"and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3"

I was already well in my coding years when it came out. Seen it, used it, only thing I can say about it is good riddance. Would I care to elaborate? Not really. The only point of view from which the whole topic is somewhat interesting [for me] is software history. Oh, maybe a little bit of nostalgia of childhood comes attached, but with not much connection with Win3. Anyway, I'm not missing crap just because of some "good old times" feeling. They had to start somewhere, but I'm not sad it's long gone.

"the cost of maintaining any body of code over time is in maintenance"

No, really? The cost of maintaining is in maintenance? Well, now that's some earth shattering surprise.

Anyway, the intention was probably to say that maintaining is more costly than creating. However, since it says "any body of code" I'll just call it the deepest bullcrap. I've seen and heard lots of people talking out of their behinds over the years dismissing the effort going into creating some really nice algorithms and realizing them in applicable and useful code, simply thinking about the whole process as "coding" which is usually the easiest part. Also, maintenance costs a lot mostly when the coder monkeys hacking the code together were crap in the first place. Just stop paying outrageous amounts of money to idiots who put together unmaintainable code and then leave to another company to do this again and again, and by the time their code needs "maintenance" they're already gone and couldn't care less.

"Witeboards are racist. So are blackboards"

Well, in all the schools I've attended, the boards' colors were either green or black, and they were always called ...(wait for it)...boards, oh the surprise :)

Anyway, the starting post is BS. Boards (of any color :) ) are extremely helpful and useful. That doesn't mean they have to be 'analog', I've seen quite nice digital boards as well.

"I would go see ANY movie with Charlize Theron scampering about in leather."

Finally, the first comment that is worth replying to. I couldn't care less about the real or implied or forced or intended or unintended or inexistent or whatever message of a movie, I'd still go see it if Charlize Theron was in it (well, if she was still a woman and was played by herself, that is).

I'm getting really tired of such sexism-rerated blurbs. I'm tired of hearing and reading about some people's ideas about how to force an increase in the number of women in politics, in academia, wherever. I'm tired of these ideas mostly because most of them feel themselves forced, and very often drop over to the other side of overly positive discrimination horse. I'm tired of them, because most of them don't contribute and are worthless, or simply disregard the real world, trying to envision some half-assed gender-neutral utopia. All stupid crap.

I've spent now more than a decade in academia, and I've always had women colleagues, during msc, during phd, after phd. Not many, naturally (fairly typical CS/IT ratios), and even today from the 9 senior (young postdocs and "older" postdocs) in our lab onyl 2 are women - which I think is a fairly average ratio in our field. None of my earlier or current female colleaues/coworkers had such negative experiences as the blog post is about. That doesn't mean others didn't, but sometimes I have the feeling such stories are a bit overreacting and over-generalizing.

Personally, I wouldn't mind to see more women in scientific fields, but I couldn't care less if there weren't any either. I just never thought about such numbers as ratios as being an issue. It certainly never occurred to me - or anyone I've ever spoke about such topics - that women couldn't perform in our field, since I know from experience that they can, furthermore, most women I know - personally or because of their results and publications - in our field are really exceptional in their areas, very many of them are much better than me or some of my colleagues :)) And the ones I do know personally always seemed to be really motivated, since they want to show they can do more and better. Which, while is nice, it's really unnecessary, nobody I know would think they are inferior. Also, performance&results are important, gender is not.

So, tl;dr, sexism and gender issues: don't care.

Well, I might be alone with this opinion, but I really do like Spotify, and if they'd raise their yearly subscription fees with a few (I do mean a few) bucks, I wouldn't mind very much. I generally don't mind paying for stuff I like.

"- Comes with a mini IDE called PowerShell ISE for developing scripts"

No. A shell that has an IDE to aid formulating godforsaken scripts that mere mortals can't even remember. Just no.

