"Maybe we should consider more natural reasons for the extremely recent rise in temperature and stop wondering which dance moves caused the rain."
Well go on then, if you've got a theory that you think can be demonstrated to be a much more likely reason then I'm sure the global scientific community would love to hear it.
You really think people haven't been looking for another cause? Of course they have, the problem is the only possible cause with any sizeable amount of evidence backing it is that of man made climate change.
You're making a terrible assumption, you're assuming you're smarter than the global scientific community, you're assuming they haven't thought of this, and that they're focussing on man being the cause because it was the first thing they came up with and they're too dumb to consider any alternative. The problem is your assumption is deeply flawed, science has long been searching for another reason, there just hasn't been one that can stand up to the same level of evidence as is available to suggest man made climate change is the most likely cause.
I don't really understand what the point of your first paragraph was? I don't really see how it's an argument for anything, because man also has a pretty awful track record of doing the environmentally responsible thing either, plenty of species have been whiped out and environmental disasters occured for no reason other than greed or laziness. Right now, given the mounting evidence, believing that man isn't responsible and that there is instead some impossibly hard to discover massive and constantly increasing heat source causing the effect we're seeing is far, far more about superstition than believing man is, at least, for a large part, responsible for climate change by simply making the easily demonstrable greenhouse effect worse as we release ever more CO2 in the atmosphere whilst simultaneously destroying nature's carbon sinks like rainforests on the scale of millions of acres per year.
You're exhibiting the exact traits you're chastising much of the rest of the human race for - an inability to reach a best guess conclusion based on the weight of evidence whilst instead opting for something far more unlikely, for which there is no evidence. You're taking the easy way out, you're picking the option that's most satisifying, you're saying there's something else out there for which there is no proof of the existence of- you're making the god argument, you're doing exactly the same thing as the rain dancing native Americans.
Look you may be right, it may be one of those cases where it just happens there was some effect that millions of scientists globally have missed, but we've got to make decisions based on the weight of the evidence, and you're giving the 5% chance option as much weight as the 95% chance option. This is clearly absurd, you wouldn't take the 5% option if you were gambling even a small amount of money, so why the future of the human race other than the fact that the 5% option gives you an excuse to ignore the problem until it's already too late? Is this like the baby boomers pension pots thing? You're hoping you'll have cashed out, enjoyed life and died by the time the problem of unsustainability hits, so if you can just put off having to change your lifestyle long enough in the meantime so that at least you can live your life as you want to, even if everyone else after you will get fucked over.
It's a shit attitude and it's precisely the sort of attitude that's caused everything from climate change to the global banking crisis - pure selfishness and a refusal to accept any kind of responsibility for actions with negative consequences for a greater number of people.
"protip; most artists work long hours, or part-time hours _after_ their full-time job, and spends years or decades in the trenches, before they get any success"
But it's their choice, if they enjoy it it's effectively their hobby.
As in my previous example, I spend long hours after my full time job playing CoD, providing an opponent for many thousands of players to play against across all the games I've played, however I've yet to make any profit it from it.
You can't absolve the artists of blame because in some cases they're the ones who are actually complaining about piracy, but also because without them the music industry wouldn't exist - they've had every opportunity to move away from the industry, or to talk out against the industry but none of them really do, they're equally complicit in the corrupt and broken system.
Your comment about how they have such a hard time illustrates how succesful many have been at playing the hard done by artists, whilst still often enough ending up a multi-millionaire having spent a mere few hundred man hours creating something they'll profit off for hundreds of thousands of hours, sometimes even having to do a full time job as well as their hobby, the horror! Life must be just awful for them.
As a slight aside, there was an interesting documentary on TV last night in the UK about Russia's relationship with the West, and it's post soviet issues with Russia's ultra rich oil barons.
I found the documentary interesting, and it put a different perspective on things that have happened between the West and Russia over the last decade or so. They had a number of Russian politicians including Putin himself, as well as people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice interviewed for it, so much of what was said was said with some pretty solid authority.
It spoke of 9/11 and mentioned that when the US went to Defcon 3 as a result of that, Russia reassured the yanks not to worry, that they wouldn't see it as a reason to also increase their military alertness level, and in fact said they'd cancel all military exercises to show support for the US's response to the event. When it became clear the US was going into Afghanistan Russia also sent signals to the ex-soviet states on Russia's border that Russia wouldn't be offended by those nations allowing America to access Afghanistan from their territory - Russia effectively okay large US military deployments in nations on Russia's border. These are all things that wouldn't even be dreamt of during the cold war. There was also an interesting mention that the Taliban actually approached Russian border guards with Afghanistan to say the Taliban was willing to work with the Russian's against the Americans, and quite amusing, the Russian response to the Taliban was literally "Fuck off." - this despite the fact America had done exactly the same against the Russian's only 20 years earlier.
But the Russian's then wanted to test how two sided the relationship was and asked about the potential of being invited to join Nato, as an opportunity to show that there really was a blooming two way relationship, but it was at this point Russia was told "we don't invite people to join NATO, they have to ask" - after what Russia had done it saw this refusal to make exceptions as quite an insult, and IMO understandably so - this was a massive lost opportunity to build bridges. The situation then deteriorated as America decided to build their missile defence system along Russia's border when America claimed it was for Russia's benefit to against for example Iran, but America refused to host part of it within Russia's border if that was the case.
But there was another facet to the documentary which I also found interesting, it was that of how post-USSR breakup, some Russian's got rich by taking all the oil fields, because Russia's business laws post breakup just hadn't covered all the loopholes. One of the guy's in question complained that he had done nothing wrong under the letter of the law, he'd merely exploited loopholes to seize this oil, and effectively the thinking in Putin's government was in stark contrast to the West in this respect- whilst in the West we'd say (as we have with the bankers) "Well, they technically did nothing illegal by the letter of the law, so I guess we'll let them walk away with those billions", in Russia the view was more "It doesn't matter if you've technically done nothing wrong, you admit you know what you did was morally wrong regardless, and so we're taking action".
Of course I'm not saying Russia is right, perfect or anything - I've obviously avoided the negative actions of Russia regarding their actions in Chechnya (which the US supported), and the issues surrounding democracy, or lack of, but these two issues highlighted some interesting points to me.
The first is that America threw away some massive chances to build bridges with Russia which would've let to impressive political stability and solidarity across the world, simply because of it's own sheer arrogance. Russia was forced to realise that it didn't matter how much it gave the US, the US was only interested in Russia when it benefited to the US - it's an inherently selfish nation that isn't interested in two way relationships to such a degree that it's massively shorts
"Whatever you might think of the case itself, your outrage over the method of the arrest is a little misplaced - we have mutual extradition agreements with many countries."
It's not misplaced, these extradition agreements were set up under pressure from the US to allow extradition of terror suspects and so forth after 9/11.
Now the US is using them to extradite for things that aren't even illegal in the home country, and arguably not even in the US either.
This is why in the UK there's so much uproar about the extradition treaty being one-sided, in theory it's actually not, but in practice it is because whilst the UK only asks for extradition of, for example, American citizens who have committed murder whilst in the UK, or joint British-American citizens who have committed say fraud, whilst in the UK, America is requesting extradition for British teenagers who have run websites deemed legal in Britain.
The fact is, America is abusing the system well beyond what it was intended for.
"I would sure hope that US law enforcement (assuming they investigated and agreed there was enough evidence to prosecute) could get the cooperation of the government of the foreign country where the thieves lived and have them extradited for trial here."
Why would they have to be extradited? why couldn't they face justice in their home country?
