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Someone asked a very similar question on Stack Overflow. It's here. The short version is: if you're running KDE and can change the window manager configuration, no problem. If you can change which window manager, then sure. (Also, the previous "yank the ethernet cable" or "boot off of live CD/USB" suggestions are quite reasonable. However, it is possible to handle most of it in the application using JNI to write X-Windows code which will capture most all keystrokes. It doesn't get ctrl-alt-backspace, but it appears to get prevent most of the rest.

incorred

That's useful, thanks.

There's a Javascript method to retrieve the timezone of the user's PC: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_gettimezoneoffset.asp

I've never tried it, but it might be easy to add the HTML5 geolocation thing as a default: http://html5demos.com/geo .

I'm not sure if there's an easy way to get the timezone for a lat+long though. Some ideas here. I've heard of geonames.org (related to my job), but never used it.

I would suggest, as one piece of your credential "pie" you try to answer Drupal questions (or any other thing you might have experience with) at places like Stack Overflow

It might not directly get you hired, but you will build an online record of your knowledge, and you'll probably learn even more as well.

Good luck!

(I am self-taught, as well)

Check out How much does it cost to develop an iPhone application? for a few numbers that are in line with what you roughed out here. There seems cause to complain about the quality of the result, but the price tag itself isn't surprising at all. $150 an hour is also cheap for a good mobile phone developer, given the rampant gold rush speculation driving up salaries in that section of the market right now.

C# and Java both have atomic operations in the standard library. See Interlocked.CompareExchange, and java.util.concurrent.atomic for examples.

Multi-threaded programming is particularly easy in those languages, because a lot of their internals are inherently thread-safe. For example, strings are read-only, so they can be passed around risk free. Similarly, mark & sweep garbage collection is thread-safe, and doesn't suffer from the rare but complex to debug memory leaks that occur with reference counting. It's also faster -- there's garbage collectors in common use now in the Java world that significantly outperform malloc. Throw in the overheads of atomic increment/decrement required for thread-safe reference counting in the C/C++ world, and suddenly things can tip towards Java in a big way.

I do C# mostly myself, and I've found that because it makes multi-threading so easy and safe (compared to C/C++), that I use it much more often than I would otherwise. Even if it's a tad slower than C, the ability to liberally sprinkle multi threading throughout the code makes the end result a lot more parallel, and hence overall faster or more responsive.

Take a look at the new await and async keywords about to be added to .NET v4.5. They allow traditional serial code to be converted to a thread-pooled asynchronous version with what amounts to about two dozen additonal characters of code!

Meanwhile, C and C++ have poor support for multi-threading, especially if code needs to be portable. There's basically no threading standard library to speak of, or even a threading aware memory model!

It seems the power of HTML 5 is just some new tags for multimedia and the browser support for them. It is just a markup language. When I read articles/tutorials on HTML 5, I don't see how a markup language comes anywhere close to Silverlight or Flash/Flex in terms of a rich set of libraries and language features to support interactive applications. Javascript comes no where close to touching either of these technologies IMO, and it is sad to hear the both are potentially on the way out. Additional reasons why HTML 5 alone is not the new Flash/Silverlight can be found among answers here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2172626/how-can-html5-replace-flash

I am sure someone will fill the void left by these products, perhaps something new that leverages HTML 5 for display/graphics but has something more substantial than javascript. Probably in the interim we will see libraries like javascript trying to fill the void, but its still javascript at the heart.

You make a good point about layers, but in practice, macro abuse seems worse. Macros also make it hard to have good development tools (like Smalltalk has) because the syntax of the language can change so much through macros (at least for something like C).

An example just to show you what textual macros can do from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-real-world-macros-pre-processor-abuse-youve-ever-come-across

#include #define System S s;s #define public #define static #define void int #define main(x) main() struct F{void println(char* s){std::cout s std::endl;}}; struct S{F out;};

public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello World!"); }

That just seems like a very different thing than the fact that when I change a class it may affect how other classes behave -- even though, it's true, there is some abstract logical equivalence.

I'm sorry but that begs the question: why do it? This is a complete violation of everything we have learned about good software development for the last 3-4 decades. More than that, it defies common sense. And that lack of common sense is not in any way related to the power of macro systems, or the nature of macro systems in general.

