While PHP has low barrier to entry and there are a lot of people who tinker with it, PHP still powers a lot of production websites, far and beyond the hello world apps or the 'pictures of my dog' wordpress blogs. Your implication that there aren't "powerful stuff" websites running on PHP is just simply not true.
Backstory here: freegeoip.net has an hourly per-IP limit, so we distributed the load by doing the geolocation from client browsers. This borked freegeoip after many hours of Twitter/Ars Technica'ing.
It was a good thing Github got its storage servers back up; we're now running a local clone of freegeoip, as freegeoip.net smolders.
I highly suggest that in this day and age, you teach using simplified characters. For entire swaths (not to mention the overwhelming majority) of Chinese people out there, simplified is the way to go.
You're right. But... if you've ever used a Raspberry Pi as any kind of modern web server, you'll realize just how slow it is. Compile ruby on a modern PC vs a Raspberry, and it really forces you to remember that this is a tiny litte ARM device for fun projects + experiments, and not mean't for a rails stack (as an example).
My point is not to knock the Raspberry, rather, this demonstrates just how pathetic an Amazon Micro instance is. It's abysmal to the point that you have to ask yourself why they provide them at all. It's like they're teasing us, "Here, a free server! Enjoy it!" but in reality you'd rather drink a shot of drano full of nails because it's so painful to work with. Then again, beggars can't be choosers and free is free.
I think you're missing the point of the micro instance. It can give you decent performance in short bursts, which is suitable for many light usage cases e.g. a low traffic blog. If you are going to load it via a benchmark you get very heavily throttled way below the performance you would get with light usage.
I don't think it's meant for production. I use mine for staging, ssh tunneling, hosting small projects with <1000 users, and to ssh to a Linux box I control and can run emacs on when I don't have my laptop.
As I went through college (and I think everyone more or less goes through this) I learned to care less about marks as a whole and more about what I learned in that class/if there the knowledge is easily obtainable elsewhere. However, I'm fortunate enough to be in a field that doesn't explicitly require grad school (compared to say, those aspiring to be doctors) and that internship experience/generally more concrete interviews generally lessen the requirement for having really high marks.
I wish my parents got me AAPL stock as birthday gifts.