'Nice' compared to Amarok, Banshee, etc? Or just nice in that there aren't better alternatives?

Last I checked, iTunes was a contender for the best media library available for Windows. Personally I have always found it to be rather lacking, with a small feature list and limited configuration options. I understand that might actually be a feature in itself for a majority of users. In any case, it's been some time since I've used it.

I'm beginning to think that the causative factor behind this misquotation is a rather peculiar mental illness.

It's not, "Do no evil."

It's "Don't be evil."

The implications of this distinction are left as an exercise to the reader.

You're on my foe list for good reason. You're basically a dick as far as I can tell, and wrong more often than you are right.

But here you are so entirely right that I am compelled to post a "me, too!" comment.

This guy should have known better. Nuff said.

PHP's original problem was that generating HTML is actually not all that hard. You didn't need all of those fancy real-language features; that would just create a barrier to entry!

"Well, apparently it's a little harder than we thought, so we'll add some things to the language and then it will be okay!"

The recent phenomenon of using Javascript on the server is the exact same pattern.

Hi, APK. How's the life?

I have been working pretty hard on other projects; I haven't had time to set up my new computer let alone the tests we discussed. Really, it's quite depressing.

Your insistence that "the IP stack had to do some work first" is a complete departure from reality. A browser request starts in the browser, and may not even reach the DNS layer -- for instance, if you're requesting a local file (file://), your browser is not going to do a DNS request.

If you're the kind of guy who is going to completely ignore the factual when it suits him, then I'm probably not going to make these benchmark numbers a real priority.

And honestly, if you keep trolling my posts on here, writing a plugin to automatically hide your posts would be at least as much fun to write as doing these benchmarks would be. The next step would be to run a script to automatically post links to said plugin after every post of yours. So let's keep the drama to a minimum, shall we?

The problem with your idea is that you are assuming that Linux as it exists today is a bad consumer desktop OS. From a certain perspective this is true.

Linux is not really anything in and of itself. It is a platform for constructing other things. You can use a Linux system to serve web pages, crunch numbers, or throw some eye candy on the screen, but the project itself will always be focused around the ease of use for people who are building such things, and not the end users.

In fact, the versatility of Linux is precisely what conflicts with its ease of use. Leaving aside UI concerns regarding the paradox of choice, it is impossible to optimize of all tasks simultaneously. In a more specific context, much of the graphical stuff that makes your desktop use easier are anti-features in other domains.

I am completely fine with Linux not ever being more than a niche desktop contender. I am even fine with people occasionally turning it into a locked-down playskool user toy every now and then. For people to hold up the toy and say "All Linux should be like this!" is to completely misunderstand the point of both Linux and the toy, and the processes that produced them both.

Yo soy el mismo.

The only time that being able to understand other languages has come in handy is when the programmer I'm talking to forgets the English word for something.

English is built into programming languages, with a few exceptions.

Learning languages is wonderful in general, but not always useful in practice. English is overwhelmingly the world's most popular second language, the ipso facto lingua franca mundi. If you want to use your second language, go to someplace where there are many native speakers. In places where people from disparate lands mingle, you will invariable converse in English; it's really quite boring.

I ask this question in ignorance: what does the much-vaunted CPAN contain within it that has unit tests?

It is my current belief that any code lacking some sort of proof of correctness is valueless. In many cases it is worse than having no code at all.

I have strong feelings concerning the promotion of untested or untestable code, but will reserve them until I know whether they're warranted.

So this question is, on the surface, pretty retarded. It's obvious that the terms 'phase transition' and 'symmetry' are being used as scientific jargon; your question is based on a completely different set of semantic meanings and so ultimately attempts to answer it will boil down to telling you the definition of the term and how none of your examples have anything to do with the actual subject matter.

On the other hand, you just got a bunch of physics geeks to explain the concepts as applied to a variety of contexts.

Mod parent +5 Troll.

Our current generation of batteries has a tendency to explode in the right conditions. What happens when you pack five times the energy density of a lithium cell into your new device, and then something goes wrong?

