Are you telling me I could not use a compiler on Windows. Or write device drivers on windows? Granted, I have to download or maybe purchase the compiler for Windows, but there is really no big difference on the fundamental concepts. There are many differences in the details.

E.g., on Windows you don't fork a process. This prevents you from doing some multi-processing things in Windows as easily as the natural way under Unix. But if you are learning the fundamentals, you can happily learn what you are doing with either environment. You can still use multiple processes on Windows, you just don't can't inherit the parent process state so it is more complicated. Way back when, fork/exec was unnecessary overhead in Unix since most of the time all you wanted to do was spawn an unrelated subprocess. Unix fixed this extra overhead long ago, but Windows never added fork to its API -- so Advantage Unix. Potentially a big advantage.

There are also built-in WIndows APIs that have no equivalent on the Unix. -- Advantage Windows.

Price, freedom, source-code, etc. -- Linux

Apps -- Maybe Window, maybe Linux depends which apps aee important to you.

Games -- Windows

In fact, you are better off learning both environments even if you have a strong preference for one of them. It opens your mind to different ways of thinking.

Should be clear, I know facebook is using batteries for a short time to serve as the power till the diesel kicks on. But how can you beat a flywheel in-line with the diesel.

Given then Facebook should have acres of servers, why are their data centers not using a flywheel / diesel combo for power backup.

If you only have a couple of racks of servers, batteries make sense, but they should have thousands and you need something like a generator if your power can be longer than your battery will last. Its not like this is a new and unproven technology.

Is there really any good reason to consider batteries for a large data center?

You people with you unreasoning hatred of Bob. I personally have benefited from Bob. Was is a meeting with some MS guys sponsoring a segment. The room was overcrowded and getting too hot fast. The MS guys has brought along some freebie copies of Bob and volunteered the use of Bob to prop the doors open to help cool the room.

There was much applause. Problem with Bob was that it was frequently misused. Made a perfectly good doorstop.

Exposing yourself to mono is fun.

Coming down with mono, not so fun.

The republicans were with minor exceptions out of power in congress since FDR. Finally, they got the power that they desired. Within 2 elections, they proved themselves to be no less venal than the democrats.

I helped to vote them in to power. I was disgusted by the result.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men -- Lord Acton

Cost is one factor, a 50kWh battery is about over 25,000 USD -- about $500 per kWh for lithium ion car batteries. Projected cost by 2025 is about $160 per kWh, so only $8,000 in in 2025

It does not last a few days of intensive use either. Avg US household use is in 2012 was 10,837 kWh per year, or about 29.7 hWh per day, so 50kWh is less than 2 days..

And here is article claiming they installed Ubuntu. A couple of pictures.

The real question is drivers -- the article is pretty short on any real info on driver compatibility.

Sure, no that Ebola is in the news everyone wants more Ebola money. Obama was proposed budget cuts in the same budget in prior years too. I'm sure you can find Republicans that did & will do the same thing.

In this case I would half expect that Republicans would increase Ebola funding because it proves bi-partisanship, etc. I can't imagine Obama vetoing this either.

Yeah, it's all Dick Chaney's fault. Oh wait, it says in the article that Dick Cheney was largely responsible for the large funding increase for treatment of Ebola, etc.

Now the Bloomberg article clearly and accurately points out that Cheney did this to combat potential terrorism threats. But hey, no reason not to blame Republicans for being pro-death, anti-vaccine, etc. just because you have no idea about the actual funding details in this case.

Like most people, Dick Cheney has some things to like, some things to dislike. At least Cheney shot an attorney in the face.

Of couse, near fool-proof was only meant in terms of legitimate voter. Outright voter fraud via ballot stuffing or illegal voters (non-residents, felons, etc.) or other external factors cannot be solved by careful handling of real ballots.

We use mark sense locally. Voters feed their own ballots into the tabulating machine. It looks for pretty much all the detectable marking errors and kicks it back to the voter immediately. in the event of a detectable problem. Ballots can also be hand-counted.of course

There is no perfect system, but what we use is about as close to foolproof as possible.

Personally I have never noticed much difference in the nature of the scandals based on party. I just picked an article comparing 8 Rep. & 8 Dem. scandals that were selected for a different criteria. These are scandals you've probably heard of before.

6 Rep. scandals were drugs / sex
2 Dem. scandals were drugs / sex

Only 1 of the 16 was declared more or less as innocent (overzealous prosecution). It was Ted Stevens (R) -- a non drugs/sex scandal.

There may be a bias for scandal selection in that some Dem. don't considered family values important whereas some Rep. are preachy on same, so a Rep. sharing quality personal time with an aide or smoking some dope is inherently more scandalous than a Dem. doing the same because hypocrisy sells news.

But I have noticed a big difference in the reporting of the scandals. If the bum is Republican, the new story will almost certainly mention this, if the bum is a Democrat they news story usually does not consider party affiliation worth mentioning. In fact, this bias was why I selected the article that considered the coverage of the 16 scandals and the coverage in the press. This articles was the only article on the first page of Google results for "difference between republican and democratic scandals" that obviously related to news reporting. News busters is hardly top-notch unbiased journalism, but I expected that they handled basic facts correctly -- In an article like theirs, they probably did not care about the sex v. money difference in the scandals.

I've played this games for years, see a scandal, no party affiliation mentioned. Bet Democrat. Look up the answer and collect on the bet. It's even more reliable than betting against the Cubs.

They forgot to tell Chicago that you could not win an election by fraud. I know heritage.org is right-leaning, but the article is thorough and heavily footnoted documenting one of the largest voter fraud prosecutions ever conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

So both the R's & D's do it, yeah! We already knew both parties were pretty slimy.

The state does have a legitimate interest in tracking whether your vote -- I.e., have not voted for x years, lose your registered status.I think x is 8 in my state. I know that they also track which party you vote for in the primaries. And they furnish all of this info with the R's and D's, don't know who else can get it.

I would never be intimidated by one of these letters, but I can see how that others would consider it intimidating. Lots of things are more worrisome than this. Thuggery committed by cops, DA's, IRS, EPA, TSA, FDA, NSA, and a host of others bothers me a lot more. Abuse of power by politicians of every stripe is very concerning.