I think the problem is that the nature of most of our jobs and work environments are repetitive, non-physical, dull, uninspiring, and often lacking in meaningful interpersonal communication. You can only take so many hours of that sort of stuff without burning out. In that context I understand and agree with the supposition that our productivity is hurting because of these long hours.

On the other hand, sometimes working long hours isn't that bad of a thing, but it depends on the context. Currently I'm working in a family partnership doing agribusiness (IE farming). Depending on the day I may be working from 8 to 14 hours a day. But since it's a lifestyle as well as a job, and family lives here on farm, it's not quite as soul-sucking as working 14 hours behind a computer screen, though sometimes I do spend hours doing things on the computer doing things like server maintenance, or the odd bit of software development, which is rather tiring after a few straight hours (maybe it's being behind a screen shining in one's eyes that makes jobs so fatiguing). Each day differs pretty significantly. Yesterday I put in some hours after supper and came in at 9:30 pm. Today I was done by 5. Those seasons that demand long hours do get old in a hurry, but they don't last forever, and there are other compensations. Also I take one full day a week off (Sunday). Most farmers really enjoy the lifestyle, and their families too, as well as many farm workers, despite sometimes putting in long hours, and they do find balance and it works out. At least for some people.

So it's not just a simple hours put in issue, but more of an inability to balance personal and family needs against an employer's demands, and the type of work these long hours consist of.

And hopefully in any lectures on Moore's Law, the students learn that Moore's Law refers to transistors on a die, not the speed of the chips. This 36-core chip probably jumps ahead of Moore's Law a bit, as it's got to be a fairly large die. In any event Moore's Law continues to hold, more or less. Other things like CPU speed have followed a similar trend in times past, but no longer do now.

Replace Windows with ReactOS? That's funny. Putin might have taken a passing interest in ReactOS for obvious reasons, but I'm highly dubious that anyone has replaced Windows with ReactOS for any reason, especially in the military. From what I can see ReactOS development crawls along at about the same rate it always has, with no sign that Russian money has caused any dramatic leaps in stability or usability.

How will visiting sourceforge help me see summaries of new software releases? Guess I'm confused. I always thought freshmeat.net (renaming and moving it to freecode.com was stupid IMO) was just a listing site, and that's what I've used it for the last 14 years. And it's still been useful at that. Takes money to pay the bills, but it seems to me that this is another example of Dice thinking they can takes something that's popular and monetize it without bothering to find out why it's popular, and what value it gave to the community.

Have you ever written an init script? As an admin you should have written one or two in your day. You'll know how fragile init scripts are, reinventing the wheel over and over again to do basic things like prevent a service from running twice. Want to restart a service automatically when it crashes? Well you hack another script that runs in a cron that uses hackish ways of determining if the daemon has crashed: Check for a running process, find out if it's responding, kill it if necessary, start it again. Gets unsupportable in a hurry on production systems. So we resort to third party solutions like supervisord, which work pretty well, but aren't integrated into the init system at all, so they don't obey runlevels. The two largest unix vendors have not shipped sysv init for many years. Solaris replaced it with SMF, and Apple with LaunchDaemon. systemd is superior to both systems.

As an admin surely you can see the benefit to creating simple daemon definition files that can get your daemon up and running (with restart, with protection against multiple instances) all with two or three lines of a simple text config file.

From what I can see systemd is modular, and if you don't want to use journald, you don't have to. On RHEL7 it's set to small, ram-based log for crash reporting only, with the real enterprise-required logging going to rsyslog which is a conventional logging facility.

I personally cannot find fault with Pottering's work. It just works for me (I am an admin also). I also am extremely grateful for pulseaudio also. It just works now, and lets me do things that no other system currently does, like record one program's output to mp3 while listening to music or watching videos. Can't argue with results.

If you read the article, or even the summary, you'll know the author indeed had roaming disabled. He only enabled roaming for one minute to get google maps to update, then disabled it again. And he also states that he never successfully got any data. Google Maps did not load. 50 MB is a lot of data for an unsuccessful attempt to connect.

So while your advice is sound, the original author also followed it and still got burned. He would have been happy to pay exorbitant rates for the 1.5 or so MB he actually needed. But not for 50 MB which in all likelihood the phone never used. Thus AT&T is still ripping people off by charging for data that they admit they cannot even accurately track. It is this that he wishes to call attention to.

After friends, coworkers, and sales people convinced her, my sister got a nice iPhone a year or so ago after having a crappy android phone for a couple of years. After one week she was so fed up with it. This was probably iOS 5 days. I'm sure things are better now but back then it had a hard time setting up her contacts and calendar to sync with Google. That and the lack of third-party keyboards caused her to give up on it and she exchanged it for a halfway decent Android phone which she quite likes. To this day she wonders why people can stand iPhones. To each his or her own.

