Doesn't feel like that long. Admittedly a lot of the 90's is a blur. Hey, hey, you guys remember that time when the Linux kernel went over 10 MB and we predicted it would destroy the Internet?

Hah. In my town the traffic lights seem to be designed so that traffic stops at every goddamn one of them. I wonder if they could be fixed. I'm already not liking where this train of thought is going heh heh.

Can we use it to shoot Congress into Space? We could call it an "Emergency preparedness for giant asteroid strike" or something! Of course once IN space, they might have to stay there for a while. Giant asteroid and all that. Earth might not be habitable again for decades!

Nuclear power CREATES birds? That would be AWESOME!

Bribing foreign officials is, especially if you do business with the US government. It means fewer bribes *cough* I mean... campaign contributions... for our guys!

One of my biggest advances as a programmer has been writing unit tests for everything and the associated decoupling of code required to make unit tests for everything actually work well. They reveal weaknesses in your design early on, before fixing them is too bad, encourage reusable code, encourage you to keep your design simple and increase the degree of certainty you have when you deploy something. I haven't quite jumped on the test-first bandwagon yet, but I'll write a class and then write its unit test. If the unit test reveals that more functionality is needed or that I need to change something, I do it then.

Like my 70's era assembly language book thought that 32 bit processors would "never' be widespread due to how expensive it would have to be to produce them?

You know, if anyone was actually bribed in the process of that, it would be VERY illegal back here in the USA. Just sayin'...

Well anyone on QT can just pick a new renderer. Assuming we want to throw our fortunes in with QT. More people seem to be going that way. I'm pretty much writing off Gnome/GTK/Unity. I run Enlightenment right now. It doesn't look like ass, has focus follows mouse and has the concept of running more than one app (or multiple instances of one app) at one time. Rather than ramming some concept of how someone else thinks I should work, it lets me work the way I want to work. This is a very simple concept which if you don't embrace will relegate you to the status of also-ran. Gnome/GTK/Unity chose that status for themselves. So did Windows 8. Hopefully the next thing that comes along won't make the same mistake.

Yeah, I'm kind of waiting to see if everyone drinks the Wayland kool-aid. Everyone seems to hate it because Canonical is trying ram it down our throats.

I just started maintaining an old Linux X11 app. A REALLY old app. Some of the function declarations still use K&R. It's all Motif and XT. Looking at it with an eye to modernizing it, well... I guess QT won. Problem is, if I go QT, I pretty much have to drink all the QT kool-aid, since they seem to have tried to re-implement the entire C standard library under their API. Other than that, the field's pretty much right where I left it back in the mid '90's, last time I really looked at X11 programming in a big way. Actually back then GTK and gtkmm were at least looking like promising competitors to QT. Looking around at an even lower level, I can find a rant from Rasterman about imlib being faster than Xrender, and pretty much everyone deciding that OpenGL was a better way to go than Xrender anyway. That's pretty much everything, since 1995.

I think if you want the desktop it's going to take another linux-kernel-level effort around the GUI. The question is do we keep trying to put more band-aids on X11 or do we design something from the ground up that everyone can agree on?

Does the local nuclear power plant kill?

Ok, you have a valid point, true. But your gay love letters don't have the immediacy of, say, a video of the recently departed wearing a diaper and being spanked with a riding crop by a woman wearing a leather corset and a Richard Nixon mask.

The relatives of the deceased have a wonderful opportunity to learn new things about their dearly departed relative. Things they never would have suspected, when that person was alive! What could possibly go wrong?

If we can't sort out an asteroid coming right at us by 2880, we kind of deserve what we get. I'm not going to worry about it too much in any event.