So you have a quad-core with hyperthreading.

But in general I agree with the sentiment. I do think comparing random whitebox with the big POWER boxes fails to capture the whole reality, but it's easy enough to note that alongside that random whitebox there are enterprise grade suppliers using the common architecture. A person able to slap together a whitebox x86 may not be as useful for business continuity on his own left to those decisions, but those same skillsets can be employed toward an enterprise solution while staying in the x86 family. POWER does not scale down yet, and that is one of IBM's missions. I'm skeptical they will succeed, but at least they acknowledge ecosystem as a key need.

It is a market segment that is seeing growth, and the hype machine has gone into overdrive under the assumption that anything that grows will grow indefinitely overtaking anything it conceivably could in its path.

The reality like all other times before is that it might get more adopted than it should before receding to the appropriate amount as it plateaus as the hype gets done. Thin clients have been around for ages even as the hype behind them has erupted and died out multiple times. They clearly have their role but it is clearly not the end-all, be-all that these companies bill it as.

The funny thing is, Windows often works better on one than it does on a regular PC, simply because it's crapware-free. :)

On the call I got, I don't think he gave a name. I just assumed it was "Peggy".

That's interesting. I got one of those phone calls. I'm not an AARP member, but I'm old enough to be on their list (they keep sending me snail mail asking me to join). Unfortunately, they called after 10PM when I wasn't fully awake, so I didn't think to play with them. He said something in a thick accent I could barely understand about my computer being slow, and I mumbled something back that he probably couldn't understand and hung up.

Yup! When our ancestors wanted "fast food", it really was "fast" and we had to work hard to catch it. There were no McDs in ancient times.

IMO, the best improvement to 8.1 is that it now boots to the desktop. I don't even have to see Metro if I don't choose to.

> You're talking about totalitarianism under the false guise of socialism.

What's what you tend to get when you grant the government ever increasing powers. If not outright genocide you will end up with more and more meddling and the expansion of government power.

That's what beaurocracies do. They seek to expand themselves.

Also, they don't seek to be efficient. So they will seek the most costly path possible. They are not run by altruists but by the same greedy crass types that fuel capitalsm. They're out to increase their personal power, wealth and influence.

You have the same problem with corporations but they aren't supposed to be monopolies. You should have the possibility of playing one off the other in order to get what's good for you and the public in general.

Of course "net neutrality" is ultimately a (natural) monopoly problem much like AT&T before it.

Communism in practice devalues labor. This is especially true if you aren't in one of their selected groups. Then your labor gets really devalued.

Just about everyone here would be a victim of Maxist-Communist labor devaluation. You think it's bad being a geek now. You don't even want to know what it was like when the Soviet Union was still around.

> They ate meat when they could get it, which wasn't 100% of the time, and the meat they got was lean.

Um... no.

If they had an animal, they used all of it. They didn't waste any of it. They would not have turned up their nose at any part of the animal because of modern diet fads.

They would have eaten the fat and been happy to have it.

You can see how the same pragmatism manifests in older food cultures where pure fat may be eaten as a delicacy. Humans for the vast majority of history have eaten whatever they could acquire and digest. Doesn't matter if you're talking about a farmer or a hunter/gatherer.

We might not need to relent from any of those allegedly "bad foods". We may just need to lay off the recently invented industrial food chemicals.

I have a family member that's just fine with white wheat flour products as long as the flour in question is not brominated. This easily could have been misread as "gluten intolerance". You gotta wonder whether these "allergies" are the real thing or just chemical sensitivity.

Plus there is always moderation to consider. Just about anything is harmful in excess.

> Barring allergies, most humans are fully capable of assimilating anything they throw at their GI system

No they aren't. This can be readily apparent as inappropriate things leave your GI tract. A lot of this boils down to individual variation. We aren't machine stamped machines, but modern political correctness has us thinking we are. The idea of "being equal under the law" has been perverted into "being exactly the same".

We aren't all the same. Some of us do better with some things than others. Some cultural traditions actually acknowledge this.

A little science and some self awareness goes a long way. Both of these are actively discouraged by American consumer culture.

When the neck beards speak, it's often prudent to at least listen.

I'm reminded of a myth, of when the Ancients were sitting down to design Unix, someone said "Why would we ever need a special file, that never contains any data, and always throws away everything written to it?" The Ancient replied, "Trust me, you'll need it." And thus, /dev/null was born.

I don't find upstart easier. I don't find it easier at all. If systemd is anything like that, then it's not making things easier either. If anything, it sounds like it's making things more complex and harder to debug and easier to screw up.

That's the value of "old and primitive". It's easy to keep the whole thing in your head rather than it being a big mess you can't get your head around.

> Only in the open source community would people that think it is perfectly fine having to compile drivers every time a kernel gets a .1 update

Must be a FreeBSD thing since this is a solved problem in Linux.

You need to update your FUD playbook. It's out of date.