After 18 months, "Metro" is not a roaring success. Firefoxes absense on Metro will only hurt WinRT users. By definition, being a WinRT users they have already decided they are going to have a stripped down experience.

I don't think Mozilla is losing anything here.

There are plenty of times when I have not been near a computer and writing some code out when I had a thougth was a great thing to do. In addition to the fact it is great to do when learning a new language or construct.

The point was that everyone brought up on intellesense did not really know the language, they had a very lose understanding of the syntax. During their larval phase in learning to program it was hindering them from learning the language better. When you understand things, then it is eaiser to undertdand the tradeoffs, when to cut corners, how much time you tools are saving you, etc.

Used to have 3 very active childern at home. The bathroom was the only place I could sit and read for 5 minutes. And 5 minutes 3 times a day 7 days a week is almost 2 hours of distraction free time to read a manual.

As for the state of my colon, it is better than ever. Thank you for asking.

Well it looks like it is time to type Q in edline and switch to using notepad. I want to move up to a more powerful editor and am not sure if Sublime is right for me.

Back in the 80's I wrote a lot of code for my Commodore 64 on paper which I would type in later when the computer was available to me. I was in college a few years ago and was required to take a class on Visual Basic. Everyone is class was new to programming or learned with a fancy IDE. We had a test where we had to write a few routines on paper for a test.

Most students had no idea how to form a line of Visual Basic code. They would just start to type the statement and let IntelliSense give them the proper parameter list and then they would just fill in the blanks. This means they were lazy on if a statement used : or ; or if a variable was one-counter or one_counter or OneCounter. It was a disaster. out of 60 students I was the only one who passed that part of the test.

It is not that I am against IDEs. But having worked without them, and having to do the edit-compile-execute-debug loop, I conceptually understand what the IDE is doing for me. I have done the heavy lifting and I appreciate what the IDE does.

The best way to learn what the language can do, is to set down with a manual that has all of the commands and with simple examples, and read it whenever you are in the bathroom. It is much less boring reading something like this when the only competition is staring at the floor.

I doubt Microsoft will every be able to justify the 8 billion dollar price tag it paid for Skype.

I think Google should go out to and make another wise investment. I would love to so MS buy something like Pinterest for 15 billion.

Really. Geek Card revoked.

I set up a group of rules like 15110, 15111, 15112, 15113 then on my laptop I use a ~/.ssh/config file with entires like

Host HomeWife
  Hostname myhomeip.net
  Port 15111
  User honey
  Compression yes

Then I don't have to remember. BTW I know the external IPs, internal IPs, firewall rules, etc for all my work systems at multiple locations as well as my home systems.

And more gun laws would stop that?

The laws on the books in Chicago that would keep a legal gun owner from selling a handgun to a person off the street are not working? More laws will not help with that.

If the only 2 groups that had handguns in Chicago were cops and gangs, gangs would still find a way to steal or purchase guns.

If I recall correctly stat say that the US is #3 in gun deaths in developed countries.. What is funny about that is if you take the 3 cities with the strongest anti Gun laws (Washington DC, New York City, and Chicago) and made them their own country, they would be #4 on the list and the rest of the US would drop down to something like #20 or lower on the list..

It is not the legal gun owners in these cities murdering each other. The truth is most of these deaths are black on black murders done with illegal guns. As long as we are discouraged from saying this and do not address the real problems in these communities, stronger gun laws won't fix anything.

Not hard to split up the debt. take the total revenues/taxes for each district last year, figure out the % it is of the total. Now use that percentage on how to break up the states debt.

I know that Northern Cali/Jefferson will get screwed, but it they want freedom, they should take the deal. It will prove to be a bargain, The rest of the state is not slowing down in ow fast they are spending money. The sooner they split, the less new massive debt that is not fair for them to take, that they will have to deal with.

That is the problem. Old skool players that have to much of the market cant make the switch. There is to much money in the old product and never enough money in the "where the market will be in 5 years product" to be worth their while. Then in 5 years if they enter the market, they are wannabes without a good product for that market.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

I mean, even the close/minimize/maximize buttons had to be switched around to the top left... WHY?

I believe it is something like penis envy.

Duh, it is a huge deal. Ubuntu / Canonical maintains all the Xorg stuff. This will also be true of the Wayland stuff.

What do you do when there are ZERO xorg or wayland packages used is Ubuntu? That means Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Mint/etc will have to borrow from Debian and deal with whatever bugs pop up.Or each distro will create their own set of packages. Or they will have to join forces, make some sort of consortium and work up their own packages as a group.

The truth is none of these groups have the time to do that AND remove dumb Ubuntu stuff AND create their own non-unity programs of new features in Ubuntu.

You sir, sound like you are expecting an answer from reasonable people.

The GNOME 3 devs have a better than 3 year track record of showing that they are NOT reasonable people. No screen savers, no-left pane in a file manager, or being able to blank your screen instead of sleeping when you close the lid on your laptop. These are features that have been removed with no way to add the functionality back in (xscreensaver and moving to Nemo don't count). These are not the decisions of reasonable people. They have shut the door on these features, and if someone finds a way to hack them in, they then remove the backdoors that allow for that. They are damn serious about making this stuff go away and in their arrogance and hubris believe that they know better than you what you want and need to be productive in a desktop environment.