Why do you think that would make a difference to us who are trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of our boxen? Wasted GPU cycles are still wasted, on a machine that could be tuned to offload some of the rendering work or number crunching from the cores to the GPU.

I do some CG. A "simple" three minute animation can easily take more than 30 hours to render, even with four cores AND the GPU cooking.

There is a reason why anyoine doing serious computer work today is using one of the Linux distros.

I don't knock Windows or even Apple. If all you are doing with the computer is the same stuff your Grandma and Grandpa used to do with a pegboard accounting system and a sliderule, then by all means get a box that will play the games you enjoy. But trying to compare that OS with a serious computing OS is like trying to compare the best ever go-cart with a Formula One race car. Yeah they can run on the same track, but that's about all they have in common.

That's a really bad car analogy. About the worst I've ever heard. Really really bad.

Yeah. It was bad. The best I could do under the circumstances.

What circumstances?

Can't justify wasting any more time on this.

Oh. Yeah, I see your point.

Short answer: I am not a fanbois of Linux or any particular OS or application. It is just that I have neither the time nor the money to play around in any of the closed gardens-- the two biggest being Microsoft and Apple. In the rare occasion that I need a Microsoft only product, like upgrading my Garmin GPS, I can do that through WINE or by running Win7 in a VM, under Linux, with all the safeguards against malware or corruption of the filing system that come built into Linux.

Spoken like someone who has never used a computer for anything that could not be done in a week's time with paper and pencil.

Computer graphics and animation. Audio editing (the high quality stuff, not mashing together lossy mp3s). Statistical analysis. To be brief, much of what is done today by many artists and small business owners. All of these are done measuably better on computers that do not waste resources on OS and GUI shiny distractions.

Why would anyone set window borders to 1 px wide? This sounds like a PIBKAC thing. (Oh dear. Did I just date myself?)

I have been using XFCE for several years.It comes with Studio Ubuntu, which also uses a kernel optimized for audio editing and CG rendering. My passion is CG, and if using XFCE helps to shave a half hour off a 10 hour rendering task, then you bet I'm going to use it.

Another benefit I have noticed is that I spend a lot less time messing about in the GUI time sinks. I look for an OS to provide a fast and economical way to get to the applications where I do my work. Code that supports fifty different ways to color the file manager screen is deadweight and frought with potential bugs, and I'm happy to be free of it.

A third benefit of XFCE: I am as susceptible to shiny distractions as the next guy, so I appreciate that XFCE has far fewer ways to wander off into the woods than KDE. There were a number of features in Gnome 2 that I miss, and if the Gnome 3 train wreck had not happened, I might never have moved to Studio Ubuntu and XFCE. Yet considering today's alternatives to XFCE, I have no regrets.

You said that very succinctly. Unfortunately it is also very wrong.

Read TFA again. The dark side (of Iapetus-- not the Force) is the side that is facing forward in its orbit.

May the Farce be with you.

That's no moon; that's half a binary planet.

"North" is a geocentric concept that can be projected outward upon the solar system.

That one is simple and easy since there is a clear consensus among Earth dwellers as to which way is north.

In other situations it can get more complicated, such as when projecting the egocentric concept of "Left" and "Right" outward from an individual point of view. The simplest case is when looking at a photo of Mutt and Jeff, and being told that Mutt is on the left. Even though when the photo was taken both Jeff would have said that Mutt was on his right side.

There are even greater problems when there is no consensus within the group. For instance, for a libtard "going to the Left" is definitely right, but "going to the Right" is clearly wrong, which is as succinct a summary of the state of USA politics as you can get. Well, except for the die hard Tea Partiers, where "Right" is always right, and "Left" is always wrong. But then after rejecting everything that is not right, all the Tea Partiers have left is right. Which is at best terribly confusing.

It was all so much simpler during the last American civil war, when everything was either North or South.

