As oppossed to commercial bug handling? On more than one occaision i have had problems in our systems, and traced the bug down to a bug in the commercial vendor product. From both Oracle and Microsoft we have got the response which was essentially "Yeah, its a bug. We have no plans to fix it, so tough luck buddy." To give another slighly different example, I had an issue displaying IBM Cognos produced excel spreadsheets on blackberry devices, and traced it down to them not bothering to follow the microsoft spec for .xlsx documents. They just said "oh we dont support blackberry", and took no interest in the fact that the root problem was that excel spreadsheets were actually malformed, and would be easily fixed. On an open source system i could have added a few lines to fix it myself. I probably could have decompiled the java and done this with Cognos, but i couldn't due to license restrictions.
IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are 'big names' who have biggest budgets and investment in their brand, I doubt any of their competitors behave any better, and I would expect smaller commercial vendors support to be on average significantly worse.

Often support for relatively obscure bugs in open source products suck, thing is it isn't *because* it is opensource, commercial support sucks too. You think because you are paying them for support you are calling the shots? it doesn't work that way. Opensource does however give you a lot more freedom. If offical support is letting you down you can fix it yourself, pay someone to fix it, or just investiage the code and try to figure out a way of avoiding the problem.

I have a setup with 3 different sandboxes for browsing. 1) Sensitive (banking, confidential, financial or highly personal info) 2) General (regular random surfing such as slashdot) 3) Scary (file shares, flash games, java, anything that looks dubious or untrustworthy) The 3 sandboxes are simply different users setup on linux, all with restricted rights, and independent caches and profiles, and none of which is my normal 'login'. The 'launch' commands just run the browser under appropriate user. As for browser, Who do you trust? Microsoft? Google? Apple? I'd go with mozilla/firefox

I thought this was a tech site? CDs of course *are* digital. Vinal is not digital which folk use as an excuse to collect old vinal records. lossy/lossless compression is just different ways to compress DIGITAL data. There is of course 'lossiness' when the analogue wave gets digitized too

+1 It does graphs, and a *lot* more. Invaluable for math work.

The reasons to opensource in a business context are :-

• 1) You want to use GPL or similar licensed components in your software instead of spending time and money re-inventing the wheel
• 2) You expect the product to be adopted by other DEVELOPERS, who will work on and improve the code for free in their own interests
• 3) If 'broad' user testing is usefull. By releasing opensource you are potentially greatly extending the userbase and by releasing early it is possible to get significant testing.

The core idea is that costs are shared by co-operation between parties who have a similar need. This is not a new concept, and has appeared and suceeded in many different forms in business. Like a 'franchise' which shares branding costs because it would be impossible to get the same level of branding on their own individual budgets. There are other reasons to opensource your code (fame, altruism, etc) but these are not very appropriate in your context.

Not one of the programming languages listed were a success because 'it was taught to students'. Its arse about face, they were taught because they were successful. Who the hell wants more languages anyway? renaisance? wtf are you talking about? We need better, faster, easier ways to get the job done. Not spewing out more languages for the sake of it. Also if you *did* have some magic new language, why would you want to force feed a bunch of inexperienced students with it? If you come up with a *genuine* significant improvement, be it a language, a technique, a library or whatever real programmers will pick it up and it will soar on its own wings. Look at JSON for a very recent and clear example of this. depsite the MASSIVE investment in XML by big industry and acedemia, some single guy posts a webpage and says 'hey heres an alternative format that works well with javascript' and now half the world is using it.

Also, If you have the facebook android app, facebook can do any of the following without your knowledge

• Access all the stuff on your SD card
• Track your current location with GPS.
• Download anything they like onto your phone.
• Access ALL the accounts (not just facebook) that you use on the phone.

On many phones (like mine) this app is pre-installed and actually uninstallable it was the main reason i switched to cyanogenmod

I hate windows, osx, kde and gnome. I use exactly the same ratpoison setup on my laptop and on my desktop. Its not for everyone, but i think the core principle of having an window manager that is almost invisible could be taken MUCH further, and provide a great window manager that techs and non-techs would be happy using. People dont actually need to USE a window manager, they need to use their applications, the WM is just the middleman. The problem is that a gutted out highly optimised WM is not be very desireable to the majority. They dont pick WM because they are easy to use, they pick largely based on 'bling' (if people see my windows flipping about doing summersaults they will think I am l33t h@x0r!!). So perhaps they get the WM's they deserve.

Goodbye nvidia, i wont miss you. For years I've stuck with nvidia because everyone said that they are the best choice for linux, but i've hated every minute of it. They were a constant annoyance for the following reasons.

