Hear, hear! Moderation is first about sifting threads for quality discussion. Rewarding and penalizing commenters comes later. I wonder, does the grandparent also never mod down anonymous comments?

(Posting non-anonymously as I haven't had any mod points since Saturday.)

A fair point, which had completely slipped my mind.

I lived in Scotland for a spell, and (while I didn't do any driving there) I used to see billboards encouraging people to actually shut off their engines while stopped at a light. Blew my mind. To be fair, the lights there have a half-second yellow-red combo to indicate that the lights are about to be green again. But I am genuinely curious what the laws in the US might have to say about (a) putting an automatic transmission in park and (b) switching off the engine while at a light.

Has Waze really gotten better in this regard? I stopped using it after a couple of months because it was always pestering me with alerts that were tens of miles off my course. I think the idea of crowdsourcing traffic patterns is brilliant, but the idea of social driving is bizarre.

And don't get me started on the new Google Maps. It is unusable in landscape mode, which is how I mount my phone to the dashboard. The controls take up so much space that there is no room left on screen for the map.

I guess my first line above could have been paraphrased like this:

Your point, however, stands: it is clear that – whatever sparse checkout features git may have – git's 'sparse checkout' abilities were added because of popular demand, not because sparse checkouts are a good idea. You obviously view them as a crutch, and I have no argument; I even believe I can see where you're coming from. If I invested the time necessary to master git, and spent time collaborating with others and sharing my code, I would probably reach the same conclusions.

That seems pretty clear-cut, since HTTP doesn't protect the IP address or domain name you request. If you're communicating with IP's of Facebook, Facebook pays Verizon. If you're communicating with IP's of /., then /. gets charged.

Well, that's most of the way there but it still requires downloading the whole repository first, and then some configuration, and you have additional unnecessary directory structure.

However, upon reflection, I'll agree that it is probably better for the OP to go all the way and make a repo for each project, which is the standard practice with git. But I'm not convinced that sparse checkouts, as described in your link, is a drop-in replacement for svn.

Thanks a lot! Last time I had looked for such a feature in git, it didn't exist. I do understand that the git philosophy is to make many discrete repositories rather than one repo with many projects organized in subdirectories. It just seemed that sparse checkouts were a closer analogue to OP's current situation, which might mean a lower learning curve. Although as I think about it, making several sparse checkouts for different projects is nigh-indistiguishable from cloning several discrete repositories, from the user's perspective.

svn is appealing in this case because you can check out subdirectories of a repo without downloading the whole thing, which is more similar to his current organization.

Or maybe it's like removing your license plate every time you go into the store.

Hiding your SSID is like parking your car behind a small hedge.

I really like your argument, here. It's the first time I've heard it put quite this way.

See, I would pay for the service, but I don't think we'll ever be given that option. I expect that Google will add it to a spring cleaning list long before they try to charge for it. It doesn't matter how much I would be willing to pay; they'll never take my money.

Is that like the Parable of the Broken Window?

The linked article is the prologue to a series of seven posts chronicling a week spent using Gnome Classic. See the RECENT ENTRIES sidebar at the top of the page.