REXX was the "blessed" scripting language of OS/2 as well, and had lots of hooks into the OS.

I was never offered an alternative when I took Intro to Psych, although this was back in 1986. Your "alternative" was: don't take Intro to Psych. They made it clear on the first day.

That's because companies view network security as a cost center, rather than a profit center, so they want to spend as little on it as possible. Being a network security specialist is a "reactionary" job - you do everything you can to make the network safe (on the usually meager budget you've given to do so), and then wait for ... something ... to happen, after which you'll be implicityly if not outright blamerd for it. You can also look forward to carrying a pager, possibly 24/7. In order to do the job well you'd probably need a skillset that intersects knowledge of IT, networking and programming. You could be a programmer, which is a profit center for software companies, which means you'd probably be treated and paid better, and not locked into IT, which is a dead end at many companies who see IT as something they begrudgingly have to pay for.

Still, network security sounds sexy, and it probably pays better than mainstream IT - I'm surprised they're having that much trouble finding people to do it.

I also can't help wondering if the world's black hats would pay better for someone with the skillset. After all, for them, network security is a profit center.

Ah, the memories ... OS/2. It had a lot of great features, but it was a PITA to install, and they spent too much time trying to get it to run windows programs and not enough smoothing out some of the rough edges. I did prefer it to Win 3.11 at the time, though. IBM's WebExplorer become the first web browser I ever used. I still prefer the mutli-document interface from their NR/2 newsreader to anything I've used since. It also had the first multiboot launcher I've used, Boot Manager, which I had running DOS 6.2, Windows 3.11, OS/2 3.0 and slackware linux all on the same drive. LOL, it was fun trying to keep them all running and updated but I had no room for applications!

This is why Microsoft has left the right to sell used games squarely in the hands of the publishers ... along with the legal liability for not doing so if it runs afoul of the EU's consumer protection laws. Notice they won't even claim a portion of the used game sales. Since when would MS leave money on the table like that? Since the EU has been jabbing them with multimillion dollar fines every other year. Used game sales is a hot-button issue, as the number of comments on this story suggests.

I "escaped the dungeon" once in vanilla "hack", back in college, before nethack existed - does that count? Is ascending in nethack that much harder?

The term Libre is used by many in the FOSS community instead of "free", so they won't have to keep explaining the diference between "free as in speech" (free to use and modify) and "free as in beer" (cost).

They're downstream from Ubuntu instead of Debian because Ubuntu is more end user-friendly than Debian. I would imagine that could change depending on how Ubuntu changes over the next few releases.

I'll be downloading Toutatis today. Along with my main (gaming) rig (which runs Linux Mint), I maintain a "free box", which contains nothing but 100% Free (tm) software, mostly as an experiment to gauge the current status of how useful a box with only free software is (or isn't). I have to say, it's become a lot easier than it was in the old days, where almost nothing worked after you stripped out the nonfree bits. Modems and network cards were notoriously hard to get working. Brigantia, the prevous release of Trisquel, supports every peice of hardware on the box except the ethernet port (the box has an nVidia nForce-based motherboard), but the wireless worked, so I didn't really try. Interestingly, I've been increasingly using the free box over my gaming rig for day-to-day use, and may end up scrapping the gaming rig as I don't game as much these days.

Some things that are challenging on a free box:
- Anything that requires heavy graphical use, e.g., no serious games. The free box has an nVidia card, running X using nouveau.
- Flash-based stuff is iffy. I have flash video supported, but no apps (and in my case at least, little of value was lost).
- Any java programs that require Sun's implementation of java.
- The fonts are hard to look at. Does anyone konw here I can get some good libre fonts?
- Using proprietary audio/video formats. In many cases playback works, ostensibly becuase in many countries there are no software patents (yet). Since I''m in the USA and try to keep the Free box free, I stick to free formats (fortunately I ripped most of my music collection to FLAC a long time ago. For the free box, I wrote a script to go thorugh my collection and convert any remaining mp3's to Ogg).

As you can see, most of the issues revolve around proprietary languages, hardware, fonts, etc.

Congrats to the folks who put Trisquel together for getting Toutatis out. I can't wait to try it!

...and will we want it to? I wasn't aware of Debian having resonable touch support (but TBH, I really don't know). How are the specs? How open is the hardware? Assuming reasonable specs, and open hardware drivers (and that's assuming a LOT), I'd like to see KDE Plasma Active on it.

I'd also like to see if Canonical can produce a usable tablet. I'm not a huge fan of Unity, but I'm willing to be impressed if they can make something impressive. Ball's in your court, Canonical.

Last I checked, the various flavors of BSD were alive and well (but I haven't confirmed this with Netcraft, so I may be wrong).

You are the way this model should work - you understand that what you're spending money on is entertainment, not any sort of future investment. If STO shut down tomorrow. the $20 you spent last month wasn't "lost" - it was spent on a month's worth of entertainment, As you mentioned, it can actually be a good entertainment value. When MMO's do shut down, it's a sad day for players who enjoyed the game, but a worse day for those who mistakenly thought of the money they spent on the game as "invested" in their avatar(s).

...and the knowledge you gain about hardware, OS'es, etc, has its own value that offsets the cost of your time.

Got it - thanks for the tip.

That brings the cost of game development for the PS3 down to free, and Sony can't sell insanely priced dev kits to development houses.

Bruce, first off, thank you for everything you've done to advance the cause of FLOSS. My question: It's not hard to notice the shift in mass market computing away from the PC and toward the tablet and phone. While at its core Android runs the Linux kernel, it's hard for me to think of it with the same fondness that I have for my favorite FLOSS OS distributions. I can't just load up a new Linux distro on my Acer tablet, or in many cases even an updated version of Android, short of "jailbreaking" it. It's seems clear to me that such hardware is designed with the intent to replicate Apple's success with a vertical hardware/software stack.

Given this (or perhaps not given this, if you disagree with my statements above), what do you think the future of open source will be in the tablet and phone world? Android? Meego? WebOS? Something else? Will it be open source programs in a not-quite-completely open OS like Android?

This was such an awesome post that I clipped and saved it. Thanks.