I first saw X on Apollo workstations in 1986. At that date all the Sun workstations in the lab still ran a windowing system called 'News', if I remember correctly. I saw X on both Suns and Silicon Graphics workstations before 1988, and on DEC Station and RS/6000 machines shortly thereafter. We also had PERQ machines in the lab but I don't believe they ever ran X. In those days I used Xerox 1108 and 1186 machines, which didn't run X.

The first machine I personally owned which ran X was an Acorn R260 running Risc IX (BSD 4.2) in 1990. I switched to Linux at kernel 0.99pl11 in 1993, which is to say more than twenty years ago.

Gosh.

That's a matter of taste. For me everything on MacOS X looks like candy-covered shit on acid, but that's my taste.

I hated NeXTStep, too.

Since Qt works with Objective-C and Objective-C works with Swift, doesn't Qt already (automatically) work with Swift?

Automation may improve productivity, but what is productivity? It's been calculated that Chinese peasants in the Han Dynasty worked an average 13 hour week, and medieval European peasants didn't work much more. Now, OK, they didn't have access to decent healthcare, and because of poor transport they were vulnerable to poor local weather causing famine from time to time. And, of course, they didn't have MTV or Facebook or even iPads. But on the whole they were much better fed (on much better food) than you are now. If you could have a simple life with a comfortable home for thirteen hours a week, would you? I know I would.

I'm not against automation. Automation means that we can get back to working thirteen hours a week, without having to give up MTV and Facebook and iPads, or even modern healthcare. But we can only do that if the surplus value created by automation is widely shared, rather than being captured by elites.

That's a really bad analogy. Peering at someone's credit card - even if it is under a napkin - is quite obviously very bad manners indeed. If you're saying unauthorised penetration testing is like peering at someone's credit card, then it's clearly wrong.

And speaking as someone who has his own little toy server out in the cloud, I'd very much prefer to do my own damn penetration testing, thank you.

Thanks for that, you gave me a chuckle. I agree with you in spririt, but there are a lot of people out there molesting data in order to perform their work function and to get paid. Far more than have any understanding of data structures, algorithms or even basic data normalization. It's unfortunate.

Working. There are far more people that work with large amounts of data than know how to program.

Oh the horror.

... for complex software engineering projects. It's okay for 99% of the stuff that regular people use it for.

Perl no good for people that don't program.

The problem isn't that people that know how to program and to test are writing crappy spreadsheets. The problem is that people that don't know how to program and test, ie. the general non IT tech population is writing spreadsheets because they don't know another way to build these tools and they do it in the only way that they've taught themselves to do. If they knew better they often wouldn't start by clicking the excel icon in the first place.

Arguably Howard Hughes Spruce Goose was a fantastic success. But not from a aeronautical engineering point of view. In fact Howard Hughes did about zero to increase the field of aircraft design, nothing ever worked (at least in time to be useful) and none of his designs ever made it to production.

Dead reckoning - navigation where you have no accurate fix - has been around for literally hundreds of years, and it is spelled 'dead reckoning' - because it's reckoning (of position) without a live fix. When I learned to navigate small boats fifty years ago, it was still pretty standard - because sun sights are awkward, and in any case using sun sights alone you can't get two position lines at the same time, so you have to do a running fix (which involves some dead reckoning). Even in coastal navigation you can't always get bearings on two good landmarks at the same time.

You're not thinking at all, you're just emoting.

If you were thinking you would realise that drone strikes on a civilian population - on women, on children, on funerals, on weddings - recruit a thousand terrorists for every one they kill. Of course the CIA and the military promote this policy. More terrorists means more money for the CIA and the military, terrorism and counter-terrorism are inherently symbiotic. But foreign policy should not be dictated by the needs of inter-agency pissing matches in Washington DC.

I have never, ever bought an Apple product of any kind, but considering build quality the MacBook Air is probably better value for money than the very similar Asus Ultrabook which I do have.