No, that's EXACTLY what people are arguing about. You say "A is ten times smaller than B" when B is already understood to be small compared to something else. The implication in that sentence is that B is already known for its smallness, and A is even smaller. Except, people use that same construction even when B isn't considered small. They use that incorrect connotation when what they're really trying to say is, "B is big, but A is only a tenth as big."

So what you're saying is, "B is already small, and A is even smaller."

Right?

Are you presuming that someone already understands B to be considered small? What is B small compared to?

There's a simple reason for this: Debian is not a democracy. I don't know where people get these silly ideas. It's a project run by a few core maintainers who make all the decisions. Linux on the whole is about choice, choice of which distribution you run, and choice of how to configure that distribution within its provided parameters.

The only thing new here is that suddenly its a parameter you actually care about. Nothing else has changed in the way systems are run.

Don't like it? Why not support one of the forks?

I don't cry about this. Too many programs out there assume that the only scenario for them is a perfectly and ordered shutdown, and then if something happens such as lockups, system crashes, or power outages there is suddenly as massive amount of data lost or corrupted. Maybe this will force some people to actually write their software in a more tolerant way.

What makes you think that any open source project is democratic?

I can't remember where but I distinctly remember reading that systemd does NOT provide the fastest boot times. Faster than sysvinit in many scenarios, but not faster than some other parallel startup setups.

But then really fast boot times was not at all the point. It was more of a side effect of being an event based init system rather than a linear list of scripts executed in order. In fact the speed of boot is not mentioned on the project page, and even Poettering's blog only mentions that it's faster than Upstart in Fedora 17 and only due to one specific reason.

Oh is that all it takes? Okay then: SYSTEMD SUX. Now where's my +5 insightful?

And you don't? How do you ever have a hope of finding a job in IT? Next you're going to tell me you don't have 3 years experience as a Windows 10 admin. Maybe this industry just isn't for you.

Yep, along with all the other problem the outdated init system presents that we have spent years and years patching and adding helper programs to work around.

Math doesn't help in the absence of context. If Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B, but Product B costs $10,000 ... does it really matter? That's a little different than Product B costing $3, right? Right. In real life, context actually matters, or you're just wasting people's time.

Yes, there IS confusion. Are we supposed to infer that the thing that the new 10-times-smaller version is being compared to was already considered small? That's what implied, but nobody knows for sure because the person saying it is lazily using a common, and poorly thought out, construction that doesn't actually tell us that.

OK. But let's say you don't know how big the Small Magellanic Cloud is, relative to, say, the Milky Way, or Andromeda, or anything else. And then someone says, "We've just found a new galaxy, hiding behind a dust cloud, and it's three times smaller than the Magellanic Cloud." What are you supposed to gather from that use?

No, I don't like people conveying information in a way that forces you to go research something they mentioned without providing any useful context. When somebody cites a comparative size, but doesn't explain why (or if) that comparison is meaningful, then it's a waste of time. Especially when the communication is theoretically about science and/or technology.

Indeed, he was a true monster and deserves to be vilified. We should start a kickstarter to buy pitchforks for all. I'll organise a press release.

This post is authorised by the NSA, TSA, FBI, CIA, US Government, NATO, EU, UN, Allied governments of the USA, and enemy governments of the USA.

I propose an even funnier idea, just take a random div element from each startup's site and mash them together.

You're missing the point.

When someone says, "The new battery is ten times smaller than the old battery," yes ... we can guess that part of what's meant is, "The new battery is a tenth the size of the old battery."

But there's a reason those are TWO DIFFERENT SENTENCES.

When you use the word smallER in that context, you're communicating that the old battery is small, and the new battery is even smaller. Why? Because you're saying that the new battery has time times the smallness of the old one. That has a completely different connotation than a sentence that suggests that the old battery was what it was (or was large), and the new battery is comparatively small.

The reason we have lots of vocabulary words, adjectives, and constructions is so that we can be nuanced and more precise in simple communication. When you use a sentence that essentially forces the audience to go find out what you actually meant by "ten times smaller" (was the old one small, or huge?) then you've done the opposite of providing useful information. All of that in order to avoid using slightly different words that we also all know?

This is pure laziness, that's all. It's mimicking a sound or phrase without thinking about what's actually being communicated. It's no different than people who say, "I could care less," when they mean exactly the opposite. They are uttering sounds without thinking about the actual words they're using. One small, lazy spoken step for man, part of one cumulative giant leap towards dumbing everybody down.