The first gen Conroe Core 2 chips apparently used a similar design trick. It was after all primarily a return to the Pentium III core with a die shrink and some tweaks to support EMT64. Intel was scrambling to recover from the wasteful detour of the Pentium IV. It might have taken them one more gen before the redesign for full 64-bit ALUs - I don't remember anymore.

That laptop has a mobile consumer Pentium III. I'm pretty sure it didn't have PAE. Even so, it booted from USB, which used the standard DVD image, dd'd to the USB key. Not the same release admittedly ... but I didn't see anything indicating they had relaxed the PAE reqt. for Mint 13 Maya.

Yeah, I recently installed the most recent Linux Mint LTS (13 Maya) on a 12 year old laptop. It wouldn't boot from the CDs of older releases (presumably because it couldn't handle overburned CDs with more than 640MB). But I was able to use a Plop boot CD to boot from an old 1GB flash drive using the laptop's lone USB 1.1 port. So even without a PXEBoot server setup, there are still some options.

It was true for the first generation or two of Intel chips that supported AMD's 64-bit extensions. It hasn't been true for quite a while though.

Maybe he meant as on "order of magnitude" difference. But yeah, it's not an obvious thing.

Estimation usually involves combining a lot of rough guesses/factors together, using addition, multiplication, and other arithmetic operations. It's use as a process/data entry check is seriously limited if it also requires manual entry into a calculator.

Yep. There are lots of people with no running water and no electricity who have a phone.They charge them up using solar panels, car batteries, or get them charged at stores.

Interfaces between the human brain and tools are prone to human error like typing mistakes. 20th century physicists used to practice exercises in estimation trying to get answers within an order of magnitude. They usually didn't bother putting pen to paper for that check but did it mentally. It was a useful technique to double check that the real, accurate calculation wasn't subject to a processing/entry error. Yes, you would still find the mistake eventually without that check, but you would waste lots of time and effort before you did so. I don't see that calculating instruments have significantly changed that.

Apparently you can get charged with money laundering though.

Seriously, you expect us to believe that you got tutored by Feynman in quantum mechanics for the double slit experiment, but that you can't figure out that the orientation of mirror reversal is due to the horizontal alignment of binocular vision (a trivial optics problem)? Bad troll.

Yeah, it sure does sound like somebody with an agenda trying to establish an unsupported equivalence between religious dogma based on belief and scientific theories developed to explain a diverse body of factual observations. Cue "evolution is just a theory" wilful ignoramuses.

You've deviated from the original point of your GGGP post. My reply is that you should use tools optimized for the tasks you perform, and with computers, the operating system's HCI model is very much a functional part of the system. Screwdrivers can be used to hammer in nails, and hammers can drive in screws (very poorly), but it's better to use the appropriate tools for the job. You shouldn't expect to use the tools and skills optimized for content consumption to carry over for content creation. Portions of the hardware may be general purpose (although even that's debatable as mobile processors are optimized for low power consumption whereas desktop components don't have the same power constraints and tend to be optimized for performance), but the O/S HCI shouldn't be. You don't use a shovel to dig a swimming pool, and a backhoe is overkill for tilling a vegetable garden.

But the difference between the UI of a tablet and the UI of a desktop PC is a matter of software, not hardware.

So touchscreens are a common and primary form of input for desktops? Never mind. However I see your (new) point regarding adding a keyboard and mouse to a tablet (presumably via Bluetooth, although I suppose you might be able to use a powered USB hub with some tablets). Yes, Windows is proprietary system created by a for-profit corporation which chooses to enforce market segmentation to maximize profits. They've been doing it, and been publicly lambasted for it for at least 20 years, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. If you want to use your tablet as a desktop for content creation, you could always wipe Windows 8.1 from your tablet and switch to a Linux distribution, or perhaps re-size/re-partition storage and dual boot. Ideally Windows would present a Metro interface in tablet mode, and detect when you are plugged in to a keyboard/mouse/screen dock and automatically switch to a desktop UI. Microsoft have chosen to not do what is best for their users (provide flexibility) to make up for the fact that they are years behind competing mobile O/S solutions in developing mobile apps by artificially pumping up the market for Metro apps for developers. Caveat Emptor.

The analogy works very well. Shovels and backhoes have very different user interfaces, even though they both shovel dirt. But you use them for qualitatively different things. You use the shovel to do some gardening in your backyard. But if you decide to put in a swimming pool in, you're quickly going to find out that the shovel isn't going to cut it. And if you realize you need a backhoe, you're either going to need someone skilled to drive it, or you're going to need to pick up a whole new set of skills to control it than the ones you learned for gardening with the shovel.

Tablets, smartphones, and desktops all are general purpose computers that process electronic data. Tablets and phones are devices primarily optimized for media/content consumption. In terms of functional complexity and data entry volume, that is a qualitatively different task than that of the typical uses of content creation/manipulation for business desktops/users. The simplified UI that is a boon for the former, is a dragging anchor for the latter.

The thing is of course that MS doesn't want to maintain two UIs and developers don't want to have to support/develop two GUIs for their apps. MS wants everybody to move to managed code in Metro ASAP so that they can sunset and kill the classic desktop yesterday.

Clearly we need to replace all backhoes with Aliens-style power loaders that can handle giant shovels. Open pit mining? Really big power loaders and really big shovels.