When I was a young kid, and I first heard "literally", I presumed it was something to do with "literature", stuff like Harper Lee or Shakespeare - i.e *fiction*. It must have taken years before I actually checked its dictionary meaning (its literal meaning, one might say), and had quite a shock. Now, every time I see someone "misuse" the word, I initially think "no it wasn't, you're exaggerating ", and then think back and mellow to a "well, you might imagine a diarist (or journalist) writing that" stance, and let it pass. Language changes; this isn't the grossest perversion of the language that I've seen.

Have some respect, that's your government you're insulting! http://geke.us/GS.html

(OT - And incidentally, in case anyone interprets my .sig as being anti-Obama, I first set it while Bush was in power, and just never got round to changing it. For obvious reasons.)

Because your code is more fragile to misrendering or mistransmission by Slashdot, and MS Exchange, and yahoogroups, and google groups, and ...

The answer to your question was in your parent post, did you not see it?

Fuck ~= vittu, literally cunt, from Swedish fitta

Perkele's harder to translate into English, being the name of an pagan god. So you'd probably want it to be something that offends Church of England sensibilities through blasphemy. I can't think of anything apart from "Hell!" that fits that description at the moment, but that's not really any good as the Finns have "Helvetti" for precisely that meaning. I'm not sure how much the Finns distinguish "perkele" from "saatana" = "satan". It's worth asking a Finn.

What? He's already used up all the words in the English language, he's had to resort to Finnish to fill the gaps already: http://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132

Erm...
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/07/15/1530233/linux-311-officially-named-linux-for-workgroups

See with your own eyes:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Makefile

What does "received $1.5 billion in benefits" *mean*?

It doesn't sound like profit to me, as there's a better word for that, namely "profit". And that's the thing I think RoI should be calculated from (as do economists, it's rare that I agree with them on anything).

> Less than a day's worth of military funding, I'm sure.

Very good point. One should always seek to optimise the largest wastes, and the military is an enormous sink-hole. Except if you're one of the lucky industrial parts of the military industrial complex, that is, in which case, it's Christmas every day!

However, that doesn't mean one should throw money willy0nilly at any fancy-pants futuristic scheme that follows the current fashion, as ...

> And this is not an expenditure, it's an investment.

Only if it pays off. What are your estimates as to the probability this will be both workable, and cost-effective?

> Now add cooling, power, generators, physical security, a SAN, a virtualization platform, and multiple failover sites.

6 of those things we've been doing all along anyway (OK, we non zed-heads have only been virtualising for half a decade). The remaining one AWS doesn't do for you unless you pay significantly more than the simple hosting service.

> Amazon provides availability zones

Not always. Sometimes they provide *unavailability* zones. That's the problem. And that's what makes people think they're deceptively named.

> It is *not* generally considered a cheap

Quoth Forbes:
Cost savings… [...] These are the advertised benefits of cloud computing

Quoth Salesforce:
4. Cap-Ex Free [...] no need for capital expenditure [...] minimal project start-up costs

Quoth Verio:
Achieve economies of scale [...] Reduce spending on technology infrastructure. [...] Globalize your workforce on the cheap [...] Reduce capital costs.

And those were the first 3 hits for ``benefits of cloud computing'' (although the first one is meta, it refers to others refering to cost savings).

I hate to shake you from your firmly entrenched world-view, but you have to know that people are touting cloud solutions as ones which have cost benefits. Whether they're valid claims or not is irrelevant, they are undeniably being made.

But that's the problem - it doesn't serve them, right?

> Uptime guarantees without penalties when failed to meet them are worthless.

I thought AWS did have penalties, of the partial-refund variety. Which ain't exactly great. However, I think the uptime they guarantee is barely 2-nines. They can be down a whole working day per month, IIRC. Which is pathetic, and certainly not worth paying for.

> Re-open it (Ctrl+Shift+Tab).... Aha!

If my firefox (running on linux), this just takes me to the previous tab. Ctrl+tab takes me to the next tab, adding shift just reverses the direction.

> KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS ARE NOT NEWS.

They might be to non-nerds.

That of course leads to a single conclusion - perhaps I don't belong here any more.

How did this nonsense get through the hosepipe, or whatever they call it?