"We're not happy with a 99.9% solution, it must be 99.999999% solution" is a pretty good summary of what you said.
Because the missing 1% will be a big security hole. Right now case-sensitivity reminds people that the computer cares about the exact name, and is very fussy. If we want the computer to have a notion of equivalence between filenames, it must be a good and rigorous one, otherwise it creates a huge exploit vector.
multiply the number of air-accidents by the difference between the number of planes journeys and the number of cars journeys world-wide and see what happens!
You end up with far more car accidents, still, and it's unsurprising given how (relatively) little training car drivers get.
Height is far more important for programming, and much more useful for reading the web (most trendy sites nowadays put the text in a tiny column in the middle, no matter how wide your screen is). Windows makes it very fiddly to use two documents at once, so I don't think that's what (the majority of) people are getting the widescreens for; it's about movies if anything.
I lost respect for them because they subscribe to ManBearPig's farcical religion that tells them they can cleanse themselves of their environmental sins if they purchase carbon indulgences
You did this much damage to the environment, it costs this much to clean up, so you can either not do it, clean it up yourself, or pay someone else to clean it up for you (which is all this credit scheme really means). As long as the price matches the real cleanup costs, where's the problem?
Every living organism contains carbon, so the idea of somehow trying to "offset" it is nonsense.
Every living organism contains radioactive elements too, that doesn't mean it's fine to spew as much as you like all over the place. Yes breathing does emit CO2, and if we were to do a fully rigorous accounting and rationing of emissions (as we'll probably need to eventually - you get a certain ration and can buy/sell it on the market), you'd have to include that, but it's minuscule compared to that from flying.
Apple have a history of dropping apple-only things (you should see my collection of PERCH cards), or maybe you'll find yourself wanting a non-apple machine for something. I know I'm very glad the firewire drive I bought three years ago also came with a USB port, because my two-year-old laptop doesn't have firewire, and neither does my six-month-old netbook. In fact I've taken to just using the USB cable even when connecting it to my desktop - I don't notice any speed difference, and it's easier to only worry about one cable.
And to be blunt, yes, a new connector that is less useful than USB is a failure. Why would I buy Thunderbolt hardware when it might not work with my next machine? If I don't have any Thunderbolt devices, why would I want to buy a machine with it? If it ends up becoming "the" way to connect monitors then I guess I'll end up using it for that, but I'm sticking to VGA until that battle quietens down (use DVI! No, use HDMI! No, use DisplayPort!)
Many ISPs did. Heck, my old university turned off their server a year or two ago. I'm sure there are still servers out there, but usenet as it was is dead.
The only downside to running Testing is that there are some source packages in Sid that you might need that aren't in Testing
No, the big downside is you don't necessarily get timely security updates. Stable gets security updates quickly because specific effort is made to release them. Sid gets them quickly because it gets all new packages quickly. Testing has neither of these.
Do people really commit that rarely? I'd expect to be committing at least once every half-hour when I'm working, and probably more frequently. And doing that means you end up with better code - you work more incrementally, more agilely, because each commit has to stand alone.
How is a bitcoin bubble different from a housing bubble?
It isn't, and that's the problem. Bitcoins are intrinsicly prone to these kind of bubbles (isn't TFA saying the value's gone up by a factor of 4 in a short time?) because they're deflationary rather than inflationary so speculators will hoard them, and that's not conducive to their being actually useful as a currency. Imagine if selling anything (i.e. "buying money") became as difficult as buying a house was in 2007; that's going to happen periodically with bitcoins, which makes it harder to run a business on them.
Why do you care about exchanging them for real currency? It seems easier to think about it as exchanging them for the sorts of things which real currency could buy: sweaters, pizzas, services (web hosting, programming work, etc).
Yes, except there are perhaps 4 major global currencies, which seems a much easier problem than the millions of possible things to buy. Once every store down my local high street accepts bitcoins then there's no problem, but the bootstrapping seems a lot easier if I can easily exchange my bitcoins to/from dollars, because every store down my local high street already accepts dollars.
You assume that an inflationary fiat currency is immune from hoarding, which is clearly not the case. It is merely that the threshold of the rate of hoarding at which the economy falters is higher.
So... an inflationary currency is not perfect, just better than a deflationary one.
But in both cases, should hoarding occur at a rapid enough rate, (the "my money will be worth more tomorrow" also becomes true for fiat currencies, at least in the short term if the hoarding rate exceeds that of inflation) the only possible action that the authority controlling the currency can take is self-destruction, converting the currency to fiat in the case of deflationary one, or triggering hyper-inflation in the case of fiat one.
You can walk the line; it's happening here in the UK right now. Inflation's up at close to 5%, which would have been unthinkably high a few years ago, but isn't hyperinflation (money is still perfectly usable day-to-day). And guess what, it's working - I'm buying more and saving less than I would otherwise, which is exactly what the economy needs.
