Not at all. The whole dark matter thing was based on the presumption that there is mass that we can't see and this matter that we can't see was called "dark matter".

Others may have read more into it, but the name itself betrays the real, original intent behind describing this matter that we can't see or identify.

A browser cell phone doesn't need to be a calculator, a word processor, a typing instructor, a device manager, etc.

A browser/cell phone/Desktop Environment/etc doesn't need to be anything but what people want it to be. I want my cell phone to be a calculator, word processor, typing instructor, etc. And I'm perfectly happy with my browser extensions that share screens and do other stuff that is useful.

People don't buy minimalism, they buy features.

Describing them as "death traps" is hardly fair. In truth, they are approximately as safe as driving a car. A certificated aircraft flying in VFR conditions has a death rate per hour of flight a little less than twice the death rate per hour of driving a car, and a death rate per mile of flight slightly better a car. This makes sense; they go significantly faster than a car.

And that compares a fleet of aircraft with an average age of 30 years or more, to cars with an average age of perhaps 5 years. And even on newer aircraft, very little has been changed in the last 30 years except perhaps instrumentation.

Flying cars you say? Oh, yeah, of course we don't have those! What a silly idea!

Because nobody is doing flying cars. And, nobody else is, either.

I wonder how many people reading this have no qualms about using an Android phone with "Google Now" that do essentially all of these "telemetry" things and much more.

LOL, came here to say this. Isn't it nice to be "on the spectrum" ?

If you value reliability, you want ZFS and RAIDZ.

Odd, but I see no sign that this is true. PC Ports of console games typically require far more "firepower" than would be implied by the original console. Case in point: GTA IV/V.

FYI It's normal and customary for companies or individuals who are compelled to perform a significant task to be paid for their time and effort. I had an employer once get subpoena'd in a law suit and I was the admin and the compelling party (a private party) had to pay for the administrative cost for me to do a data recovery from a backup.

I have little doubt that gmail SPAM filtering is Postini SPAM filtering with a few tweaks.

Right now, today, I have a P3 desktop running CentOS6/32 as a network monitor. It's old as the hills. My phone beats it handily in performance. But it runs on about 15 watts, and does the job so reliably that, in 10 years, it's never skipped a beat. It started with the original RedHat 6.1. (before RHEL was a thing)

I know it won't actually make any records, but I'm sure it's one of the oldest 0.01%, maybe even 0.001% of computers in terms of durability. It would be a remarkable machine if it wasn't otherwise so unremarkable.

Wish I had mod points! So, I'll agree, blah blah.

It seems absurd to have lameness filters that seem to specifically target code on a site that caters to the coder types! And the 4 minute limit is just silly. Back when it was still publicly shown, I had karma out the yin yang. I'm sure I still do, even though it's no longer displayed in any form that I can tell.

Slashdot trumps Reddit for quality of articles, Reddit bests Slashdot for UI and comment participation, though posting on Reddit has become such a land mine I don't bother unless I'm on a very small/exclusive subreddit)

We use ffmpeg to process video files uploaded by customers. We'll be patching our app first thing in the morning. This is a big deal for us.

The spinning disk era is coming to a close, and I welcome it! The issue is that while storage capacity has, for decades, increased almost exponentially, the actual performance of the HDD has remained virtually flat. A typical HDD spinning at about 7200 RPM can store 4 TB of data or more, but can only serve about 150 seek operations per second. Physics, she is a bitch, you know? So while you might be able to store 500 million files, it takes a month to copy them.

Everywhere I look, Enterprise or "performant" storage has moved to SSDs. We moved our DB servers 4 (5?) years ago to SSDs and saw at least a 95% reduction in query times involving disk operations. (EG: not cached) For us, spinning rust is the new tape; SSDs (or RAM) anywhere performance matters, and spinning rust for archival use. For our session cache, we use a RAM drive.

So, your program allocates some memory. Should it initialize the memory to make sure it's all a bunch of zeros? Apparently, Nvidia doesn't think so.

So, a program running on your OS requests some memory. Should the OS initialize the memory before handing it to the application? Apparently, Apple doesn't think so.

Either answer is right.