The IDE that works, is free/FOSS and runs cross-plattform is the best for me. That would be Netbeans for me, since I mostly do PHP. QtCreator looks neat aswell. And after Anjuta, CodeBlocks and whatnot crashing on Ubuntu for me or not being supported for OS X it seems like a good candidate for C/C++.

In fact, I'd go as far and say that not having a good IDE that runs on Mac, Linux and perhaps Windows is actually a dealbreaker for a new programming language for me.

Example:
Yesterday I came across Dart again and clicked through a few websites on it. I still have it in the back of my head and haven't dismissed it yet because - Tadaa! - Google offers a chrome based IDE for it. ... Couldn't say though that I'm all ready for this cross-compiled for JavaScript fad that's going on right now, so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

That's my take on IDEs.

We need more of this around the world. It can't be that people work 3 jobs and barely get by why others buy a new car every year or a new cellphone or whatnot and do no more important stuff than the cleaning lady or the cook. ... And no, shoving around papers or hacking up the next bazillionth Twitter or IRC clone or setting up the next Wordpress installation that's going to be totally abandoned 15 months in is not more imporant than cleaning. Emphasis mine!

If it's not worth paying 15$ it's probably not worth being done by a human in the first place and should be left or automated. And if you're not ready to spend 15$ but insist you have cleaning personell you're an asocial *sshole and ought to clean up your own dirt.

My 3 cents.

Newsflash!
Closing of ThePirateBay top level domains forces millions of users to search two minutes for an alternative bittorrent infosite.

Next up: Bag of rice falls over in China! Situation unclear!

That is a *very* long story. I could tell a similar one about my father. ... Doesn't matter.

Just briefly: There are hardly any things I can discuss with my father - who is a type-a evangelical christian faith man, a charlatan and a fraud who took the easy way out of his responsiblities and who had the nerve to try and borrow money from me on my 37th birthday, after having left me and my mother to our fate when I was twelve. And countless other things of the same bizar proportions too strange to actually be believable. ("I'm praying for you ..." ... Yeah, great. Thanks a bunch, asshole.)

Also there are also things I can simply not discuss with my mother. There are things she never will appreciate and there are acknowlegements I will never get from her, no matter what I do. To deeply engrained is her feminist hate of men because of those who wronged her ... or she thinks who wronged her. I love her and she did her best. She says she tried as hard as she could and I believe her. There is actually literally nothing more you can ask from a parent. In that regard I got very lucky.

The thing im getting to is this:
It's most certainly an evolutionary and biological constant that some people have good parents, some people have so-so parents and some people have parents who are way in over their head with the parenting business. Think of how many children would simply die out of neglect just a few centuries ago. It's just a few decades ago when 12-year olds where expected to work 14 hours a day for a plate of food. It still is in some places of the world.

What I'm saying is this: If your burden happens to be having parents who you simply can't look up to anymore in this day and age, as a grown adult, it is time to move on. It's hard and I catch myself falling into relapse every once in a while, but move on I should. I try to associate with people I admire and I try to cope with the fact that quite a few things I learned from my parents are flat out wrong or at least based on a bias.

I try every day to move on, and so should you.

Little Tip: I've taken on the habit of calling my mother and my father by their first name about 15 years ago. It helps.

I also try to be the best Pop in the world to my daughter, that's a good thing to focus on aswell. I think I'm doing fine. Not perfect, but fine.

My 2 cents.

... take a look at mens rights groups.

In your teens and early 20's you're partying hard with friends, getting laid, and making lots of good memories.

You got *laid* in your teens? Dude, WTF? What are you? Some bizar creature from outer space? ... You're definitely wrong here.

Unlike other methods (and I'm strechting the term "method" here), agile methods rely on excellent optimised and product oriented software production pipelines. This is how you should do it anyway, agile or not. But in my experience roughly 1 in 20 software shops implement even the flakiest of standardised production. Most of the time you still have to explain to people why they should use versioning.

