When you are a large institution who have (over)paid consultants to create workflow tools on your intranet, upgrading is far from free. The new approved browser will have to be validated against your existing tools, then you'll have to do rewrites where you had horrible IE6 kludges. The cost of the software isn't the issue, it's the cost of delivering your applications on that platform that is the issue.

With that said it provides a wonderful example of why organisations should avoid proprietary extensions to standards. One day the world will move on and you'll be stuck with an un-integrateable piece of shit platform.

It is not just foreign transfer. In Malaysia, online banking transfer cost MYR2.00 per transaction. With checks, the entire 50 pieces checkbook only cost MYR8.00, that's RM0.16 per piece. There is no additional charges for cashing local checks. I would have thought that with all the manual work required to process checks, it should be more expensive but somehow electronics transfer is about 12.5x more expensive than checks. And these days with their improved check processing facilities, money is transfer on the same working day but some how it sometimes take more than 1 day when it is only via online transfer. Go figure that out...

Taking it one step further, we could have a piece of paper that says how much to transfer, signed by the transferer to make it legal. Then there'd even be a paper trail that could be checked if there were any problems!

Not sure what to call something like that, maybe "instant signed bank-to-bank transfer guarantee on paper receipt" (or "isbtobtgopr" for short)?

Except that it isn't reliable, or instant, or guaranteed (when we still had cheques here, they were only guaranteed up to 300 guilders (about 125 euro). So you'd still need a whole stack of them to pay for a car, cash would be easier.)

If someone pays me via a direct online bank transfer, I can check if the money is in my account immediately, usually doesn't take more than a minute. Also, it'll show up on my and their bank statement so you do have a paper trail.

Cheque is something I write, and you've only my word that its a) valid, b) got funds to cover it c) it's actually my cheque book, and that's actually my signature. d) I won't just ring up to cancel it in half an hour's time
Bankers draft is ... very similar to a cheque, but what happens is the bank transfers the money out of my account, into theirs, and writes a cheque for that sum. It's therefore easier to validate (can be done over the phone, and the bank can confirm they've issued a draft for that sum to that person) and is 'guaranteed' by the bank, and probably some FSA regulations as well - if you take my bankers draft, you can be pretty certain that you will get that money.

There's not a lot of room for Necrophiliac Sadism in chemistry, but I suppose if you were making (and taking) LSD or pouring HCL on biology's lab mice for therapy, you'd be having a sit-down with your dean.

Nice strawman. As it happens, some chemistry labs do indeed involve dissolving various things in HCl (capitalization matters here, so get it right). Suppose I said I enjoyed them (I do) and were looking forward to the next one (I am); should that get me banned?

You do realize that embalming (or some methods of it, anyway) requires cutting open the corpse, right?

Then use the cpan CLI tool or if you're using Debian use the prebuilt apt packages

I took online classes in DeVry University/Keller Management School last year, and used only my home Linux computer for that. Apart from a project management class that required MS Project (demo-version works under Wine), all was fine until the final class, where prof strongly insisted on everyone using only Office 2007 docx/pptx files for everything. At the same time Devry administration issued a letter that whole university migrates to Office 2007, and everyone should have it. It was very disappointing decision.

it likely still shipped with Windows, meaning you still paid the Microsoft tax,
 
I have heard that most or maybe all of the "Microsoft tax" is covered by the junkware that the computer vendors include on their Windows install disks, so the amount that Windows adds to the price of a new computer is very close to zero.
 
I don't know if this is really the case, though, and I'm frankly rather suspicious of that. Does anyone know for sure?

I'm a bit confused, what about that publication provides ANY additional information to the thread?

Or are you insinuating I need a crash course in "computers"? Kernighan is a legend and a good writer but I would be surprised if the average IEEE journal reader didn't already know everything he wrote about...

In my intro to operating systems class, Stanford used "NACHOS" (not another completely heuristic operating system). I loved that course, but it looks like they have switched to "Pintos" more recently.

This (in my opinion) shows there is of course no perfect model, and I'll give the benefit of the doubt that a good teacher will always search out what they think will help students the most...

I have no idea why you think using the kernel from the most popular OS in the world as a study aid is a bad thing. Personally, the last few set-top boxes I have worked on have been Linux, and I think that whole industry is pretty much dominated by the Linux kernel. I haven't done any serious Windows development in years. But for many new grads a solid understanding of the Windows kernel would be invaluable to their future jobs. In the end, at the kernel level most of the fundamental design principles are pretty much the same - what *I* am amazed at is how many candidates I interview don't even know the basics of virtual memory, disk I/O, process scheduling, multithreading/sychronization, etc.

Once again, I'm trying not to pass judgement... but read your post and decide if it added anything useful. The only concrete phrase in the whole thing was "direct observation and investigation", which yes, is provable, and no, you haven't shown that the MS program does not include.

My i7 920 system, overclocked to 3.2GHz, draws 95W at idle (monitor excluded). This is based on the APC utility that monitors my UPS unit into which my computer is plugged.

That seems extremely high for an idle system. You should check it with something like a Kill-a-watt.

Are you sure you don't have a few instances of Prime95 or something running in the background ? :)

You may sayyyyy I'm a dreamer... But I'm not the only one!

There is, we even have our own flag, it's just like yours, but on fire (Apologies to Rob Newman)

Eoin is a perfectly standard spelling in Gaelic, we tend to use too many vowels, a friend of mine, Aoife (pronounced eefa) has great fun in other English speaking countries. Now try Aodhan, ;)

Which puts Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz in 7th place with 1.85 of the changes between Linux 2.6.12 and Linux 2.6.30. I always knew students had way too much spare time ;)

Their mail tech support is hilarious, I had a similar but different problem, mail from eircom customers never reached my domain. This was due to an extinct domain with my domain name having been hosted on Indigo back in the day.

I rang them to get them to remove their MX record for the domain, their responses were hilarious:

• "Which mail client are you using?" "pine(just for kicks :)"
• "What is the account number of your hosting account?"
• ...

After 3 days of this shit I eventually began each call with "Do you know what an MX record is?" Eventually I got a guy who sounded insulted by the question, half an hour later it was working, but their tech-support guys are beyond ignorant.