I'm in the same environment but with clusters. Glueing lots of things together in an interpreted environment is very useful but isn't everything because it usually comes with a speed cost, which while irrelevant in some situations it can consume hours per run in others. Some libraries/tools can take away a lot of the pain (eg. NumPy) but the more your interpreted stuff does the more it becomes clear that seemingly arbitrary blocking conditions are stopping it from doing anything useful for annoyingly long periods of time.
I hit that problem frequently with a dotnet developer who is always complaining about "the network" when his tiny and trivial application runs dog slow instead of having the instant response you'd expect with 1.2MB of data in a CSV. He stopped letting me look at his code after I ran it with the data on the same machine and it was still dog slow (user staring at a blank screen for ten seconds or so, just like with the "network" problem). In that case things have been glued together very badly.

When are people going to stop buying products that they feel the need to jailbreak instead of buying unlocked or open alternatives?

As soon as my employer decides to offer a choice other than "windows or IOS", I'll take it.

Until then, jailbreaking remains the only option.

Offtopic a bit maybe, but the big problem of the larger "word processors" is that they try to supply half of a full desktop publishing system as well and it's not the useful half. You can spam pictures all over a page but can't place them precisely - you have to fuck about with other settings and hope they wobble into place.
IMHO it's the feature creep where the word processors approach DTP without getting there that gives that 90% that is marginally useful.
Similarly with IDE's that try to approach LabView but never get there - mainly because somebody points out that a LabView GUI is almost limited to a write-only approach for small and well organised bits of code and an unreadable spaghetti explosion beyond a certain size and complexity.

Or taken a lot longer to sort it out and then move on to FreeBSD.

Joe seems very intuitive to me and has just enough power as a text editor to give you free range of config files and basic scripting or even a couple hundred lines of Perl. I've always found vi impossible; the command/editing modes never made sense yet Joe seemed to work "like normal."

I made an honest effort to master emacs, but it always seemed like effort and I always went back to Joe when I needed to get something done.

I actually went trolling recently for a win32 text mode version of joe (which I swear I used to have) but couldn't find one.

GP needs to stop playing daddy and let the newbs grow by fixing the problems themselves.

That's when you find users that don't exist in the group files (due to typos) and then when that didn't work a "fix" of setting the permissions of entire systems wide open. Next step some script kiddie has owned the system.
Newbs are often such newbs that they do not know that they should be making their stupid early mistakes on development systems (like we all did) instead of fucking up production systems for everyone - that's one reason to give them a hand even if you are entirely selfish.

Steel cases are still steel cases and can still have sharp edges if poorly designed.

Give me a 10 year old Lian-Li case

That's one of the early examples of the well designed stuff I'm describing. It seemed that around 2000 every new machine demanded a blood sacrifice before it would work :)

Used to use it on Xenix (a LOT) for general text and used it to do a Solaris root password reset about ten years ago but I'd never voluntarily go back if vi is available.

It's because xkcd isn't original content. It just takes existing observations,

Just like political cartoons and a pile of three panel strips. It's what they do.

Gedit is so slow to start that it has been used as a strawman as to "why X is bad" instead of the more accurate "why is this new gnome stuff so much slower than the old gnome stuff?"

The Bitcoin network uses about $35 worth of energy to process a single transaction.

This seems extremely unlikely, since processing a transaction means transmitting a few hundred bytes and doing doing some simple cryptography and database lookups.

Now, I don't know how much energy a single credit card transaction uses, but given the transaction fees that processing companies charge, I'm willing to bet that it's far, far less than $35 worth.

Yet for some reason you think this logic doesn't apply to Bitcoin transactions.

7000 people will die of the influenza in Liberia this year. That's nearly ten times the number of people that have died from Ebola.

Which is why things like Swine Flu get worldwide attention.

I know you've seen a lot of scary made-for-TV movies and what-not,

An argument from condescension? How very logical of you.

but despite that, there is no disease that can penetrate a hazmat suit.

That depends on the specifics of the hazmat suit in question, of course. Even airtight with its own supply isn't necessarily good enough since you might be contaminated when taking it off. And most are far from airtight, since that basically cripples you - apart from the bulk, you can't sweat.

Period.

Spelling out "Period" simply signals your argument didn't sound convincing on its own, even to you.

If my wife contracted this, I'd put on the suit and go right in and give her a hug. There would be absolutely no risk to me. None, zero, nadda.

Well then, the medical professional talked about in this article must have been a fool then, and treated his patients without this foolproof hazmat suit of yours.

Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold Election Systems, was a top fund-raiser for George Bush in 2004. He wrote in a fund-raising memo that "he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." He did.

Why not? For the purposes of the argument being made with respect to the UK market, they were both in the same boat.

Besides which, there were two versions of the Spectrum when originally released; the aforementioned 16K model, and an otherwise identical 48K model. The 16K spec was rendered increasingly irrelevant as time went on and the 48K version became the de facto "base model" required for Spectrum games.

Still wasn't as good a machine overall as the C64 (BASIC and faster CPU aside), but that's neither here nor there.

governments come and go, just ask the ottomans

That's nobody's business but the Turks.

Assuming a company's only aim is to make money, then whatever happens to their products after they die is essentially irrelevant in that respect. (*)

Of course, I'm sure that there are those working within a company (more likely to be in engineering and development) that feel otherwise. But ultimately this will be overridden by those in sales, marketing et al, unless it offers a clear benefit to the company.

Yes, some companies will offer well-backed guarantees or promises about what happens with respect to various things should they go under (e.g. release of source code). But even that is ultimately a means to attract more paying customers- by providing a level of certainty that is valuable to them- while the company is still in existence.

(*) Unless, of course, those in power have a conflict of interest and something to gain from the company's demise.