Indeed macro abuse is more prevalent, but that still sits squarely on the developer's fault, not on the macro system. They are more prevalent because they are easier to abuse, but so are pointers. Or object systems. Or meta-programming. And that can still be said with any other powerful mechanism of any type.

I see like this: Here is a powerful tool. Use intelligently. You screw yourself up with it, or screw somebody else up, it's on you, not the tool.

Also, I don't necessarily agree that macros makes it hard to get good development tools. Maybe harder relative to a system without macros, but not necessarily hard. Take a look at Eclipse CDT. That's what I'm using for C/C++ development, and it can tell me right away how a macro application is going to expand, or where a macro is invalid (that it cannot expand into something that can compile.)

Just as there have been people who have fucked it up with macros, there have been people who have done good work with extensive macro usage. With the vast body of knowledge we have accumulated in the last couple of decades on how to build software, we can't assign blame to the tool, not even partial blame.

We are not in the early 70's when people were discovering these stuff, using them without a body of knowledge for guidance. There is no excuse anymore to do stupid things like that, and we can't simply ignore a tool if the tool is right for the job simply because a horde of morons shoot themselves in the foot with it.

You make a good point about layers, but in practice, macro abuse seems worse. Macros also make it hard to have good development tools (like Smalltalk has) because the syntax of the language can change so much through macros (at least for something like C).

An example just to show you what textual macros can do from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-real-world-macros-pre-processor-abuse-youve-ever-come-across

#include
#define System S s;s
#define public
#define static
#define void int
#define main(x) main()
struct F{void println(char* s){std::cout s std::endl;}};
struct S{F out;};

public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello World!");
}

That just seems like a very different thing than the fact that when I change a class it may affect how other classes behave -- even though, it's true, there is some abstract logical equivalence.

All the people that use ASP.NET websites like, for example, this.

Having developed for both Android and Blackberry -- I'll never develop for Android again. (Developing for Android is like a bad joke.)

Developing for Blackberry was simple and painless compared to Android development. Hell, with the new set of development tools from RIM, it's even easier.

Google gvim disable recording mode. Number 1 result: EASY BUTTON

I'm not talking about GUI at all. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/167414/is-an-atomic-file-rename-with-overwrite-possible-on-windows

That's not just a file-vs-directory issue, it's a rename() vs. MoveFile() issue. If the target exists, rename() attempts to remove it, but MoveFile() fails. That's even true for files. For files, but not directories, MoveFileTransacted() can be told to overwrite the target if it exists (I say "overwrite" because the description of MoveFileTransacted() says "If a file named lpNewFileName exists, the function replaces its contents with the contents of the lpExistingFileName file").

Oh, and if a required attempt by rename() to remove the destination fails, the rename() fails, so the target directory had better be empty if you're moving something in its place. If you're renaming or moving a directory, and the destination doesn't exist, and the source and destination are on the same file system, both rename() and MoveFile() are atomic, even if the directory being moved is non-empty.

In any case, it's not as if this is Not A Problem on UN*X and A Problem on Windows, much less being solely due to MoveFile() not supporting atomic moves of directories within a file system if the target name already exists.

I'm not talking about GUI at all. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/167414/is-an-atomic-file-rename-with-overwrite-possible-on-windows

I don't know about C++, but C has the WTF operator.

!ErrorHasOccured() ??!??! HandleError();

Say for example, I want an image at a between certain paragraphs, and it spans two columns, and any text on the second column should wrap around the image instead of written over it. How do I go about doing that? In fact, someone else was also asking the same thing here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4577380/css3-columns-and-images

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/172798/lisp-in-the-real-world
http://www.franz.com/success/

http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory.lhtml

Airline travel and booking. No that's not important. Owned by Google now, I believe.

