Maybe Japanese lawmakers go the full length and make comming to work on time a felony too.

After all, holding a steady job is a fantastic way to finance terrorism. And a cover. And with the right job, even access to large buildings,city centers, subways during rush hour.

Yes, this is sarcasm.

I want to congratulate E.M. on the near thing. I see a lot of discussion on whether ./ is full of fanboys or whether the legs are shite.

You are all missing the main point of success: do any of you remember seeing such a rate of launches? Ever?

Who cares if a few of them tip over. Just get better on the next try.

Errm.. the type that DanielRavenNest was taking about (a semi-submersible) you CAN drive up to a dock. Its deck may be a bit higher than the "Just Read the Instructions", but thats what dock side cranes are for.

I would add
    Martin - The Clean Coder
but switch
    DeMarco to "The Deadline"

But while we'are at it, "The Phoenix Project" by Kim,Behr,Spafford make at least as good a read as DeMarco. Not strict science, but good practice still.

I simply do not care how loud that set of machines in the rack with my cloud service provider is.

I think that the wide range adoption of server SSDs also shows how far server installations have progressed toward eliminating all single points of failure.

In the passt HA and 'five nines' was something only done by a few niches, like telephony provider switches or banking big iron. Today it is common in many cloud installations and most sizeable server setups. A single component failing will not stop your service.

If your business can support the extra cost for the SSDs, a failing drive will not stop you and the performance of the service will see great improvements anyway. The power savings may even make the SSD not so costly after all.

Quote:
[...] "I did not miss having to chase the proper package for my current version of Linux, or beg someone to package something. Binaries just worked." [...]

I can agree to this to a certain extend. I am actively using Linux as my primary desktop since Linux 0.99pl14 came out. Having used/configured/compiled fvwm/olwm/olvwm/CDE/twm/piewm/wm2/AfterStep/Enlightenment 16-17/KDE1-4/GNOME1-3, thus I consider myself able to handle things quite well.

Whenever I (more recently, i.e. GTK2/GTK3) tried to install a new GNOME program I ended up updating my whole stack of applications breaking others on the way, having to fix them later on.
*This* never happened to me when upgrading or installing KDE programs. They are simply designed with a rather stable API and thus are much more forgiving of one not having the bleeding edge library "X" on ones system. Sure even KDE programs sometimes require one to update libs along the way, but the APIs for "older" programs seldom breaks.

So I can only agree with Miguel if he states that he needed to chase the proper package, which is, if at all, never available for your current distro (Murpy's law). But if GNOME (the project members) kept things more clean and stable instead of making major API changes while making minor library number upgrades the problem would never have occurred in the first place.

Well, even if it is 2013 and we have tablets and 25" LCD's all over the place, I have consciously switch from playing games at the PC to playing games at my PS3.

I cannot stand upgrading my PC every half year and trying to follow M$'s next version of DirectX Something just to be able to play game X.

I have encountered really bad behavior of expensive joysticks at expensive soundcards when trying to steer planes in flight simulators, and I was never able to calibrate any joystick/joypad on an soundcard I had. Maybe it got better with USB based joystick but anyway.
The PC controllers are "cheap" compared to the PS3 ones and the PS3 ones usually come without a cable (unless they need charging).

All in all, I enjoy sitting one my couch and switching on my Onkyo 10:2 sound system to play e.g. Fallout 3 on my beamer (approx. 9') or LCD 42" TV. Nothing in the world beats this, even the downloading times of updates when inserting a new game are less enervating then upgrading my Windows box again.

BTW: the PS3 sits next to the TV anyway for watching Blu-ray movies

just my 2 cents

First of, I hold the idea, that the list was sold, very likely. They will never admit to that. You might want to check their privacy statement and take actions according to that (see post by nemesisrocks).

But for a self confessed geek with his/her own email domain, the OP shows shows an alarming lack of knowing the proper channels.

This is a problem with email, so maybe the OP should have send a mail to 'abuse@company.com' or even 'postmaster@company.com'. Not place something on the facebook page, that only gets read by some marketing drone.

Don't you guys ever read the RFCs that are relevant for you?

Yes, sure, and while the eggheads are at it, why not as well enforce a "non-smoker" tax, i.e., everyone who smokes less than a pack of cigarettes or equivalent (zero is less) has to pay a tax for not smoking ....

Reading this headline as a European makes me think that some politicians in the states have lost their marbles ....

The point you are missing, is the respect you get for respecting the other guys culture. Learning a language, especially one as far apart from English as Mandarin, is getting to know a foreign culture. Also you get to understand the structure of your own language much better.

A high percentage of americans, in my experience, suffer from a very narrow minded view on culture. Not from caracter or personality, but from lack of exposure.

So he should either go for

- Mandarin for demograhpic reasons. I am finding more an more C.S. research papers, where only the abstract is in English (my 2nd Lang.) and the rest is in Mandarin.
- Korean if you are gamer ;-)
- Japanese if you are into all that budo stuff.

I would stay away from Hindi or Urdu. It is my understanding, that speaking english in India is considered cultured, but my original point about culture would probably still hold. Mandarin, btw, used to be the language of cultured people all through indo-china as well (dont know about now), as was French in Germany and German in Russia at one time in the past.

Since you wrote, you are used to Perl, the gap between Perl and Python is somewhat smaller than between Perl and Objective C.
And Python fun part is the indentation what makes your code automagically more readable and you have less curly braces.

I would even look for specific Python offerings related to the astonishing Plone (http://plone.org/) which is based on Zope and that is based on Python. In the EU, for example, we are struggling to find Python/Plone developers.

The iOS stuff binds you to one Platform (i.e. Apple's) and makes you vulnerable if that goes down the drain.
If you stick to an open language and settle for an "ordinary" job, you can always find someone else to pay you.

Good luck,
Holger

... in an alert box of it's own:

javascript: and data: URIs typed or pasted in the address bar are disabled to prevent social engineering attacks.
Developers can enable them for testing purposes by toggling the "noscript.allowURLBarJS" preference.

Browsing the Web w/o NoScript is dangerous to the core anyway.

Just my 2cents

- Holger

I for my part tested KDE 4.x since it became beta in the old days ... I revisited nearly each minor KDE 4.x update, but always switched back to KDE 3.5 (now 3.5.10).
And yes, openSUSE 12.1 certainly takes the pain out of it. Even though some KDE 4 parts keep popping up, like e.g. yast2 and if you do not install all KDE 3.x programs you might end up with one from KDE 4 in between ...

The only sad things is, that the Firefox and Thunderbird Themes matching KDE 3's crystal ceased to work :-(

I think I also remember an ubuntu project called TDE that should keep KDE 3 under a new alive for ubuntu ...

Cheers
- Holger

Thank you for listing more reasons to use not to use either fosil nor nuclear fuels.

I live within a tidal zone that is feeling the climate change right now. We have had higher and higher storm tides for the last 100 years. Blasting GHGs into the athmosphere does not make it better.

Pointing at Centralia as an argument in favor of using nuclear power is Insanity.