Wikipedia gives the energy density (Megajoules/kg) of lithium batteries as 1.8, and that of dynamite as 4.6. (Gasoline is ~46) At that point I'd be happy if an electrical discharge were the worst of my concerns.

No. The word you are looking for is "epistemology."

A method for determining truth is not itself a truth. Facts, or beliefs, are the result of this process.

Further, science is an empirical epistemology, as opposed to (e.g.) a rational one. So your appeal to logical principles is actually unfounded.

The above statements should not be construed to imply that rational epistemologies are "wrong." More to point out that the truths produced by each process are not equal. You may have a rational truth that "the sky is blue," and a thought experiment which proves this. You may also have an empirical truth that "the sky is blue", and empirical measurements that suggest that the light emitted is such-and-such a wavelength on average.

Both systems have problems. Rational systems can prove anything, depending on the axioms chosen. This can include things that are not empirically true: the sky is green, the Earth is flat, etc. Empirical systems cannot deliver exact results; nothing is ever entirely "true." Both systems cannot fully describe the universe -- in point of fact, nothing can, since that book would have to contain all information about every part of the universe.

The relative value of each system is mostly not measurable. Most systems make both rational and empirical claims. However, taking empiricism to extremes means not believing in anything but data. The opposite course involves believing anything that you can construct a rational explanation for. Philosophically, these things are equal. I don't presume to inform the reader which may be preferred.

O hai!

I'd just like to take a minute to point out that you are both arrogant and clueless. You seem to believe that your generation has some sort of richer or better culture, or perhaps a deeper wisdom. Youth is often arrogant and derisive of what they have not experienced. What's your excuse?

You have constructed a bias in thought without input from reality. Your generation was decried by the previous one just the same -- the tradition is at least as old as Socrates. Aside from the general principle that ninety percent of everything is 'crud', your complaint is mostly one of ignorance. You don't seek out counterexamples, or involve yourself with the creative minds of the younger generations. For my part I am rather pleasantly astounded at the number of young people that I meet who have actually read The Brothers Karamazov, although meeting an equal number who have read Finnegan's Wake fails to elicit the same emotions.

Overall, this may be a generation that is unused to theatre -- but expects at least 20 hours of plot from video games. They may have a preference for netspeak -- but they interact with each other on a global scale. They may not write sonnets -- but only because you can't use a 3D printer to make them. They may not share your musical tastes -- and for that they should truly be damned, because everyone knows that good music hasn't been made since whichever formative decade you experienced.

I would label this as a case of projection: you are a small-minded person with limited knowledge outside your own domain, and assume that this is true of everyone else.

And mostly this part. Moody's didn't know what they were rating. Literally had no information about the component parts of the derivative. Are 20% of these loans bad? 80%? Don't know, but someone will buy them if they're rated right, so we'd better rate them just to stay relevant.

It really had nothing to do with homeowners and everything to do with Wall Street. Banks don't just give out cash they're never going to get back, just for the hell of it. It's not like all the homeowners woke up one day and decided to lie about their credit ratings, or that the bank managers' union(??) collectively decided to try for higher sales targets. This was a top-down crisis, a crime of ineptitude and fraud. Wall Street decided it could turn shit into gold, and then did this as much as possible until the first wave of defaults broke.

The triple-A rating was all Wall Street needed in order to not do any research into what they were buying. The rating agencies didn't create the crisis, but they certainly enabled it.

Markets are not a solution to everything. Read about natural monopolies. Like, before you read the rest of this post, even.

Rephrased, you're saying that the government can delegate authority to charge a tax for something to a private profit-driven entity.

Capitalism is what we call it when many entities compete to provide services. The competition part is what is good about that; it forces efficiency.

You're advocating Fascism.

It has ever been thus. Post offices were some of the first structures built in frontier America. In 1776 when the USPS was mandated in the Constitution, most of the country lived in rural areas. Socialism ain't all bad, you know, and in this case it's pretty obvious that this is how the system was designed to work. Take it up with those dead guys who are on all the money in this country.

Money! Now there's a socialist venture. We should go back to when all the banks printed their own notes.

Next time pick rural Alaska for the target of your sociopathy. It's an easier target.