I was talking with a fairly large group of tech-savvy friends here in Austin the other day, and it was nearly unanimous - the last thing we ever want is another damn app to download, constantly whine for updating, and try to find among the other 200 crap apps on our phones or tablets. We coined this rising level of disgust "App Fatigue"...

Web apps could conceivably be a decent alternative, but only if someone gives me Settings option checkboxes labelled,

[ ] Never, ever, show me the crippled mobile version of any website at all, as long as I live., (preferred) or maybe,

[ ] Always lie to web servers so they think this is a desktop computer with a real browser. Because it's more powerful than my desktop computer, and has a real browser.

And you waste a load of shotgun shells that are going to be extremely valuable in the post apocalypse.

Yes it does. I just downloaded a copy of Gnu Readline. I want to use it as in my new proprietary application that will make me $$$$$. Does the licence restrict me from using it in that way? Yes. That is by design and I do not criticise the developers for making that decision.

That is also by design and I do not criticise Apple for making that choice.

Two reasons:

The idea that many eyes make all bugs shallow is a myth. Even most programmers don't bother auditing the open source code they download. I bet most of them don't really look beyond the API documentation.

Also, OpenSSL is one of the worst code bases you'll ever set eyes on. It's poorly documented and so complex, it'll make your eyes bleed.

Yet again, C's non-existent bounds checking and completely unprotected memory access lets an attacker compromise the system with data.

But hey, it's faster.

Despite car companies complaining loudly that if people just drove better there would be no accidents, laws were eventually changed to require seatbelts and airbags because humans are humans and accidents are inevitable.

Because C makes it trivially easy to stomp all over memory we are guaranteed that even the best programmers using the best practices and tools will still churn out the occasional buffer overflow, information disclosure, stack smash, or etc.

Only the smallest core of the OS should use unmanaged code with direct memory access. Everything else, including the vast majority of the kernel, all drivers, all libraries, all user programs should use managed memory. Singularity proved that was perfectly workable. I don't care if the language is C#, Rust, or whatever else. How many more times do we have to get burned before we make the move?

As long as all our personal information relies on really smart people who never make mistakes, we're doomed.

^^ This.

Add a bit of OCR software and you have a system that can both be read by humans without the aid of special software and by computers to produce textual output with a bit of special software (you need a bit of special software anyway for QR codes, so you don't lose anything).

Eich was not fired. He chose to resign. Maybe he did so because he cares about the foundation and didn't want to be a distraction. Maybe he was told he'd better resign or they would lose their funding and have to lay everyone off. We don't know, but the insinuations of the original story are out of line for implying so. The truth is we just don't know.

This isn't some free speech issue or some form of inquisition trying to purge the unbelievers.

Eich chose to wade into a controversial issue by making political donations (after all, a conservative majority of SCOTUS claims money == speech). Those "free speech" statements offended a bunch of people and he chose to resign rather than drag the non-profit Mozilla foundation through an ordeal over it.

Anyone in a leadership position is certainly free to make any statements or support any political cause they want. Employees, customers/donors, etc are also free to loudly complain or refuse to associate with the organization if they disagree. That comes with the territory. We wouldn't give Eich a pass if he were sending checks to neo-Nazi organizations. A leader always takes a risk that they'll piss people off by taking a stance. He was CTO of Mozilla at the time, he knew what the consequences could be and made the donation anyway.

A few decades ago it was accepted that blacks and whites shouldn't intermarry. Even some people who campaigned for civil rights still held such a view. If Eich were donating to a group promoting a constitutional amendment to outlaw interracial marriages almost none of you would be wringing your hands over free speech. Everyone would laugh at him for being a dumbass and move on with their lives.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Even if someone faces no offical sanctions for speaking out, they can certainly be excluded socially, even to the point of being driven out of the organization. That's how human group dynamics have always worked since we were grunting at each other and throwing pointy sticks.

Furthermore, technology has always been intertwined with personalities, politics, and the like. Only very rarely is it always 100% about the pure technology. You can write the best code in the world but if you can't play nice with others you run the risk of your code languishing in obscurity.

Social norms are changing; you can change with them, you can keep your mouth shut about it, or you can fight for the status quo. Each of those courses of action has risk associated with them. Eich chose to fight for the status quo, then chose to stick by his guns when it pissed a lot of people off, including a lot of the very people his organization depends on to contribute money and code from their own good will! That has consequences and it always has.

Linus is generally fair from what I can tell, and does not except himself from criticism. In that very thread:

Someone proposed a better idea and Linus immediately admits his idea was worse and moves on. That was also one of Steve Jobs' greatest talents, even though it's in a completely different sphere. He originally said "no" to iPods for Windows and the iOS app store. People presented their case and he changed his mind.

We should all be so willing to admit when someone else has a better idea or we were wrong.

They also open-sourced their new C# compiler:

http://roslyn.codeplex.com/

Bitcoin transactions will not be free in the long term. Once all the bit coins are mined, the people verifying the transactions will have to charge a fee unless they are using a bot net.

I keep hearing the "git is better than svn at handling conflicts" meme, but of course neither handles conflicts at all. A conflict is a file where the tool can't figure out how to merge two versions and therefore has to offload it to a human.

I've also heard on the Internet that git is better than svn at doing merges, but everybody I know who has used both git and svn in real production environments says the opposite.

In my company we use svn. I did consider moving us to git or - more likely - Mercurial (the hg user interface is more similar to svn so that would make the transition easier), but I found out that it is really easy to make a directory both an svn working copy and a git/hg repository just by using setting ignore properties so I can do local commits and still have a central svn repo.

Ah, the arguments of the willfully ignorant. I wish I were still a conservative. No nuances, no questions. Everything had a trite simple answer.

Reality does not so neatly fit into a box.

House fires happen rapidly. They are also largely preventable. And even though one person's house fire may be a tragedy, pouring water on it puts out the fire. (Remember kids: the fire department exists to prevent your house fire from burning down the rest of the city, not to save your house)

Mudslides, like earthquakes, are triggered by complex conditions that are not knowable by humans in advance (with any degree of certainty). They also cannot be prevented or controlled. There is no "Mudslide Department" because there is no response. By the time you find out about it, the mudslide is over and the damage is done.

This case is very simple to explain: no one wants to be the person who "wastes" taxpayer dollars buying out homeowners and tearing down houses when the potential disaster can strike anywhere between tomorrow and 50 years from now. So county officials, housing developers, and maybe to some degree homeowners all chose to ignore the report and get on with their lives. That works great, right up until the moment when everyone died.

If you call 1997 new, then yes it was new. Except that egcs was based on a gcc snapshot.

Correct. The huge, gaping security flaw with Android is the same one that afflicted ActiveX in Internet Explorer: Assuming that the majority of users
a) have a clue what any of the permissions actually mean
b) can trust the app not to abuse the permissions it has (or contain flaws that allow it to be hijacked)

The reality is that 100% (rounding up from normal people to geeks) of people simply tap accept, click OK, etc and move on with their lives. Those annoying dialogs are just how you use phones/computers. They've learned if they choose Cancel they don't get the game/app they wanted, so the correct course of action is to always accept.

Any security decision that relies on users to take the correct course of action is an automatic failure. If making the wrong choice results in being pwned, having a $10/mo premium SMS subscription added to your bill, etc then the system is badly designed and broken.

As a matter of viewpoint, I see this quite differently.

I think science didn't actually reject the various religious ideas. They all get tolerated. They've all been tested. There's contrarian data.

I don't find it discriminatory to give something a chance, then learn from detail that it isn't correct.

I think science is actually wildly tolerant of bizarre ideas.