I heard chicken eggs being reffered to in another delicious way:

Chicken periods.

Yuummmm...

Do you want it blown again?

It is object-oriented now!

COBOL

Good to see that I am not alone in my admiration of Advantage series. Love the keyboard, except for those horrible rubber function keys.

If you are not a touch-typist do not get an Advantage keyboard. You will suffer gretly as that keyboard angles and layout will make your hunt-and-peck extraordinarily more difficult. Also Advantage is quite an expensive options with $300 pricetag. Adaptation period is at least two weeks as well. Also it is only manufactured in the USA and Kinesis does not provide shipping to other countries, so you may pay even more to get one from a reseller (Here in Australia I paid $400 for mine).

I would reccomend Microsoft Natural series if you want a split layout without the extremety and not breaking the budget.

All that negativity being said, once you get comfortable with Kinesis Advantage, it is just a pure joy to use (Except function keys :-P). If you have RSI definitely give it a try, pricetag be damned. If you possibly can, go to a shop that stocks it and try it out. You will either fall madly in love with it or decide it is too extreme.

I would love to have a Kinesis Advantage with durability and buckling springs of Model M.

Advantage got such a good layout, but the rubber function keys are just garbage!!!

Why is it so many people see humans as not part of nature?

If we build a dam, we are damaging the ecology. If a family of beavers build a dam, it is all natural. If we grow a cow and slaughter it in a slaughterhouse, it is barbaric and unnatural. Yet when a lioness brings down a buffalo that is all fine and part of the circle of life. Why is a piece of plastic artificial, but a piece of wood carved by a beaver is not?

In my opinion humans are animals that change their environment around them to suit their needs. Just like a bird that makes a nest to care and protect its young. A city is much more comfortable for us than a forest. An airplane is a tool to get around just like a spider that builds a sail out of a web to use wind to get across a river.

Yes, we are VERY good at what we do. With our usurpassed intelligence and social hierarchies we have tames the most hostile of environments. All this "destruction" you accuse humanity of is just nature rearanging itself to another state.

I am very happy with rectangular shape of the screen. It is very intuitive and practical. GUI windows are rectangular after all.

What shape would you like your screen if you had a chance to customize?

To be fair that is quite terror inducing. I have just pictured Osama wearing nothing but women's underwear waiting in a security line. Pass the mind bleach please. Everyone within sight range will be traumatised for life!

A bomb is much more humane.

I believe Sparta predated England in that regard. Women there had ownership of land and had quite a bit of influence while the men were in their constant war training.

Of course, I consider Greece to be a Western nation, but that point might be debatable.

Please not another rewrite! 1.6 to 1.7 took 12 years!!!

It did not help that instead of using other common libraries they had implemented their own from scratch (EFL).

What E needs is to work on stability: It is the only desktop environment that crashes. Sure it is very fast and seamless at restarting right away, but it shouldn't crash in the first place!

Grab popcorn, go to one of the systemd-related stories and watch them tear each other to pieces.

Who said /. is not entertaining?

Linux's primary market share is on servers. Thus the distributions should focus on server usage first and desktop users second. There are hardly any of the later when compared with a former.

If you want to run Linux on a desktop, you should jump through extra hoops to install systemd on your machine, because you are a minority. In practice, there should be different distribution based on the server and desktop.

Alas this will cause more fragmentation, but as we spoke about this before, some people do not see this as a problem.

Ah! That is the first insightful reply and one I agree with.

Indeed, you are being judged by the clothes you wear. This is something I had to learn back in high school when I had to go for my first job interview. It is all about the first impression and regardless of what you know, it will be formed before you even speak. It is tragic that regardless of what you know, it is how you look like that makes the most difference :-(.

Alas, that is human nature and there is no changing that. At some point one has to give up on idealism and just accept that certain realities of society are just not-nogotiable. I guess developers are one unique group that can get away with since they can work from home and avoid seeing clients.

Thank you for your explanation.

It puzzles me because it is quite petty (You wear one additional piece of clothing over the usual), this aversion is quite widespread among developers and from my interactions among several white-colar industries it is only in IT that it is present.

Hence I find it odd... Especially since they are willing to sacrifice money to get around this requirement.

This has always puzzled me why some developers list this as a negative. What is wrong with wearing a suit? Every professional workplace has an expectation of a formal atire. What is wrong with requiring suits over the usual office shirts and pants?

There is certanly a lot of hate directed at COBOL. However, since if it is still being used, then it still has some capability that is not available in other solutions. Also looking at the wikipedia, the language keeps being updated (COBOL 2014 standard is out for example) and supports object-oriented methodology.

COBOL is one language that I haven't encountered. Perhaps it would be insightful if someone can explain why there is so much animosity towards this technology.