You can easily almost double the vertical resolution.

Turn it 90°.

Good thing and the way it should have happened in the Linux world, with DEs and all Redhat/Poettering stuff.

It probably depends of your country. Where I live, 2nd class is plenty of comfort for me; except in one case: the plane-on-rails, aka TGV, whose nickname is accurate in that its 2nd class really lacks space, as in planes. Well, to be honest, not as much as in planes, but it is the only category of trains for which I consider looking for 1st class tickets (the price difference between classes is generally much smaller than in planes).

But for planes, yes, please just sedate me. Nevertheless, if I have friends who might enjoy the body cavity search, as far as I am concerned, I would rather avoid it.

There is more: when a method requires you do steps A, B, C in order, you can do step A and then step C, and, when it is over, do step B (or just pretend that you have done it) because your boss told you to follow that step order or because you have to fulfil a norm that requires this method. With all the various methods there are now, you can invent infinite ways of getting around them. This is what is most rich and powerful about development methods :->

The first computer I ever used was a Thomson TO7: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=11. Not as bad as people may tell. Good light pen. Keyboard could be painful for the finger tips if you typed a lot.

Then we also had one Exelvision. Could be this EXL 100: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=123. I remember the terrible infrared connection of the keyboard. I did not like it.

There is also probably a variety of standards of HDTV to deal with, across different countries the world and across different sources (satellite, ADSl, cable, terrestrial...).

Not sure this counts as another spelling comment, but: hit harder, there is still a living bichr :-)

Bichr or bichir?

What do we even use lithium for?

It also has various uses in nuclear power.

a team of 20 year olds

These are called seniors in open software development nowadays.

Hmm, you're right about Seamonkey - should've thought of that one. The number of derivatives of Firefox is kind of overwhelming. I did get iceweasel though!

Yeah, I was a bit surprised you listed iceweasel which is basically just a rebranding of firefox and forgot seamonkey, which is much more different since it is a suite (with an email agent and newsreader, a composer and probably one or two more things). Even if at the moment I only use it as a browser, my folks use it for mail too. I don't know if it is still the case, but at some point, seamonkey mail+web browser were lighter (RAM-wise) than firefox (let alone firefox + thunderbird).

I can't wait for the next step: all this re-implemented in Javascript over a Python engine:-)

I cannot see Seamonkey/Iceape in the list. That is the one I use on all my Linux setups, and it is also the one my folks use on their Windows PCs.

Going running with a 5" smart phone is quite annoying.

Let us make it shorter. Going running [...] is quite annoying.

In the company where I was previously working, we were only 2 guys without a smartphone. The funny point is that we were also the only 2 guys in charge of electronic design / low level programing with smartphone/tablet SoCs :-) We had absolutely no interest in such devices.
Fortuitously, we also happened to have the exact same model of basic Nokia dumbphone :-)

And the "homogenizing all distros by adopting systemd" argument in the article is bull. Weren't distros previously "homogenized" by running on sysvinit?

Homogenising thanks to systemd is a major point in systemd proponents arguments!

I switched back to alpine too a few months ago, but that is my MUA, not my distro ;-)

I had not read this analogy before but, although not all characteristics probably match, I think I like it :-)

... is the answer to the question:

> When's the last time you heard someone advocate moving immediately to Slackware or Gentoo?

That was when Debian decided to go for systemd. I switched to Gentoo. Debian remains on weak machines on which I do not want to compile every program, but I pinned systemd so that it should not ever get installed.

By the way, I had switched to Debian when Arch went systemd. What a joke that was: "don't worry, I promiss the regular init scripts will be maintained, you need not oppose systemd as default, do not be afraid, let us do" said one lead Arch developper. Less than 3 months later, he announced traditional init scripts would not be maintained any more. And he now works at RedHat! Really funny...

