Why does this entire article smell of fakery to bolster ad revenue? I know people like this exist and while in school I had people offer me their services in this department on several occasions. But this whole article smells fishy. The numbers barely make sense and he seems way too altruistic. I also had a professor in college who claimed to have taken a writing class and there were people like this guy in there and apparently they all wrote garbage papers. Anybody else smell fakery in this article or am I just spitting conspiracy theories?

Not for being a resource hog, because it isn't. Not for being laggy, because it isn't. But for being so insanely confusing to change even the slightest settings. Every conf file for it is gargantuan and confusing. And it doesn't help that just about every distro I've used has put it in a different location. The tools to change settings are atrocious as well. I recently blew away my Fedora, Gentoo, and OS X boxes to replace them with Ubuntu, because it "just works". And yes, it does "just work", and installing new software from outside the main source repository is surprisingly easy. But that's not the point. X is ancient. Even M$ knew that they needed to do a major system overhaul after XP. But Linux is still using things that predate even itself - X has been around for god only knows how long, but the initial Linux kernel release was in '91. The UNIX-HATERS Handbook even has an entire chapter devoted to X. X is a fantastic system for servers - the client/server model it's built on works great for remote session - but desktop users don't want any of these 9000+ options and features; they want simplicity, and X is anything but simple.

Having a degree in Mathematics and having worked with and briefly as a developer for a large IT company, I say take discrete math. The other class is probably more computationally intensive, but what you do in programming is much more logic based than computation based. Discrete math will deal with topics that are more related to programming and should build logical thought processes in your mind. Also, proof writing very frequently requires extreme outside-the-box thinking which is also a very important thing in development.

Have it calculate rainbow tables out to as many characters as it can