Last time I checked, Sun was a corporation selling pro-level branded hardware and insanely expensive services (like they all do), being bought out by Oracle and Mozilla was a FOSS orgranisation watching over branding and provided guidance to a set of web- and mobile-centric FOSS projects.

Those two things couldn't be more wider apart.

As for Mozillas market and mindshare being eaten by Google: That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman. Mozilla itself is ten git commits away from switching from Gecko to Blink, and the devs could probalby do this in a weekend. Probalby have been doing it privately already just for the kicks. So no big deal, it's all free and replacable anyway.

The one big thing that Mozilla has going for them is their branding, and as far as I can tell that is going pretty well. Right now, anything standing between a totalitarian Googlezied control of the web and freedom loving citizens is Mozilla - at least in most peoples perception and if they continue playing their cards right, relyably drumming the hip and flashy but yet still underdog/freedom theme, they'll continue to do just fine.

IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.

As for the browser: Google-independant "Hello" voicechat by Telefonica, Search by Yahoo, neat, google-independant environment syncing, etc. All these things aren't too bad. In fact they're all pretty interesting to me. And I am an IT opinion leader, as we all are. That should have Apple and Google raising their eyebrows.

What we need is a replacement for the Google online suite of apps, and if Mozilla can manage to pull yet another underdog of the industry in to help build that, we have a free-free competitor to all the Google stuff. Desperately needed!

Meantime, Mozilla IMHO is doing just fine making neat celebrative movies and playing to the hippster independant "we are different and free" crowd. That's what made apple big. Apple, however, is a PLC, dependant on profit. Google is too. Mozilla, OTOH, is mostly a FOSS organisation. They can all go on vacation 10 years and then come back and everything will still be the same for them. What does that have to do with revenue and eval problems Sun had back when Oracle scooped them up? ... Nothing.

I see Mozilla as a hip web-zentric play of the old and bland EFF & GNU organisations with a solid focus on branding (very smart btw.). They'll do just fine if they don't spread themselves to thin and wait for the big boys get all paniky about profits somewhere down the line.

I've got FF in everyday use and will continue to use it. If they build an independant contacts application for mobile and web alongside a calendar and perhaps some simple docs management, preferably all of it encrypted, I'll be on board from day one.

Google doesn't have to get *that* big or know everything.

My 2 cents.

I missed applying for a German ID at the age of 16 which would've automatically made me a German citizen. I could've kept my amercian citizenship. I had to renunciate it when I wanted to become a German as a grown up. It's a bit of a shame I couldn't get my lazy teenage ass to go to the citizens bureau for 20 minutes to pick up my ID a few years earlyer. If I still were american, I'd have zero hassles entering the US whenever I want to.

I am glad to be German, Germany has quite a few upsides, especially these days. But it would be cooler to have both citizenships. No suprise here.

If you can get U.S. citizenship for your kids without needing to renunciate their other citizenship(s), by all means do it.

On the other hand, ditching a perfectly neat european citizenship for a U.S. citizenship is something I probalby wouldn't do.

Quite a few countries public don't allow for multiple citizenships, but in pratice they let them slip (who's going to find out anyway?). If you can sneak into a dual-citizenship for your children without to much of a legal risk, do it. Just tell them when they're grown up, and tell them not to advertise it at every occasion, especially not at US customs(!!!).

Ask other swedish/belian people in simular situations and try to find out how belgium/sweden handles dual citizenships and if there are any serious legal pitfalls.

Good luck.

Gitorious? ... Please keep the KDE team from writing a client for this service or something like that.

Compiz is the bug. The whole thing. Seriously.

Rendering the desktop / ui with OpenGL is a very neat idea, and as far as I can tell Blender and Enlightenment have both achieved this very gracefully a long time ago, as has OS X.

However, Compiz is an entirely different thing and in my book one of the most annoying bug-ridden additions to the FOSS desktop stack in the last 10 years. A buggy laggy piece of sh*t software, messing with my input, shoddy responsiveness with particularly annoying and not-very-useful animations (unlike OS X), freezing randomly after running to long, etc. And no, running a few days shouldn't be an issue for any piece of software.

I don't know the next thing about OpenGL GUI building and acceleration, but Compiz is in perpetual commercial-software-beta state. Why it's even included, let alone a default in some distros is beyond me.

Someone please kill this project off, replace it or replace the development lead. It's degraded the Linux experience considerably in my book.

Software Corp continues to use brain when licensing its software, remains perpetually popular. What a concept. These guys deserve our respect. I remember buying Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, one of those rare games that acutally shipped with a Linux binary back in those days.

You guys are Epic! (pun intended)

I use Google regularly, but I never forget that it's a search engine. Nothing less and nothing more. People who rely on their Google rank for business are going to wake up some day to a big disappointment. A whole generation of users mistaking Google for the web, or even the internet is completely annoying.

If Google wants to change their system, it's their business. If Google can't find a site that I'm looking for, even though the searchterms are distinct and the site offers exactly what I want, it's Google fault, not the fault of the site builder.

