Your point is valid: the failure was probably not directly attributable to the operating system. It may be that the automation was developed in Java/Eclipse and would have broken identically on any platform.
However, the point of many Microsoft 'haters' on/. has been that Microsoft tools are explicitly designed to interfere with the freedom of its users and especially developers. This is not an especially contentions point in the debate because the Microsoft side of the argument is that this is their value-add. Deployments of Microsoft products are argued to be more consistent because the tools prohibit 'hacking'. Microsoft proponents also claim that there is less need for freedom in Microsoft tools because they tools integrate with each other seamlessly and 'just work'.
The reason some folks make these childish comments may be little more than "I told you so"-ism with a little confirmation bias, but the longer-winded version of these comments don't get any attention any more. The longer versions are basically re-hashes of essays by the likes of RMS, ESR, Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall and other FOSS folks.
So, in short, tools which are designed to prevent their users from modifying them attract and breed users who have no interest or experience in knowing how their tools work, how they don't work, and how to integrate them with tools which were not developed by the same company. "It only runs on Windows" is an indication to some that a tool is fragile, so whenever something breaks those people will naturally assume that thing runs on Windows even if Windows was not the cause of the breakage.
To answer your question, the point of mentioning that it runs on Windows is to re-iterate the above.
Good luck developing a collaboration tool which is not subject to the tyranny of the majority. And if you do develop one, good luck getting the majority to use it.
I didn't RTFA, but the summary says Apple asked the city to remove the _meters_, not the parking.
The number of street parking slots is reduced by 0% under Apple's plan. It's Apple's way of offering customers validated parking. According to the summary they would pay the city whatever the city expected in revenue. So I don't see a problem. If every business in the city participated in this you'd have business-sponsored downtown parking. The businesses would be paying the city NOT to charge potential customers for parking in front of their stores.
If the city won't cooperate, maybe Apple will pay a monkey to feed the parking meters on a regular basis.
Also in the summary it says "The city is in the middle of a campaign to reduce downtown parking." I don't think this is relevant to Apple's proposal. If the city wants to reduce downtown parking, they can. Parking meters don't reduce downtown parking. Replacing parking with sidewalks and parks reduces parking.
Also, by "socially agnostic" I mean that I keep my relationship with spirituality out of my relationships with most other people. My marriage to my wife was a commitment between the two of us which we made as a matter of choice. Our spiritual relationships with the universe are not part of our commitment to each other. There was no church involved, and we only involved the state because of certain hassles we would have run into otherwise.
What form would such evidence take? Repeatable phenomena with no generally accepted theory or explination? Science has made great strides, but for every mystery we unravel two more show themselves.
I'm socially agnostic. Atheism would require that I choose a definition for the deity or dieties my atheism would be denying. Mundane philosophical logic dictates that it is impossible to prove OR disprove the existance of an all-powerful entity.
My intuition tells me that Godel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to scientific knowledge to show that we will never have a complete model of the mechanics of the universe. Such a model would necessarily be incomplete or self-contradicting.
We will always be making progress, asymptotically approaching a Perfect Model. Between our current Best Model and the Real World will be a gap of unexplainable or unpredictable behaviors. There will always be room for religion or supersition in those gaps, no matter how small they are. However, even if my intuition is wrong and we come up with a complete model of the universe, there's no way we can "know" that that universe and our measurements and modeling of it, were or were not constructed by a greater power of some sort.
Whether you believe there is or isn't a higher power, the degree to which you hold that believe is the degree to which you claim to know something which is, by definition, unknowable. There is no logical difference between telling someone an untestable assertion is true and telling them it isn't.
The original claim, that "MySQL is fine for the vast majority of applications out there" is not invalidated by any of the problems you point out.
The objections you raise are valid, but irrelevant. There are far more cases of small-scale applications use out there than Industrial Strength applications. Who cares if some David Hasselhoff fan website's bulletin board isn't robust? Even the owner of the board probably doesn't REALLY care.
