Not just startups run by kids. Be wary of companies run "like startups" who want to be all kinds of agile by exclusively hiring people who have started but not finished a CS degree because those people are supposedly both experienced (because all CS students are experts in all things computer) and extremely creative (because people over 25 can't keep up). Experience is considered problematic as apparently it translates into higher salaries but not higher skill.

I work in such a hellhole (well, until I'm done with my degree) and the sheer amount of stupid mistakes we're making because nobody has any kind of experience is mindboggling and is the reason why the company has been in damage control mode since 2010. The kicker? The owner of the company is in his 50s. He's still convinced that only CS students can ever be reasonable employees in the IT world.

Not just young bosses can be stupid about hiring.

What's keeping Kickstarter from recouping the lost money from the creator? I haven't read the fine print of the deal between Kickstarter and a creator but I'd be surprised if it didn't contain a clause that allowed them to do exactly that.

Crowdfunding is a bit of a gamble. I've backed a few projects that are massively overdue. On the other hand I also backed Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2, both of which are here and immensely enjoyable. And a high-efficiency LED bulb I'd buy again if I needed another one. Aside from Kickstarter I bought myself into the Path of Exile closed beta and PoE became a succesful and very fun game that I spent a lot of time with.

Of course there are some wasted Euros in there. I'm not going to deny that. And I'm still waiting for a few promising-looking games, although at least I get status reports every once in a while. One semi-example for a failed Kickstarter would be Preaching to the Perverted; while the Blu-Ray version works fine and looks great, the promised digital download first turned into an iOS app (I don't own a recent iDevice) and then had to be redone from scratch because Apple wouldn't allow it on their store. If I remember correctly it's still being worked on.

You have to accept that it's always going to be hit-and-miss with crowdfunding. Sometimes you get a polished, fun product that will leave you entirely content with how much money you spent to obtain it. Sometimes you get something disappointing or the project folds due to mismanagement. In my experience the former is more common (even if time overruns are the norm), especially if it's a high-profile project. But it's still a gamble and it's up to you to decide whether you're willing to take it.

The gist of it is that a terrible and untouchable community manager managed to get several backers to a point where they felt that the only effective way to protest a community management issue was to financially hurt the developers. You can find the details online; a search for "mighty number 9 chargebacks" should bring up relevant stories. There's a dash of Gamergate towards the end but it's only tangentially related to the core issue.

NeXT didn't close up shop, they were bought by Apple. Then they replaced several of Apple's top execs (including the CEO) with their own and used NeXTSTEP as the foundation for the new MacOS. In essence, NeXT bought Apple for minus 400 million Dollars.

You are painting with broad strokes. By the same measure one could argue that guns have pretty much one use: Accelerating bullets. The kinds of targets the bullets can be accelerated towards are varied, one of which is murder victims. There is considerable societal interest in regulating guns' use in bullet acceleration leading to the production of murder victims.

You conflated all chemical reactions with bomb making, which does not make much sense, just like my conflation of all gun use with murder doesn't.

Also, by your logic, hydrocarbon fuels should be severely restricted because they can be used to make ANFO. Also vegetable oil because you can use that for ANFO, too. Or you leave the ammonium nitrate away and just build a fuel-air bomb. Society has interest in regulating the production of those, too. And let's not forget that electricity can be used to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can also be used as an explosive. Access to electricity should be regulated as well.

Or we agree that just because something can potentially be used for actions that are against the interests of society we can't assume that this is a particularly common use.

No, only lawmakers. A chemist would just look at what you're trying to do, say "yup, he's probably not going to kill himself" and move on. Chemists can be unnervingly casual around fairly dangerous chemicals because they can gauge the actual danger involved.

Of course when the chemist does become nervous, so should you.

When mainboards came with AC’97 that was good enough to deliver high-qualify 5.1 sound people stopped buying sound cards because the onboard sound was on par with them and came free with the mainboard. Plius, we still had the option to go for a sound card if we disliked the onboard sound or if it broke.

When mainboards came with onboard Fast Ethernet people stopped buying discrete NICs because, again, the onboard sound was on par and free. Plus, we still had the optiom to get a discrete NIC or two.

When mainboards came with onboard modems Well, I have no idea; we only got internet in the ISDN age. But, again, discrete modems continued to be available.

