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Comment Re:Never used this keystroke (Score 1) 521

What? No. Mouse vs. Keyboard shows that the mouse is better for moving around, compared to one of the UNIX-style editors where moving the cursor takes many keys. That's it. If you are doing a job other than moving the cursor and/or text around, keyboard beats mouse. Navigation is the thing the mouse is good at.

The context for TFA is writing new content, and there a save keyboard shortcut is far more efficient than anything else. It's only when you change your focus from there to editing that the mouse becomes a viable alternate navigation method.

Comment Re:next for NoSQL (Score 5, Interesting) 162

All "NoSQL" means is that the database doesn't use SQL as its interface, nor the massive infrastructure needed to implement the SQL standard. This lets you build some things that lighter than SQL-based things, like schemaless data stores. There several consistency models that let you have a fair comparison. It's not the case that NoSQL must trade consistency for availability in a way that makes it impossible to move toward SQL spec behavior.

Differences include:

  • Less durability for writes. Originally PostgreSQL only had high durability, NoSQL low. Now both have many options going from commit to memory being good enough to move on, up to requiring multiple nodes get the data first.
  • No heavy b-tree indexes on the data.
    Key-value indexes are small and efficient to navigate,
  • No complicated MVCC model for complicated read/write mixes.

    Today NoSQL solutions like MongoDB still have a better story for sharding data across multiple servers. NoSQL also give you Flexible schemaless design, scaling by adding nodes, and simpler/lighter query and indexes.

    PostgreSQL is still working on a built-in answer for multi-node sharding. A lot of the small NoSQL features have been incorporated, with JSON and the hstore key-value index being how Postgres does that part. Both system have converged so much, either one is good enough for many different types of applications.

Comment Re:Ignore these naysayers (Score 1) 113

No, it's OCZ. ext4 is the most popular filesystem that expects good behavior from drive write caches, so of course it also has the most problem reports. The way write barriers work in ext4, the filesystem struggles when hardware lies about data being flushed to disk. See ext4 and data loss for an introduction.

As outlined there, ext3 gets lucky in some situations ext4 just doesn't tolerate so some people see that as a bug in ext4. But the reason for the change is improved performance. You just can't get a fast filesystem and rugged behavior in the face of drives lying at the same time. You have to pick a side there. In the classic "good-fast-cheap--pick two" trio of trade-offs, OCZ always picks cheap and fast.

Bad drives aren't tolerated by zfs or btrfs either. It's just the case that ext4 is deployed on far more servers than they are.

Comment Re:Can't Tell Them Apart (Score 1) 466

When I give someone a fizzbuzz style program to do, I point out to them that part of my grading is how it handles errors. The example programs people swipe online don't help very much, because they usually don't worry about things like boundary checking. If I can break someone's fizzbuzz by giving it a negative number that's a failing grade. That is much, much more important to me than language mastery. For C programming as one example, I'll trade you a dozen people who know the correct order of arguments for calloc for one who knows how that library call might fail.

Comment Re:Legally questionable, doomed to fail! (Score 1) 427

This is the hard way to mess with douchebags who use this app. The easy way is to create a throwaway account, sell a random parking spot outside where you live/work, and then get a good laugh at the buyer who shows up. Watching a hipster asshole circle the block for 15 minutes, frustrated "their" spot isn't open...now that's quality entertainment.

What's that? You'll get a bad rating and not be able to do that again? Yeah, that Uber feedback model works fine when there are a small number of sellers relative to buyers. For this system to be useful on SF streets, you need to capture the one-shot traffic that parks then leaves. Anything you tailor to make it easy for a city visitor to sell a spot will be easy to abuse for fake sales.

Comment Re:not a black and white issue (Score 1) 394

Stallman's refusal to compromise and the way he frames debate have been both hugely influential and downright prophetic in spots. If you don't get that, unfortunately that means you're still one of the suckers. Sorry.

But it's not too late. Try reading his pieces on DRM, trusted computing, and privacy; consider when awareness of those issues crossed into your own life; then compare that against the publication date.

Even a few years ago, it was feasible to make a case Stallman was being a zealot when he said that allowing any non-free software in your life would lead to a world where companies and government were spying on you, controlling your access to content with DRM, and using content blocks to control what political content a group was allowed to see on the Internet. Nowadays, though, it's obvious Stallman was right all along. Anything that's not free does not have your best interests in mind, and there's no question that will be used against you--the only question is when, not if.

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