"Well, I have a job, a fiancee, hobbies and many things I prefer doing rather than watch Wikipedia articles for changes. That answer screams out "broken process!" to me."
You can (and probably do) say the same thing about any free-participation project from open source to a colaborative picnic project. You're getting something for nothing: the option of benefiting from the work of the current and past volunteers. You have the choice to participate or not. If you don't participate, you lose nothing. You would not be better or worse off if the project had not existed. If you have an "it's nice, but..." feeling about the project, you may choose to address the "but..." or not.
It is not helpful to say "this is dumb because I'm not interested in helping out." By that I mean, it doesn't help YOU any. It doesn't inspire other people to fix things on your behalf. It doesn't magically make the project better.
From your post it's clear that you are not the target audience for this particular project. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm just posting to suggest that publicly announcing "this project is of no value to me" may be a posting of no value to you, so don't bother. Just move along, nothing to see here.
However, if the project in question (Linux, WikiPedia, HypotheticalVolunteerPicnic) were not open/free/libre, you would have no option to participate. You couldn't improve it if you wanted to. And it would almost certainly not be non-commercial, so it would be encumbered with fees, advertising or both. The point is that you're under no obligation to participate, but you're really just shooting yourself in the foot by making noise about your choice not to participate.
I don't think a strongly auth'd wiki would attract as much positive attention as WikiPedia has, but...
How about a fork?
1. Users sign their diffs
2. Seed the fork with the existing WikiPedia data
3. Setup automation to track 'upstream' differences
4. Trusted users can vouch for upstream-derived diffs by signing them
I like the anonymous aspect of WikiPedia, so as long as the keys can't be tracked back to a real person, I'm happy. I don't think it's necessary to have meatspace accountability as long as you have online accountability.
With some kind of peer recognition mechanism, 'good citizens' can be recognized for their work and given priority for adding or revoking changes.
I don't care how well you can drive, no one is perfect, and that one day that someone drives imperfectly is the day I don't want to be near them. I'm for no driving.
Life is dangerous. Making everything illegal is not the solution. It's already illegal to cause an accident. It is not necessary to legislate all the different ways a person can be irresponsible. Some people are fully capable of doing those things reponsibly. There are some people who will never be safe drivers no matter how many restrictions we place on them. The only sensible solution is education and attempting to extract appropriate compensation from those who cause accidents.
This culture of preventive legislation demeans us as capable humans and re-enforces the notion that we're incapable of taking care of ourselves and a menace to those around us. This is certainly true of some people but legislating for the lowest common denominator only allows and encourages us to degrade even further.
Furthermore, this cell-phone antagonism that is so popular these days just smacks of classism. "Those damn yuppies in their SUVs, drinking their lattes and talking on their cellphones with their stock brokers!" Get over it. Talking on cell phones in restaruants isn't rude. Talking loudly in a restaurant, on or off a phone, is rude.
Driving while talking on a cell phone isn't any more dangerous than talking to rambunctions children while driving. It's not the talking, the children, or the cell phone that causes the accident. It's the driver. The human being with free will and personal responsibility is the only person who can prevent accidents. Not the police, not the politicians, and not the vocal antagonists of individuality and personal freedom.
All of what you say about Wikipedia is true as far as I know, but the problems also exist everywhere else: the internet at large and traditional media.
The differences are that on a Wiki
* anyone can also FIX it
* there is a publicly available history of changes
* there is a system for notification of changes
So at their worst, Wikis are no worse than anything else, but in all other cases they are, _or could be_ far better.
I do not concede the causitive relationship between playing games and having destructive thoughts, but even if it does exist that doesn't take responsibility for the act away from the perpetrator or their legal guardian. If someone is forcing people to play brain-washing games, then THAT PERSON is the problem, not the game. If people are voluntarily playing games, then they are still responsible for their actions.
This is the same confusion that led to prohibition. People got drunk and did terrible things, but instead of holding people accountable for the terrible things they did, the United States outlawed alcohol. We're still recovering from the effects of that ban.
