and yes I messed up my quoting.

I'm in industry at my day job and rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.

Perl 6 was something those of us in industry had been anticipating with glee. We expected it to modernize the Perl platform, and make it a contender against Java, .NET and C++ for large-scale software development. But we also expected we'd have that around 2005. It's nearly 2010, and we still don't see much real progress on that front. Rakudo just isn't a production-grade product yet.

I'm sad to admit it, but instead of waiting for incremental Perl 5 releases for the next decade until Perl 6 is finally mature enough, the company I'm with has started to migrate from Perl to Python. Unlike the Perl community, the Python community has shown with Python 3 that they're capable of working together to create a major release with many new features in a relatively short amount of time (especially compared to the Perl 6 effort).

Rewriting our approximately 3 million lines of Perl code into Python has actually gone reasonably well. Although I was a staunch defender of Perl, I do have to give Python its kudos. Every day it looks more and more like we've made the right choice moving away from Perl, and towards Python.

Often times the effort of rewriting something is where you get your gains, regardless of which language you're doing it in (even the original). Learning from past mistakes, being more efficient, and adapting to new needs are all useful. You may have had the same gains from using PHP, depending on what you're liking.

I'm tired of Microsoft so Windows XP 64-bit is the last Windows I'll use. Been running Ubuntu on my home desktop and Fedora on my work laptop (at large corporation) for months now.

The descriptions are bad enough. I'll pass on seeing the real thing, thanks.

I only speak for myself at work, but as soon as the next release of the distribution is out I upgrade my laptop. It's so painless there's no reason not to, and I don't even have to reboot immediately if I don't want to.

I guess I need to tell my computer it can't run Windows XP 64-bit anymore...

A shame too, because it has worked just fine.

Every game I buy is followed by a visit to that site. No DRM or cd-in-tray garbage then.

Nope, completely different. Not Mac-like at all. I mean they're nothing like a bar at the bottom of the screen that lets you switch and/or run applications for your documents ... oh wait.

Where I work, the servers are getting their October security patches this month. They're inside a firewalled corporate network, but still...

Vista SP2, plus the OS X dock.

I'm currently running Windows XP 64-bit because I didn't want Vista but my Windows 2000 didn't get video driver support from ATI anymore. Due to Vista and Windows 7, my next desktop OS is Linux. I already run Linux as my primary OS at work, so no big stretch there and OpenOffice 3 means all my co-workers don't notice.

Why does the OS itself practically need a FPS meter?

Just you wait for "protected content" to hit your screen.