The developer in question was not mad at Apple per say, they were doing what was required. He was mad at people thinking Apple was doing something useful for KDE/khtml. Apple was not making things useful for KDE, but they were fullfilling all their obligations.
Once he spoke against those non-Apple, non-KDE people, those people tried to deflect the blame to Apple. Apple to their credit realized how the publicity was hurting them and changed their ways.
Once again, the KDE devs were not mad at Apple. They were disgusted because of being unable to get something useful, but not mad. They were mad at people who thought without checking that Apple was doing something useful.
CodeWeavers is a company that is looking for some more people to buy their product. They will make the tweaks needed to get your software to work - for a fee of course. There are two advantages of buying Wine from Codeweavers, one is they will make the tweaks you need to make your stuff work, and the other is it supports Wine development, which supports linux.
CodeWeavers is not such a large company that they can afford to turn down money. They will be happy to discuss terms to get any application supported. And they will be honest about it - some things are a matter of the program is the only one so far using some API, so it hasn't been implemented, but once asked for they can do it in a day. Others require a few years of work yet, but they will tell you that it isn't worth the cost. (Unless it really is worth the cost to you...)
Don't worry, typing "FUND" does not cause earthquakes. In fact if you do it early enough there is no earth to quake. However does cause 'big bangs', which can be devastating to an established universe.
True, but there are many projects that need 6 months or a year to get over a major hurdle. KDE need some people to work on the qt4 port now. There are many other projects with good ideas, but they are ideas that are complex enough that the programmer needs to be working full time on it to make meaningful progress.
I'd prefer they use it for development. Most linux hackers are paid these days (By IBM, redhat, and so on), as are the openOffice.org hackers (by sun). However there are plenty of projects that can't claim that.
Better to hire a contractor for 6 months of working on one project, and then let the money build for another year before hiring another. There are good programmers who can take a 6 month contract for some project, and do a lot of good work. I know of at least one person who has done this[1]. Fund a few more of these.
Right now KDE could use a few full time people to push the qt4 port. They are in a place where major effort is needed to get some grunt work done, before they can take off again with the more visible development. Other projects hit the same situation where they need someone to do major work before they can get to the next level.
Promotion is nice, but frankly I don't care if the unwashed masses are using linux or not. I care that it works fine for me. I care that it is stable, and secure.
[1]He was a FreeBSD hacker, had some ideas that needed 6 months to implement, and 6 months without a contract yet. He agreed to less than his normal price, because it was something he wanted to do.
Get a job at McDonald's, like everyone else. However don't treat it like a chore you need to get gas money. Work hard, and advance. They are always looking for management. Come home every weekend in college and to the Friday night,
Saturday, and Sunday shifts. (Perhaps something in the middle of the week too, but don't put in too many hours) You need the experience of management, and McDonald's will give it to you.
While managing a restaurant is different from running your own business, you will learn some lessions that are important. You will learn to interview and hire people, you will learn how to keep customers happy after half the crew walks out, and you will learn how to make money (or at least not loose money) even on slow nights. When you go into business for yourself you will need to apply these lessions - though in a different way.
Once you get into the latter years of college you can get an intership, and quit McDonald's. Make sure you have learned the lessions they can teach first.
Internships cannot be had at your age. But for someone who wants to run his own business you get experience that a technical internship will never give you. You need both types of experience.
10 years latter I still get free meals when I go back. (Which isn't often, I'm still burned out on the food) I also know that there is a job waiting for me if I decide I hate programming. Sometimes I'm tempted to do it. (cute girls no longer have to talk to me, back then they did because I was the boss) Honestly, if I had stayed with McDonald's instead of going to college and getting a technical position, I would be making just as much now, and there is potential that I could advance even farther. Do not overlook these benefits. (Remember most companies fail in the first 5 years!)
I don't think you could win the apple II version. However the IIgs version was trivial to win, even on hard. (though at the end of winning I noticed that I crossed the mountains in January - in other words I won because the game was nothing close to realistic)
Are you sure you want it? I drive a Geo Metro, which is missing on one cylinder, the windows do not work, and the synchromesh is out. Not that it matters, I'm driving those 44 MPG until it falls apart, or at least can't out accelerate the average Porsche (this is a reflection on the type of people who drive a Porsche, not the car itself) up to 70 mph.
