When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.

However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.

Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high.
This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.

I get where you're coming from but when I was a post grad teaching first year students my experience was that that they found Emacs to be uncomfortable and used it only when the tutorial sheets required them too. Most of the time the dominant linux text editor in use by students I taught was kwrite.

Actually you've hit on a major problem of programers that we don't like to talk about (well, except me, obviously..). The thing is, GUI design is a complex art, one that takes a long time to learn to do well, so its hard to be good both at visual interfaces and the often very complex code that they control.

I know this from my own work. I'm a pretty good coder (gosh, how modest of me). I can write code to just about anything, and charge a pretty penny to do so, but my ability to code a user interface is rather poor. Sure I know all the theory, but there's something extra you need, that 'eye for the visually pleasing' thats hard to cultivate unless user interfaces are what you do all the time.

I've used plenty of applications where the guy who wrote the backend code also coded the gui, and as a rule the gui is somewhat lacking. This is't just restricted to single coder projects, it also occurs when a project is full of able back end coders, and they build the gui to suit their own level of ability to use the code.

You can see this if you use Emacs. Nice though that software is in features, the interface is godawful, and actively prevents anyone new to computer usage or programing from using it.

Because I want the audibooks writer and performer to get paid for my enjoyment of their shared work. Its as simple as that. Everything else is just people trying to shove their agendas down my throat.

Audible have already cornered the market in DRM encumbered audiobooks. I've been a regular customer of theirs for years, buying dozens of titles. Yet I have not a single drm file in my collection, thanks to those nice people who packaged up the 'how to strip Audible DRM' set and stuck it on piratebay that is.

I'd prefer if they had no DRM to start with, but for the moment they have lots of titles I want, so I just pipe the downloaded files through the stripping process and discard their drm. It takes all of 20 minutes usually.

If however they changed their DRM to make it harder to crack, I would cancel my account that day and never go back.

Look, if it works....

Um, what? proprietary software is nowhere near being on its last elbows my friend. Ok the old model of sale of software as a product is getting, well, old, and software as a service is taking off.

Open source is suited for that, but companies providing such services are managing quite well with proprietary code too. I know of several that mix open source and closed source in their product quite happily. Its not a problem, provided no licence terms are broken, and to be frank its not hard to manage that.

As for Microsoft? Anyone who thinks they'll just say 'oh, we lost, time to pack up and go home' is out of their tiny mind. A company with a turnover and product range like theirs isn't going away any time soon.

Its not much good having the source for a project, particulerly a large one. You also need people who understand it. This takes time and costs money. Then, perhaps more importantly, you need people clever/interested enough to take the project forward. Again this is hard to acheive.

As Microsoft and other companies have learned, you can't throw people and money at a project and be certain of success. The people have to be motivated (money != motivation) and *wanting* the project to succeed.

There's probably just as much dead open source code as there is closed source code, just having the code available is never enough.

DId you know the PC port is still available? I drag it out and try to do Morkins quest every now and then. I used to find it easy when I was a young'un, but now I'm not so lucky.

I must have played it far too much back then.

Reaaly showing your age there :) If you hang out on the Egosoft X3 forums you'll find that the debate about which was the most influential Space sim emerges fairly often. For me its Elite 1 all the way.

However, many of the games you (rightly) mention are beyond the experience of most gamers, so I suspect they left them off because either they thought their readers wouldn't know them (or perhaps the person compiling the article didn't play them).

Its like the Star Wars thing. Lots of people think of that as the start of decent/influential SF films, ignoring Logans Run and others that predate it. This being mainly because if you aren't a serious SF fan, you likely would only encounter older films by accident, except when buying posters of robbie the robot carrying 'that hot chick'.

But can they fold them more than seven times?

Not really. Microsoft Office is the dominant word processing package on the Mac.

I've bought a number of audiobooks based simply on the fact that Scott Brick narrates them. I wouldn't consider tts to be something able to replace a reader of his skill.

I don't know. I mean it was a great desktop years back, probably the best (discounting Debian), I used it for the whole of my time at university, but things have moved on.
I use it for servers nowadays, servers that I set up and don't change, aside from updates, but as a deasktop system it would need to compete with Ubuntu for ease of use and administration. Ubuntu's a long way ahead in those respects.

Still, I'm mildly interested to see what they might offer.

Java is slower than C, yes, but having used it recently for the first time on some commercial work, I have to say that speed concerns aside, Java is vastly better in terms of additional libraries, ease of use, and general 'getting things done faster'.

With multi core software being the way forward, it also has the edge because its easier to paralellise than C/C++ (well ok, debatable, but in my experience its easier and involves less dev time), and the increase in cores mean the old concerns about speed aren't as relevent, or won't be soon.

Not that I'm using Java for my own work, just for paid stuff. Since my own code is something I control, the reduction in dev time you get from Java isn't a factor, and I do like my C++.