There is something unusual here, just like there's something unusual with the case of the guy from Sheffield in the UK last week - these people are facing extradition despite doing nothing illegal in their home country, to the point that even the police in their home country saw no point pressing charges. In this particular case there's a big problem - the extradition treaty does say the act must be illegal in both countries, yet here in the UK we've had an idential case (the Oink case) where the guy was found not guilty of any wrongdoing, yet this case was completely ignored by the presiding judge in favour of a completely different, but largely irrelevant case that did justify extradition - obviously there is something fishy going on there, it may be incompetence, or it may be corruption, but something is not right- I wouldn't be surprised to find it's the same in these other cases too.
For what it's worth, in that case the FBI was personally involved, they were present when the kid's computers were seized at his house. I'd be amazed if the FBI wasn't present during these nesw raids too, so sure they may not have power of arrest, but they were certainly at the scene dictating what they wanted in at least this one case.
Now you can argue it's the fault of the host countries for allowing this, and I'd agree to an extent, but the reality is America does have power in the world and there are only so many things you can piss it off over before you risk suffering economic isolation. When America abuses it's power like this it can be hard for countries to say no. With America's power comes responsibility, but it's abusing that right now.
"I strongly agree, that, if especially, megauploads owners have been arrested due to material that users of the site had uploaded, this is a very ominous sign"
It's worse than this, this is a bunch of non-US citizens, situated outside America, running a business from Hong Kong, having their international domain names hijacked.
Worse, MegaUpload is even used by some businesses, I know a handful of companies first hand, but I suspect there are thousands, who use it as a method to distribute large, legitimate files.
This goes beyond any US action that has ever happened before as the US in this case has effectively just shut down a legitimate foreign business that it simply does not like, and has had arrested everyone who works at that business.
This can now only be resolved by the following two things: - Countries must start ignoring US requests for arrest of their citizens where the crime has happened outside the US and/or is not illegal in the country of arrest
- The US must lose all control of the internet, it must now be internationally controlled by something like the ITU where majority consensus is needed globally for this kind of thing to be possible such that no single country or small group of countries can impose their will on the rest of the internet
America is now effectively just unilaterally deciding which businesses are allowed to do business on the internet, and the worst part, foreign sovereign nations are allowing it to happen.
"In any case, would you do your job on that basis? No, so you have no right at all to tell others that they should."
Not sure about the AC, but I know I do. I turn up to work each day, write code, and get paid for being at work to write code. What happens to that code when it's left my desk and gone to clients I really don't care about, it could be copied and reused as many times as they want it to, the point is I've been paid whilst I've been actually working, not continued to be paid long after I've stopped working. This is the case with public performances too.
See the point is the vast majority of the world's working population (like on the order of 99.99% of it or maybe even more) already work around the "public performances" type concept - they get paid for actually turning up and doing something. The problem musicians have is they're too lazy, they don't want to work the hours people in almost every other profession do, they just want to do a few hours every few weeks, with the option to take a few years out, and still make millions.
They complain if it's not profitable for them to do this, but so fucking what? It's not profitable for me to sit playing CoD online all day every day, but it doesn't mean I still have the right to do it and make millions in the process - life isn't like that, if you can't provide something the market wants then you need to retrain to do something you can, the world doesn't owe you employment doing your preferred task, in your preferred way.
So excuse me if I have zero sympathy for the whining artists, it's not my fucking fault they're lazy layabouts who refuse to do what most of the rest of the working population has to. So assuming the GP has a job like nearly everyone else in the working population has, then yes he fucking does have the right to tell others how to work - he has the right because it'd mean he's working his way through life, providing something the world wants and is willing to pay for and shouldn't have to subsidise lazy bum artists who feel the world owes them through all sorts of legislation set up to support their lazy lifestyles through lobbying and corruption.
I similarly have the right to tell artists to turn up and actually do some work for a living if they want money, because I provide something the world is willing to pay for and I do so day in, day out. The should also expect only money proportional to the work they do - i.e. if they only want to a few hours work every few weeks or months, then only expect a few hours pay every few weeks or months. The current system despite piracy, already provides them plenty more than that, if they don't like it they can change professions like anyone else would have to, this is why they don't have a leg to stand on whatsoever when they cry about piracy - because they're no more fucking special than anyone else, despite their belief that they are.
I'll start to have sympathy for the profession when there's no more new music in the world. I'll be waiting forever though, because people have always made music, even when there's no money in it, simply because to many, they do it as a recreational thing, rather than an expectation of something to live off.
He pointed out that if everyone is in the same low level of light then everyone will see equally because their eyes will adjust, thus if someone is raping you you will be more easily seen in a dark bush by someone whose eyes are adjusted to the dark due to lack of lighting, whilst if someone has dragged you into a dark bush to rape you when they are walking in the light, because their eyes wont have adjusted to the dark it'll actually be harder for them to see you.
What you say is only true if someone rapes you in the light, but what rapist is stupid enough to do that? Most happen after their victims have been dragged somewhere dark, where most people can't see because they're walking in the light and their eyes are adjusted to the light.
It was using 1gb for me yesterday with 17 tabs open.
I don't really know how they can claim it's the most memory efficient like this, IE, Opera, Chrome, all use much less, and perform much better, and this is Firefox 9.0.1.
Granted it's been better in general recently, but the last few days it's got bad again, 9.0.1 seems to be a broken release or something as I've had other bugs too - i.e. open tabs being completely lost when reopening the browser without even the usual recover tabs page, and despite the browser being set to open the tabs I had open last time. It is of course hard to tell when the change happened, because versions are being thrown at us so thick and fast, and in a way you often don't even notice that you struggle to draw a line as to at what change things started screwing up.
Perhaps as you say it is an addons issue, but if the most prominent addons like AdBlock and Firebug (as that's all I have installed) can completely and utterly mess up the browser then there's still something very wrong with it.
"Also keep in mind that civilian generation of nuclear power is within their rights under the IAEA?"
I assume you mean the NPT, but either way, no it's not, not if they can't adhere to their nuclear inspection obligations, which they are not doing, hence, they are not within their rights.
Last November the IAEA also issued a public statement citing concern that Iran may well have continued it's nuclear weapons programme after 2003, so using the IAEA to imply Iran is fulfilling it's obligations is a little naive to say the least. See here and note specifically the offer from the IAEA to send an inspection team to clarify that this is not the case, to which Iran responded with nothing but a load of the usual rhetoric about Western imperialism:
Of course, Iran would be within it's rights to pull out of the NPT, but then it can no longer use the shield of claiming to be an NPT member in it's defence if a country attacks it's nuclear programme without a prior UNSC resolution. That shield is important to it, because it'd be a pretty bad precedent if an NPT member's well publicised nuclear programme was attacked as it would bring the whole worth of the NPT into question if NPT procedures and rules weren't being followed. This is why the likes of the US and Europe have been doing things via the IAEA, to ensure procedures are properly followed prior to any potential attack because it is at this point, that if an attack is legally justified, that Iran would officially have been seen to have failed in it's obligations. Currently things are heading precisely this way, because Iran isn't doing anything to demonstrate it's fulfilling it's obligation, hence the recent IAEA condemnation of that fact.
If Iran is attacked it only has itself to blame, it's had plenty of opportunity to fulfil it's obligations under the NPT but has chosen not to. Other NPT signatories don't seem to have a problem fulfilling their obligations without any drama, including those who the US would also love to bomb.
If you're going to quote the IAEA as some way to absolve Iran of blame over the issue, at least get your facts straight. Right now the IAEA most certainly doesn't believe Iran is fulfilling it's obligations, and most certainly does suspect Iran has continued a nuclear weapons programme on from 2003.
Sure the GP can't out and out prove they have a nuclear weapons programme, just like you can't personally prove that Elvis is really dead, but sometimes we just have to go on the balance of evidence, and trust objective multi-national organisations like the IAEA, and on the weight of the evidence, it seems likely that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons to at least some degree - whether it's to the degree where they'll have a bomb within a year or two as some of the fear mongers suggest is more in question of course, but there's a decent degree of likelihood that they're at least heading down that path. Only time will clarify things further though.
