Uber ist just the fairly short transition phase.

What I don't get is this: If Rhino Horn powder is such a big deal with so many idiots - why hasn't anybody started breeding them? Sounds like a license to print money to me. Clearly some african nation must've thought of that, no? ... And you can take a Rhinos horn *without* killing it.

Back in the 80ies they were trying a better thing: Tranquilizing Rinos and replacing their horns with artificial ones made of red plastic. The Rinos don't care - they're colorblind and probably like a new horn thats bigger and sturdier than the original. But the poachers won't kill a rino for plastic. Neat idea - why didn't that pan out .- apparently?

Find a feasible FOSS replacement for Flash that enables fast and easy cross-plattform development for performant non-trivial 'good-looking' client applications - and you have a winner. Offer some tacky half-assed JS cross-compiler nonsense, and your new tech won't get off the ground. The Web and DOM tech is a mess enough as it is, without yet another PL/runtime solution thrown into the mix.

However, I remain slightly optimistic that this may be the long awaited not-fucked-up-by-adobe FOSS Flash successor we've been waiting for. All other non-foss contenders failed throughout the last 15 years, but this might have a chance, also since there is nothing else around and the web has taken over as platform of choice due to 80ies style tech fragmentation via the mobile revolution.

Two cents from a senior webdev.

Common User Access Standard.

Enough said. ...
The very first to start breaking the rules on a broad scale was - curiously enough - Apple with their we're-doing-everything-different-this-time iTunes programm. UI standards basically went steeply downhill from there on. We've moved so far away from standards that it can even take an expert weeks to get familiar with programms (s)he should be able to operate instantly. On top of that, the software manual has disappeared (I'm looking at you, Adobe)

Handling computers has gotten more difficult, no doubt.

Switching positions throughout the day is awesome - for physical and mental health. ... And for the eyes and arms/wrists (RSI) aswell.
Highly recommended. I once worked in an office where everyone had a desk they could electrically lift to standing height. Very cool for quick discussions or standing conding sessions. ... You can do standing excersises and Kung Fu moves at the same time. ... Work on your "Crane Technique" (TM) :-)

Hey, thanks for your honest question. ... Wow, nuanced political debate coming up on slashdot - interesting! ...
I hope this answers your question:
I have absolutely nothing against any country or folks in our outside of Europe. And, funny clichees aside, I don't think anybody in Europe has anything against Greece or Italy or any other country. Most Europeans love Europe in its entireity. And also each country on its own, especially the differences. Europe would be quite a boring place if it weren't for those.
As for Greece, no problem at all. I would love for Greece to be a merry member of the Eurozone with no more problems than Germany at the moment. Part of this whole charade being such a waste is that we actually have enough problems in Europe without one country causing so much trouble.
The big problem though is that Greece has been living off emergency (!!) loans for quite some time now and has been unwilling to execute even the most elementary and pressing reforms. Their administration hasn't even started trying! To me and many other observers it seems that the Greek aren't really aware of how dire their situation is. An exit from the Euro is long overdue and I see absolutely no problem with that. Denmark and Norway have both kept their currency and AFAICT they're doing just fine. It's a drag to trade currency when I visit them, and I'd rather not have to, but I'll live and I still like to visit them and take the trading thing as an excersize.
As a currency, the Eurp is a tool. It's supposed to facilitate easyer trade amoung European Countries and move their economies closer together. The implementation of the Euro is buggy, no doubt, and it could've been done better. This Greece thing is an exception no one thought of, for instance. ... Well, except those who've been warning everybody else for years that is.

Bottom line:
Greece has to get its shit together, one way or the other. Just about now is the right time to call it quits and have Greece take the other way. At least that seems to be the broader opinion within the Eurozone and I can't blame them.

Idiots. The whole corrupt and incompetent lot of greek politicians. They frauded their way into the Eurozone and have been dragging their heels ever since. This whole Syriza stunt was the very last straw. They were the worst. They could've gotten real reforms on the way - they had the mandate by the people. Instead they kept fucking and bullshitting around, squandering the very last bit of good will with every gouvernment in the Eurozone. Even Italy is pissed - which actually is quite amazing in itself, because they're are almost right up there with Greece when it comes to mal-administration.

They could've gotten away easy - now they'll be left to their own devices.