The decision makers, sales people and IT strategists also usually have a very hard time commiting to a product and produktion pipeline. They want to sell whatever goes and have the devs sort it out, understaffed, ill-equipped and with extra weekends.

There are a few companies that have sales and technology and perhaps even industrial design/user experience all on par (Apple for example), but most companies that offer software development have no decision makers that understand even the faintest about software development.

Agile methods such as Scrum are the ones that expose the fastest wether you actually are doing professional development or if your crew is just a bunch of people faking it with poor gouvernment, bad organsiation and a sales and production team that don't communicate professionally with each other. IT mostly is a second and third afterthought with most companies and in such environments the best method won't improve development, no matter what.

If a PM can't tell a client from a server or Java from JavaScript and couldn't be bothered to understand why it is important to make a call and a final decision about tabs or spaces Agile will show how shitty your environment is in an instant. Waterfall (i.e. we don't know what we're doing but we're doing it anyway) will disguise that indefinitely, because there's no fixed model for accountability built in.

Bottom line: Until IT stops being the cellar child of the company no method in the world will professionalise development as it is desperately needed. We're still like medicine in the 16th century in that regard.

Meaning the hype around big data has settled and its back to business. I'd say there less than 10 companies worldwide to whom big data actually might make sense. Others clean and aggregate their data in such a way that its actually useful. .... I don't want my bank guessing my balance with big data statistics, I want them to know it. And so do most other people.

Nuclear Power plants and solar powered things with no moving parts will probably be the last things still working. Perhaps a solar and condensator powered lamp in some ruggedized military component or something. Correctly built, a device like that could last thousands of years.

If we count decay of artificially saturated nuclear fuel as a man-made "machine" or "device", then we have 200 000 years of "worling devices" ahead of us.The problem here is that they "work", wether we want them to or not. Which sort of is the problem with nuclear waste.

The one thing Germany has going for it is it's privacy and data protection laws. They're being eroded as we speak by EU lobbying, dimwit politicians and clue-/careless citizens, but they still are tight enough that a German court would've given the employer a good public shafting. Without lube, after having a good laugh and concluding the verdict in 10 minutes.

To be honest, I never got what all the rage is about. As with the foaming at the mouth because of Gnome 3.

I do 'get' init and runlevels and I like them. I can change them with a texteditor and they're all fairly neatly sorted in someplace below /etc or something (can't remember exactly, to lazy to check now). I haven't used runlevels in 9 years or so, I'm not an admin, but I know when they're useful and I probably could start editing and switching them within 5 minutes.

I don't know what all the systemd hate is about, but the shrill voices of nerds who don't have enough sex to remain cool irritate me. I can asure you that I'll chime in if I find out somewhere down the line, when I need runlevels or systemd's equivalent and there's no replacement to be found - some neat newfangled click-tool or equaly easy or better neat textfiles and directories to fiddle about with.

I know very well that systemd will die a very quick death if it turns out to be a shitty system in practice. It's FOSS folks - if it's shit and there's a better, working FOSS alternative people will move (back) to it faster than you can say "Mambo out, Joomla in". No reason to get all that worked up as if the world has ended.

AFAICT that won't happen. systemd is with all the new distros - apparently for the simple reasons that it boots faster. Well, it that appears to be a good enough reason for many people, so be it. New issues probably will be patched and the simple fact that systemd has most distros on its side probably is momentum enough to make init a thing of the past.

That aside, there are, IMHO, way more pressing issues plagueing Linux and it annoys me that no one seems to care about those.

Like for instance: Why is monodevelop the only dev-environment that does not crash on me after a regular installation?

Why do Anjuta, KDevelop, Codeblocks etc. crash on me on mint pure native Debian or Ubuntu linux installs when I attempt to compile something? Isn't the C family of languages our native turf?

Why do 49 out of 50 attempts to compile something downloaded in source from Github or SourceForge fail with obscure error messages? Does something like this still happen on software systems in 2015?? Color me suprised.

Why am I tempted to register with Apple, download XCode and be done with it? This doesn't feel right.