But the same things don’t apply to RAM and mass storage. The new MBPs don’t ship with terabyte SSDs for free so for people who expect to store large amounts of data directly on their computer the default offering is not on par. One could choose the BTO option for more storage but Apple’s prices are way above market average and they don’t even offer the choice of an HDD in a new MBP. So people complain because now they get less capability than before with no reasonable upgrade strategy. There would be no complaining if the baseline MBP had a terabyte SSD onboard or if one could pop it open and mount an HDD in there.

Likewise with the soldered-on RAM. Previously one would buy the MBP with the smallest RAM package available and then upgrade with third-party modules because, again, Apple’s prices are ridiculous. Not only that; it was possible to buy the machine and then later upgrade the RAM. This was useful if one didn’t have the money to purchase the machine and the RAM at the same time. No longer possible; RAM is non-upgradable now and if it breaks you have no option besides sending the entire computer in for repairs.

I’m talking about MBPs because they saw a big change recently but the same applies to other Macs. While treating ones computer as a disposable tool might be fine for the average user it’s not acceptable for those of us who do know their stuff. Not quite coincidentally, those are often the people who need a workhorse computer instead of something that can browse the web and play back fullscreen video.

I used to consider MacBook Pros to be no-brainer purchases. They looked good, had user-serviceable innards (at least those parts you’d reasonably expect a notebook to have) and came with OS X, which I like. These days I still like OS X but I don’t like the machines it comes on.

My next Mac will probably be a Thinkpad. Those things tend to make good Hackintoshes and don’t suffer from an anorexic design department.

I'm not saying that Windows is going to drop off the market; I just think that it won't be the only choice anymore.

Now if you'll excuse me; Steam just finished downloading Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on my Mac.

To be honest, Windows is no longer the big name in gaming platforms, Steam is. And Valve is pushing for game devs to move away from Windows-exclusive games so they can sell their Linux-based Steam Machines. While Linux support isn’t quite common yet it does pop up every now and then and OS X is actually seeing a fair number of high-profile releases.

Right now Windows might hold its dominance in the video game market but whether it’ll still be the obvious choice in a few years is not settled. (For instance, I have no idea what effect Microsoft’s rumored plans for a free baseline Windows with subscription addons would have - depending on how they'd play it it might make Windows more attractive to gamers or it might scare them off. We’ll see.)

The only issue I see with this being part of systemd is that this probably means you need to run systemd in order to get virtual terminals (because of internal dependencies). This might be bad for small embedded distros that don't want to run the whole systemd stack. Perhaps things like systemd-shim will work, in which case it might not be too painful, but otherwise the distro might have to lug around relatively heavy components in order to get virtual terminals.

As far as I can tell the systemd devs seem to want to optimize Linux for a number of use cases while declaring all use cases that stand to lose as irrelevant. A lot of people are unhappy about this, thus the hate. Well, and their attitude.

The basic idea (replacing the old VT code with something new and better) seems fine; the only problem is that it's yet another component that will be integrated with systemd. If the old VT code is completely deprecated in favor of systemd-consoled that means that yet another part of the Linux world has dependencies on systemd.

While that may be fine if you run the kind of system systemd expects, it's problematic if you want to use, say, an embedded system built around uclibc instead of glibc. To my knowledge, systemd still refuses to incorporate libc compatibility patches and thus won't run unless you use their preferred libc flavor. Trying to make your embeddded Linux distro work without systemd will mean that you either have to write and maintain your own console daemon or live without virtual terminals. Or, of course, you can move to glibc and systemd, even if your distro would be better served by lighter alternatives.

I think that the systemd subprojects would be more popular if they were less dependent on each other... and if the developers had less of a "my way of the highway" attitude.

On the other hand, Amazon is the king of "you recently bought a new computer so we figured you'd be interesting in buying more new computers. Have some ads". It's baffling how Amazon will send you mails advertising the exact same kind of thing you just bought after you purchased something. Sure, for things like media it kinda makes sense but for other things it really doesn't.

Wait, someone actually got angry over Free? My anime-savvy friends just shrugged and said: "Hey, fanservice for women." And that was their entire reaction - it's just the kind of blatant fanservice Japan already produces by the truckload aimed at people who find men attractive. News at eleven.

But I guess people can get angry over everything. (Interestingly, as far as Twilight is concerned, I've heard more complaints about how much of an object the protagonist is than about the slightly less two-dimensional guys she deals with.)