Not true. Every Xeon since 2006 has shipped with VT-x support. Look at the Xeon 5030 for example. Absolute bottom of the line ($150 at launch) from 2006, and it supports VT-x.

You're probably thinking of Intel's desktop line where to do artificially hobble large swaths of their CPUs with respect to VT-x.

Yes, that is the disgustingly awful part about C-11, but you missed the upside:

Emphasis mine, see http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6544/125/

You play weird video games. Personally, I like playing the "my computer works already, I didn't have to hunt down twenty drivers from twenty different sites and make sure I kept them all up to date individually" game, that's why I already use Linux (and have for nearly a decade).

You'd need several dozen hard drives to even approach the IOPS of a single consumer level SSD. The SSD wins so many times over it's not funny.

Now, if you're talking about sequential read/write speeds, that's a whole different matter. You'd need roughly 3-4 hard drives (in RAID 0 (no redundancy)... double that figure for RAID 10) to match the typical sequential read/write speeds of an SSD. At that point, the raw cost of the hard drives far exceeds that of the SSD, and that's ignoring the need for the extra SATA ports, cooling, physical space and the extra drive failures you need to deal with. So, the SSD wins again, hands down.

Now, say you needed to store more than roughly 200 gigabytes of data and performance didn't matter at all, in that case, hard drive(s) will be more cost effective than SSDs.

Basically, hard drives excel at bulk storage of stuff where performance doesn't matter. SSDs excel at everything else.

If only more people understood this. 99% of the time when I'm behind someone while merging onto the highway, they'll be going way under the speed limit as they merge. It is infuriating.

Support for TRIM on RAID linear/0/1/10 md devices was quite recently added. The patch series is here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/11/261. I can't find the actual merge now, but I believe it'll be in 3.7.

Now this seriously bums me out, as I believe in competition and have been building AMD exclusively for the past few years, ever since the OEM bribery and compiler scandals came out. But since MSFT has already said they aren't gonna backport the scheduler fix (they have only released a patch, since withdrawn I believe) and thanks to this boneheaded design you'll have a boat anchor tied on your system you really only have 4 choices, 1.-Disable half the cores, 1 per module, so you are basically only getting half of what you paid for but each core then has a full FP unit,2.- OC the living hell out of it to use speed to make up for the penalty, 3.-Stick with the AM3 Phenom II units, this has been what I've been doing as the Phenom II quads and hexacores are dirt cheap now and still have decent speed, or 4.-Don't buy AMD.

You're missing the elephant in the room... don't use Windows.

A CS degree is a requisite but not sufficient property to make a good developer. They also need a genuine interest in the field, which most often manifests as being self-taught before getting a degree, and continuing to self-teach after getting said degree.

Purely self-taught developers will miss learning a lot of important topics, not because they're difficult, but because they don't realize what they don't know. In particular, data structures (anything beyond arrays), databases (and normal forms) and algorithmic complexity. I don't care how good you are with $language, if you don't understand the above topics like the back of your hand, you're going to make a mess.

On the flip side, purely academic developers are typically going to have knowledge gaps in more practical topics like input validation, version control systems and bug trackers. Again, you can get by without these, but you're going to make a mess (or someone else is going to make a mess of it for you when they exploit it).

Fixed that for you.

When you drive the speed limit, you put other lives at risk, not just your own.

So? Driving is a priviledge, not a right. Should we also give up on driving exams and just let everybody drive?

As an added bonus, you'll stimulate the economy (through car manufacturers).

People refuse to obey the speed limits because the speed limits are retarded. Take any major highway in North America and you'll find massive stretches of more or less completely straight road where there's no reason you couldn't drive all day at your car's top speed, except, the posted speed limit is a third (or less) of said top speed.

This will never change because the government strongly prefers to keep everyone a criminal, they're much easier to control that way. If speed limits were strictly enforced (and not increased to sane values), there would be riots in the streets.

Don't be silly, insurance rates will rise across the board. After all, all these fancy new electronics make the cars more expensive and therefore more expensive to repair in a crash, therefore, everybody's insurance rates need to go up. Furthermore, insurance rates will rise even more for those of us who refuse to enable the tracking data, as obviously only filthy terrorists would value their privacy.

Well no wonder, 72F is still too hot.

Perfect, then we can wait a decade for the case to go anywhere, only to have it thrown out in the end and all computers made within the past decade remain unusable.