Both Mach and the FreeBSD kernel are derived from BSD4.3. Mach retained enough similarities in its core, and the the VM sub-system written for it was well enough encapsulated, that it could be easily ported back to a conventional BSD kernel. Interestingly, one of the Mach developers popped up on a mailing list a few years back and pointed out where some optimisations could be made that would benefit both FreeBSD and OS X. It related to how a little understood part of the VM sub-system had been intended to work, something that had been left incomplete for years.

This isn't really news. The PS3 also ran FreeBSD, as did the PS2.

The PS2 didn't run FreeBSD, and while it has long been suspected that the PS3 operating system is derived from FreeBSD there's no categorical proof.

I don't notice a big boost to BSD given by the most popular unix derivative, OSX.

You didn't look very hard then. A lot of code from Darwin (the underlying Unix like part of OS X) has made it back into FreeBSD. This includes significant changes in the kernel, particularly around the VM subsystem - this has a lineage that stretches back to Mach, the BSD derived micro-kernel.

MacOS X is a FreeBSD-derivitive.

No it isn't. Both OS X and FreeBSD are BSD4.3 derivatives. They were then updated with code from BSD4.4. When NeXTSTEP / OpenStep was rebranded as OS X, the userland was updated with code from NetBSD (another BSD4.3 derivative) as that code had more recent features and was very portable. Later on, the userland started to be updated with code from FreeBSD, since it had become more portable in the meantime.

With the new Laravel PHP framework winning RoRs and CodeIgnitor converts by the thousands

Citation please.

It sounds like the proper support for renaming that's new in this release is a step in the right direction. I assume branching is still really copying in Subversion though, which I recall being problematic in earlier versions where you needed to know at what point you'd branched from to do merges.

Everyone and their brother seems to have moved to Git

I've seen a lot of proprietary development moving to Mercurial, but haven't heard of anyone moving to Git. The latter seems to be much more popular for Open Source stuff.

We never intended for a support contract to be required to keep JDK 7 up to date

Then provide bloody YUM and APT repos for easy upgrading on RedHat, CentOS and Debian based systems. Even Adobe can manage that for the poxy Flash plugin.

I vaguely recall that at my first job some users used to hide games by renaming them as the first revision of a genuine work file. Then the sysadmin got wise to it and deleted all revisions, so users started naming them a.out or whatever the VMS equivalent was for the default linker output.

Scotland which like it or not is physically joined to England however for the sake of political correctness we will call him Scottish. Following that "logic" Voltaire was German, since France is physically (well, geographically) joined to Germany. Or if you meant politically joined, then I guess that makes Ghandi English since India was politically joined to Great Britain when he was born.

Since when did Slashdot become horribly biased in supporting Israel?

It's a US website, and having witnessed first hand how fucked up the teaching of history and reporting of foreign affairs is in that country I'm not surprised that it's biased. As an example, a couple of years ago a new book on the Anglo-American war of 1812 was published. It got a write up in a US paper where it was lambasted for not repeating the mantra that the British started the war. In actual fact, the documentary evidence proves that it was a war of aggression by the US that attempted to annex Canada while the British were struggling against Napoleon. The plan backfired, as the poorly organised US land forces were repeatedly defeated by determined Candian colonials backed later by hardened troops from Wellingtons Iberian army. Meanwhile the Royal Navy ravaged the US coast unopposed and Royal Marines torched Washington in revenge for similar actions by US forces at the start of the war. The war was subsequently portrayed as a victory by the US, despite achieving nothing more than a status quo ante bellum (the British could have pressed for concessions by threatening to use further forces freed up from the Napoleonic wars, but saw the whole thing as a sideshow and were content with the resultant treaty). The US maintained plans for annexing Canada as recent as the 1930s, and there was even strong public opinion in favour of putting the plan into action in the first two years of the Second World War.

Yup, branching and merging in SVN sucks. The original author even admitted that the existing support is incomplete (). Use a better version control system such as Mercurial and Git from the open source world, or Perforce and Plastic SCM from the proprietary world. Do not use Accurev. I repeat, do no use Accurev.

I'd suggest not vacuuming. A layer of dust and fluff will prevent the Bungle's Finger that most discerning burglars leave from adhering to the carpet.

Bollocks. CSS was designed to separate styling from structure in web pages. It does this admirably, and only needs to be a declarative language to do so. This prevents a lot of "clever" hacks that including conditional or flow statements would have encouraged. It's the same reason why statically typed languages are better than dynamic ones - since the tooling and compile time checks can be much more comprehensive and optimisation is easier - but clueless twats prefer the dynamic ones, since they don't understand the downsides or foolishly think they are so good they wont screw up. Improved programmer productivity claims for including flow statements in CSS (or using dynamic languages) are crap as well, since while a programmer might find it easier to cobble together something that just about works, chances are very high that it will be harder to maintain.

AMD even ...