The history of this event is actually quite interesting in itself. There are even ancient writers that describe it. One was Bishop Marius, the bishop of Avenches and later Lausanne (547-594), who was actually neighbor to this event.

(Quick translation from P.C. Basilii anno XXII. Ind. XI) What the mountain 'Tauredunum' corresponds too in modern geographical terms is somewhat disputed.

This is so true. It seems people need to argue and fight, and better for them to fight over turnip quotas in a parliment than at the edge of a sword.

If he seriously wants to brag about his exploit-free OS, let him put it out there in the world. Better yet, let us look at the source. Anything else is just words. Let's see the code.

A good writer by definition knows how to organize his thoughts, get quickly to what is important and is able to express himself clearly. Documentation is for people who develop software or products with your code, and in some ways analogous to what the user sees as an interface. Programming a user interface is often completely orthogonal to the technical part of the project, and really takes a different type of programmer. Look at how many excellent projects that work so well and yet are a real pain in the ass to use because of the interface - one can do well in one aspect and completely fail in the other. The same it is with code and documentation. The code might do what you want but if you have no idea how to implement the api it is damn useless.

I wish your last paragraph could be engraved in stone in every IT department. Yet there are these things called deadlines and emergencies that prevent doing anything in a sane manner. Such is life.

True enough, that a programmer needs to organize his thoughts, as the computer cannot function without clear directives. However communicating with human beings is a different matter. I would say that documentation is for the developer what the UI is for the user. Look at how many magnificent projects are technically sound and yet have a user interface that is completely unusuable. The same is true of documentation. Interacting with the developer or user of your code is something complementary to interacting with the computer.

It is very rare for a good programmer to be also a good writer. Heck in any job it is rare to find someone with two good skill sets. Even with the two skill sets you often only have time to do something well. I would have to say though when then planets align and the good programmer is also a good writer, usually some sort of standard results from it, and lots of progress is made in the field. Also, some projects don't really warrant the time to make extensive documentation. I wrote tons of LISP code that never had much of documentation because it didn't really need it and simply got the job done. I'm sure many projects never get past the stage of documentation on a need to know basis.

Mars looks almost orange in my telescope, undoutably because of all the orange juice.

You sound more like a memory chip salesman than a software developer actually.

Actually Gnome 3 did the same. What is wrong with OS designers these days?

There is even FreeBSD .

Just a completely different question - if this idea was patented wouldn't Canonical run into problems? Maybe the patent system can save Ubuntu from this garbage....

You mean like unix has done like forever ?

You can't even disassemble browser apps, all you have is the front-end.

Say that again? You just look at the source code, the javascript and it's all there. Maybe not like you want it, but there is nothing intrinsic to browser apps that make them a sort of DRM. If it is written in HTML5, you can look at the code if they make it available - in fact in some ways you can do 'Show Source' in a browser easier than many native apps. Even Google Apps you can do 'Show source' in your browser. In a certain way the web is far more open that native apps, which are painfully difficult to disassemble from the binary.

The only real problem are the requests from the server - true, they don't often release server software source. But often this is mostly connection to some database. While this can be problematic for open source, it is not intrinsically so. Most web apps can also be written to work offline.

So this is what they mean when he 'brings home the bacon' ?