Recent Comments

Firefox's market share has gone from the mid-30% to somewhere around 10%.

Nope. Numerous sources put it at 15% to 21%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table

So where exactly did that 20% go? You claim it isn't to Chrome, but it mostly is.

I didn't claim that at all.

But IE is clearly making a comeback.

Also completely wrong. Through August 2014, IE has continued falling, with absolutely no indication of a rebound. W3Counter, Clicky, and StatCounter stats all say exactly the same thing. A straight fall for IE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Historical_usage_share

Here's a graph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_%28Source_StatCounter%29.svg

Firefox has fallen off it's highs, but not substantially.

Debian is heading in a very bad direction with the adoption of systemd. That's why it's a dying project.

You call it a bad direction. I call it a good direction. You are only predicting Debian will become a dying project in some distant future, with zero evidence to back-up that claim, just like your complete nonsense about browser share, clearly based on how you personally FEEL about them, rather than... reality.

Besides all else, if systemd is going to hurt Debian, it will necessarily hurt every other Linux distro out there, so Debian is no worse off. Only Slackware/Gentoo is abstaining from systemd (for the moment), and they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted by corporations, in lieu of, say RHEL. FreeBSD similarly isn't going replaced the installed base of Linux distros. It's utterly and totally ridiculous to claim Debian is hurting, or going to hurt, because of systemd, when there is no alternative.

But at about the same time I also set up a UUCP account.

Help me out, then.

In what way, exactly, is this particular case an issue?

The article was about the fact that a large group of people trying to make a difference were using a public service, not violating ToS, and with a single tweet from someone opposing the group had the repository shut down. It has significant impact on software developers who use the service to host code for any number of projects that could be susceptible to a tweet from opposition or competition.

No, it doesn't. It has no effect, whatsoever. I am one of those developers.

So... FUD?

This reminds me of the Ben Bova short story about the SSZ, or supersonic zeplin. He also envisioned a tubular design, although in his case it was for shockwave cancellation.

A. No, you don't hate bloat "more than anyone." Otherwise you'd see more than zero use in getting rid of it.

B. Everyone (by which I mean, power nerds) loves running linux on all kinds of stuff, so what's wrong with running linux on old or embedded systems? Seriously, if you have nothing to contribute besides insults then don't even comment. You're selling keystrokes for hatred, and that's a crappy waste of everyone's time.

C. No, most distros don't run on a 486 anymore, at least not without a hell of a lot of customization. Many are compiled with optimizations so they don't run natively on anything below a PII or so. Also, most require a lot of work arounds to run on anything under 256 or 192 MB of RAM, so "runs on a 486" vs "runs on a 486 with an amount of memory that a 486 would have" becomes a concern.

Yes, exactly, so again, why in the world would you trust something important to a 'free' service that has zero contractual obligation to you?

Something important? Who said something about something important? When you say 'important' or 'all its eggs in one basket' again a notion of data loss sneaks in. I tried to explain already, that this is the least concern. And if it is really important in terms of valuable trade secrets a service like GitHub, regardless if free or with a paid plan, is out of the question anyways. Services like GitHub are convenient, if they are reliable. An example use case? For instance to fulfill GPL or LGPL obligations. There are plenty of non-profit projects, some quite large, which are required to release source code, because they build upon the GPL software. I have a such a project on Gitorious. It is a hobby project. I don't make money with it. I am happy to share the code. Open source projects helped me tremendously to improve my coding skills. If I can give back to the open source community, I gladly do so. But I certainly don't want to pay for this privilege.

For uses like that you don't need "a legal leg to stand on". And: "don't rely on the thing". If you mean with "rely" something like a guaranteed availability, you are right. But I doubt anyone does this. Even GamerGate apparently was able to move their project in a very short time to Gitorious. Does not sound like they put all their eggs in one basket and everything was lost when GitHub closed their gates for them.

So, for the users of the free service, stunts like that are only inconvenient. They may lose a backup. They might to have to change their websites. READMEs in downloaded code might suddenly point to dead repositories. There will be support requests of users, who are not experienced enough to switch from one git repo to another. Nothing of this is really a disaster. It is mostly annoying.

