Oh there go my mods, but I had to call this one. 35k rounds for each American killed, sure. I doubt if there were 1.7 trillion rounds fired to account for the 50 million killed in total.

No mod up? Get off my lawn!

Ugh. The LOTR cartoon by Ralph Bashki was a complete abomination. He didn't animate that movie. He had actors play the scenes and then he traced over their images.

aka rotoscoping, which I thought was very effective in that film, and has a long history which didn't end with Bashki's LOTR.

Even paintings now, some % after every sale goes back to the artist after the first sale.

UK too: http://www.artquest.org.uk/articles/view/first-semester-report1

I'm guessing we're going to be looking at navel wiring before we find one.

How will umbilical cords help here? I'm confused.

?I am pleased to say that I was the one who first added Vim to the Sunsite Linux archive back in 1993.

Since nobody else seems to have done so, can I send you very warm thanks? My skin still crawls when I'm on a system and I get:

vim: command not found ...and have to resort to 'vi'. Can I also send you karma for mentioning Sunsite, which nobody much on ./ seems to have has any recollection of nowardays, which was particularly galling the in the Sun (ghod rest their bones) bashing days of the 200?s.

That's KDE, and what's with Gnome? Gnome3 consists nearly solely of regressions, there's barely any functionality left. The primary mode, "gnome-shell" is beyond words, acting as everyone has fat fingers on a 3'' touchscreen, combining worst ideas of iPhone and Windows Phone ("you can't run a program more than once", etc). The secondary mode, "gnome-fallback" is a bad joke too -- no usable panel, no desktop, no messing with the menu (try right clicking... try dragging...).

Hear, hear. As a very happy Fedora Core user up until FC14 (and not just on my home machines, we're RHEL at work servers, and FC on dev workstations) I'm very unhappy with Gnome3, and just can't understand this terrible move, I've asked the dev team to stay at FC14 as Gnome3 is just a train wreck for me, I can't believe that the lunatics have taken over the asylum in such a way. It'll get better but in the meantime I'm now fighting my desktop rather than sailing it. Gnome-shell just doesn't cut it for a workstation (I'm sure if I had a 7" tablet it'd be fine) and the fallback mode is so buggy it's atrocious. Maybe a fresh install would help out, but I've nuked my .gnome* and the problems are still showstoppers.

Call me grandad, but I can't believe that they've dumped all "power users" (for want of a better term, I woudn't have put myself in that category before this) for this.

Compare it to JPEG2000 vs JPEG, for example - licensing issues have hindered JPEG2000 adoption

JPEG2000 part1 is licence-free. The main barrier to adoption has been the lack of performant free implementations. A subtle difference, but worth pointing out.

We have the same issues with some accented characters, and the solution that I'll implement (if I ever get round to it) is to rasterize the string and print it as an image. No reason why it shouldn't work (dunno if zebra thermal printers can print graphics).

The one real problem for me is actually some driver for certain types of devices, like zebra thermal printers and such

I don't know what you did to fix this, but for zebra card printers, they have pretty good documentation, and I wrote my own userland apps to talk raw ZPL (IIRC) to create cards (figuring out the image printing was a PITA). Funny thing is that I got much better results than the commercial windows application I was replacing, which was pretty crap (printing black by overlaying YMC rather then the black K layer). It wan't fun but I haven't had to touch if for years. I guess the thermal printers are wildly different, but possibly simpler, though.

Is the new offer solid? Is it subject to references? Is the new company solid, or a startup that could disappear? You'll need a good reference from your present employer if the new company tanks, but if it's a long term contract or a permanent post with the new company then that may not be such an issue. Is the new post one that you'd enjoy? There's lots of people saying "screw them, they'd screw you" but from what I know of small dev companies in the UK, I think they're showing a US bias.

You've given us an figure for the income raise you're getting, rather than a %age, so I can't really tell what level you're at, which would be useful (though I understand why you may not share this). Will this take you into the higher-rate tax band (making that £7k smaller, losing family allowance from 2013, other considerations)? Flat salary isn't everything, you need to consider pension and other benefits (I'm sure you have, but you haven't shared that, so we can't figure that in).

Share your quandary with your company. The 45 min commute is costing you, both in hours and quality of life. Give them a chance to step up and match the offer + compensation for that commute. If your leaving will cost them as much as you say, they'll be happy to do that, and you'll have shown your loyalty by giving them this chance, but be sure to spell out exactly what you're expecting from them. Your CV will be enhanced if you stick with them to getting a 'flagship' product out the door, and if they're really your friends and have proper business acumen they'll be happy to have this chance to keep you. Just be sure that you're strong enough to resist any "jam tomorrow" promises and stress that this isn't a bluff or blackmail attempt (not in those words, though). Unless you live in the middle of a tech zone, they're going to know who's offering you the job, so be certain that whoever you approach isn't somebody who's going to wreck your new offer. If you have any doubts about this strategy, that's probably a sign that you don't really trust your present company and you should just jump ship.

Good luck, whatever you do. Note that if any of your present company management are ./ers then they'll probably finger you for this post if you approach them, not that that should matter, you've been very honest about your dilemma, just don't be surprised.

From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations."

  No it wasn't, newbie. Get off my lawn.

alt.* was outside the offical hierarchy, but was still text discussion, not copyright infringement - check out the archives.

Don't blame the kid that bought the Helium, blame the helium repositories that don't price it as the scarce resource that it is.

ie, blame Congress, who passed the Helium Privatization Act of 1996 forcing the stockpile to be sold cheap regardless of any market forces on scarcity.

Woosh.

Typical MS, ripping off great ideas from OSS.