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/172798/lisp-in-the-real-world
http://www.franz.com/success/

Yes, and the original standard allowed any site to frame any other site and access any data from it... This isn't 1999, and you shouldn't be quoting a 12-year-old spec to talk about security issues that weren't even known at the time. Read the HTML5 spec and maybe you will start to see just how many nuances there are in keeping things working while having security on top. Not even the HTML5 spec explains all the complicated shit that browsers have to do... Mozilla's documentation is the best resource for this stuff because they describe what a real browser does. Here you go, first google result:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_X-FRAME-OPTIONS_response_header

X-Frame-Options is a standard header (despite the "X-" part, it is a standard security feature built into *all* modern web browsers, including IE), and it is up to a site owner to choose to use it. This is the only guaranteed way to solve clickjacking attacks. Other methods require javascript enabled and some nasty hacks. See this page if you don't believe me:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/958997/frame-buster-buster-buster-code-needed

That said, it's like using a hammer to put in a staple, way overkill. Problem is, there is no way to guarantee that your page is not being clickjacked -- there are so many ways to do a clickjacking attack that browsers simply can't guard against all of them, for example, plugins, opacity, ...

Yes, users shouldn't be stupid enough to input confidential information when the address bar has an untrusted URL... but the clickjacking attack works by showing users confidential information that only a trusted site could possibly know and giving them a familiar login form... It's very difficult for all but the most trained user to distinguish this type of site from the real thing.

Not all sites use this, but Google decided it was worth adding the header to protect themselves. That's their decision to make. For my web page, I'm considering the javascript-based solution because it allows a more clear message and lets users override the check if necessary, but this may compromise security in one or two cases, so it's a tradeoff.

Absolutely, I wish I could reply in as many words as you do. But "Coward Anonymous" is just being a full-time arrogant, I don't know why but perhaps whatever gene enables social intelligence has malfunctioned. But I'm always fascinated by how brains work, so that's my usual theory.

Over at XDA, people are constantly trying out new things and posting the results. Some of them even develop complete ROMs you can install packed with customisations, having only little development experience (which is sometimes worrying but the good ones always stay around longer). The things that can be accomplished is just amazing. Besides rooting and overclocking, there's TouchWiz on HTC and Sense on Samsung, mtd repartitioning, alternate cli shells, native SIP over UMTS/HSPA, backtrack for ARM, various webservers, qemu and bochs... too much to mention. If your phone is on the list of forums, the community developments are just wonderful. And the people of Stack Overflow are great, too. The site has become an invaluable resource of answers to common development problems (started out as mainly .net orientated but covers a wide range of topics).

But I like my home screen easy and simple, though. So I just adb pull Launcher2.apk from an AVD for the version I'm currently running and adb install them onto my phone. Switching home screens can optionally be done with EasyHome. OTOH it could definitely be fun to customise it a bit more then that!

So that means we need "five years .Net 4.0 experience" to get a job ;)
I doubt even Eric Lippert is qualified by that standard.

Yeah, cause its never happened to anyone else before...

Last fall, Apple released their App Store Approval Guidelines. The relevant guideline—the only place where the word "duplicate" appears in the guidelines—is quoted on Stackoverflow:

Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps.

If you were to write and submit your own app that connected to Dropbox, it might get rejected. Given the number of third-party Facebook apps and Twitter clients still available on the App Store, however, I think that unlikely.

Plus there's no no shortage of web browsers on the App Store.

I feel pretty good about Dropbox never being pulled for "duplicating functionality."

No, they use SLM.

Your knowledge is at least 11 years out of date. I used to work at Microsoft (left several years ago). We switched from slm to Source Depot (Perforce fork) in about 2000. In addition, Google tells me that many teams are using VSTF (not SourceSafe 2010, which doesn't exist). It's not clear whether any of them are using the revision control part of TFS (hence replacing sd) but I imagine at least some of them are doing so, given that TFS has existed at least 6 years.

How much does it cost to import ten plus years of VSS data? If it could be done, I'd definitely be interested in switching to something better supported (read: FOSS)...

There are a number of free options you can try, which again you can find via Google, for example: http://www.google.com/search?q=migrating+from+sourcesafe+to+subversion. Indeed, this was one of the first questions on Stack Overflow: What's the best way to migrate from VSS to Subversion? Of course, you can also choose to make your SourceSafe instance read-only and simply check in a new copy into svn and start from there.

