As an oldtimer using Ubuntu myself, I largely agree. It largely Just Works and gets the job done, and these days that's what I want out of an OS. And yes, the Debian-esqueness makes it very comfortable.

Is that conjecture/anecdata, or verifiable fact?

(Not being snarky, genuinely curious.)

... as to how much of a boost you get for your business when you manage to sneak a link to it into a /. summary.

Well played sir.

I assumed they meant that Prince Valiant was organizing the petition.

Sorry, if he's not involved then I'm not interested.

At time of writing, this story is tagged "Netherlands". Is there in fact some connection to the Netherlands here (I can't find one), or is this just geographical delinquency?

(As with arguments over metric/US units, I fear this may trigger a deluge of "STFU OK, Slashdot is a US-based site, deal with it"...)

Ah yes, I didn't mean that valve amps (as I tend to call them, being a Brit) don't sound pleasant. And I can fully believe that their unique sound is currently impossible to replicate by other means. It's the claims of their being more "faithful" or objectively "better" that I object to.

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that, say, the Battle of Austerlitz was not in fact a victory for the French, because the parents of the French emperor had not been French? If you don't consider that the French were the victors at Austerlitz, then who were the true victors? The Genoans, perhaps?

Phew, at least it wasn't the same as the top secret US nuclear missile lock code of 00000000.

<cough>Napoleon</cough>

Heaven forfend that anyone should resort to stereotypes in a thread about a "the French always surrender LOL" joke.

It's trolling so hard! It's even got Steve Jobs and a vinyl's-the-best claim in the same sentence! I am disappointed, however, at the lack of:

1. "We should all use valve amps because the sounds just, y'know, warmer, and therefore better.

2. "My sound quality improved 800% when I switched to Neil Young endorsed Monster cables!", exclaimed an unnamed consumer.

3. "Double-blind ABX trials are actually irrelevant because. erm, well you're just not sufficiently attuned to understand. Go away."

Well yes, I was half-joking. But I feel as though they're more like two cycles behind on this -- 2011 was when NFC really hit the mainstream, there was a fair bit of speculation that the 4S would have it.

The first phone with NFC was the Nokia 6131, which came out a year before the first iPhone. So maybe new tech comes six cycles late...

Absolutely! I remember all those years when PC and *nix users had to deal with finicky, unreliable 2- and 3-button mice. With Apple you got one button, and you were thankful for it, by Jobs! Deep down we all knew that the second mouse button just wasn't ready for prime time yet.

(See also: virtual desktops.)

Fair enough, I phrased my point rather poorly. The point I was attempting to make was this: if your robot is, say, fettling widgets, the important metric is not "time to fettle one widget", it is "cost to fettle one widget". So it doesn't matter if the robot's working slower than a human in the same job, provided that the robot's effective "hourly wage" is correspondingly lower.

(Pulled-out-of-my-ass figures: say your robot costs $22k upfront plus $1k a year, and lasts ten years, for a total cost of $32k a decade. Say your human is paid $15k a year, for a total cost of $150k a decade. Robot can then be four times slower and still represent a saving.)