Thus the discussion of which type of currency is "better" cannot be predicated solely upon theoretical liquidity, which is what you insist on.
No I don't; of course there are plenty of other reasons to prefer one currency or another. But a deflationary currency is fundamentally bad for the economy it supports; all other things being equal, you're much better off with an inflationary one.
In both cases, people have incentive to stash their wealth away. For 1, they just leave it in the currency. For 2, they put it into gold.
The whole point is that people hold onto the currency itself as little as possible, so the currency remains liquid and available for people who are actually using it as an intermediary (i.e. suppose I'm selling some grain and buying some, I don't know, lumber. Then with an inflationary currency my incentive is to buy the lumber as soon as possible after I've sold my grain, because the money I'm holding onto is only going to decline, so the market keeps moving. If it's a deflationary currency I'm better off holding on to the money for as long as possible (because I'll get more lumber for it in the future right), and pretty soon all the money disappears into people's vaults and it's useless as a currency. Up to a point this happens to the gold in case 2, but it's not a problem because people don't need to get hold of gold to be able to sell one thing and buy another).
(and ideally people wanting to invest buy shares in companies that are actually doing wealth creation, rather than gold).
I have a wonderful netbook with the same screen size (Vye S18) - it's got a perfectly usable keyboard (far more than the touchscreen on my android), and the processor and screen are up to watching videos and playing my large collection of older PC games. Also little things like normal connectivity (USB host, VGA out, ethernet). It's perfect for e.g. train journeys if I don't want to lug my full-sized laptop around. So I think there's value in this kind of form factor.
I can't help thinking he had a quick, easy death. Compared to those people who had to choose between jumping to theirs, or getting burned alive in one of the Towers. What do you imagine their last moments were like?
I'd rather have the choice. I can't imagine getting splattered on the pavement is any more painful than being shot; probably less in fact. And either way you get a few minutes to make whatever peace you want to, maybe even send a few text messages to loved ones. Not that I think for a moment the attack was justified, but there are far worse ways to die.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad thing is, it really was a lot more usable than the current version.
I wish Wikipedia as it was circa-2006 - not the content, but the culture - could be preserved for future generations.
"We're not happy with a 99.9% solution, it must be 99.999999% solution" is a pretty good summary of what you said.
Because the missing 1% will be a big security hole. Right now case-sensitivity reminds people that the computer cares about the exact name, and is very fussy. If we want the computer to have a notion of equivalence between filenames, it must be a good and rigorous one, otherwise it creates a huge exploit vector.
multiply the number of air-accidents by the difference between the number of planes journeys and the number of cars journeys world-wide and see what happens!
You end up with far more car accidents, still, and it's unsurprising given how (relatively) little training car drivers get.
Height is far more important for programming, and much more useful for reading the web (most trendy sites nowadays put the text in a tiny column in the middle, no matter how wide your screen is). Windows makes it very fiddly to use two documents at once, so I don't think that's what (the majority of) people are getting the widescreens for; it's about movies if anything.
(Not disagreeing with the result, but the einstein-fanboying in TFA is a little irritating)
I lost respect for them because they subscribe to ManBearPig's farcical religion that tells them they can cleanse themselves of their environmental sins if they purchase carbon indulgences
You did this much damage to the environment, it costs this much to clean up, so you can either not do it, clean it up yourself, or pay someone else to clean it up for you (which is all this credit scheme really means). As long as the price matches the real cleanup costs, where's the problem?
Every living organism contains carbon, so the idea of somehow trying to "offset" it is nonsense.
Every living organism contains radioactive elements too, that doesn't mean it's fine to spew as much as you like all over the place. Yes breathing does emit CO2, and if we were to do a fully rigorous accounting and rationing of emissions (as we'll probably need to eventually - you get a certain ration and can buy/sell it on the market), you'd have to include that, but it's minuscule compared to that from flying.
And to be blunt, yes, a new connector that is less useful than USB is a failure. Why would I buy Thunderbolt hardware when it might not work with my next machine? If I don't have any Thunderbolt devices, why would I want to buy a machine with it? If it ends up becoming "the" way to connect monitors then I guess I'll end up using it for that, but I'm sticking to VGA until that battle quietens down (use DVI! No, use HDMI! No, use DisplayPort!)
Thunderbold will expose pci-express lanes to external devices.
That sounds good for security!
Yes, but it doesn't always work, or your router doesn't always support it. And in those cases, skype still works, where the open alternatives don't.
Yeah, if Linus took half the net wealth of everyone who used Linux.
Nostalgic for Usenet? Why? Did they turn it off?
Many ISPs did. Heck, my old university turned off their server a year or two ago. I'm sure there are still servers out there, but usenet as it was is dead.
