During a chat with John Montgomery yesterday, he tangentially revealed a stunning number: according to Microsoft, there are more than 7 million "hobbyist programmers" in the US alone. Not professionals, not students, not "macro kings and queens," not sysadmins with a knowledge of Perl, but flat-out hobbyists.

I still don't …

Jan Gray wrote an excellent essay ... My favorite quote from this piece is "This scenario is so bad and so common that the microprocessor vendors use 80% of their transistor budgets for on-chip caches -- Intel as glorified [SRAM]{.caps} vendor.". via [iunknown.com]

This echos a favorite theme of mine …

http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/BradA/commentview.aspx/ddedfad0-c94f-4873-9c8c-4005cd8faaa5 Should the BCL contain both generics-based collection classes (List\<T> ) AND object-containing classes? (my initial gut is that generics-only is the way to go. Better to accept some pain now than 5 years from now. )

Blogged on a Tablet PC

If you use NewsGator,  and Outlook 2K3, a "search folder" set to all the folders is much faster than News Gator's top-level page.

Blogged on a Tablet PC

Quite a few of the presentations from this year's [PDC]{.caps} are now available in Microsoft Producer format. The nice thing is that you get videos from the demos integrated into the presentation as well. Very nice.

[iunknown.com]

J2EE 1.4 is now official, Sun announced this week.
[InfoWorld: Top News]

Martin Spedding clarifies that he's criticizing PNC on a strictly economic basis. This is perfectly valid: consider that the benefits of a conference accrue primarily to the individual while the cost is borne primarily by companies. And the value of a conference is delivered primarily by speakers and attendees, but …

A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture, kill and send a 'package full of Anthrax spores' to employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with spam promising to enlarge his penis. via [Wired News]

Oughtn't his defense be "But they opted-in to …

Martin Spedding wonders "Was going to the PDC really worth it?" and Scoble sez "I'd say there's a huge amount of value in actually being there" via [The Scobleizer Weblog]

Spedding essentially says that he goes to the PDC to "get an edge" and, now that conferences put up presentations …

Today the C++/CLI candidate base document was posted, and it's freely available for download.  via [Herb Sutter's Blog]

This describes the C++/CLI extensions discussed at PDC but not available in the PDC bits. Let the studying begin...!