The problem is I don't think it's as simple as simple sales rates anymore, with this gen introducing services and other content too, the number of units shifted is a pretty pointless measure of success for a company and acts as little more than a number for fanboys to have a little circle jerk over.
There's a pretty fair argument that the additional profit from games (higher price point, higher attach rate) for the other two consoles, as well as the income from downloadable game addons, downloadable movies, music, avatars, and all that cruft, and profits from addons (Move/Kinect) as well as service subscriptions themselves (i.e. XBox Live) that Sony and Microsoft have probably actually made more profit than Nintendo despite the lower units sold for Microsoft and Sony's consoles.
The units sold only matters if you can monetise those units, and Nintendo has out and out failed to do so. Microsoft and Sony have in contrast had solid, and fairly succesful plans.
I don't even like Sony in the slightest, so it pains me somewhat to offer somewhat of a defence for them, but the fact is whilst Nintendo had the potential to be far and away the winner in terms of profits this console round due to their large install base, they completely failed to take advantage of that, and that, coupled with the early failure of the 3DS (even if it's picking up now) is why Nintendo has struggled financially, the Yen is certainly going to be part the problem, but not to the extent they're claiming. I like Microsoft a bit more, but recognise they still have a long way to go in terms of ethics in some areas.
It takes more than just shipping a succesful console to have a profitable games console division or business, you need to be able to shift games, and nowadays, many other types of content and subscriptions with it to boot.
I'd like to see Nintendo thrive, because IMO they're the most ethical of the console manufacturers, and so deserve to based on that, but time and time again they throw their growth away. This is fundamentally the difference between them, and say, Apple over the last few years, Nintendo has all the good will that Apple has (or at least had) and the strong massively loyal fanbase to boot, but whilst Apple has had a handful of failures too, Apple has been far more consistent in it's successes, whilst Nintendo has been painfully inconsistent. They need to maintain the kind of momentum they had when they released the Wii, but instead they keep letting it slip away time and time again. Because I do like Nintendo and think that from a moral point of view they deserve to do well, because they are fairly ethical, it genuinely does pain me to see them keep doing this. It's what I imagine having a daughter, who dates the odd brilliant guy with a phd, and high paying job, that really thinks the world of them, only to keep dumping them for countless douchebags in between must be like- you still love them, but it isn't going to stop you shaking your head in despair and having a go at them when they're being so fucking stupid.
It's just the way it's always been for Nintendo, without fail they have always had a generation or two of shit consoles where everyone's thought the end is nigh for them, then out the blue they pull out something really quite impressive and storm the market.
I predicted precisely this would happen with the Wii, that people buying shares in Nintendo based on that assuming it was setting itself on a path of perpetual massive growth as it saw with the Wii were stupid, that's not how Nintendo works. The Wii U will be a bit of a flop, the next console after may or may not be, but certainly that one or the next one again will probably be a massive success.
It's as if Nintendo's engineers only work their arse off when their company is at risk of going under, and then they produce something awesome, and just sit around lazily getting fat on the success until things start to go to shit again.
But it goes beyond that, when the BBC has had it pointed out to them in response to a number of articles by a number of people that he's not trustworthy with many sources and explanations to back that up it's no longer a case of a journalist knowing better, it's a journalist, and the managers who have also been informed of the problem outright not doing their jobs, and that makes the BBC outright complicit in corruption of factual reporting.
The Register I could understand it from, their whole business model is built around lying about things (almost everything in fact) to stir up controversy and get hits, but the BBC shouldn't be like this. The whole point in having a publicly funded broadcasting organisation is that it means it can be impartial free from corporate interests, if the BBC isn't doing that, then it ceases to serve a purpose that commercial interests couldn't better and more efficiently serve.
There has been a long history of the BBC being too close to Microsoft (see the original iPlayer DRM fiasco for example) and their parroting of a paid Microsoft shill, Florian Mueller, who they have had pointed out them is such on numerous occasions at numerous levels yet who they continue to quote implies the problem is still there.
FWIW, I'm not even anti-Microsoft, I like a lot of their products and in fact thing they're far and away best in field (Visual Studio, XBox 360), but I like my public service broadcaster neutral, and the BBC is repeatedly failing at that in certain areas, despite being fully aware of the problem, and knowing exactly what it can do to solve it.
No, it's the same here in the UK, I guess our politicians just have the decency to still gently place the bill on the table before launching ad hominem attacks to falsely justify their position though:)
Ah so it's a local council issue rather than a central government issue then. Those are at least generally easier to solve as you need much fewer people to get the local press to embarass them into changing it.
To be fair, I doubt he cares, he did his shilling, and collected his pay cheque.
The real problem is that sites like The Register, the BBC and so forth allow people to make money like that, by repeatedly parroting their tosh, even after he's been heavily discredited and forced to admit he's in the employ of Microsoft.
Lying is only now a workable profession, because the media are happy to publish lies, so I'd personally blame the media.
Well if it's a remnant from British rule then there's a fair chance Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, and half of Africa use that terminology too.
But out of interest, what is the reasoning behind the American interpretation of tabling? The British interpretation stems from the idea that tabling a bill, means you're putting it on the table for discussion.
"So if you want rid of your copy of Apocalypse Now Redux or Munch's Oddysey, now you have to give over your ID to the dealer and you can only deal in cash."
What piece of legislation covers this? I've never heard of this.
I'm aware of the stuff about the PRS but this is a new one on me!
Yes, but the point is in this case, that on average you wont be paid more following this route because the jobs just aren't there for most people, and in the long run it may be a career dead end, which will whipe out any benefits of short term pay gain, that's the fundamental problem with going for an obscure, or dying language. The point is that whilst you may be one of the lucky ones who manages to outdo the averages, and actually thrive off the benefits of a higher paying, more obscure option, that for everyone that does that, there must be someone that fails, hence the average case. It's quite a gamble for your career.
"As for averages, you have to look at everyone, not just yourself to decide things for the graduates."
That was exactly my point - on average.NET is a far superior option for grads, because it's the development skillset that is most employable right now. For the odd unique case, i.e. those who have somewhere they can stay for free in London, then it may well be that that's not the case, but.NET is going to be far and away the best option for candidates.
"As for changing jobs, you simply 'lie'"
But when you're pretty high up in your game, rusty isn't good enough - the argument works fine if you're going for junior or low-mid range jobs, but if you're at the mid, to upper range level of skill "I'm a bit rusty" just doesn't cut it, because you'll be up against candidates who aren't. So sure you may still find work as a.NET job but it'll be at the lower end of the scale - £25k or so, and you'll have to spend a couple of years there to get the experience companies are looking for, by that point taking in that low wage will have undone the benefits of a short stint at a higher wage relative to just going for something more employable from the outset.
"I don't know what the job market will look like in a few years, but I think C# will fade (as you say, people can't hire them, so they will look elsewhere for the candidates) and HTML will rise."
But what will replace it? The C# market is churning out devs as fast as any other option, so sure you can move from C# to a different language, but that language will suffer recruitment problems to an even greater degree so you don't solve anything by moving away. I think growth for.NET will slow, largely because of the shift to mobile and because it'll take MS some time, if at all to move more strongly into mobile, but I think it'll be the best bet for quite some time to come.
It's always worth keeping an eye on the horizon, to try and spot the next big thing, but I don't think we're there yet,.NET doesn't even seem to have reached it's peak yet due to the very fact growth still actually seems to be accelerating right now, only when it's stopped accelerating and starts to become flat will it be at it's peak.
