In a response to a NYT column on outsourcing, Jim Fawcette says " Unemployment in programming is 40 percent above the national average, despite the fact that the number of people in that profession has declined rapidly for four years, and salaries are down 15 percent." Nasty numbers, if true (and …

James Robertson thinks that Java is an interruption in the forward progress of software development....It is nice to see people returning to serious language research again. Efforts like the Feyerabend Project and more practically focused offshoots like OOPSLA’s Onward! track and the Post-Java Workshops (as well as increasing …

JOEL JOHNSON -- The government has purchased a completely solid-state 2.5TB (terabyte) drive array from Texas Memory Systems... 

In related news, President Bush received a digital camera for his birthday.

I know that I'm no longer untainted because I work in the big house, but I just don't get this. Do developers really want to build the same thing over and over, project to project, app to app or do they want to spend their time building cool, new stuff …

Sometimes I forget that the world is also a place of delightful whimsy. (Via Ben Hyde) via [Exploration Through Example]

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p dir="ltr"> Words can't express my delight. I used to count the smoots every day as I rode the Harvard Bridge to get to Community Boating.

I have never really understood the machinations that you have to go through to enable SSL, but Scot Gellock has posted a script to simplify part of it, i.e. getting the certificate. And he does it with freely available tools, which is always a nice bonus.  via [Marquee de …

I read a lot of Java related blogs and a lot of MS related blogs, but very few of the Java blogs are by Sun folks.. ..If I'm looking for thought leadership from the community, in the Java community, I'm looking towards the non Sun bloggers -- these are the folks …

Mark Canter asks "why hasn't Tivo taken off?"

It hasn't taken off because the acquisition and implementation cost are too high for most people. Look at the rats nest of wires behind most AV systems and you'll see just what I mean.

Also, most people are scared of technology. Seriously …

Jason Haley asks: What do you do with people who are still putting off learning .NET?

From my standpoint, you keep improving .NET until they start getting the message that .NET is +the+ platform of the future.

via [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Man's (and woman's) ability to solve problems. via [Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet]

The problem: CAPTCHAs (those visual problems used to defeat registration 'bots). The CACM reports that defeat requires advancing the state-of-the-art of Artificial Intelligence.

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p dir="ltr"> The solution: "Solve this CAPTCHA for us and we'll show …