I considered and still consider moving to *BSD. But 20 years of Linux (15 years as main/only system) are a bit difficult to wipe. Dual booting is a bit annoying because *BSD and Linux do not support really well a common filesystem. Maybe running Linux in a VM on a BSD like some people run Windows in a VM on Linux, for the few applications requiring Linux. But I have the feeling that virtualisation software is not as well developped on *BSD as on Linux.

What worries me too is that, as someone else already pointed it, systemd seems like a shiny symptom of the tendancies of the last 5 or 10 years. Bloat, complexification, over-automatisation, hiding more and more stuff from the users (and from admins now), novelty for novelty, bad documentation (and never up-to-date because everything is changing too quickly), corporatisation (most pieces of software have been taken over by big corporations(RedHat, Canonical, Google, Apple, Oracle, Intel...), there is not much left to hobbyists, students, universities researchers). Basically all the things that I could complain about under Windows during the 90's and early 2000's and that made me enjoy and switch to the refreshing Linux. And I am afraid those tendancies would slowly contaminate the BSDs, starting with FreeBSD/PC-BCD.

My question is unrelated to the topic.

I feel stupid asking this, but how do we assign points in this kind of poll ? Do every item need to be filled with numbers ? What values should we pick ?

Instruction sycall is AMD64; for a 32-bit program, you would use an interrupt instead (int 80h since this program uses Linux system calls, could have been something else like int 21h for MS-DOS) and also possibly change the system call number and the way other parameters are passed to the system because the 32-bit kernel and the 64-bit kernel have different ways of handling these.

Everyone, feel free to correct my possible mistakes, I am not an expert.

Yep, I agree with your forecasts (even though they are just forecasts and we can be wrong). I do not see why Google would continue sponsoring Mozilla (except for a bit of openwashing marketing), not only because Firefox market shares decrease, but mostly because now that Google has locked such a large number of users in their system/services, these users will choose Google as search engine / start page even if it is not the default proposed by the web browser.

Dammit, I do not have any popcorn left!

Sites I regularly visit at the moment:
Hacker News
Phoronix
Liliputing
Linuxgizmos
LWN

Site I used to visit:
EETimes

And for non-UK (and non-US and other non-UK-colonies) people, websites in our own languages. Would be linuxfr.org for me, for example.

This kind of reasoning has been flourishing during the last years, and it would be very fine if one were only using one program. But it does not scale. I have perhaps 30 programs running at the same time: many terminals, many PDF viewers, several text editors, 1 IDE, 1 web browser, 1 mail agent, 1 music player and many more. Just imagine when each of these 30 pieces of software starts requiring 10 or 20 times the memory and power that they should need.

And I do not want to pay n x 20$ to add memory modules, supposing my motherboard supports it, and I do not want to buy a new computer (or MB+proc+new kind of RAM), just to achieve roughly the same functionnalities I could achieve before (sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less, generally little more than a fashionable change of appearance or engine, not an astounding improvement). All right, it works fine on the developper's machine which he upgraded, but because of his laziness / lack of care, it will be millions of users that will have to buy more RAM, millions of $ spent for this.

One a side note, I do agree that having a good computers is a lot of comfort for development work, but there is a huge drawback: then developpers totally lose contact with reality, the reality of computers users will (try to) run this program on. If they had average computers, they would be aware, care a bit more about what they do. I do not mean they should ultra-optimise everything; just avoiding bloat would be a start. You cannot produce good quality software if you have a bleeding edge setup, you will not see or feel many of the problems; and a 1 hours test on a small computer at release time is not enough to experience them. The laziness and convenience of the developper is quite opposed to the convenience of the end user.

I had to use recently a program by a major chipmaker that was hardly doing more than just displaying folding lists with checkboxes. The thing took several hundred Mo when lauched and was as slow as can be imagined (click on a checkbox -> wait 3 seconds before the box is checked)! And, to add insult to injury, with such "good" programming, it started leaking memory like hell. I was not a memory leak, it was a memory flood: after 2 hours, it would eat an extra Go of RAM. Oh, on a powerful computer, it could be run. The programmer likely had such a computer and did not even notice these major troubles.