It's this type of attitude that separates programmers into idiotic "camps". I'm not talking about MS behaving weirdly and making nonsensical decisions -- that's a given. I mean making it sound like C# is oceans apart from modern C++. When you're programming in C++ and STL (along with some Boost, as required), most programs are going to be almost identical in structure. I know this because I've had to port code back and forth from C# to ANSI C++, and apart from some specific, easy-to-isolate areas (like interfacing with the GUI), the structure of the programs remains the same. You should be separating the code that talks with the GUI no matter what language you use, unless your program is heavily intertwined with the GUI (like graphics programs or visualizers).

You should be comfortable using both languages. If you're coming from C# to C++, then check out Accelerated C++, and (some time later) follow that up with this advice.

This isn't like moving from C# to C, it's much closer. Also, you should aim to be a Programmer, rather than a (C++ || Java || C# || Python) Programmer. It'll make your life easier and make you better at your job.

It has a great list, and may have what you're looking for: Book recommendations - Web Usability.

Unfortunately for those who like cross-platform languages, OCaml is well behind F# in a couple of areas:

1. Toolchain - getting a simple OCaml program to compile is horribly complex involving various separate tools such as omake, ocamlbuild, ocamlfind, etc - there is no one way to do things and it's really hard even for someone used to building open source packages in many languages (I've built KDE in the past which uses CMake but did work OK)

2. Integration with other languages - see this tutorial for the various issues to be covered: http://www.linux-nantes.org/~fmonnier/OCaml/ocaml-wrapping-c.php - and this for the build sequence: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2807021/compiling-c-lib-and-ocaml-exe-using-it-all-using-ocamlfind/2809086#2809086

I think OCaml is a very impressive implementation and language, and is one of the few languages which can compile to real machine code with performance competitive with C, yet at the same time provide the productivity of a much higher level language such as Python, Ruby, etc. For heavy computation on limited hardware where the right third party libraries exist, it can really work well. But the OCaml community needs to make it easier to get started....

If you're going to suggest Silverlight then I would argue what's wrong with Flash? The thing I've never fully understood in the whole JavaScript vs Flash vs * is that surely it's better to have a browser plugin - a single common platform to base your code on as opposed to individual implementation of a spec where you end up with utter insanity, like there being no Array.forEach() in IE8...

Yeah, if anyone knows a way I can search the Google index for sequences like ">>" please let me know!

I know I have seen this topic treated in books, but cannot find anything. I did find the following two links, however:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2711780/question-about-char-input
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-8093.html

C is not a strict subset of C++. There are just enough subtleties to be annoying; perhaps even dangerous.

Please note though, I'm not placing myself in the "C/C++" pedant camp. I just see it as shorthand for "C or C++" and it never really bothered me.

Here are some more links:

• Sourceforge help wanted page
• A similar Slashdot story from before
• Some similar Stackoverflow questions: 1 2 3 (C related)
• One comment from above I especially agree with -- Look at GNOME Love -- Large enough projects have bugs marked as "easy to fix for newbies" -- This is for you!

Here are some more links:

• Sourceforge help wanted page
• A similar Slashdot story from before
• Some similar Stackoverflow questions: 1 2 3 (C related)
• One comment from above I especially agree with -- Look at GNOME Love -- Large enough projects have bugs marked as "easy to fix for newbies" -- This is for you!

Here are some more links:

• Sourceforge help wanted page
• A similar Slashdot story from before
• Some similar Stackoverflow questions: 1 2 3 (C related)
• One comment from above I especially agree with -- Look at GNOME Love -- Large enough projects have bugs marked as "easy to fix for newbies" -- This is for you!

Strange. 10 years ago I used to get my news from slashdot first. Now, not so much anymore. This list is pretty exhaustive and has more backing than I expect you'd find anywhere else, including here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-most-influential-book-every-programmer-should-read

That only works for finals.

JLS 8.1.3: "Any local variable, formal method parameter or exception handler parameter used but not declared in an inner class must be declared final. Any local variable, used but not declared in an inner class must be definitely assigned before the body of the inner class."
  (source w/ discussion)

I totally agree. Also, it's not about the noobs. I suspect most experienced java programmers cant' code the correct try/catch/finally/try/catch for a resource access without looking it up. Check http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4092914/java-try-catch-finally-best-practices-while-acquiring-closing-resources

I don't have a link off-hand but IIRC it has to do with being able to "batch" your collection being more efficient than doing it "on-demand." Here's a discussion that goes into a bit of detail WRT Python reference counting and Java garbage collection: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21934/why-java-and-python-garbage-collection-methods-are-different

I can't speak for .net, but in Java you have very little need for it. It's better to close your files and connections, but they'll be garbage-collected for you if you don't.