The question is, what is it for GitHub? Why do you think they offer the free service? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Hardly. So, how do they make money with it? Could it be that they speculate that groups, which are used to use free GitHub hosting, might change someday to a paid plan? That maybe someone who had a good experience with free GitHub might propose to use GitHub when his company evaluates possible hosting solutions?
This certainly will not happen when someone got burned by purely political decisions like in this GamerGate case. Maybe they have shot themselves in the foot with it. And to be honest... I really hope so.

Yes, exactly, so again, why in the world would you trust something important to a 'free' service that has zero contractual obligation to you? I hope everyone is over the silly concept that a web site ToS means more than a plate containing a bean.

I use GitHub so rarely (yes I have an account) that I didn't even realize they had paid plans. At least then you'd have a legal leg to stand on. But as with any business, if you think they're bad then by all means move on. What is a "larger team" doing putting all its eggs in the good graces of someone else's free basket? It's unwise. Sure, use it as a backup methodology if you like (some people treat GMail / GApps that way) but don't rely on the thing.

Good one! Was sort of thinking that myself. OK grandpa, lemme guess: PDP-11, compuserve, 486, Usenet, get offa my lawn! :)

I think we've worked our way through most of the 'my first' suggestions though, so onto bigger and better.

This is a good point, but I'd like to point out the GamerGate repository was "disabled", not deleted. I don't know exactly what that means, but I suspect it wasn't deleted altogether. I imagine when we finally get past the whole, "Gamer Gate is a hate movement" thing they could just reactivate the repository. Of couse by then it'll probably be pointless.

What's to say they wouldn't remove a repo even if it was being paid for?

See, that's the whole problem that companies that use GitHub are facing now. Due to this incident, there's uncertainty about how safe their code and other assets stored in GitHub truly are.

And if a company does go and set up their own git servers somewhere, what's the point in continuing to use and pay GitHub? The whole point of using GitHub is that they're supposed to provide and maintain the infrastructure. But if there's this risk of deletion forever looming over GitHub users, and these backup git servers are already in place, a company might as well just get rid of GitHub and use their own servers.

I disagree, I see pipedot as a place for us to not only read news, but to discuss it and share ideas. You might not like what others have to say, but when we start censoring some where do we draw the line. What if, just as example, Bryan is pro Gamer Gate and he doesn't like you bad mouthing it? Should you be banned? I don't think so. It comes down to what constitutes as "wrong" and who makes that decision. It shouldn't just be arbitrarily left up to an individual.

Gamer Gate isn't a hate campaign BTW, censorship of people talking about it is part of the reason it exists. Problem being the game media has the platform to say what they want and gamers are already an easy target to demonized. 4Chan, Reddit, all Game media forms pretty much banned and censor discussion of it. So there's no way to spread the message that the movement isn't actually harassing the people the media says it is. The Escapist was allowing discussion, after they updated their code of ethics because of the movement, but they were DDoS and had to drop the form. Twitter and Facebook are the only place now where people can talk and organize.

I submitted some incoherent rambling with lots of links to various things to Soylent and it was rejected... probably because I'm a terrible writer, I don't think they're trying to censor it.

The break down is there's a huge amount of positive along with the negatives going on and a lot of tangential things happening. Game media declared gamers dead. Gamers came together, conservatives, liberals, black, white, male, female, everything in between. Women and minorities formed #NotYourShield to stand up for cis-white-male gamers that were being demonized in the press. The Fine Young Capitalists raised $20,000 to get women into game development with Gamer Gates help. Wikipedia is having a huge editor war over the "Gamer Gate Controversy" page, and it's getting uglier by the day because most of the sources wiki uses are bias and basically reporting on and parroting each others bias articles. Anita Sarkeesian allegedly faked threats to herself to get in on the publicity, otherwise I have no idea why she keeps getting brought up as being harassed, She has nothing to do with anything, but 4Chan practically ripped itself apart when M00t banned discussion during the XOXO conference where he attended a talk by Anita Sarkeesian (can talk about CP and rape, not Gamer Gate). Julian Assange was on reddit and someone was shadow banned right in front of him for asking a question related to censorship of #GamerGate. Kickstarter Mighty Number 9 project's community manager banned people from their forums after they pledged hundreds of dollars for the project. People started a charge back campaign, and are actually getting money back. Several media sites revisited their code of ethics, only the Escapist to my knowledge made and significant changes. 8Chan was formed. Several new game sites sprung to life. Steam updated it's ToS so Curations (I think that's what they're called) have to disclose any monetary/personal connections. Intel pulled ads from Gamasutra. Linux dev threw a fit over it and refuses to update Linux kernel for Intel fixes. Git disabled the Gamer Gate repo.

