Most every other sport has human interaction as a core element: US football/rugby has people crashing in to each other as a core element, baseball has a pitcher throwing a ball to a batter and the pitcher can directly affect the batters performance, in basketball you could be the best 3 point shooter on an empty court but you've got to get the ball past the defensive players trying to block it.

Except, of course, for track & field, swimming, skiing, ski jumps, kayaking, rowing, running, synchronized swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting, luge, skeleton, boblseigh, and pretty much any other sport which doesn't involve a ball or direct combat. Some you do regardless of other contestants, like weightlifting, some you do alongside others, like running a marathon, but no interaction is allowed. So, whatever you do in practice you should be allowed to repeat in competition.

Sports like football (real or American) and basketball may be good television, but they hardly constitute "most sports".

For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.

When they ask about why it looks different, I just tell them "oh, this is the newer version.", and they're fine.

You are describing my experience with home users, e.g. people who use Word to type out a school assignment or a project report and then print it.

People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating. Excel formulas will not always successfully transfer to Calc, which means old spreadsheets can't be used and they can't be shared with people still using MS products.

Write and Word do have incompatibilities. E.g. one bug lingers around for years: when a header is saved in OpenOffice format and then saved as a Word document, it will appear on all pages and not only on the first page.

I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base, but Base does have stability and bug issues, at least on Mac (just yesterday I had problems with it crashing).

I won't even go into macros, templates, etc.

Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.

Fresh start with OO/LO, on the other hand, is a breeze :)

I am in a South-Eastern European country and I don't have a degree in a related field, but I didn't have a hard time finding my first programming jobs.

Keep several things in mind:

1. Good developers are in demand. If Eastern Europe is anything like the Balkans in that regard, people are looking for competent programmers. At any particular job interview for a programmer most of the people who apply don't know anything about programming, have never used a relational database, etc. Use that to your advantage.
2. Small companies don't have HR departments to veto you just because you don't have a degree or enough years of work experience.
3. You have 6 months to beef up your resume. You can always invent free-lance work, as long as you have knowledge to back it up.
4. You can always find for-peanuts work on various "hire a freelancer" website. You will not earn good money there, nor will you get any enterprise application experience, but you will have an "Aha!" moment if you never programmed for money before. When you are developing as a hobby, you tend to adjust requirements to your knowledge and spare time, but when somebody else gives you requirements, you will quickly discover how to learn quickly and do things efficiently. That's what employers want from their programmers.
5. When negotiating a salary, keep in mind that the price you suggest will tell a lot to your employer about what you are worth. I know this may be a mistake, but when I was interviewing people for jobs, I took more seriously people who expected higher-than-indurstry-average salary than people who wanted to work for peanuts. If you come to me and ask for a salary that's half, or a third, of what I know most company in my city pay their developers, I will assume that you don't have much experience.

Fair enough. I don't think I have a problem with particular practices as much as I do with general philosophy. I try to be security aware whatever I do and I am put off by any sort of thinking where security breach is something that happens to others.

When you host your own stuff and use your own services, you can be proactive about safety and devise and enforce good policies. While you can develop good practices when using "cloud" technology, it always will be next in line to convenience and your policies have to fall in line with your cloud provider.

I am lucky enough to work for an organization where using LibreOffice came from the top down: if the boss sends you an OpenOffice/LibreOffice document, you tend to install it and aren't too lazy to share work by email or shared directories.

Another organization I worked for used Google Apps.I tried to point out flaws of it (security problems, what happens when you are offline, etc.) to them, but I got: "Google is not evil, we trust them". This worked OK until one guy managed to incidentally invite a completely unrelated person to edit a document in which they stored a bunch of sensitive passwords and information ("so it's all in one place").

Even with that wonderful experience, that same organization still uses Google Apps ("it won't happen again"), and even though I relay this experience to other orgs I work for, "it's just too convenient, Google is not using our data in an evil way and you can incidentally email passwords to anyone anyway".

I don't think you would go to jail for taking a picture of e.g. St. Stephen's Basilica (which would be impossible to take without anyone in the shot) or the Parliament building in Budapest. Firstly, I doubt the punishment would be anything other than a fine. Secondly, I strongly suspect this law has little to do with privacy and tourism and much more to do with e.g. making sure nobody can take pictures of anti-government protests.

TFA is kind of lacking details and I don't follow Hungarian politics that closely, but my first instinct has to do with Viktor Orban's government - he's known for some controversial laws curbing media freedom and changes to their constitution which got the entire EU worried.

