The "G" in "GTK+" originally stood for "General", not "GIMP".

Do you know whether Yahoo! is still largely hosted on FreeBSD? I worked there at the very end of the 90's, and it was all FreeBSD - even the developer desktop machines ran it. It was my first exposure to FreeBSD, having used NetBSD and Linux before that.

BSDs have their advantages over Linux, but portability ain't one of them, given that Linux has been ported to far more platforms than NetBSD.

Linux has only been ported to more platforms because of the sheer number of people working on it, but that's no reflection of the portability of the code. NetBSD was designed with portability from the start, whereas Linux was and still is in many areas designed for an x86-centric world. Many Linux ports never reached maturity, and even some of those that did are now broken.

A colleague at work is building a Ford GT-40, a combination of a kit, parts also used on other models of cars and some parts he's had to fabricate himself. Once completed, he can call the car a Ford GT-40 rather than a replica as long as he meets some (very stringent) criteria. I wasn't aware you could do this before, but he explained that to qualify, his car had to be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing (unlike a Lamborghini replica I once saw that had the egine block from a family saloon car).

Rasterman's code is elegant and very readable. From what I remember, he parted ways with the GNOME project because he wasn't particularly interested in working on the GTK libraries as a RedHat staffer.

It's been usable for most of the time it's been in development, and I'm actually running the nightly RPM builds on my laptop at work. I think the lack of a formal stable release just reflects the high rate of change in the underlying libraries, where things are refactored or rewritten quite often. Despite this churn, the window manager itself has remained remarkably stable.

Eclipse is the worst IDE I've ever used. NetBeans and IntelliJ are far superior, so much so that I can only wonder at the popularity of Eclipse.

Typing bugs just don't really happen.

Utter rubbish - in any dynamically typed language you will have many such bugs. I used to code a lot of Perl, and lately I've been forced to use Groovy. There is little chance of refactoring anything, combined with endless cycles of compile, test, fix dynamic language related bug. It's pissing me off so much that quitting my current job and going back to working with Java.

Yes, the UK does have the principle of "contempt of court", and I'd say this is pretty much an example of it as it goes against the spirit and arguably the wording of the court judgement. I just wonder how the court would decide which Apple employees are going to prison for this (and yes, contempt of court invariably means jail time even if it's only overnight).

Simple unlock patterns are inherently flawed, anyway. Your password is finger-painted on the screen. Even direction is easy enough to determine.

Particularly if you sweat as much as Jimmy Savile in a primary school playground.

Amazon is doing something shady and it'll get worked out in court now that it's know[n].

Oh yeah, just like Vodafone and the billions of pounds they avoided paying in tax. In the UK the politicians let big firms get away with crap like this and the Facebook tax dodge in the mistaken belief that it brings jobs to the country. All it does is line the pockets of a few at the cost of a huge amount of tax revenue taht could be used to finance real investment.

I wonder how they manage to support all these different hardware.

One way is automated cross-compiling to ensure that the source at least builds for as many architectures as possible. Think of it as a large scale continuous integration environment.

These guys were targeting primarily older users.

Yup, they targeted my elderly neighbour and a number of her friends, but I've never heard of them targetting younger people. This suggests to me that they have access to data on people so they can pick the best targets. The only commonality we could find amongst the victims we knew was that they had called British Telecom's broadband support lines in India ...

At my current company we have a huge number of cold callers, mostly of the automated variety. There's always a pause as the auto-dialer software waits for a human voice rather than a fax, which is when you should randomly press buttons on your touchtone phone. This either fools the software into thinking it's called a fax line, and removing you from its call list, or transfers you to a human. In the latter case, it's now fun time. My two favourite games (shamelessly nicked from someone else) are:

1. Answer every question or prompt with one word, usually "yes", but extra points for something else

2. Pretend you are a law enforcement officer at a crime scene, and question the telemarketer as to their relationship with "the deceased", ascertain their location and then pretend a unit is on its way to question them

Chips aren't exactly designed to "run Linux" or any other OS.

To be pedantic, most processors are designed to run an OS, in that they have features that are specifically required for the way operating systems are implemented. Support for things like privilege levels for example.