iirc Seattle has the highest male to female ratio in the country. Maybe some single women will move there once they realise how heavily the economics lean in their favour, until then I think I'll give it a miss, thanks.

This makes no sense. There's a conflict between the employer (who wants more work), and the employee (who is exhausted and wants some time to rest). What happens if the employee refuses to continue working without a vacation? If the employer backs down then the employee has the bargaining power. If, on the other hand, the employee is swiftly fired and replaced with a more compliant one, then perhaps there isn't as much of a shortage as you claim.

Anyway, this shouldn't even be a conflict to begin with. Exhausted programmers produce crap that keeps breaking, and their sleep-deprived fixes maybe put the worst fires out, if you're lucky.

Probably not. But you can still be a disgustingly well compensated one. Executives like Ballmer and Fiorina walk away from presiding over the most spectacular fuckups imaginable with more money than most programmers will ever see in their entire lifetimes.

Maybe we should look for alternatives to keeping all seven billion of our eggs in one fragile and increasingly overburdened basket.

How do you replace the motherboard? What if a cap blows?

Something has to hold the system bus, and that can't be hot-plugged.

https://01.org/linuxgraphics/i...

"No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this software is permitted."

You can mine coal fairly easily after the apocalypse, sure, but that isn't going to power an internal combustion engine, only an external one.

All of the readily available oil on the planet except for maybe the Arabian Peninsula has been drilled out. New prospecting is almost exclusively performed on oil rigs that are far offshore, which requires a lot of advanced technology to access (such as helicopters, which are powered by, er, oil).

No, if we get bombed back to the stone age then we're staying there. Maybe we can rise up to some liberterian's wet dream of a coal-powered, diseased, and poisonous world of struggling city-states where the average life expectency is 30, but no more than that.

Yup. This guy has an auto-immune disorder. Pattern baldness is caused by premature death of hair follicles. Treating that would require a way to bring those cells back from the dead or some really nifty tricks with stem cells to replace them.

Not that that's going to stop a deluge of clickbait crap about this over the next few weeks, I'm sure.

This is so damn stupid. If somebody can unwillingly violate your patent then that means your patent is bullshit pretty much by definition. Well, to a reasonable person anyway, the legal system apparently has other ideas.

Being able to drive a car right this second isn't usually a matter of life or death.

...in order to extract more favourable terms during licensing negotiations with Microsoft, nothing more.

Nothing to see here.

Qt, on the other hand, is its own universe. It's written in a weird dialect of C++98 (though I'm sure it works just fine in C++11 these days), it has its own object model, networking stack, container library, threading library, graphics primitive library (i.e. not Cairo). This object model also leaks into its language bindings if you don't want to write your software in C++.

It's the same problem that Java and C# also suffer from: they're not cross-platform, nothing is. What they actually are is their own platform built alongside a perfectly good already-existing one, and you can see the seams.

There's more to each platform's UI than what bitmap you skin buttons and checkboxes with. If you want a cross-platform application, then write a completely different UI for each platform using those platforms' native UI toolkits. Sadly "good enough" is the order of the day here, so you end up with platform-refugee applications that look like shit.

Game changers earn a short-term first-mover advantage, and given the revenues generated from Apple's iPhone division I don't think they've had any shortage of THAT. Longer term, people will copy innovators and incrementally improve on their new technology, and everybody benefits as a result, in the form of accelerated innovation and lower prices. As the law stands right now, competition is severely hindered in order to extract even more exorbitant revenue than what the Free Market(R) naturally has to offer. You can't have a competitive marketplace when you have to ask the incumbent's permission to compete with them.

Anyway, fuck Apple and fuck the iPhone. Dictatorial control wrapped up in a shiny package, and the masses love it. It is the antithesis of the equalising power of technology that made the field so attractive to me in the first place.

If I'm going to use a desktop for hours on end then I'd prefer that it had aesthetics that don't make me barf. Primary colours everywhere, sharp specular highlights, drop shadows, grey gradients, chunky 3D bezel effects, even the spacing between visual elements and their sizes are just all horribly wrong. I can't understand how anybody could stand looking at that, but I guess KDE has a sufficiently large user base that at least some people disagree.

GNOME 3 might not be ideal, but at least it looks nice. Actually, in my opinion, I think it looks even nicer than Apple's stuff, but again that's just my personal sense of aesthetics talking. If they made the workspace management a little less rudimentary (e.g. if they went back to having a fixed number of workspaces that you could create and destroy on the fly, and allowed you to re-arrange the workspaces themselves as opposed to just the windows on them), then I think I could get used to it. It's still extremely bare in terms of currently-implemented functionality, but hopefully this will improve over time.