Nice try, John.

oooh. someone "gets it". Finally.

Dang. In DoD contracting, everything has to be all serious. And they have to form some kind of aggressive acronym. Really gets tiresome.

It kept rising after 2004, because Greenspan stimulated the economy with a low FED rate. When it became obvious that the rates needed to be raised in 2004, they kept them low - likely to continue funding the war; which was not paid for by tax hikes or bonds, but but was paid for with debt. This overstimulated the economy (exactly what Keynes said NOT to do with stimulus spending), which is what really created the bubble. Irresponsible manipulation of monetary policy by the Bush administration. This is why Greenspan had to retire in disgrace. A disgusting legacy of greedy monetary policy manipulation for a generation and a half.

Oh I remember this, too; in 2007; and I kept imagining that housing demand will always go up, because we're always adding more people, right?

I was naive enough that I could never conceive that we'd get to a point in this nation where vacant, foreclosed houses outnumbered homeless people 4:1. I never dreamed that our trusted financial institutions and ratings agencies would sell their credibility and AAA ratings like a crackwhore sells her virtue. Yet, post 2008 - the banks were willing to sit on empty, depreciating inventory, rather than let their fellow americans sleep indoors under a roof. Disgusting. I learned a lot since 2007.

But I'm pretty sure that when the next crash comes, everybody's going to act all surprised like they didn't see it coming, and though it could never happen like that again.

yes; it was called the "New Economy". A term that should be remembered for generations, in infamy. Like Hitler.

Yet - people still refer to the "New Economy" as a thing; instead of as a grim reminder of how we create buzzwords to fool ourselves into believing that "it really is different this time, and we are really a special flower."

no. More like
"There's a sucker born every minute" - David Hannum

It could be argued (and has) that "Smart TV" features, are a value-add for the manufacturer, not the consumer. (because those very features are used to generate revenue, and are not particularly useful to the end-user).

The only real benefit to the end-user is if they're too dumb or lazy to hook up a Roku or other cheap streaming device (or whatever). In fact; I found my Samsung's menus and apps to be so ridiculously slow and poorly designed, that those features are basically unusable. (example: get up in the morning, turn on TV to watch something while I eat breakfast: TV takes at least 60 seconds before Netflix app can even be selected (please wait, the TV is starting up), then another 30 seconds to START the program, then another 30 seconds to display, pick, and enter the profile - OMG-Teh LAG!; we're all used to Netflix taking about 5-10 seconds to fire up the stream of your selected program, plus the remote is shitty, is very sensitive about direction pointing, weird button placement, poor battery life. . . if I instead use the Roku, it's literally 5 seconds to get into where I'm picking the program, the remote has a simple, intelligent layout, and doesn't particularly care if it's pointed perfectly at the device).

As far as "Smart TV" features go, I think it's just this year's "3d" (which, also, nobody wanted.)

IMO: it is the "major distros" (ie. We'll just call it "RedHat" and "Ubuntu" for now. . . ); who have been poor stewards of what are actually very influential segments of the Linux market. Spreadsheet jockeys who were clearly not "technical" - at these companies, made these decisions. To the detriment of the entire community. These guys are invested in their quarterly bonus check. Not the overall success or failure of Linux. They have their corporate accounts, with money rolling in. Like Microsoft, and sorta like Apple. They give no fucks about the people who actually use the system.

I don't see Pottering as the problem. Unless he has a mind-control ray that works on the fat fucks at RedHat and Canonical. Or; unless he's an NSA plant, and RedHat is paid-off by the US Government, and Canonical paid off by GHCQ. And while that's wildly speculative and crazy sounding, I think that at it's root, the problem with Systemd, is that admins and developers do not TRUST that Systemd is their tool. It's a Tool that's foisted on them by the vendor - and bundled with all the other "free" stuff they were used to getting. In that regard, this is really the quintissential RMS argument. But then again, I think RMS's advice was that everyone should be running BSD anyway. Fuk da man.

I will confirm this:

My Samsung's CPU seems to be something well-below that of a low-end smartphone. It literally takes 5 minutes to fire up the Neftlix App. It's so bad, that I stream it from my Roku instead.

Now: it doesn't take a LOT of processing power to do onboard speech recognition. Just quite a bit more than is available on your typical "low power" processors that you find on phones and appliances. A low-end desktop will do just fine. (in fact, I can remember when Apple added speech recognition to it's desktop line back in the early 1990's. They were capable of limited dictionaries that worked well for opening and closing apps, clipboard operations, etc - - - just not dictation. Dictation involves a broader dictionary, and special software with the statistical models, and the hardware to process them quickly. Still not terribly difficult on midrange desktops of the 1990's.

A lot of older guys are not particularly worried about the fertility bit.

Prostate enlargement, on the other hand. . .

That said; IBM has made itself largely irrelevant now for at least the past 5 years, if not longer - especially after they sold their desktop and laptop business to Lenovo. They gambled on a core part of their business that was already dead, and sold off their best assets.

Part of this was that. They didn't catch the wave of mobile computing.

The other part of this is that; believe it or not, this economy is headed for a steep nose-dive. Again. I know most of us have felt that it never came out of the last recession. But the past two years, we've seen parts of the economy doing like gangbusters, and other parts just falling on it's face. And just in the last 4 months, we saw the bottom drop out of the oil market due to weak demand. That's a signal. Not that there's a massive oil-production conspiracy (I'm not saying there isn't) - but that demand is falling because the economy is failing. We're seeing it in the 9% drop in CS grad starting salaries. We're seeing it in the mass layoff at IBM. I'm seeing it in my company. (last year's results were shitty: we basically made no money at all for the year.) Virtually nobody I know is doing well, money-wise, or job wise. It actually feels worse than 2008.

Excel has a very stubborn and evil UI bug. It's been there forever, and it appears that MS has no intention of ever fixing it, or ever giving users an option to suppress the behavior. Ever try to scroll a large document, and you'll see what I mean. It is impossible to scroll by half-cells (or >1 cell). It's very annoying, especially when you have cells which contain a paragraph or two of text, and makes it almost impossible to navigate without losing your place as you're reading a spreadsheet. The other really horrible issue is that tab-names can only be llike 15 characters. If you need a more descriptive name for tabs, well, then, fuck you.

Tizen on smartwatches does have some pretty good battery life.

Apps?

Not so much.

Also - samsung writes SHITTY UI's.

I use an S5. I don't hate it.

I used to use a Samsung DVD player - I actually loved that thing.

I was slightly less impressed with the GG2. (running Tizen).

I am appalled and horrified by their absolutely craptastic "SmartHub" system on their TV. Not sure if it's Tizen-based, but it's really, really bad.