In any case, I don't have that much stock. Though it is a nice amount of cash, I can't retire on it. In fact there are cars that I cannot afford to pay cash for even If I sell everything.
In any case, IF I spend the money on a car it won't be to replace my old car. I might buy a 64.5 mustang or 1929 John Deere, but I wouldn't drive either to work. More likely I'll invest it in something else so I can retire on it.
STK does not know how to sell storage. STK knows how to sell tape. Disk storage is something they sell, but with most of sales it is an accident. The company has had problems for years because customers call their salesmen when they want more tape, and customers call often enough that the salesmen can make a good living selling just tape to customers that call them. When you are selling million dollar tape systems there are not many new customers, so there is no worry about selling to a new customer.
Selling disk is not something they can do. Which is one of the reasons STK's disk never sells well. (Great product overall, though there are downsides that are easy for compititon to take advantage of when the salesmen doesn't care about the sale anyway)
When I worked there, STK had the rights to sell every Sun computer, but they never did. (including the Ultra Enterprize 10k, which Sun didn't let many sell)
STK's tech support is pretty good though. AT least the ones I've worked with.
I used to work for StorageTek. I got a lot of stock in the late 90's for a a employee discount. I think I paid as little as $8/share for them. (StorageTek had to be the only high tech company that lost money 99, and had their stock drop for it)
I don't get too many wins, but this looks like one of the better ones.
Actually StorageTek wouldn't be surprised if you could pay someone to do the work manually. However the company has made several sales when the manager walked in on the night shift and discovered the kids were using hockey sticks to pass tapes across the room. That explained why so many tapes were breaking overnight. No surprise that a fully automatic solution was brought in and those kids fired.
Combine abuse of hardware, with potential for stealing sensitive data, and the difficulty of finding people willing to work a boring job overnight, and automatic solutions make sense despite the higher cost.
You can. However your starter is designed with a low duty cycle. That is you are supposed to use it for 10 seconds, then let it cool for 5 minutes. Which is exactly how most people use the starter.
I've known people who have burned their starter out when the engine didn't start right away. You can normally get by with up to 30 seconds of cranking, but you shouldn't.
I think it is law... Every car I've seen in the last 10 years has a switch on the clutch pedal so you can't start it while the clutch is out. Then the drivers manual still says that if you have a manual car stalled on the railroad tracks you should use the starter to get yourself off.
Some cars have a button you can push to bypass the clutch switch. Most don't though.
Electric motors have always had more torque than gas. However it is difficult on the scale of a car to get power to the motor. 10 gallons gas is about 60 pounds, (I don't know the number, IIRC a gallon of oil is 6 pounds, and that number is good enough for my purposes) and will take a typical car 250 miles. (25 mpg, which is actually low for a car, high for a SUV). Batteries to go the same distance weigh much more, which leads to more energy being needed to accelerate those batteries...
There are other issues with batteries, you can look them up, if you are interested - they are not really on topic for this discussion.
This is mostly interesting now because hybrid cars make sense in the city. (Not on the highway though)
The first car to go 60 mph ~ 100 years ago was electric. However gas cars have always been more practical.
Really? There are several charitable foundations that give money to causes the are opposed to what the guy who gave the money in the first place supported.
The FSF won't give permissions today. However if RMS is run over by the proverbial bus and dies who knows what will happen. It wouldn't surprise me at all if someone evil saw an opportunity and jumped in to get control. After that who knows what will happen.
Actually I've known a couple people who got brain cancer and suddenly changed their behavior to something completely different. (I'm thinking of a case where a very religious, would never cheat on her husband, wife suddenly divorced him, left the church, and started sleeping with everyone she could. 15 years latter the cancer was discovered and treated, and she then went back to the old husband, church, and never cheated again)
There is no problem. Joe Hacker owns the copyright on the code he wrote, unless he signed it away. He did not give the copyright to Jack N. Box, so Jack N. Box's heirs do no have rights to that code. Those heirs do have rights to the code Jack N. Box wrote, which is only 10%. Company X can contact Jack N. Box's heirs for a different license, but they only have the right to that 10%. (And if they gave rights to everything they might be in trouble themselves for negotiating in bad faith since they sold rights they did not have)
There is no problem here, except that Company X has a really hard time changing the license. In general the point of the GPL is to make it hard to change the license to something else, so this is intentionall. In fact if company X goes to Joe Hacker and gets rights to his code, they may be unable to use it if Jack N. Box's heirs decide to not give those rights up. In short a tiny minority can hold the majority to not changing the license. (Again, this is by design)
Note that some people assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. The advantage of this is the FSF will sue to make sure code they own is not misused. This saves Joe Hacker the effort of finding a lawyer when needed. The disadvantage is in theory someone can gain control of the FSF and sell rights (or just make a new version of the GPL that gives everything away), and there is nothing Joe Hacker can do. Most projects using the GNU license choose to not require code be turned over to the FSF to protect against a rouge FSF sometime in the future.
