See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... . Also, my apologies for spelling "Dolores" wrong.

I had remembered that there was a small, Eastern European country that has a population of around 3 million and occupies about 13,000 square miles of territory. But I couldn't remember its name up until now - only that it rhymed with a part of the female anatomy.

I've seen this in some cases, and in other cases I've seen people with relatively little experience starting out with good instincts. So, I think those instincts are partly a talent and partly drawn from experience.

The thing that I have as an "old guy" with lots of experience that I see lacking in some younger folks is a keen sense of design - knowing what's good and bad. The common failure of young designers is that they don't actively seek out simplicity, and they don't know techniques of how to achieve it. They also don't understand Gall's Law:

Of course, my points are generalizations that don't apply in every case. I'm sure you could find an old guy with experience who never learned such lessons.

Experience also allows you to solve some problems quickly that an inexperienced person might take much longer to solve - or might never be able to solve at all. So, as a veteran engineer who is surrounded by very bright and much younger people at work, I've come to believe that when my employer pays me extra for my experience, they're not getting a bad deal.

As with any big success, it seems that the success of Linux must be attributed to multiple factors, of which you make a very good case for some of the most important.

That said, in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", a lot of credit is also given to Linus for inventing the Bazaar model of software development.

I've watched Python carefully over the years, and I think the success of Python can be most strongly attributed to technical factors, that is, the design of Python itself. However, it's also clear that the social skills of Guido van Rossum in terms of carefully and persistently building a community also must be a big factor. It seems you need both. Probably true for Linux and Linus as well.

That may also explain why certain Software Foundations we shall not name whose leaders lack social skills have never developed into a true "community", except in the abstract sense of various disparate groups rallying around some of the same flags.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Then again, once time and chance happeneth, being wise, understanding, and skillful don't hurt.

To quote Adam Smith:

So, if you're making six figures writing Perl, are you sure you're being adequately compensated for its disagreeableness? :)

The word "completely" seems like a pretty strong hedge here. Sure, Mono exists, but it seems to be a bit of an unloved stepchild of the Open Source world, which generally seems to regard all things with any relation at all to Microsoft with some combination of hostility, suspicion, or at least disinterest. So, is Mono "a real boy" now in terms of being a full-fledged alternative to .net at all levels including features, libraries, tools, etc., or is it actually an unloved stepchild, as I seem to have perceived?

Here's one you missed:

Python excels at being the jack-of-all-trades, though most of its trades have other masters (see above.)

Correction: $20,000...looks like I can't do math any better than Microsoft...it's late...

You'd think it would make more sense to simply shut off the "suspicious" activations for a given IP before they got to hundreds. That would seem to be a whole lot faster, easier, and cheaper than filing a lawsuit. (Let's do the math: 200 copies times maybe $100 each = $10,000.)

For comparison, I recently installed a new website using Wordpress, which I'm relatively new to. I got the excellent "Wordfence" security plugin running early-on, which uses a default limit of 20 failed logins within 5 minutes before it bans an IP. My new site evidently got attacked by a botnet (I assume) a few days later because there was a burst of 14 failed logins within the span of a few minutes, each one from a different country. The logins were pretty-much a tour of the ragged edges of the Internet: they came from Russia, India, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Belarus, Vietnam, etc. When all that failed because I had used an obscure admin account name and a strong password - and because Wordfence shut all those IPs down - the botnet evidently gave up.

Though a limit of 20 worked fine, even that seems like more than is necessary to allow normal/legitimate login failures, so I might lower it. I certainly wouldn't raise it to 200. Or file a lawsuit about it.

If "she was never in any real danger" from Kirk, I guess all STDs must have been eradicated by then.

Point taken. But even in my small home business, I can afford to register the "big three" of .com, .org, and .net for each of the primary TLDs I own. I guess Ms. Fiorina must not have gotten a very good severance package from HP if she can't afford to do the same.

I see in a quick search for Yeoman Janice Rand that the good yeoman was a redshirt. So, how could she possibly have lasted this long...?

In any event, thanks for the memories, Grace.

Or, as Shakespeare put it, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

    - Samuel Goldwyn