The simplest place to draw the line: Does it have conditional flow control? If so, it's a programming language, if not then it isn't. If you can't write some equivalent of an if statement, then it's not a programming language. There are some languages (e.g. BPF bytecodes) that are intentionally not Turing Complete, because having finite and deterministic run time is a design goal, so they omit loops, but they do have conditionals (but only forward branches).

You mean declarative, not functional. HTML does not have functions, which is a big clue that it isn't a functional language. Your other examples are just plain wrong (SQL is definitely not a functional language and isn't even a declarative language, PostScript is imperative language and is a functional language if you squint a bit).

If you don't need dynamic content, Jekyll is a very nice way to go. The template system is easy to use and it generates static HTML pages so you only need to worry about the security of the web server (which is comparatively easy). Even if you do need dynamic content, you might only need it for some parts of a page (e.g. comments) and so it's easy to embed an iframe that just provides comments for a page in a template and separate out the dynamic and static parts. This also has the nice effect of meaning that you can easily keep the content working if the comment system is compromised.

I read a few other posts on his blog. He uses Encyclopedia Dramatica as a reputable source. I can't tell if it's an elaborate troll, or if he really does have no credibility.

The Netflix client logic is fairly complex (it dynamically jumps between servers, bitrates, and so on). Each new version they add increases the size of their testing matrix. I'd imagine that they really don't want to do that...

Pings to where? I've never seen pings over 100ms to machines in the UK, and even ones above 50ms usually indicate problems at the far end. 20-30ms (including a wireless hop at my end) is about normal.

They ought to for that price. Their FTTC price (plus the BT line rental) is almost three times what I pay Virgin for about the same speed, and AA's caps are lower.

The problem is that we don't vote nationally for cabinet posts. Someone may be a perfectly competent local MP, in touch with local issues and understanding their constituents' interests, but have absolutely no idea about whatever department they're put in charge of.

No, Virgin 'throttle you to 25% for a few hours when you go over the caps' Media. On their cheapest plan, 25% is still fast enough to stream iPlayer HD and the maximum amount that you can download within the caps is several TBs/month, so it's not really something I've felt the need to worry about.

It's probably the thing that they've done to allow them to bump the speeds that they offer every few years. I was an early adopter for their 1Mb/s and 10Mb/s services and stayed on 10Mb/s as it moved from their most expensive tier to the cheapest. It then moved to 30Mb/s and is now I think 50Mb/s (might be 60Mb/s, not sure).

Do they have any mechanism for downloading them? I could only find streaming versions. The Phase II and Axanar people both allow downloading, which makes it a lot easier to watch their stuff.

That's not the argument. fsck is not magic. It is designed around a number of possible kinds of error. It verifies on-disk structures and will attempt to reconstruct metadata if it finds that it is corrupted. Equivalent logic to fsck is built into ZFS. Every ZFS I/O operation runs a small part of this, validating metadata and attempting to repair it if it is damaged. You could pull this logic out into a separate tool, but why bother? zpool scrub will do the same thing, forcing the zpool to read (and therefore repair) everything using the fsck-like logic in the kernel.

The same is true of any filesystem. If a filesystem is corrupted to the extent that the self-healing logic in ZFS can't recover, it's also corrupted to the extent that a fsck tool would not be able to recover it.

All of the CDDL stuff in our tree is in a separate cddl directories. You can get a copy of the tree that does not include them and you can build the system without them. This is a requirement for a number of downstream consumers of FreeBSD.

That said, we do enable DTrace by default and the installer lets you choose UFS or ZFS. I'd recommend ZFS over UFS for anything with a reasonable amount of RAM (not your Raspberry Pi, but anything with a few GBs).

No, NTFS has continued to evolve. The original design team were given changing requirements right up until Windows NT shipped. The on-disk format is basically an efficient way of storing large blobs of data and an efficient way of storing small blobs of data (much like BFS, though with a different approach). Everything else is policy that is layered on top.

Maybe. The people harmed by this are HP shareholders. Crimes against the rich are usually investigated...

Symbian, particularly EKA2, was a very well designed system. It was let down by its slow adaptation to changing requirements. The userspace APIs were designed for a world where 4MB of RAM meant a high-end device. You suffered some difficulty programming because it was the only way to make sure things fitted in this little space. When 128MB started to mean a low-end device, this was a problem - the cost wasn't worth paying to be using 10% of the device's RAM instead of 15%. It wasn't helped by the in-fighting at Nokia that resulted in a load of different potential replacements.