Firebird is an open-source embedded database project that was already quite mature when they renamed Pheonix. They didn't threaten to sue, they just asked nicely.

I think I read somewhere that the $100M Microsoft injected would have made little difference to Apple's bottom line/survival, but was an important show of confidance. More important for Apple was the Office deal (and in return Microsoft got IE5 bundled as the default Mac web browser).

Out of that period came my favourite Steve Jobs quote of all time, when he told the Apple faithful at WWDC "for Apple to win, Microsoft don't have to lose". The same is still true today -- even more so -- there's plenty of room for a huge ecosystem of competing products. The constant arguments in blogs and on sites like this about whether Andoid or iOS is winning are futile -- there doesn't need to be one clear winner.

Their will be a lot of snarky "too late" comments today for this news, but it's a sad day when you have to step down from the company you worked so hard to build -- a company that must feel an extension of yourself -- and it must have been a really tough decision for these guys. No doubt they still wanted to prove themselves (and who wouldn't, given their situation?). I feel sorry for them. It's easy to be an armchair CEO, especially when you have hindsight.

They could have sold 10,000 early access/ developer boards at $50 a piece, maybe even doing a 'buy one give one' promotion like the OLPC project. It does kind of defeat the purpose of computers for all, but it'd also helped them guarantee future production...

I suspect that it's actually far cheaper and easier to ship you an assembled board than an unassembled board. Shipping stuff like this over from China in a container is really cheap. Also, to disrupt the manufacturing process and ship a bag of bits would add extra cost because that's actually harder to automate.

If you get the Gert board that they mention (a break-out board that gives you lots of IO options for hardware projects) you do get to assemble that yourself :)

I really do know what you're saying -- I feel the same myself, but I'm not convinced correlation is causation -- I don't see any sites that have less 'trolly' comments than Slashdot, and I'm starting to think it's just me getting older and not actually feeling the same way as the younger generation. Don't forget that a lot of the Slashdot readership started visiting the site in the late 90's, when we were teens ourselves, and our tastes/opinions/priorities have changed so much in that time -- I know that I'm barely the same person I was back then. What I thought was a great discussion 10 years ago might not impress me so much today.

There are definitely always improvements to be made to the comments system, but I've yet to see anything better on the internet. Disqus haven't even tried to fix the problem, nor have Facebook comments, and anything phpBB doesn't stand a chance.

Anyway, I feel for you if you're genuinely being harassed by somebody, that sounds really not much fun. It's also very odd that somebody would do that over such a prolonged period of time. It's a funny old world.

Commendable.

Oh, so there are still /some/ people who aren't quite as elite as us ;)

Every time I see the word 'fanboi' or the phrase 'circle jerk' I lose a bit of faith in the site I'm on. Stop it. Learn to use grown up words and make your point more rationally. I know you're annoyed that you have a stalker, but surely they'll get bored soon enough -- maybe now the school holidays are over. I also suspect it's a personal grudge, rather than a FOSS thing.

As for your other point, you must understand that we all miss the good old days -- but that has been the case for thousands (if not millions) of years. Not only that, but group think is something you have to learn to accept, no matter how annoyed it makes you. Maybe those mod-rules you point out exist purely because that's how the majority of people feel? That's the basis of democracy. Slashdot still, after all these years, somehow manages to see discussions with contrary views and actual debate. For that we should be thankful (though obviously not too thankful -- especially with the ever increasingly 'sensational' stories that seem to be appearing).

If somebody gave you a detailed spec for software that they found useful, you'd be surprised at just what you can achieve already. Useful software doesn't have to be highly complicated, it might just be a console app for fetching data from a remote feed and storing it in a database. Useful software is useful. You clearly have the right aspirations, you just need to find the purpose. Once you complete your first project it kind of just snowballs as you grow in confidence and ability.

And there are plenty of entry level jobs. If you speak to those companies looking for 3-5 years and say you're willing to work on a trial basis to prove yourself, you'd be amazed at how willing they are to give you a job. They will value your eagerness/ambition just as highly as they value 3-5 years experience (which everyone knows actually means nothing anyway).

If you have a developer doing that, at least it shows they are thinking about the problem. In my experience, that self awareness is a good sign -- they are likely to continue improving the code they write, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that in another 12 months to find that they were writing compact AND maintainable code.

If you were to go back and look at the code you wrote years ago, when you were just starting out, would it be easily maintainable now? I doubt it. My early code certainly wouldn't. It makes me cringe just thinking about some of the hacks I did to compact my code down (often times involving bit fields...). Ugh.