There are already a few operating Maglev trains, and there was many tests in the past. This system is different because of its "individual" vehicles, not because of Maglev.

It was proposed to the city of Toulouse, France, a few month ago. The project did not look very serious, but well, let the israelians deal with the teething troubles, and see if this system can prove operational.

I have a file server (old computer stuffed with a few HDs), the important parts of it are backed up on the backup system with is just a Cubieboard with a 2,5" 2To HD attached to it. Also /etc and /home/.Mail of other computers are backed up there.
For the things I "work" on, they are version controlled (there is a subversion server too on the Cubieboard), so that makes a kind of backup (one with history on the svn server, several others without history on each computer where I do svn updates from time to time.

There are many weak points in this system. I do not do any offline backup/archive because I am too lazy and for the reasons below. So almost everything is online all the time and could be destroyed by a major trouble on the electrical network. Well, I hope that as they are in different parts of the house, on different electrical cables, on different UPS, there is a chance that at least one survives.

I do not feel very confident with offline backups either.
I have seen too many HDs which fail at the moment you power them on after a long time without being used.
CDs/DVDs degrade too quickly.
I may like tapes but althought tapes are cheap, tape drives are unbelievably expensive (and if it breaks, you need to find another drive compatible with your tapes, and that drive should be compatible with your new computer; it reminds me I still have ZIP disks somewhere around, but even if I could find the drive, there is no more // port on current computers; you see the kind of mess it can become in the future).
I considered Glacier and such, but the awfully complex pricing seems designed to screw you (and with automated scripts, it is easy to make huge mistakes), and depending on your internet connection, it can be very long to perform your backups (especially if you encounter transfer errors) and very long to recover data when you need it.

Also, NASes are more likely to run 24/24 than normal Windows PCs that the user will often switch off periodically (or will crash periodically :->).

For 4 millions and 2 years, it will have to be muuuuch better than the dozens of existing systems. I lack imagination so I fail to see what great improvements can be brought to a system that fondamentally relies on the quality of what is posted. I fail to see how it may change the fact that most people commenting on newspapers websites cannot read and understand the articles, cannot spell and write coherent ideas, and/or continuously spam with their political obsessions, not caring how unrelated to the topic they are.

For example, you may search photos of their new office in Paris. An 18th century mansion with golden walls et ceilings. Over 1000 m² in center of Paris for 20 employees...

That is free software 2014. Free software 2014 makes me sick.

Because Bugs Bunny wears no clothes, I guess he's off limits, too.

A relative of mine often posts on Flickr pictures of a squirrel that visits his garden daily. On one single image, amongst those many pictures, the squirrel presented his back to the camera. That picture was censored!

Either somewhere, there is someone who, every-day, looks for photos of squirrel butts and reports them, or someone has programmed a squirrel butt detector... I am not sure which hypothesis is the most disturbing.

Is FIDOnet still around? At least we owned that one.

I believe it is still present in Russia, but it has almost or totally disappeared from other regions of the world.

Nothing special comes to my mind about contemporary writers at this moment, but in a general way, I would say any book that has an oppressive or totalitarian technological setting.

For anyone who has read several SF books, what has been going on these last years can be scary :
-- Megacorps like Google who buy companies in many different tech domains.
-- Flying drones (armed or monitoring) become widespread.
-- General spying by governments, together with megacorps. They even stopped denying or justifying.
-- Personal spying devices like Google glass for a start, but sooner or later, it could be implants.
-- Genetic manipulation, or at least selection, that slowly starts.
-- Medias: hard to say how they will evolve. Anyway, their interest seems to keep the people fed with the most easy and idiotic content in order to sell the most advertisement time to corporations.
-- Worst of all : most people gladly welcoming those devices and actions.

I must forget or fail to see a few other points, but if you add the next thing coming: Internet of Things, you have almost everything you need for any dark SF.