I have a SGI Octane sitting in the corner here which doubles very nicely as a room heater. IRIX is also stuffed to the brim with clever tweaks and ideas, so it's a bit of both I guess.

An Amiga 500 or Commodore 64 would have been a lot more inspiring, considering the huge demoscenes these platforms had in their heydays.

Dijkstra of course had godlike skills with a blackboard.

CS grads who can't remember or figure out where to find critical documents lack the basic intelligence or the motivation needed to finish the program: they should fail. Same goes for those who can't click their way around a basic OS + wordprocessor combo and manage backup copies of their docs: epic fail. Electronic courseware is a godsend as far as I'm concerned: thousands upon thousands of pages fit in a simple tablet or ereader which puts it all at your fingertips. Back when I was a student books and other paperwork took a sizable chunk out of my already cramped living space. A tablet with a usable browsing/searching app would have been most welcom.

Why don't you get a life yourself instead of slinging insults and profanities at people you know nothing about from behind the cowardly mask of online anonymity?

I have to be neither a chicken or a chef to have an informed opinion on the quality of an omelette.

Not everything with a price has value.

Which patents are those, exactly, and where is it proven that they are being infringed upon by Linux?

Dude.. I've just read post upon post of agressive flaming here, mostly from you. Expressing yourself in such an insufferable know-it-all kind of way detracts hugely from any technical merit your software may have, which I'm not disputing because I haven't looked at it. I'm simply extremely distrustful of anyone who keeps repeating that they're unquestionably right on everything they say. Sounds too much like a priest I knew as a child.

That comment was actually better the second time I read it.

6 isn't that far-fetched. You have Debian and its many derivatives which are extremely similar under the hood, RedHat and its seven dwarfs which will manage with the same RPM, OpenSUSE and a few oddballs like Arch, Gentoo and Slackware. If Blizzard supports these, the rest of the world will support itself right up to FreeBSD and back as long as Blizzard provides both x86 and amd64 builds and lets us know what libs they link against.

Just release it for the most popular distro(-family), which is undeniably Ubuntu (covering Debian and Mint as well). The geeks will get it to work on everything else, no support needed or they wouldn't be using non-Ubuntu or non-Mint Linux anyway. As long as Blizzard provides builds for Ubuntu LTS x86 and amd64, the rest will be done for them.

You just proved my point. Somehow there's a yuck-factor involved when actual meat is grown in a lab, but it's apparently not there when consumers see processed soy proteins, salt and artificial flavoring pressed together into a cheap "chicken" burger. I'd call that a double standard. If actual real chicken breast can be grown in a lab without animals suffering, I'll have that over any of the mystery meat today's fast-food chains sell.

I don't understand the yuck-factor. Go buy a McChicken at the big yellow M. There's nothing recognizably chicken-ish about that product at all. The taste and texture is completely different from the chicken I tasted as a kid, when my grandfather would routinely kill and prepare his own chickens for dinner. I can tell you from personal experience that the yuck-factor in actually killing a chicken with a blade is much higher than that of an electricallly stimulated nuggy grown inside a petri dish.