There is only the small problem of getting to court when NSA and FBI regulations come into play before the courts are involved. When those regulations stipulate that property can be confiscated, bank accounts can be frozen, and you could be turned out into the street with nothing more than the cash in your pocket, that is a powerful incentive to STFU and do whatever the Man says to do.

You may not have any effective allies, either, since there is nothing preventing your lawyer from being gifted with an NSL gives him a bad bit of conflict of interest wrt your case.

You seem to be unaware that Federal agency regulations are enforceable long before a situation can be brought before any court. The agencies have their own "courts" as defined by agency law, with their own means of encouraging cooperation. Such as confiscation of property, like all your computers and hard drives. And your cars. And your house. And your passport. Oh, and freezing your bank accounts.

It is all done according to their regulations, generally. The agencies are the ones who take the general guidelines given to them by directives of the Executive branch and/or laws of the Legislative branch and work them up into whatever regulations the agencies think would be most effective. That always means self-serving, to some extent. If you will notice, there is no mention in any of this about being innocent until proven guilty-- this is not court law, this is agency regulation.

It is a crappy system. It can be badly abused: J. Edgar Hoover. There needs to be reform. But this is so integral to the standing government-- all those agencies and bureaucrats who are unaffected by elections-- that reform is not going to happen anytime soon, and possibly not without bloodshed. And by the way, I'm a hippy leftest libtard, not a gun rights freak or anything like that.

Agency regulations come into play before courts are involved. When an agency regulation has a gag order preventing the victim from speaking to a court, then you have the kind of situation we now have in America with FISA, NSA, etc.

"But what good is a phone call if you have no mouth?" Agent Smith asked very quietly.

Is this the Dumb and Dumber show? Is slashdot in a mad race toward the lowest IQ that can still author a comment? Come on, guys, you are giving nerds and geeks a bad name.

You do realize it would take a thick book to document all the chemical changes that happen in a candle flame? (Everyone here has seen a candle flame at least once, right?) And that candle flame is a highly controlled burn.

So do you really think anyone can add a known fluorinated chemistry to a wild fire that is creating all kinds of products of incomplete combustion and have any idea how one of the most reactive elements in the periodic table is going to combine with who the hell knows what?

Of course no one knows what the chemical compositions of the stuff that is getting into the firefighters might be. All they can recover is the products after a second very complex set of chemical reactions; after whatever further reactions occur in the lungs or the blood or maybe the liver. At this point, even the portal of entry can only be guessed at. The environmental chemists have their work cut out for them on this one.

Well, yes, I live very well with on an income of $10,000/yr, barring a catastrophic health issue. I do so by being very careful about avoiding frivilous expenses. A one-time expense of $300 on top of a continued monthly expense that is only a few bucks less than what I am now paying doesn't work for me. But spending $300 now to avoid years of monthly payments would be a good deal.

I don't really need any faster access or greater bandwidth than what I now have. Yeah, I'd like those, but I'd also like a trip to Hawaii, a larger appartment, room for an infinite number of bookcases... Not going to happen.

Thank you for posting that. I think I had stopped reading when I hit the "$300 construction fee". That was a show-stopper, so why spend any more time on the thing?

Yeah, I would be interested in the $25/mo for 12 mo, then $0 for the next 6 years.

I'm disappointed that Portland did not make the cut this time. But I don't expect to directly benefit from Google's fiber anyway. I'm on a fixed income and the last I looked, Google would be more than I could afford.

That said, I expect that when Google does come to Portland that will force its competitors to sweeten their offerings. But maybe that will happen soon anyway, in an economic equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance.' If Google succeeds big time in these other cities, the providers already in the Portland market might realize that it would be advantageous to drop their rates and offer better packages now, and thus make Portland look like a less inviting market to Google.

Well, a couple of providers would also have to improve their customer and technical support (here's looking at you Comcast). But I'm sure they would sacrifice some of their excess profit margin if they felt the Google dragon breathing fire on their butts.

So I for one welcome our new google overlord. Even if he never comes completes the courtship ritual, he might put the fear of loss of market share in the boardrooms where it will do the most good.