My books run out of batteries once in a while. The flashlight I used to use as a kid under the covers didn't last too long. Once in a while my local utility supplied power (a large coal battery several hundred miles away) has gone down. Either way, my book is now dead.
That is not true. However most of Minnesota does not have the Minnesota accent. You won't find it in the Twin Cities (We have more of an Iowa/Wisconsin accent). In Duluth you will find it, but mostly in out of towners coming in for their yearly shopping trip.
In northwest Minnesota you will find it, almost exactly like you hear in the movies. The more isolated the town, the more people who will have it.
There were private roads in the US before there was a government separate from the crown. They charged a toll, and provided the only good way across the country. (well by the standards of the day, as I understand they paved the roads with logs) I think there are still a few left on the east coast.
I'm not sure that this is a good thing. It is nice to just pay my tax at the pump (which ends up being less than tolls, but that doesn't factor in other sources of funding) and be done with it. Stopping every few miles to pay the new toll quickly gets annoying, not to mention what it does to time and gas milage.
More than that, I have no interest in working within it. As a geek I like to keep full possession of my senses, and bars are not a place that encourages that. (I'm religious enough to have other objections to the bar scene, but they are irrelevant to my feelings as a geek)
The bar scene is not inferior for geek reasons - it just is. So long as it doesn't affect me (drunk driving, and alcoholism affect me, but they are not directly the fault of the bar) I don't care what you do. Don't expect me to enter it, even if that is the only way I could ever get a girl - I'd rather be alone than there. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
Perhaps. But I won't die of AIDS either. Nor will I catch herpies, or one of the many diseases that girls tend to spread. I people who have taken home girls who they latter found out had something. Getting a call the next morning: "you should know that the girl you brought home has..." is not something you ever want. She won't tell you.
I judge girls by their personality and their interests, not looks. A girls that hangs out in an arcade is already more my type than a girl who hangs out in a bar. I'm sure she has a better personality - if only because drunk girls have no personality.
Sure I'd love to have a super model. However girls get old, and even super models loose it. (some get downright ugly) That is assuming they do nothing more - throw in a few kids, and the girl will have a few extra pounds anyway. All that is left is personality - most good looking girls seem to have a bad one. (though most ugly ones as just as bad or worse)
Good luck getting 20 year old super models when you are 70. Unless you are rich enough to pay for it of course.
It is rare that I can say someone is wrong on all counts, but I have not found one defensible statement in there. (Though I guess one could be hidden and I missed it)
His first mistake is thinking GNU is everything. Maybe for him it is, but for most people we use what works. When the boss sets me down on a AIX machine I want it to work - I'm not allowed to install Linux (though I'd install *BSD if I could wipe the OS), I'm supposed to get work done.
Minorities are useful despite the cost of working with them. Bugs that are 1 in a million may happen every time on AIX. 1 in a million bugs are very hard to find. I've spends days looking at a partial crash trace wondering why it broke, and if it will happen again. With no known way to duplicate the bug it is really had to fix, and hard to be sure the 'fix' works. When it fails every time the bug is easy to fix.
Good programmers should have no problem writing cross platform code. When your code breaks on AIX, it is a sign of bad code - even if the breakage is because AIX doesn't have a function you expect.
Cross platform compilers (gcc) are much easier for me to work with. Because gcc is cross platform I can compile my stuff at home and debug it, than bring it to work and compile it and assume it works. Particularly with gcc 2.95, the support for C++ was so bad that you could not count on code written for that to work on a better compiler.