That's exactly it right there. Business is risk-averse. Any risks taken must have known, quantifiable limits and statsitcally likely profits to justify them. There is no gambling in successful businesses. The only risks are making less money than projected, and even that is unacceptable.
But that's the way it has to be. Anything else would be unforgivable. Any company that throws money around without knowing exactly how much ROI they're going to get is playing fast-and-loose with investment capital, and MUST fail eventually. Witness the dot-com bust.
The answer to this problem is not legislation or education of the business people. The answer is for the people who care about the problem to take steps to obsolete that system. If you're an artist, refuse to sign with companies with which you disagree. If you are a consumer, don't buy from companies with which you disagree. Support the independant artists. If you are a voter, vote against anything which interferes with the ability of the artists and consumers to make those choices.
The freedom to not participate in a relationship you find offensive is very important, and we must continue to exercise it lest it atrophy.
If you're looking for a specific way to support independant artists, I recommend listening to kexp.org. They are listener-sponsered radio and they know who their masters are: the listeners and artists who support them.
Since I work in a unix shell so much I tend to avoid whitespace in the names of things. Therefore, I call the Microsoft operating systems Win95, WinNT, Win2k, WinXP. I call Unix variants by their distribution name: Debian, RedHat, FreeBSD, Solaris. I only use a slash when it really is part of the OS name: OS/2, HP/UX. Whenever possible I avoid using names which would have to be quoted or escaped.
Until we actually know how much of human behavior and consciousness comes from each of nurture and nature, I'd say comments like this are premature and out of line. Maybe upbringing is everything, but what if it isn't?
Besides, what if the parts of himself that the kid is most proud of are the parts he got from his biological father? We know that genetics control predisposition to certain diseases and body structures, so we can infer that someone could be genetically healthy. If that's what the biological father gave his son, I'd say he has something to be proud of. Just because the choice was "easy" and didn't take a lot of work or a long time doesn't diminish its value to the recipient.
More drives means more heads, means the average distance a head has to travel to read data is shorter, means lower latency.
Are there situations where RAID won't help you? Of course.
Is RAID a silver bullet? Of course not.
Do five drives in a 25% full or less RAID4 (parity not striped) find the data you're looking for faster than one of those drives? Usually.
Does the raid slow down as it fills up? If the heads have to sweep the whole platter to find data, yes.
It is true that for individual operations RAID5 does not improve latency because all of the drives have to be read to verify parity, but this is not true for every RAID algorithm, and few RAID5s are actually used in this way anyway. As several other posters pointed out, improving throughput has the effect of improving overall latency by keeping the I/O queue moving faster. As long as the RAID is always busy, more heads (for the same amount of storage) will improve total latency and throughput.
Symlinks work across filesystems (as you mentioned in 3) and the filesystem hosting the link may not be mounted when it's destination moves, so it's actually impossible to make them work the way you ask. And as another poster pointed out, sometimes you don't WANT links to follow their targets.
Another poster mentions that hard links may work the way you want, but I think that poster mis-understands hardlinks and your request. You can't hardlink directories, and deleting the link doesn't delete the target (which is what you seem to be asking for with 2).
Anyway, what you need to understand is that symlinks are not the things they point to, nor are they supposed to be. In fact, even the things they point to aren't themselves. A file or directory is a one-way association between that name and the data it points to. A path is a list of names. A symlink is a one-way association between a name and another name. These are powerful abstractions just as they are, and whatever functionality you're actually looking for is probably higher-level than this.
If you want two names for the same thing, your desktop shell is probably where that functionality belongs.
The minimalist behavior of symlinks and hardlinks is exactly what makes unix more powerful than DOS.
For those looking for a much better written perspective on these issues I recommend Neil Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line..."
"If people only bought things that were of high quality and good value for money that they actually needed, the world economy would grind to a halt."
Nah. That's a variation of the Broken Window falacy. If people quit buying crap, then the people who make crap will make or do something else. Yes, there will be short term diffulties while everyone adjusts, but a change like that wouldn't happen quickly anyway. I'm sure the entrepreneurs will adapt faster than the consumers.
