I totally agree with you. Of course, that means that we start to treat broadband like a utility and not a private business, which is fine by me.

I think you need to think that thru a little more. Going by that logic, you're saying that farmers (who grow your food) and others who just like small town life don't deserve high-speed internet. I'm not sure what word I want to apply to that, but you don't come out looking so nice there.

Now, if you want to say that those who live further out will need to pay a bit more because of their situation, I think most of us could agree to that. Of course, with the advent of putting access points on water towers and other high places and then a receiver/transmitter dish on the person's house so that lines don't have to be run to individual houses, even those of us not in "the big city" can get better speeds at mostly reasonable prices.

I joined the profession just after PCs were moving into the coporate world. At that time where I worked, the really good stuff ran on expensive "workstations" I couldn't possibly afford, personally. Now days, the equipment is so affordable that the computer setup I have at home is better than my desktop setup at work. That creates it's own kind of stress, for me in having to use "lesser stuff" and for the IT department when I keep asking for something better ... not a problem we had in "the old days".

Ah, crap, I just bought 1 too; which means none of data is more than a month old. At least they're giving away a fix. Gee, more mess to deal with... :(

Arguing from analogy is always fraught with peril, but I'll start there. Can you patent a specific ordering of words? No you can't; because that's copyright not patent. Software is the same way, it's an ordering of words that does the instructions of the programmer, for whatever is in his/her imagination. There is lots of creation, but little true innovation (to inspire true patents).

Also, software is one of those things that moves very fast and comes about by building on the works of others. If you start patents for software, you'll stiffle and kill the software industry. We can't wait 28 years for some idea that literally thousands of us could come up with to be freely usable. It would also be very hard to enforce that.

We already have hypersonic missles -- really! Most of the air-to-air missles shot from 1 plane to another are hypersonic and we've had these for decades. This is public knowledge.

What the article is try to get banned is "long-range hypersonic missles", or if you prefer, the old ICBMs going a lot faster. If you could make a very small nuke and stick it in one of the existing missle cases; you could have a pretty awesome weapon if short distances are all you need (say in the 80-100 mile range from what I've read, definitely far enough the pilot wouldn't have to worry about getting caught in it). It'd be pretty easy to hit any coastal city from international air space that way.

It *sounds* like you've never worked on a large project then. Fine, fire the architects, but you're still going to need someone to do their job, no matter if you call them the team lead or something else. There needs to be a *technical* person at the top who says "we're marching that way" and here's some stuff we need to keep in mind and do. Some technical person who can push back to the product owner when it's needed and explain in technical gory details when required. That's not the project manager because they're not technical enough; or that's been true for all the projects I've ever worked on.

You need someone to can look ahead at the items coming and notice that there are some common things needed, and that if you spend some time up front to fix (a framework, a subsystem, whatever) that it will be cheaper and faster to do that way than to let small bits of code be written and then refactored a hundred times as the sprints slowly come in.

I'm sorry you don't like the construction analogy, but it's very true that the cheapest time to change a building is when you're still at the blueprint stage before it's built ... the cheapest time to change software is during the planning stage before it's written.

Sure, most product owners owners don't really know where they want to end up, but some things are well known and when you have that knowledge you should use it as soon as possible, no matter what you want to call the roles or the results. Protocols, APIs, security, data models and databases, etc are all things that should be planned as much as possible, not organically grown and refactored. Who does that planning?

My day job right now is dealing with code that had very little upfront planning, very Agile'ish, and the system is a nightmare at times. I'll admit that the source of the problem may be that the devs before me never came back and refactored and cleaned up, but a little more planning would have made much of that unnecessary. That's what an architect brings to the table: some overall planning and technical sense.

For the "big stuff", much of what's listed in the summary, they probably can't create the bandwagon. The reason developers jump on something like that is because it's already in widespread use. All the "big stuff" already has leaders. The best RH could hope to do is to buy some of those out and take them over.

OTOH, do we developers want that? Look at the controversy surrounding systemd, directly developed by RH. If that's a sample of what they do, I'm not so keen for their solutions.

Gotta agree that's stupid. First, you can only hire people that are available with the skills you're looking for. So if you don't have "diverse applicants", you'll never get "higher numbers".

Second, I hope he doesn't mean it, but it sounds like Cook want to be more diverse to look more politically correct. If I were a stock holder, I'd be upset. I wouldn't want him be "diverse" so he can look good; I'd want him to hire the best qualified people in a completely "blind" way. If that means 90% are male, or 80% white, or 85% female, or whatever the numbers work out to be because those were the best people to get the job done, then so be it. If the PC-crowd doesn't like it, then they need to encourage more minorities to get the required education and get qualified.

I also really appreciate the work the KDE developers have done over the years. I'll go look at KDE5 to see what's coming.

However, I really Really REALLY hope they've found a way for you to install KDE and not have to have akonadi or nepomunk installed on my system. For the longest time, they've been force installed because of dependencies and I don't want them on my machine because I never use them and their daemons just suck up resources. Seems like there was something else like this, maybe amarok, but I'm having a hard time remembering. I like KDE in general, but I don't want all of it.

VMplayer would work too

How about we follow the money for him to see if he's getting "contributions" to say this. Perhaps that's why he's using other's ideas.

+10 :) I was pleased to find the Linux version of Palemoon; it's my preferred browser now.

What programs are you using that doesn't intercept that quit where you have unsaved work and prompt you to save or acknowledge that you'll lose work? Other than my browser where I'm filling in a form, I can't think of anything that allows you easily lose your work ... power outages ignored for this as they're realtively rare and a UPS handily gives you time to save before the machine goes down.

Generally speaking, I don't like auto-save because there are many times where I work for a bit to try to figure something out and when that idea doesn't work, reverting to where I started is easy, or if the idea worked out then I can save. With auto-save, that revert ability becomes a lot harder or else impossible if the undo buffer is not large enough. Now, if it wants to auto-save to a temp file to prevent lose of work and make recovery easy if the something bad happens (like vim does) while the real file remains unaltered, that's great and something I'll welcome ... all other forms of auto-save need not apply. :)

Seriously? You haven't found the export (save as) feature? They give you Word, PDF, XPS, and MHT formats. If it all goes bad for you, you can always copy-n-paste it out. It's not hard to get info out of OneNote. If you're trying for mass export, as in you're trying to move away from OneNote, I believe they also provide the API so you can write your own export filter (haven't tried it though).

If I was taking a class (or whatever) with a high ratio of drawing to text, then I'd agree. However, I'm rarely in that situation; most of my notes are text only.

I can type faster than I write, even with abbreviations (which I can do while typing too), and my handwriting has decreased over the years, so typing is almost manditory unless I really slow my handwriting down, which is the opposite of what I need to do while taking notes when someone else is speaking.

That's how it is for me, perhaps your situation is more conduction for pen and paer ... mine's not.