are now considered acceptable to journalism editors, particularly online.

It seems to be a common problem that people associate rules with media rather than giving any thought to what is necessary or unnecessary (e.g., "I'm not printing this onto a piece of paper, therefore I should misspell things"). Not to mention that while I think of it as a sign of respect for coworkers to write things in a legible manner for them, there sadly seem to be some who think the opposite.