This is awesome. I bet he's very thoughful about it - you don't do this sort of thing on a whim. Truth is, his boys will have a lesson for life and are very likely to end up way more useful to themselves and society than the average couch potato that plays CoD and doesn't think once about how much of a war simulator it may be.

If I'd have a son that would be into CoD or other warfare simulators and would have the time and resources, I'd do the same. I'd like to take my daughter and her friends to visit the sweatshops in Bangladesh, where the Primark clothes are made. Sadly, I don't have the time or resources. ... But she was in malasia for half a year. Indian family where girls/women are second-class citizens and slave-servants sleeping on the floor and all. She did learn her share.

My 2 cents.

Applications and confidentials are usually built by people who don't have a clue. That's the norm these days and you should know that by now. The non-sense I've seen in the last 15 years in this area is bizar beyond words, both in type and amount, and I'm sure every slashdotter here has an evening full of stories to contribute on that subject.

I personally wouldn't even fill out such an application. If I can't talk to the team beforehand to evaluate - for both sides - that an application would make sense, I don't even bother. And a short 2-liner E-Mail is enough to lead up to such a phonecall.

My 2 cents.

COBOL was better than JavaScript.

Yeah, right. ...
Dude, give me a break, you're being silly.

Sure, JS it's a tad more ambiguous than PLs from back when we used punchcards, but, come on!
So, yeah, JS has lose typing. Newsflash: That is a *feature*. You have to know how to handle it though (hint: COBOL style isn't going to get you anywhere here).
So it would be tricking writing ERP, because JS has more rope with which you can hang yourself - so, yes, you do actually have to watch out what you are doing in different way nowadays. And yes, there are a lot of non-programmers out there today writing code - I'm trying to write an extension for Typo3, so tell me about it.

So JS uses Protoyping instead of Classes - that's a feature too - get with the programm.

I don't like the syntax of JS either, it's ancient by todays standards and I'd prefer Python. But I can test my JS on the nearest computer, because the runtime is everywhere.

Truth is, JS runs everywhere nowadays, and allthough you should expect callback hell when writing larger serverside apps, that's actually an encouragement to do things unix-style for non-trivial projects. That's why so many people use it. Even those that can't programm. ... Yeah, that's anoying, but repairing their shite earns us the bucks, so go figure.

I suggest you sit your ass down, take a deep breath and get yourself aquainted with some non-amature JS code. There's a nice Oreilly called "JavaScript - The Good Parts" to get you started nice and easy.

But don't forget to chase the kids of your law before.

My 2 cents.

Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within the United States

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.