Not according to the Java documentation:

Some applications interact with garbage collection by using finalization and weak/soft/phantom references. These features can create performance artifacts at the Java programming language level. An example of this is relying on finalization to close file descriptors, which makes an external resource (descriptors) dependent on garbage collection promptness. Relying on garbage collection to manage resources other than memory is almost always a bad idea.

Also, for the fun of it, look at:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6470651/creating-a-memory-leak-with-java

I have written a few apps using Tornado... So far it is my favorite framework for developing rich web applications. I contributed code/patches that the Tornado devs used to add SSL support to the framework. Also, just the other day I completed a Kerberos/AD/SSO authentication module for Tornado (I'll be making it available soon I hope).

My favorite feature of Tornado is the built-in support for WebSockets. It should also be mentioned that it is one of (if not THE) fastest Python web frameworks.

I also want to mention that for one-off/quick development web applications that don't need to be super fast I almost always use CherryPy. It is much simpler/quicker to develop with CherryPy than Tornado. You lose out big time on speed but the development time of CherryPy apps is very impressive. I wrote a reporting tool for my job that would examine a passwd file and then check it against Active Directory for uid/gid/shell/homedir conflicts and report the results on a pretty page using jqGrid. Users could even click a button to export the grid to spreadsheet format. Total development time: 16 hours (and that includes lunch breaks and five or six hour long conference calls)! Needless to say my boss was ecstatic, my coworkers were amazed, and the people who ended up using the tool asked me how much it cost (as if we bought it).

To bridge the gap between CherryPy and Tornado I actually wrote a MethodDispatcher that lets you port a CherryPy app to Tornado with a trivial amount of effort. Of course, it also lets you write a Tornado app "the CherryPy way" which, while a bit strange sitting on top of Tornado, is much simpler and allows for faster development time.

As for the differences between some popular frameworks I wrote up a pretty good explanation over at Stackoverflow.

For reference, here's some apps I've developed using Tornado: Gate One (still developing it), PyCI (no longer maintaining it though--I hope to revisit it some day when I have time, sigh), Escape From The Web, and here's a writeup of mine on how to develop an application similar to my reporting tool using CherryPy and jqGrid in no time at all.

Web.py is great for developing web services. Really, really quick and easy to learn. The documentation is probably about a 7 though, I agree with that. However, I'd give it 9s on everything else.

Web.py+mimerender is pretty sweet. Check out the example code here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/713847/recommendations-of-python-rest-web-services-framework

I find this infinitely more comprehensible, pythonic, and nice to work with than the other Python web frameworks I've seen. I've never really used Django, but the examples I've seen look pukey to me.

It's Microsoft Fashion time again. Did you use program in C++? That made sense, since it was cross-platforms and has an independent standards committee. Well, if you want to play in Microsoft land, you have to dance by Microsoft's tune: back in 2002 it was .Net. It was the holy grail -- they stuffed that thing everywhere. People started using it, and liked it too -- there are many .Net communities. In Visual Studio 2010, there's no intellisense for C++ anymore. Did you have large projects in C++? Well granpa, you should have migrated them to C# by now. We're not going to help you with your geriatric C++ programs.

But now Microsoft isn't feeling "hip" with the young kids anymore. All of these web applications make Microsoft feel two-thousand-and-late. Oh, what is Microsoft to do... Oh! Of course! We have money! and a huge developer base! The kids like JavaScript? We'll give 'em so much JavaScript they'll pass out!

We'll cram it everywhere, not just the browser. Native Windows software? JavaScript. Embedded scripting? JavaScript. Does JavaScript have any standard way to interface with the file system? Does it have any way to do networking, or databases? No? Well, that's not a big deal, we'll just make up our own!

Man, if you program software for Windows, you'd better start eating and breathing JavaScript. They've kicked C++ out, and .Net is next. It's the new Microsoft tune -- so start dancing!

.Net libraries are mear wrappers around COM and Win32 counterparts.

