What with April 1st and so on... Anyways, tomorrow I will be in Prague, and will propose the job offer to the Golem. He's been jobless for centuries now.

Rob, both you and the other slashtards here have a point. You sound credible enough in pointing out that inserting this item as an ad would go against your ( journalistic ) ethics. The other users, however, are not without a point in remarking the ad- or plug-like quality of the item. And yes, you are right: I sit here in Central Europe, reading this, and my brain cells start humming : "this might be a business opportunity.... tight-budget government agencies in eastern europe.... hmmm".

with eSATA, USB 3.0, FireWire 800, HDMI, DVI, RJ45, RJ11 and Thunderbolt ports ? With a 40-year upgrade plan for future interface types ?

Absolutely agree. This guy could earn good money as a Linux guru.

I dunno, for a Britisch chancellor to say that in 2014... I dunno.

Lamport wrote the paper "Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in Distributed Systems", one of the papers that stayed with me and influenced me most, during a career of slightly over 19 years now. For that paper alone he merits an award.

merits an engineering prize.

You go to secondary school, so you are pretty young. Good that you took a stance. Good you made a /. post out of the story. Carry on, lad, you'll go a long way.

Second that. Learn anything you can about Linux, and - beyond that - about *at least* one of the other Unices: Solaris... Learn a *real* OS inside out. It will serve(r) you well into your 60s.

are you going to abandon CVS ? I mean, even in the fairly conservative environment where *I* work, CVS is considered a dinosaur. Mercurial ? Subversion ? Git ? C'mon, man !

jdk 1.8, apache maven, ant. Also: git, emacs, netbeans. Can't survive a day without those 6.

In / on a US market, you are fully liable not only for what you do, but also for the consequences, even if and when unintended or unforeseen, of what you do. Or say.

At the institution where I currently work, AIT / Austrian Institute of Technology, in 2013 I started ( believe it or not ) the first fully-FOSS project in the 45+ year history of the institute: ubicity, a social media aggregator. Although senior management applauded the initiative in the beginning, and although the thing was nothing short of a sheer success, fear crept up soon after: people did not know how to deal with it, especially not the many elder guys ( "elder" here meaning: "close to retirement and not willing to learn anymore" ). Result: in spite of resounding success, my contract got terminated. I do not mourn about it, having found a very nice contract through which I can further develop ubicity.

Question: have you seen this pattern before, and how do you interpret it ?