"Zug, a student at the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, argues that a centerfold does not belong in the classroom"

So, I always knew the average american to be fairly prude - well, unless they are tweeting their nude behinds on a daily basis, 'cause that doesn't count, obviously - but this is crazy nuts. I've been in image processing research for the 15th year now, and Lena's face was among the very first test images I've ever saw. It was about 2 years later I found out where it's coming from, I smiled a bit, and went on with my work. As did hundreds and thousands of other image processing students before ad after me.

Well, until the the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology came along, 'cause well, there we can't tolerate such heresy. Heresy, I tell you! This just can't be! How dare one use the image of anice face as a test image, for decades nonetheless. Outrage, man, outrage.

Well, [most] idiots are funny :)

Well, one thing should be quite clear: for factual historical information you do not turn to the media, and I say in this case Google qualifies. You read and you ask the proper people, and you learn. You can't argue or discuss about a topic (*) if your knowledge base comes solely from the internet - well, you can, but you won't ever be taken seriously, and rightfully so.

(*) Of course we're not talking about hardware reviews or celeb gossips...

I've never, ever in my part of life connected in any way to computers have I seen an Acer product that would've jumped over my quality threshold. I've never bought any of their products, but I've seen enough to know I made a good choice. Their Predator is no less disturbing - anyone (well, not anyone, ...) can put together PC parts, but it would be really an impossible task to find a worse PC case than they've built their parts into. Anyway, if they think they'll be the last to go, then I really hope I won't live to see it.

"features that I would like to find in a service: respectful of user rights, ad-free, built upon open source software, and with auditable results"

Well, well, well. For me there's only one single feature of a search engine that makes it a go or a no-go: have a damn good indexing engine that can provide relevant results in a timely manner. Everything else is just a load of crap that I will never care about. If I can't find what I'm looking for, that I couldn't care less how it protects your rights or whether it is open source or not. Oh yeah, about that auditability... forget that. I don't want to find what other people think I should find, I want to find the best match for my queries. That said, good look, develop away, maybe you'll indeed make a better indexer and ranker than Google's and we'll be all better off.

"Visible global filesystem on a phone always seemed like a gee-whiz feature that wasn't really justified. Frankly I think the visible global filesystem on personal computers isn't really justified, considering how many people just dump everything into ~/Documents and most productivity apps have their own bespoke document browser/organizer."

First: average users being ignorant doesn't mean what they do is OK, or acceptable for everyone.
Secondly: for crying out loud, how many times do we need to repeat that not everyone is in a constant consumer-only mode, and - surprise - not everyone is an idiot.
Third: I'm just simply too tired with the leagues of idiots thinking dumbing down everything to the point of frustration and sometimes sheer pain is the way to go.

I've been on planes landing in ridiculously high side-winds that I'd have a really hard time believing an autopilot could ever land safely, or for that matter, a human controlling the plane remotely - for the simple reason, that in these cases one needs to actually 'feel' how the plane reacts, and neither an autopilot, nor a remote joystick-operator can accomplish that. On a sidenote, there is no way in hell I'd trust hundreds on human lives to an autopilot built with technologies that we have today - what we call artificial intelligence, and what we have as machine learning are so far from such a thing, that it's not even funny. Unless we'll have R. Daneel Olivaw piloting that plane, I'm not boarding it :P

"The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips,"

No, not exactly. First, it's not the 'Internet', it's the search engines that give you that power. Secondly, just do a simple test and try 3-4 search engines to look for something more deep than names of celebrities and see what you get, if you don't submit the right query string. Nowadays some search engines are fairly good in 'guessing' what you mean, but most are a crapload of bonkers.

My point is no, Google doesn't make 'People Think They Are Smarter Than They Are', it's the smartass people who make themselves think they are smarter because they can eventually find something they are looking for.

" It all varies in quality, but it doesn't take much effort to find them."

But it does take much effort to watch them. While the intentions are laudable, quality is important. Even a good story can be mightily ruined by too simplistic rendition and/or unskilled acting and/or unskilled filming/camwork. And they usually are.