The main benefit is that it runs faster. 64-bit pointers take up twice the space in caches, and especially L1 cache is very space-limited. Loading and storing them also takes twice the bandwidth to main memory.

So for code with lots of complex data types (as opposed to big arrays of floating point data), that still has to run fast, it makes sense. I imagine the Linux kernel developers No1 benchmark of compiling the kernel would run noticably faster with gcc in x32.

The downside is that you need a proper fully functional multi-arch system like is slowly getting adopted by Debian in order to handle multiple ABIs. And then you get into iffy things on if you want the faster /usr/bin/perl or one that can handle 6-gig lists efficiently...

Gernalized way? Not likely. But in this particular setting (electronic scrap), there is plenty of activity. I know these because they make the local news: http://www.boliden.com/Operations/Smelters/E-scrap-project/ - but there are several competitors to them too. Lots of copper and gold and other metals in electronics that is commercially recyclable given that someone sorts it out and throws the electronics in containers with just electronics.

We do, and we much prefer HTTP over FTP since we do clever caching and redirects for HTTP. See: http://ftp.acc.umu.se/about/index.html

We are talking to the GIMP folks to readjust their links.

And *nix in the form of, say, Oracle Solaris or IBM AIX is more restrictive than the GPL. Linux is just one branch of the unix family.

But that's very unlikely to happen in the next quarter. Probably not even for the next 3-5 years, by which time they'll be somewhere else and not give a shit.

So are ISBNs, in many parts of the world. I guess the US has left it to the free market to decide how much the should cost.

The turbo mode stuff together with the kernel and firmware all come from the same raspberrypi.org repository. Raspbian is really the Debian:y environment around this.

If you want to run Debian, you can do that too (at a performance penalty since you need to use the soft float version, armhf is targeted for a newer version of ARM than is in the Raspberry Pis). You still need the same non-free blobs to do anything graphical etc though.

Yes, it is called Raspbian, which is Debian with a recompile for the target and some installer tweaks and hooks for pulling in the necessary non-free stuff from raspberrypi.org which comes from the pi being a closed platform.

Xbian, RaspBMC, etc take Raspbian and then make a custom install based on a package presets and some scripts for automagic setup for those that think Debian is "too complicated". And apparently lots of drama.

You mean 2010? That's when Andre Geim got the Nobel prize in physics (for graphene), having previously gotten the Ig Nobel for levitating frogs.

It's what is in the official torrent. My torrent client says 3146.1 MB.

Over here: http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/misc/BlackMesa/

Mostly used to hosting linux distributions, but this looks like someone might care to download too. Go ahead and eat a few gigabit/s for us. :)

China's HEP institutes also are in both Atlas and CMS. These are global collaborations and anyone with a significant research interest would likely have joined one or the other by now.

Yup, I happily fork my CC number over to anything that reasonably legit. Of course, my bank is nice enough to create a unique CC number with a charge limit on my request, so there's only so much they can steal.

Well, you'd still need keys on your laptop to get to the server. So now you have two places where your keys can be stolen and used to login everywhere you trust your keys.

For the case where you actually do need direct communication between two servers you probably want to do agent forwarding instead of having more keys in your authorized_keys. Remember that every single entry there is a point of failure, and any one of them getting compromised means that your account is likely to get owned.

Now there are special cases where having more keys is useful, but most of the time they just open up more vectors for someone to steal them and break into other computers.

Of course, even then, they are better than passwords, at least if they have proper passphrases. Not too uncommon to see lots of passphrase-less keys in home directories on multi-user servers though.

It is an unfortunately common case that people copy/create private ssh keys on servers to login (or scp) from those to another remote host. These keys are of course compromised.