You're right that HTML/Javascript skills are becoming much more important, but they're still not seen as high paying jobs, and if I'm honest even at my current employer we treat it as such, HTML/Javascript is, in all but the most complex cases, something that can be delegated to fairly fresh graduates pretty safely. Amongst our more senior devs, HTML is something they know inside out, it's not a specific sought for skill in itself at that level - it's something you're expected to know as standard, with your main languages (i.e. Java etc.) on top. The Javascript side will probably become more important and more skilled with canvas of course, as this is where you start to require some ability in mathematics to do some really fancy stuff, but I still think it'll remain a lower paying skill.
Yes, that was a large part of it certainly. The Yes campaign was really weak in failing to highlight the outright lies of the No campaign and use them against them too. The Yes campaign struck me as a kind of amateur campaign you'd expect for student council elections at some uni, whilst the No campaign was a full blown dirty tricks political campaign with the backing of the likes of Murdoch, the Daily Mail, and the who's who of the UK's most corrupt politicians (Margarett Beckett etc.).
"It also shows average salaries, which I think is far more important than popularity."
By what metric? Average wages are governed like most other things, by supply and demand, if the wage is higher it means there's a shortage, and there's a good chance that there's a shortage because it's not a thriving market.
You only have to look at the millenium bug for evidence of this - COBOL programmers were getting paid an absolute fortune but it was short lived- the salaries were paid to get essential fixes in but ultimately no new projects would then be started in COBOL because staffing them was too expensive, and similarly as many systems as possible were moved off of COBOL because again, hiring staff to maintain them was too expensive.
The fundamental problem is that if say, Scala is commanding a high salary, it may be a good short term investment - go for it, rake in the £55k, but then what happens when your Scala project is finally made obsolete due to said cost and you have to start looking for a new job, or simply because you want to move up the career ladder? or even what if your employer has to make redundancies? There'll be no new Scala jobs, and the.NET shops wont touch you because you haven't been using it.
There's also the point that the Scala market is so utterly tiny, and the Ruby market relatively so too, that although they may command higher average wages, because the community is so small by virtue of the very way averages works there'll still be more high paid C# jobs than scala jobs anyway, e.g. if there's 100 scala jobs and they pay in the range of say £55k, then there may be 10,000 C# jobs, of which most pay may be only £25k, but still 500 of which (i.e. more than scala) are paying as much as say £80k. This does mean there may also be more competition for the C# jobs too of course, but in my experience that's not the case - there's so many C# jobs out there companies just can't fill them, when I last looked I could basically name my wage (and I did, and got it without even any hesitation as my employer had been looking for 9 months already, and kicked myself aftewards for not asking for even more!!).
There are other factors of course, looking at Scala job availability they appear, in the UK, to be almost in their entirety, situated in London's financial sector, which has disadvatanges in itself, the £55k Scala dev in London is going to feel a lot more poor than the £40k C# dev in say Leeds, because of the massively higher cost of living in London.
I'm not saying there aren't circumstances where being a Scala dev or whatever isn't nice, if you've always lived in London and are happy there then sure it's a pretty decent option, but for many it's a non-starter, you'll often be lucky to even find a Scala job outside of London. It's a similar story now even for Java, it's so much easier to pick up a C# or PHP job, and I've certainly seen no better financial prospects in going for Java roles instead here in the North of England.
I suspect any personal choice on technology has to come down to personal circumstances, and when you've got some years experience under your belt going for more obscure languages is much easier, but for graduates fresh out of university, living and working outside of London for example who would be glad of any kind of employment right now, C# is definitely a guaranteed answer to that, and they'll find themselves on much more than the national average wage from the outset even which is more than many of our current 2 million unemployed could even wish for!
What do you mean "enterprise side"? enterprise software is just business software, some might argue that it has certain traits, like the ability to scale, but this means enterprise software encompasses desktop apps, web apps, and so on. There's no such thing as "enterprise side" as some special type of software that's separate from web applications and so forth.
"How many of those ASP.NET jobs are using heavyweight enterprisey stuff (message queue, service bus, WCF/SOA) versus simple database-backed web sites? Most of those big projects still seem to be in Java, at least to me."
The answer would be most of them, SOA is massively common amongst the types of ASP.NET sites businesses are building. For what it's worth I've also got a good relationship with a number of recruitment agencies and have on a number of occasions asked them what the market is like for various languages, and all agree that.NET is far and away the largest growth language now, and that there's little money in recruiting Java devs. If you think ASP.NET is only being used for basic dynamic websites which is more often the role of PHP then you're greatly mistaken, and I don't really even see how.NET jobs could be replacing PHP jobs when there are more PHP jobs being advertised out there now than Java jobs even.
So you may be right, but if you are I've no idea where all these companies using Java are finding their candidates as it's not through job sites, and it's not through recruitment agencies. I doubt very much there's something special about Java whereby Java devs always apply directly to companies, but.NET devs don't at all.
I'm not searching for any specific developers, I'm just searching for "developer" without any specification and seeing what comes up. iOS, Objective C, however you want to phrase it is relatively uncommon.
"I find it curious as to which C-based languages are thriving and which are not. If it were on the merits of the language alone, then you'd expect usage to reflect specific features, and I was assured repeatedly in the discussion on Java that languages were not (as I'd claimed) popular due to promotion."
It's all down to whether the language has been granted a purpose.
C# rises because Microsoft has made it the defacto option for developing for their platform.
Java rose, because it was chosen by universities as the defacto teaching language
Objective C rose because of the increased popularity of iOS.
So it's really simple, a language succedes when it's been given a popular cause to. You could make the most beautiful C-like language in the world, but if it's not picked up for any wild scale reason (i.e. made a learning language across nearly all unis, or attached to a popular product) then it wont go anywhere.
But keep in mind the TIOBE index just measures discussion of languages, not actual real world usage - there's a fair argument that Java's position is boosted more than C#'s for example because if Java is used as a training language it will produce disporportionately more questions than a language that is not - new developers are going to ask more questions than professional developers.
Similarly buzz around iProducts is extremely high, they're talked about massively disproportionately to their actual marketshare, and if the language they use, Objective C gets more mentions as a result, it'll boost it's ranking.
So Logo's popularity could again be more about students asking questions related to it rather than anyone actually using it for any projects.
Of course, you can argue that this type of learning is usage, and it is to some extent, but it seems a weak definition to me - if a C++ coder sits for 3 days solid writing C++ code at work without needing to consult the internet for help by posting a question, then after 3 days finally has to ask one question, does that really mean C++ is being used less than the kid using Logo at school who asks 5 different questions in 2 hours whilst he's doing his homework?
These are the problems with TIOBEs methodology, and a better measure of popularity is to take a global sample of job listings in various cities across the world to see what companies are actually recruiting for - that gives us a more realistic idea of what's really, actually being used IMO.
It's more certainly happening, but primarily from the web side of things. Java is still fairly secure on back end banking systems and the like (hence it has a good showing still in job searches in places like London where there is a massive banking sector), but C# is without question displacing it for things like internal bespoke web applications, and many corporate websites and intranets, as well as most client side work.
If you work or live in a banking heavy area then you certainly wont see it, if you live anywhere else, or work in pretty much any other industry, you just can't miss it. Whilst Java and C# run pretty evenly in job searches in London for example, an identical search on Monster.com in cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Edinburgh show.NET to be well ahead, with PHP arguably a close second. I had a search across a bunch of American cities and found a similar story.
For what it's worth though, I haven't done this exercise in about 6 months, and Java has definitely picked up again by way of Java jobs compared to where it was then, and for about a year or two before, so whilst C# is definitely more popular in terms of recruitment still now, Java is definitely showing a resurgence right now relative to where it's been for the 18 to 24 months or so prior - it'll be interesting to see how it holds up, but watching the jobs market is a far more interesting and worthwhile indicator than TIOBE. It's also interesting that PHP has shown slow but steady growth in terms of jobs recruited for over the last few years too.
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe we should consider more natural reasons for the extremely recent rise in temperature and stop wondering which dance moves caused the rain."
