It's always great to learn a new (human) language. It will allow you to discover a new way of thinking, and let you see the world through a different point of view.

That said, let's be honest right away, if there is one part where it will bring you almost nothing, it's for software development. 99% of software communities online are discussed in English. 99.9% of software comments and software documentation is written in English. I happen to speak French, English, Dutch and Spanish (nothing special, I'm just European). I have been doing software development for more than 10 years and I cannot recall ever using any other language than English except when doing translation. The only advantage is that you'll be able to understand a bit better why translators are mad at you when you write bad printf()'s.

So go ahead, learn a new language, it's a great experience. I'd recommend one with a big amount of speakers like Spanish or Chinese (this one, I promise, will completely change your understanding of the concept of "language"). However, don't kid yourself, it's pointless with respect to software development :-)

I guess it's due to the exclamation mark in the middle of the word. If you look for "O!Play" (with the quotes), it works.

The summary links to Grotesque, but what they use in the article is "Square Grotesque", a modified version which is _really_ square and IMHO hard to read (and which apprently quite appreciated by car manufacturers). Concluding every Grotesque font is hard to read is definitely not what the research demonstrated.

The best is to have a look at the paper, which has good examples. A similar font can be found on wikipedia there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile (but I find this one is still slightly easier to read).

Don't start by adding big features to the project. It's the hardest part, and there are many people doing this already. The best is to first concentrate on the quality assurance:
  * Look at bug reports, try to reproduce them, add your insights, and maybe even find a fix for them
  * Write test cases, that's what is most missing nowadays in open-source projects. It's the best way to ensure that the library will work correctly on every kind of hardware/software combination. Only someone like you who know both about programming and about the domain of the tool (mathematics) can do it right!

The original article can be found here. It has more figures, including some on China, and an interesting remark that Europe in total generates 66GW, which is another way to the per capita computation to moderate this first rank of US...

Brasero, it's there now. I was honestly a fan of K3B, but version 0.9 of Brasero is great. It looks like it has as many features as K3B, but everything is damn simple and clear.

Unfortunately neither Banshee nor Rhythmbox can beat this one. Hopefully, competition will push them to become better!