Well, while he's busy sitting on his "proprietary" meta compiler, here's a tool that uses XML to define a business application model and which can be used to produce any text-based language code you might desire. I'm focusing on building Java applications with it.

Unlike some people, I have no where near enough ego to "sit on it" until I "retire." I'd rather people gain whatever use they can as early as they can. Sure it's not perfect and it's not what *everyone* needs, but it works for what it does so far: six database products, a Java ORM, XML parsers, XML messaging for RPC-type behaviour, and I'm working on a prototype/demo Swing GUI right now.

So download http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net, play, have fun, try it out. No charge, no strings, no bullshit.

But most of all, no ego. I know I'm not "brilliant" or "innovative", just stubborn and persistent.

Sounds like a good deal. I did opt for a lot more options, tv card, wireless, dual burners, fairly high end card in its day etc., which ate up part of the balance. I know I could have built for a little less, but sometimes it is a matter of putting the risk on someone else, and how much your time is worth at the time. But either way, it shows it pays to buy quality. I'm using that computer right now, on my TV in the bed room :)

When you're SSHd into a *BSD based firewall in China, you can't just bring up some fancy autocompleting GUI editor. You'll get vi (not vim!) and like it.

The Onion had an article on the Ebola vaccine and said that it was only 50 deaths of white-people away. . .

Thank goodness, I was worried I wouldn't get my daily Elon Musk story from Memedot.

You probably should be sorry. The fastest Geodes are antiques (I have two of them right here, whee.)

How do you know how long it was "flat" before you noticed it?

They're not wasting, they're buying power. Also, whether or not the town is small is irrelevant, unless you're trolling.

Referencing the Daily Mail in an internet forum is the forum equivalent of a nuclear first strike.

Seriously, these guys lie like hell every day. Anything they publish is likely to be complete horseshit.

In this case the root reference for numbers of Chinese warheads over a couple of hundred is known to be an extremely unlikely rant by a Singaporean graduate student in a 1990's vintage Usenet message.

If you see someone citing a number like that either they are trying to foment alarm or are just asshats. In the case of the Daily Mail both are very likely.

Performance is comparable if we compare against Intel's lowest end CPU?

You're a bit late on that one. Pretty much everything is propaganda, and what's more, virtually all of it is fear-based; the remainder focuses on allaying fears, often reasonable ones. My favorite example is automotive advertising. As much as half of it is designed not directly to sell cars, but to make customers feel better about their purchases to try to induce repeat business "down the road", pun intended.

If it bleeds, it leads. Hope is not interesting to people who have more than they need.

So you're a one or two-issue kind of guy, huh? I find the problems you mention with the CLI pretty small when compared to:
- Being able to abbreviate commands (SEARCH to SEA, BACKUP to BACK, etc.)
- Having commands that abbreviate means the commands can make sense in English and still be truncated by experts for speed (e.g., no commands like "ls", "rm", "tar", "man")
- CLI integrates with system calls, so you can write quick scripts for web services or to obtain system information without doing SEARCHES (excuse me, I think that's "grep" in your world) on text dumps
- ISAM databases (RMS) can be created, designed, and updated from the CLI

ODS-5 only handles 2 TB volumes (or 2 TB files) right now, but I don't see why this can't be improved. It's slower because, besides not increasing the maximum size of volumes, HP didn't bother implementing the full XFC caching. It's clear they were preparing for this rundown for some time. Files-11 volumes have been the most robust I've ever worked with. I haven't seen anyone corrupt a file from an unexpected shutdown in 15 years, which I can't say for any other file system (although recent NTFS versions are close).

Yeah I'm sure the schoolkids and babies are also terrorists.

Just look at the kill ratio to see who is more dangerous to whom.