Bjarne Stroustrup

I often find that the command name is far removed from how newbies would talk about a task ("grep" is meaningless* compared to "search"**) - GNOME has done some great work on this by creating sensible categories for applications, unlike "<company> Control Center Ultra" on Windows, but it needs a lot more work and a lot less ego. Also, the bridge between the available materials and the expected end point might be two or more levels removed: You just bought the Weird Worlds download version, and have no idea that gnome-terminal, ls, mount and wine could get you to the next step in 30 seconds (if they're all installed and you know how they work).

Come to think of it, why doesn't find have an option like "--contains" to grep, instead of the incredibly obtuse find ... -exec grep "foo" '{}' \; -print?

* Yes, I know what it means

** Yes, I know you can echo "alias foo=\"bar\" > ~/.bashrc. Try that on someone who doesn't know what grep is.

If they all go black, remember to start running! It'll be too late for us here at the campus, but maybe some of you could make it to Mars and start colonizing it. Hairdressers and middle management first, please!

When registering IrfanView in 2007, I asked Irfan Skiljan if he had considered GPL-ing it. The reply was "Thanks, maybe later, but I don't think GPL is the best license type." It would be such a coup for open source platforms if it could be freed and ported...

After using a fitPC for the last three years as an Apache + SSL + Subversion (and recently, rsync backup) server, I'll give it a big thumbs up. The only maintenance work since installing Ubuntu Server has been the occasional sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo shutdown -r now.

Just a side note about how they handle file names: While bulk renaming files on an NTFS drive in Linux, I ended up with some file names having a space at the end. Windows (XP) Explorer was unable to delete or rename these.

After working on SharePoint for a year, I can honestly say that the documentation was a pile of dung. Development was only possible by accident, because often obvious functionality was undocumented or had so little detail that the only way to figure out what the options would do was to try them all. And SharePoint functions have a lot of options.

IANAAE, but I can't help thinking that a valve on the balloon would enable it to survive longer, siphoning off gas when the inner pressure gets too high. What other cheap improvements are available to these guys?

Like this: --- - That is, the stack of atoms (or whatever) is compressed in some areas, and sparse in others.

Triple boot of course: XP for the planning evil deeds, Vista for burning off power while idling, and ME for guest users.

Using salts with hashes obsoleted rainbow tables years ago (if you know what you're doing).

There, corrected it for you.

I've got a home Subversion server with separate repositories for documents, settings, contacts, and projects. Been like that for five years now, and it's remarkably stable and nice. For anything data intensive, there's Flickr, del.icio.us, Gmail, WordPress, etc., with a private backup just in case.

Having received my MSc in 2004, I'd say it's definitely worth it. Just watch it when getting a job afterward - There are places where you'd be doing the programming equivalent of unjamming printers (e.g., debugging business rule setups, running SQL queries that others created). Should probably note that I got the degree for almost no money (yay Norway), that I worked two years IT support at the university and loved it (university staff / students normally don't need help with jammed printers), and that I'm starting a PhD to get to the really interesting problems.

The Glooper!

I always found token count to be much more useful than SLOC. Many tokens = lots of thinking necessary to "get" what's going on.