Speaking of gcc 2.95, other vendors have had better compilers for years, while gcc is only arriving. Even today, gcc isn't a great c++ compiler. (though 4.x is much better) There is no point in throwing stones at other vendors - their compilers may have been expensive, but they at least worked close to right.
The upper/lower case differences with Windows are a non-factor. You should never have any word that differs by case only - it leads to many bugs if you do.
The API differences on Windows are mostly handled by Cygwin and mingw. Those areas that are different are places where you should have your code modular anyway. Mostly we are talking about device and networking code. IPv6 is on the way (has been for 10 years now...), you need some difference code to support that. There is no standard for device code - what works on OpenBSD won't work on linux, or FreeBSD.
True almost nobody cares are VAX - but it is interesting anyway. If you code is modular like it should be, then supporting those weird things isn't a big deal - you write you code, and let those are care about it test.
A short summary: There should be only one OS that anyone runs: RedHat Linux enterprize edition on x86. (not x86-64) Not Fedora core, much less gentoo or those other non-redhat distributions. You FreeBSD people can go to hell.
He wants to take his ball and go home, I don't care, we are better off without people like him in the open source world.
Why do I need an account in the first place? I have far too many accounts as it is, I don't need more.
Case in point: I wanted some book not in any local store, and had a 10% Barns and Noble online discount. I quit the order when they asked for a password. I gave them my address and credit card number. That is all they need to ship the order, I don't want a stupid account, I want the book. There is nothing of my they need to save. I know my address, I have more passwords than I can remember.
Even though I'm protected I'd prefer they not remember my credit card number. I will enter it every time, it doesn't take long.
That would be a good idea if:
You expand the area to the entire middle east, not just Jerusalem.
You give notice only to those who want peace, not those who are causing the violence, as they will just move elsewhere can continue.
You can prevent fall out from hitting any other area.
Point two is the hardest. If we could tell who was innocent it would be trivial to kill the rest without bothering with the bomb. If you can't tell who is innocent, than those who don't want peace will get out before hand and continue their war elsewhere, solving nothing. (A few fallout deaths would be less than what the middle east currently causes)
I like to play devil's advovate too. However it is difficult, you need to know both positions well, and it is hard to reseach a stupid position.
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The developer in question was not mad at Apple per say, they were doing what was required. He was mad at people thinking Apple was doing something useful for KDE/khtml. Apple was not making things useful for KDE, but they were fullfilling all their obligations.
Once he spoke against those non-Apple, non-KDE people, those people tried to deflect the blame to Apple. Apple to their credit realized how the publicity was hurting them and changed their ways.
Once again, the KDE devs were not mad at Apple. They were disgusted because of being unable to get something useful, but not mad. They were mad at people who thought without checking that Apple was doing something useful.
CodeWeavers is a company that is looking for some more people to buy their product. They will make the tweaks needed to get your software to work - for a fee of course. There are two advantages of buying Wine from Codeweavers, one is they will make the tweaks you need to make your stuff work, and the other is it supports Wine development, which supports linux.
CodeWeavers is not such a large company that they can afford to turn down money. They will be happy to discuss terms to get any application supported. And they will be honest about it - some things are a matter of the program is the only one so far using some API, so it hasn't been implemented, but once asked for they can do it in a day. Others require a few years of work yet, but they will tell you that it isn't worth the cost. (Unless it really is worth the cost to you...)
Don't worry, typing "FUND" does not cause earthquakes. In fact if you do it early enough there is no earth to quake. However does cause 'big bangs', which can be devastating to an established universe.
True, but there are many projects that need 6 months or a year to get over a major hurdle. KDE need some people to work on the qt4 port now. There are many other projects with good ideas, but they are ideas that are complex enough that the programmer needs to be working full time on it to make meaningful progress.
I'd prefer they use it for development. Most linux hackers are paid these days (By IBM, redhat, and so on), as are the openOffice.org hackers (by sun). However there are plenty of projects that can't claim that.
Better to hire a contractor for 6 months of working on one project, and then let the money build for another year before hiring another. There are good programmers who can take a 6 month contract for some project, and do a lot of good work. I know of at least one person who has done this[1]. Fund a few more of these.
Right now KDE could use a few full time people to push the qt4 port. They are in a place where major effort is needed to get some grunt work done, before they can take off again with the more visible development. Other projects hit the same situation where they need someone to do major work before they can get to the next level.