However, my experience is that ALL people weight the short term advantages and disadvantages much more strongly than the long term ones, and that if they have a choice between a $500 fridge that lasts three years and a $1000 fridge that lasts 20 years, they will buy the cheaper one.
There's a good side to this, though. Technology in all areas has been advancing so quickly that we're actually better off with a short replacement cycle because the latest products are more efficient and cleaner than the products they replaced. Whether obsolesence is planned or not, it is serving the consumers. Old fridges ran on the kind of freon that was bad for the ozone. Old cars pollute like the dickens. Etc.
The main things we, the thinking people, should be demanding are liberty, equality and transparency. I think we all know about the first two, but the third one is most important now. By transparency I mean that the consumers need to know EXACTLY what they're getting, and what else they could get with the money they're spending. I'm not talking about more shopping channels, either. I'm talking about a Consumer Reports crossed with Wikipedia, Google, Ebay and Amazon.
You're arguing the wrong point. You say "God is easier to believe in than evolution because evolution is 'rather lacking in scientific support and seems phenomenally unlikely to have happened'."
The grandparent post was arguing that "Adding God to the equation doesn't get us any closer to an answer because we still don't know what God is or where it came from."
The grandparent is saying creationism is like simplifying an equation by adding another variable.
You are saying that evolution isn't solved yet, so life must be magic.
In fact, you just proved the grandparent's point: your point doesn't get us any closer to understanding, preserving or improving life.
The real problem with this so-called debate is that the purpose of science and religion should never be at odds. Science provides predictive models for mechanisms. Religion puts motivation into the system. How do particles stick together? The four fundamental forces. Why? Because that's how the universe works. In other words, God (or whatever your favorite diety is) setup the world. We can't understand God, but we can build models of the universe we were given.
There may be objective truth, but there is no objective observer (which we can communicate with objectively), so there is no infallable way of demonstrating the objective veracity of an assertion. There are only aproximate truthes.
Also, it may be that objective truth does NOT exist. We would have no way of knowing because we have no objective observational mechanism with which to test its veracity.
HOWEVER, this does not negate the value of approximate truth, any more than having a lot of money would be devalued by not having all the money. I am also not saying there are no true statements. I only state that no statements can be known or proven to be objectively or absolutely true regardless of their actual truth. Statements can only be demonstrated to be statistically consistent.
Also, there are provably false statements. A statement may be internally inconsistent ("this statement is false"), or it may be shown to be subjectively inconsistent ("the earth is flat"), but that doesn't make the opposite of that statement true, it only makes it _less false_.
This is also not a justification for Nilism. I'm not saying reality is a sham, I'm saying it's something we can never know perfectly.
Every day I tell myself I'll only READ/., but sometimes I just can't resist replying...
"And as a bonus, your not bogged down with dependancies.... oh wait you want cyclical dependancies???"
apt-get resolves cyclical dependancies. Dependancy handling only fails in cases where humans would have trouble too: incorrect package information, or impossible situations.
None of the other three points interest me. I don't care of my distro is behind (obviously, since I'm comparing Slack with Debian). I don't care if it's hard for other people to use (I'm not them). I don't care if the leader is Our Lord Satan. As long as it's Free Software, the leader's quirks are immaterial.
But the one thing a distribution SHOULD do is integrate packages in a way that does something for its users. Slackware does not compete in this regard. The only rational reason to use Slack is that it's what you're used to.
I've been running it under XP for a couple of months at work, and I've never had a problem with it. My uptime is currently two weeks, since I had to patch and reboot the hosting XP instance. Performance is excellent, and the virtual machine behaves exactly as advertised: an entire VM with its own vertualized hardware and everything. Obviously I wouldn't want to play game or watch screen savers in it, but I only ssh to it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point is valid: the failure was probably not directly attributable to the operating system. It may be that the automation was developed in Java/Eclipse and would have broken identically on any platform.
