9 out of 10 statisticians cannot count to 10.

But you're the one reading into it.

At face value, the statement clearly implies that young, married, males with children are somehow more valuable. His argument talks about going home to rest, not how skilled they are.

Disclosure: I'm a straight, single, over 30 (old) male without children (or the desire to procreate).

Leave the bigotry at home, please. this isn't the 1920s and not all of us subscribe to certain puritan notions of "family".

I would otherwise agree with the idea that "going home" to rest is better than "resting at work" (because as long as you are accessible by work, you are not fully resting and free from it).

I much prefer Godwin's law. After all, Hitler supported the GPL.

I actually like the start screen:

Good:
- pressing [START] brings it up, I can start typing, and it filters like the start menu of old
- when filtering, the categories always appear in the same place
- meta options are big and appear in the same place (makes a difference at 2560x1440 with standard DPI)
- It doesn't overlap or clutter the desktop -- I press [START] and see a new screen with bigger options that are easier to navigate
- to me, the general windows desktop theme (flat, pastel, simple) is a huge improvement (reminds me of 3.x a little in that regard)

Bad
- It's not intuitive or obvious, I guess, that the [START] search functionality exists at all
- It's not obvious how to do meta actions (open with, for example)
- at first blush, if you make it to the desktop, it's not obvious how you get back to the start screen
- the hidden menus are obnoxious if you're trying to remember where they are hidden
- the "docked" apps or whatever, where the fullscreen app can take a portion of the screen, are worthless
- the hand icon, used to "discard/close" apps, is kind of weird on the desktop (I can discard my desktop? lol).

I dunno. Overall I am indifferent. I actually applaud Microsoft for giving something a go, I just hope that they keep working on it to make it more intuitive and less "post-pc"-ish (which is pretty insulting when I'm running it on a PC). I don't really use the tiles, and I'm on the desktop 99% of the time... so. Yeah. From a ui perspective alone, I don't really find it that abrasive.

Software outliving it's hardware... sigh.

There's something innately human about that which strikes me as... odd.

"You're not looking at it right."

      - steve

The real problem is corporate executives with the clout to pay themselves next to nothing in cash and everything in stock and capital assets, taxed only when they choose to liquidate at their leisure. The fact that many corporations work around taxation and can, in this case, get a refund for having put their revenue back into the economy during the year, is not such an immortal sin as to consternate the general public.

I'm more concerned with big government stripping people of their right to free choice than I am with companies doing what their shareholders would demand of them.

So, today we learned that it takes the Internet 3 minutes to offend.

My friends, I am ashamed. Three minutes? We must try harder!

That's an extreme, though, kicking someone off because they made a mistake.

It's clear (to me) that Linus cares enough to engage and teach by expressing what he cares about and why?

Is he rough? Sure.

But ultimately who cares? This is between Linus, Mauro, and the core maintainers. Everything else is sterile conjecture.

But I stand by what I said as "empirically true." Linus was nice to someone once and they committed suicide over it. That's empirical evidence that "being nice" doesn't always help. That's horrible.

It's better to be straight with people so that problems get resolved NOW rather than become lingering issues down the road. Sometimes this means writing an e-mail that says: shut the fuck up.

(by "that" I meant what you wrote, not what Linus wrote, btw).

Curse words are funny. Emotion is a strange concept to me, but I get when people are angry and go into my "there, there, dear" mode.

If my employer ever sent me something like that, I'd quit on the spot.

I don't like being coddled, I like being handled even less. Tell me what you really think and drop the fucking corporate baby speak.

I'm an adult. I drink and sometimes curse and make mistakes, but I also do great things. My skin is thick enough to understand the difference between being upset over technical choices and personal attacks.

IMO, the worst punishment is someone cutting off communication and ignoring anything you say or do.

Anything else is just the colourful blend of frustration, emotion, and artful expression that is pervasive in our industry.

The kitchen is hot, and "professional" means we keep talking.

It's more insidious than that.

If Linus coddles people, they get a false sense of approval. His brash, direct, and overtly emotional tone is intentional. It's to let the other party know exactly how he feels without accidentally leading them into a false sense of "oh, keep working on it and I'll approve it."

Watch that video where he flips off Nvidia.

He describes how being nice to people is the wrong approach, and makes things worse when the other side gets the wrong view, is rejected after months of effort in the wrong direction, and then Linus gets the blame for their suicide.

If he was paying them, he could fire them. He doesn't have that luxury, so he has to be clear and direct.

Don't like it? too bad. That's Linus, and he makes no excuses for how he behaves.

Yep. Google doesn't show the entire article, they show enough content to drive viewers to the article. It's up to the individual sites to retain those visitors, not Google.

Newspapers should be paying Google for the service of indexing and driving customers to them.