Makes sense, right?

Students go to school to learn.
I always did better with personal access to my teachers and I never knew more than the teacher/instructor/professor (that is, Not Graduate "Assistants").
I always did better with personal attention. Some concepts are not easy to grasp.

But Standford, refusing to hire more "Educational Helpers" gets the students to teach each other.
And they wrap this dismal plan in teaching the student how to work together. (I always liked linking my fate to ignorant classmates.)
More money for less education.
Bunch of turds.

Steve Ballmer warned us that Linux was a cancer. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Now the mothership itself in infected. Open source??? OMG. But really, if real programmers ever got their hands on Windows under a GPL, they would just strip out anything of value and add it to Linux. Really.

The correct balance is probably to allow it for sole proprietorships but not parternships or corporations. That way individuals aren't forced to violate their conscience while groups are required to conform to societal norms. If Joe's lawnmower service center or Sally's cake shop is discriminatory it's probably not a big deal in the grand scheme of things (distasteful as it may be to some), but if you have the same problem with Toro or Albertsons it's a major issue. This makes both sides unhappy, so it's likely the best compromise solution.

Another very simple idea is to just turn this crap off. Sometimes you have to MAKE it do so, since plenty of electronics nowadays don't have a true "off" option at all. So I put everything on surge protectors that have individually-switched outlets. Easy to find plenty of those on Amazon. Either the power-strip style, or I use the desktop models (the ones intended to sit under a monitor), depending on the application and where I'm putting it. The desktop models look nice inside an enclosed entertainment center, and make for easy switching of the electronics in there.

Either way, being able to physically flip the switch to cut off all those game consoles and those sound systems and those cell phone/laptop/whatever chargers, etc. etc. really helps.

I even installed a timer switch on my water heater (until I can get around to replacing the thing with a tankless instead). I found that the long-cycle heating up of the water when it's turned on via the timer, actually uses less power than "maintaining" the heat throughout the day. Though that certainly depends on your usage, of course. I'm a single person and generally only need it powered for a shower. The water remains hot enough even in the unpowered tank throughout the day for things like hand washing. I was surprised what a difference it made. Most of us Slashdot types probably already have programmable thermostats for HVAC, but you don't really think about your water heater sitting there sucking up power all day maintaining hot water you're not using.

I even have my damn dishwasher on a switch, conveniently right next to the garbage disposal switch. Only gets turned on when I need it. Sure, all this was a pretty fair amount of work at first, but once I'd done it, I literally cut my power bill in half. No joke, no exaggeration. Though again keep in mind I'm a single person and don't generally use a lot of power to begin with, admittedly, but still, slicing my usage in half just by putting crap I wasn't using on switched outlets made a tremendous difference to me. And I really don't think it's inconvenient to go over to the entertainment center and, say, flip the Playstation switch when I want to play that.

And as an added bonus, an unpowered device is one less possible source of circuit failure and fire hazard. That's just a nice little icing on the lower-power-bill cake.

I work on PPC systems every day. I also use several. I'd wager that you do as well.

Have cable or satellite TV? 90% chance it's using a Power cpu. Drive a car with fuel injection? 65% chance your engine is run by Power, 90% chance something in the car is (ABS, nav, transmission).

It's been around a long time (30+ years), been 64 bit much longer than x86 or ARM, has good OS support and good compilers.

I work on and like ARM as well, but if IBM can make a value proposition in China with PPC, they actually have a chance at getting some market share outside embedded.

I've been working with AIX since 1990. Prior to that a bit of SunOS. AIX is is different but generally well thought out. Most people who hate it simply aren't used to the differences. Lots of feature that we take for granted in today's Linux existed in AIX 25 years ago.

Tivoli Storage Manager is a dream. I remember setting up a high-availability TSM (well, ADSM at the time) server and having a client backup running during fail over testing. Client connection failed, continued retrying until the server was back up on the other node, then the backup continued where is left off. Transaction backup with rollback and resumption after server fail over! Try that with NetBackup or Networker or Avamar or CommVault.

B

The POWER architecture has been around longer than X64, the vast majority of linux software comes with source code and compiles fine on power (and arm, mips and anything else) so it doesn't matter what the underlying processor is. A lot of the software that doesn't come with source these days is java based, which will run just fine on power too.

Except for a small number of fairly niche apps, most linux based server loads will work fine on a power system.

That'll be why our street is full of new trucks and SUVs. They need them to drive to Wal-Mart, I guess.

The Canadian middle class is being crushed out of existence. NAFTA has played a big role in this, as it resulted in much manufacturing draining directly to Mexico. Subsequent trade agreements have not helped. At the same time, there has been a huge flood of immigrants, most of them from third-world nations. The lack of work, combined with a large population increase, has resulted in higher levels of unemployment, along with higher housing prices.

Middle-class stores, including large and long-established chains, are closing throughout Canada at an astounding pace. Zellers is gone. Target never really got off the ground. Sears is on its way out. Many of the mid-sided clothing stores have gone under lately, are in the process of going under, or are just about to.

The middle-class retailers that have survived so far have often done so only by dropping their quality levels, or moving into higher-end goods. There is a stunning degree of economic polarization: either you are quite wealthy, or you are very poor. This is a huge change from what the country was once like, when it had a robust middle class. Most middle-class Canadians have been, or are being, forced down to a Wal-Mart level of existence.

As long as it's not one of either this list: http://gizmodo.com/the-25-most... or just a copy of your exact username, then yep it will probably suit you just fine. Dictionary attacks don't happen in break ins nearly as often as exploiting password resets (via social engineering or otherwise) or other blatant sidesteps of security (token reuse, etc), since everyone tarpits bad logins, sometimes after as few as 3 attempts.

That's a pretty broad exclusion to be enforceable.

There is absolutely no incentive for Heinz to put this into their bottles. This means people will spend less on average on ketchup per year since they can get every last bit out of the bottle. I know it may not seem like much, but multiply it by millions of bottles sold and it adds up to a hefty hit on their bottom line.

Often by the United States of America or other western powers. When nations see that having a nuke prevents other nations from toppling them, nukes become vital for stability.

Perhaps we should stop driving them towards nuclear weapons by invading them for oil and minerals.