Since the 90s my main reason to not contribute to FOSS is that I do not ever want to be thrown in the same drawer with ESR.

It is sad to see gedit, Firefox and way too many other projects desperately trying to look as cool as Apple or Chrome but of course hopelessly falling short, instead of focusing on things that actually matter. It has been almost 6 months or so, I am sure Firefox is working on a new UI as we speak...

Fuck you, Firefox! Sincerely, everyone.

Not really been wondering, we already got to witness it first-person in HalfLife! Just watch out when you notice any resonance cascade...

Kim Schmitz started out in the BBS days and did exactly the same thing back then: providing storage for people to upload and swap "warez" on his BBS site. Google "Beverly Hills BBS" and "House of Coolness BBS". He was reading and archiving everyone's messages and when the police in Germany cracked down on him he turned on his former colleagues and friends and gave everyone up to get a better deal for himself. He was also convicted of calling card and computer fraud, a few years later he was getting rich on an insider deal scam with letsbuyit.com for which he was also convicted.
However you might feel about hollywood abusing international leverage to break into his home, make no mistake: Kim thrives in the grey area and on illegal activities and he has several criminal convictions to prove that fact. He has repeatedly managed to at least temporarily flee jurisdiction by moving country. If there is one person who definitely understands all ins and outs of copyright then it is him, at the very least out of experience and from having been caught red handed more than once.

This is nothing but yet another one of his charades and PR stunts. He is not fighting for you or your right to keep a "backup copy". Trying to get everyone on the net riled up is just yet another PR stunt. Kim always has been and always will be caring for only one person: himself. And he will not hesitate to lie and step on former friends and partners alike. Never just trusting anything he says should be the default.

Except that Coke and Pepsi are still being sold and people care about them to varying degrees. I doubt anyone but Marissa and the handful of remaining sad developers who somehow didn't get a better offer have even heard or cared about yahoo in the last 5 years. Providing the weather information for the iPhone must have been a really big deal judging by them forcing Apple to "proudly" display that fact but I didn't know you could run a business on that.

And even in its best days yahoo was never a search engine, it was a weird portal with a back then popular chat client and email. It has since been replaced multiple times in each one of these "key" areas. Firefox might as well have switched to altavista, at least it would have been known for search.

I have repeatedly tried to use DDG over the years and I honestly wish I could like them but as someone in Europe who at times needs more "local" results, I just really, really hate DDG. A simple search on google yields the results I was looking for down to "Shopping" which can be handy or "Maps" or "Images" results. On DDG I got results that were not even close to what I was actually looking for, no shopping and no images. I have had the same experience when searching for error messages for work or code snippets. DDG results were so atrociously off and useless, it was painful.

Firefox has long displayed an absolutely horrible focus in their development. What used to be the cool, slim and fast new browser on the intarwebs has become a ridiculous moloch and instead of working on that, they started berating users with things like completely breaking https access for self-signed certificates which are all too common amongst developers who are traditionally also the lion share of Firefox's users. And instead of fixing that or supporting modern web formats they went on to useless "image" and coolness campaigns and redesigned the interface I dont know how many times, as if that really mattered THAT much... and finally ended up with a cheap Chrome knock-off lock that is just disgusting.

They are not idiots for saying "your card was declined". Hotels and car rentals are notorious for blocking amounts on your card, just in case. When they tell you the card was declined what really happened was that at minimum they tried to block whatever amount they felt is justified to rip you off in case your parents would not have shown, more likely they tried to block the whole amount for the stay up front. Car rentals do the same even after you brought the car back, for potential overlooked damage or tickets.

It should not be surprising to see those names up there, for them it is all about getting access to cheaper employees by conjuring up the idea that there are not enough "experts" available. Bitkom has been doing the same scheme for over a decade now in Germany and it has become a running joke amongst IT professionals.

I think that as an employee your best and most efficient chance of finding a job or at least getting to a decent interview is through word of mouth from your friends, or your "network", if you are one of those people. You will get inside info on the company and its culture way before you even apply and this should give you a great feel whether you should or should not apply.

Before you get your pitchforks out because "omg nepotism!" let me tell you about the advantages for the employer side: great quality applications without wasting too much time and resources. Good IT folks typically know a whole bunch of other good people who would make a great and natural fit for the company. And your buddy "vouching" for you also means that employers might be more willing to invest in you and get you up to speed with their often ridiculous requirements It can also be beneficial for the culture and atmosphere at work because you get like minded people.

I think that if you are just more or less blindly applying through the official channels, you are already doing it wrong. The HR drones have only gotten worse. Be in a position where either potential employers come to you or you know folks on the "inside". This, of course, requires that you are a great employee and can live up to the expectations. Then it is a win-win for both sides.

If you are just starting out your two best options to get into that position are either through your studies or, duh, work. Choose a university and courses that involve real, actual projects with actual organizations. These will be the most long-term valuable hours you will ever spend in your academic life. Talk to the professors, see if any companies are posting jobs or looking for cooperation.

Being middle-aged means that any time soon they will kick out the old and bring in the new because somehow everybody seems to know, old IT workers are somehow completely useless and just cost money...
Oh and there is never enough of them so please let in more cheap labor from abroad!

Yet strangely enough, practically every CS or IT related degree will hit you over the head with copious amounts of advanced math... and not too long ago anything computer related was basically treated as a sub-section of math and these people would swear on their very lives that without advanced math you couldn't even switch a computer on. ANYONE wanting to program basically needed at least a PhD in math.

If you like the paradigm of the centralized repository which sure has it's uses then consider moving to SVN instead. It will make things easier and nicer, it is CVS done right.

The git/mercurial crowd just cannot stand the CVS/SVN workflow and wants a lot more flexibility which makes perfect sense for a global open source project. If you don't need all that, move to SVN and be happy.