I'll narrow the scope to "OSS software that is common and where its license is not a selling point to most of its users." KHTML/Chromium/WebKit (to Internet Explorer), Firefox, MySQL, BSD (to AT&T Unix), GCC, LLVM, GIMP, InkScape, VLC to name a few.
2. Centralized documentation, board of directors versus benevolent dictator for life, faster network stack, fewer GNU tools in the base install, ports tree, license.
4. Hardware support, especially power management (ACPI, SpeedStep, etc.) on laptops that are not ThinkPads or Dell Latitudes. Wayland.
5. The FreeBSD handbook.
The biggest problem with the BSDs are not the operating systems themselves, but the network effect surrounding GNU/Linux causing developers to completely overlook them, going on to create bodies of code that are not easy to port or in some cases impossible (Systemd, Wayland).
The "Final Verdict" is very plain and is hardly enhanced by reading the body of the article. It would make more sense if it was put in the opening of the article, creating a complete abstract.
It absolutely has. I don't think I can live without doing it anymore. I started in middle school and am currently in college. Being so close to me, it's not formal at all, being more like a stream of consciousness filled with anything I think is particularly interesting to myself. I don't do it according to any set schedule; just as I am not equally energetic and insightful every single day, I am not equally productive every day.
If I don't write something down, I forget it and move on to the next idea. While I rarely read what I have written, it is a massive benefit by itself to commit to paper what I am thinking because the process of transforming a pool of unorganized, but related thoughts into something resembling a cohesive idea that can be told linearly is invaluable in resolving contradictions and evaluating their value. I prefer to handwrite because I don't think in ASCII (or Unicode, or LaTeX, or any other computer format). Ninety-nine cent composition notebooks and commodity rollerball pens are all I need.
This spring, I completed a data structures course at a large state school. We used Java at our university because Princeton did, and I imagine Princeton did because of the ease of segmenting concepts into classes because Java bytecode is the same between the students' devices and the machines which were used to grade their assignments (our grades were determined as a fraction of the number of test-cases our code would pass).
What advantages does this offer over something like typing "$QUERY -site:*.com" into a mainstream search engine? I think webmasters in general do a pretty good job at self-segregating their sites into commercial and non-commercial entities through the use of different top-level domains.
The advantage is a better set of sites since there are a ton of interesting little .com sites out there, and lots of unwanted sites on .org and country code domains. He also blocks some URL patterns that appear on spammy domains regardless of TLD. Try a few searches or the random results page to see the difference. It’s fun browsing.
That doesn't actually sound very different from my experience with major search engines beyond the first page. I've taken it as a bit of an law that the Internet outside of large centralized and/or moderated sites gets very fringe very quickly. Since the whole point of the search engine is to display noncommercial sites, users will inevitably face thousands of self-published blogs of varying beliefs, quality, and truthiness. As these fringe sites take up more domain names by total volume than mainstream platforms (there is only one Twitter, Facebook, et al.), I am not surprised at all that they seem to be even more voluminous here than on commercial search engines.
