Electrolytic capacitors have a poor life expectancy, typically decades. Cap jobs are common on old audio amplifiers. I heard that recent ones are made using "optimized" processes, which doesn't bode well for durability, and indeed I've had to replace a motherboard due to exploding capacitors. It gets even worse when they are not powered from time to time - it reduces drastically their lifetime.

So don't expect to get most electric gizmos in working order straight out of a time capsule. Their power supply would probably need newly made electrolytic capacitors, which could prove difficult in a post-armageddon environment.

To put this ruckus in perspective...

The demoting caused a drama in the US mostly because Pluto was the only planet to have been discovered by an American.

> The comment about C is absurd

You missed the point entirely. When Unix was conceived, it would not be written in assembly language as was usually the case back in the days. C was seen as terribly slow, its functions were costly. The vision behind that choice was that performance was not as important as clarity of design and maintainability.

> The single process is sort of was done for dependant triggering of events between different event types to be done.

I know that. Using a monolithic architecture makes it easier to manage dependencies. It is not the only solution to that problem though, and I would have preferred another one, more modular. Since I'm not in a position where I can design my own init subsystem, I use systemd, but I can't help noticing this "dependent triggering" doesn't work too well yet. No magic wand will solve such a complex problem, and being unable to easily isolate faulty parts makes it in fact harder to solve issues.

> The Gphoto thing is not what you would call a core part of the system but is for your camera. I dont know what you expect it to look like, i dont see a problem.

Hmmm... Ok, let's repeat. Instead of gphoto2://[usb:008,044]/store_00010001, I want something along the lines of /media/user/Camera/. This is straightforward. This is something I can use in scripts (instead of godawful hacks like parsing dmesg to grab these device numbers). Instead, we have this annoyance, a false abstraction, yet another telling symptom of what is wrong with "modern" Linux.

- Use text whenever possible
- Performance is not paramount, so use C
- And do one thing at a time but do it well - connect small specialized tools to build complex applications
- Documentation, while terse, should cover all features
- The filesystem is a simple tree starting with /

Let's see what modern Linux does:

- Lots of binary stuff everywhere, where text would do
- You'll boot up faster with systemd, oooh yeah baby, totally rad!
- Oooh, and it's more integrated, one single process does everything!
- Look for processes with stranges names running on your machine, then try to find any documentation on them
- gphoto2://[usb:008,044]/store_00010001

The last one makes me angry. It's VMS all over again: is anyone here old enough to remember host::disk$1:[directory]file.ext;version? I can't find another way of accessing my phone data. I can't, for the life of me, mount it the way I would mount another volume.

Guys like Poettering couldn't care less. They have a vision, for sure, and they have good ideas sometimes. But there are really two issues here: a good idea is not sufficient when you engineer a system, and their vision is not Unix. To hell with simplicity, to hell with consistency.

Nothing is harder.

No IDE here, but if all what you want is discover new territories, you'll just need an editor. Apart from PowerShell, there is another decent scripting language on Windows, which is JScript. That's a Javascript implementation allowing to access system resources through "ActiveXObjects". Example:

var fso = new ActiveXObject ("Scripting.FileSystemObject");

Have a look at MSDN for reference about this object and others, then browse it, and various blogs, while happily writing your scripts in whatever editor is present on your machine. By the way, they will run on any Windows system, even XP. The drawback is that interfacing to DLLs is often impossible when it hasn't been provided by MS.

Then, you might want to explore Javascript as a functional language - a usable Lisp in my opinion...

Me too. Does that mean an entire generation will become what I am now? How scary.

News sites usually answer on port 80, or 443, you know. 82 is highly unusual, so much that my corporate proxy won't let me connect. Who are these guys, whose site is on 82? Are they serious? I don't know, and couldn't read TFA, but this port does ring a bell in the "amateur news site" section.

See, they called Kader Arif a "Chief" when he's only the "rapporteur". From Techdirt on this subject, 'A rapporteur is a person "appointed by a deliberative body to investigate an issue."', far from a "Chief".

The main problem I see with the current economic system is that finance becomes more and more decorrelated from production and consumption of actual goods, be they manufactured products, or services. Well, it shouldn't, otherwise crises happen, and they did happen - two in the 2000's - and they will happen again if nothing is done to fix the mess. (I believe nothing will be done, and we will pay dearly for this.) That Bitcoin thing tries to solve unessential problems, mostly ideological, while making early adopters rich. Should it really gain momentum, however, I see nothing in it that would alleviate the risk of a future financial crisis. On the contrary.

I guess you have to put real money on the table for an auction. Like, $1.

UUCP had a command called cu (call up) which is what you need. From "apt-cache show cu" on Debian/Ubuntu:

The cu command is used to call up another system and act as a dial in terminal. It can also do simple file transfers with no error checking. cu is part of the UUCP source but has been split into its own package because it can be useful even if you do not do uucp.

I agree a music tax is a bad idea, but not for these reasons (TFA is more exhaustive though). Reward marketplace failure? But the music market is rigged. Bureaucracy? I don't think its inefficiency could surpass the majors' operations. However, a music tax would be unfair to those who don't listen to music. And how would one determine each artist's share?

Another flat rate music distribution model (this one being voluntary) might be this one, where music files belong to the customer whose ID tags them.

First, flat rate is convenient. Flat rate is one of the reasons why IP took over - bye bye, X.25.

Then, trust the users. Even if some of them remove the ID3 tags. Even if many of them do. Piracy is part of the music ecosystem anyway. Give them ownership, give them responsibility.

Finally, you have to count the beans - how many downloads for which files from which artists. That implies centralization though a hub. There could be many distributors (think Google or your.national.isp or whoever), who would compete for the same basic service, and add additional services on top of that.

But that's sci-fi right now.

gqap
Reformats a paragraph. Think M-q.

:map [list of one-key-commands]
Binds a key (q being a favorite of mine) to a macro. Knowing h, j, k, l, 0, $ commands is a requisite, C-v allows control chars like line feed and escape.