How about fixing or getting all worked up about that shit? It's a shame I can't compile native Linux software on Linux simply due to the fact that all the rest of the bunch aren't as disciplined as Linus Torwalds and get their fucking C/C++ pipeline in order.

The truth is, Linux will be going nowhere if we don't fix some basics, simple down a little and perhaps move towards open or at least fixed-standard hardware concepts. Wether some dude or distro thinks systemd is awesome or not shouldn't matter that much.

It's a bit long to follow.

Said it roughly 15 years ago already here on slashdot:
We're smack in the middle of a transition to a post-scarcity cyberpunk society. A throw-away end-user PC for 9$ is basically exactly that.
Computers aren't the deal anymore. Who can operate them, how do I connect x to y to z and how do I migrate data from a to b - that's what this is all about. I can hardly be bothered to replace my 4.5 year old HTC Desire HD Smartphone because it's already basically a supercomputer in my pocket. With a replacable battery - which most of todays smartphones don't have.

The fact that I would like a bigger screen and that the browser with Android 2.3 Gingerbread is starting to have problems with todays website might actually just get me to do it. I would love to have a convergence device though - one that can act as my desktop as soon as I plug it into its cradle. ... Maybe I should really wait for that new Ubuntu phone to come out ...

One should jump to conclusions too fast. NYC and other first world cities have such a bad eco-balance because all their consumerables and devices are built with a huge resource payoff and complex processes, not recycled, replaced often for no reason and so forth. All out unregulated meat 'production' (one of the largest single causes of modern first world eco-imbalance) and modern mono-agriculture also is a big problem. In that regard the 2nd worlds garbage dumps in the slums in far-east asia or south-america are just about as eco-efficient as a society can get. After all, they're living of our garbage(!!).

If we would tax consumption accordingling, people would be way more cautious about getting that new car or repairing the washing machine by simply tossing it out and getting a new one. Direct recycling would be more of a thing (don't get the impression those bags and pouches are cheap) and we'd shake our heads at the insanity of todays throw-away culture. Our consumption society is the problem. It's only that no one in china or india - or most of any other places for that matter - gives a shit about the environment that we can throw away a t-shirt after one season or get a brand-new smartphone every odd year.

Fix that and the entire planet can live in an utopia and we can add another 10 - 20 billion people without even breaking a sweat or nature noticing.

It's like Gandi said: The world easyly has enough for everyones needs - it does not have enough for everyones greed.

Seriously, I wouldn't bother. It makes no sense.

The Chromebooks available are dirt cheap, good-looking, light-weight, run for 8 hours and longer and have their OS tailored to light-weight power-saving CPUs and built around the computers it runs on - sorta like Apple. Chromebooks basically are the poor mans mac-book air. And if ChromeOS fits your bill and you have no problem with your OS basically being a remote extension of the todays online service known as Google you should go right ahead and one of those available. That current one from HP looks pretty neat, for instance.

As for the dabbling, I'd go exactly the other way around: Get a ready-made buy-unpack-works Chromebook and install Crouton on it for Linux freedom pleasure. Don't be silly and try to build your own. It will be shitty, lots of work, short on battery life, weigh a ton, look like crap and be expensive in comparsion.

Mind you, I did just get two refurbished ThinkPads for Linux progging and fiddling, but those are definitely not meant for lugging around. They each weigh well over 2kg and run 4 hours on a full-charge at most and are power-hogs in compasion. Good for proggin C/C++, running LAMP at full throttle (ones got 18GB, a Quad-Core Intel iSomething in it with a 256GB SSD) or playing Fallout 3 on Wine with the GFX all maxed out.
I do *not* use them for everyday utility computing though. One actually serves as ... a server (duh) at work.

My everyday computing, mail and leisure surfing I do on a 10" Yoga 2 Android tablet. Even lighter than a Chromebook and runs 18 hours under full load. ... Have you thought about something like that? That might actually be an alternative. Although ChromeOS does seem to be a better fit for your useage.