Well go on then, if you've got a theory that you think can be demonstrated to be a much more likely reason then I'm sure the global scientific community would love to hear it.
You really think people haven't been looking for another cause? Of course they have, the problem is the only possible cause with any sizeable amount of evidence backing it is that of man made climate change.
You're making a terrible assumption, you're assuming you're smarter than the global scientific community, you're assuming they haven't thought of this, and that they're focussing on man being the cause because it was the first thing they came up with and they're too dumb to consider any alternative. The problem is your assumption is deeply flawed, science has long been searching for another reason, there just hasn't been one that can stand up to the same level of evidence as is available to suggest man made climate change is the most likely cause.
I don't really understand what the point of your first paragraph was? I don't really see how it's an argument for anything, because man also has a pretty awful track record of doing the environmentally responsible thing either, plenty of species have been whiped out and environmental disasters occured for no reason other than greed or laziness. Right now, given the mounting evidence, believing that man isn't responsible and that there is instead some impossibly hard to discover massive and constantly increasing heat source causing the effect we're seeing is far, far more about superstition than believing man is, at least, for a large part, responsible for climate change by simply making the easily demonstrable greenhouse effect worse as we release ever more CO2 in the atmosphere whilst simultaneously destroying nature's carbon sinks like rainforests on the scale of millions of acres per year.
You're exhibiting the exact traits you're chastising much of the rest of the human race for - an inability to reach a best guess conclusion based on the weight of evidence whilst instead opting for something far more unlikely, for which there is no evidence. You're taking the easy way out, you're picking the option that's most satisifying, you're saying there's something else out there for which there is no proof of the existence of- you're making the god argument, you're doing exactly the same thing as the rain dancing native Americans.
Look you may be right, it may be one of those cases where it just happens there was some effect that millions of scientists globally have missed, but we've got to make decisions based on the weight of the evidence, and you're giving the 5% chance option as much weight as the 95% chance option. This is clearly absurd, you wouldn't take the 5% option if you were gambling even a small amount of money, so why the future of the human race other than the fact that the 5% option gives you an excuse to ignore the problem until it's already too late? Is this like the baby boomers pension pots thing? You're hoping you'll have cashed out, enjoyed life and died by the time the problem of unsustainability hits, so if you can just put off having to change your lifestyle long enough in the meantime so that at least you can live your life as you want to, even if everyone else after you will get fucked over.
It's a shit attitude and it's precisely the sort of attitude that's caused everything from climate change to the global banking crisis - pure selfishness and a refusal to accept any kind of responsibility for actions with negative consequences for a greater number of people.
"protip; most artists work long hours, or part-time hours _after_ their full-time job, and spends years or decades in the trenches, before they get any success"
But it's their choice, if they enjoy it it's effectively their hobby.
As in my previous example, I spend long hours after my full time job playing CoD, providing an opponent for many thousands of players to play against across all the games I've played, however I've yet to make any profit it from it.
You can't absolve the artists of blame because in some cases they're the ones who are actually complaining about piracy, but also because without them the music industry wouldn't exist - they've had every opportunity to move away from the industry, or to talk out against the industry but none of them really do, they're equally complicit in the corrupt and broken system.
Your comment about how they have such a hard time illustrates how succesful many have been at playing the hard done by artists, whilst still often enough ending up a multi-millionaire having spent a mere few hundred man hours creating something they'll profit off for hundreds of thousands of hours, sometimes even having to do a full time job as well as their hobby, the horror! Life must be just awful for them.
As a slight aside, there was an interesting documentary on TV last night in the UK about Russia's relationship with the West, and it's post soviet issues with Russia's ultra rich oil barons.
I found the documentary interesting, and it put a different perspective on things that have happened between the West and Russia over the last decade or so. They had a number of Russian politicians including Putin himself, as well as people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice interviewed for it, so much of what was said was said with some pretty solid authority.
It spoke of 9/11 and mentioned that when the US went to Defcon 3 as a result of that, Russia reassured the yanks not to worry, that they wouldn't see it as a reason to also increase their military alertness level, and in fact said they'd cancel all military exercises to show support for the US's response to the event. When it became clear the US was going into Afghanistan Russia also sent signals to the ex-soviet states on Russia's border that Russia wouldn't be offended by those nations allowing America to access Afghanistan from their territory - Russia effectively okay large US military deployments in nations on Russia's border. These are all things that wouldn't even be dreamt of during the cold war. There was also an interesting mention that the Taliban actually approached Russian border guards with Afghanistan to say the Taliban was willing to work with the Russian's against the Americans, and quite amusing, the Russian response to the Taliban was literally "Fuck off." - this despite the fact America had done exactly the same against the Russian's only 20 years earlier.
But the Russian's then wanted to test how two sided the relationship was and asked about the potential of being invited to join Nato, as an opportunity to show that there really was a blooming two way relationship, but it was at this point Russia was told "we don't invite people to join NATO, they have to ask" - after what Russia had done it saw this refusal to make exceptions as quite an insult, and IMO understandably so - this was a massive lost opportunity to build bridges. The situation then deteriorated as America decided to build their missile defence system along Russia's border when America claimed it was for Russia's benefit to against for example Iran, but America refused to host part of it within Russia's border if that was the case.
But there was another facet to the documentary which I also found interesting, it was that of how post-USSR breakup, some Russian's got rich by taking all the oil fields, because Russia's business laws post breakup just hadn't covered all the loopholes. One of the guy's in question complained that he had done nothing wrong under the letter of the law, he'd merely exploited loopholes to seize this oil, and effectively the thinking in Putin's government was in stark contrast to the West in this respect- whilst in the West we'd say (as we have with the bankers) "Well, they technically did nothing illegal by the letter of the law, so I guess we'll let them walk away with those billions", in Russia the view was more "It doesn't matter if you've technically done nothing wrong, you admit you know what you did was morally wrong regardless, and so we're taking action".
Of course I'm not saying Russia is right, perfect or anything - I've obviously avoided the negative actions of Russia regarding their actions in Chechnya (which the US supported), and the issues surrounding democracy, or lack of, but these two issues highlighted some interesting points to me.
The first is that America threw away some massive chances to build bridges with Russia which would've let to impressive political stability and solidarity across the world, simply because of it's own sheer arrogance. Russia was forced to realise that it didn't matter how much it gave the US, the US was only interested in Russia when it benefited to the US - it's an inherently selfish nation that isn't interested in two way relationships to such a degree that it's massively shorts
"Whatever you might think of the case itself, your outrage over the method of the arrest is a little misplaced - we have mutual extradition agreements with many countries."
It's not misplaced, these extradition agreements were set up under pressure from the US to allow extradition of terror suspects and so forth after 9/11.
Now the US is using them to extradite for things that aren't even illegal in the home country, and arguably not even in the US either.
This is why in the UK there's so much uproar about the extradition treaty being one-sided, in theory it's actually not, but in practice it is because whilst the UK only asks for extradition of, for example, American citizens who have committed murder whilst in the UK, or joint British-American citizens who have committed say fraud, whilst in the UK, America is requesting extradition for British teenagers who have run websites deemed legal in Britain.
The fact is, America is abusing the system well beyond what it was intended for.
"I would sure hope that US law enforcement (assuming they investigated and agreed there was enough evidence to prosecute) could get the cooperation of the government of the foreign country where the thieves lived and have them extradited for trial here."
Why would they have to be extradited? why couldn't they face justice in their home country?
