Look into Plan 9. While it never really got off the ground commercially, it's the successor to Unix. All resources are distributed over the network & storage servers know how to manage multiple levels of storage, being able to move data from 'fast' to 'slow' as it ages.

What's changed in the last decade? There's actually women around (that aren't just there as as girlfriends/arm candy).

Very Johnny Mnemonic.

We're dealing with a dozen people here, not some giant megacorp with thousands of seats to fill. When you're hiring for an environment this small, you can afford to be choosy. When hiring those first 10 guys, he should have been careful to not pick misogynist assholes - not because of liability but because those people are generally assholes to everyone around. If you have people acting inappropriately just because there's not women around, it means you've already hired the wrong people. People are probably already comfortable, it's just hard to make "I had to work with a douchebag" lawsuits.

Similarly, when hiring the first woman into an all-male group, you can afford to make sure you don't have some lawsuit-happy, thin-skinned, man-hating ultra-feminist. You're not hiring person N+1, you're hiring a team-member & considering how they fit in with your existing dynamics is just as important as the skills they bring on board.

Mann's a fucking attention whore. Period.

This isn't evidence of some rampant campaign against the disabled, it's one guy getting hassled at one store out of over thirty three thousand, the majority of which are fucking franchises. Even from his own incredibly slanted report, he did nothing to deescalate the situation when some ignorant dumbfucks took issue with his gear. Yeah, what happened to him was bullshit, but to try calling out the entire corporation because a few minimum wage monkeys at a single store fucked up is ridiculous.

The irony is that the people who will read this report today, more than a decade after the rest of the community started discussing the ideas, are so organizationally mired in heavyweight processes & resistant to change that they are the very ones that would benefit the most from agile practices.

The real barrier to entry is knowing what the fuck you're talking about. Picking up some wiki markup is easy if you're not a fucking retard. PCWorld has just proven they're irrelevance by claiming that wiki markup is too hard - send them out to pasture with an iPad and a copy of Angry Birds.

Consider the time scale we're working with here. Ancient Rome only stood for about a thousand years. The subsequent dark ages lasted about 700. Humans have only really been building "civilizations" for about 15,000 years. We're talking about recording information for stuff that might be dangerous for twice that long. We need to communicate with people that are further away from us than the people who discovered ceramics.

That's a lot of time for things to horribly wrong. While €25,000 seems like a lot of money for a drive, it's really small peanuts compared to the overall costs of storing the waste. On top of that, right now is the best time to invest that money - when we have resources & the stability to undertake the project. If civilization were ever to crumble, we'd probably be a little distracted & not in a good place to put permanent warnings up that don't require maintenance.

Just wait until they find out about the nine billion dollars we spent on the LHC just to prove the existence of an elementary particle we were almost certain existed.

Nothing notable for me to say here - I don't have a super low UID or any special claim to fame but thanks for all the years of work.

Nobody's been putting them in PCs for two decades - those 386s have been for embedded and industrial applications.

I didn't follow it too closely but, in short, it's that the maintainers are a small, closed group that doesn't want to let anyone else into the pool. It's one thing for an OSS project to be delayed because the people working on it have other shit to do in their lives, it's another entirely when they're too busy to finish a job and actively reject volunteers from the community.

This is just basic economics at work. If there's still a demand and the cost goes up (or the current supply dries up), replacements will be found, or new, previously uneconomic sources become cost effective to tap.

Cablecard is such a joke. At best, the implementation was half-assed and companies only supported it enough to maintain legal compliance.

Of course. Without having to support internal hardware, the OS devs have a far easier time testing system stability. It greatly helps the "it just works" ideal that they like to promote.

...it also forces people to buy a whole new machine when it's time to upgrade.