. If Apple and Google want to make things friendlier out there for developers, they might consider stricter enforcement policies for the blatant rip-offs filling their digital storefronts.

It took a lawsuit for Atari to kill KC Munchkin ... and even then they only won on appeal : http://www.mathpirate.net/log/...

If KC Munchkin was a rip-off of Pac Man, then every first person shooter is a rip-off of Wolf 3D. (which might've been a rip-off of Space Simulation).

Don't get me wrong -- there needs to be something done about people making crappy games and tricking people into buying it (eg, The War Z), but once in a while, someone makes a *better* game that's similar to something that already exists (eg, Arkanoid vs. Break Out).

It's a very typical practice to have insane requirements that just aren't practical for jobs you have no intention of locally sourcing. Spend 10 minutes on a major job board and you'll find them. It will be like 6+ years experience in a product that's only been out for 6 or 7 years. They'll want someone that's an expert on three or four unrelated things that it's just not likely someone WILL be an expert on all of them -- expert in Java, SAN and Networking with 8+ years project management experience. They will post someone with CCIE level experience and be asking for someone at a CCNA level salary.

I've noticed you'll find this behavior often in older public companies that have exhausted their market growth through saturation and have made every reasonable efficiency improvement they can make without hitting salaries and cutting workforce. This is the last step of the constant drive for greater profits to appease shareholders.

Being in one of these companies at this transition period is not particularly pleasant and there's a better than good chance you'll get axed either on the front-end as they find a way to outsource your job or on the back-end as they prep the company to look more attractive to a potential buyer or after an acquisition and your job is marked as duplicate because someone from the other company is working for less and will get saddled with your work load.

I've worked places where 1/2 the time was spent doing the 'other duties as assigned' ... and some of 'em really sucked. (paperwork ... ick)

Think about it -- an undergrad degree is about you willing to spend 4 potentially productive years to get a sheet of paper. (and in my case, that's all it was ... as they neglected to flag in their computer system that I had graduated, so 7 years later, when I needed a transcript, I had to spend many months and threaten to sue to get them to mark me as having graduated).

If you want to do only the things that you enjoy doing ... start your own business, and be successful enough that you can hire someone to do the stuff you don't want to do. And that doesn't require having a degree. The degree is just so that you have a sheet of paper from some group vouching that you have some minimal set of skills to be a productive employee.

I wasn't a comp-sci major, so I don't know how common they are in that field ... but in engineering, you typically have a freshman class that's referred to as the 'weed-out' class.

It's not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be damned hard, so they can see who's got the fortitude to stick with it.

Not all of life is going to be a cakewalk -- there are going to be times when you really have to knuckle down and study, and it's often better to get it over with early on than spend 3 years towards the degree and then find out that you can't cut it.

Mine's got a wireless charging pad in it.

Of course, it's running WebOS, which lets me set up security such that I can require confirmation before an app's allowed to use certain features (eg, GPS), rather than just giving it a blanket 'you're allowed to use GPS whenever you want to'.

The drawback is that I don't have nearly as many apps available to use, being that it's WebOS. (I still blame those horrible Palm Pre commercials with the stoned albino -- why they didn't bother showing that it supported multitasking and copy & paste way before iOS, I have no clue)

My thought exactly ...

"Oh, no! The item we built is starting to fail after it's had 40 times the planned usage!"

That's not a poor design choice ... that's a *fantastic* problem to be having.

The point of Docker and containers in general is that they are running at basically native performance. There is no vm, no virtualized OS, you run under the main OS kernel, but it don't let you see the main OS filesystem, network, processes and so on, and don't let you do operations risky for the stability of the main system. There is some overhead in the filesystem access (in the case of docker, you may be running on AUFS, device mapper, or others that will have different kind of impact in several operations), but still is a far cry from VMs using a filesystem on a file of the main system with its own filesystem driver.

I have Psensor installed, and that is absolutely a cause of multiple disasters.

However, I suspect that if Munich goes back to Windows after more than 10 years of Linux, there will be a lot of angry users - even if they retain Libre, Word is not great in German anyway.

I am not sure if your are a troll or just stupid or ignorant. Libre and Open are WAY ahead of MS Word on this feature. It is far more stable and easier to use.

If people have trouble readng the docs with Word, tell them to download Libre - its free. It is Word that is an inconsistent, unstable (from version to version) POS, and it is DOCX that is poorly defined. If you want to share, you should be using internationally standard format for your documents, which works even with Word, not some unstable proprietry format. If you use a proprietry format as a government, you probably ought to be investigated for corruption (yes I know stupidity is the most likely explanantion).

I give you "calc" is wierd and lacking in the graphing area, but Writer is WAY better than Word and has been since version 4 got stable.

I like your planet - can I live on it too?

However, in Europe, who knows?

There is a reasonable chance a significant portion of the West African population has some degree of immunity. There is NO chance the same is true of Europeans - It may well turn out like when the Spanish invaded South America. - or plague in Europe in 14th century.

Sure we might be better prepared, but with incubation of 20 days or so, who did you shake hands with three weeks ago? Come on, make a list - we need to interrogate them NOW!

I have no intention of listening to it just to find out! However, I suspect that most of the population of West Africa do not actually understand the words of rap music anyway. Perhaps Afrobeat or Highlife would work better?

Really? Do tell us about all the governments that would rather have Iran or North Korea in charge of ICANN. Please :)