Promotion is nice, but frankly I don't care if the unwashed masses are using linux or not. I care that it works fine for me. I care that it is stable, and secure.
[1]He was a FreeBSD hacker, had some ideas that needed 6 months to implement, and 6 months without a contract yet. He agreed to less than his normal price, because it was something he wanted to do.
Get a job at McDonald's, like everyone else. However don't treat it like a chore you need to get gas money. Work hard, and advance. They are always looking for management. Come home every weekend in college and to the Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday shifts. (Perhaps something in the middle of the week too, but don't put in too many hours) You need the experience of management, and McDonald's will give it to you.
While managing a restaurant is different from running your own business, you will learn some lessions that are important. You will learn to interview and hire people, you will learn how to keep customers happy after half the crew walks out, and you will learn how to make money (or at least not loose money) even on slow nights. When you go into business for yourself you will need to apply these lessions - though in a different way.
Once you get into the latter years of college you can get an intership, and quit McDonald's. Make sure you have learned the lessions they can teach first.
Internships cannot be had at your age. But for someone who wants to run his own business you get experience that a technical internship will never give you. You need both types of experience.
10 years latter I still get free meals when I go back. (Which isn't often, I'm still burned out on the food) I also know that there is a job waiting for me if I decide I hate programming. Sometimes I'm tempted to do it. (cute girls no longer have to talk to me, back then they did because I was the boss) Honestly, if I had stayed with McDonald's instead of going to college and getting a technical position, I would be making just as much now, and there is potential that I could advance even farther. Do not overlook these benefits. (Remember most companies fail in the first 5 years!)
I don't think you could win the apple II version. However the IIgs version was trivial to win, even on hard. (though at the end of winning I noticed that I crossed the mountains in January - in other words I won because the game was nothing close to realistic)
Are you sure you want it? I drive a Geo Metro, which is missing on one cylinder, the windows do not work, and the synchromesh is out. Not that it matters, I'm driving those 44 MPG until it falls apart, or at least can't out accelerate the average Porsche (this is a reflection on the type of people who drive a Porsche, not the car itself) up to 70 mph.
In any case, I don't have that much stock. Though it is a nice amount of cash, I can't retire on it. In fact there are cars that I cannot afford to pay cash for even If I sell everything.
In any case, IF I spend the money on a car it won't be to replace my old car. I might buy a 64.5 mustang or 1929 John Deere, but I wouldn't drive either to work. More likely I'll invest it in something else so I can retire on it.
STK does not know how to sell storage. STK knows how to sell tape. Disk storage is something they sell, but with most of sales it is an accident. The company has had problems for years because customers call their salesmen when they want more tape, and customers call often enough that the salesmen can make a good living selling just tape to customers that call them. When you are selling million dollar tape systems there are not many new customers, so there is no worry about selling to a new customer.
Selling disk is not something they can do. Which is one of the reasons STK's disk never sells well. (Great product overall, though there are downsides that are easy for compititon to take advantage of when the salesmen doesn't care about the sale anyway)
When I worked there, STK had the rights to sell every Sun computer, but they never did. (including the Ultra Enterprize 10k, which Sun didn't let many sell)
STK's tech support is pretty good though. AT least the ones I've worked with.
I used to work for StorageTek. I got a lot of stock in the late 90's for a a employee discount. I think I paid as little as $8/share for them. (StorageTek had to be the only high tech company that lost money 99, and had their stock drop for it)
I don't get too many wins, but this looks like one of the better ones.
Actually StorageTek wouldn't be surprised if you could pay someone to do the work manually. However the company has made several sales when the manager walked in on the night shift and discovered the kids were using hockey sticks to pass tapes across the room. That explained why so many tapes were breaking overnight. No surprise that a fully automatic solution was brought in and those kids fired.
Combine abuse of hardware, with potential for stealing sensitive data, and the difficulty of finding people willing to work a boring job overnight, and automatic solutions make sense despite the higher cost.
You can. However your starter is designed with a low duty cycle. That is you are supposed to use it for 10 seconds, then let it cool for 5 minutes. Which is exactly how most people use the starter.
I've known people who have burned their starter out when the engine didn't start right away. You can normally get by with up to 30 seconds of cranking, but you shouldn't.