/. has been that Microsoft tools are explicitly designed to interfere with the freedom of its users and especially developers. This is not an especially contentions point in the debate because the Microsoft side of the argument is that this is their value-add. Deployments of Microsoft products are argued to be more consistent because the tools prohibit 'hacking'. Microsoft proponents also claim that there is less need for freedom in Microsoft tools because they tools integrate with each other seamlessly and 'just work'.
However, the point of many Microsoft 'haters' on
The reason some folks make these childish comments may be little more than "I told you so"-ism with a little confirmation bias, but the longer-winded version of these comments don't get any attention any more. The longer versions are basically re-hashes of essays by the likes of RMS, ESR, Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall and other FOSS folks.
So, in short, tools which are designed to prevent their users from modifying them attract and breed users who have no interest or experience in knowing how their tools work, how they don't work, and how to integrate them with tools which were not developed by the same company. "It only runs on Windows" is an indication to some that a tool is fragile, so whenever something breaks those people will naturally assume that thing runs on Windows even if Windows was not the cause of the breakage.
To answer your question, the point of mentioning that it runs on Windows is to re-iterate the above.
How much is that in Libraries of Congress?
Good luck developing a collaboration tool which is not subject to the tyranny of the majority. And if you do develop one, good luck getting the majority to use it.
Death on Two Legs
537,000,000 for sex
1,520,000,000 for internet
I didn't RTFA, but the summary says Apple asked the city to remove the _meters_, not the parking.
The number of street parking slots is reduced by 0% under Apple's plan. It's Apple's way of offering customers validated parking. According to the summary they would pay the city whatever the city expected in revenue. So I don't see a problem. If every business in the city participated in this you'd have business-sponsored downtown parking. The businesses would be paying the city NOT to charge potential customers for parking in front of their stores.
If the city won't cooperate, maybe Apple will pay a monkey to feed the parking meters on a regular basis.
Also in the summary it says "The city is in the middle of a campaign to reduce downtown parking." I don't think this is relevant to Apple's proposal. If the city wants to reduce downtown parking, they can. Parking meters don't reduce downtown parking. Replacing parking with sidewalks and parks reduces parking.
Also, by "socially agnostic" I mean that I keep my relationship with spirituality out of my relationships with most other people. My marriage to my wife was a commitment between the two of us which we made as a matter of choice. Our spiritual relationships with the universe are not part of our commitment to each other. There was no church involved, and we only involved the state because of certain hassles we would have run into otherwise.
"for whom no evidence exists"
What form would such evidence take? Repeatable phenomena with no generally accepted theory or explination? Science has made great strides, but for every mystery we unravel two more show themselves.
I'm socially agnostic. Atheism would require that I choose a definition for the deity or dieties my atheism would be denying. Mundane philosophical logic dictates that it is impossible to prove OR disprove the existance of an all-powerful entity.
My intuition tells me that Godel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to scientific knowledge to show that we will never have a complete model of the mechanics of the universe. Such a model would necessarily be incomplete or self-contradicting.
We will always be making progress, asymptotically approaching a Perfect Model. Between our current Best Model and the Real World will be a gap of unexplainable or unpredictable behaviors. There will always be room for religion or supersition in those gaps, no matter how small they are. However, even if my intuition is wrong and we come up with a complete model of the universe, there's no way we can "know" that that universe and our measurements and modeling of it, were or were not constructed by a greater power of some sort.
Whether you believe there is or isn't a higher power, the degree to which you hold that believe is the degree to which you claim to know something which is, by definition, unknowable. There is no logical difference between telling someone an untestable assertion is true and telling them it isn't.
So let's ALL keep our beliefs to ourselves.
The original claim, that "MySQL is fine for the vast majority of applications out there" is not invalidated by any of the problems you point out.
The objections you raise are valid, but irrelevant. There are far more cases of small-scale applications use out there than Industrial Strength applications. Who cares if some David Hasselhoff fan website's bulletin board isn't robust? Even the owner of the board probably doesn't REALLY care.