At least it's a clear "No" by the people. Better a clear NO that a whishy-washy YES. Tsipras can use this to get some real internal reforms on the way. ... Although I doubt he will.
Well, at least we can finally make a clear cut. No more money for free for all. No more bizarely overpaid early pensioneers and nepotism. The Eurozone should finally cut their losses, have Greece move back to the Drachma and prepare for humanitarian help, like food supplies and such - at least that money won't be wasted.

Lets finally put the ECB goodies and candy to work for nations who are actually pulling their weight and can use a little help aswell, like some baltic nations.

My 2 eurocents.

In my perception jQuery has basically become the JavaScript standard library.
Basically any combination of frontend toolkits has it included somewhere, so you don't even have to worry about doing that. It's the default for Joomla and Wordpress and there are a measurable amount of functions that take care of the gruntwork and normalize utility across browsers.

On top of that, the amount of JS projects relying on jQuery as a foundation is staggering. The secondary market has tools built around the jQuery ecosystem and the project as a whole does an excellent job at marketing and advocating.

I personally see the next generation in such avantgarde stuff as Googles Polymer (pretty amazing) but until everyone has moved to SPAs and web components - which is not happening any time soon - but until then it's not the worst idea to familiarize yourself with the concepts and the utility funcitons of jQuery. ... *After* you've learned JS itself properly, that is.

My 2 cents.

In my experience the biggest problem in software development is people (developers, PMs, stake holders, etc.) not talking to one another. And not talking about the next concrete steps to solution of a problem.

Anything that mitigates this problem is a good thing.

Wether it's pair programming, Scrum (formalised rituals of talking to one another) or this "mob programming" stuff. The problem with these methods is, you always have to keep in mind why you're using them: To solve problem #1 mentioned above. Forget that, and you're back to square one, only now you're wasting your time with rituals no one understands or fails to use productively.

*Tadum* *Crash* *Thud*

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.
Tip your waitor and try the fish.

Neat idea. But please ditch the old keyboard light. It was cute back in the 90ies, but seriously not anymore.
Individually lighted, dimable keys please. If Apple can do it, so can you.

If you suddenly had a few billion dollars at your hand that you specifically had to put to use for developing an open source hardware architecture and producing the first line of hardware, how would that look like? How would it differ from x86, PPC or other system architectures you've come accross? What's most annoying to you about existing architectures you've come accross, that you would like to change?
Any features you'd like to combine in one, perhaps?

I've tried to get myself around to learning C++ since the early 90ies and really never made it just yet. I find your comments on C++ interesting and wouldn't be suprised if they had a grain of truth, if not more. To be honest, I've been second-guessing my C++ ambitions since I've read your comments on it.

Which brings me to my question:
I know you're a plain-ol C guy, but do you see a point in recent attempts to build a new Systems language, particularly the Go project from Google and the Rust project from Mozilla? Do you think this is just a fad or do these projects have potential? Are they adressing real problems and doing something useful or are they just a waste of time in your opinion?

And if you would differntiate, what do you think in particular about Go and what about Rust?

Can you picture yourself using a different language than C for programming a thing such as Linux or Git?

That's more than one question, but since they're related, I believe you can answer them in one reply.

All that aside:
Thank you very much for your and the Kernel teams great contribution to society. Very much appreciated. Your straight-forward approach to things at times serves as a concrete role model for me in my daily work as an IT person.

Since you're not saying what kind of tool/programm you're trying to build I presume it's some kind of performance critical focused but non-trivial application. So a compiled language probably is the best choice - you won't be dependant on some VM stuff or an interpreter.
The real C family of languages (I'm excluding C# with the 'real') isn't the worst choice for this sort of thing. In fact, it's just about the only choice. With C, C++ and Objective-C left to choose from, C++ comes to mind as a tried and true systems language.

Long story short: You can't go wrong with picking C++ - just don't expect your code to be the cats meow from the get-go. Once you're finished you'll know enough to rewrite the entire app again. But we all know that's how it goes with new PLs.

I still do have to important pieces of advice for you:
Did you check the existance of FOSS Unix tools? It could be that your problem can be solved by doing some tricky CLI and scripting stuff with a set of specialized *nix tools - perhaps just compiling them into a single binary. ... Check that to save yourself tons of work.

Something else: If you're in it for the learning experience consider those new hip system PLs Go and Rust. They look promising ... or at least interesting.

Good luck.