But if I'm using Bash, I obviously prefer a terminal anyways, and have no use for those fancy DE's. Obligatory "Now get off my lawn"

For OOP though, the terchniques are the same for C++, Java and C# so unless you want them to learn the C#/.NET specific parts (eg WPF, WCF, all the wizard generated bumpf) then or learn how to use Visual Studio, you might as well show them Java instead. The tooling should be better for your platform and I'm sure you can find better example code.

Well, if "MS doesn't make .NET for (his) platform", Visual Studio is totally out of the question. He's most likely on a *nix; so, he'd most likely go with something like MonoDevelop (GTK#) for an IDE and one of these may be chosen for a GUI toolkit (when he eventually gets to that): http://www.mono-project.com/Gui_Toolkits

If he wants to stick with Pascal, he could also consider Oxygene which also runs on top of the CLR/Mono. This has the advantage of using all the classes already available in Mono, but with a similar syntax.

Perhaps he doesn't understand what a niche market is. As for a Linux based gaming system, there are things like The Evo 2 from Envision: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Envizions-Evo-2/?kc=rss

I'm not going to say it's a realistic alternative to the current generation consoles, because it's most likely going to appeal to a similar niche market as the Uzebox (Note, the Fuzebox is a specific implementation of the Uzebox.)

*shrugs* I may not like it, but that's just how things are currently.

The part of the review I found to be quite funny was this line:

if the Department of Defense wanted to rip off a Windows theme to make their software seem familiar to their employees, why did they pick a look from fifteen years ago?

I guess the reviewer never tried IceWM before since it's looked pretty much exactly the same for about 10 years now.

MINIX 1 & 2 were teaching tools. MINIX 3, which is "loosely based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX," wants to not only be a teaching tool, but also be a serious option for small & embedded systems. Also, this new version of MINIX has only been in active development for about six years.

Anyways, I've rambled on enough. You can read more about it here: here and here

YES!

Which is exactly why you still see web apps that require IE6 and fail for pretty much anything else. They developed for a browser instead of the standard. It's sad that people still try to do this even though history has shown us it's bound to be extremely problematic.

You must be out of the loop: Intel and MeeGo. Hopefully this release will be well received and Intel will continue their work. Also note, all of the tablet developer preview in this release was totally Intel's doing.

I was referencing this sentence: "Sure, I could TRY to convince the company to switch to a completely different application that is incompatible with skype, just because I want to use Linux" Which is backwards because Skype is the incompatible one, not the other way around.

For anyone who actually cares about open standards, it is important to point out the distinction I made. I just perhaps was a bit too harsh on PARENA at the time.

With respect to PARENA, it does indeed look like he's quite knowledgeable (based on his reply to me), but used a slightly poor word choice IMO.

You misunderstand the technologies at play here. It's not that other clients are incompatible with Skype, it's that Skype decided to turn its nose to the standards already established to effectively lock in users. Obviously it worked. If they were using standard SIP technologies this would be almost no story here.

I had a hell of a time when I was looking for an 8-bit PCI network card for a 286 machine. Ended up finding one from someone who had bought a bunch of old computers from a government auction. To this day I consider finding one for cheap an extremely lucky occurrence.

I thought at the time, AT&T was the only one willing to take the iPhone, with all other carriers turning them away. In any case, they still made a killing off the iPhones.

One thing that I think has many web developers excited is the possibility of creating browser based games that are on par with that of computer & console games of 10-15 years ago. Take for instance the Quake 2 port to GWT. Because this uses WebGL, it's purely Javascript speed that matters and not DOM manipulation.

And in the not too distant future, some DRM inside you will disable your movements so you have to watch the ads

Well, in Go you'd have to do:
if( a ) {
  do_a()
}

You'd probably write it this way then in Go:
if( a ) { do_a() }
if( b ) { do_b() }

In Go (no real change except it automatically breaks, not sure if I like that yet or not to be totally honest...)
case A: do_a()
case B: do_b()

Again, the first example in Go is what you'd write here again because it forces the use of braces.

To an extent I agree, but I've also seen some people who also believe that and their code not only looks like garbage, and/or there's subtle bugs because they did something like this (in C):
if( a )
  if( b )
    do_something();
else
  not_a(); // wrong

I personally don't care for this style. I've also never really heard a compelling argument to make me consider using that style. Back to Go, you're in luck with this example because Go doesn't have a dedicated enum. Instead, you use const.
const (
  Red = iota
  Green
  Blue
)