doesn't necessarily mean you should. This might just be a case of that. What's the usability of OSX on this? For that matter what about the resource hungry Vista and 7? XP was probably as far as it needed to go. That and perhaps Linux.

I've been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and have always upgraded using the "Upgrade" button without any issues. Upgrading to Karmic Koala was just as simple. I'm sure there's some crud left over from Jaunty but I did run apt-get autoremove so most of that should be gone.

George R. R. Martin as well. He's taking forever and a decade finishing a dance with dragons.

As an actual lazy slacker even I put in a little bit of work before asking my peers for help. That way I can maximize the benefit I get from asking my peers by making sure they don't give me the same answer I could get frmo Google. That just makes good sense. It also helps me determine who else is a lazy slacker :)

AVERAGE isn't the only archiving function you can use with rrdtool. For your purposes, you should create an additional RRA with an archiving function of MAX. http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc/rrdcreate.en.html#IRRA_CF_cf_arguments

6. Bertrand Russell "Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy" (1919)

Europeans and the rest of the world which writes dates that way can make 22nd of July Pi day. We're sticking to March 14th.

I happen to have a printout of an article on "The Liskov Substitution Principle" and was wondering just yesterday how it is that as programmers we use these principles in everyday life yet don't know their names or the stories of how they came about. As the first US woman to earn a PhD in CS, I'm sure there are some interesting stories to tell about it.

For those who might not have her original text handy, the Liskov Substitution Principle states (rather obviously):

If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behavior of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a subtype of T

which, when stated in the words of Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin as something we probably all intuitively understand from our daily work, is:

Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it

"Further, violators are tagged with a complete history of their downloading activities, which is easily translated to create customer profiles for online marketing purposes" This looks like they'll be using file sharing statistics to provide the content owners a benefit too. Seems only fair that the file sharers who, by their very actions, actually give them the information about what is popular and what is not should get compensated for that. Instead they will be fined. Way to go Nexicon/RIAA!

I've always thought the IP data types were a bit frivolous but the one thing that always gets me is that in MySQL you cannot have a table with two timestamp fields with both default to now() (or equivalent). Oh and timestamptz from PostgreSQL ... life saver. Oh and an example of a table w/ two timestamps that need a value of now(): I usually have two fields labelled creation and last_update on tables that require them. Aids in debugging and can be useful info to provide to users. I typically have them both set to now() and use a trigger to alter last_udpate just before updates. Doesn't work in MySQL though. Don't even get me started on the lack of timestamptz.