It's the best of a lot of worse options. Social media is a shouting match, and newsletters are either spam filtered or ignored. People don't want to ignore it, but email is just a bad way to follow a lot of things. RSS readers offer a nice, compact list of all the things you want to read.
I don't know what the click through rate is like on RSS feeds with a statistically useful subscriber count, but Google Reader says my feed has 11 subscribers, meaning those 3 people who came through on my last post are 27%. I don't get that kind of click through with hundreds of real people following my Twitter accounts, or thousands on G+. A million social media followers is meaningless if only 10,000 of them click your links, and any publisher with sense realizes that. Email is only slightly better: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benc...
Well, this service doesn't really seem useful to people that live outside the US. E.g. "A Good Day to Die Hard" won't be released until a month later in Australia, but the website indicates that it comes out a month earlier. Aggregating the release dates would be nice.
You mean to tell me that Oracle think that embedded devices will run Java? Heavens, I'm shocked.
"Embedded devices" is such a broad term now, that they need to scope it a little better. An ATM running Windows is considered embedded by some definition, which is kind of what I suspect they're talking about here - not resource-constrained devices like Arduino boards, as inferred by the image at the top of the article.
It gets even funnier when they mention 'security considerations' as a major benefit of using Java for said 'intelligent embedded devices', and that Java was 'originally designed and conceived to run in embedded devices [and] was precisely focused on the portability and productivity problems faced by embedded developers'.
Last few times I read about widespread cross-platform malware that affected Windows, Linux, OS X and even Android, sometimes all at the same time, these exploits were based on Java security holes :-S
In practice, for MOST developers, the changes between 2 and 3 are minimal. Offhand, print is a function, and there's no distinction between unicode strings and ascii strings anymore. If you do a lot of "low level" networking involving byte strings, you'll notice the difference, because you can't just jump between bytes and strings anymore.
It's this distinction that's delaying a lot of networking related libraries from porting to Python 3 - basically, it's going to be a long, buggy journey. Libraries such as Twisted, have very old codebases - old enough that some of the practices aren't the best, even for Python 2 code. Upgrading it to Python 3 will introduce quite a few breakages.
There's a lot more that I can't think of right now, but I'm sure someone else can cover off other differences.
There's no reason not to learn both - I use Python 3 for a few personal projects, and Python 2 for work.