See also: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
"Well, I have a job, a fiancee, hobbies and many things I prefer doing rather than watch Wikipedia articles for changes. That answer screams out "broken process!" to me."
You can (and probably do) say the same thing about any free-participation project from open source to a colaborative picnic project. You're getting something for nothing: the option of benefiting from the work of the current and past volunteers. You have the choice to participate or not. If you don't participate, you lose nothing. You would not be better or worse off if the project had not existed. If you have an "it's nice, but..." feeling about the project, you may choose to address the "but..." or not.
It is not helpful to say "this is dumb because I'm not interested in helping out." By that I mean, it doesn't help YOU any. It doesn't inspire other people to fix things on your behalf. It doesn't magically make the project better.
From your post it's clear that you are not the target audience for this particular project. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm just posting to suggest that publicly announcing "this project is of no value to me" may be a posting of no value to you, so don't bother. Just move along, nothing to see here.
However, if the project in question (Linux, WikiPedia, HypotheticalVolunteerPicnic) were not open/free/libre, you would have no option to participate. You couldn't improve it if you wanted to. And it would almost certainly not be non-commercial, so it would be encumbered with fees, advertising or both. The point is that you're under no obligation to participate, but you're really just shooting yourself in the foot by making noise about your choice not to participate.
I don't think a strongly auth'd wiki would attract as much positive attention as WikiPedia has, but...
How about a fork?
1. Users sign their diffs
2. Seed the fork with the existing WikiPedia data
3. Setup automation to track 'upstream' differences
4. Trusted users can vouch for upstream-derived diffs by signing them
I like the anonymous aspect of WikiPedia, so as long as the keys can't be tracked back to a real person, I'm happy. I don't think it's necessary to have meatspace accountability as long as you have online accountability.
With some kind of peer recognition mechanism, 'good citizens' can be recognized for their work and given priority for adding or revoking changes.
Taken further:
I don't care how well you can drive, no one is perfect, and that one day that someone drives imperfectly is the day I don't want to be near them. I'm for no driving.
Life is dangerous. Making everything illegal is not the solution. It's already illegal to cause an accident. It is not necessary to legislate all the different ways a person can be irresponsible. Some people are fully capable of doing those things reponsibly. There are some people who will never be safe drivers no matter how many restrictions we place on them. The only sensible solution is education and attempting to extract appropriate compensation from those who cause accidents.
This culture of preventive legislation demeans us as capable humans and re-enforces the notion that we're incapable of taking care of ourselves and a menace to those around us. This is certainly true of some people but legislating for the lowest common denominator only allows and encourages us to degrade even further.
Furthermore, this cell-phone antagonism that is so popular these days just smacks of classism. "Those damn yuppies in their SUVs, drinking their lattes and talking on their cellphones with their stock brokers!" Get over it. Talking on cell phones in restaruants isn't rude. Talking loudly in a restaurant, on or off a phone, is rude.
Driving while talking on a cell phone isn't any more dangerous than talking to rambunctions children while driving. It's not the talking, the children, or the cell phone that causes the accident. It's the driver. The human being with free will and personal responsibility is the only person who can prevent accidents. Not the police, not the politicians, and not the vocal antagonists of individuality and personal freedom.
All of what you say about Wikipedia is true as far as I know, but the problems also exist everywhere else: the internet at large and traditional media.
The differences are that on a Wiki
* anyone can also FIX it
* there is a publicly available history of changes
* there is a system for notification of changes
So at their worst, Wikis are no worse than anything else, but in all other cases they are, _or could be_ far better.
I do not concede the causitive relationship between playing games and having destructive thoughts, but even if it does exist that doesn't take responsibility for the act away from the perpetrator or their legal guardian. If someone is forcing people to play brain-washing games, then THAT PERSON is the problem, not the game. If people are voluntarily playing games, then they are still responsible for their actions.
This is the same confusion that led to prohibition. People got drunk and did terrible things, but instead of holding people accountable for the terrible things they did, the United States outlawed alcohol. We're still recovering from the effects of that ban.
"They want the model that puts them in control."
