IIRC, there is one difference: how they respond to read errors. Consumer drives will keep trying to maximise the likelihood of a successful read, while the enterprise ones will just fail immediately since they're expected to be RAID, so there's another copy of the data and taking longer to reply just kills the throughput.

Serious question: how does one meaningfully distinguish between hardware and software patents? As I understand it, software is supposed to be unpatentable because it is just math, but the same could also be said of Widlar's negative feedback amplifier, since the mathemathical models by which transistors function were well established at that point.

The best argument I've heard against software patents is that they inhibit interoperability (e.g. the MPEG patents), but that's not specific to software - the same is true of Apple's magsafe connector.

To be fair, Arch is a distro for people who are fine with things breaking all the time, which is what you'd expect of a bleeding edge rolling release distro. A review of someone who spent a year running Ubuntu on their laptop would be far more realistic in terms of what a casual user would experience.

If they offer average pay, they'll get average employees. If they offer above average pay, they miss out on exceptional employees. And if they offer exceptional pay, they'll likely go bankrupt as most of their employees will not be exceptional.

Negotiation exists because there's no objective way to evaluate the value of the employee to a company before they've been hired. If someone can get twice the work done (and can demonstrate this), they can justifiably demand twice the pay. Of course, the subjectivity is a double-edged sword, because it means that individual prejudices can affect the hiring process.

One way to solve this problem is to handle all negotiation through a well-defined algorithm. The would-be employee shouldn't even interact with a person for this part of the process, just with a webpage. Strong AI is obviously impractical, but you could probably do a pretty good job of predicting performance if you managed to trawl a big enough dataset for some key statistics.

Another approach is what this poster suggested, where pay (above a base salary) is determined by one's peers. In that case, the individual prejudices are averaged (which ideally negates them), and the valuation of the employee is done by their peers. You'd have to be very careful about how you implemented it though, as you run the risk of creating some major social/political problems with that approach.

You could avoid that by setting master.rebase for that repo, or setting branch.autosetuprebase=always globally. But even if you did accidentally merge instead of rebasing, the merge commit will contain the hashes of both parents, so it's simple enough to reset the branch.

So use a different GUI library. WPF is pretty bad even when compared to WinForms. The Qt libraries are cross-platform, have existing bindings for C#, and are an absolute pleasure to work with. IMO, they blow the pants of WPF.

The value in Microsoft open sourcing .NET isn't in running existing Windows programs under Linux - they probably wouldn't work without WINE anyway, due to P/Invoke calls or lazy programming like concatenating backslashes instead of using Path.Combine(). The value is in being able to use C# to write new, cross-platform programs. And while Mono did have implementations of them, they didn't necessarily work the same way. I gave up on it completely after a particularly annoying bug prevented .NET binaries from running as a less privileged user.

C# is an excellent language, and arguably the best-positioned language in its niche - C++ has too much cruft, Java is struggling to catch up (and seems to lack a decent GUI library), D's userbase and funding is close to non-existent, and Objective-C/Swift aren't used outside of Macs. All the other languages are too immature, or lack the requisite feature set, to be competitors.

FTFY.

(This is a direct reference to the "on a computer" patents, for the humour impaired.)

Why on earth would you want a 96-bit CPU? Even the current 64-bit ones can 'only' address 48-bits of memory (i.e. 281 TB).
And if you want it for a certain computationally expensive load, 128-bit would make more sense (or just doing the computation over 2 -bit words).

The main advantage of Github, etc. isn't the hosting - you can use any SSH-capable server for that. It's in the issue tracking and other built-in features.
That means it makes more sense to have your backup server pull updates from Github, since it can't provide that.

Of course, an even better approach would be to use an alternative like Gitorious (now Gitlab?) that allows you to host it yourself, so you don't lose access to anything if your primary hosting goes down...

The problem I see with this is that it would give corporations power over the employees they have educated. No business would pay to have an employee educated if there was a chance they'd leave immediately after, so they'd either require them to stay with the company for N years, or make the entire debt repayable the moment they quit.

There also seems to be the implicit assumption that there will be enough jobs available for the entire population. I don't know how true that will be in the future, or if it's even true now...

There's a difference between elapsed time locally and globally. Locally (i.e. on a single processor), you can have some meaningful concept of absolute time (i.e. whenever the timer interrupt fires). The moment you introduce a second processor, you run into issues where they can be ticking at different rates, and the non-trivial delay in communications between them means that you can't ever hope to synchronize them to the extent you can assume they are the same.

For most applications, you can get away with fairly large tolerances. e.g. wifi is probably fine with 1% variations in your concept of how long a second is. But that only works because you're using local elapsed time. If you need to compare timestamps from multiple nodes (global absolute time), you need to use approaches like vector clocks, because otherwise there's no meaningful way to reason about whether two events happened before each other.

tldr; protocols like wifi just need elapsed time to be roughly correct. Comparing timestamps between systems is much, much more complicated, and you can't even infer an ordering for the general case without casuality. (In that sense, there are a lot of parallels with relativity.)

I think is simultaneously the best thing and the second biggest issue[1] about Kolab - it's a very powerful piece of software targeted at sysadmins. You can setup some very complex, enterprise grade configurations with it, but to do that you need to be willing to muck around with postfix, etc. By that same note, you need to have at least basic familiarity with postfix, apache, cyrus, etc. to actually set it up in the first place, which sets the bar fairly high. (I think it took me a week of practicing in a VM before I was ready to do a proper deployment on my home server.)

[1] The biggest issue would be its general bugginess. e.g. This bug affects anyone with an apostrophe in their name, but went untouched for over a year, despite a patch being included in the original submission.

I've been using it for little over a year (for the same reason as you - didn't want to put too much info into Google), and would describe it as half-decent. I use it as a diary, essentially - schedule, calender, todo list, etc. I still use Gmail for actual email though, because unless you own the domain outright (i.e. not a subdomain) you can trigger false positives for spam on other servers that results in you mail being dropped.

Pros:
-open source
-free (gratis)
-works

Cons:
-pain to setup - the target audience is sysadmins, so you really need to practice doing it in a VM first (especially since doing a complete uninstall is non-trivial)
-buggy - every time I've upgraded to a new version, I've run into a significant bug. (Inability to handle apostrophes in names, buggy apache module that keeps crashing the server, etc.) You can usually fix it if you know PHP/Python, but it's still a pain that makes for a poor user experience. (I've submitted bug reports with patches for these, but not all of them have been merged.)

Basically, it does take a lot of effort to get it working (I have 500 lines of notes on it), but once you've done that it will keep working pretty reliably. The official client is KDE Kontact, which works great for me since I use Linux anyway. I can see it working out poorly if your OS is Windows though (KDE for Windows isn't stable yet). It syncs well with Android too. I generally prefer to enter important events, etc. in through the webui though, since I don't quite trust the other clients to sync them properly.

tldr; it's probably the most broken piece of software I've used under Linux, but it works well enough that I continue to do so. I wouldn't recommend it for anything important (e.g. actual business use), but it's fine for non-critical personal use.

Actually, it's an email server, except it's not just email - there's also contacts, calendars, to do lists, etc. It's basically a direct competitor to Microsoft Exchange, but with a FOSS stack. I have it installed on my home server, and it works pretty well.

According to their website (or at least, the Australian version), you get the choice of Win7 or Win8.

As for Linux support, it seems that the mouse buttons don't work. Apparently there's a patch for the kernel which will be included in the next release.