The main confusion is that consent can be given in many different ways: implicit consent is still a consent and the article mentions one of their government ministers saying you are fine as long as nobody is explicitly asking you not to take a picture.

Unfortunately, Hungarian is so hard to understand that even with Google Translate I can't follow their newspapers and columns, so we are at the mercy of second-hand journalism and skimpy stuff such as TFA, but indeed this looks like one of the laws enected to be used selectively against well defined targets.

Meanwhile, don't cancel your Hungarian vacation just yet - it's a lovely country with things to see and do, even without taking a camera :)

P.S. Personally, I welcome this law. When traveling through Hungary, I can stop paying Hungarian vignette (road tax) and when I drive under highway cameras, I'll just wave my arms in explicit objection to having my picture taken :)

So you're saying that midday should occur at 1pm instead of noon. Why? Did our ancestors get the definition wrong?

So we get more daylight when we leave work. Regardless, two people at two opposite boundaries of the same time zone will get midday at different times anyway, so why should we care about it?

mysql_real_escape_string is a wrapper of a C function. Does that make C the laughing stock for you as well?

I keep saying this on Slashdot: PHP has it's weaknesses, but inconsistent naming conventions isn't a major problem. What made PHP the laughing stock is looking at incompetent coders' code and thinking that's how you do things in PHP.

PHP is a good language for web development. It has an easy learning curve and gives you power to shoot yourself in the foot. Combine those two and you get a bunch of atrocious code floating around the web from the hands of incompetent. But you also get rapid development with very readable code where new programmers can easily jump in in the hands of competent.

P.S. mysql_real_escape_string is now deprecated. PHP has come a long way since its atrocious beginnings and TFA talks about that (clue is in the title).

While both hacking and cracking should be available to gifted students, most of them need to learn a simple skill that will take them far in life: how to file a bug report.

More companies nowadays depend on their software and good feedback from users is very hard to find. In such environment, those who can file a proper bug report, or write up an understandable feature request, can genuinely prosper.

Those who can properly ask for e.g. a data report from IT, or explain what's wrong with company's intranet website's feature that they use, usually get what they want and their productivity increases.

Any IT education should start there. Those who get hooked will learn how to "hack" (or crack...) regardless of their high school curriculum.

While I don't know what's NY Times' excuse, Cpanel, which powers a lot of servers on the internet still relies heavily on FTP. And Cpanel, while primarily designed to manage shared hosting, is not limited to shared hosts only, many people choose to have it installed on their VPS or dedicated server.

For many web developers, process of deployment is still uploading via FTP, which is both insecure and inconvenient, but I see it very often.

Ditto.

So many sites nowadays require you to register so I use throwaway emails in combination with throwaway passwords. E.g. if I want to try out Trove (that was mentioned in a previous article), I really don't want to put in more than a few seconds thought into it, so my email will be trove@domain-which-i-use-to-collect-spam.com and password probably something along the lines of asdf1234. If I find the service useful, Firefox will remember my email and password for login and/or I'll be able to recover the password using their system. If, more likely, I forget about them, I don't care if my credentials get compromised.

It doesn't even have to be updates asking for more rights. I usually uninstall software I don't use once it starts bothering me with upgrades at all. On Linux, I never have that problem as I generally know which software I need and don't just try out new programs without a good reason, but on OS X and Android, where I mostly install things through their respective app stores, some applications will be asking to update themselves more often than I consider polite.

On Linux I usually apt-get update once a week (and I do the same with macports), but when particular app wants my attention even if I don't feel like upgrading - it gets old quickly.

To be fair, every government in the world can be identified by 1984 in one way or another...

It's not just boot time - all applications load "instantly", your IDE will start faster and searching through source code is much quicker on SSD, to name a few benefits.

Most of us who use SSDs are willing to sacrifice reliability and storage space for speed. I have 3 SSD's in two laptops and one desktop machine and so far none failed, but I am prepared for any one of them to fail at any time. If it does, I'll readily buy a new one a replace it - because I feel their cost is justified by their speed. All my data is backed up with Time Machine (thanks, Apple) and all my code is in subversion repos, so I think I can fully recover from an SSD failure about 4 hours and €200 later at most.

I am not ashamed of making a mistake when it comes to buzzwords, but the way I see it:

- My site is hosted on a server in Acme Inc.'s facilities in New York / London / Tokyo. It's in a datacenter.
- My site is hosted by Web2.0 Inc. I have no idea where it is, but I am hoping they are doing some smart load balancing and backups for me. It's in the cloud