Not as much as you might think. Some examples are System.Xml which is not a wrapper of MSXML, the Managed portions of System.Security.Cryptography, and WPF, which is written in entirely managed code. Also note that GDI+ was written in C++ and cannot be called from C code.

Not true. Office 2010 is written in C++ and does not use WPF. In fact, the ribbon control introduced a few years ago is a free download from their web site, and you can only use it from C++.
Office 2010 does not use WPF

Prior art.

• Jon Skeet can stop an infinite loop just by thinking about it

These sites helped me a bit when I first started using git. The best way is to just start using it and set a goal to use a feature you just read about if you think it applies to your situation. I think the point of good-enough use of git is successfully operating like below, being able to use interactive rebases successfully and to know what command to use for the job (merge, rebase, cherry pick):
http://gitguru.com/2009/02/18/branching-strategies-overview/
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2428722/git-branch-strategy-for-small-dev-team

It's pathetic that so many Slashdotters (who are supposed to be nerds) won't even accept that some sort of encrypted system is better than plaintext for storing password. Absolutely pathetic.

This is what astounds me, that so many people here are seemingly willing to accept this gigantic flaw simply because it's behind one or two layers of security. There is no excuse for not keeping any stored credentials in something like the Keychain, this is a solved problem. I just assumed Android had something like it.

The worst part is, if there is no keychain to store user credentials how is every Android app out there storing credentials today? The laughable claim appears to be that since apps cannot by default see other apps, the model is simply to store credentials in the application directory in the open. Combine that with the fact that most devices store apps to external storage, and the external storage is unprotected...

In practical terms, it would seem any app you run could look for popular twitter app directories on an SD card and gain credentials that way. Or banking apps or whatever.

Or, as that thread says, a computer virus could look for mounted SD cards that had Android apps on them and gain credentials that way.

I would be interested to hear from Android developers if this is really not the case, how Android protects apps and credentials they store located on an SD card.

You need to look up what a GUID is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_unique_identifier
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2982748/create-a-guid-in-java

Okay, there is a lot of documentation there.

I probably should have written, "tutorials", as that's really what I've looked for -- at various times, I've gone looking for tutorials and free textbooks for several programming languages and so on, and generally been able to find several for whichever language or tool I wanted to learn about, but I hadn't found much of use for PowerShell. The documentation you point out reminds me of Linux man pages, which I use frequently, but I can scarcely imagine using man pages alone to learn how to write shell scripts. There's a very detailed man page for rsync, for example, but someone had to tell me that rsync was useful for backing up files, before I knew to look at it. Someone gave an example of a single line of code in PowerShell to batch rename files; I don't believe I could have come up with that in 45 minutes without some introduction to PowerShell.

I just tried searching for PowerShell tutorials again, and found some book recommendations. I should probably just suck it up and pay $30 for something in print.

Stack Overflow reputation is cumulative. This means that if two people are providing answers of the same quality and at the same rate over time, the folks who have been there longest will have higher reputations, and that the higher reputation will reflect only tenure. Not any kind of quality.

If you want to look at quality, you should be looking at a metric that is something like (total reputation / number of months active). Even this is imperfect of course, since if people take a hiatus or something that will present the appearance of worse quality using this metric.

I was going to say that this fatal flaw invalidated the conclusions because the correlation between reputation and age just reflected the older people being around longer. The problem with that is that Stack Overflow opened in 2008. That's not enough time to explain a linear trend that tracks from age 16 to nearly age 50, but the final conclusion "So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality." should still be re-examined with tenure-controlled analysis to try and see whether older aged members have been members longer.

I am assuming you mean Floating point SOUND MIXING of sound channels.

Here are a few pages that talk about the issues in mixing two audio streams, and lead to the benefits of floating point mixing.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/376036/algorithm-to-mix-sound
http://www.vttoth.com/digimix.htm

JS is indeed a bad language if you care at all about syntax or sanity.
Here's a couple from Stackoverflow.

In JavaScript:
  '5' + 3 gives '53'

Whereas
  '5' - 3 gives 2

the following construct
return
{
        id : 1234,
        title : 'Tony the Pony'
};

is a syntax error due to the sneaky implicit semicolon insertion on the newline after return. The following works as you would expect though:
return {
        id : 1234,
        title : 'Tony the Pony'
};