Their will be a lot of snarky "too late" comments today for this news, but it's a sad day when you have to step down from the company you worked so hard to build -- a company that must feel an extension of yourself -- and it must have been a really tough decision for these guys. No doubt they still wanted to prove themselves (and who wouldn't, given their situation?). I feel sorry for them. It's easy to be an armchair CEO, especially when you have hindsight.

They could have sold 10,000 early access/ developer boards at $50 a piece, maybe even doing a 'buy one give one' promotion like the OLPC project. It does kind of defeat the purpose of computers for all, but it'd also helped them guarantee future production...

I suspect that it's actually far cheaper and easier to ship you an assembled board than an unassembled board. Shipping stuff like this over from China in a container is really cheap. Also, to disrupt the manufacturing process and ship a bag of bits would add extra cost because that's actually harder to automate.

If you get the Gert board that they mention (a break-out board that gives you lots of IO options for hardware projects) you do get to assemble that yourself :)

I really do know what you're saying -- I feel the same myself, but I'm not convinced correlation is causation -- I don't see any sites that have less 'trolly' comments than Slashdot, and I'm starting to think it's just me getting older and not actually feeling the same way as the younger generation. Don't forget that a lot of the Slashdot readership started visiting the site in the late 90's, when we were teens ourselves, and our tastes/opinions/priorities have changed so much in that time -- I know that I'm barely the same person I was back then. What I thought was a great discussion 10 years ago might not impress me so much today.

There are definitely always improvements to be made to the comments system, but I've yet to see anything better on the internet. Disqus haven't even tried to fix the problem, nor have Facebook comments, and anything phpBB doesn't stand a chance.

Anyway, I feel for you if you're genuinely being harassed by somebody, that sounds really not much fun. It's also very odd that somebody would do that over such a prolonged period of time. It's a funny old world.

Commendable.

Oh, so there are still /some/ people who aren't quite as elite as us ;)

Every time I see the word 'fanboi' or the phrase 'circle jerk' I lose a bit of faith in the site I'm on. Stop it. Learn to use grown up words and make your point more rationally. I know you're annoyed that you have a stalker, but surely they'll get bored soon enough -- maybe now the school holidays are over. I also suspect it's a personal grudge, rather than a FOSS thing.

As for your other point, you must understand that we all miss the good old days -- but that has been the case for thousands (if not millions) of years. Not only that, but group think is something you have to learn to accept, no matter how annoyed it makes you. Maybe those mod-rules you point out exist purely because that's how the majority of people feel? That's the basis of democracy. Slashdot still, after all these years, somehow manages to see discussions with contrary views and actual debate. For that we should be thankful (though obviously not too thankful -- especially with the ever increasingly 'sensational' stories that seem to be appearing).

If somebody gave you a detailed spec for software that they found useful, you'd be surprised at just what you can achieve already. Useful software doesn't have to be highly complicated, it might just be a console app for fetching data from a remote feed and storing it in a database. Useful software is useful. You clearly have the right aspirations, you just need to find the purpose. Once you complete your first project it kind of just snowballs as you grow in confidence and ability.

And there are plenty of entry level jobs. If you speak to those companies looking for 3-5 years and say you're willing to work on a trial basis to prove yourself, you'd be amazed at how willing they are to give you a job. They will value your eagerness/ambition just as highly as they value 3-5 years experience (which everyone knows actually means nothing anyway).

If you have a developer doing that, at least it shows they are thinking about the problem. In my experience, that self awareness is a good sign -- they are likely to continue improving the code they write, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that in another 12 months to find that they were writing compact AND maintainable code.

If you were to go back and look at the code you wrote years ago, when you were just starting out, would it be easily maintainable now? I doubt it. My early code certainly wouldn't. It makes me cringe just thinking about some of the hacks I did to compact my code down (often times involving bit fields...). Ugh.

Your problem with CSS appears to be that you aren't familiar enough with it to use it effectively. That's expected, and the same would be true for any sufficiently complicated system. Of course CSS has its faults, and of course there are alternative options that might have worked better, but it doesn't matter, because CSS works and is good enough. That is all that was required of it, and it is why it is used. As it happens, I'm not aware of any other layout system that gives you the power of CSS and HTML yet remains simple.

