Go here if you want to switch off Unity and GNOME3.

Both Unity and GNOME 3 suck. Neither one works correctly with multiple monitors. Try running 4 monitors on two video cards, TwinView'd and Xinerama'd, and you will understand.

I especially hate the global menu bar in Unity. I can sort of live with the similar design in OS X but Unity does it horribly. I'm not even sure what the difference is but I just couldn't stand Unity even though I'm used to OS X.

That's too much. Check out lowendbox and find something you like.

Since you don't need disk space, much RAM or CPU then you should be able to find something that will work for less than $20 a year. They usually come with a fair amount of bandwidth.

I have been programming in C for 25 years so it's not my lack of experience. It's a very simple algorithm anyway, there isn't any more optimization that I can do, it's all in the compiler and LuaJIT just does it better than GCC.

I can't explain it either because until now I didn't think it was possible. This algorithm almost 100% pure math operations and LuaJIT is apparently really fast under certain circumstances.

Plain Lua is nice and all but LuaJIT is where the fun is. It blows the doors off of any other scripting language (and many compiled languages) in terms of performance. I actually have some LuaJIT financial data processing code that runs faster than anything I have been able to code in C. It also has an incredibly awesome and fast FFI interface so you don't even need to write native code to interface with most native libraries.

Lua's Achilles Heal is string performance. It does have awesome tools like LPeg and has powerful string handling functions but if you're handling massive amounts of string data then it starts to bog down because of the string interning. It's still very fast and usually faster than other scripting languages like Python (not as fast as Perl though) but it is a long standing problem that pisses me off considering how fast it is otherwise.

By the same token, not getting enough of certain things can have bad consequences. It's a complicated balance and it's different for every person.

It is my personal theory that the correct diet for an individual is similar to whatever tribe they came from back before modern times when we had to eat whatever was available. Some ate a lot of meat, others mostly grains, some had only fruit, and still others had access to a variety of foods, etc. What is healthy for you depends on what type of tribe you are descended from. This is part of the reason why it's so hard to be healthy these days, it takes a lot of work to figure out what is correct for you from the vast array of choices.

And it's not just the government that does that, businesses do it too. Over the past few years we have seen consumers cutting back personal budgets which causes businesses and governments to increase prices or look for other sneaky ways to get more money from people in order to make their next budget cycle. Which then causes consumers to cut back even more, which then causes business to increase prices even more... and so on.

The whole thing is about to implode here at some point if businesses and government don't recognize that they need to seriously cut spending just like us normal people have been doing. You can't have infinite budget increases when the economy is going the opposite direction.

I had an interesting reaction watching that. It was kind of a base level primal fear instinct that got kicked off. I don't even mind snakes and have had many as pets. I have had some pretty big ones too.

However, seeing one that size and moving like that fired off neurons that said "run away!!" Was weird because that is not a normal reaction for me. It seems like it was specifically the size combined with that slithering movement and not the shape of the thing.

They need to separate the applications from the OS the way every other operation system does (eg. BSD, OSX, Windows, etc).

So you have a core system which is just the most basic requirements to run the OS. Kernel, utilities, display, web browser, etc. I would do it like the BSD's where you have a kernel core, x-windows core, etc. No large apps like OpenOffice and all the other crap. Those can and should be installed separately by the user like they do on every other system.

Then you just maintain and have releases of the core like everyone else does. This is much less work and allows for more focus and higher quality.

The general applications can be done as a rolling release or whatever the user wants. Separate from the core.