ups, yes I did, my mistake, the correct link is: http://www.r-chart.com/2010/08/github-stats-on-programming-languages.html

Seems he was referring to the Tiobe community index at: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Yes, it's controversial and probably a bit off the real numbers, but real numbers are near impossible to get. How do you want to know what people use in their closed projects? Nobody ever publishes that data.

Now if you check out a different chart, the language distribution of Github projects, you'd get a totally different picture: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html , but it's also not very representative for the entire ecosystem.

Seems you happened to miss the trend, big data centers are built with cheep commodity hardware, and the workload is distributed by software.

I know Google is doing this, they manufacture a container with hundreds of these. They don't even bother to replace failing parts, only when a specific percentage of nodes goes down, the container is replaced. Basically zero maintenance.

Theoretically it would be possible to kill an entire data center, or a big chunk of it anyway, with the master codes for only a few production batch serial numbers.

I think this will really worry some folks.

I think you are right about that, and the reason is, that the processors have to be very resilient against external influences, like the elevated radiation up at around 1km height (~4k feet).

I know they do special hardened chips for anything that goes to space, as the most important thing up there is reliability. I imagine it's similar for planes, though not that extreme.

Besides the simpler and more robust build for these chips, the probably also draw much less power than a modern workhorse processor, and that's pretty critical when the power goes out and you are flying on a little emergency battery.

There is also the tons of optimized code for these things. Developing airplane control software is not exactly like building a website, and it's expensive as hell (multiple reviews of every line, test cases ad infinitum, etc.). The current software works well on that architecture, so there is no inherent reason to quickly switch (unless the production lines run dry, of course).

/. ate the > and < part, and everything that was between. So ps: "visit *favourte_website.com*

Yup. That's what browser language settings are for, which more and more websites start to forget.

If you happen to travel to an Spanish language country now-a-days and visit your using a WiFi on *your* laptop with your browser preferences still on *English*, you are still welcomed with: "Holla! Commo esta?". WTF?

Serious question. Yes, the BitCoins are and will further gain in value, which is normally called deflation.

There are a lot of economists who'd say that's a very bad thing, but those are the same ones who ram wall-street into the ground regularly, so I'd not give them too much credit.

So if you want to know what a BitCoin based economy would look like, here it is:

* Central banks could not print as much (FIAT) money as they'd like (now a days they use the euphemism: quantitative easing). They could not print any. This would mean, that they could not inflate away debt (which is what's actually going on). They'd actually had to do responsible accounting (imagine that).
* This would encourage people to actually save and spend what they have, and not buy everything on debt creating massive problems down the road.

This all would make pretty good economic stability and nominal growth (not this exponential lunatic thing we see today, ending in bubbles most of the time).

This is all based on simple logic, and must not be true, but can it get much worse than it's right now? I doubt it.

Please, for the love of the written text: read the damn FAQ http://www.bitcoin.org/faq *before* you engage in a discussion about the topic!

The generation of BitCoins is just part of the bootstrapping process, and it's not economically viable to do that to get wealthy (you'd set up an Amazon cluster to make them, you'd pay more than you'd earn). Generation also slows and will cap out at around 21 million BitCoins.

The primary value of BitCoins is defined by how much people are ready to exchange it for, and what you can buy/sell with it, not unlike real currency.

The primary differences are that there is no central bank that can print more money on a whim, and that the transactions are anonymous (kind of, the numbers are broadcasted, but they are not attached to names, only cryptographic keys anyone can make).

In that sense, it is an interesting and promising thing. Could use some broader adoption though, but that's not an over night thing. The current structures are stable enough to use it for practical things already and maybe we'll see it in broader adoption in the future.

What ever happened with the assertion that the Windows product family got super safe and stable in recent years and the old stigmas aren't true any more? Seriously, I should not have to read these kind of news if that'd be true. What gives?

Not to mention the planned obsolescence that can be enforced with simply turning off the server. You want to replay a game you liked 10 years ago, dream on buddy!

You seem to have the wrong idea about Wayland. It's not meant to do any of that, but to provide a slim connector between the hardware and the applications.

Putting all that stuff in one giant library is what led to X and it's persistence in the first place, nobody wants to repeat those mistakes.

Drag and Drop / Clipboard are more sent to helper programs, UI toolkits, D-Bus, etc. That way it's much easier to maintain and improve.

That's what the UNIX philosophy was all about form the beginning, one tool should do one thing, and it should do it right.

It's OK, runs fairly stable, but it also locks up once in a while and does some aggressive disk I/O. No idea what exactly, probably housekeeping, but it's somewhat irksome, could use some more fine tuning.

The main problem with btrfs right now is that it lacks fsck tools, so in case of havoc there is little chance to recuperate, which is not good for server like systems.

As for ZFS, it's not the tech that's keeping it from Linux but the restrictive licensing. Unless that gets fixed (probably won't happen), it is off limits, and Linux folks will do their own thing, like the always do.

..and their tendency to abuse every software paradigm.

As I see it, app stores / software centers are meant to unify application sources and updates. This implies to me, that there should be one of it and probably the best place is on the platform level: the OS.

If we start pushing in app stores on all other software stack levels (browsers, random websites, company specific app stores - I'm sure Adobe is working on something like that -, probably more will show up) then the whole idea misses it's point. Could as well go back to downloading random apps and installing it.

This is the same crap that happened with OpenID. Suddenly we had 16 different, incompatible OpenID providers, and it's hardly useful at all any more.

I picture the scenario where my uncle asks me for help over the phone and I tell him to please install app x/y from the software center.. and then I have to detail which one of the 15.

Except that Google and many other tech companies don't pay out dividends at all.

Corporate tax is the equivalent of income tax for corporations. So if everyone has to pay their income tax, why should corporations be exempt of that?

You seem to have a strangely optimistic fate that the corporations will do good with the money, but fail to present a good reason why they should do so.

Employees are just assets/liabilities of them, but don't really belong in the same bucket with the obligations of their income.

I have genius ideas around 3 times a day. Nobody gives a damn, ideas are plenty everywhere.

Are we really going to start nitpicking that someone had the idea of one or the other successful product someone else made successful?

Facebook did something people enjoy and long for with it. Good for them. The guy that thought of it first obviously failed with that for about 7 years.

I know, it's just random trolling on the front page, but it irks me.

Disclaimer: I don't have a Facebook account, nor am I very found of them. I don't own an Apple device or product either.