ICQ still required you to remember random 7-digit numbers. I don't think there were many "normal" people doing that.
Shame they didn't just finish off reiser4, which I believe was almost done.
The only downside to running Testing is that there are some source packages in Sid that you might need that aren't in Testing
No, the big downside is you don't necessarily get timely security updates. Stable gets security updates quickly because specific effort is made to release them. Sid gets them quickly because it gets all new packages quickly. Testing has neither of these.
Do people really commit that rarely? I'd expect to be committing at least once every half-hour when I'm working, and probably more frequently. And doing that means you end up with better code - you work more incrementally, more agilely, because each commit has to stand alone.
How is a bitcoin bubble different from a housing bubble?
It isn't, and that's the problem. Bitcoins are intrinsicly prone to these kind of bubbles (isn't TFA saying the value's gone up by a factor of 4 in a short time?) because they're deflationary rather than inflationary so speculators will hoard them, and that's not conducive to their being actually useful as a currency. Imagine if selling anything (i.e. "buying money") became as difficult as buying a house was in 2007; that's going to happen periodically with bitcoins, which makes it harder to run a business on them.
Why do you care about exchanging them for real currency? It seems easier to think about it as exchanging them for the sorts of things which real currency could buy: sweaters, pizzas, services (web hosting, programming work, etc).
Yes, except there are perhaps 4 major global currencies, which seems a much easier problem than the millions of possible things to buy. Once every store down my local high street accepts bitcoins then there's no problem, but the bootstrapping seems a lot easier if I can easily exchange my bitcoins to/from dollars, because every store down my local high street already accepts dollars.
You assume that an inflationary fiat currency is immune from hoarding, which is clearly not the case. It is merely that the threshold of the rate of hoarding at which the economy falters is higher.
So... an inflationary currency is not perfect, just better than a deflationary one.
But in both cases, should hoarding occur at a rapid enough rate, (the "my money will be worth more tomorrow" also becomes true for fiat currencies, at least in the short term if the hoarding rate exceeds that of inflation) the only possible action that the authority controlling the currency can take is self-destruction, converting the currency to fiat in the case of deflationary one, or triggering hyper-inflation in the case of fiat one.
You can walk the line; it's happening here in the UK right now. Inflation's up at close to 5%, which would have been unthinkably high a few years ago, but isn't hyperinflation (money is still perfectly usable day-to-day). And guess what, it's working - I'm buying more and saving less than I would otherwise, which is exactly what the economy needs.
Thus the discussion of which type of currency is "better" cannot be predicated solely upon theoretical liquidity, which is what you insist on.
No I don't; of course there are plenty of other reasons to prefer one currency or another. But a deflationary currency is fundamentally bad for the economy it supports; all other things being equal, you're much better off with an inflationary one.
In both cases, people have incentive to stash their wealth away. For 1, they just leave it in the currency. For 2, they put it into gold.
The whole point is that people hold onto the currency itself as little as possible, so the currency remains liquid and available for people who are actually using it as an intermediary (i.e. suppose I'm selling some grain and buying some, I don't know, lumber. Then with an inflationary currency my incentive is to buy the lumber as soon as possible after I've sold my grain, because the money I'm holding onto is only going to decline, so the market keeps moving. If it's a deflationary currency I'm better off holding on to the money for as long as possible (because I'll get more lumber for it in the future right), and pretty soon all the money disappears into people's vaults and it's useless as a currency. Up to a point this happens to the gold in case 2, but it's not a problem because people don't need to get hold of gold to be able to sell one thing and buy another).
(and ideally people wanting to invest buy shares in companies that are actually doing wealth creation, rather than gold).
I have a wonderful netbook with the same screen size (Vye S18) - it's got a perfectly usable keyboard (far more than the touchscreen on my android), and the processor and screen are up to watching videos and playing my large collection of older PC games. Also little things like normal connectivity (USB host, VGA out, ethernet). It's perfect for e.g. train journeys if I don't want to lug my full-sized laptop around. So I think there's value in this kind of form factor.
But getting angry seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the state of the US healthcare system
I can't help thinking he had a quick, easy death. Compared to those people who had to choose between jumping to theirs, or getting burned alive in one of the Towers. What do you imagine their last moments were like?
I'd rather have the choice. I can't imagine getting splattered on the pavement is any more painful than being shot; probably less in fact. And either way you get a few minutes to make whatever peace you want to, maybe even send a few text messages to loved ones. Not that I think for a moment the attack was justified, but there are far worse ways to die.
But unlike people like you I don't need to justify my beliefs anymore - the proof is out there on the streets
What, in the form of the lowest crime rates ever, approximately 15% of what they were 20 years ago?
Iodine-131 being the stuff that lasts about 8 days? Compared to the ~9000-year half-life for uranium? Just sayin'