I think it's awfully pretentious that some "developers" feel ENTITLED to the time of open source volunteers, when they don't make every effort possible to answer their own question. This is time people spend away from family. I think what you're seeing is the eventual result of being bombarded by people that refuse to search Google first. People that won't crack a book that think all information should be spoon fed by anyone by request. I myself have stopped releasing any more projects due to the arrogant and unappreciative behavior of my users. I don't need to spend the last hour of my day holding a lazy developer's hand.

It's like comparing Kraft Mac & Chesse to your own homemade. Sure, making your own is less expensive and has more options for upgrades (bacon)... but Kraft is much more convenient if you don't want to sweat the details, has a nice box & packaged look, and a taste you cannot fully replicate on your own.

Yes!!! I've worked on these beasts. Changes do not come easy.

The lack of cross-document ACID in MongoDB is both overblown and overlooked. Mongo will work in specific domains, as long as you put a lot of forethought into your schema. For a lot of cases, however, you just can't get around multi-stage commits, background batch processing, etc. ... essentially, hacking minimal "transaction" support offered by an RDBMS.

I've used just about every major RDBMS in production. Oracle, in my experience, is the most forgiving and has a query optimizer that nearly eliminates the need to think. PostgreSQL works wonderfully in the hands of a competent engineer. Oracle works well for people that barely know SQL. Much of Oracle's complexity comes with the training wheels it provides... at the expense of cost, configuration, tuning, administration, customer service, etc.

This happened to me at Zynga unintentionally. We started talking scale, I made suggestions and then the notepads came out. Through "sources," I learned they implemented my ideas. Not as bad as it could have been, I ultimately turned them down.

Putting university courses online with the same "read this," "listen to this," "answer these questions" is NOT taking advantage of modern technology... even if they add forums & chat. This isn't a revolution, it's an aging institution's last attempt to find relevance as they continue to raise tuition fees. The only reason universities were relevant up until now, was due to the immense information hoarding. The Internet has changed everything, decentralizing the knowledge that once gave them power. If everyone had access to every text book, college is little more than an overpriced tutoring & certification service.

If he's bright and you're willing to play together until it "clicks," I'd highly recommend Minecraft (Linux supported). Kids generally excel at open world games and Minecraft is as creative as games get these days. As far as your ban on FPS's, I didn't censor anything for my kid. He grew up playing GTA. He could explore, blow things up and not be tied down by a quest system. He's well adjusted and non-violent. In fact, he'd rather play Pokémon over hardcore titles... or watch kids movies over adult titles. Even in GTA, he was more concerned with making friends than causing mayhem. The more open his options, the more vanilla his choices became. Of course, all kids are different.

I guess my advice is to avoid litigious people at all costs. You can sue for anything these days. You can't tell a joke, give a high five or even kiss your wife on the cheek (someone i worked with actually invoked sexual harassment for this) without pissing someone off. I say: let these people work elsewhere. I like dropping the f-bomb and being sexist & crude, as do my peers. We band together in a mutual agreement not to spoil the freedom for everyone.

Apple invests a metric assload of cash toward R&D. They cut in a partner, like Samsung, to develop components. Samsung has grown mightily, in fact, by Apple's own products. They share the wealth, so to speak. Then, Samsung comes along and just copies an entire fucking product in a shitty way and cries foul when the law stops them. I support capitalism, but not communism. WTF is wrong with everybody?

I'd recommend making a weekend BBQ event / movie day out of watching the original series. Food & drink. You host. If they're resistant, make a drinking game. Kirk bangs a green bitch: shot. McCoy says he's just a doctor: shot (and/or bong rip, depending on the crowd). Etc. Pick episodes that maximize. Encourage dialog: Think Mystery Science Theater 3000 with booze. Work in Kahn or Voyage Home (if they dig the cheesy) after a couple episodes. If everyone is still down, TNG borg. Smack 'em hard. Break out the brownies, turn off the lights & hook up the surround sound. End the night with something fun and unrelated, to make sure everyone wants to do it again even if they weren't down for the show. Star Trek isn't something everyone falls in love with instantly. It can take a few exposures to click. The key is to provide a low barrier to entry.

Everybody has ideas. They're a dime a dozen. Even original ones are near worthless when standing on their own. Most ideas are bad. Many are mediocre. The rest are expensive and time intensive to build.

G5's are great when you're working on PPC embedded hardware. I've had luck using VMs where full emulation was too slow. I think MS even used G5s for original XBox work, but that's just a rumor.