I *hear* that MS has a culture of fear, where lower levels are basically expected to kowtow to the management line. A company without dissent and an environment where employees can air and discuss their opinions is VERY bad since decision making then lays in the hands of the select few, and when mistakes are being made, people are prevented from even pointing out those mistakes.

So far we've seen the disasters of Surface pro, Windows 8 metro, XBone, and I'm sure there are others I'm missing. That a company could have such a litany of product disasters suggests that the culture doesn't exist where *innovative & good* products can be made anymore (MS does have good products but these tend to be either their mainstays e.g. office, rebadged hardware).

The blame for this *has* to rest at the top.

I dont understand the problems that people have with it. I spent an hours learning it, I kept an open mind and ended up really liking it.

That said - 90% of what I do requires a shell so maybe Im missing something....

Interesting, would you care to expand?

I hate JavaScript but I've been using CoffeeScript for a project and I've been reasonably impressed at how it removes many of the worse parts of JS - how does TypeScript differ/improve on Coffee?

Funnily enough, so were the satellite, mobile phone, trips to the moon, voyages to the bottom of the sea etc.

Now if the OP had referred to "Type" rather than level, he would have been referencing the Kardashev scale which is a genuine metric...the fact that it might we have evidence of only a single civilization to measure using that metric is immaterial.

As a 41 year old (software) engineer...I sort of wish that were true.

But it results in the paymasters of the politicians gaining access to information that is of great financial benefit to *them*.

I seem to recall reading that the return on investment for the US economy from the 1960s space program was something like 100-1. Today government investment in a space program acts as investment for private companies to develop new technologies - and I would be unsurprised to discover that the return is still not above 10-1 from an economic perspective.

If you really want to attack waste of money spending there are FAR better targets.

The Russian search engine Yandex is one of the sources for duckduckgo. We need them because they help to maintain our privacy.

Three? I wish:

1: Rails Server output
2: Sinatra Server output
3: Editor - coffeescript
4: Editor - scss
5: Editor - Sinatra/Rails server
6: Editor - Tests
7: Browser - app
8: Browser - research
9: JS debugger

Number of monitors? 1. I cry at night.

I would mod you up (except for the stupid mod system that means I never have mod points when I want to mod).

Sadly this is "business" 21st century style ~ 50% politics, 10% luck, 10% corruption, 30% actual work. Many failing companies could be turned around in short order by removing the top heavy bonus culture for a more equitable system (e.g. look at Germany for a viable model) with all the long term benefits that brings but in cultures where next quarters earnings report matters more than whether the company will still be in business in 10 years, thats never going to happen.

its just a pity that B&N only have about 0.0001% of the available books (i,e. of those that have been electronically published in any format) available through their store, and what they do have are vastly overpriced. I'd still rather own a paper copy of a book and pop it on my bookshelves, but at the same time I would love to be able to start reading an e-version immediately hence my last book purchase went through amazon and the errmmm less than kosher e-version onto my nook while the physical ones arrived.

I wouldn't have minded paying a (small) premium for that, even though I think it should be done by default. I wouldn't have minded buying the e-version if the price reflected the significant savings of not having the expenses of physically distributing the books to retailers, the retailers mark up, the printing costs, the warehousing costs etc. etc.....but in the end, the paper copy was cheaper than the e-version!

It's sad really...all the out of print books that exist, all the various opportunities to innovate and instead we see companies driving themselves to the wall from greed.

I used to have issues with locking but it seems fixed with a Ubuntu 12.04/Gnome 3/FF 20 combo....

Its still buggy and cra

I'm amazed no one has said "HUMA" - Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access, and that this fundamental difference between the architecture of PCs and the PS4 is likely to make it an uphil struggle for PS4 emulation. It *may* be a different story when it comes to AMDs Kavari (?) APUs since they use a HUMA architecture themselves.

Personally I think the best to expect is that we may see more games ported to Linux ....