That's exactly it right there. Business is risk-averse. Any risks taken must have known, quantifiable limits and statsitcally likely profits to justify them. There is no gambling in successful businesses. The only risks are making less money than projected, and even that is unacceptable.
But that's the way it has to be. Anything else would be unforgivable. Any company that throws money around without knowing exactly how much ROI they're going to get is playing fast-and-loose with investment capital, and MUST fail eventually. Witness the dot-com bust.
The answer to this problem is not legislation or education of the business people. The answer is for the people who care about the problem to take steps to obsolete that system. If you're an artist, refuse to sign with companies with which you disagree. If you are a consumer, don't buy from companies with which you disagree. Support the independant artists. If you are a voter, vote against anything which interferes with the ability of the artists and consumers to make those choices.
The freedom to not participate in a relationship you find offensive is very important, and we must continue to exercise it lest it atrophy.
If you're looking for a specific way to support independant artists, I recommend listening to kexp.org. They are listener-sponsered radio and they know who their masters are: the listeners and artists who support them.
It's not the same band, but Harvey Danger is doing this with their new album. It's a good album, too.
Since I work in a unix shell so much I tend to avoid whitespace in the names of things. Therefore, I call the Microsoft operating systems Win95, WinNT, Win2k, WinXP. I call Unix variants by their distribution name: Debian, RedHat, FreeBSD, Solaris. I only use a slash when it really is part of the OS name: OS/2, HP/UX. Whenever possible I avoid using names which would have to be quoted or escaped.
I don't know what other people's excuses are.
Until we actually know how much of human behavior and consciousness comes from each of nurture and nature, I'd say comments like this are premature and out of line. Maybe upbringing is everything, but what if it isn't?
Besides, what if the parts of himself that the kid is most proud of are the parts he got from his biological father? We know that genetics control predisposition to certain diseases and body structures, so we can infer that someone could be genetically healthy. If that's what the biological father gave his son, I'd say he has something to be proud of. Just because the choice was "easy" and didn't take a lot of work or a long time doesn't diminish its value to the recipient.
More drives means more heads, means the average distance a head has to travel to read data is shorter, means lower latency.
Are there situations where RAID won't help you? Of course.
Is RAID a silver bullet? Of course not.
Do five drives in a 25% full or less RAID4 (parity not striped) find the data you're looking for faster than one of those drives? Usually.
Does the raid slow down as it fills up? If the heads have to sweep the whole platter to find data, yes.
It is true that for individual operations RAID5 does not improve latency because all of the drives have to be read to verify parity, but this is not true for every RAID algorithm, and few RAID5s are actually used in this way anyway. As several other posters pointed out, improving throughput has the effect of improving overall latency by keeping the I/O queue moving faster. As long as the RAID is always busy, more heads (for the same amount of storage) will improve total latency and throughput.
Symlinks work across filesystems (as you mentioned in 3) and the filesystem hosting the link may not be mounted when it's destination moves, so it's actually impossible to make them work the way you ask. And as another poster pointed out, sometimes you don't WANT links to follow their targets.
Another poster mentions that hard links may work the way you want, but I think that poster mis-understands hardlinks and your request. You can't hardlink directories, and deleting the link doesn't delete the target (which is what you seem to be asking for with 2).
Anyway, what you need to understand is that symlinks are not the things they point to, nor are they supposed to be. In fact, even the things they point to aren't themselves. A file or directory is a one-way association between that name and the data it points to. A path is a list of names. A symlink is a one-way association between a name and another name. These are powerful abstractions just as they are, and whatever functionality you're actually looking for is probably higher-level than this.
If you want two names for the same thing, your desktop shell is probably where that functionality belongs.
The minimalist behavior of symlinks and hardlinks is exactly what makes unix more powerful than DOS.
For those looking for a much better written perspective on these issues I recommend Neil Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line..."
"If people only bought things that were of high quality and good value for money that they actually needed, the world economy would grind to a halt."