There is something unusual here, just like there's something unusual with the case of the guy from Sheffield in the UK last week - these people are facing extradition despite doing nothing illegal in their home country, to the point that even the police in their home country saw no point pressing charges. In this particular case there's a big problem - the extradition treaty does say the act must be illegal in both countries, yet here in the UK we've had an idential case (the Oink case) where the guy was found not guilty of any wrongdoing, yet this case was completely ignored by the presiding judge in favour of a completely different, but largely irrelevant case that did justify extradition - obviously there is something fishy going on there, it may be incompetence, or it may be corruption, but something is not right- I wouldn't be surprised to find it's the same in these other cases too.
For what it's worth, in that case the FBI was personally involved, they were present when the kid's computers were seized at his house. I'd be amazed if the FBI wasn't present during these nesw raids too, so sure they may not have power of arrest, but they were certainly at the scene dictating what they wanted in at least this one case.
Now you can argue it's the fault of the host countries for allowing this, and I'd agree to an extent, but the reality is America does have power in the world and there are only so many things you can piss it off over before you risk suffering economic isolation. When America abuses it's power like this it can be hard for countries to say no. With America's power comes responsibility, but it's abusing that right now.
"I strongly agree, that, if especially, megauploads owners have been arrested due to material that users of the site had uploaded, this is a very ominous sign"
It's worse than this, this is a bunch of non-US citizens, situated outside America, running a business from Hong Kong, having their international domain names hijacked.
Worse, MegaUpload is even used by some businesses, I know a handful of companies first hand, but I suspect there are thousands, who use it as a method to distribute large, legitimate files.
This goes beyond any US action that has ever happened before as the US in this case has effectively just shut down a legitimate foreign business that it simply does not like, and has had arrested everyone who works at that business.
This can now only be resolved by the following two things:
- Countries must start ignoring US requests for arrest of their citizens where the crime has happened outside the US and/or is not illegal in the country of arrest
- The US must lose all control of the internet, it must now be internationally controlled by something like the ITU where majority consensus is needed globally for this kind of thing to be possible such that no single country or small group of countries can impose their will on the rest of the internet
America is now effectively just unilaterally deciding which businesses are allowed to do business on the internet, and the worst part, foreign sovereign nations are allowing it to happen.
"In any case, would you do your job on that basis? No, so you have no right at all to tell others that they should."
Not sure about the AC, but I know I do. I turn up to work each day, write code, and get paid for being at work to write code. What happens to that code when it's left my desk and gone to clients I really don't care about, it could be copied and reused as many times as they want it to, the point is I've been paid whilst I've been actually working, not continued to be paid long after I've stopped working. This is the case with public performances too.
See the point is the vast majority of the world's working population (like on the order of 99.99% of it or maybe even more) already work around the "public performances" type concept - they get paid for actually turning up and doing something. The problem musicians have is they're too lazy, they don't want to work the hours people in almost every other profession do, they just want to do a few hours every few weeks, with the option to take a few years out, and still make millions.
They complain if it's not profitable for them to do this, but so fucking what? It's not profitable for me to sit playing CoD online all day every day, but it doesn't mean I still have the right to do it and make millions in the process - life isn't like that, if you can't provide something the market wants then you need to retrain to do something you can, the world doesn't owe you employment doing your preferred task, in your preferred way.
So excuse me if I have zero sympathy for the whining artists, it's not my fucking fault they're lazy layabouts who refuse to do what most of the rest of the working population has to. So assuming the GP has a job like nearly everyone else in the working population has, then yes he fucking does have the right to tell others how to work - he has the right because it'd mean he's working his way through life, providing something the world wants and is willing to pay for and shouldn't have to subsidise lazy bum artists who feel the world owes them through all sorts of legislation set up to support their lazy lifestyles through lobbying and corruption.
I similarly have the right to tell artists to turn up and actually do some work for a living if they want money, because I provide something the world is willing to pay for and I do so day in, day out. The should also expect only money proportional to the work they do - i.e. if they only want to a few hours work every few weeks or months, then only expect a few hours pay every few weeks or months. The current system despite piracy, already provides them plenty more than that, if they don't like it they can change professions like anyone else would have to, this is why they don't have a leg to stand on whatsoever when they cry about piracy - because they're no more fucking special than anyone else, despite their belief that they are.
I'll start to have sympathy for the profession when there's no more new music in the world. I'll be waiting forever though, because people have always made music, even when there's no money in it, simply because to many, they do it as a recreational thing, rather than an expectation of something to live off.
I think you completely missed his point.
He pointed out that if everyone is in the same low level of light then everyone will see equally because their eyes will adjust, thus if someone is raping you you will be more easily seen in a dark bush by someone whose eyes are adjusted to the dark due to lack of lighting, whilst if someone has dragged you into a dark bush to rape you when they are walking in the light, because their eyes wont have adjusted to the dark it'll actually be harder for them to see you.
What you say is only true if someone rapes you in the light, but what rapist is stupid enough to do that? Most happen after their victims have been dragged somewhere dark, where most people can't see because they're walking in the light and their eyes are adjusted to the light.
It took over BBC HD which was nice too.
It was using 1gb for me yesterday with 17 tabs open.
I don't really know how they can claim it's the most memory efficient like this, IE, Opera, Chrome, all use much less, and perform much better, and this is Firefox 9.0.1.
Granted it's been better in general recently, but the last few days it's got bad again, 9.0.1 seems to be a broken release or something as I've had other bugs too - i.e. open tabs being completely lost when reopening the browser without even the usual recover tabs page, and despite the browser being set to open the tabs I had open last time. It is of course hard to tell when the change happened, because versions are being thrown at us so thick and fast, and in a way you often don't even notice that you struggle to draw a line as to at what change things started screwing up.
Perhaps as you say it is an addons issue, but if the most prominent addons like AdBlock and Firebug (as that's all I have installed) can completely and utterly mess up the browser then there's still something very wrong with it.
"Also keep in mind that civilian generation of nuclear power is within their rights under the IAEA?"
I assume you mean the NPT, but either way, no it's not, not if they can't adhere to their nuclear inspection obligations, which they are not doing, hence, they are not within their rights.
Last November the IAEA also issued a public statement citing concern that Iran may well have continued it's nuclear weapons programme after 2003, so using the IAEA to imply Iran is fulfilling it's obligations is a little naive to say the least. See here and note specifically the offer from the IAEA to send an inspection team to clarify that this is not the case, to which Iran responded with nothing but a load of the usual rhetoric about Western imperialism:
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/statements/2011/amsp2011n030.html#iran
Of course, Iran would be within it's rights to pull out of the NPT, but then it can no longer use the shield of claiming to be an NPT member in it's defence if a country attacks it's nuclear programme without a prior UNSC resolution. That shield is important to it, because it'd be a pretty bad precedent if an NPT member's well publicised nuclear programme was attacked as it would bring the whole worth of the NPT into question if NPT procedures and rules weren't being followed. This is why the likes of the US and Europe have been doing things via the IAEA, to ensure procedures are properly followed prior to any potential attack because it is at this point, that if an attack is legally justified, that Iran would officially have been seen to have failed in it's obligations. Currently things are heading precisely this way, because Iran isn't doing anything to demonstrate it's fulfilling it's obligation, hence the recent IAEA condemnation of that fact.
If Iran is attacked it only has itself to blame, it's had plenty of opportunity to fulfil it's obligations under the NPT but has chosen not to. Other NPT signatories don't seem to have a problem fulfilling their obligations without any drama, including those who the US would also love to bomb.
If you're going to quote the IAEA as some way to absolve Iran of blame over the issue, at least get your facts straight. Right now the IAEA most certainly doesn't believe Iran is fulfilling it's obligations, and most certainly does suspect Iran has continued a nuclear weapons programme on from 2003.
Sure the GP can't out and out prove they have a nuclear weapons programme, just like you can't personally prove that Elvis is really dead, but sometimes we just have to go on the balance of evidence, and trust objective multi-national organisations like the IAEA, and on the weight of the evidence, it seems likely that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons to at least some degree - whether it's to the degree where they'll have a bomb within a year or two as some of the fear mongers suggest is more in question of course, but there's a decent degree of likelihood that they're at least heading down that path. Only time will clarify things further though.
