You are still a horrible person for believing that a lack of faith in god automatically means narcissism. You speak much of faith and hope, but you certainly show a horrible lack of faith in humans if you believe that we need some imagined judge in the sky in order to have compassion and love.

Who is a better person? Someone that finds in himself the reasons for love, compassion and regard for others, or someone who needs the threat of judgement day hanging over him?

I agree that MS is not the only one to blame. However, MS was the one that ran the "Windows Vista Capable" program and MS was the one that had final say on what the minimum hardware requirements were for allowing OEMs to slap "Vista Capable" on their machines.

In the generic case I agree with you, MS does not control the hardware market and the dynamics of the hardware market is such that manufacturers will try to cut corners to eke out a tiny profit margin. So I agree with you that blaming MS for sub-standard hardware is barking up the wrong tree.

However, in this particular case MS had full control of which machines got to carry the "Vista Capable" certification and which didn't. MS fumbled bad here, they should have set the standard higher. Since they didn't, customers were misled and people ended up with "$2100 email machines".

And this entire article is about how MS aided and abetted that. See "Vista Capable"(r)(tm).

Oooh, neat! Could you comment on how well this works in real life? That is, how is performance, how well does it scale and how resilient is it?

I suspect one could end up with devil in details problems if the guest OS suddenly saw different CPUID values. While it might work fine, the expectation has always been that CPUID won't change after boot-up so you could end up with all sorts of snafus.

What you could do is have the hypervisor trap CPUID and report a least common dominator set of capabilities for the CPUs in the cluster. Or have CPUID report more capabilities than the weakest/oldest CPUs but have the hypervisor trap and emulate those instructions when running on those CPUs.

I must admit that I'm not quite up to date on the details, but isn't the VT/AMD-V changes only visible to the hypervisor (ring -1)? It might make moving VM state harder (the hypervisor has to handle migrating AMD-V state to the equivalent VT state), but it should be invisible to the guest OS running inside the VM.

I would suspect that Guest OS visible changes (ring 0-3) would be harder to handle (like migrating from a CPU that has SSE2 to one that doesn't). The hypervisor would either have to trap and emulate the missing instructions, or trap cpuid and tell the guest OS that the CPU only supports a least common denominator set of extensions.

I don't have much experience with BGP, but running ipsec on a Cisco 160x wasn't exactly fast either.

Your Mileage May Vary

That's actually a funny coincidence. Car analogies is a /. meme and that expression originated as a car advertisement disclaimer.

The cable modem has been unstable and the troubleshooting steps taught to the other people in the domicile is "restart all them boxes". So, no impressive uptime to paste.

In my experience, pretty much all home broadband routers are stable when they are using proper firmware like Tomato, dd-wrt or open-wrt. Just make sure you get one (e.g. WRT54GL) that is supported.

Or one could redirect the output of a program to someone else's terminal.

echo "I'm alive! Time to conquer the world!" > /dev/tty1

'apropos' is kinda like google. It is very useful, provided you know what to search for.

These days I am more surprised/annoyed when I come across a system that doesn't do tab completion.

As for useful tools.

screen has been mentioned already, I really wish there was a proper equivalent for X programs.

cut

tail -f and -F

ssh -X user@machine programname

apropos

locate

the -h option to df and du