Yeah, but just picture being able to put "100,000 StackOverflow points" on your resume!

I hope you're being sarcastic, but I'll answer as if it were serious given that Joel and others have tried to hold up StackOverflow points as some sort of hiring benchmark.

If someone sent me a resume saying that they 100,000 StackOverflow points, I would have to consider it a negative (not an instant "no hire", as Joel would put it, because it could just be an aberration), firstly that they thought it was wise to put it on the resume, and secondly that they actually spent so much time and energy accruing SO points.

The posters at Stack Overflow know what they're talking about.

I entirely disagree. The average Stack Overflow poster seems to have a low level of expertise and knowledge in the topics that they comment upon.

But it is far from useless. It's a very useful site when used and exploited correctly.

StackOverflow is essentially a mechanical turk, similar to various other attempts to "pay" people for spending their time doing your legwork. In this case the pay is ribbons and badges and points (similar to Slashdot points, only imagine that it has no limit and comes with a myriad of cute icons and designations).

I could go and waste valuable time searching all around to try to find out how to do X, or I could just post it to StackOverflow, letting hoardes of trying-to-get-acknowledged devs rabble to earn some reputation points. Until the crowd gets wise, the latter is a very efficient (for me) choice.

Well, they can still make fun of Joel, the software was written and implemented by Jeff Atwood

Purportedly there is a team of developers, since the inception. Given Jeff Atwood's very limited claim to SO, I suspect that his contribution was lower. At the time that Jeff and Joel grouped up, Joel's blog was on a steep decline of importance and readership, while Jeff was getting front-paged on a number of sites daily, so I also suspect that Jeff is a "front man", herding his readership to SO.

Because if Jeff actually developed StackOverflow, I doubt it would have ever worked.

USB2 max transfer speed is 33~35mb/s depending on the chipset on your motherboard, how is that "fast or faster" than 50-60mb/s range

Again, it's close enough that it's a non-issue for anyone who isn't already using eSATA, or at least firewire. This isn't that hard to understand.

or more realistically, sequential READ speeds of most HDD is >100mb/s

Few hard drives read that fast. Maybe you're confused by the "read from the cache" burst speed, but in reality that has little practical value given that if the HD has it cached, so does the OS.

USB 2 as fast or faster than most hard drives? What drugs are you on?

It is as fast as the shoddy drives that Maxtor and Seagate put in their external enclosures. It is not a limiter for them (and the CPU usage *is* high, and that won't change much with USB 3).

People who have faster drives use eSATA or SAS, which was exactly what I said. For people who don't use them -- well they probably won't notice a difference with 3.0 then.

I'm not going to ignore the blatantly wrong assertion that USB2 can transfer data at a 480Mbit/sec (60MB/sec), because it can't.

Clap clap clap.

Only the majority of external hard drives that you can buy right now will give you similar performance whether you use USB 2, firewire, or eSATA. Making a faster interconnect won't do anything for these drives.

People who have performance drives *already* use eSATA (seriously, firewire? Is this 2002? Worse, you then go on to talk about CPU usage, where again the answer is "use eSATA") or SAS.

What if you aren't going to your hard drive?

The submission is concerned with connecting a hard drive. As mentioned, anyone with a speed issue with transfer speeds could have been using the superior eSATA for some time now: It's inexpensively supported by lots of devices, and exposes the native capabilities of the storage device to the controller. Win/win, a no bleeding edge drivers or poor vendor support.

I'm not down on USB 3, I just think this is a gimmicky way to get some attention for a non-solution. It's cool when all connection technologies get better, so faster ethernet, wireless, bluetooth, USB, etc -- it's all good.

"We now can transfer a 5GB movie in just 38 seconds - it's unbelievably fast," said Freecom's managing director, Axel Lucassen. Assuming that USB 3.0 scales proportionately, USB 2.0 would have transferred the same file in six and a half minutes
Ignoring the naive assumption, USB 2 is as fast or faster than the majority of hard drives (which average reads in the 50-60MB/s range). Buying a faster connection technology won't somehow make your hard drive faster.

Though if you really are concerned, we've had the excellent and widely support eSATA for some time, giving you a 1.5Gbps or 3.0Gbps connection, and if your MB supports SATA, then it supports eSATA. For a second hard drive I put it in an external enclosure supporting both USB 2 and eSATA, and normally use eSATA, sacrificing nothing (and all of the SCSI-like features of SATA are enabled and used).

The biggest reason it has been slow in adoption is the lack of support in IE, which is mostly due to Microsoft's former stagnation between the releases of IE 6.0 and IE 7.

Microsoft was one of the original working partners of the SVG specification. They were in a position to support it at the outset, and even published an article about SVG in their premiere magazine. I remember going to a Microsoft conference back around 2000 and, when asked about the long-term viability of ActiveX, the Microsoft reps (who were actual developers and not just talking heads) spoke enthusiastically about how they were working with Corel (another SVG author) on a fabulous new vector graphics technology.. ..and then it got iced. If I had to guess at a reason, I would point to the ascension of internal "vector" technologies like XAML, and of course they already had VML.

Oh I entirely understand the absurd niche that it started through. However not only do most people use Twitter through mechanisms not at all bound by the SMS limit, are we to believe that someone posting a tweet from SMS first went to a URL shortener on their mobile device, got a shortened URL, and tweeted that? It doesn't happen.

URL shortening + SMS = a ridiculous combination.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Pier+5+94111

It's yet another shortening service, among a field of hundreds, few of which have any legitimate reason for existing beyond shock-links. They cried like little children because Twitter (a dumb, artificially restricted service) had a "preferred" service, so after stomping their feet for a while, pulling a little tantrum (did they *really* think there was a business model behind this garbage?) they then came back with this "we'll show them!" response. Cheap.

Why do they keep getting this attention?

>Some things you can't win I guess. Stick it in your media centre and forget about it.

Define "win". You realize that it's very likely different people you hear from each time, right?

Such uncalled for hostility.

In any case, an open source operating system currently supported by at least four major manufacturers (and it's growing) isn't quite the same, especially considering the growing platform of hardware. And have you not been paying attention regarding Apple lately?

Yes, but some guy used it to mass-convert a bunch of static TIFFs to static PDFs...so...

The cloud is grossly overhyped. People have some vague, fuzzy belief that it is the solution for everything in the same way that they thought XML and Web Services were before. It is a part of the puzzle, but it certainly isn't as profound as some think it is.