xefyr

Tapirs accounting for 78% of the world economic output? Pikachus in a blender? I think he's finally lost it.

"So our product needs managers and our product is built by developers who need managers and process to organize how the build is managed? All this to support a level of accountability and transparency not respected by the business? Sold."

This is my general opinion regarding freelancing as well; I have every intention of building a product company and no interest in "consulting". Would you say, if worse comes to worst, it's better to get a 'day-job' outside of the field than to pursue contact/freelance gigs coding? If freelancing too much of a distraction to pursue at all?

Thanks Yuri! I appreciate your support, or at least constructive evaluation :)

I'm familiar with the book - I'll give it a go. As for my areas, mostly I'm finding people looking for full-time deals related to hadoop/hbase/lucene. Thanks for the reminder though, I'll look "harder".

You sound confused. This is the better option.

Why would you only learn one of them? Learn every language you can. Learn them well enough to love and hate each for 5 different reasons. Learn them well enough to know which should be used when.

IMHO: they are very similar languages with converging library offerings. I think Java is ahead of the game in this regard because it's been "in the wild" longer and has more of an open source following.

And don't forget, they can interop very easily with SpringFramework and XML-RPC.

If you're really concerned about it you can go through an anonymizing proxy service. But, as has been said, if you have the time, spacing out your requests should work fine too.

Thanks!

+1

waldrews: I have some freelancing bandwidth if you have an interesting project. My email is in my profile while yours is not; send me a line and we'll chat.

I succeeded in transitioning my workplace out of the dark ages about a year go; I chose Spring. If nothing else, use the IOC container and AOP. While it cannot reduce the xml-sit-ups, the Eclipse plugin does simplify their maintenance. I've not yet toyed with EJB3, so I have no comment in that respect. The other specific benefit of Spring is that the .NET side of the shop has the Spring port which eases the conceptual hurdles as engineers bounce from project to project. All that said, I'd not heard of Seam and I will be investigating it as an alternative.

Depends.

Do you know anyone already using any of these languages? The path to enlightenment is almost always more easily tread when you have someone hiking it with you.

If no, choose by documentation. What do you find the easiest read? I was first introduced to lisps via PG's "ANSI Common Lisp" -- great book. If scheme's your thing, SICP is the way to go. I haven't been following Arc and I'm not up to speed on Clojure, so I cannot comment on those tools.

I chose Common Lisp. Openmcl on my ppc and sbcl on x86. Your milage may very.

Best of luck!

For the curious, I've had the recent misfortune of working with JBOSS at work; this sounds identical to how it provides form-based authentication.

For the curious: http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=SecureAWebApplicati...

Because it hasn't yet been mentioned, you might consider an OLPC. They're small screen size is, imo, greatly compensated for by their durability, portability, and mobility. They run debian and can be used in direct sunlight. Did I mention the price is right? Oh, they also have much better antennae than the thinkpad. :D

I'm not sure if the needs you outlined above are driven by some technical requirement or if that's just a list of the laptop-de-jour to which you are aspiring.

If nothing else, check out the hardware specs for the pure geeky pleasure: http://www.laptop.org