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Well, f*ck you and your stupid short-film then!

Just 5 Minutes ago I deleted the open source Spring RTS and the shite they build. 3 different lobbys with 3 different technologies, none of which work or are documented, the one that works - a redo of a webbased lobby in QT called "Weblobby QT" (No joke, seriously ...), has no documentation whatsoever on getting it to work with an existing installation and the 90 seconds before the mono-based lobby crashed a 3rd time some guy told me, they'll redo the lobby for the Steam release. Jesus HB Crickey, if I wanted a steam game for which I have to hand in my name, credit card data, finger prints and my DNA, I'd certainly *not* do it for your shitty game. In fact, I did *not* buy the very neat Shadowrun Returns for linux precisely because it's only available on steam. ...

Just 5 minutes ago this Spring RTS crap! Planing to release on steam ... how about learning to programm first? ... Unbelievable. Now I come to /., click on the upper new story and now this.

Seriously, I'm sounding like a jerk right now, I know, but I get the impression that there are people doing open projects that have no business doing any such projects at all. What's the point in releasing your stuff for free (liberty) if you're relying on shitty flakey libraries and technologies (mono, etc.), especially if you're *increasing* the complexity of your product or its availability and deployment or - as in the case of this art-jerk movie - hand it over to some DRM ridden POS distribution corp. for distribution. ... If I had donated to this project, this would be precisely the moment where I'd be super-pissed.

My 2 cents. Sorry, I'm really pissed right now.

"Given a sufficient amount of time all software either becomes free open source software or goes extinct."

PDFLib GmbH (german LLC) build exactly one product: PDFLib. And they've been doing that since 1997. AFAIK the company was run by one guy - the initial developer - alone for most of the time. Now it's probably a shop of 5 or so.

So it's not FOSS - yeah, that's a real shame. But the devs get to eat, you can demand service and response if you run into a bug and you can expect a good product and with PDFLib you're probably going to get it too.

I haven't come across a single project doing non-trivial PDF stuff that doesn't use PDFLib. I've used it myself a little, and the cookbook that comes with the product was very good, so it comes recommended.

My 2 cents.

Feasible electric cars and their battery technology could be exactly the thing the world needs to decentralise electric power. Let's hope for it. The energy companies are way to powerful for their own and societies good. I'm sure it would help the environment to - not just the electric car thing but the decentralisation.

My 2 cents.

Jebus H. Christ, Tlds are bits on an HDD. Who can 'own' those? The whole concept of 'intellectual property' is laughable and disintegrates after 3 stages of rationalisation the latest. Especially with network meta directories such as the DNService.
I can send them a HDD full of Tlds, including ones that I just made up. If they pay me a little more I might even take a used server and set up a DNS to serve them.
1000 Euros and it's theirs.

I've never heard about this ACM thing. From the looks of the website it seems like some academic oriented CS club or something from the US. They even got a "german chapter" - suprised much I am. Don't know if I need to be in that club though. I doubt any programmer of importance I look up to is a member either. Linus Torwalds? RMS? Projekt Lead of Node.js? Don't think so. ... For example, I'd be suprised if more than 10% of the Blender crew even heard about this, let alone were a member.

My 2 cents.

Even god almighty couldn't make Italian transit work, Mussolini never stood a chance.

The italians couldn't even manage to invade greece once the war started. Hitler had to send troops to help out and they ended up doing most of the work (no joke). Anecdotes say he was fuming, that with allies like Italy no one needed enemies. As WW2 goes, The Third Reich would've probably actually errm ... 'done better' (pardon my choice of words) without Italy as an ally.
If you want a project to fail, give it to italians, I guess. :-)

Seriously, the GCC is a prestige project just like the kernel. You have to have the basics of your particular software development field down, otherwise you have no business whatsoever lost in these projects. I don't know the details and I certainly can't judge them, but from the broad perspective it seems like somebody did something akin to not avalidating and filtering your input or pushing windows-1252 but presenting it as UTF-8 or something in webdevelopment and it passed all the way through evaluation, testing, merging, release management, etc. right into the final GCC release. Which does reflect on to the entire team and project.

Bottom line: When Linus has released rants like these in the past he usually was spot on and dead right. The GCC has gotten some flak for it's shittyness lately, and it looks like they haven't improved their process much yet.

It's well known that cheap android phones have always been bad, and will always be bad.

Errrm, no!?