All this isn't to say that Android doesn't suck; rather it sucks in different ways that work better for some people. To me battery life on Android is still pretty crappy after all these years.

Yes I have used Python, actually. and I've found the same thing ESR discovered about it years ago. Python promotes rapid development with fewer errors than many other languages. And it's generally clean and extremely easy to read. Python has its warts of course. And gotchas. PHP has its good points and bad points as well. But to try to disparage Python just to make your point that PHP is great is pretty silly. If PHP is great it should stand on its own regardless of your personal language preferences. And I think it can. That's not to say, of course, that PHP does not have many problems as a language; it does.

Umm yeah that's what the OP was suggesting. The flaps cause drag and increase downforce. So of course you might want that... while slowing.

The problem with metric is that some of the arbitrary base units are more difficult for humans to estimate and use. For example, let us take some common units of measure: centimetres are too small, decimetres are too large. Both are inferior for human estimation compared to inches. An inch can be approximated more easily using say a segment of a finger. Even feet are easier for a lot of people to estimate than metres (or yards). Especially for in-between distances that are neither small nor large. In general the idea of using orders of magnitude prefixes is a great idea, but the base unit, metres, leaves something to be desired. And lets not kid ourselves. All units of measure are arbitrary. A metre is an arbitrary length. It's currently based on some reference bar somewhere. It may have originated by dividing latitudinal distance by some factor or something, but the standard metre is completely and utterly arbitrary. We could have selected some other unit like an inch to be the base and everything would be fine, though a kilometre would be very small.

I agree with your overall sentiment. In many cases it is beyond a joke and misguided attempts to help the environment often hurt it, as is the case with banning the disturbance of brush around homes and communities.

While you are correct that the banning of DDT was at the time unfounded scientifically--the egg shells seemed to be thinning that year generally and may not have had anything to do with DDT, but alas it was never really researched. However, had DDT continued to be used on the scale that it was, modern research has showed that mosquitoes would have adapted and become resistant in just a couple of years, ending the use of DDT anyway. Put in another way, banning DDT did *not* directly lead to the deaths of millions of people. Perhaps banning DDT was even a benefit, because now it is used by some countries, on a much smaller scale, to a good effect in controlling malaria.

You're completely misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying Africa is going to be a bread basket exporter of food. I'm simply talking about principles of self-sufficiency. Growing one's own food internally is one thing that can break the poverty cycle (if only the attitude part). Look, many people in Africa are completely dependent on western handouts, which wouldn't be so bad but for the strings attached to the food which western nations do pull on a regular basis. That's what I'm getting at.

Perhaps my sarcastic remark about cheap goods from China misled you, but I never said anything about export-related jobs and Africa. You are correct about that of course. But it simply wasn't a part of my comment.

Either way we both seem to agree that handing out USB sticks to work with garbage computers we dump on them isn't going to do a thing to help with poverty.

If we in the west really want to help Africa, there are a few things we can do right here that will make a difference. Eliminate agricultural subsidies, stop buying African diamonds, and stop using cheap African-sourced conflict minerals. Right now food prices are so artificially low that African farmers can't afford to grow food for their own countries. It's quite literally cheaper to buy food from abroad than to grow it locally. And the US is happy to give Africa food. In exchange for favors. Food quite literally has become a weapon and it's certainly part of what keeps Africa in a cycle of poverty and abuse. Meanwhile China has been buying up farm land in China to raise food that will be exported from Africa without really benefiting Africans themselves, except for a few that directly benefit.

Conflict minerals, including diamonds, also concentrate a tremendous amount of African wealth in the hands of just a very few who are quite happy to use this wealth to buy whole governments. Most times they *are* the governments. But hey, as long as we can get cheap goods made in China with cheap African resources, life is good, right?

But I guess my idea to not buy diamonds and kill the farm bill has about as much merit as handing out usb sticks after all. I doubt western policies that hurt Africa are going to change any time soon. Good luck to these folk. I'm personally quite skeptical.

Yeah Lucas always sucked at writing dialog, especially romance scenes. I remember reading that his wife at the time rewrote a lot of the romance scenes because they were even worse in early drafts.

Well I did have a choice, true. I could have bought an OEM version of Windows 7 that was more than twice the cost of Windows 8, and cannot ever be moved to new hardware when this computer dies or requires a major upgrade. Or I could buy Windows 8.1 direct from Microsoft for about $100. I knew it had the ridiculous metro start screen, but I knew that Classic Shell could make it close enough to Windows 7 to be workable. And it is. Also Windows 8.1 can be transferred to brand new hardware and reactivated. They loosened up the restrictions some. So faced with this, it wasn't a hard choice to put on Windows 8.1.

Mind you this situation I was in was precisely engineered by Microsoft to push me in the direction they want me to go. But surely you would do the same, no? Or would you really drop nearly $250 on an operating system?