I also have an integrated dust removal tool. It operates by projecting a high velocity jet of yellow liquid.

Damn. I was hoping he'd answer the question inquiring what it was that he ate from his foot. My money was on a large verruca.

I even wrote a small DOS virus in assember myself (never released it, just as a study).

I did an evening course in x86 assembler at a college in the UK many years ago. In our first lesson the tutor showed us how to write a boot sector virus for DOS - I thought it was quite an amusing way to motivate us!

Dear God. I used IRIX on an SGI Indy, and it was the perfect disaster of buggy, unstable software on top opf painfully slow hardware. In comparison, the OpenWindows desktop on my Sun workstation was a thing of reliable elegance.

Linux would not exist without the annoying aspects of GNU and the FSF. They would have made their own kernel in a timely fashion and Linus may never have been motivated to make his own.

Interestingly, the original architect of the Hurd kernel wanted to use 4.4BSD as a starting point, but was overrulled by Stallman who wanted to use Mach.

The company claims that it's one of the best releases till date

Well, you would rather hope so.

Ladyada created the brilliant x0xb0x - a faithful recreation of the Roland TB-303 synthesiser and sequencer, but with MIDI and a flashable firmware. It's a a brilliant device, and acknowledged that what made the 303 so good was the combination of synthesiser and sequencer. All previous clones had imitated the sound generation aspects alone.

OS X has user land components and code from both Net and Free. The initial updates to the creaky old OpenStep code base relied on NetBSD as the primary source, but this gradually changed as key FreeBSD developers were recruited by Apple.

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.