Despite all that's already been accomplished people still think it's a hate campaign against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian.

The article was about the fact that a large group of people trying to make a difference were using a public service, not violating ToS, and with a single tweet from someone opposing the group had the repository shut down. It has significant impact on software developers who use the service to host code for any number of projects that could be susceptible to a tweet from opposition or competition.

Getting the data back isn't the point and even less the problem. GitHub comes from 'git', which is a a distributed revision control and source code management system. So if you are a developer and use git, chances are high, that you have the complete source tree on your local machine anyways. But for a single developer using GitHub is almost a bit overkill. Its real value comes as central repository for developer teams. Especially in self organized open source teams. Being forced to move somewhere else can cost money, e.g. if a website has to be adjusted to point to the new repository. I might break 3rd party links, which makes documents harder to find. The larger the team, the higher the logistic efforts till normal work can continue as usual.

Definitely not a non issue.

I apologize for the summary, It was tough for me to balance. I'm pro-Gamer Gate, but I didn't want this to be "about" Gamer Gate. It's tough to separate "Github developer deletes repository of alleged harassment campaign" without going on a huge rant bringing my personal Gamer Gate views into it. I tried to just give the relevant information and evidence that essentially a developer received a tweet and deleted a repo and tried to demonstrate he did this based on his personal agenda rather than based on any real facts that the repo supported a harassment campaign.

The fact that Git developers have and abuse that power is the issue here. I work on a MAJOR government project that's distributed all across the country, open for public use and development, with hundreds of of people working on it. I believe someone pays for it, I'm a just code monkey on the project so I don't know for sure. What's not to say that someone in the private sector doesn't like the competition from a free alternative and wants their for profit project to be the only one or have an edge. They tweet a dev at Github and say my project is a harassment campaign related to Gamer Gate and, without even looking at the contents of the project, Git just deletes it?

It's something we need to be conscious of and prepared for through methods like what you've mentioned and/or by using another central server, maybe setting up our own. It's important in the professional software development space.

pipdedot is a privately funded public discussion website. It is totally withing the rights of the maintainer to ban the user kwerle, even though he did not [do] anything wrong, did not violate pipedot's TOS in any way. But... the owners here have any right to be biased. If they want you gone, they can ban you on a whim. If this happens.... News at 12?

I guess 'wrong' is in the eyes of the beholder. The notion is that everyone thinks they're in the right.

I think that it is beyond the scope of any TOS to define everything that could be interpreted as 'wrong'. At least I hope so, because I never read 'em, anyway.

But here is my direct response in brief: I hope that pipedot bans users that it feels have done wrong. I don't come here to read ads, hateful crap from assholes, sort through base64 binary encoded warez, or any number of other things. I come here to read geek news. So, yeah, ban 'em. Or me.

Finally - WTF was the original article about?

I am a developer. I use github. So I know that if they were to pull my public repos without warning that I could petition them to get the data back and they would be totally reasonable about it. I know that because I have actually come very close to having that discussion with them for a private repo that was unexpectedly nuked (my fault).

What's more, I know that my local git repo had everything that got nuked, so it was a non issue.

I think that covers it.

This was exactly the point I was making. I do use Github, but if they can just disable my repos without any kind of process or warning. I think I'm better served to move to one of a half dozen other choices. I do support #GamerGate, Github is within their rights to do this, but I feel what's going on with #GamerGate shouldn't be being brought into the professional space. I.E. Linux and Git devs throwing hissy fits because they don't like Intel pulling ads from Gamasutra. Again, IMHO, that has less to do with #GamerGate and more to do with the editor at large, Leigh Alexander, being a raciest, sexist, douche that has no idea who her audience is or how to talk to them. Intel doesn't want to associate with that.

In the long run #GamerGate is not going to win, there is no winning in this situation, but they will come out on top. Mainly because the journalist are arrogant elitist who don't know when to shut their traps.

