When mainboards came with AC’97 that was good enough to deliver high-qualify 5.1 sound people stopped buying sound cards because the onboard sound was on par with them and came free with the mainboard. Plius, we still had the option to go for a sound card if we disliked the onboard sound or if it broke.

When mainboards came with onboard Fast Ethernet people stopped buying discrete NICs because, again, the onboard sound was on par and free. Plus, we still had the optiom to get a discrete NIC or two.

When mainboards came with onboard modems Well, I have no idea; we only got internet in the ISDN age. But, again, discrete modems continued to be available.

But the same things don’t apply to RAM and mass storage. The new MBPs don’t ship with terabyte SSDs for free so for people who expect to store large amounts of data directly on their computer the default offering is not on par. One could choose the BTO option for more storage but Apple’s prices are way above market average and they don’t even offer the choice of an HDD in a new MBP. So people complain because now they get less capability than before with no reasonable upgrade strategy. There would be no complaining if the baseline MBP had a terabyte SSD onboard or if one could pop it open and mount an HDD in there.

Likewise with the soldered-on RAM. Previously one would buy the MBP with the smallest RAM package available and then upgrade with third-party modules because, again, Apple’s prices are ridiculous. Not only that; it was possible to buy the machine and then later upgrade the RAM. This was useful if one didn’t have the money to purchase the machine and the RAM at the same time. No longer possible; RAM is non-upgradable now and if it breaks you have no option besides sending the entire computer in for repairs.

I’m talking about MBPs because they saw a big change recently but the same applies to other Macs. While treating ones computer as a disposable tool might be fine for the average user it’s not acceptable for those of us who do know their stuff. Not quite coincidentally, those are often the people who need a workhorse computer instead of something that can browse the web and play back fullscreen video.

I used to consider MacBook Pros to be no-brainer purchases. They looked good, had user-serviceable innards (at least those parts you’d reasonably expect a notebook to have) and came with OS X, which I like. These days I still like OS X but I don’t like the machines it comes on.

My next Mac will probably be a Thinkpad. Those things tend to make good Hackintoshes and don’t suffer from an anorexic design department.

Yawn.

No, that is an anarchist society: no cops, no courts, no laws. If you have any of those, you have government employees. If you don't have government employees, you have none of those. Capitalism does not imply anarchy.

I won't even read the rest of your comment; an anonymous coward getting this fundamentally obvious thing so clearly wrong doesn't deserve more of a response.

Yes, my view of things is that we should rely on reason and evidence. Yours is that we should rely on fallacies and innuendo.

I see. You think the number of prosecutions of the executive branch, BY the executive branch, is a reasonable measurement between administrations of which is more corrupt.

That's so cute. And it's so stupid that it physically hurts.

The rest of your comment was nothing more than lies and ad hominems. Literally, there was nothing else in that comment that didn't fall into that category. Especially your claim that speaking to my assumed "culture, ancestry, location of birth" in your argument is not an ad hominem. That's fucking textbook ad hominem.

Since you didn't say how the examples "suck," the examples therefore still stand, and therefore your assertion that they are "just like the rest" -- which ignores the examples of how they are not -- is baseless, and ignored.

Much moreso than Republicans, as the examples -- which remain undisputed -- demonstrate.

Ad hominem.

Non sequitur.

What's that got to do with whether "people who 'donate' to political campaigns ... expect a return on their investments?"

And you did tell me that I am "full of shit" ... but you've not backed it up. Still waiting.

a. He is not my idol
b. You're lying that Regan's is "[o]n official record as the most corrupt administration ever"

Didn't you used to better at this? Maybe I am misremembering.

I didn't mention donating to campaigns, unless you're referring to collective bargaining leading to politicians giving handouts to employees in exchange for donations and votes ... which is obviously true, which is one of many reasons I say Democrats are more anti-capitalist.

But I don't think you're talking about that, so I don't have any idea what you think I said here, but it seems to me that I didn't say it.

Yes, he accepts donations, like all politicians do.

What's wrong with that? This isn't an argument, it's just an attempt to imply something negative, without actually saying anything that is actually negative.

I gave specific examples. Do you have any counterexamples? If not, then you're not actually making an argument here, either.

False.

You're correct on the first point, and incorrect on the second point. There would be far fewer government employees, but no, they would still exist.

But I didn't say these are the correct capitalist positions. I said they are "much more pro-capitalist" than the Democrats. Clearly, if there should be no minimum wage under capitalism -- which I agree is clearly true -- then being against its increase is more pro-capitalist than being in favor of its increase. Further, the one person I mentioned -- Scott Walker -- said just recently that he thinks the minimum wage serves no purpose.

Yes, the GOP -- as a whole -- does pay off its cronies. But there are a significant number of prominent Republicans in office who oppose these practices (e.g., Scott Walker). There is not a significant number of Dems who oppose these practices. Further, the Republicans' policies are generally much more pro-capitalist (against raising the minimum wage, against collective bargaining with govt employees, and so on).

So ... no, the GOP is significantly more pro-capitalist than the Dems. Very clearly and easily. They are not, however, as pro-capitalist as I am, or Scott Walker is, etc.

I'm not saying that Windows is going to drop off the market; I just think that it won't be the only choice anymore.

Now if you'll excuse me; Steam just finished downloading Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on my Mac.

To be honest, Windows is no longer the big name in gaming platforms, Steam is. And Valve is pushing for game devs to move away from Windows-exclusive games so they can sell their Linux-based Steam Machines. While Linux support isn’t quite common yet it does pop up every now and then and OS X is actually seeing a fair number of high-profile releases.

Right now Windows might hold its dominance in the video game market but whether it’ll still be the obvious choice in a few years is not settled. (For instance, I have no idea what effect Microsoft’s rumored plans for a free baseline Windows with subscription addons would have - depending on how they'd play it it might make Windows more attractive to gamers or it might scare them off. We’ll see.)

The only issue I see with this being part of systemd is that this probably means you need to run systemd in order to get virtual terminals (because of internal dependencies). This might be bad for small embedded distros that don't want to run the whole systemd stack. Perhaps things like systemd-shim will work, in which case it might not be too painful, but otherwise the distro might have to lug around relatively heavy components in order to get virtual terminals.

As far as I can tell the systemd devs seem to want to optimize Linux for a number of use cases while declaring all use cases that stand to lose as irrelevant. A lot of people are unhappy about this, thus the hate. Well, and their attitude.

The basic idea (replacing the old VT code with something new and better) seems fine; the only problem is that it's yet another component that will be integrated with systemd. If the old VT code is completely deprecated in favor of systemd-consoled that means that yet another part of the Linux world has dependencies on systemd.

While that may be fine if you run the kind of system systemd expects, it's problematic if you want to use, say, an embedded system built around uclibc instead of glibc. To my knowledge, systemd still refuses to incorporate libc compatibility patches and thus won't run unless you use their preferred libc flavor. Trying to make your embeddded Linux distro work without systemd will mean that you either have to write and maintain your own console daemon or live without virtual terminals. Or, of course, you can move to glibc and systemd, even if your distro would be better served by lighter alternatives.

I think that the systemd subprojects would be more popular if they were less dependent on each other... and if the developers had less of a "my way of the highway" attitude.

On the other hand, Amazon is the king of "you recently bought a new computer so we figured you'd be interesting in buying more new computers. Have some ads". It's baffling how Amazon will send you mails advertising the exact same kind of thing you just bought after you purchased something. Sure, for things like media it kinda makes sense but for other things it really doesn't.