Fanboi alert.

Like I tell my kids - it doesn't matter what other people are doing if what you are doing is wrong.

Most voice-mails are of *terrible* quality (listen to them sometime - people mumble, etc.). But even still GV does a pretty good job. And it does a very good job with numbers. So it's great for that person who left you a long rambling voice-mail with their phone-number half-way through. Oh - and the phone number will be "clickable" in GV to boot.

I always thought /.'s moderation system was pretty clever like that. It rewards commitment. Stackexchange has taken it a bit further and limits the type of things you can do until you gain some "creds" by participating on the site (can only mod up until you get the "right" to mod down). I don't know why these systems aren't more common? The childish trolls don't have the patience to gain trust and those who commit to a site are the sort of community you want to foster.

What are you talking about and do you have a source for what you're talking about?

Raw data is available and has been used. For example the Berkley Earth project re-analyzed the data starting with raw data and addressing concerns about heat islands, bad sources, etc.

http://berkeleyearth.org/about....

Exactly.

You mean like most vacation photos ever taken?

Ah, and *now* I find this paragraph:

"Kalia himself indicates the study refers to popular music and not specific genres or time periods with the title of his analysis: “Music was better back then: When do we stop keeping up with popular music?” It’s not that you stop listening to new artists or even discovering new styles as you age, just that you won’t care as much who is taking home platinum records and leading the iTunes downloads race."

That's a long way from calcifying...

I'm in my late 30's (*sigh*) and my music tastes have only expanded. Thing is - they expanded into areas that still aren't the current "popular music." It's difficult to tell how that would be represented in this report.

Granted I'm likely an outlier of sorts but it's not clear that the methodology would consider me such.

Thanks! Now can you define "colloquial" for us all too?

Pffft. *I* don't even own a TV.

Negates? No - it just provides a single location through with to share code. You're confusing "using a central repository" with "requiring a central repository." It is just above trivial for any git project to switch to a new "central" server through with to share code.

# git remote add newupstream git://new.server/my-project
# git push master newupstream

Aaaaand, done.

You're not going to do that with Subversion anytime soon. Sorry - I like SVN. But to claim that having a central repository is anything like *requiring* a central repository is just missing the point.

Which makes it very strange that they would think to write a paper on it. It's not even worth a blog post.

Not to mention that in the Java implementation they're writing to a BufferedWriter. So even with the StringBuilder they're comparing "concatenating a string, writing it to a buffer and writing that to disk" to "copying strings to a buffer then writing that to disk."

If you do more work it takes longer. QED.

In the Java application they're using a BufferedWriter as well - so they're buffering before the OS buffer.

It seems pretty clear to me that "concatenating a string then writing it to a buffer and flushing that to disk" would be faster than "writing a bunch of strings to a buffer then flush that to disk." They're basically copying that data around at least twice.