+1.

Maybe it would be a great benefit to learn that perfect is the enemy of good enough, and that in IT reinventing the wheel is almost always a bad idea.

I go into meetings which aren't about code (requiremens, for example) with a tablet. I read documentation on a tablet. I use skype and email intensively on a tablet. Occasionally I use the tablet as the third screen. I'd say I do use a tablet for work. And I'm _not_ a manager. But then again, my tablet has a physical keyboard, and a battery life of three days, if not used for watching movies - Asus' Transformer Prime (there's an even better transfomer out there, if you're interested - mine is almost a year old). My laptop has a 17" screen and weighs in excess of 9 pounds (pretty old, I must say, but I use it less and less, so I don't intend to upgrade any time soon - I would have, if the tablet didn't change things for me). So whenever I can get away with just using the tablet, I will. So all in all I'd say your rage against tablets is unfounded. Give one a try, and see what gives in about three months.

Zac Greve wrote:

I kept reading it over and over because there are a lot of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot things there (It is sometimes worse than documentation from Microsoft!).

I'm puzzled. What's your motivation to set it up on Windows? I mean, what you're telling me is something as simple as running the Kubuntu setup, followed by sudo apt-add-repository https://launchpad.net/~mercurial-ppa/+archive/releases sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 323293EE sudo apt-get install mercurial apache tomcat6 jenkins I didn't check the details, but that should be it, give or take some package names on the last command line. That gives you a fully working and configured setup, where all components are already integrated, on an OS with reportedly better IO performance (which should help at least the web server), and which also updates everything by itself, not just the OS, without breaking things. Why would you download and install each component individually, and go through the hurdles of installing an OS which ?

:-D I guess at that price difference it's not just Vilmos say no ...

rnbergren wrote:

Sometimes as much as a buck a minute ...

Some still do. In fact, I think many, if not most.

rnbergren wrote:

Won't be long people the world changes and corporations will not keep up.

For some reason, the extinction of dinosaurs comes to my mind ...

I was once very seriously advised by a mail server admin not to use "/" in email addresses before "@" because it's not a valid character there. I told him to go read the RFC, which he refused to do. I can only say "WTF!?".

Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

It's amazing how much you can simplify JavaScript through jQuery.

Surely that must have been a type - you meant DOM manipulation, rather than the Javascript language, right?

Mike Mullikin wrote:

Apple is obviously not perfect but they win a ton of design, quality and customer satisfaction awards. More than any other computer maker or consumer electronics maker I can think of.

Yeah, but I am different. Apple's OSX doesn't cut it, for me. Closed, opaque, nothing for a developer. IMO.

Mike Mullikin wrote:

Every Apple product I've owned has been rock solid.

So is my desktop running Kubuntu 11.10, which I've built from parts. It's also a powerhouse (eight physical cores, 16 GB RAM), way more powerful than whatever Apple I could've bought for the same money, and the desktop eye candy is richer than what OSX provides.

You can save, restore and manage sessions in Opera. You can even be prompted at startup about which session to start.

Sounds a lot like callback-based programming to me ... (I actually like callbacks, and tend to overuse them.)

You mean anti-pattern, right? IMO just a variation of observer done wrong.

Pardon me, but that's not my experience. Programmers work with their brains, not their hands. The brain has a mind of his own, and doesn't react well to monotony or any kind of restrictions. Also, the brain doesn't stop working on job stuff when you go home - unless you hate your job. Therefore, in order to get a high productivity and quality code from programmers, you need them to love their job, nothing more. You can chain a programmer to his keyboard in an empty room for ten hours a day, and he may be producing more lines of code than someone working from home, or working only when he pleases to, but that's not what you're after. You want as much functionality delivered each day as possible. A bored or annoyed programmer may deliver more lines of code, but these lines will definitely implement less functionality, contain more technical debt, more bugs and require higher costs for maintenance. Trying to get programmers to be more productive by using restrictions is like pulling a plant by its leaves to make it grow faster.

Super Lloyd wrote:

internal law? what is that?

That's what pretexts management can use to hang people :laugh:

I think there is HTML5/JS technology mature enough to drop proprietary MS technology and build on something less plagued by uncertainty. Eclipse has chosen qooxdoo for its RAP project. Maybe you could have a look. But there's also ext, sproutcore, smartclient and tons of other JS libs to easily build rich web apps. IMO that's way more future oriented. Games are going mobile (unless you write the next first person shooter hit), and an IDE closer related to and built in the same environment where the various games to be built with it will run will probably be friendlier to game developers, provided it is fully usable. You may also want to look at/talk to the developers of Cloud9 IDE - I don't know what the full stack behind it is, but IMO it is the way to go. Nobody knows what will happen to Silverlight or WPF, but IMO it's quite safe to assume that the cloud, HTML5 and JS are here to stay.

+1 :-D

Please please please Unix geeks! They’d create a platform which is stable, reliable and secure, and just let specialists collaborate via simple yet powerful mechanisms (a.k.a. pipes) to solve actual government issues. That’d be the best government ever.

It's more of an intense love/hate relation for me. C comes in handy when you absolutely need the speed, but don't have a huge model to implement. Java/C# come in handy when you need to develop and maintain code with minimal cost. When you need both - which is in itself a PITA - C++ is the only alternative. But it sort of adds to the PITA. Its only advantage is that there's not really anything else able to do the job.

I think he meant what he said. Statistical evidence says you're twice as fast, on average, when using a language with managed memory. I think Joel Spolsky or Fowler, can't remember exactly who, said this about themselves too. It's my experience too. Also, the additional speed gained from super-optimized native code doesn't always make a difference. Plus, statistical analysis has shown that at least memory management is faster and requires less CPU cycles with managed memory than when doing all memory management manually (at the expense of a three to five times higher memory usage, on average - but I'd trade memory for CPU any time of the day, since fast CPUs are expensive whereas memory nowadays is cheap).

Nah, that's after he gets bored with how good a fisherman he is - after he has figured out that the whole world conspires to make fishing extremely difficult just for him.