Where did I or anyone else here say that GitHub or pipedot owes me/us anything? I thought I made clear that both sites would be totally in the right to ban whomever for whatsoever reason they want. And who complains that a free lunch ends? I doubt that anyone would have said anything, if GitHub would have announced: Sorry guys, our business model is not profitable enough, therefore we close our services in a week from now. Please, get all the stuff you need from our servers before that date. This is not what happened. They closed a project, which did not in any way violate their TOS. They did it for purely political reasons. I want to stress it again: Totally within their rights to do. But doing it this way and for the given reason clearly makes it news. Especially on an IT site like pipedot. Sites like GitHub partly live from the trust of their users. May I quote another A.C.:

We need to know which solutions we can trust with our data, and which we cannot.

If a public repo can be removed in such a manner, apparently without any sort of due process, then it could very well happen to a private one.

Exactly. But not only that. Some of us, me inclusive, also have our political views. And also rightfully so. With its actions GitHub needlessly chose a side and now has to live with the consequences. In my personal view GitHub chose the wrong side. You might not believe me, but: No hard feelings about that, it really is GitHub's decision to make. However, no hard feelings does not mean that I want to support them further in any way. Fortunately not much of a decision for me to make, I have a GitHub account, because I once helped in a project, which is hosted there, but I have no project of my own on GitHub. If I had, I would now migrate to Gitorious. And this would be my decision. An informed decision I can only make because it is here and on other sites discussed and not just waved away as:

So... "free service refuses service to someone." News at 11?

Well yeah, exactly, business as usual. Neither site owes you anything, period. I really, really don't see your point. These aren't public trusts or government services. They're little experiments that happened to have let you come in and play for a while. How could anyone NOT know that? How can you complain when the free lunch ends?

Thanks, but still not seeing it. Going to the trouble of putting up a kiosk means that sub 100 MB or sub 1 GB storage is not a problem. Ditto for older hardware. Can't most distros still get running on a 486 or so?

I get that it's an interesting exercise, and I hate bloat more than most anyone, but I'm still not quite seeing the real world appeal. I guess embedded devices maybe, or something to contribute to wearables?

Then for goodness sake pay for it! Why in all the world would even the tiniest, poorest organization rely on the good graces of ANY "free" service to do ANYTHING important?

And YES that includes Gmail!

If you want some assurance your project will actually be there tomorrow, pay under $5 per month for hosting and back it up, or distribute it among your members as Git had intended.

I appreciate the reactions here, but come on. There are a LOT of more important and serious topics on Pipedot that aren't getting this kind of attention. And yeah I too had trouble parsing the summary.

This is very important news for anyone and everyone in the software industry. That includes a lot of the readers here at Pipedot.

Maybe you've never done software development. If you haven't, you may not realize just how important source code, asset, and documentation management is. Well, it's very important.

GitHub claims to provide a solution to these sorts of problems. But one of the most critical features of any such solution is the safety of the data involved. It can't just disappear overnight, whether by accident, by incident, or by manual deletion by an employee of the company tasked with storing the data.

We need to know which solutions we can trust with our data, and which we cannot.

If a public repo can be removed in such a manner, apparently without any sort of due process, then it could very well happen to a private one.

Organizations just can't take that kind of a risk with critical data, or with systems that are important to their everyday software development practices.

We need to know when our critical data may be lost without warning. This incident is thus something we need to know about.

It's moved to gitorious

https://gitorious.org/gamergate/gamergate

GitHub was hosting a public repo that they didn't want to host, so they nuked it. So... "free service refuses service to someone." News at 11?

You are totally right. GitHub is a private company and can host whatever it wants. GitHub can be biased. GitHub can play it save. GitHub can pamper PC. GitHub can pull whatever it wants. TOS violation or not. But just wave this away with "News at 11"?

pipdedot is a privately funded public discussion website. It is totally withing the rights of the maintainer to ban the user kwerle, even though he did not anything wrong, did not violate pipedot's TOS in any way. But... the owners here have any right to be biased. If they want you gone, they can ban you on a whim. If this happens.... News at 12?

It would be karmic to vote for "Netcom" then... They got swallowed by Mindspring, before they were in-turn swallowed by Earthlink.

