lurkerperpetual

For those who care more about the underlying OS getting security updates for a long time, 8.04 is still the 'most supported' even if 2 years old. LTS releases have 5 years of updates for servers, so that means 2013. No other Ubuntu server release except the upcoming 10.04 one will be supported that much into the future even if more recent.

Add the fact that turnkey actually uses fresh packages for many appliances and uses only the kernel+base system of Ubuntu LTS, it makes perfect sense.

A not ignored nerd is not a nerd.

How about this idea: if such people would not be constantly derided and ignored they may be more socially successful, start spending more time with people with less potential and start lowering their own expectations as a consequence, trading their dreams for the cosiness of mere run-of-the-mill success.

By ideal world I meant 'a better internet user experience within the next a decade or two' not 'all people are intelligent' as you meant. In the latter we would not be crouching over a browser anyway but do more evolved stuff :)

We do not teach users what an URL is when all she wants is to read her emails, just as you do not teach them how that browser is written or how the data travels to and from destination. I share your wish that people would be more inquisitive and learn but some people are just not like that for various reasons or do not have time for that and trying to teach them stuff they do not care about flies in the face of good user experience.

You use URL for many things including DB connections, this makes you a technical person. One of the reasons user experience is still shit in many applications is that many techies are convinced the user should be exposed to all the wonders of the underlying technology and consider this the noble quest of teaching them.

Yes - network://hash-of-what-you-want is the content addressability I mentioned. So the 'locator' in URL is not going to be meaningful. You do not locate a resource, you get some stuff wherever it may be located - assuming it is in one single place and not built from bits located in various parts. Anyway it was a tangent to the main topic - even if we denote the content someway it should not be exposed to your users.

Try asking around your non-tech relatives and see if they understand what the components of simple web url-s are. My mom sure does not, and I have no intention of teahcing her that .com is some silly legacy from when it was thought that if you are a company that is what your webpage address, will be named like or what is with the slashes or even worse the ampersands.

I do not assume users are stupid, they just don't give a shit about stuff that is cruft and that has little bearing on what they actually do on the web.

The fact that tiny URLs are such widespread also underlines the fact that URL is a necessary evil by which you send someone to a resource and not something to inspect by people. There are complaints about them being opaque but much less then you'd expect given their massive use.

So do not try to teach people who do not care about learning because they will not learn and you'll have wasted your time on them.

Not only the http:// prefix but the whole idea of URL is a notion that should not be user-facing in an ideal world. Even the pretty REST ones are the internet equivalent of the command line voodoo many non-technical users just don't get and type in or copy paste without knowing what it means. If the URL is too long only geeks understand its components, let alone edit it in place to go somewhere else.

It's debugging info for sure, but for most newbies is wasted vertical screen estate.

Bookmarks and web navigation via links are already hiding the fact that 'you go to URLs' now, entering a URL in the bar is the corner case because not everything is easily accessible from everywhere else in very few steps.

In the future the internet will be distributed and content addressable and not have a certain thing only available at a certain URL you have to remember, and then the URL will really go away. HTTP is client server, IP networks are peer to peer by nature.

controversial != awful

They have a syncdelay parameter which you can tweak to flush to disk as often as you want http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair

Here's a comparison http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Comparing+Mongo+DB+and+C...

Actually: How an Ubuntu script which is not meant to be run manually, temporarily had a bug that deleted the file system when using the development version of Ubuntu.

From the first paragraph it seems the author is angered he did not witness 'an unprovoked massacre of unarmed civilians'. I think that could have been rephrased much much better.

Linspire has stopped existing for quite some time now.

I usually append an extra character to the To: email address so it bounces in case I accidentally send it

having kids in the title makes the article much more click-worthy. You have to stand out somehow among all the other polyphasic sleep experiment blogs, right? Prepare for 'Two kids accepted to Y Combinator's funding program' articles in the future.

Would be nice to have a similar dashboard for each country in the world.

why would one need a new refrigerator??? Having hunger solved in the western world is vastly different from having it solved globally and even more different from not needing food at all. Not having plenty of food. Not needing food at all. I am disappointed by what seem very shortsighted, almost knee-jerk remarks which illustrate the poster did not think much about the problem. As if the logical next step after realizing you do not need to eat is to go and work some more in that saved time to have more money. Depressing :)

A very interesting topic for a study would be similarly testing groups of omnivores, vegetarians and vegans, to see if there are any detectable mental capacity differences. It should be less controversial than comparing the same between races and genders.

