Vietnam has a high standard of education. Overseas students from Vietnam definitely show up at Australian universities with better high school education than the locally educated kids. In my experience, the USSR delivered some highly educated people as well.

It's hardly fair to ignore external factors that affect quality of life in Vietnam. They had the shit bombed out of them by the US and a lot of farmland destroyed with Agent Orange. Then they had the drain on their economy of cleaning up Cambodia in the wake of Pol Pot. Communism is a factor, but hardly the only one.

There are two governments that claim to be the legitimate government of all of China: one located on the mainland, and one located in Taiwan. Simple as that. There's a similar situation in Korea, where two governments claim to be the legitimate government of all of Korea. Do you call them North/South Korea, or do you make a point of saying DPKR/RoK? Do you call Taiwan RoC for that matter?

It isn't practical. Speakers can handle far more of a reasonable signal than a horribly clipped almost square wave. While a "normal" audio signal will be converted to transducer movement, a square wave will end up being dissipated primarily as heat in the driver coil. Speakers can handle normal overload far better than they can handle severe clipping. It's easier to destroy a 500W speaker with a 30W amp driven to clipping than with a 1000W amp driven to make the peaks push your threshold of pain.

Nah, it could actually increase ratings. People love to have something to be righteously indignant about. They'll watch him just so they can bitch about him.

How is he unpredictable if he's known to jump categories after knocking off the two hardest questions? Sounds like a storm in a teacup - dumbasses pissed off because the guy isn't playing how they would.

Yeah, but they have a patent on something that prevents Postgres implementing certain concurrency features.

Well, two reasons. Firstly, basement-dwelling nerds have far more experience with their own equipment than anything else, so they're far more confident designing dicks in CAD than anything from the other side. Secondly, dicks are supposed to be hard when performing, while boobs are supposed to be soft, meaning current 3D printing technology is far more suited to making functional dicks.

System Z is like that - you have hardware on-site but you pay ongoing fees for resources you use. You can also get paid rent for allowing IBM to farm out batch processing jobs to your hardware using capacity that you aren't using.

In a situation where you have that many disks and fully redundant storage, the lower purchase cost may win out over better reliability in terms of total cost to the business. It's a very different equation if you aren't working in the same parameters. No-one is saying that our purchase decisions should be the same as theirs - they are just being kind enough to show stats over thousands of drives, which most of us couldn't afford to gather, so we can use that in making our own decisions.

This is similar to Google running servers above recommended temperature and wearing the cost of higher failure rate because it's cheaper than running cooling to keep the servers cooler and more reliable. The cost in convenience of doing the same with your desktop or gaming rig probably isn't worthwhile when you're going to have it in a room that has to be comfortable for humans anyway. But it's still nice to see Google's stats on reliability vs temperature, and hear how it influences their decisions. Nerds are supposed to love this shit.

And you sir are way too shovinistic.. do you also have problems with jews and everything that is not your kind?

The word you're looking for is "xenophobic". Also, you should learn to spell "chauvinistic" in case it actually is the word you need at some point.

Everybody has something to hide...

...except for me and my monkey! :)

Yeah, but the thing is Jesus did like the company of whores - he was criticised by the religious elite of the day for associating with "tax collectors and sinners". That and the "he who has no sin cast the first stone" thing...

It's not a anything. There's a number of different distros, and when you install one you can generally choose the components you want and leave out the ones you don't.

There's still a minimum set of components you'll need to build a POS system, and if they're attacking your POS system they'll target one of them. Same applies to Windows anyway - you can strip Windows Embedded down pretty effectively, as they do to make the setup that Xbox games run.

What? They were doing a pretty good job of pushing you to their AMD servers by making the price/performance ratio of the SPARC gear shit for years.

I can tell you that a multipurpose platform is not appropriate for a specialized task.

So how does Linux magically help? It's a "multi-purpose platform" if I ever saw one - trying to get into everything from embedded devices to routers to smartphones to web servers to desktops.