The problem is I don't think it's as simple as simple sales rates anymore, with this gen introducing services and other content too, the number of units shifted is a pretty pointless measure of success for a company and acts as little more than a number for fanboys to have a little circle jerk over.
There's a pretty fair argument that the additional profit from games (higher price point, higher attach rate) for the other two consoles, as well as the income from downloadable game addons, downloadable movies, music, avatars, and all that cruft, and profits from addons (Move/Kinect) as well as service subscriptions themselves (i.e. XBox Live) that Sony and Microsoft have probably actually made more profit than Nintendo despite the lower units sold for Microsoft and Sony's consoles.
The units sold only matters if you can monetise those units, and Nintendo has out and out failed to do so. Microsoft and Sony have in contrast had solid, and fairly succesful plans.
I don't even like Sony in the slightest, so it pains me somewhat to offer somewhat of a defence for them, but the fact is whilst Nintendo had the potential to be far and away the winner in terms of profits this console round due to their large install base, they completely failed to take advantage of that, and that, coupled with the early failure of the 3DS (even if it's picking up now) is why Nintendo has struggled financially, the Yen is certainly going to be part the problem, but not to the extent they're claiming. I like Microsoft a bit more, but recognise they still have a long way to go in terms of ethics in some areas.
It takes more than just shipping a succesful console to have a profitable games console division or business, you need to be able to shift games, and nowadays, many other types of content and subscriptions with it to boot.
I'd like to see Nintendo thrive, because IMO they're the most ethical of the console manufacturers, and so deserve to based on that, but time and time again they throw their growth away. This is fundamentally the difference between them, and say, Apple over the last few years, Nintendo has all the good will that Apple has (or at least had) and the strong massively loyal fanbase to boot, but whilst Apple has had a handful of failures too, Apple has been far more consistent in it's successes, whilst Nintendo has been painfully inconsistent. They need to maintain the kind of momentum they had when they released the Wii, but instead they keep letting it slip away time and time again. Because I do like Nintendo and think that from a moral point of view they deserve to do well, because they are fairly ethical, it genuinely does pain me to see them keep doing this. It's what I imagine having a daughter, who dates the odd brilliant guy with a phd, and high paying job, that really thinks the world of them, only to keep dumping them for countless douchebags in between must be like- you still love them, but it isn't going to stop you shaking your head in despair and having a go at them when they're being so fucking stupid.
It's just the way it's always been for Nintendo, without fail they have always had a generation or two of shit consoles where everyone's thought the end is nigh for them, then out the blue they pull out something really quite impressive and storm the market.
I predicted precisely this would happen with the Wii, that people buying shares in Nintendo based on that assuming it was setting itself on a path of perpetual massive growth as it saw with the Wii were stupid, that's not how Nintendo works. The Wii U will be a bit of a flop, the next console after may or may not be, but certainly that one or the next one again will probably be a massive success.
It's as if Nintendo's engineers only work their arse off when their company is at risk of going under, and then they produce something awesome, and just sit around lazily getting fat on the success until things start to go to shit again.
But it goes beyond that, when the BBC has had it pointed out to them in response to a number of articles by a number of people that he's not trustworthy with many sources and explanations to back that up it's no longer a case of a journalist knowing better, it's a journalist, and the managers who have also been informed of the problem outright not doing their jobs, and that makes the BBC outright complicit in corruption of factual reporting.
The Register I could understand it from, their whole business model is built around lying about things (almost everything in fact) to stir up controversy and get hits, but the BBC shouldn't be like this. The whole point in having a publicly funded broadcasting organisation is that it means it can be impartial free from corporate interests, if the BBC isn't doing that, then it ceases to serve a purpose that commercial interests couldn't better and more efficiently serve.
There has been a long history of the BBC being too close to Microsoft (see the original iPlayer DRM fiasco for example) and their parroting of a paid Microsoft shill, Florian Mueller, who they have had pointed out them is such on numerous occasions at numerous levels yet who they continue to quote implies the problem is still there.
FWIW, I'm not even anti-Microsoft, I like a lot of their products and in fact thing they're far and away best in field (Visual Studio, XBox 360), but I like my public service broadcaster neutral, and the BBC is repeatedly failing at that in certain areas, despite being fully aware of the problem, and knowing exactly what it can do to solve it.
No, it's the same here in the UK, I guess our politicians just have the decency to still gently place the bill on the table before launching ad hominem attacks to falsely justify their position though :)
Ah so it's a local council issue rather than a central government issue then. Those are at least generally easier to solve as you need much fewer people to get the local press to embarass them into changing it.
To be fair, I doubt he cares, he did his shilling, and collected his pay cheque.
The real problem is that sites like The Register, the BBC and so forth allow people to make money like that, by repeatedly parroting their tosh, even after he's been heavily discredited and forced to admit he's in the employ of Microsoft.
Lying is only now a workable profession, because the media are happy to publish lies, so I'd personally blame the media.
Well if it's a remnant from British rule then there's a fair chance Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, and half of Africa use that terminology too.
But out of interest, what is the reasoning behind the American interpretation of tabling? The British interpretation stems from the idea that tabling a bill, means you're putting it on the table for discussion.
"So if you want rid of your copy of Apocalypse Now Redux or Munch's Oddysey, now you have to give over your ID to the dealer and you can only deal in cash."
What piece of legislation covers this? I've never heard of this.
I'm aware of the stuff about the PRS but this is a new one on me!
Yes, but the point is in this case, that on average you wont be paid more following this route because the jobs just aren't there for most people, and in the long run it may be a career dead end, which will whipe out any benefits of short term pay gain, that's the fundamental problem with going for an obscure, or dying language. The point is that whilst you may be one of the lucky ones who manages to outdo the averages, and actually thrive off the benefits of a higher paying, more obscure option, that for everyone that does that, there must be someone that fails, hence the average case. It's quite a gamble for your career.
"As for averages, you have to look at everyone, not just yourself to decide things for the graduates."
That was exactly my point - on average .NET is a far superior option for grads, because it's the development skillset that is most employable right now. For the odd unique case, i.e. those who have somewhere they can stay for free in London, then it may well be that that's not the case, but .NET is going to be far and away the best option for candidates.
"As for changing jobs, you simply 'lie'"
But when you're pretty high up in your game, rusty isn't good enough - the argument works fine if you're going for junior or low-mid range jobs, but if you're at the mid, to upper range level of skill "I'm a bit rusty" just doesn't cut it, because you'll be up against candidates who aren't. So sure you may still find work as a .NET job but it'll be at the lower end of the scale - £25k or so, and you'll have to spend a couple of years there to get the experience companies are looking for, by that point taking in that low wage will have undone the benefits of a short stint at a higher wage relative to just going for something more employable from the outset.
"I don't know what the job market will look like in a few years, but I think C# will fade (as you say, people can't hire them, so they will look elsewhere for the candidates) and HTML will rise."
But what will replace it? The C# market is churning out devs as fast as any other option, so sure you can move from C# to a different language, but that language will suffer recruitment problems to an even greater degree so you don't solve anything by moving away. I think growth for .NET will slow, largely because of the shift to mobile and because it'll take MS some time, if at all to move more strongly into mobile, but I think it'll be the best bet for quite some time to come.
It's always worth keeping an eye on the horizon, to try and spot the next big thing, but I don't think we're there yet, .NET doesn't even seem to have reached it's peak yet due to the very fact growth still actually seems to be accelerating right now, only when it's stopped accelerating and starts to become flat will it be at it's peak.
