Exactly. I don't know why there's such nerdage against SVN except that git is hard, so therefore its better somehow. Despite the fact you can lose your history (irrevocably if you try) and screw things up even if you don't.

If something is working, there's no point in trying to break it. And if you were to go break it, you'd go with Fossil anyway, git done right.

of course an even more obvious solution is to open your own ice franchise at Burning Man, there's obviously the demand if queue's are an hour long, and £3 for a bag of water.... and he can implement his idea, make a fortune *and* post smugly about how great he is for thinking it up!

but if Debian drops systemd, what will "automagic" Ubuntu do, seeing as its very much based on Debian?

What it will do is divide the Linux distros into systemd and dependencies, and those without (or with something better). If projects like Gnome become more tied into systemd, will this mean they won't work on non-systemd distros?

Production is essential to the mix here, we tried the concept of simply driving an economy by selling each other non-produced things (typically services, like mortgages and loans) and you saw what happened there around 2007/2008.

An economy cannot be spun out of thin air, we need to sell stuff to each other - sure, but we need to sell stuff we need to buy and make sure its regulated so we don't go into another spiral of 'profits' generated out of our imaginations. After all, my house is worth a million dollars, so I'm incredibly rich.

There is an issue with investment - as you noted. As the rate of return drops due to too much investment money chasing yields, investors demand more interest-bearing investments, which is why housing (as 1 example) has gotten out of control. Instead of investing in productivity, they are simply inflating a bubble (again). This can't be healthy for an economy.

The colo server - if the provider goes bust, you might turn up att heir doors only to find it locked down and facing a lengthy battle with the administrators to prove its your kit. Even then, when you get it back both hardware and data will be obsolete.

This is the same problem we've always had, whether its someone's website on a shared host or a colo server. You need to back it all up and doing a naive dump of the entire thing will take too long and cost too much in bandwidth, so you take a dump of the entire thing once (preferably when you have the thing you're deploying locally) and then take incremental backups from there.

The big question is what's the best backup tools to do this, and do they work on cloud systems that don't look like real servers? eg. I recall rsoft that did very good incrementals based on disk blocks changing so the backups were also continuous. Not sure if that'd fly on AWS.

boatloader beer, of course.

the difference is: when Linux has a critical bug, its front-page news; when Windows has a critical bug, its just another Tuesday.

Its not about the flexibility, its about the solidity. I want the keyboard to stay still, even if I knock it sideways or with the palm of my hand accidentally. A heavy keyboard sits there and takes it, a cheapo one bounces around slightly, its annoying.

I do have a build machine at work that sits on some drawers between desks, the keyboard is just too wide to sit nicely on the drawers so one end is always raised. A good keyboard would improve that situation, but its so little used directly that we live with it.

Biggest problem for me is that I'm in the UK and the layout is different from the standard US-style keyboards (and far superior :) )

So Deck, Code and similar new manufacturers just don't cut it.

if they can be taken apart, you can put the mechanical bit in the dishwasher (detergent not really recommended). Do not put the electronics in though, some people say it works if you leave it to dry out, but I think it's probably not as guaranteed as they think.

I did it with the keyboard part of my old compaq, when I spilt beer on it (sticky keys... for sure). Came out squeaky clean.

The thing is, its more than the keys.
A good keyboard must have weight to it, so its solid and won't wriggle or bend. It must have a decent size so its not slightly cramped to save plastic, It must have decent legs to raise the typing angle up, and it should have a little runner to store your pencils without resting them on the top of the function keys.

Cherry keys are a good thing, but there's more to it than just those.

Myself, I use an ancient compaq keyboard that I'm sure will be classed as a deadly weapon if I ever have to beat off burglars with it. Best thing is it doesn't have those 2 crappy Windows keys either!

I recall a quote:

FreeBSD is what you get when you take a unix developer and ask him to write a PC OS. Linux is what you get when you take a PC developer and ask him to write a Unix OS.

I guess this now is shown to be true in ways the original author never thought possible!

I prefer:

When you look back at all your failed relationships, you will find a single common factor in all of them .... you.

I recall an article about a aquarium that had a big tank of cuttlefish installed. Then every night one cuttlefish would disappear and no-one could figure out who'd come and steal cuttllefish, so they stuck some night-vision camera in and waited.

An octopus in a tank across the walkway would pop out the top of its tank, shimmy across the floor, up the side of the cuttlefish tank, grab one, eat it and then retreat back to its tank. I figure anything that figure out that its human keepers had put a fresh source of food for it across the hall is intelligent enough to not be eaten. Incidentally octopi are intelligent enough to take the trapped crabs and lobster from traps.

but hey, human eat fucking everything, destroying the environment it lives in as we all know nothing is more important than our bellies, and the profits made from selling it for other people's bellies.