Maybe it's easier for me, because I started programming web-centric software at about the time CSS arrived, so I've lived through the evolution and it seems perfectly natural to me. That said, I have the same problem moving to any new language -- it takes me at least a few months of messing around on little side projects before I'm comfortable enough to take on a real project, and then at least another 6 months before I feel I am truly proficient. You seem to want to skip all of that and go straight to mastery, and are blaming the system/technology because you can't.

Thanks -- somebody else also pointed out the link that gets shown next to the search results (and it points to the same page you linked). I should have seen that.

I agree with your sentiment, they do deserve time to grow in to something bigger -- I wonder if they will ever have the resources to build their own index though. It looks like the decision to use Bing is purely technical/engineering (they need cheap search results and there aren't many places to get them -- I know from experience that the Google API is very restrictive) so I can understand that, even if Bing results are very poor versus Google.

Re-reading my original comment, I think I was a bit harsh. I guess I was just surprised at the association with Microsoft. When you're talking about a company built entirely on privacy, open-ness and trust, Microsoft aren't the first people that spring to mind.

I've been a professional programmer for something like 12 years, and in that time I've spent the majority of my time working with Microsoft tools and systems. I still do, in fact. Before that, I was an MSCE engineer for about 3 years. I don't hate for the sake of hating, I just don't like Microsoft because, well, they've proven themselves untrustworthy time and time again. Maybe I'm a hypocrite, but Microsoft have left a bad taste in my mouth and it is going to take something extraordinary before I'll even trust, never mind /like/ them again.

The examples of Microsoft strong arming the industry (and especially Linux) are abundant. The examples of Microsoft making the wrong decisions and then, rather than manning up and admitting they got it wrong, they try and change the market artificially (and often times illegally). I don't like that. This is not conspiracy theory stuff -- most of it came out in the court trials and is part of the public record. Microsoft haven't changed their DNA -- Ballmer is the same as ever, and that affects the whole organisation. I think my problem with Microsoft is that I really don't identify with them at all -- I look at Ballmer and the rest, and I just don't like them all that much. I identify with Google far easier.

Back on topic, I didn't spot the results by Bing thing -- It sort of appears half way down the page for me. I do actually understand why they'd use Bing/Yahoo -- the API is infinitely less restrictive than Google's API, but it still feels a bit odd. I'm glad DuckDuckGo exists, and I'll probably still use it from time to time, but apart from anything else, Bing results (especially for tech related queries) are nowhere near as good as Google results, so if they rely on Bing for general search they've already lost.

I wondered that too. And the funny thing is, if it's the case, it might work -- I didn't know that DuckDuckGo was powered by Bing and, now that I do, it changes the way I feel about them. All of a sudden they aren't the champions of freedom that I thought them to be.

I just went over to their site and searched around. No mention anywhere that they're Bing powered. They must know that if they do have ties to Bing and they try to hide it, it'll hurt their image.

I wonder if it is FUD. There's just one article I found about DuckDuckGo being Bing powered (because of the similar low placement of Libre-Office when you search for Open Source Office on DDG and Bing), but it doesn't have anything concrete, just 'what ifs' and 'maybes'. Does anybody have a more official announcement on the matter? Do we know if DDG get money from Bing for using their results?

Or is it....? *wink*.

Oh wait, that wouldn't work. Doh.

I'm not sure it matters how you get the monopoly -- I think the problems start if you abuse the power once you have it. Google will have to be really careful (but they know that, and I'm sure they are doing all they can to play fair), but if they use their dominance in search to (artificially) dominate other markets, it's kind of what Microsoft did with IE and it got them in to trouble. Of course, Microsoft also used some very dirty, very immoral tactics time and time again, so it's hard to compare them with Google.

Good point, I hadn't thought of that, but you're right -- why did they just cut out 9 million potential users? I thought they were still trying to grab gaming market share at any cost, but I guess that only applies to the console space (because they really want to be in your living room).

There's one person here so far trying to say that even at $250 it's good value, but they aren't convincing. Waving your arms at your PC is not the future, especially when you have $25 of components wrapped up in a $250 package.