I'm going to sit here and speculate on why. First of all, I taught myself C at 11 years old, and I'm 25 now. In the past 14 years, I've obtained a pretty good idea of what programming is, and of course spent plenty of time messing around with and administrating my own systems. I'm sure this isn't an unusual story to hear on slashdot, I'm sure many of you made a similar journey. But here's the problem, after talking with friends who had taught themselves how to program and do it well, and had gone through schooling for that subject, I realized there weren't heaps of new things to learn. Almost all of the schooling would be rehashing things I already knew.

So where am I going with that? Programming is a relatively easy subject to pick up on your own. You can just start messing around and get immediate results. You don't need a huge buildup of theory before you can start applying the stuff, either. If I can start coding in C at 11, it isn't that hard. And I'm definitely not one of those people who had a PhD by the time he was 14 either. So this doesn't really surprise me at all, the degree has very little practical value to someone who is already confident in their abilities with these kinds of things.

It was actually because of this that I chose my major to be Electronic Engineering instead(still working on it). The material is more challenging to me, and most of it isn't stuff that I've done already. It's not as easy to learn on my own (though it could be done. I even made a list of textbooks used in the 4-year school I want to attend in case I decided I wanted to go that route). I'm not sure how everyone else here feels about it, but I think programming is easy shit. Using computers is relatively easy shit. Just because you don't have to spend as much time making that foundation, I think it's a lot easier to get away without getting a degree in it. Maybe this is due entirely to the fact that it's easier to self-teach, rather than it being an easy subject in and of itself. I know many of you wouldn't agree with the latter statement. Once you know it, why have someone try to reteach you?

Blue... No, Yell-AUUGH

Well, obviously you're paying for all those extra wheels.

Well to be fair, I wasn't comparing Debian to RH. Though, when I last used RedHat, that was back when 9.0 came out (either 8 or 9 was my first distro back in the day when it at least seemed "cool" for the desktop), I would say that I much prefer Debian's package management.

But you raise a fair point, I had forgotten about the fact that RH has that whole enterprise loonicks thing going on. After looking up what "FAI" is, I can see how having something like that working would be pretty dandy, and practically essential for hundreds if not thousands of servers in a datacenter. Package management I suppose will play less of a role if you aren't constantly changing things like I might do on my personal desktop, but like I said, I've never run a high volume server.

Rather, the intent of my post was to say "Why the hell can't they ditch this shit for free stuff? Either way it's going to cost them money, but maybe open-source(which is usually free-as-in-beer) software could help mitigate that in the future."

Linux? Debian, maybe? Though I'm not sure what the preferred 'server' distro would be... Or maybe unix, perhaps FreeBSD? I know that's wildly popular as a server OS, but I think Debian is much easier to use than any unix variant I've yet tried. There's plenty to choose from. I guess the question would be how the costs to change over compare to the costs to just keep Windows Server.

Forgive me, as I've never run a high volume server before. Just small ones that I've not used far beyond basic personal stuff.

So that's where Armus is living in the 21st century? If we go to pluto, maybe we could kill him and save Natasha Yar from an early death!

Well, it's true that I don't play a lot of games these days. I spend a lot more time pursuing my goals in life, so I don't have hours and hours to just sit down and immerse myself in all sorts of high end games. I tend to stick to a few that I like and play them from time to time, and DX 11.2 isn't required by any of them, or even the new title(s) that I'm interested in which are still WIP.

Other than that, I spend the vast majority of my time on Linux with KDE 4. Even moreso with Minecraft working on multiple platforms due to Java. The only new title I'm currently interested in is Planetary Annihilation, which if I recall correctly, will support a Linux port. So I guess my care-o-meter about this announcement is somewhere around zero.

I will say this, though. The user interface style that was developed, with a task bar and normal start-menu (not this metro start screen crap) was developed and refined over a period of 20+ years or so now. It's available across many operating systems and kernels. It's there because it works rather well. If you ask me, this touch-centric crap that Microsoft is pushing isn't much good beyond tablets and phones, where your primary mode of interface is your finger on a screen.

