She approached the wrong punter

http://static.igossip.com/photos_2012/16blowing_ronald_mcdonald.jpg

"The number of jobs at risk is in line with the figure given when the strategic review was announced – between 250 and 300."

One of *those* reviews, that no doubt started with this conversation:

RM Director: Mr Consultant, we need to shed 300 jobs.

Mr Consultant: No problem, my daily rate's £2000, and I'll get my PA to fill in the blanks on our pro forma "sack the minions" review.

Wow. Someone awaiting sentencing for a conviction that carries jail time is allowed to leave the country to go to Cambodia? I knew the Swedish justice system was lenient, but that's bizarre.

Like others commenting here, I owe my career to two of the things Dennis Ritchie played a major part in creatng - C and Unix. My ability to use those two technologies I also owe in part to Ritchie, as along with Stevens APUE, the second edition of the K&R C book showed me how to program.

Frankly, the author sounds like he needs a course in proof reading (I'd love to see if his job ads are as illiterate as his writing for El Reg), and a change of medication from what I suspect is currently the powdery Bolivian marching kind.

And little wonder the author is a recruitment consultant and not a programmer. If you want to get the better paid programming jobs that aren't in niche industries, then you need to know how to program in the large. While knowing about the hardware is useful, it wont help you design large scale systems as much as knowing and understanding frameworks and how to exploit their features. That goes for almost all programming outside the relatively specialised areas such as embedded work.

Doesn't matter if the language is C++, Java or something functional like Scala - the approaches to building large scale systems are similar, taking in areas such as layered caching, event notification and so forth. Any decent programmer should be able to pick up one of the current crop of popular languages quickly - C++ possibly excepted.

MongoDB is web scale

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/mongo-db-is-web-scale

Nuff said.

Just a me too ...

I have a HP16C that I still use several times a week. It no longer stays on my desk at work though, in case someone permanently borrows it.

Syco

Syco went bust when their headquarters burnt down - it turned out they weren't insured. Up until then they'd cornered the market for high end electronic music equipment, acting as distributors for classic but long gone manufacturers such as Fairlight, Linn and Oberheim. The company they used to service all this gear is still around though - Alpha Entek, who also operate under the name of Hammond Hire. The've serviced some of my older music gear, and there's quite a demand for their expertise as many people like me prefer to use dedicated synths and drum machines to fiddly software based stuff.

DEC memories

I worked for a software house that wrote warehouse automation software, and one of their clients was still running on a pair of MicroVAX 3200 machines when I left in 2003. The company had one Fortran programmer on the staff solely to work on enhancements for this system, since all the other clients were running a sucessor system written in C for Alpha hardware.

During my time there I acquired an unused MicroVAX 3200 (it had been kept boxed up as a spare) and a PDP11 (a 23 I think) that had been decomissioned. I still fire up the 3200 occasionally, now running NetBSD, and it is a beautifully built machine. I also got a VLC, which has colour graphics and was a good desktop machine - especially if you developed for VMS.

The PDP was rudimentary inside, and sounded like a jet plane taking off when you fired it up, but I gave it away to an enthusiast since it lacked a RAM card (what I thought was the RAM card turned out to be a custom board of unknown purpose).

A title is ... etc.

The problem I had with the update to the desktop version of Snow Leopard was that it deleted my wallpaper image! Not a bige deal, but it suggests that quality control was a bit lacking on this particular update ...

Her fans in Asia

Someone let Paris know that Japan doesn't form the entirety of Asia. I'm sure there are other Asian states that would welcome her ... such as North Korea or Burma.

Please, please, please Oracle

Use the release of Java 7 to finally remove all the deprecated stuff that's been lurking in the class library since version 1.1. If people really need the deprecated methods, then please provide an optional compatibility pack that can override the default classes (as can be done with other parts of the class library, such as the SAX parser implementation).

"Most people have only ever used webmail..."

Me (programmer): Thunderbird on NetBSD

Wife (sales drone): Thunderbird on Windows XP

Brother (graphic designer): Apple's email client

Mum (retired secretary): Apple's email client

Dad (retired tiler): doesn't do computers

So amongst my close family, not one uses webmail. As for my friends (few of whom work in IT), checking the headers of a few recent emails I receive from them I see that not one is using webmail. Even the Gmail'ers are managing their messages from a client like Thunderbird.

Spelling (no, not Aaron)

Looks like they corrected the spelling of original, but check out this doozy from the description:

New genuine Apple parts!! Not fake! Quickly availably!

Someone skipped their spelling bees as a kid.

John Sanders and Pet Peeve

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the design of the Chernobyl reactor. What went wrong was down to bureaucratic cock up and a Soviet era unwillingness to act without authorisation even in the most dire circumstances. When the reactor went critical it was during an experiment where the fail safe systems had deliberately been turned off - had they not been turned off, the explosion would not have happened. When the reactor started overheating, the staff on the ground were too scared to do anything in case they were disciplined for acting without authority. The staff who could give such authorisation were not at the plant, and when the on site staff called Moscow they were not understood.

