All successful 'open' and 'free' and 'democratic' systems (not just software) are run by a small dedicated old boys club.

Firewire, at least, was because of a huge user-base of FireWire video cameras and devices.

There was one model of MacBook where they took FW out, and because of user complaints it was back in the next generation.

> I figured I needed that for sure and bought a modem dongle but then found I never used it.

Same with my internal CD drive. I am no sooooo happy with an extra thin laptop because that drive is gone, and I use my exern one maybe 3 times per year. Mostly for CD's on magazines.

Few people use drives, SSD or not, that can sturate a USB bus NOW, but this could well change in the FUTURE which is why extra bandwidth gives some breathing room unless you want another standard in 5 years.

My normal gigabyte motherboard has a few thunderbolt ports on it

QNX. Sigh.

I wish every Google and Apple and Linux and Microsoft engineer will be forced to work with QNX for a week as a training session just to show them how things were supposed to be done. Same with BeOS.

I keep an old Thinkpad from 2000 around just to occasionally boot up BeOS on it and toy around a bit.

Polite? "Stupid people use Ruby?". How is that polite?

" Then we have less-smart people who use Ruby. They don't have the mental capacity or acuity to understand C++, so they see it as being complex."

Jesus, where shall I start?? Less smart people use Ruby??!!! Get real.

Ruby is very LISP like. The smartest programmers I know are into LISP, Clojure and Ruby because it allows you to construct large system by using meta-constructs at a much higher level. Seeing the forest for the trees and stuff.

Most C+ hackers I know can do lots of high-details low leave things because they are just too much control freaked to let the computer take over some of the details. And they achieve much less, however that what they achieve has higher performance, has higher speed and bloody well breaks all the time because the systems are too precisely optimized so any small disturbance causes a crash. Nightmare to work with too.

I do a lot of data logging and sensor work with scientific/engineering people, some who are very very bright. They all use Python, none use C++. It ain't because they are stupid, considering that about half have a PhD in physics.

Sorry but you are just a arrogant little nerd. Go and learn actual computer science, programming language design and software engineering on a systems level.
Hint: It's harder than low-level bitwhacking.

Is that why scp takes so long at the end? It really annoyed me today, had to transfer a file through two tunnels and a modem to Costa Rica. a 5 MB one, took forever.

Bullshit. It is a legacy thing, not a intentional incompatibility thing.

Apple basically bought OS/X from Next together with Job back in the previous century and Next was using Objective C back in the late 80's. All the Apple API's start with NS_. That stands for NextStep. Back ini the mists of time when the C++/Obj C choice was made Apple was not even involved (but Steve Jobs was). In those days a choice between C++ and Objective C was not clear cut, both languages were very new and untried. C++ only became important because Microsoft used it for their Windows API's.

Objective C compiles just fine on any platform, and Apple also uses C/C++ for much of their *NIX userland

Honestly, if Apple/Microsoft/Linus were to rewrite the entire operating system stack from scratch today I doubt that C/C++/Objective C would be used. Or at least someone would think about redesigning the languages. Momentum counts for a lot.

This. The Sykes-Picot Agreements were a bad idea and now, 100 years later, the world is paying. The fighting would have happened sooner or later in any case.

"Lost" and "Won" are very relative things when it comes to wars. The US bogged down and drained the communists in Vietnam. It did not achieve total military victory, no, but not did it did it lose the big-picture fight (the cold war) in the end either.

The heads of several other South East Asian states (Singapore, Malysia) have stated that US presence in Vietnam did state that US action in Vietnam did reduce communist influence. Eliminate, no. Reduce, yes. The US did win die Cold war without much of a shooting war too.

Wars do not have to end with military victory or loss. Nor do they have to be fought in the classic sense either. Witness peacekeeping forces in Africa. They do not (too often) get involved in shooting, nor is there much hope for something like total victory, but they do use the threat of force to limit more serious violence.

In the much larger context of the cold war the US intervention in Vietnam was something like this. A battle that showed other allies that the US was, in fact, prepared to put boots on the ground when it came down to it.

Last year I slipped on ice with my bike and broke my arm. Still hurts.
I was one the way do demo a software system to my boss. He said that usually the program crashes in a demo, not the programmer..

Seems like you took too long to type yipee there. Better luck next time. Try a few e's less maybe?

Intel was heavily invested in VLIW, and developed Itanium. That did not go well, and AMD brought out x64 and ate their lunch. Intel adopted AMD's instruction set and Itanium is basically dead now.