So, tablets and phones came along and a new interface style was designed that worked better with almost-exclusively touch-screen interface devices... Then Microsoft decided that *everything* should use this interface. I'm not interested in relearning how to use my Desktop's or Laptop's interfaces. Screw Windows 8. If I found a part of my computer's user interface to be highly inefficient, requiring a redesign to solve the problem, I'd be very aware of it. I hate wasting time. But the stuff before Metro in most cases doesn't give me that impression. Metro does.

So there's my possibly subjective rant. But hey, the article asked.

I find it interesting that the only option that isn't something I find myself directly using is a nuclear bomb, and that it isn't even something I'd want to uninvent. Almost seems like they wanted me to pick it. Maybe traction control or anti-lock brakes. Now those piss me off.

Anonymous does a pretty good job of that themselves, if you ask me.

I use the Nature's Way Sublingual Melatonin in the 2.5mg potency. You can order it on Amazon, if you prefer. They also come in other forms where you just swallow them, but then you tend to have to take them a few hours before you go to bed, whereas you can take the lozenge closer or at the time you intend to go to sleep.

Disclaimer: I'm no doctor of course, but I'm told it's perfectly safe. I actually know of 3 people other than myself that use it without issues. I've also heard that if you take much more than 2 mg it can lessen the effect, but I've had no issues with the 2.5 mg lozenges.

Interesting tidbit: I just did the math. I used to sleep for 9.5-10 hours, and then was awake for 16. That would make my sleep cycle around 25.5-26 hours.

I actually have a circadian rhythm disorder myself. Between 2005 and 2010 my sleep 'schedule' would go around the clock fully over a period of every 1-2 weeks. So, part of the time I was up during only the night, sometimes in between, sometimes during normal parts of the day. I have a greater than 24-hour sleep cycle naturally it would seem. However, I've been maintaining a pretty normal schedule for 1.5 years now. I started using sublingual 2.5mg melatonin lozenges after my sister told me about them. It totally did the trick in my case.

Of course, more relevant to the article, there are lamps you can also buy for bright light therapy. I actually just got myself one about 11 days ago. It can take up to a few weeks to have an effect, and I think I've finally started to feel a measurable effect over the past 3 days, but I'll see how it goes before I make a final determination. According to what I've read, it can help with circadian rhythm disorders, but I personally bought it for the antidepressant effect. Perhaps I'll be able to switch over to using only the light, which would be pretty neat. But I wouldn't complain if I still had to use melatonin.

Having driven manual cars and motorcycles plenty myself, I can say that I don't find the need to use the clutch or change gears really that distracting at all. Sure, it's something else to do, but something I can do without thinking about it. On top of that, if you just want to stop in a manual and you're more concerned about avoiding an accident? You can still just hit the brake. The car will stop and stall, no big deal. It's a lot better than getting in an accident, and it probably won't do any real damage to your car. Trust me, I've stalled mine plenty when I first learned to drive a stick.

P.S. Good luck shifting a manual into reverse going at 70 MPH on the highway. Most cars, to my knowledge, don't have a synchro on the reverse gear.

My CHM 111 professor would get a kick out of this. He's always giving biologists a hard time, but he makes fun of geologists as well.

Also, I prefer iron(II) oxide personally.

No joke. My dad has Charter out at his business, and his modem died not too long ago, so he called them up and they came out and replaced it. This new modem had three different ethernet ports on it, and what the charter guy did was plug the router into the second, non-operative port (he was only paying for one connection anyway), and then plugged his desktop directly into the first port on this new modem. He also told my dad that he needed a "business router" and that's why the router no longer worked. Business router my foot, all he needed was someone with a brain larger than a peanut to come in and hook it up for him. I unplugged the computer, plugged it back into the router, then plugged the router into the first port of the new modem and all was well. It's just a cheap little d-link router but it works fine, he doesn't need anything more and never did.