The original idea was to get more out of the extra hours of daylight. But that was suggested before the introduction of electric lighting.

These days it seems like mucking with numbers for no good reason.

Can Systemd be used to start one script that do all the actual starting etc, and just sit back and shut up?

Right now Sysv init can be used to do just that. Get started by the kernel, then fire up whatever process is listed at the requested runlevel (said process will handle the rest). Then sit back and wait for the shutdown to the called.

If Systemd can be used in this manner, it is a full drop-in replacement for Sysv init.

except that the kind of "marxism" that they tried to implement in Russia and elsewhere (honestly, China and later are reinterpreted "Stalinism") may well be quite contrary to what Marx actually envisioned.

First off, the envisioned a nation like Germany, that was heavily industrialized via capitalism, to be the starting point. Not Russia that at the time was mostly still agrarian.

Also, he did not envision centralized state control. More likely he envisioned worker run factories and such. That is, the board room was not filled up by shareholders and venture capitalists, but the actual workers of the factory, bank and so on.

So in essence the transition would be form a capitalist run work environment to a worker run work environment. That is, the workers would be working for their own benefit, not some suit and cigar overlooking it all from a posh office.

Actually, MS more or less invented the tablet PC. Gates seems to have had a old dream about pen based computer input, and so they came up with the UMPC and tablet pc concepts and presented them around 2001. Problem was that the CPUs at the time too power hungry, and so one could not really get any work done. There was also some resistance from inside MS, resulting in MS Office lacking integrated pen support. So rather than notating directly into Excel or Word, people had to make do with a input box that was really meant for "legacy" programs.

And i think OSX picked up steam in CS and various science fields because of the UNIX/BSD core. This especially once it ran on x86.

Then find someone else to follow.

Still, it seems most of the tech heads are moving to G+...

It is if they drop the cost below expenses to keep the competition out of the press.

Mac at the time was using PPC, not x86. Also, Mac in the classroom was (tho this may be changing with the ability to dualboot and the increasing awareness of the Apple brand in consumer electronics) basically non-existent outside of USA (various media and digital art studies excluded).

The thing was that you could take your existing hardware, the real big cost in acquiring and maintaining, and pop Linux on top of it. This then replacing Windows, and then potentially extending the lifetime of the hardware.

If MS did not consider Linux a valid threat, why did they bend over backwards to get XP onto netbooks? Remember that the original Asus eeepc came with a Linux distro installed. And Acer followed suit with Linux on their Aspire one (never mind the OpenSuse install on the MSI wind and its various rebadged variants). XP was destined for retirement, yet MS held on to it rather than giving up netbooks to Linux.

Hell, they had for years up to that point called Linux all kinds of things (including at one point cancer).

We can see some of the same behavior with MS, where they basically stopped doing anything with IE and slowed down considerably the Windows development in the 2k/XP run. Then all of a sudden they find that Mozilla and Linux can be credible threats on the casual home market, their traditional marketing leverage vs corporate office sales. Just consider the quote from Gates about him preferring people pirating Windows than considering alternatives. The central issue is one of mindshare. If a potential employee already knows the product from home, MS can claim that there will be little to no training time once hired.

In essences what AMD was evolution vs Intels attempted revolution. They evolved x86 with a 64-bit extension rather than attempt to revolutionize like Intel went for.

Now however the roles have switched. Intel goes for a evolution, while AMD tries for revolution with their APU concept of shifting floating point onto the GPGPU.

Heh, i recall reading about those "exploding" AMDs. Tho i wonder how much of that has changed in recent year, similar to how more than a few arguments against Linux are 10 years old, or more, but never checked to see if they are still valid.

This seems to be a repeating pattern in both hardware and software.

Some big name entity makes noise about going with the "little" man supplier, and then their old compatriot casually pass them a back room deal to make them stick with the old compatriots products. I swear, corporate contracts really need to be out in the open, or else they undermine democratic principles.

Never mind that the roman economy functioned for decades before introducing their first gold coin by using copper coins.

Then again, the interpretations of roman currency history is a hot topic to this day.

On that note, i found this a interesting read a few years back:
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Science-Money-Mythology-Story/dp/1930748035/

Seems to be out of stock now tho.

Norway is dropping the 50 øre this year, and i think the 25 øre went out of circulation in the 80s or 90s.

I think there was some musing about turning the 50 kr bill into a coin as well, because they get worn out so quickly. Never mind that we already have a 20 kr coin that makes it surprisingly easy to have several 100 kr rattling around.

I suspect that came about because at least one guy was doing just that up and down the Mississippi, only later to be found out to have sold well beyond 100% of some riverboat or something.

Maybe they find UCAS as a concept appealing?