Nah. That's a variation of the Broken Window falacy. If people quit buying crap, then the people who make crap will make or do something else. Yes, there will be short term diffulties while everyone adjusts, but a change like that wouldn't happen quickly anyway. I'm sure the entrepreneurs will adapt faster than the consumers.
However, my experience is that ALL people weight the short term advantages and disadvantages much more strongly than the long term ones, and that if they have a choice between a $500 fridge that lasts three years and a $1000 fridge that lasts 20 years, they will buy the cheaper one.
There's a good side to this, though. Technology in all areas has been advancing so quickly that we're actually better off with a short replacement cycle because the latest products are more efficient and cleaner than the products they replaced. Whether obsolesence is planned or not, it is serving the consumers. Old fridges ran on the kind of freon that was bad for the ozone. Old cars pollute like the dickens. Etc.
The main things we, the thinking people, should be demanding are liberty, equality and transparency. I think we all know about the first two, but the third one is most important now. By transparency I mean that the consumers need to know EXACTLY what they're getting, and what else they could get with the money they're spending. I'm not talking about more shopping channels, either. I'm talking about a Consumer Reports crossed with Wikipedia, Google, Ebay and Amazon.
And that's all I have to say about that.
You're arguing the wrong point. You say "God is easier to believe in than evolution because evolution is 'rather lacking in scientific support and seems phenomenally unlikely to have happened'."
The grandparent post was arguing that "Adding God to the equation doesn't get us any closer to an answer because we still don't know what God is or where it came from."
The grandparent is saying creationism is like simplifying an equation by adding another variable.
You are saying that evolution isn't solved yet, so life must be magic.
In fact, you just proved the grandparent's point: your point doesn't get us any closer to understanding, preserving or improving life.
The real problem with this so-called debate is that the purpose of science and religion should never be at odds. Science provides predictive models for mechanisms. Religion puts motivation into the system. How do particles stick together? The four fundamental forces. Why? Because that's how the universe works. In other words, God (or whatever your favorite diety is) setup the world. We can't understand God, but we can build models of the universe we were given.
There may be objective truth, but there is no objective observer (which we can communicate with objectively), so there is no infallable way of demonstrating the objective veracity of an assertion. There are only aproximate truthes.
Also, it may be that objective truth does NOT exist. We would have no way of knowing because we have no objective observational mechanism with which to test its veracity.
HOWEVER, this does not negate the value of approximate truth, any more than having a lot of money would be devalued by not having all the money. I am also not saying there are no true statements. I only state that no statements can be known or proven to be objectively or absolutely true regardless of their actual truth. Statements can only be demonstrated to be statistically consistent.
Also, there are provably false statements. A statement may be internally inconsistent ("this statement is false"), or it may be shown to be subjectively inconsistent ("the earth is flat"), but that doesn't make the opposite of that statement true, it only makes it _less false_.
This is also not a justification for Nilism. I'm not saying reality is a sham, I'm saying it's something we can never know perfectly.
Every day I tell myself I'll only READ /., but sometimes I just can't resist replying...
"And as a bonus, your not bogged down with dependancies.... oh wait you want cyclical dependancies???"
apt-get resolves cyclical dependancies. Dependancy handling only fails in cases where humans would have trouble too: incorrect package information, or impossible situations.
None of the other three points interest me. I don't care of my distro is behind (obviously, since I'm comparing Slack with Debian). I don't care if it's hard for other people to use (I'm not them). I don't care if the leader is Our Lord Satan. As long as it's Free Software, the leader's quirks are immaterial.
But the one thing a distribution SHOULD do is integrate packages in a way that does something for its users. Slackware does not compete in this regard. The only rational reason to use Slack is that it's what you're used to.
I've been running it under XP for a couple of months at work, and I've never had a problem with it. My uptime is currently two weeks, since I had to patch and reboot the hosting XP instance. Performance is excellent, and the virtual machine behaves exactly as advertised: an entire VM with its own vertualized hardware and everything. Obviously I wouldn't want to play game or watch screen savers in it, but I only ssh to it anyway.