If you've got a simple website that lives on one server and isn't using anything that isn't in your "monoculture" of LAMP, then yeah, Docker doesn't bring a lot of value to the table.

But if you've got 2-3 load balanced PHP front end serviers in front of a half dozen Java Workflow Engine instances that that run against data pumped out by a cluster of 8 Python Data-Science workers and they're all exchanging data through a RabbitMQ messaging layer and storing data in Redis backed by a MySQL data warehouse, next to a ancient legacy app exposing a socket service written in C++, then Docker containers make a lot more sense to free you from having to maintain one OS Sistro that supports all of those things

The real power of Docker and containerization comes from heterogeneous environments. If you're building everything on LAMP, then go ahead and make the assumptions that your apps will continue to run on standard Linux servers with Apache, MySQL, and PHP. You don't get a lot out of Docker in that situation. But if you're developing on new apps, while maintaining legacy apps, with a variety of other languages and technologies, you'll get a lot more out of Docker. I've used Docker to help bring an old PHP4 app up to modern standards, without having to downgrade the install of PHP4 on my laptop or anywhere else, and that was very useful. The other nice use case I've seen for it is when you want to try something out, and are expecting to throw it away eventually. Docker does a great job of keeping it all together in one simple thing you can just "docker rm ..." and boom, your files, the interpreter, the libraries, all the dependencies that it needed and you had to install are all just gone, and you don't have to worry about them cluttering up your system anymore.

"The majority of humans read silently by rendering a simulation of the printed words as if they were being spoken."

Wait? Seriously? That sounds awful! How do you get through a whole book that way?

Just some back of the napkin calculations: So with 44 chanels (4.7% of the spectrum) they could host 575 callers. If they had the 59.7% of the spectrum allocated to TV, they could have hosted around 650 channels, which, by extension would support about 8000 callers. In New York City, a city with more than 7 million people in 1940. So, no, we couldn't have had everyone using cell phones in the 1940's even without FCC meddling. *AT BEST* it would have increased the cellphone user base from 0.01% of the population to 0.11% of the population. Without the geographic cells and spectrum switching tech that AT&T brought about in the 1980s, cell phones would have remained toys of the very wealthy and lucky.

It's pretty simple... Most software users don't see the software as an abstract thing that can be better or worse, they see it as a tool they use to perform a task. Their goal isn't to use the software, it's to get their task done, and any change to the software (even a small one that benefits lots of other people) means that they will have to invest time in learning this new feature, which will take away from the time that they have to do the task that they want to get done.

It's a pretty straight forward calculation: I use Word to write school reports. I don't care that adding a step to the save dialog which other users (or even me) to do things in a more "logical" fashion. I've got my process, and I've probably even got some procedure in place to deal with the "inefficiency" that this new feature fixes. So if you make that change, then suddenly my old process will stop working, and i'll have to take an unplanned hour or two out of my day to learn how to use this new feature that you've implemented, when I was already on a time crunch for the thing I was doing. Sure, maybe your new feature will save me 8 hours over the course of the year, but the short term impact to my schedule is *really* frustrating.

And now that we know how you feel about podcasts, have you heard of this "Twitter" thing? or "Facebook"? I keep hearing people talk about them, and I'm thinking it might be a big new thing...

I like the idea of suing people who sit on their patents without bringing them to market, but yeah, this was solely the driver's fault, not Apple's.

I would imagine it's been tested in court, but since Patents are intended to protect the ability of the inventor to sell their invention, why aren't patents that the inventor fails to bring to market within a reasonable time inherently invalidated? What's the rationale behind allowing companies to sit on patents that they aren't actively marketing?

TFA doesn't seem to have anything to do with Scrum, except to say that they don't like it, and are proposing a working group be gathered from Open Source developers to come up with something to replace it. I've never been at a company that actually "does" scrum, they all just use Scrum, and Kanban and Toyota Lean, and Continuous Deployment and 100 other buzzwords in various combinations. Rallying against Scrum is like complaining about companies using YAML instead of JSON in their config files for their Enterprise CRM system. It's missing the whole point, and nitpicking at what's probably the least important part of the whole process.

Generally, yes, but Methane has a far stronger Greenhouse Effect (IR Radiation absorption rate) than Carbon Dioxide. If we can convert the methane into CO2, that's actually probably going to reduce overall global warming.

There are basically two things that make a job pay well: Rarity of the skill, and complexity of the task. Back in the day, computer programmers were a very obscure and rare trade. Nobody knew much about the arcane inner workings of computers, so the few people who did know something about it were able to extract a good hefty paycheck without having to do anything particularly complex. However, now there's a flood of people on the market who are reasonably well informed as to how to make a computer do what they want. 100 line C programs can be cranked out by outsourced Chinese workers for pennies on the dollar. You can probably even find a college intern to do it for free if all you want is someone to read a spec, and produce code that works. So, "simple" programming is not well paying anymore. Now, if you want a career with reasonable pay, you have to start tackling the "complex" tasks. Sure, writing thread locking is fun and all, but nobody really cares how your semaphore code is working, what they care about is whether the website properly shows your profile picture on the next screen after you upload a new one, and that their 600 friends all see the new picture in their stream too within a minute. That's not a "simple problem" so if you want good pay, that's the kind of problem that you're going to be asked to tackle.

I have lots of electric fans in my house... They're not very quiet.

The plastic dust is probably what makes up the Plastiglomerate

I don't think I would say "Enthusiast Computing" are limited to people who upgrade their processor to the latest and greatest every 6 months. I would rather call those folks "PC Game Enthusiasts". I would call Enthusiast Computing things more like building Beagle Bone/Raspberry Pi clusters, or people doing more interesting things than just installing new motherboards constantly.

Whew, I'm glad we managed to get everyone to switch off of memory-leaking and CPU intensive Flash stuff over to standards compliant HTML5 and JavaScript then!

I was trying to draw on my OpenGL 1.x knowledge a few months ago when building an Android app... Damn, OpenGL has changed a lot since 1999 :)

*shrug* my current plan is actually to spend some quality time figuring out how to use Ruby this summer. Though to be fair, I'm skipping Rails and going straight to Sinatra.