You can't be restored if you haven't been saved.

It should be cake. Then he'd know it's not a lie.

So now they have switched to having just one plan that costs $50/month. That's $600/year. If they think I'm going to pay them this much they are insane. Sure, there are all these phone junkies who are on the phone all the time and are able to use a web browser on a 3" screen, but for quite a few normal people a cell phone is kept mostly for emergencies. For now I apparently can still keep using my $10/year pay-as-you go plan, but if they make me switch, I'm leaving. Where? I have no idea.

Obligatory xkcd

As an Arch user, I second that. Arch is not user friendly. It does not even have an installer any more; there is just an install.txt on the installation CD and you are expected to follow the instructions manually.

The reason I use it is that it takes the least amount of effort to configure the environment the way I want it, with no extra crud floating around. With a user friendly distribution you have a hundred daemons running around doing nothing but take up RAM, the startup takes five minutes, and the UI drives you nuts. And, of course, every package has a bazillion dependencies that just must be installed, so you need ten gigs on your tiny SSD just to get the damn thing up.

If you are beginner, none of these things matter to you. You probably don't know what RAM is, and are not bothered by slow startup times. So install Ubuntu, or Mint, or whatever. Works out of the box and zero maintenance. You can thank me later.

"Man, we should totally invade Greece! That Alexander is a real sissy and needs a lesson."
"Hear, hear! Now let's drink so we can evaluate this proposal more thoroughly!"

Yes, InternAtom requires a round trip, but only a newbie would use it often. If you have a lot of atoms (and any nontrivial X11 application does), you use the XInternAtoms call, which will stream all the requests into a single round trip. You can also use libXcb and do that to all the other calls as well. With proper design you only need 3-4 roundtrips to get your app fully loaded.

That's cute, but at this time the OSS drivers in the kernel are still not suitable for doing anything serious with OpenGL. They don't even support GL3.3 and core contexts yet, which is the minimum base any new code should target. And that's even without considering performance which is still lousy, and the fact that most games that run in Wine still won't work with OSS drivers. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the effort Mesa developers are putting into these drivers, and I hope that someday they'll work, but they just aren't good enough to use yet, so for now there is no choice but to use binary drivers.

Seriously, be a man. Drill a hole in the floor with a jackhammer. Stick in a 2x4. Pour concrete. Nail monitor to the 2x4. Grab a beer. Done.

Pump in coal ash and you can call it carbon sequestration.

Researcher: press that lever, you rat!
Rat: I realize that command does have its fascination, even under circumstances such as these, but I neither enjoy it nor am I frightened of it. It simply exists, and I will do whatever logically needs to be done.

A small shop can not afford to take a case to court even without paying the defendant's lawyers. An IP lawsuit costs millions of dollars to pursue; more money than any normal person will make in his entire working lifetime. The courts are for the big fish. For the rest of us, any involvement with them leads to bankrupcy.

And the clueless MBAs strike again. Business school graduates forget that the basis of capitalism is capital, not short term profits. You build capital when you care about the company sticking around for a long time, when you intend people to buy your products because of the reputation of your brand, and when you genuinely care about making the world a better place one awesome toothbrush at a time.

MBAs on the other hand, only care about the company's survival until the next bonus time, believe that people will only buy something if they are tricked and brainwashed into it, and have no interest or knowledge of what the company actually produces.

And when you do not care about the products you make, why would you want talented employees to make them? If quality is irrelevant, all you need is a bunch of cheap warm bodies to make whatever garbage marketing can sell. It is amazing how fast you can ruin the economy when you only intend to stay on your job until the company dies, rather than until you retire from it.

Thinking FTW.