@ J. Simon van der Wait

They aren't recording in public - their in a venue. And yes, I have done what one of the posters has suggested by knocking phones out of the hands of the inconsiderate arseholes who block the view of the stage with their bloody phones. It helps to be six foot four, almost 100Kg and in good shape, but if I have trouble seeing a gig for all the phones, how do people shorter than me feel?

Wow.

"[T]he regulator then awards the licence to the company it feels will offer the best service. That's "best" for the citizens, not the treasury coffers or company's shareholders."

Now I'm glad I learned Finnish at university.

Hei, hei!

Strange coincidence

I was telling my wife about the Callan series a couple of nights ago. She'd asked what TV I particularly remembered from growing up, and one thing that had really stuck in my mind was a rerun of the Callan series in the 1980's. The swinging light bulb in the credits and the gritty noir feel were really memorable. Another thing that stuck in my mind was the great theme music to The Equalizer, and they way Woodward's character was immensely cool - kind of like the Dad or Grandad you'd want on your side if you ever got into bother!

Re: power outage in Sweden

Surely they have hosting in more than one location? If not, then it just goes to show that their hosting arrangements are as amateurish as their products.

@Annihilator

I think you've confused this with Firefox 3.5. This is a separate browser for mobile devices that uses some of the same components as Firefox.

Big deal

It'll just be some demos on a package like Ableton. Given the lo-fi nature of The Kills music, if they can't recreate those in a couple of days, then I'd be frankly surprised. It's not as though they're known for creating complex samples or synth sounds, which may then have been on the same laptop.

@frank ly

I hope your comment is sarcastic. My father worked in the construction industry for forty years, and had nothing good to say about architects. The civil engineers did the real work, taking totally impractical sketches from architects and trying to make them buildable. It's an interesting comparison to software engineering, where managers make the same kind of impractical design decisions that should be left to qualified system architects.

To all the non-programmers

Having Snow Leopard support PowerPC does not hold back an Intel release. A modern operating system consists of mostly architecture independent code - this is true even of Windows, which has been ported to at least Alpha, PowerPC and (allegedly) UltraSPARC. As most of Apples changes between releases are provided by higher level systems than the kernel, the impact of supporting more than one architecture is even less. There are also benefits of keeping the code portable. This means endianness and 64bit issues don't go unnoticed, and switches of primary architecture (as happened with the switch from PPC to x86) are realistically possible. The switch to x86 was only possible because OpenStep (which OSX is a re-branding of) was ported to a number of architectures.

Extreme solution

Our extreme, but effective solution, was to rebuild all our Debian servers with CentOS instead. My predecessors had decided to use Debian on a whim, as they were GNU fanatics (a number of poor quality GPL libraries and tools were chosen over those with BSD and ASF licenses for "political" reasons as well). We've had no end of trouble with the machines, and the OpenSSL mess was the final straw. In all, we had to rebuild 14 machines and decommission 2 more,

The problem with the Debian project, is that a number of its package maintainers believe they know better than the the original authors of the software. They muck about not only with the configuration of the software, but the source code itself. OpenSSL is a classic example, and the dubious Firefox patches that resulted in them having to call their version "Iceweasel" at the insistence of the Mozilla Foundation is another.

@Ken Hagan

TextPad supports RTF, which I believe is a standard.

@Duncan Ellis

The reason you're missing stack allocated objects is because you're using SWT, in which the garbage collector is not responsible for reclaiming memory. Unless you're writing an Eclipse extension, then it's your own fault for using SWT instead of Swing.

As for posts by others, the reason C++ is not used for much kernel development is that when you do, you end up using a tiny subset of C++ (STL is out, virtual inheritance is often out as well). This ultimately makes it seem like a pointless exercise (Linux for example, was briefly going down the C++ route but reverted to C). As for portability, a virtual machine written in C is far easier to port than a C++ compiler. Simpler and more consistent OOP languages such as Java and Objective-C are also far more easy to learn, and lack the constantly changing, almost impossible to implement complexity of C++.

@Bruce Sinton

"Apostasy was punishable by burning at the stake in that land of liberty etc. , called England .

Don't be too hard on these Muslims , I mean we(I mean you) did it too."

Note the past tense in your own posting. Previous generations of Brits may have killed people for heresy, but that was centuries ago. A few things such as enlightenment, reason and a general lessening of ignorance means that contemporary Britain is now quite secular (despite Blair and his love of faith schools).

Hmmm

Sod scalability, MySQL needs to stop corrupting data when tables go beyond a couple of GB. It also needs to be better documented (for example, clearly noting that changing InnoDB cache parameters will quite often drop all your indexes and foreign keys - a bug I guess, but one they should document if they're incapable of fixing it). They should also They also need to put a lot more work into the query optimiser, as anything involving substantial joins will fallback to full table scans far more readily than any other RDBMS I've used. Better ANSI SQL conformance, and an end to silent truncation or conversion of input (often to invalid values in the case of dates) wouldn't be amiss either.