The above quote was tossed off by Billy Hollis at the patterns&practices Summit
this week in Redmond. I passed the quote out to the Twitter masses, along with my
+1, and predictably, the comments started coming in shortly thereafter. Rather than
limit the thoughts to the 120 or so characters that Twitter limits us to, I thought
this subject deserved some greater expansion.

But before I do, let me try (badly) to paraphrase the lightning talk that Billy gave
here, which sets context for the discussion:

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Recently I've had the pleasure to make the acquaintance of Walter
Bright, one of the heavyweights of compiler construction, and the creator of the
D language (among other things), and he's been great in giving me some hand-holding
on some compiler-related topics and ideas.

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Recently, an email crossed my Inbox from a friend who was concerned about some questionable
practices involving my content (as well as a few others'); apparently, I have been
listed as an "author" for SysCon, I have a "domain" with them,
and that I've been writing for them since 10 January, 2003, including two articles,
"Effective Enterprise Java" and "Java/.NET Interoperability".

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Google made the announcement on
Tuesday: Chrome OS, a "open source, lightweight operating system that will initially
be targeted at netbooks."

Huh?

I'm sorry, but from a number of perspectives, this move makes no sense to me.

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(Disclaimer: In the spirit of full disclosure, Stu is a friend,
fellow NFJS speaker, and former co-worker of mine from DevelopMentor.)

I present this review to you in two parts.

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Well, OK, the title is trolling ever so slightly, but there is an interesting trend
at work, and I'm genuinely concerned about its ultimate expression if the trend continues
to its logical conclusion. Have
a look and tell me if you agree or disagree.

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Apparently the Rails community isn't the only one pursuing that ephemeral goal of
"edginess"—another blatantly sexist presentation came off without a hitch,
this time at a Flash conference, and if anything, it was worse than the Rails/CouchDB
presentation. I excerpt a few choice tidbits from
an eyewitness here, but be warned—if you're not comfortable with language, skip
the next block paragraph.

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Update: See below, but I wanted to include the text Mike Abercrombie
(DM's owner) posted as a comment to this post, in the body of the blog post itself. "Ted
- All of us at DevelopMentor greatly appreciate your admiration. We're also grateful
for your contributions to DevelopMentor when you were part of our staff. However,
all of us that work here, especially our technical staff that write and delivery our
courses today, would appreciate it if you would check your sources before writing
our eulogy.

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