Last night (October 3) Github developer Jake Boxer disabled the GamerGate github repository containing documents for "Operation Disrespectful Nod". Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago. Here's a link to an image of the removal request for if/when the original tweet is eventually removed.

What?

OK, there is someone named Jake. There was a github repo. There were documents? There is something called "Operation Disrespectful Nod"?

"Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago." is not a sentence. Or at least is a horrible one. But specifically:

documents for a letter writing campaign (what does that mean?)
to advertisers (so - letters to advertisers?)
for the publishers of game media articles (so... uh... game mags and/or review websites?)
declaring gamers dead (nope - you lost me. are all gamers dead? I'm not dead, so I don't think that's what you mean.)
just over a month ago. (uh... something happened just over a month ago. No link. Did gamers die? Or was the repo deleted? Or was that when the repo was created? Huh?)

After clicking a few links, none of this is much clearer - except there is lots of drama. Most of it sounds mostly imagined.

GitHub was hosting a public repo that they didn't want to host, so they nuked it. So... "free service refuses service to someone." News at 11?

What's wrong with animation?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/10/05/0125205/the-era-of-saturday-morning-cartoons-is-dead
Not geeky enough?

Towards 100% Li batteries. HOoooooooooooooooo

That is creepy, and disgusting.

I see that sort of "we're promoting inclusivity" argument a lot, and somehow it always involves excluding some particular group of people, often ones who dare to voice their own opinion.

Ah yes. As usual: All animals are equal.. erm... wrong.... All hate campaigns are equal, but some hate campaigns are more equal than others.

This was just posted as a response to inquirers about why the #GamerGate repo was disabled

So they're denouncing a consumer boycott as a hate campaign, it's totally not about it being something they disagre with. Nothing to see here move along.

I agree with that, there are lots of other central servers and it's easy enough to migrate, which is what #GamerGate did. Unfortunately I can't remember the site name. It is still a really crappy deal that one tweet to Jake was all it took to disable the repo with no warning or research involved.

My biggest concern is this 'consumer revolt' shouldn't be bleeding over into a professional space. Like with Matthew Garrett pitching a hissy fit, refusing to update the Linux kernel for Intel fixes (admittedly it's unpaid volunteer work so his choice) and acting like a child because he doesn't agree with Intel pulling ads from Gamasutra. I'm positive Intel isn't supporting #GamerGate, it's much more likely they don't want their product being associated with Leigh Alexander's behaviour (Editor at large of Gamasutra). Outside the "Gamers are over" article she wrote, she's excessively abusive, racists and sexist on twitter. That's what Intel doesn't want to be associated with. But "how dare they pull their ads! Muh soggy knees!!"

"¦ or Library of Congresses?

One of the major goals of the "git" source code management system was to be distributed. Each git repository has the full data set, can stand alone, and can act as the full SCM system by itself. This is in stark opposition of traditional SCMs, like CVS and Subversion, where one central server controls the code base. GitHub is a central server that, for the most part, tries to replicate the old ways with the new tools.

That being said, it's the new "cool" project hosting site and lots of people use it. I find it easy enough to push my own git repository out to it every once in a while - even if I don't see it as the "master" repository.

Apparently members from #GamerGate who were e-mailing Github support are alegedly getting doxxed. One user posted an open letter regarding information on him being gathered http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sce3fa

I hope that other GitHub employees take offense to this action, and publicly decry it.

Only if they have a death wish. Dangerous to publicly act against the interests of scientologists, feminists, islamists... more or less against all *ists.

I hope that other GitHub employees take offense to this action, and publicly decry it.

This incident reflects very badly on GitHub and anyone else associated with them, in my opinion.

I never trusted GitHub enough to store anything of mine there, even just my hobbyist code.

Then there was that incident with their executives and their wives and all that crap.

Now there's this unjustifiable incident.

As far as I'm concerned, they have no credibility left. I never really could take them seriously before, but now I doubt I'll ever be able to.

Maybe - but imagine an internet kiosk that boots from a read-only flash card, and runs from memory. You get a clean system with every boot, and if that gets you a reasonably good-looking desktop and an up-to-date version of Firefox, you've met the needs of 90% of your clients. Imagine a kiosk in a hotel lobby, for example.