1. Every time you build a kernel you have to download the latest nvidea driver and install it separately.
2. Want to try a release candidate kernel? nope forget it. Just to get the damn thing to install you have to reverse engineer their installation scripts, and even after you get that working, the driver is usually unstable (not surprisingly).
3. It overwrites libgl with its own version that wont work with anything else ... WTF??
4. I had serveral problems such as an unstopable crackle coming out of my TV/monitor over HDMI (nevermind actually getting the HDMI audio to work!) , or having to write my own modeline to stop overscan
5. The installer is a real PAIN IN THE ASS if you swap about kernel builds a lot. It complains about kernel versions and refuses to install, or refuses to uninstall grrrrr
6. nouveau simply did not work for me, and even if it did i wasn't sure the 3D would be good enough for my needs. I could never get X running with it on my monitor. just screen noise. The nouveau guys are kinda heroic but why isn't nouveau backed by nvidia? and why is nouveau helping sustain a product whos manufacturer wont play ball? might they not be better employed helping improve the open ATI drivers?

recently i finally decided to give the radeon and try. and bought a cheap radeon HD 6450. Ok. I admit i still had to write my own modeline to get rid of overscan issue (similar to my experience with nvidea), but after that it JUST WORKED, with seemingly any kernel i build without having to shoe-horn in proprietary drivers everytime i do a build.
The 3D performance seems perfectly adequate for my needs, and being opengl 4.1 I can build and run opengl ES 2.0 type code against it happily. I really dont know why every slags off ATI/radion support, and gives nvidea a free ride. I like life of the ATI side of the fence and I'm not going back to nvidia anytime soon.
For some of us having a card with a half decent opensource driver in the kernel tree is not an idealogical battle, but simply a practical necessity.

Does no-one use the proper terms anymore? malware - yes, Trojan - yes , Virus - No.

I agree completely with the sentiment. The "disney princesses" suck. They just want to sit pretty and wait for 'prince charming' I find this disturbing. (Mulan is cool though)
On the other hand when i was growing up my biggest hero was "The incredible Hulk", some guy who's would get angry, totally loose it, and go on a violent rampage. Not a great role model if you think about it, but I dont think it did me any harm.

grrrraRARARAGHGHAHG!!!!!!
*ahem*

Personally I dont think creating 'artificial' role models makes sense. I think the problem is parents etc, for some reason most of them want to encourage girls to be 'girly' and boys to be 'boyish' in terms of their own preconceptions of what these roles should mean. My sister hosted a birthday party where she gave all the boys blue boxes with a car in it, and the girls pink boxes with a hairclip and a wand (which i was told is typical). Maybe boys and girls are naturally drawn to slightly different things, but many adults seem to want to actively enforce and artificially exagerate the difference.

The big change in modern web development is the shift to the clientside for dynamic html. JQuery is now so powerfull, and modern browser now so good at processing javascript, that stuff like applets, silverlight, flash, are undesirable cludge that you can live without. Also a lot of the serverside conditional html generation is also redundant. You should use just pretty much static html pages serverside, but change it dynamically on the clientside with JQuery.
So do you need the serverside code at all? of course you do, but it should be feeding the client with JSON (or similar) instead of html. For this 'feed client with info' serverside code the traditional web framewords still work fairly well even though their role has changed. there is nothing wrong with using java here if thats what you are comfortable with (i normally use either python wsgi or asp.net).
Usually the most sensible design for a modern website is a (sort of) MVC structure where JQuery is the controller, the 'views' are static html, and interfacing with the data model is the serverside framework.
Oh and DOJO is a perfectly workable alternative if you hate JQuery for some reason.

If you stop someone in the street and ask 'How do i get to the post office', would you be happy the following answers?

1) "Nah you dont want to go to the post office, its UPS you want. To get to UPS you should go..."
2) "Its 11am? what sort of idiot goes to the post office at 11am? the queues will be terrible, you should just go home."
3) "There are many ways to go the postoffice, i cant tell you which if you dont give me the exact critiera by which you can judge the best route. Is it fastest? shortest? most scenic? safest? does it need to be wheelchair friendly?"
4) "You should just use email! you fool!"

No? then dont ask slashdot...

It is as if someone is trying to create the impression there is an ongoing 'debate' about about the pros and cons of software patents. There is no debate. Software patents are harmful nonsense. and this is the general consensus amoung people who write software (supposedly the people that these patents 'protect'). I'm sure you could scrape up some guy who swears blind that smoking cured his sinus problems but that doesn't mean an article 'Smoking - good for your health?' should hit the front page.

Muslim kid: "Cor look at the bajungas on her..."
(Crazy fanatic dad walks in)
Crazy fanatic dad : "OH NO!!! you have been corrupted by the filthy western decadance!! "
Muslim kid : "No dad!! look im using their own flithy videos against them, by hiding cunning terrorist plans inside them!! honest!!"
Crazy fanactic dad : "Ahh good son. Well done carry on"
(Crazy fanactic dad leaves)
Muslim kid (whispers) : "sucker! heh heh "