chungy

You can argue that Canonical isn't upholding their end to provide security support, exactly what TFA is all about.

It's still a pretty basic reason businesses might calculate that Ubuntu is a good fit.

1. Faster and predictable release cadence. New releases every six months, April and October (hence x.04 and x.10). New LTS releases every April on even years (26.04, 28.04, 30.04, etc).

2. The LTS releases are supported by Canonical for at least five years on the free tier, and up to fifteen years with paid support contracts.

I depend on this behavior frequently. It's been a thing since MS-DOS 2.0...

Why is it horrible? It's just basic and well-documented system behavior.

The proper solution is that your merge commit should describe exactly what was merged and why. Git pre-fills it with a default "Merge branch-X into branch-Y" message so you can quickly exit the editor and still have a functioning DAG. It's just not ideal to leave it like that, precisely for this reason.

Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki) doesn't fill out a default message, and sometimes that has annoyed me, but it does make you think about what you're doing. If you look in the Fossil and SQLite trees, almost all merges include a full description of what the merge was all about and why. Fossil also doesn't forget the entire history of the branch (including from which commit it was branched from), so it has that advantage too.

It's a bit hit-or-miss whether logos are skippable. Some games let you, some don't.

It's often a cover to mask loading times anyway.

Yeah, I remember DVD menus (and the rare Blu-ray that employs "interesting" menus) being fun, but even the fun ones would get in the way of actually wanting to watch the movie or TV episode at hand.

They might be bland and boring, but the menus employed today by the vast majority of discs produced are infinitely preferable in my opinion. Play Movie/Episode, Audio, Subtitles, Special Features. They're made from just a few templates and generally work the same across all discs from a studio. Doesn't bog you down with cutesy animations or wild layout choices, lets you just watch your movie in peace.

A non-scam product would probably be targeted exactly at that scenario: plug it in, run a server for a handful of friends. Likely anything more than 10 players would never depend on a product like this.

For family and friends, this should be adequate.

That's the weird part. It's trivially simple to run a Minecraft server. Slap whatever your favorite variant of Linux is, install Java, run minecraft-server.jar. Make a service for it (heck I made one many years ago, probably still works: https://gist.github.com/chungy/0b2c438c7db90b32701a).

Once you have the Raspberry Pis, pre-installing an operating system to run the standard Minecraft server should be the easy part.

Unless, of course, it really was a case of "reverse engineer and reimplement Minecraft to make my own server." Not strictly impossible, but a completely unreasonable goal.

Roddenberry specifically wasn't needed, Rick Berman was able to learn from his vision and maintain it. After Roddenberry died, Berman was able to maintain TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise all with the Star Trek ideals that Roddenberry always fought to maintain when he was alive. Even as Deep Space Nine and Enterprise had to seemingly throw the ideals out the window temporarily, with the Dominion and Xindi arcs, just to better demonstrate why they were so badly needed in the first place.

Unfortunately, we don't have a Rick Berman, or anyone else that maintains the same ideals, at the helm anymore.

On a similar vein, Gene Roddenberry was pretty similar with Star Trek. He had a pretty big universe imagined, got the scaffolding in for it, but all the best works under the name of Star Trek were made by other people. Anything Gene Roddenberry was directly involved in as a script writer (see: many episodes of the original and first two seasons of The Next Generation) are generally the weakest and worst parts of Star Trek.

You absolutely can use "just a /docs" directory in Fossil. You can even point the web server to /doc/trunk/docs/index.md or whatever other file names you want. :-)

Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki) solves this pretty nicely. You can have documentation as files or in a special wiki namespace and it's versioned both ways, and every repository clone gets everything. Even better than that, your in-tree documentation files are rendered and browseable in exactly the same way as the dedicated wiki namespace.

The linked URL to the home page there can even serve as an example: the "trunk" is a check-in name (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/checkin_names.wiki) that points to the newest check-in on the "trunk" branch. You can replace it with any other reference to get the old version; eg, version-2.20 would work to get the version 2.20 of the docs, 2015-03-14 would work to get the version from 14 March 2015, etc.

> - UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.

UltraSPARC came out in 1995, and Athlon 64 in 2003. I'm confused on how it could be late?

> - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. [..]

I disagree with this assessment strongly. I believe Oracle wanted Java and only Java. All other Sun properties were collateral damage of the acquisition. It might be weird that Oracle now owns MySQL, but Oracle never cared about it. (Of course, both your and my assessment are mere opinions.)

The thing is that Windows is actually UCS-2, a consequence of the OS predating UTF-16 by a few years, and coming into existence when Unicode originally thought 16 bits was going to be enough.

For backwards compatibility with old file systems, there's no way the OS can start enforcing surrogate codepoints as forbidden from names. You can just so happen to pretend it's UTF-16 until it's not.

Money is created all the time. It is not a zero-sum game.

Have an IPv6 connection.

Not that it counters any point you're making, but ZFS displays the number of contained entries of a directory in the directory's size field; mind that . and .. are included, so you usually need to subtract 2 to get the count you actually want. I do find it useful sometimes to know the count without getting the listing; the former is a very inexpensive operation (since ZFS is keeping track of metadata like you suggested), the latter is expensive, potentially extremely with hundreds of thousands or more of entries.

This is more-or-less unique to ZFS. Other file systems even on Linux and FreeBSD generally don't provide this behavior.

Sneakernet was common also. Say you have a class of 30 kids, and one of them has access to Usenet to grab qcrack.zip. He'll put it on a floppy disk and share ;)

Mind that every Quake release includes the same soundtrack, it's not just the shareware version ;)

There's millions of such CDs in the wild, both shareware and fully purchased copies.

I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time.

Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.

the SQLite archive format (it's probably worth linking to the main documentation[1], instead of the very old experimental repository) may not really be a good fit for something like GIMP's native file format. (To be clear, "SQLite archives" are not special compared to any other database: it's just a well-defined schema for an sqlar table, which the sqlite3 command line tool is able to create, update, and extract using syntax like the tar command.)

That being said, SQLite would still be a good choice, especially as it's a format that's really intended to be modified in-place, and has good data integrity features (eg: keep WAL enabled so that mid-save crashes/shutdowns don't corrupt your file), neither of which are provided by Zip. You could even just run zlib on data (be it XML or what have you) if optimizing the on-disk size of the file is desirable.

[1] https://sqlite.org/cli.html#sqlite_archive_support

> Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write.

You can make ISO images that boot fine from both CD and USB sticks, when written to either format. Why "Fix" something that ain't broke?

Guix solves the same problem in similar ways, though it uses Scheme as its configuration language.

Different use cases than QEMU, honestly, to the point that there's not much overlap. QEMU is extremely good at running modern operating systems, and not so much at older ones (DOS and Win9x are pretty sore points in QEMU). 86Box is extremely good at running old operating systems (including DOS and Win9x!), but modern operating systems are mostly out of the question (you can run WinXP, but https://86box.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage/faq.html#can-i-...).

Files in Git don't have timestamps, only commits do. It got swept up when `git commit --date=...` was run.