Turbo Pascal came out in 1983, two years before the first release of GNU Emacs. However, Maestro I (1975) seems to be generally credited as being the first IDE (although some argue for Dartmouth BASIC from 1964).

So, uh, yeah. :)

Except that only Ceres is big enough to have become a spheroid under the pressure of its own gravity. Which is actually a pretty significant feature (unlike the orbit nonsense), and a fairly solid reason for putting something in a separate category from "random rock".

Vesta was actually on the bubble for a while. Despite the big chunk missing from one side, the final decision about whether it would be a dwarf planet or asteroid wasn't made until the Dawn mission gave us a better close-up look.

I'm actually more interested in making Ceres an official planet. Pluto's a big comet. It comes from the Kuiper belt, and doesn't really resemble anything in the inner system. I can certainly understand giving it a different classification. Ceres, on the other hand, is more similar to Mercury than Mercury is to Jupiter, and I don't see any reason at all to classify it separately.

I can see using "cleared its orbit" to separate classes of planets, so Ceres can be a dwarf planet, but "dwarf planet" should be a type of planet! It's got planet right there in the name! We could even have other classes of planet, like Gas Giant, so the whole "Mercury is classified with Jupiter instead of Ceres" nonsense would be resolved.

Frankly, I'd just as soon see them drop any mention of orbits from the definition. Why *shouldn't* Luna and Ganymede and Titan be considered planets? They'd still be moons, but there's no reason something can't fit into more than one category.

Heck, there are so many more interesting features they could have used to define categories: does it have an atmosphere? Does it have its own satellites?

The current definition is a horrible compromise designed to piss off as many people as possible, without offering anything useful. I realize it was intended to try to rock the boat as little as possible, but it hasn't even done that!

Your reading skills are weak. I said zero in the right position, but two (MD) in the right order.

That's silly. How do I (someone who routinely uses ISO8601) describe my birthday, or any other annual event? Certainly not by reversing the order of MD from what ISO prescribes, even if ISO won't certify the result as a valid date. Christmas last year was 2013-12-25. Christmas in general is *-12-25, or 12-25 for short.

Here's a quick comparison:

Fields in the correct position: European: 1; American: 0
Fields in the correct order: European: 0; American: 2

By that measure the American style gets two things correct; twice as many as the European.

In addition, when the year is omitted (very common), the results are even more striking:

Fields correctly ordered and placed: European: none; American: all.

I don't think anyone has anything to brag about here, except perhaps the Chinese and Japanese. :)

Or: I can turn on compiler warnings and clean up any problems later.

Ah, well, I can't comment on this particular course, since I know nothing about it, but in general, courses designed for working professionals whose companies want them to learn new skills and continue to be useful for the company are not cheap. It's not like taking classes at your local community college.

Of course, the fact that you're talking about spending your own money suggests that you don't work at a company that values ongoing education for its employees, in which case, sucks to be you! :p ;)

Really? The same people? You have proof of this, I assume? 'Cause there's a hell of a lot of people using Linux these days, in all sorts of forms, and all sorts of environments. Many of these people have (and I realize this may come as a complete shock) wildly differing opinions on things! Some love SELinux, some hate it, and some are neutral. Some even think it's appropriate in some situations but not others, and these might fit in your hypothetical category, but in my experience, most of those think SELinux is mainly useful for servers, and a waste of time for personal desktop systems, which makes it unlikely that they'd be complaining in this instance.

Now I don't mind some hyperbole. I personally know several linux subforums that contain no mention of SELinux, pro or con, but I understand what you meant by your last sentence, and agree with the underlying notion, even if the words aren't literally true. But your suggestion that it's actually the same people who say "disable SELinux" who are complaining in this case strikes me as so preposterous that it needs to be challenged. You're basically trying to paint all Linux users with the hypocrite brush. (Or, at least, all those with an opinion on SELinux.) And I want some damn good evidence before I buy that line of crap!

Do you also think the people who proclaim that consoles are dead and that PC gaming is king are the same ones out buying all the new consoles? Because that makes just about as much sense. They're all gamers, and all gamers think exactly the same. Right?

Really not sure how you got modded "insightful", but hey, this is slashdot...

The kind of person who thinks an education has value?

The kind of person who prefers to learn things in an orderly fashion, rather than digging through random piles of source code and "free" advice from the internet of questionable utility and accuracy? And who is willing to pay for that privilege, or who works for a company that has a budget for ongoing education?

"The problem is that if the FSF actually intends people to use GNU code in their own creations, then giving people at least the option of relicensing that code in any way that might support their business model will go a long way towards doing that."

I don't see how what Getty is doing here (use it for free in this way, or pay money to use it some other way) is any different from what many companies are doing with GPL'd code (use it this way for free or pay money to use it some other way). Other than "in this case, it affects ME-E-E!!"

And that's the sort of thing that Anti-SLAPP laws are designed to prevent. If you live somewhere that doesn't have anti-SLAPP laws, I strongly recommend never doing anything that might piss off someone with money, whether government or private.

You and your colleagues have horrible taste! :p

As for the just-one-cup issue, there are dozens of other options, from single-use filters to single-cup-size presses to simple espresso machines. I have a press that doubles as a travel cup.

I rest my case on the horrible taste issue. No one with any taste in coffee would ever mention Folgers, except as a how-NOT-to! :D

You're doing it wrong. For pure Unix, you need to start with a SysV source license. It's a little more work that way, but the results should be more than worth it! :D

Of course, it might be a bit tricky to get your hands on one at the moment, since owner Novell had a tiny falling out with exclusive license reseller SCO. Still, you might be able to pick one up on the second-hand market. I understand that Daimler-Chrysler has one they're no longer using--at least according to their response to SCO's subpoena.

There are several ways to do polymorphism in C, and those are both examples. See, for example, qsort(). The real answer to the question "how do you do polymorphism in C", though, is "awkwardly!" :)

Since a version of Linux was certified to meet the Single Unix Spec (SUS) years ago, simply by adding STREAMs (which Linus has refused to add to the mainstream kernel for good reason), and since SUS is far stricter than POSIX, I doubt this. (Also, STREAMs were made optional in more recent versions of the SUS, so any random vanilla Linux system might well be certifiable as a True Unix(tm) today, if anyone actually cared.)

I suspect you are A) getting your standards mixed up, and B) relying on out-of-date information, but please feel free to prove me wrong with specific examples from POSIX, if you can.

POSIX is a really low bar to meet. In fact, some elements of it were specifically designed to allow VMS to meet the standard (which is how NT was also able to do so, at one point). If you're trying to suggest that VMS or NT is a better "emulation" of Unix than Linux, I can only conclude that you've never used any of the systems in question! :)