Just bought a Huawei Y530 for 113 Euros for my SO. It runs Android 4.2.x. The camera is sub-par for todays standards and even weaker than on my 3-year old HTC Desire HD, but with 5MP more than sufficient for taking shots of cats or the family on a trip. Or videos for that matter. That aside, the screen is awesome, the processing power is more than sufficient, Chrome works like a charm and so does hangouts, email and such. No problem with special apps so far. Video playback works as intended. The widgets look fine. The UI is dumbed down a little - installed Apps are automatically placed on the UI, there is no seperate "installed apps" drawer - but that simply makes things less complicated for normal users.

The battery is replaceable and the case looks cool (designed by the fin who did some Nokia cases and the case for the Jolla, IIRC).

Bottom line:
If you take your time searching, you can get cheap Android phones that have an amazing price/performance ratio and do their job just fine.

Rücksturz zur Erde!

Back Fall to Earth! ... i.e. Fallback to earth! Fall in this case meant quite literally, since a fallback, as in combat, would be translated with "Rückzug" - "back pull" or pullback. So in "Raumpatrouille Orion" going back to earth always was "falling". Neat detail imho.

Slavian Farmers Militia ("Seperatists") bored and trigger-happy and with easy access to Russian military hardware. To dumb to doulbe-check their targets or to dumb to care. Wether this is Ukranian seperatists or not is of no significance - there all just pawns in a Game. I think Putin has since this begun weighing the risks of supporting seperatists and making russia fell big again - whatever that is - and keeping a low(er) profile. This could shift sentiment considerably.
Either way, I don't trust the guy but I don't consider east-ukranian militia folks rational enough to be under any usefull control by russian. When push comes to shove, they'll do whatever they feel like doing, as long as they've got enough ammo and toys and enough dumbwits who support their cause - whatever that's supposed to be.

I've never heard of this guy, but calling your Computer "Mailüfterl" in contrast to other ones named "Wirlwind" definitely gives him instant credit with me. Must have been a fun guy to be lectured by. ... Seriously, this may actually be the very first non-gigantomaniac humourous computer name in history.

Smartwatch wishlist:
Shockproof
Waterproof (200 m)
Solar Powered
Flat but Sturdy - Think a combination of Casio G-Shock and Skagen
Pressure Sensor / Height Meter / Variometer
Temperature Sensor
Environment Sensor
Complete Biosensor Package
FOSS OS with every aspect configurable, especially blocking of corporate tracking (Google, Facebook, etc.)
Speed-charging mode
Assistance AI ('please' of course being optional :-) )
      --> Watch, when does the milonga in collogne start today?
      --> Watch, are the regional trains to collogne on schedule?
      --> Watch, please warn me if I cross the speed limit.
      --> Watch, please navigate me along the fastest route to school.
      --> Watch, I hear cheering from all the windows around me - who just scored a goal?
      --> Watch, guide me to the nearest DM that stocks dental care. (Watch knows that I'm on foot and guides me to the nearest Tramstation if required.)
      --> Watch, has the bike shop gotten back to us yet? (Watch checks voicebox and all message channels including mail)
      --> Watch, please tell me if todays schedule is still valid or if there are any unforseen changes.
      --> Watch, what was her name again? Just show, don't say.
      --> Watch, please record a tracklist of everything the DJ is playing tonight. Use any analytical software available, not just shazam. And establish what it would cost to buy that tracklist on the music platforms that we're registred on.
      --> Watch, please silence youself and all my devices in proximity until tomorrow 7:30 in the morning. Silence all priority notifications except the "Company Server Down" Alert. And go into "Push to show" mode for your clockface and turn of all screensavers and backlights. (Thinks to himself: I want to enjoy this evening/night with this tango-cutie here without any further disturbance. :-) ) ...

you get the picture.

Furhtermore:
Standardised wrist strap connections
Cheap and available spare wriststraps in variing colors and materials
Cheap and available spare and extra bumber cases in variing colors and materials
1st hand 3D printing files of wriststraps and variant bumper cases
Quick change from wriststrap to pocket'watch' / pocketdevice mode ...
And probably some other things I haven't thought of yet. ...Allthoug I couldn't say if such a watch would be good for me. With that type of AI my brain would probably start to rott from under-usage quite soon :-) .

My 2 cents.

"A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack. When there is only one job active, the normal case on a small PC, it buys you nothing and adds complexity to the code. On machines fast enough to support multiple users, you probably have enough buffer cache to insure a hit cache hit rate, in which case multithreading also buys you nothing." - Andy Tanenbaum on the "LINUX is obsolete" Thread from 30 Jan '92

Nice to see a so called "expert" so far off. Seriously, not the first CS Professor to be completely backwards. I've met a few of those too. :-)