You can extend the useful life of the Brother cartridges by resetting its "flag gear" as shown here.. Resetting flag gears is an essential skill for anyone who buys a Brother laser printer with the hope that the per-page printing cost will be low. Like many printer makers, the thing starts refusing to print when the cartridge has a long way to go. Luckily, the folks at Brother have engineered a way around that problem for us.

Unfortunately, the teaser cartridges that come with the printer are missing some small parts that are required for reset. Those can be bought as part of a toner refill kit, though I ended up buying new cartridges before I knew that.

I've had good luck with the toner refill product you linked. Here's a corresponding link to the caps. I always end up damaging those in the process of removing them, so I always replace them with new ones.

See http://bbc.in/1LA1Zn2 for details.

Good points. I tried your examples for fun and found that the ones such as "what is the national animal of Scotland" that resulted in a simple factual answer did not contain any ads. I've also done a number of searches in the past that resulted in an informative blurb that was extracted by Wikipedia, which didn't provide any ads, IIRC. I don't know if that's true in every such case, but it might be well be. If so, such results serve the user but don't produce any revenue for Google, except indirectly via continued customer satisfaction. Unless one deems such results to be some form of predatory pricing (the preceding link is itself another such example), it's hard to argue that they're anti-competitive.

I was thinking more of SourceForge itself, though it happens to be a Dice property. Previously, I used to trust it as a source of binaries that I might download and run. Currently, I don't. I may trust it again one day, but it will take a while.

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

- Warren Buffett

From TFS:

Never blame on bureaucratic conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by Congressional incompetence.

You're thinking of this the wrong way. Look, Google spent over $3 billion to buy Nest. So, a better way to value GitHub is in terms of fancy thermostats. Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: assuming Nest has more customers than GitHub - which is probably quite generous, if not downright wrong - then each user is worth 2/3 of a thermostat sale. Put in those terms, it sounds fairly reasonable.

About 20 years ago, I accidentally solved a similar problem. I created a Windows application using Visual Studio with MFC without thinking very far into the future. It turns out that I still maintain that application - and a few spinoffs of it - to this day. VS and MFC turned out to be a good choice for this system.

I've had to do some migration work every few years as newer versions of VS came out, but that's been tolerable. For example, I recently migrated from VS 2003 to VS 2010 because 2003 doesn't run correctly on Windows 7. And I recently made a transition to Unicode, which was slightly painful but tolerable - definitely the right thing to do at this point.

VS may not actually be the best answer to the question, but my experience does illustrate a few points. It worked for me because:
- The IDE had a large user base and ran on a ubiquitous platform.
- The framework, MFC, likewise has a large user base. Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about MFC anymore, but it's easy for them to maintain with each new version of VS. Basically, as long as VS, C++, and the Win32 API is around, it makes sense for them to update MFC whenever they update VS. Typically, they just add new features for new API things I don't use like the "Ribbon" interface. That's easy enough for me to ignore.
- Migrating to the new version of the system every few years makes sense. I don't do this with every version of VS, but I do it with every 2 or 3. Microsoft more-or-less forced me to do this when old versions of VS would no longer run, but it's actually been good for me overall. However, if I had somehow managed to continually use VS as it existed 20 years, the pain of migrating to a modern version today might be too great.

Please complain about as many things as possible. In my experience, people universally enjoy hearing complaints. :-)

But seriously, I literally have not had any of the problems you complain about. I don't remember the whitespace thing (which I happen to like) to have ever caused me a problem. If anything, it prevented problems compared to the common alternative.

Regarding compatibility among minor versions, Python has always been famously committed to a very high level of compatibility between minor versions, which I have always used interchangeably. (Think about it: you don't get and retain the status of being one of just a very few primary scripting languages without that.)

That said, you're right, though about "it's" [sic] slowness. So, what part of "scripting language" don't you understand...? Specifically, it really isn't possible to gain the advantages of dynamic typing without losing the advantage of speed. That's why those of us who use Python for part of our work use a compiled language for the other part of our work. (I use both C and C++ regularly.) You might as well complain that a screwdriver doesn't pound in nails very well. True enough, but a hammer really isn't that useful for turning screws, either...

I heard a similar rationale regarding a baby and its bathwater. At first, the bathwater was blamed for the unfortunate zealous disposal of the baby. But when that explanation didn't fly, the purported ugliness of the baby was offered as justification. However, after hearing both explanations, the jury remained unconvinced.

It always amazes me that so many folks reject something entirely because they don't like one aspect of it. Good luck finding a wife...

"A hacker with his computer can steal more than a hundred men with guns."

Are you sure? Sounds like yet another NSA conspiracy to me...

Good point. Maybe we should have been neutral like Switzerland in 1941 - and ever since. Just think how happy we'd all be here on our own little continent, away from all the troublemakers of the world, with only Mexico and Canada to worry about.