jniles

Not having been a developer in the Borland era, the most valuable take-away for me is this statement:

"On paper this may seem like a fairly minor adjustment, if you have the attitude (as Borland executive management had) that developers are a dime a dozen and any developer can be applied to any product or problem space. That may work for technical programming skills but it doesn't work for passion."

Regardless of what the technical abilities of the product, it's a good reminder that a product made great by the hard work of people who believe in it should be mindful to prioritize their ambitions in product decisions. This is particularly relevant in the open source world.

I thoroughly disagree.

The point is that we are seeing too much PC, and it is corrupting the nature of public debate. All comments become subjective to the audience, rather than subjective to the speaker. The examples cited by the author all are encompassed in the quote

" I think it’s these very small things that reinforce cultural and racial stereotypes.. "

to which the author disagrees. You are correct, there is no appropriate scale to measure being offended, which is why unchecked (read: no scale to judge) PC results in kids being kicked out of school, a huge industry being built around PC counseling, etc. The author is not proposing removing PC altogether, just that it is being laughably abused to the detriment of everyone.

I'd be inclined to agree.

This is a great idea (even if not original). Every news agency should budget one of these as part of being in the business.

Having done several years of college using LaTeX religiously, I can safely say it isn't a replacement for Word. I found my documents were immaculate, but I wasted a lot of time on relatively simple things (getting the pt's right, margin's, title pages, etc..)