overgun77

Mexican here. Living in a city very near the border (3 hours away), work in a offshore software developing agency, friends and my father works and used to work at Ford's maquiladora and other industries.

For a very long time, foreign investment have played a large role in our economy, since early in the 1900, there is a lot of investment in minery particularly on the states near the border. With the modern age, a lot of "maquiladoras" exists in the cities that are near the border, Tijuana, Juarez, Monterrey, Hermosillo, Nogales. The labor hand is incredibly cheap, and it's not only because the companies like Ford or Motorola or Samsung wants to pay low wages, the government plays a large role since not very long ago our economy secretary considered that a person who makes ~$500 a month can afford to have a car, a good house and send their kids to private schools (which is of course a stupid lie). A typical laborer works 48 hours a week and is expected to change schedules as the needs changes, often working more than these 48 hours sometimes pulling up to 60 hours a week or even more. The average salary for a laborer in a month is around $600, which is around $3 an hour. It is enough to live a fair life. To put this in perspective, the minimun wage is around $4 a DAY. The article says the average wage is $6 an hour, but I find that inaccurate from what I can see every day.

A laborer typically hasn't finished their school, probably dropped before going to college or are graduates who studied something with not a lot of demand, like administration (probably the most studied grade) or graduates that fail to find a job for what they studied. In the eyes of the big companies, the laborers are just disposable people, there's always more from where they came from. People settle with the first opportunity they see, a lot of people dream is to find a job in the government and retire 40 years later. There is a lot of apathy and I think that's one of the reasons we don't progress as a country (Our president is a disgrace, for example).

Luckily the software industry is MUCH different. It's one of the best paid professions here, very flexible hours and working Monday to Friday and the pay is 4 times greater than that of an industry laborer and even then that's less than a junior level engineer would earn, all you need to know is how to speak English and learn some web development. A well paid software engineer with around 5 years of experience, earns around $14 an hour, which is I think around twice the minimum wage in USA? An entry level engineer earns around $5.

Life here is much cheaper, I can go out with my girlfriend, eat something fancy, buy a 3 liters of beer and go see a movie with $25 and still have some money left.

Linux Mint does this on their LMDE version. A rolling release will mean that Canonical must provide an easy way to rollback to previous package versions or to save snapshots of the user's machine before upgrading. You can't expect that an Ubuntu end-user to have the same technical knowledge as someone with experience with Debian, Gentoo or the BSDs to troubleshoot when suddenly their computer is not booting and that they need to change run levels or disable their display manager to figure out what's wrong with Xorg. Shit happens, and happens often.

Also, I've used Archlinux (now Debian sid recently with their systemd "upgrade" and other desicions that deviate away from their KISS principle) and haven't experienced any problem, then again I tend to run a maximalist[1] desktop. Stuff starts to break when you have a lot of applications installed with their own dependencies and their own team of people working on that application, I've always felt that the whole desktop environment on Linux is like building a tower with cubes, it's solid when you have a few applications, but as you start adding stuff on top, the whole things starts trembling away and it takes a really small problem to bring everything down.

If this is going to be done, they better provide ways to their users to easily recover from an upgrade gone wrong.

[1] - Maximailism is a better word: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/maximalism-is-a-bett...

I live in a region where there is no DST. It's troublesome because DST applies at different dates around the world, since I work with people from different countries, this can get troublesome around the dates when the new times start on the different regions, and when I was a kid I remember on winter when going to school, I actually arrived at night at 7:00 AM and the sun went out until ~8:30, and the sun would set at 5 PM, but on summer, the sun rises earlier than 5 AM and goes down at ~8PM. I like any kind of idea that helps the world to, at least, alleviate some of our resources sucking activities. I don't really believe these random claims people throw like "Recent studies show that DST doesn't save enough energy" or something like that, at least provide some facts and studies that prove that, I don't know much history around the DST, however I'm pretty sure the countries around the world applied it for some good reason.

Not trying to undermine your skills, but if you can't get something done, it's not the tool's fault.

Not really a unix command, but a vi command that has been really useful, specially if you do lots of editing protected files and want to keep your custom vim configuration:

!sudo tee %

I honestly don't understand all the money and hype around "world changing" startups that creates a product or service that offer some kind of amusement/entertainment or solving a "real world problem" such as the need to know what restaurants are near one person or how much one spends in potatoes.

I wish projects like this had more support, from offering sponsorship or scholarship to the people involved in the project to do more research or prototypes, to big companies offering to help on the research of that project, something like that, and hopefully leave aside the cookie-cutter world changing android app we see every week and start focusing on things that matter. I have the feel we have become a stagnant society as far as innovation and discoveries go, we focus all our energy, money and interest in entertainment rather than in discovery and humanity development.