Rumours were that Bill pushed him out at Microsoft because he was spending too much time with his gourmet hobby than actually doing his job.

Despite the knee-jerk anti-anything-that-ever-came-out-of-MS bullshit of slashdot Nathan Myrvhold is actually a better cook than 99% of the people here. He knows his stuff.

> PHP is relatively modern, robust

No it isn't

I was an Emacs dude for a long time and still use it. Then I tried RubyMine, and eventually upgraded to IDEA. The IDE features are sometimes handy. I also use vi very regularly for quick edits of small scripts.

I would no more stick to one editor than I would stick to one programming language. Right tool for the job is the key.

In my job the young one is arrogant, stuck in his ways. All his life sat in mom's basement hacking in C, and used to claim that he refused to program in C++ because it is too high-level for him.

Now, because of management decree, he is in a Rails job. His first words when reporting was "I have never really developed in OO languages before". Hates Windows. Hates Adobe. Hates any Linux other than Gentoo. Hates PDF files (in the publishing industry). Hates mobile devices (but does web dev). Hates Wireless LAN.

Problem is that what he hates he never works with. And that makes him incompetent.

Management refused to reassign him. Now, after 3 years of trying, I am about to leave in frustration. So it goes both ways.

No they should not go to prison for a long time. They should be shot.

I agree. Whenever some hacker whackjob here destroys things /. always goes into "blame the victim" and "they should have had better security" and "hackers can do whatever they want because they are attacking 'the system'". No. Screw the hackers. I am fully for the British government's idea of making the punishment proportional to the damage caused which would basically entail life-long imprisonment. Actually I am all for the death penalty for serious hacking and virus cases. Start shooting the bastards.

Close to ITER, the main fusion research place in Provence, the entire countryside is littered with "Iter-Boom!" graffiti. The greens are already up in arms.

I live 7km from Fessenheim (in Germany, Fessenheim is right on the France/German border), and everywhere around here the Green fcktards have posters wanting to close the place down. Every time someone in the plant lets steam escape from the tea-kettle in the kitchen the greens freak out. Every few weeks they block the bloody bridge over the Rhine and then they block the traffic on the highway and then they block this and then block that. As if disrupting normal traffic is going to help.

When we moved into our house a few years ago we got a information sheet from the local government about what to do if Fessenheim blows up. The school has anti-Fessenheim posters in it. So do the creche, the kindergarten, the town hall and probably the its printed on the toilet paper of the mayor too.

You're a fool. Once I realized that "willpower" is a metabolic state, not moral success or a moral failing, and I learned how to manipulate that metabolic state, I lost 150 lbs.

But go ahead, haters gotta hate!

But both are too expensive to deliver to Germany so I have a digital subscription :(

I have a simple question to all the anti-tech, anti-medicine, natural-healing, doctors-are-evil, the pharma-companies-are-screwing-us-over, homeopathic, pro-farmers-market, anti-soy, i-hate-genetic-engineering, chemical-additives-are-evil green whackjobs.

If everything the medical industry has been doing has been wrong, why has human life expectancy consistently gone up? We live longer than we used to. If we are being poisoned, radiated, pumped full of toxins, eating cancer-creating genetic frankenfoods and generally being screwed over why the hell ARE WE LIVING LONGER? It is not that hard, really!

Don't get me wrong, I like my veggies fresh just like anyone else and run my own plot of lad and product much of what I eat. But my motive is not techno-phobia. The greens are full of bullshit.

Ok, I have to weigh in here. First, I am a white South African. I lived there for 25 years and the last 18 lived in Germany, in a mid-sized university town.

My mother-in-law here lives in (and the wife grew up in) a small rural little town and I lived there for about 3 years too, because a) I got the house for free and b) I was stupid.

I can ensure you, the educational level of Germans who grew up in a small agricultural town after WW2 is astoundingly, ridiculously low. It is very frustrating what a total, utter, complete lack of intelligence you get when grandma has her birthday and her old friends (who are now in the 60s) sit around the table and talk. I always tell my wife that dropping a thermonuclear warhead on her hometown would raise Germany's average IQ by 2 points. They are simple not capable of having ANY form of intelligent conversation whatsoever.

To give an example, Germany has the best passenger train system in the world (with the possible exception of Switzerland). My mother-in-law has a small train line running RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE. Until she was 60 years old she was simply not capable of riding the thing because she was too primitive/stupid/illiterate to figure out the time tables (you actually have to change trains once to get into the city, which is a 22 minute trip). This was in the year 2005 AD. The 21st century. And she is by no means an exception, she had some friends with her on her first trip and they could not quite figure out how to get home with the train.

The problem goes further with her children. She never stimulated them. There were no books in the house, no encyclopedia, no anything. My wife did get out, she has advanced medical degree and but she has little knowledge of the world and not much common sense at times. Got it from mom, who got it from her mom, who got it from hers. SImply no interest in the outside world because it was never an issue at home.

The comparison to my house (in South Africa) where my father had a degree, owned a business, did a lot of electronics at home (I first played with computers at 8 in 1978) and my mother had a high-school diploma and training as a bookkeeper is like the difference between night and day. I can actually have an intelligent conversation with my parents.

I know quite a few blacks in SA who can outthink, out-talk and outgun anyone in the rural classes of one of the world's most advanced industrial states.

The problem is not race. Blacks in SA and peasants in Germany (who live 15 km from a thriving city with an old university!) have the same problem. Complete lack of stimulation during childhood and no interest in education because it simply was not something that came to mind. Remember, in Germany free education to tertiary level was available many years ago, so it was not really for a lack of opportunity. The people simply are not educated enough, and do not get enough stimulation from their parents, to even think about the idea that an education is something worth having. It is like some kind of inter-generational momentum. Children often do what their parents do and what their parents did and a few top-achievers escape the place but living in a rural place, sweet and romantic as it may be, simply dooms you to semi-illiteracy.

And there lies the rub with Africa. Most of the people have never lived in a modern culture and it will take years and years for this to percolate through the system. Apartheid was a bunch of people who were educated who were transplanted and realized that is will take a long time to spread basic education, and simply did not have the resources to realistically do so.
I would like to add that the people from the old white industrial class in South Africa were not much better either, high-school or not.

This has little to do with race, and all to do with culture, which in turns is very much influenced by the environment in which the people of that culture lives.

Thank you. Someone who talks sense around here.

Yeah but it also gets the job done. My colleague is a Linux Zealot. I use a Mac. I am at least 2.5-3 times more productive than he is.

Seriously, my car also costs 15 times a much as my bike but it also gets more done. Also, my Macbook Pro is 7 years old and looks like new.

I remember installing the 0.99.14 kernel in 1993. SLS Linux. My first distribution. So in more than 20 years we only went up 3 versions??!!