I am not sure an atomic bomb is a good comparison, I have heard nuclear reactors possess many multiples of radioactive material than a bomb.

Very old news.

And yet some of us are stuck using CVS.

Some of us are stuck using Clear Case or Visual Source Safe. Whatever source control you're using, someone always has it worse.

"someone always has it worse."

Unfortunatelly, not in your case. ;)

What was the name of that version control tool before CVS, RVCS? Back in 2007 I had heard one very big name hardware company using that for version control and planning to move to CVS as they thought the former was beginning to show its age.

Or you could talk to Joe down the hall. He has the 'gold' version of the source code on his desktop. Don't forget to send him your changes when you are done and he will integrate it to the current 'gold' version.

You're thinking of RCS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_Control_System

I used SCCS in the 80s. Not sure if that was the one you're talking about though.

The company I'm working at actually moved to ClearCase a couple of years back. It's the most painful development tool that I have ever used and I pity any future victims of IBM's marketing skill who choose to adopt it.

"someone always has it worse"...

That was my previous place of employment: in-house perl scripts wrapped around RCS. Absolute nightmare.

I would rather have Clear Case than SVN. As bad as it is, at least it can branch and merge.

Indeed. When I clicked the article link, I expected to find something from ~2007.

I disagree. The rest of the world gets talent back at the cost of those talented individuals. You are one individual starting a startup and the government, the people, everybody is against you. You must own a strong corporation with R&D centers to be able to swim against that tide. It's not for individual entrepreneurs. I think this way because I have been through it and now closing down in my home country, moving to the U.S.

How would you fix it? The leaders in those countries should fix it.

They should be honored to be pioneers, bringing their country up to speed.

I don't think this answer holds true anymore, i.e. the newbies who are a year old would claim comment quality is going low. I think it now has become the norm. Why not just aim for a standard near the top quality submissions?

why does he say they failed?

The original idea (a form of entertainment by 'lifecasting' Justin) wasn't sustainable on several levels. Of course, the company Justin.tv is alive and well, but with a different game plan than when they started out.

Why do new build systems have to use some clunky old make style syntax? For me speed is hardly a primary goal. A build system must be understandable, readable and easy to debug. For starters, it should have an easy to read syntax.

If you have a build system which your users are also concerned about, readability and maintainability are a lot more important. SCons managed to achieve most of this by using a Python syntax. But its behavior can be quite unpredictable at times.

The only reason GNU/Hurd is still a popular subject of discussion is its historical fame. There is no concrete reasoning behind this project anymore as to why it may find adoption. It is not easy to write operating systems in the first place. Adoption is even harder today because the subject is very well explored and the solution has become a commodity.

I don't agree. With virtualisation systems such as Xen it has become easier to use specific operating systems for specific tasks, either as hypervisor or VM.

If the GNU Hurd people can prove that, due to its modularity, it is really that more secure than current OS approaches, I can certainly see some uses.

The reason is it is the second best. It doesn't solve the problems the ipad solves any better.

If it tried to solve only slightly different problems, it could still have a good market share even if it wasn't as famous as the ipad.

Interesting. What would it take to run this on a baremetal ARM processor? There are many embedded ARM processors out there and ones running linux are a small fraction of them. There is also no reliable scripting interpreter for baremetal use except Lua.

Python's standard library includes a lot of functionality that only really makes sense on top of an operating system, e.g., filesystem operations, inter-process communication. By the time you implement that kind of thing, plus drivers to communicate with the peripherals on your embedded platform, plus a TCP/IP stack, you have an operating system. Maybe you have a small RTOS instead of Linux per se, but that's a different question than 'bare metal' (and I dare say more embedded systems are running with at least an RTOS than without).

You don't really have to have networking or files to write programs. Currently in a baremetal embedded system (I am including the RTOSes) you can write programs in C or C++. It would be very useful to be able to write programs with a main() function using python. You could write an interactive shell, device drivers, even a small operating system. So what I mean here is instead of aiming for applications, you could use python to write system software.

I think there are already lua interpreters ported in this way but python is more common and perhaps easier to use.