Except that the $300 cable isn't grounded on either end, and shows a high level of crosstalk. So the arrows on this cable are just to make people think it's worth the $300.

This cable is better than a $2 cable: It's well built, and meets the specs - barely. But you can get $10-$20 cables that are as well built, and meet the specs with less margin for error (these literally tested as 'within the specs' by less than the margin of error on the testing device) easily.

Has anyone ever clicked on a random link and been taken to a commercial porn site? To shock sites and stuff hosted in random places, sure, but these are not the ones being threatened with shutdown.

Nonsense. It is true, however, that Windows and Linux use different (overlapping) subsets of the SATA (and SCSI) command sets and, in particular, use very different sequences of commands in common use. If you test heavily with Windows and not with Linux, then you may find that there are code paths in your firmware that Linux uses a lot but which are mostly untested.

The 'tray' that Raymond describes in his second article looks very much like the Shelf from OPENSTEP 4.1, which was released just after Windows 95. I wonder if some of the NeXT people were playing with early betas of Windows 95 and, as their company CEO later quipped, started their photocopiers...

Win32s was released for Windows 3.1, but it just added some win32 APIs, not the UI. The UI was first introduced in the Chicago betas, which were eventually released as Windows 95. NT4 was released shortly afterwards and wasn't a bad OS, but hampered by the lack of plug-and-play support and perpetually having old versions of DirectX.

And, of course, I meant 'to shortcuts' there.

There are a few differences. First, symlinks are a property of the filesystem. This means that the normal filesystem APIs just work with them and you need special APIs for things that care about whether it's a link or not. In contrast, shortcuts are just another kind of file and everything that wants to follow them needs to know what the target is. Second, shortcuts contain a lot more information than just a path: they include the path to the destination file, an icon, the set of command-line arguments to pass, and some other flags. For example, I used to have a load of different shortcuts to the WinQuake (and, later, GLQuake) executable that all had different -game flags, for launching different mods. Many of them also had different icons, if the mod came with its own icon. You can't do that with symlinks.

The closest thing to symlinks on *NIX systems is .desktop files.

What time is 'late', I wonder?

I'd be very happy if the (small) city I live in only kept street lights on from dusk until 10pm, for example.

Do you live somewhere with an unusually high concentration of stupid people?

I used to walk home through a park. Except on cloudless nights with no moon, you got enough reflected light to be able to see quite clearly across it. Then there some some hysteria about the potential for being attacked (triggered by a flasher, who only exposed himself to people in broad daylight) and they added a row of streetlights along the side of the path. If you stood about 10m from the path, you were completely invisible to someone walking along it, but they were clearly visible to you for their entire trip across the park (as were any potential witnesses on the path). If someone actually wanted to attack people crossing the park, the lights made it a lot easier. It would only take a few seconds to hit someone and drag them out of the visible area.

That's not been true for a very long time. Current MacBook Pro trackpads (i.e. the ones that TFA is about) use one finger tap for left click, two finger tap for right click, two finger drag for scroll, and four-finger drag for some system-wide gestures. The 'Mac mice only have one button' thing is a decade old (and even before that, Macs supported multi-button mice, they just required that UIs be designed to work well with one-button input devices).

Is this really what Windows users consider easy? On a Mac, it depends on the keyboard layout, but for me it's alt-2. A cent symbol is alt-4 (dollar is shift-4). Entering a character with an accent is alt-something for the accent and then the letter that it goes on top of. For example, i-umlaut is option-u then i.

If memorising unicode character numbers is your idea of good HCI, then I really hope I never use a program that you've designed.

Yes, they've now added an "Ex" suffix to every system call. You now have to specify an average of 17 flag constants each with a name that averages of 30 upper-case characters, as well as initialize and provide "long pointers" to an average of five large C structures for each request you make to the OS.

Well given that on his news website he says:

In fact if you go right to stallman.org it's current front and center at the top.

If the submitter is working with Kinesis keyboards, remapping is built in to the keyboard. They probably don't want to remap to Control - the Kinesis Advantage keyboards have them in a thumb key array, which is actually awesome - but I find swapping it with the backtick/tilde key is very useful.

(Kinesis Advantage keyboards have a mostly QWERTY layout (or mostly Dvorak, if you buy that option), but split the keys into two sections, and have separate key clusters under each thumb - putting space directly under the right thumb and backspace directly under the left. Exact layout of Control/Windows/Command/Opt/Alt depends on which model you buy: Windows, Mac, or Other, but they are clustered around the thumbs.)