This is the entire problem.

The manifesto remains correct. The theatrics which have been built around the *name* "Agile" are largely insanity.

I once saw it said that the only reliable way to know how long it will take to build a piece of software is to build it and then report how long it takes. This is a hard pill for people who are paying for software to be written to swallow, because they very reasonably want to know that the results will arrive on time and that they're getting something for their money during the chasm between work being started and something like a recognizable result being produced. The former thing is what the manifesto says we should do, the latter drives companies to create layer upon layer of "management" to attempt to control and understand the software writing process.

What would you say about my case? I open tabs when there's some news item or search result I want to know more about. I close them when I have reviewed the thing, even if it's just to decide I am no longer interested. For example, I've opened six tabs from the /. front page today. I'll read the ones that are of the highest interest immediately (there were three this time) and leave the others for possible consumption in the future, if I have time, at which point they'll either be closed or left open as a bookmark of interesting information (if there's some follow-up I think I might do). The tab for this article, for example, will remain open for a day or so as a reminder to check for any replies. I don't have a problem going back to open tabs, but there is more information in the world than time so I accept that I may never get back to some of them.

I certainly exhibit some signs of ADHD, but I don't think my approach to tab management is one of them. I don't think thousands of open tabs is necessarily an indicator.

That said, thanks for bringing it up as a possibility.

Disorganized?! Quite the reverse. Linear tab lists are how I organize things. One window per desktop, each window a different type of browsing (e.g. news/research/productivity) and then open tabs in each window. Disorganized would be somehow trying to track all of those URLs some *other* way. What, do you have thousands of bookmarks? How would you manage to relate them back to the type of task they're related to, and the time they were bookmarked?

Untrue. I run Firefox with a dozen windows each of which has hundreds of tabs. All it takes is enough RAM, but I make sure I have plenty. If RAM pressure is a problem for you then look up the BarTab extension (it's defunct, but I believe there are some active forks). Firefox absolutely can do this.

Now Chrome, that's where you'll have trouble. IT was really not designed for a large number of open tabs. Its minimum tab width is ~48px and once you have enough of those to fill the horizontal bar new tabs open on the right *hidden*. Unlikely Firefox there is no window into a current set. The only way to interact with them extra tabs is via the "Search tabs" menu, which is highly inconvenient. Chrome's UI assumes no more than about 75 tabs open at a time.

It's not laziness. I typically run at least low hundreds of tabs open, frequently up into the low thousands. I know I've cleared 5,000 before, but I'm not in the business of tracking too closely--I'm just not interested in how many there are.

Bookmarks are not the same thing as open tabs; a site can vanish but still be available in browser cache/memory. A bookmark may help you find a page you were on earlier, but it's hard to know *why* you bookmarked it, to organize them linearly, and to distinguish between an ephemeral interest and a permanent reference. Really, bookmarks are a vestigial feature of the pre-Google web. Do you remember when we all had "home page"s that given over to collections of links to commonly-used sites? That, too, has gone. In my case these have been replaced by tabs.

It's all part of an efficient workflow. I see people do something like: Google search, click a result, read some of it, click back, click the next result. This pattern is inefficient and drives me nuts; when I do a search I scan through the results and open anything that seems helpful new tabs--I may even refine my search a few times and open some tabs for each variation--, then I C-tab and begin to review. I can go from zero to 20 tabs in moments without even noticing it, then I read through them and close tabs that are irrelevant. When I get to the end of the subject I am researching I'll close most or all; I may leave open a tab with an answer or something I need to refer back to as I go back to what I was doing. With news it's the same: I open in a new tab each story that I want to read more about. I may not read them all the same day, but I leave the tabs open as a linear queue of interest and get to them eventually. It often happens that the queue grows faster than it shrinks, and that's fine. I come back through later and close out unread tabs that no longer seem interesting.

I can't imagine *not* doing this. It's not lack of window management; I currently have 11 browser windows open and they *each* have dozens or hundreds or thousands of tabs. It's *not* laziness. This is simply a way to organize information that maps well to the way my brain works.

The day that Firefox removed tab groups was a sad day indeed. There have been few tab management features which actually improved my ability to organize, but that was one of therm.

You are entirely correct. However, the public perception is that places like twitter ought to offer some protections they do not offer.

There is a simple, obvious, and clear solution to this conundrum: nationalize twitter.

The outcome of such an action will be unpleasant in many ways, but I think it will bring in to focus the problems that already exist but that we can't properly debate.

You don't need home-developed, you just need locally-controlled. For that Jabber is all fine. As much as I think XMPP has problems as a protocol, it solves all of the issues you might have from a defense point of view.

You're implying that you can't get the equivalent of BSD zones on Linux and run containers inside them. You can, it's just a lot of bother.

This. It's pretty much my take, too. Imagine: playonlinux style "what works" compatible configs *maybe even tested by the original developers* and targeting the relative stable steam runtime environment? It's a no-brainer.

Honestly, I'm waiting for some ambitious desktop environment guy to start shipping a DE package via steam. No reason why you couldn't (or shouldn't). Steam has delivered a stable *end user* environment in a way no single distro or vendor has managed before on Linux. We can all take advantage.

I agree about the coffee quality. However, Starbucks isn't really in the business of selling coffee. They sell space. You really buy a break in a pretty comfortable, relaxed environment; a living room for rent. The overextracted cardboard mug of coffee is just a bonus.

The Shinkansen typically runs every 15-20 minutes or so. On the busiest lines (Tokyo-Osaka) at peak times there's a new train every five minutes. You just show up, get a ticket atthe vending machine and step on to the next train.

Flying may be cheaper, but the trains are just so much faster and more convenient. I love them.

Even if you could create a version of Windows that would run well in a cluster environment, the applications aren't there. One reason Linux is so dominant is that the kind of code you want to run on a big cluster is all written for Linux.

With that said, some HPC apps are hybrid; you run a client on your local machine (Windows app, or a web app) that dispatches the work on to the cluster in the background. With those you can treat the cluster as a big accelerator for your local app.

Todays supercomputers and clusters are all descendants of the Beowulf clusters. No need to imagine anything :)

I agree low birthrates is a problem (although the reasons are principally economical rather than social). I live in Japan and see this first hand.

Low birth rates is not the cause of the rural depopulation, though. That has been an ongoing trend since long before the population stopped growing; and it's a trend in countries whose populations are stable or still growing at present.

This is really about urbanization, not population changes, and it's not limited to Japan.

The issue is that young people leave rural areas - for school, higher education, jobs - and don't return. Cities grow while rural areas shrink, and eventually the population becomes too small and too sparse to support a good range of public services. Similar things are happening in Europe and in north America as well.