I think it is law... Every car I've seen in the last 10 years has a switch on the clutch pedal so you can't start it while the clutch is out. Then the drivers manual still says that if you have a manual car stalled on the railroad tracks you should use the starter to get yourself off.
Some cars have a button you can push to bypass the clutch switch. Most don't though.
Electric motors have always had more torque than gas. However it is difficult on the scale of a car to get power to the motor. 10 gallons gas is about 60 pounds, (I don't know the number, IIRC a gallon of oil is 6 pounds, and that number is good enough for my purposes) and will take a typical car 250 miles. (25 mpg, which is actually low for a car, high for a SUV). Batteries to go the same distance weigh much more, which leads to more energy being needed to accelerate those batteries...
There are other issues with batteries, you can look them up, if you are interested - they are not really on topic for this discussion.
This is mostly interesting now because hybrid cars make sense in the city. (Not on the highway though)
The first car to go 60 mph ~ 100 years ago was electric. However gas cars have always been more practical.
Really? There are several charitable foundations that give money to causes the are opposed to what the guy who gave the money in the first place supported.
The FSF won't give permissions today. However if RMS is run over by the proverbial bus and dies who knows what will happen. It wouldn't surprise me at all if someone evil saw an opportunity and jumped in to get control. After that who knows what will happen.
Actually I've known a couple people who got brain cancer and suddenly changed their behavior to something completely different. (I'm thinking of a case where a very religious, would never cheat on her husband, wife suddenly divorced him, left the church, and started sleeping with everyone she could. 15 years latter the cancer was discovered and treated, and she then went back to the old husband, church, and never cheated again)
There is no problem. Joe Hacker owns the copyright on the code he wrote, unless he signed it away. He did not give the copyright to Jack N. Box, so Jack N. Box's heirs do no have rights to that code. Those heirs do have rights to the code Jack N. Box wrote, which is only 10%. Company X can contact Jack N. Box's heirs for a different license, but they only have the right to that 10%. (And if they gave rights to everything they might be in trouble themselves for negotiating in bad faith since they sold rights they did not have)
There is no problem here, except that Company X has a really hard time changing the license. In general the point of the GPL is to make it hard to change the license to something else, so this is intentionall. In fact if company X goes to Joe Hacker and gets rights to his code, they may be unable to use it if Jack N. Box's heirs decide to not give those rights up. In short a tiny minority can hold the majority to not changing the license. (Again, this is by design)
Note that some people assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. The advantage of this is the FSF will sue to make sure code they own is not misused. This saves Joe Hacker the effort of finding a lawyer when needed. The disadvantage is in theory someone can gain control of the FSF and sell rights (or just make a new version of the GPL that gives everything away), and there is nothing Joe Hacker can do. Most projects using the GNU license choose to not require code be turned over to the FSF to protect against a rouge FSF sometime in the future.
My books run out of batteries once in a while. The flashlight I used to use as a kid under the covers didn't last too long. Once in a while my local utility supplied power (a large coal battery several hundred miles away) has gone down. Either way, my book is now dead.
That is not true. However most of Minnesota does not have the Minnesota accent. You won't find it in the Twin Cities (We have more of an Iowa/Wisconsin accent). In Duluth you will find it, but mostly in out of towners coming in for their yearly shopping trip.
In northwest Minnesota you will find it, almost exactly like you hear in the movies. The more isolated the town, the more people who will have it.
There were private roads in the US before there was a government separate from the crown. They charged a toll, and provided the only good way across the country. (well by the standards of the day, as I understand they paved the roads with logs) I think there are still a few left on the east coast.
I'm not sure that this is a good thing. It is nice to just pay my tax at the pump (which ends up being less than tolls, but that doesn't factor in other sources of funding) and be done with it. Stopping every few miles to pay the new toll quickly gets annoying, not to mention what it does to time and gas milage.
More than that, I have no interest in working within it. As a geek I like to keep full possession of my senses, and bars are not a place that encourages that. (I'm religious enough to have other objections to the bar scene, but they are irrelevant to my feelings as a geek)
The bar scene is not inferior for geek reasons - it just is. So long as it doesn't affect me (drunk driving, and alcoholism affect me, but they are not directly the fault of the bar) I don't care what you do. Don't expect me to enter it, even if that is the only way I could ever get a girl - I'd rather be alone than there. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
Perhaps. But I won't die of AIDS either. Nor will I catch herpies, or one of the many diseases that girls tend to spread. I people who have taken home girls who they latter found out had something. Getting a call the next morning: "you should know that the girl you brought home has..." is not something you ever want. She won't tell you.
