You know I was just reading my last reply and it occurred to me that since there are no fixed points in space, how could you possibly determine when you had returned to your original position? Blah.

In fairness, I think you can divide the hate into two separate camps: 1) Hatred for Windows (yes I know they have other software, but most of the hate is directed at Windows itself) 2) Hatred for the company. Full disclosure: I'm primarily a Linux Mint user although I do have a Windows 7 partition at home and use Windows Server 2008R2 at work. Most of the hate towards Windows is based on their continual redesign. People hate change but they hate change for the sake of change even more. From comments that I have seen, most hated is the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of Microsoft to many users that are stuck with the Windows eco-system for reasons of legacy software and if they had a more stable alternative would leave-it in a heartbeat. Many organisations *know* they are stuck with Windows and would rather that Microsoft didn't keep rubbing their collective faces in it. What they don't seem to realise is that if you write and sell software that people love, they will buy it in droves. You don't have to blackmail them: a lesson that the big media companies would do well to learn. Secondly, the company has some rather unsavoury history regarding their competitors and their re-sellers. Much of that corporate attitude is still evident to this day. Witness for example, the collusion with motherboard manufacturers to produce hardware that will *only* run Windows by design under the trojan horse of "increased security".

>Yes. Because if you also pick an arbitrary starting point and then follow around the loop you'll end up at points you have already visited, thus you must have passed the end point. Sounds like we're only disagreeing on what the word "end" means then and whether or not you can go beyond it. If, in travelling in any direction, you arrive where you started after some fixed time interval, then the Universe must be finite because you could measure the distance that you travelled and therefore determine the Universe's "size". It could be that there are physical reasons why this is impossible to do in practice analogous to moving faster than c. We do have good reasons for thinking that the Universe is expanding so measuring the size of the Universe might be difficult. It might also be difficult to come up with a measurement unit to describe the size of the Universe since all measurements of anything are relative. My 3 dimensional head hurts.

> What is wrong with people on the internet. As soon as someone disagrees with you they must be trolling? That was actually a joke. Don't take me too seriously. ;) > I disagree. If you pick a point on the loop and call it the starting point, you can quickly see that there is also an endpoint. In that case, you could arbitrarily call anything an "endpoint". I think what most people intuitively call an "end" in the context of this discussion, is somewhere you cannot go beyond, a point beyond which nothing exists. At least that's how I would interpret it. Interestingly though, although people can conceive of an end of a universe as a concept, I don't know if they could actually describe what it would be like. Perhaps it would a big wall. Perhaps it would be just a void-like nothingness, but surely that would be just space with nothing in it and therefore not and end at all? Sometimes trying to describe something precisely betrays our ignorance of what we actually mean.

Assuming that you're not trolling :)... Just because something is not infinite does not mean that it isn't endless. A loop is not infinite (inasmuchas it has a measurable size) but doesn't have an end either. The Cosmos (and others) talked about this rather nicely with the 2D version of reality called Flatland. A Flatlander's reality could be mapped into our 3D reality by visualising it as inhabiting the surface of a sphere. The Flatlander walks and walks and soon finds themselves where they started. Seems infinite, but in fact is not. If you map our 3D space into a higher dimensional reality (which would be difficult for us to imagine and really requires pure mathematics to explore) then we could travel in any direction and end up where we started, the implications of which would be very hard for our puny 3D brains to comprehend. The Universe seems intuitively infinite because otherwise we assume that there must be an "edge" but there probably isn't.

I completely agree with the comment about regression testing. You have to at least run the code to make sure it works right? Why not frame that test in a way that can be run again? If you have a decent framework set up and are familiar with how to use it then it won't take much longer anyway. Then sometime down the road you have to modify it (internal enhancement for performance or change in functionality) and it gives you so much more confidence to make the change knowing that you had good coverage tests from before.

Could I also echo the responses from some of the other repliers that that is a chronic shortage of documenters for most open source products? They are like rocking horse poop. If you want to hone your coding skills and can find a project that deeply interests you, then hack away. If you are just looking to contribute to a project that matters to you, then documenters are always welcomed with open arms.

I also suggest that getting involved in that depth with a project that you use regularly will increase your interest and commitment to the process. Doing work on a project that you have little interest in, just for the sake of it, will soon feel like a thankless task. I've only ever contributed to projects that I have a direct interest in, because the first step in contributing to any product is using it.

> ... and two basement levels. Plus all the ones containing the alien artifacts....

Agreed. I think some folk are confusing counting floors, with counting ceilings :D

I guess it depends what you define as "floor" I guess. Here in Canada (ex-pat Brit here) there are inconsistent implementations. I have seen: 1) Lobby, First floor, ... 2) Lobby, second floor, ... 3) Mezzanine, first floor, ... And of course it is quite common to miss floor 13, as I guess some consider 13 unlucky.

Roman numerals were awful. There's nothing particularly special about 10 as a base, though. It is most likely because we have 10 fingers. The problem with Roman Numerals is that it is an inconsistent implementation. You could easily have a base 12. You just need 12 numerals.

It's funny you should ask that question, because every time I see an article about "Salesforce" I automatically think it is a recruitment company. They could do with a bit of rebranding IMO.

To behonest, I have to agree. There was no snark in the response. It seemed an honest attempt to explain the situation. Who knows how busy this guy is. I've personally had the frustrating experience of trying to get open source software projects off the ground to find that family and work often gets in the way. If he is in that situation, prioritisation is essential to get *anything* done.

Read a blog post this morning that popped up in my Code Project email: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/05/01/TypeWars.html Strange, though. Not a single mention of Rust.

One of the big problems that I find is that nobody seems to manufacture a PCI card to support the floppy interface. IDE sure. But not floppy. If the motherboard doesn't support it, then you're sh*t out of luck.

What I can never understand is why people use "children" as the reason to avoid talk of sex, as though pre-pubescent children would really care either way. Personally, I think using kids to justify avoiding taboo subjects is just a proxy of adults' personal embarrassment.

Many people are liking Mint with MATE or Cinnamon for it's familiarity with the standard GUI that most people are familiar with. I would give that a look.

Initial versions of LibreOffice 5 (on Linux at least) were really buggy for me. Frequent crashes, strange formatting decisions. So I put off upgrading. Been running the most recent 5 stable release chain for a week or two now. Nothing to complain about so far. They must have hammered most of the issues. Currently running 5.0.5.2 now. I would certainly try it out first and see how you go.

Indeed. At the time, the iPhone was one of the must dumbed down featureless phones available compared to pretty much every other smart phone that was available at the time. A lot of people seem to forget that.