Imagine a call center or database entry place where you can re-purpose some dirt-cheap, low-spec hardware. That's useful.

For me, on a more philosophical level, this is also interesting because it shows it can be done. The world would be a different place if developers were forced to be miserly with resources and think carefully about their constraints. Give everyone a new macbook with 5G of RAM and a top-speed hard drive, and you get akonadi/nepomuk (barf).

This isn't about hard drive space. The impressive thing is that it runs completely in RAM. I can appreciate the maintainer(s) effort in creating a usable distro with that small of a footprint. Great work!

A system that fits in less than 128MB could be very interesting practically, as it would fit entirely within the eDRAM cache on certain Haswell CPUs.

Of course the 30MB is compressed data, which gets decompressed to RAM; the 256MB figure is more relevant, but still a factor of two high. But it's very conceivable that that some upcoming processor could keep this whole distro in cache, which should eke amazing responsiveness from even firefox.

I am software developer. I develop mostly under Linux. I usually compile my own development tools. Compiler, IDE, non-standard libs. This is not always necessary, sometimes even overkill, but at least this way I know how the stuff is compiled and what the dependencies are. And I rarely get nasty surprises when I do an update/upgrade. So my work stuff is somewhat insulated from the rest of the Linux. Apart from developing stuff I do almost everything with Linux (Debian). I surf, watch movies, print. Linux is my main system. And it works. No problems at all. So I don't really care what kind of init system is used. Maybe I would think different, if I develop for Linux itself. Maybe systemd has problems, which really bite developers, who have to work with it directly or indirectly. However, when I see the noise because of systemd... are there really that many developers, which work on that level? I have the feeling something might be a bit blown out of proportion.

Firefox's market share has gone from the mid-30% to somewhere around 10%. So where exactly did that 20% go? You claim it isn't to Chrome, but it mostly is.

Both IE and Firefox have lost users to Chrome. But IE is clearly making a comeback. It's getting better, while Firefox is getting worse.

That's the difference between a dying project and a thriving project: a dying project is heading in the wrong direction, while a thriving one is improving.

Debian is heading in a very bad direction with the adoption of systemd. That's why it's a dying project. Like GNOME and Firefox, it's collectively making bad decisions that are ruining the user experience, and driving users away.

"Dying" doesn't mean "dead", either. Debian could very well come back, if they're smart and ditch systemd now, before the community is too fragmented.

And FreeBSD was never dying. The whole idea behind those comments at /. was that they flew in the face of reality, and that's what makes them amusing. FreeBSD has always been a thriving project.

We tried to discuss technology. But people like you modded down our comments, preventing that from continuing.

Mine was mindspring which was eventually swallowed by earthlink. Of course I am not counting my Ga Tech school email account since I rarely used it.

Why EXACTLY is that impressive?

It's impressive because it is a challenging feat.

Riding a unicycle across a tightrope isn't exactly a viable mode of transportation... But it's still impressive.

stripping an OS down that small to brag about seems not only stupid but a serious waste of time

I don't see anything stupid about it, off-hand. Maybe it's lacking some features, but that remains to be seen.

Basically anybody making their own Linux distro should similarly be accused of wasting their time. It's just so much quicker to use whatever else is already out there. Most of those open source developers over the years have wasted profound amounts of their time. Your comment, similarly, a waste of time.

USING (rather than building) a tiny distro, meanwhile, doesn't require wasting any of your time. In fact it's guaranteed to save you at least a little bit of time. And on an ongoing basis, the smaller it is, the faster it'll load and run, saving small amounts of time, multiplied by however many users the system has, and multiplied by however many times they launch each application or reboot.

Why EXACTLY is that impressive? Are you dumpster diving hardware from 1993? Even the cheapest POS tower I have in the corner of the shop so I have something at every price point including below $100 has a 160GB HDD in it so frankly stripping an OS down that small to brag about seems not only stupid but a serious waste of time,especially when its supposed to be a desktop as opposed to an embedded platform.

I think we could save some time with all these recent "My First _______" polls, and just have one that directly asks readers "How Old Are You?" and be done with it...

Then you'd be able to do a pretty good job estimating what their first email address, first gaming system, first computer system, etc., was very likely to have been.