I judge girls by their personality and their interests, not looks. A girls that hangs out in an arcade is already more my type than a girl who hangs out in a bar. I'm sure she has a better personality - if only because drunk girls have no personality.
Sure I'd love to have a super model. However girls get old, and even super models loose it. (some get downright ugly) That is assuming they do nothing more - throw in a few kids, and the girl will have a few extra pounds anyway. All that is left is personality - most good looking girls seem to have a bad one. (though most ugly ones as just as bad or worse)
Good luck getting 20 year old super models when you are 70. Unless you are rich enough to pay for it of course.
It is rare that I can say someone is wrong on all counts, but I have not found one defensible statement in there. (Though I guess one could be hidden and I missed it)
His first mistake is thinking GNU is everything. Maybe for him it is, but for most people we use what works. When the boss sets me down on a AIX machine I want it to work - I'm not allowed to install Linux (though I'd install *BSD if I could wipe the OS), I'm supposed to get work done.
Minorities are useful despite the cost of working with them. Bugs that are 1 in a million may happen every time on AIX. 1 in a million bugs are very hard to find. I've spends days looking at a partial crash trace wondering why it broke, and if it will happen again. With no known way to duplicate the bug it is really had to fix, and hard to be sure the 'fix' works. When it fails every time the bug is easy to fix.
Good programmers should have no problem writing cross platform code. When your code breaks on AIX, it is a sign of bad code - even if the breakage is because AIX doesn't have a function you expect.
Cross platform compilers (gcc) are much easier for me to work with. Because gcc is cross platform I can compile my stuff at home and debug it, than bring it to work and compile it and assume it works. Particularly with gcc 2.95, the support for C++ was so bad that you could not count on code written for that to work on a better compiler.
Speaking of gcc 2.95, other vendors have had better compilers for years, while gcc is only arriving. Even today, gcc isn't a great c++ compiler. (though 4.x is much better) There is no point in throwing stones at other vendors - their compilers may have been expensive, but they at least worked close to right.
The upper/lower case differences with Windows are a non-factor. You should never have any word that differs by case only - it leads to many bugs if you do.
The API differences on Windows are mostly handled by Cygwin and mingw. Those areas that are different are places where you should have your code modular anyway. Mostly we are talking about device and networking code. IPv6 is on the way (has been for 10 years now...), you need some difference code to support that. There is no standard for device code - what works on OpenBSD won't work on linux, or FreeBSD.
True almost nobody cares are VAX - but it is interesting anyway. If you code is modular like it should be, then supporting those weird things isn't a big deal - you write you code, and let those are care about it test.
A short summary: There should be only one OS that anyone runs: RedHat Linux enterprize edition on x86. (not x86-64) Not Fedora core, much less gentoo or those other non-redhat distributions. You FreeBSD people can go to hell.
He wants to take his ball and go home, I don't care, we are better off without people like him in the open source world.
Why do I need an account in the first place? I have far too many accounts as it is, I don't need more.
Case in point: I wanted some book not in any local store, and had a 10% Barns and Noble online discount. I quit the order when they asked for a password. I gave them my address and credit card number. That is all they need to ship the order, I don't want a stupid account, I want the book. There is nothing of my they need to save. I know my address, I have more passwords than I can remember.
Even though I'm protected I'd prefer they not remember my credit card number. I will enter it every time, it doesn't take long.
That would be a good idea if:
You expand the area to the entire middle east, not just Jerusalem.
You give notice only to those who want peace, not those who are causing the violence, as they will just move elsewhere can continue.
You can prevent fall out from hitting any other area.
Point two is the hardest. If we could tell who was innocent it would be trivial to kill the rest without bothering with the bomb. If you can't tell who is innocent, than those who don't want peace will get out before hand and continue their war elsewhere, solving nothing. (A few fallout deaths would be less than what the middle east currently causes)
I like to play devil's advovate too. However it is difficult, you need to know both positions well, and it is hard to reseach a stupid position.