We need to educate the ordinary people that Google is one of many search engines. The best perhaps and pretty good most of the time, but only a search engine. That internet traffic goes down by 60% whenever Google is offline simply because people don't get that is scary.

"explaining" superconductivity? Hum? "explain" ... get it?

Uuumh, Superconductivity, ...umm, electricity, errmm, no resistance, .... aaah Electricity! Superconductive! Urg, urg, like lightning .. understand? Oook, ook, ...

SCNR

Just in: Training your circular system regularly with strong temperature fluctuations help you live longer vis-a-vis just sitting on your fat ass all day long and doing nothing. Film at 11. ... Seriously, this was news in the 70ies when the Sauna boom started but it's common sense today.

Sidenote: I've picked up the habit of showering cold after each shower half a year ago. Does wonders to my wellbeing and my imune system. My colds and allergy issues are way down and my overall well-being has notably improved.

Is XFCE going down the bloat path? ... I'm not trolling here, this is an honest question. To me it looks like they're building a dekstop environment and slowing piling features on. My impression is, that we have enough of those with Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment 17 and perhaps a few others.

Or what is the upside of XFCE? Is it like a "light-weight" KDE or something? And what's with LXDE? Wasn't that the hippest kid on the WM/DE block these days?

BTW, what happened to E17? I remember Enlightenment being the darling-child of WMs in the Linux community. Is it nowadays to difficult to configure and/or install?

I live in Germany and bike + public transport is my main means of transport. I've been riding bike since the age of 9 and have my bike optimized for everyday use. It's as expensive as it can be without getting stolen, has flat-proof tires (very important for hassle-free biking), a 100 Euro folding look, hydraulic brakes, mudgards and a special ..."luggage carrier" (wording?? ... GepÃcktrÃger in German) from the US with an expansible pouch that clips on. Use that and my Freitag backpack for grocery shopping.

Correlated: I'm one of rare in my peergroup that isn't overweight. And I regularly get judged around 35 although I'm 10 years older.

I'd say part of the cause of "invented-here syndrome" can be "not-good-enough syndrome." I'm often comparing my programming skills to people I see online - people whose skills far outpace my own. So when it comes time to access my programming skills, I'll understate how good I am because I'm simply not as good as those "coding superstars."

I have a solution to that exact problem. Just download any of the most popular web CMSes built in PHP. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, or, if you think you're a tough one, Typo3 or Typo3 Neos. Install it (good luck with Neos, you'll need it) and load up the ERD with MySQL Workbench and stand amazed at the sight of the shittiest class of software architecture ever concieved by lifeforms able to type on a keyboard.

Seriously, if anything showed me that I must be in the upper single digit percentile of software devs, it's looking at systems that have an install base of 0.5 million or more. In the case of Typo3 Neos and TypoScript it might cause your head to explode. You have been warned.

Some of these systems are 10 years in making and emphasise that there are many people around that have no business programming what-so-ever. Right now I'm trying to do something useful with Wordpress taxonomies and categories - it's beyond insane what these people have built, I guarantee you. I actually just now had to take a coffee break of 1.5 hours just to let my frustration ease off. ... I spent that time designing a CMS architecture, if only not to forget how it's actually done right.

Looking at those systems will restore your self-confidence, that's guaranteed. Although it will also seriously make you doubt humanity in general. It's a tough tradeoff, I admit. But a change in perspective.

Getting rid of estimates is the wrong approach - of course. What companies need is a clear product, pipeline and system strategy. Have that, and estimates are trivial.

If I know I have a set of servers and they all run system X and toolkit Y and management process Z and I'm hired to handle XYZ and we/I have optimised my skills and toolset for said chain because we've chose it as our strategy, I can give estimates that are precise to a margin of half an hour per week of project time on the drop of a hat.

However, give me deciders and/or co-workers who don't have a clue and make decisions way out of their league that I have to follow on, shitty testing and deployment, 10$/hour students making core system decisions, local servers I have to salvate from a junkpile and decisions on what system we're going to use in the next project based on what software the custmers drinking buddy had heard of and was rambling about after 7 beers half a year ago on their last pub tour and my estimates will be just as shitty as your decisions.

Leave me out of the loop until the very last moment and then barge into the door with some system I've only looked into for 15 minutes in the last 10 years and my estimates will be based on how true the vendors describe their product in the flyer. And we all know how true that is.

We have seen some suprises leaning towards the positive side from MS lately, no doubt. I'll admit that. However, MS has screwed up so much, so often, for so long that I'm weary of taking their word for it when it comes to enabling a more hassle free web.

If MS offers a relyably usable web frontend I at least will stop recommending *against* MS with my customers. In my opinion it would be smart for them to focus on openess and professional services with native software as a fallback for the heavy lifting. Their Azure thing seems to play in that direction. I'm wondering if MS can pull it all together with their new management. We'll see.

Until then, they can talk all they want. It will take some time before I see MS as a relyable player in my field again.