At least when i encountered the discussion initially (some thirty years ago) I'd say we usually talked about how many requests the system was capable of handling. Then requests per second was the obvious unit since a request usually took less than a second to process (obviously depending on the system and so on - but mostly), so using that unit often gave a fairly low, comprehensible number.

Was it ten? A hundred (very impressive)? Perhaps even a thousand (very, very impressive!)?

Multiply those numbers by 60, and there's suddenly a lot more mental gymnastics involved. By 3600 and you're well into "all big numbers look the same" land.

Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.

Of course there were people raising concerns, though. I figured that was pretty obvious in my original post. If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.

So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" in a sentence where I figured it was quite obvious that that's what I was doing, and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times that I thought it was a common and accepted pattern. Perhaps I am wrong about the last bit though. ESL speaker, so that's quite possible.

-- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

Emacs does foo~ by default, not ~foo.

In either case, you're not really supposed to edit files in sites-enabled. That directory is expected to contain symlinks to files in sites-available. I'm not going to say with any certainty that one of the reasons for this indeed is that the pattern (which was used by apache as well - and perhaps other things before it) protects against accidentally reading backup files, but it's not impossible.

So there's definitely a case of holding it wrong if you end up with backup files in that directory.

"Move the pypy trunk into its own top level directory so the path names stay constant."

PyPy migrated from Subversion to git at some point. Not sure how much of the history survived the migration.

Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.

Presumably this. Coffee terminology is (apparently) not global. I've never seen the term "long black", and I visit cafés quite a lot. Wikipedia lists it as a thing primarily in Australia/New Zealand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_black

These days, the needy on the streets accept our local app based payment system called Swish. Still not joking.

There's not much left to sort by then, is there?

Thanks to your link I also learned that Alex has done some voice acting work, including the voice of Ancano in Skyrim! Thanks for posting :)

My reasoning is quite simple: I really don't need the latest versions of everything. Were computers useful two years ago? Yeah? OK then, then a computer is obviously useful today with software that is two years old. I'll get the new software eventually, with most of the kinks ironed out. And I've had time to read up on the changes before they just hit me in the face.

Sure, it was a bit painful with hardware support some twenty years ago or so, but I can barely remember the last time that was an issue.

For the very few select pieces of software where stable doesn't quite cut it there's backports, fasttrack and other side channels.

TFA: Candy consumption started increasing in 1980s and by 2010s, Sweden had the highest per capita candy consumption in the world.

I'd say that "highest consumption in the world" qualifies as "great amounts" :)

It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.

It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.

It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.

I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.