1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc.

2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice.

3. Filters mail at the server side.

4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscation and get maybe 1-2 spams per month.

Cumulative: it's one more thing I don't have to jerk around with. It just works.

Facebook engineer here, working on this problem with Joshua.

What this comes down to is that git uses a lot of essentially O(n) data structures, and when n gets big, that can be painful.

A few examples:

* There's no secondary index from file or path name to commit hash. This is what slows down operations like "git blame": they have to search every commit to see if it touched a file.

* Since git uses lstat to see if files have been changed, the sheer number of system calls on a large filesystem becomes an issue. If the dentry and inode caches aren't warm, you spend a ton of time waiting on disk I/O.

An inotify daemon could help, but it's not perfect: it needs a long time to warm up in the case of a reboot or crash. Also, inotify is an incredibly tricky interface to use efficiently and reliably. (I wrote the inotify support in Mercurial, FWIW.)

* The index is also a performance problem. On a big repo, it's 100MB+ in size (hence expensive to read), and the whole thing is rewritten from scratch any time it needs to be touched (e.g. a single file's stat entry goes stale).

None of these problems is insurmountable, but neither is any of them amenable to an easy solution. (And no, "split up the tree" is not an easy solution.)

You have to give the guy some credit; Stallman believes in the free software movement, fights for it, and refuses to compromise his rights or values.

This isn't as much about place as it is about time and could have easily been entitled, "Why 1950s Parents Are Superior."

We were raised in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s much like the French children in the article. We weren't treated like children, but like small adults. There were no children's menus in restaurants. If we wanted to go to out to eat, we dressed and acted properly and ate real food with our parents. If we wanted to go to little league, piano lessons, or anywhere else, we got off our butts and found a way to get there while Dad was at work and Mom was watching younger siblings. We walked to school from age 5. If we were late for dinner, we didn't eat. If we were late getting home at night, we didn't get to go out again. If we wanted money we got a job, not an allowance. If we misbehaved...I don't know what would happen. We didn't misbehave; we just knew better.

Most of our cousins and friends were the same, with a few exceptions. That was just the way it was.

Then somebody somewhere fucked it all up and now schools are surrounded by parents in minivans picking up special people who never really grow up. No wonder.

The French aren't different, just late. Just give them a few more years and they'll fuck it all up, too.

Stallman reminds me more of Steve Jobs than anyone else does:

   - 70's wunderkind
   - simple, clear belief about what computing should be
   - realized his vision, creating permanent improvement enjoyed directly or indirectly by every computer user
   - uncompromising in his determination to control his environment

Personally I believe he has some major blind spots -- so did Jobs. The failure of this community to hold him in comparable regard is just that, a failure.