The 'we developed bigger and better brains from eating meat' is an often used rationale for the omnivore diet.

Imagine for a moment that you do not need food, then see how many of the services you currently use you can do without as a consequence. Bankers? Really? What to use money for when nobody is anymore threatened by hunger. Even today you have plenty of people doing volunteer work, any problem in a society where there's no competition for resources would make that the norm. I am very disappointed that the answers to this thread are given without much thought.

Having the tech available would indeed not prevent anyone from using the old ways. I wonder why not answer this to all proposals in this topic as those problems being solved would make people stop doing stuff the old way.

Also you miss a huge point: with such magic pills there would be no team. You would not need cranking out software for industries that would go away entirely if the problem was solved or for niche domains that would also become irrelevant. Most of our problems and solutions we are looking for today are indirectly related to our need to live and thus eat. Name one problem outside the realm of metaphysics, arts, emotions and the like that is not solved if the food problem is solved.

Sigh. It's not only and indeed not primarily about price. What about the effects on the environment of growing and transporting that rice? Also I sure would like to go on a hike in the mountains without needing to carry 25 Kg of food for a week. It is not silly, you are looking at it very conservatively.

Few voters will express their true preferences and will go instead with 'the lesser evil' when they fear their option will be in a small percentile and discarded. It is not unusual to have systems where 5% is required for a party to get into the parliament, or for a nominee to get into preliminary rounds, etc. So one cannot expect a voting system to incorporate all voter's preferences if they are very small but a warm-up voting would reveal that the fringes that big media avoids covering can become popular.

I don't think low turnouts are the biggest problem with voting as it is done today. No use in having 99% participate if the process remains easily gameable, influenceable and opaque.

There are plenty of advances to be made for sure, there's not much science for it 'yet'. That is why I mentioned 'healty'. Not some super-food to get you through a short period of intense physical/mental/emotional effort, but something that does not wreck your metabolism and plays well with your organs' age-old habit to be useful and doing their thing. So it would definitely not be just some bunch of nutrients but nanobots too that get cooperate with and monitor your organism. It's probably very hard, but if solved, it would make most (all?) other problems mentioned in this thread be non-issues :)

If not proper elections at least a whole population simulation before the polls. That way people could express their true preferences without fearing that their vote will not count if it goes to a fringe candidate and would reassure them that they're not as few as regular polls and eventual results usually show.

That is a consequence of needing to eat, not that of needing to interact with others, and you do that because 'more important things' such as work prevents you from taking the time to talk. You could talk to those people face to face without eating as well. Nobody would prevent anyone from eating, but for those who would rather do something else it would be a very welcome invention.

"Deprecate the base of Maslow's pyramid" Inventing cheap and healthy concentrated 'food' that would allow people to eat once a month or even more rarely. Almost all other problems have a root in our needing to eat (work and cars, pollution, corruption, fighting for social status and it's consequences). You'd have the autonomy and time to take long trips without needing to carry much.

the mongo shell above needs some Stop Eval/Reset button as it can get into a non-responsive state after a bad parse > db.scores.find({'sdf':) >> })

also no copy paste in the browser version AFAICT

Did the poster confuse the Elliot Associates with Ellison? :)

There is fun and exciting work to be done still. The fact that most of us chose to work on boring plumbing has little to do with programming having changed; it became a more diverse field a majority of which is 'commoditized'.

So why complain? Go do something interesting. If the problems you are solving as your daily routine are themselves boring why would the process of solving them be any more fun?

Re: 3. ... 'so publicly '.. You make it sound the problem is the publicity rather the act itself :) Actually it may be better in the long run for him it happened so publicly, or he may have reached new lows later on encouraged by early success. Being caught can be a blessing in disguise.

according to various resources google.load() can do the work asynchronously so the whole page load will not be stalled by the <script> loading. Also you may want to load that .js only on demand not on page load. That said, IMHO most pages are fine with hardcoded <script> though.

By always framing such issues in this way (is a dolphin similar to us in some ways) we keep maintaining the age-old attitude that we should only care about those who are like us. If it has the tendency to run away if you try smacking it with a baseball bat, person on not, it is more sensible leaving it alone if possible.