I never said one should port to all platforms and architectures. There's a balance and that is mostly to do with the resources a software project or individual has. For example, I dropped Sparc64 support in MidnightBSD because I don't have the time to maintain it. It also took 2 weeks to build packages on my two sparc systems.

I would argue that things don't just compile on FreeBSD. In fact, if you change the uname to something else, many things don't work. There are a lot of FreeBSD specific hacks in source code from many popular projects.

I would know since I have to deal with it all the time in my BSD project.

Ironically, OpenBSD is one of the projects that supports a lot of crusty old architectures using the logic that it helps them find bugs.

This logic is often used by Linux people not to support *BSD. I don't agree with the crusty old platform argument.

I'm sorry but I don't buy this. Microsoft broke Windows 8.1's installer so bad that if you had a mouse driver installed for a gamer mouse, it would BSOD and die.

Mouse drivers are incompatible between 8.0 and 8.1! I haven't had a mouse problem since windows 3.1 to 95 update.

I think Microsoft has some quality control issues.

Many people don't like launchd on OS X either. It uses XML configuration files and you get a hurd of apps spinning and waiting for resources. It's very easy to botch writing a good startup script.

The real issue is that systemd is a non compatible, poorly licensed solution and it intentionally is incompatible with every other unix system. If we're going to replace init with something else, it should be possible to actually run on more than one unix like operating system. There have been poor attempts to port launchd to FreeBSD for example. Nice in theory, but even that license isn't "good" with some folks. It also has a lot of depends on core foundation.

I actually think it makes sense to combine the jobs of init and cron because they have obvious overlap. However, making a kitchen sink kind of daemon that runs as root has obvious security implications.

The best possible solution is to come up with a daemon that can be used by several unix like operating systems so that scripts are compatible and things just work. The linux community will replace systemd and dbus in a few years because that's what they do. The rest of us have to live with these decisions for some time.

Yes, he does. How is it different than using a site like stack overflow?

I second this. As a software developer, I deal with weird issues with vendor products I have to support and extend. I've had great luck communicating with their product support folks via twitter. It literally saves hours waiting for email responses.

We also use Google Plus to communicate at work through a private community. It's actually scheduled to replace a good part of our current intranet site. It's been a lot quicker for us to just use that rather than maintain the custom solution we were using. We also can search it effectively and the teams have been good about tracking it as we use a full google stack at work (Gmail, drive, etc) so they get the notifications regularly.

Like any tools, it depends on how you use them.

You can do dynamic updates with BIND or windows DNS. There are perl modules to do it or you can run one of several possible command line utilities to update the ip address.

When I was still in college, I had a cluster of machines that I used for building packages for my BSD project. They were behind a NAT, but I had SSH access to them only they were also on DHCP. I setup a script that ran periodically on them to send their current IP address to a public facing website I ran and logged the IP to a mysql database. Then I had another process that would update the dns record securely after some sanity checking if the IP changed. I didn't want the nodes to have the update key for my DNS server and that's why I went through the crazy intermediate script + database.

This doesn't help him. He wants windows firewall or norton internet security level of firewall (but for linux) for his own computer.

I'm a huge fan of pfSense, but it's not a desktop OS.

Honestly, I think the OP needs to realize that even today, Linux requires a little command line foo. Look at the official ubuntu documentation and turn on the firewall. Blocking incoming traffic is sufficient on Linux most of the time. There's much less malware that will connect out and cause harm.

See https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/... if you want to get into some gritty details. This is the server guide, they may have a more user friendly desktop guide, but it should still be useful.

It depends. I just had to replace the motherboard, processor and RAM in my desktop recently and while I had to reactive windows, windows 8 was able to do it without a full reinstall. This was an AMD to Intel switch too.

It probably wasn't as clean as a fresh install, but it worked fine.

This should have been part of 8.1 from the beginning. I just got used to the start screen and now it's going back?

This should be 8.2 or 9.0 instead of a patch against 8.1.

I thought there was no value in computer science theory when I was younger. Once you go through the experience, it changes how you look at problems and it does impact your code quality. There is a big difference between writing software that works and writing well designed, maintainable software. That's what you get out of college. Learning to code is on you either way.

I started in technical support at a small ISP. I worked up to sysadmin and worked various IT related jobs while I got my degree in Computer Science. I did try to land programming jobs and aside from some small business website consulting, I never had much luck at it.

Your situation is different than mine because of location. I live in the US. However, my experience is that you get filtered out unless you have a lot of experience programming when another candidate has a degree. I've even had a few cases where masters degrees blocked my job opportunities although that is much more rare.

If possible, I strongly recommend you get a degree and if you can't do that, get some certificates.

Funny, but I changed from an AMD Phenom II X6 1090t to an Intel Core i7 4770 because the motherboard went bad. I find that the Intel does a lot better for the work I do, web app development, operating system development and gaming.

The real point is that AMD has nothing for power users. If you want to be cheap and go sub $200 for your CPU, AMD is great. If you want real power, AMD can't help you. They just don't care about power users anymore. The only line I can even look at on the desktop side is the FX series and it's horribly slow for gaming and compiling 2200 software packages. (I do that all the time)

AMD is happy with the little people but that strategy only works for a generation. Without a performance part, they won't have anything to sell in a few Intel release cycles.

A kindle fire can run apps. It just can't connect to Google's app store. I have a bunch of apps on mine including games, word processor, weather and news apps, etc.