On the other hand Darwin certified and blessed as a bona fide official UNIX. And Darwrin is derived from BSD.

Genetically, the various BSDs are direct descendents of UNIX. The ancestral tree might not be all that clean, but no one outside of a mythical Ozzie and Harriet world can claim the same about their family either. Legally I can't call NetBSD a UNIX, but that doesn't mean it isn't.

I don't mind paying to play a game, but I do mind paying to get rid of a grind deliberately introduced to make people pay. That's just rude. It's would be like if restaurants offered you free2eat meals, but you had to pay to get rid of the hostile and abusive waiter.

I'm as confused as you are why everyone is jumping on board the Javascript bandwagon. And not just on the desktop where there's the extra horsepower to run it, but also on very resource limited platforms such as phones. Why not Python? Isn't it easy to learn? Isn't it stable and robust? I'm coming from the Qt world, and Nokia's decision (which Digia is now forced to live with) to make QML/Javascript a requirement for QtQuick was mindbogglingly stupid. I have nothing against QML per se, but the arguments as to why C++ can't be used instead are downright silly.

But I know the reason why everyone is pushing Javascript: Because it's a web language. Look at the apps you can get for your Droid, the vast majority are little more than hastily ported web pages. Web developers are cheap, C++ developers are expensive. With HTML/QML/Whatever all you need to do to write an app is drag-n-drop some stuff around in an IDE and tie them together with some Javascript snippets. It's Visual Basic all over again!

If they don't want their privacy violated they shouldn't be telling the whole world what they're doing on a minute by minute basis.

I get the impression that those who want to tell the whole internet where they are at any given moment aren't too concerned about privacy. Then again, they may just be oblivious to reality. I know many college kids who have absolutely no clue that everything they post on a social site is viewable by the entire world for all of eternity.

That's not an error, that's the normal state of being. Sheesh.

And if it crashes and pukes all over the user's desktop, then that's their problem...

I must be a bad developer, because I never throw an exception if I don't know explicitly who is going to catch it. Because the minute I do some other developer will fail to catch it and the program will crash.

The framework is already split up among several libraries, and will be split up even more for Qt 5 (due before the end of the year).

As for not having everything and the kitchen sink, that's a good thing. Not every widget needs its own embedded email client :-)

They went to Google in their twenties, and they're now working at Google in their 30s.

Listen kid, when you're 30 you're still a kid. Arguing that Google isn't ageist because you know people in their 30s there is stupid.

I know someone in their fifties at Google, so there!

Having walked around the Googleplex quite a bit, it still seems to have a younger average age those most tech companies. The average age does seem to be creeping up there, but so is the average age of software developers in general.

Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.

It depends on which kernel you know best. If you're a Linux developer than writing one for Linux will be easier. If you're a FreeBSD developer then writing one for FreeBSD will be easier. It is not hard to write one for FreeBSD. It's a very clean architecture with plenty of readily accessible docs.

Ever hear of 386BSD? It ran on a, wait for it, i386!!!

He's right on the lawsuit though. I remember that time at the very beginning of Linux. I remember people shaking their heads at having to reinvent the wheel just because AT&T got a bug up its butt. The source of Tannenbaum's sour grapes is that Linux stole his hobbyist marketshare. Remember the early days of Linux, and it was a hobbyist system. Use in real world production was exceedingly rare. On the other hand BSD *was* being used in real world production. It was because of that lawsuit that people chose to convert a hobbyist system to a production system.

That's only half of the story however. The other half isn't about the licensing either though, but the cultures. BSD had a very elitist culture that didn't give a rat's ass about the desktop. Even today that anti-desktop attitude persists in some BSD corners. By targeting off-the-shelf consumer hardware, Linux was able to run on more people's systems.

Google is an aberration. I work with many different companies, and the average age can vary greatly according to culture. Google has a very young average age, heck I think half the males there can't even shave yet. Startups also tend to be very young. But then go take a look at medical technology companies. A much higher average age. Animation studios: very young. Petroleum engineering: higher age. Financial trading: somewhere in between. Military contractors: much older. Other miscellaneous companies I've seen have also ranged from the very young to long in tooth.

I am talking about the SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS in these companies.

I think the two factors that push the average age downwards are: 1) The trendiness and hipness of the company. Kids want to go work for Apple and Google, and not for IBM or Oracle. Older workers shy away from these because they feel uncomfortable. Then there's 2) the cultures at software companies that emphasizes newer languages, technologies and platforms. "Newer" being relative of course.

I used to think that too, until week before last. I'm a literature major who couldn't make it past second semester calculus. Until week before last I never needed to do any math in programming beyond arithmetic.

Then I landed on a project involving OpenGL. There's a heck of a lot of math there, and a lot of math/graphics jargon. What makes it even more frustrating are all the tutorials for beginners that assume you've majored in math and never bother explaining homogeneous coordinates, frustrums, etc. Almost as annoying as they're assuming you already know the syntax to glsl. I am good at geometry, and could write very complicated POVray models, but OpenGL has been kicking my butt due to my lack of linear maths.