The scary part is that they are both right.

Have there been any attempts to pass a serious budget in the senate regardless of what the Republicans are doing? I have heard of budgets being brought forward that neither party was going to support which I would call political versus a serious budget.

I hate politics.

For what they have done, I think it is a good thing since it looks like a lot of the changes are bug fixes where language would not matter.

From the description of Lotus Symphony ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Symphony#Features ), it looks like Eclipse is for some shell, so I do not know if that is part of what they will even consider using or not. OpenOffice may be taking ideas from it without the Eclipse requirement to develop their new task pane: http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Sidebar. The only thing I can tell is that there is a lot of C++ work in the sidebar branch of their repo.

I agree that Java was overused in places that it did not need to be. I personally prefer C and/or Python for work I do.

I am pleased with OpenOffice (v3.4.1). I have not seen any need to try LibreOffice personally. My take is that both are developing new features.

Regarding new features in OpenOffice, https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/merging_lotus_symphony_allegro_moderato talks about what is being merged into OpenOffice from IBM's Lotus Symphony. As long as IBM continues to develop Lotus Symphony, I think that OpenOffice will benefit earlier than LibreOffice as IBM tends to do a lot with the Apache foundation. I say earlier since LibreOffice can always get the code from OpenOffice.

I am fine with these visas, however, they should make it very easy for the person hired using one of them to switch jobs at will without a slew of requirements that keep them effectively owned by the first company.

Of course, many corporations would oppose it because the people here on such a visa would be asking for much better salaries and benefits, but the only stated purpose to increase the number of visas and the whole idea of the H1-B is to get more workers. Note: I said "stated" purpose.

How does that factor in the tax breaks (income tax and mortgage deductions) that California takes advantage of? A CNN bit about it: http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/06/news/economy/state-local-tax-deductions/index.html

Do they really have a surplus? http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Does-California-Really-Have-a-Budget-Surplus__Bay-Area.html

As I noted at the bottom, I use zsh. You really should try it.

I have used both a lot. gmake can be a pain in differences between versions when the Makefiles become complex, especially prior to 3.81. With BSD make, I can do 'make -V VARIABLE' to print what the calculated value. That is not to say it is blissful. They are different advantages and disadvantages. However, you should be using something like cmake where you do not have to care about the underlying make. They thing that really annoys me between the two is they are the opposite with regards to $.

You had implied that using older, stable tools was worse than using newer tools.

Regarding file size, I guess it depends upon a few factors since there are examples where MacOS binaries produced by Clang are smaller than gcc but not for Linux.

That still confuses me. Is the KDE version that far behind on FreeBSD as compared to Linux? I can only install v4.7.3 on FreeBSD. Is that old? If you talk about shells and other command-line tools, then you are talking about the way our grandparents used systems.

What pain? Installing a few applications is painful? What do you lack with FreeBSD's utilities? tcsh is pretty decent for a shell. cp even has the same '-a' option as cp in fileutils, or is fileutils too primitive? gmake and make are different, yet make is not primitive. Anything related to the desktop has to be installed by both Linux and FreeBSD, so that is not a valid argument. gcc is almost 25 years old. Chemisor, please answer why you are using something so old when Clang is available.

It is bad to be compatible?!? Are you saying different systems need to be incompatible else you would not use them?

I like how you said, "Well, they can keep their stability; instead of installing Linux over BSD". You seem to be implying that Linux is unstable.

Personally, I always install zsh on any system I use even if the system has bash.

Or are they GPS satellites "equipped with nuclear missiles and a laser cannon"?