The enormous amount of extra work is in maintaining a Linux server in the first place. (And in learning enough about it for "just editing a config file" to be a small matter, etc)

Slashdot norms to the contrary, most people don't do this. :)

That depends on whether you're running a Linux box at home in a "reliable enough" way to be functioning as a server. And in the example you give, as your primary machine as well. While I realize that many /. users do this, I would certainly say that most people don't.

I actually stopped doing it several years ago. I concluded that I have to maintain enough complex systems at work; I don't see any need to be a sysadmin for a complex system that requires nonstop patching and understanding of 30-year-old system internals at home, too. Plus the desktop environment was frankly primitive compared to modern machines. So I ditched it and started running OS X. (And I should say that I'm an experienced Linux sysadmin and engineer professionally, so this was not the "I don't know how to use it and it appears to have been designed by badgers" issue)

It's definitely true that, if you're already doing all of the work to run your own system at home, adding a DNS server isn't a big deal. But that's really a hobbyist thing to do. If your home system is primarily for the purpose of getting things done, rather than for playing with systems, it's an enormous amount of extra work. Yet having faster DNS lookups is still a win.

Because setting up and maintaining your own recursive DNS server is a pain in the ass? (Especially compared to the workload of "here, just change this one setting and it will go faster")

Definitely. For one thing, they're a symptom that you're using Vista.

You'd be less creeped out if this were calculated on the job?

I think you're reading too much into it. This entire headline sounds fishy, to me... the sort of pun someone might inject just for the halibut.

I had this issue for years. Ultimately I never found anything within a factor of 5 for speed of simple pen and paper. The next best thing was LaTeX; with practice you can type that remarkably fast. (Especially if you pre-define macros relevant to whatever you're doing) The GUI-based solutions uniformly stank.

I've never found any system for digitizing handwritten equations; for a long time, my hope was that such software (preferably with LaTeX output) and a tablet would be a good solution. But the market for such things is small, and a few minutes of design work convinced me that implementing it was a lot more trouble than it would ever be worth.

I do not know by whom World War III will be fought, but World War IV will undoubtedly be fought by cockroaches.

I don't think nukes alone would be thorough enough to really get us to the trivial world-peace equilibrium. We might need something big enough to detonate the planet itself.

Not only that, but in case of zombie attack, they make a tasty (and healthful!) snack.

Plus signs should still be treated as true literals. Quotation marks don't indicate literality -- they indicate that you really, really care about things like word order and so on within the quotes. It used to be true that quotation marks implied a plus on everything inside them, but that wasn't an intentional feature. The advanced search check box was, AFAIK, just equivalent to sticking everything in quotes.

If you're still seeing fuzzification with a plus sign, something may be a bit screwy, and you should file a bug with a specific broken query. (Of course, if you run the query +wombats and see the word "wombat" highlighted in the snippet, that isn't the same thing -- +wombats was treated literally, so this document really truly matched the word "wombats," it might just also have matched the word "wombat" and the snippet highlighter decided that it made sense, for this particular query, to highlight the term. A bug would be if you found a truly irrelevant document coming up.)

There's something which can be done about the example you give. "Pots" is fairly unambiguous; just because you're taking both plural and singular occurences of a word into account doesn't mean you should ignore which the user typed! (To give some simple examples; people who search for "apples" are interested in fruit, but people who search for "apple" are interested in computers. And plurals and synonymy do not commute; "red hats" is not the plural of "red hat.") "How to make coke" is an interesting ambiguous query, with two meaningful interpretations -- take a look at the Google results for that to see one good way of handling it. (Sectioning the results page and giving different interpretations)

And at least when I just checked, Dick's Sporting Goods is actually the top result for [dick's] on google.com.

I would say that Bing's results for both [dick's] and [how to make coke] are substantially less compelling. (Too many somewhat irrelevant interpretations in the first case, not enough relevant interpretations in the second)

There is nothing on whether the original artists get royalties, however.

I think that many of the original artists were royalty.

If you want fault-tolerance where calculations are duplicated, use two containers. :)

More seriously, nowadays calculation errors are more commonly hunted via checksumming, and they aren't the biggest issues in data integrity for critical operations. Bit rot, such as cosmic rays hitting your hard disks and/or RAM chips are a bigger issue, and error correcting codes and so on can give you the same robustness as "N=2" replication at a cost that looks more like "N=1.2."

I recall one student of mine whose papers I occasionally had to return with comments like "Please rewrite this entire document. I can't read enough to tell if it's right or wrong," or simply "Learn LaTeX."

She's a successful physicist now, so apparently bad handwriting isn't a complete show-stopper in that field...