You're right that HTML/Javascript skills are becoming much more important, but they're still not seen as high paying jobs, and if I'm honest even at my current employer we treat it as such, HTML/Javascript is, in all but the most complex cases, something that can be delegated to fairly fresh graduates pretty safely. Amongst our more senior devs, HTML is something they know inside out, it's not a specific sought for skill in itself at that level - it's something you're expected to know as standard, with your main languages (i.e. Java etc.) on top. The Javascript side will probably become more important and more skilled with canvas of course, as this is where you start to require some ability in mathematics to do some really fancy stuff, but I still think it'll remain a lower paying skill.
Yes, that was a large part of it certainly. The Yes campaign was really weak in failing to highlight the outright lies of the No campaign and use them against them too. The Yes campaign struck me as a kind of amateur campaign you'd expect for student council elections at some uni, whilst the No campaign was a full blown dirty tricks political campaign with the backing of the likes of Murdoch, the Daily Mail, and the who's who of the UK's most corrupt politicians (Margarett Beckett etc.).
"It also shows average salaries, which I think is far more important than popularity."
By what metric? Average wages are governed like most other things, by supply and demand, if the wage is higher it means there's a shortage, and there's a good chance that there's a shortage because it's not a thriving market.
You only have to look at the millenium bug for evidence of this - COBOL programmers were getting paid an absolute fortune but it was short lived- the salaries were paid to get essential fixes in but ultimately no new projects would then be started in COBOL because staffing them was too expensive, and similarly as many systems as possible were moved off of COBOL because again, hiring staff to maintain them was too expensive.
The fundamental problem is that if say, Scala is commanding a high salary, it may be a good short term investment - go for it, rake in the £55k, but then what happens when your Scala project is finally made obsolete due to said cost and you have to start looking for a new job, or simply because you want to move up the career ladder? or even what if your employer has to make redundancies? There'll be no new Scala jobs, and the .NET shops wont touch you because you haven't been using it.
There's also the point that the Scala market is so utterly tiny, and the Ruby market relatively so too, that although they may command higher average wages, because the community is so small by virtue of the very way averages works there'll still be more high paid C# jobs than scala jobs anyway, e.g. if there's 100 scala jobs and they pay in the range of say £55k, then there may be 10,000 C# jobs, of which most pay may be only £25k, but still 500 of which (i.e. more than scala) are paying as much as say £80k. This does mean there may also be more competition for the C# jobs too of course, but in my experience that's not the case - there's so many C# jobs out there companies just can't fill them, when I last looked I could basically name my wage (and I did, and got it without even any hesitation as my employer had been looking for 9 months already, and kicked myself aftewards for not asking for even more!!).
There are other factors of course, looking at Scala job availability they appear, in the UK, to be almost in their entirety, situated in London's financial sector, which has disadvatanges in itself, the £55k Scala dev in London is going to feel a lot more poor than the £40k C# dev in say Leeds, because of the massively higher cost of living in London.
I'm not saying there aren't circumstances where being a Scala dev or whatever isn't nice, if you've always lived in London and are happy there then sure it's a pretty decent option, but for many it's a non-starter, you'll often be lucky to even find a Scala job outside of London. It's a similar story now even for Java, it's so much easier to pick up a C# or PHP job, and I've certainly seen no better financial prospects in going for Java roles instead here in the North of England.
I suspect any personal choice on technology has to come down to personal circumstances, and when you've got some years experience under your belt going for more obscure languages is much easier, but for graduates fresh out of university, living and working outside of London for example who would be glad of any kind of employment right now, C# is definitely a guaranteed answer to that, and they'll find themselves on much more than the national average wage from the outset even which is more than many of our current 2 million unemployed could even wish for!
What do you mean "enterprise side"? enterprise software is just business software, some might argue that it has certain traits, like the ability to scale, but this means enterprise software encompasses desktop apps, web apps, and so on. There's no such thing as "enterprise side" as some special type of software that's separate from web applications and so forth.
"How many of those ASP.NET jobs are using heavyweight enterprisey stuff (message queue, service bus, WCF/SOA) versus simple database-backed web sites? Most of those big projects still seem to be in Java, at least to me."
The answer would be most of them, SOA is massively common amongst the types of ASP.NET sites businesses are building. For what it's worth I've also got a good relationship with a number of recruitment agencies and have on a number of occasions asked them what the market is like for various languages, and all agree that .NET is far and away the largest growth language now, and that there's little money in recruiting Java devs. If you think ASP.NET is only being used for basic dynamic websites which is more often the role of PHP then you're greatly mistaken, and I don't really even see how .NET jobs could be replacing PHP jobs when there are more PHP jobs being advertised out there now than Java jobs even.
So you may be right, but if you are I've no idea where all these companies using Java are finding their candidates as it's not through job sites, and it's not through recruitment agencies. I doubt very much there's something special about Java whereby Java devs always apply directly to companies, but .NET devs don't at all.
I'm not searching for any specific developers, I'm just searching for "developer" without any specification and seeing what comes up. iOS, Objective C, however you want to phrase it is relatively uncommon.
"I find it curious as to which C-based languages are thriving and which are not. If it were on the merits of the language alone, then you'd expect usage to reflect specific features, and I was assured repeatedly in the discussion on Java that languages were not (as I'd claimed) popular due to promotion."
It's all down to whether the language has been granted a purpose.
C# rises because Microsoft has made it the defacto option for developing for their platform.
Java rose, because it was chosen by universities as the defacto teaching language
Objective C rose because of the increased popularity of iOS.
So it's really simple, a language succedes when it's been given a popular cause to. You could make the most beautiful C-like language in the world, but if it's not picked up for any wild scale reason (i.e. made a learning language across nearly all unis, or attached to a popular product) then it wont go anywhere.
But keep in mind the TIOBE index just measures discussion of languages, not actual real world usage - there's a fair argument that Java's position is boosted more than C#'s for example because if Java is used as a training language it will produce disporportionately more questions than a language that is not - new developers are going to ask more questions than professional developers.
Similarly buzz around iProducts is extremely high, they're talked about massively disproportionately to their actual marketshare, and if the language they use, Objective C gets more mentions as a result, it'll boost it's ranking.
So Logo's popularity could again be more about students asking questions related to it rather than anyone actually using it for any projects.
Of course, you can argue that this type of learning is usage, and it is to some extent, but it seems a weak definition to me - if a C++ coder sits for 3 days solid writing C++ code at work without needing to consult the internet for help by posting a question, then after 3 days finally has to ask one question, does that really mean C++ is being used less than the kid using Logo at school who asks 5 different questions in 2 hours whilst he's doing his homework?
These are the problems with TIOBEs methodology, and a better measure of popularity is to take a global sample of job listings in various cities across the world to see what companies are actually recruiting for - that gives us a more realistic idea of what's really, actually being used IMO.
It's more certainly happening, but primarily from the web side of things. Java is still fairly secure on back end banking systems and the like (hence it has a good showing still in job searches in places like London where there is a massive banking sector), but C# is without question displacing it for things like internal bespoke web applications, and many corporate websites and intranets, as well as most client side work.
If you work or live in a banking heavy area then you certainly wont see it, if you live anywhere else, or work in pretty much any other industry, you just can't miss it. Whilst Java and C# run pretty evenly in job searches in London for example, an identical search on Monster.com in cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Edinburgh show .NET to be well ahead, with PHP arguably a close second. I had a search across a bunch of American cities and found a similar story.
For what it's worth though, I haven't done this exercise in about 6 months, and Java has definitely picked up again by way of Java jobs compared to where it was then, and for about a year or two before, so whilst C# is definitely more popular in terms of recruitment still now, Java is definitely showing a resurgence right now relative to where it's been for the 18 to 24 months or so prior - it'll be interesting to see how it holds up, but watching the jobs market is a far more interesting and worthwhile indicator than TIOBE. It's also interesting that PHP has shown slow but steady growth in terms of jobs recruited for over the last few years too.