It's funny, because the great comment/discussion you're talking about has been going downhill for a very long time. Just look at the first post on this topic, for a case in point.

That's not an unreasonable comparison... a growing number of Hindus actually believe that the many gods of Hinduism are all aspects of a single god, and there are even some who practice a sort of mixed bag where, nominally, they're Hindu and celebrate Hindu festivals like Diwali, but are also Christian, and celebrate Christian festivals like Christmas.

Computer sales in general are dipping across the board, because there's less reason to consider upgrading. Unless you count cell phone/tablet, many if not most of the people reading this probably haven't bought a new primary computing device in years. Heck, I'm typing this on a 3 year old laptop that is still running as well as it was the day I bought it. I have absolutely no reason to consider upgrading it until I start seeing hardware failures, and that could be another few years.

10 years ago, each new generation brought huge improvements in overall user experience/speed. Today, they're incremental at best, and most of the improvements that are being seen in the desktop/laptop markets are to do with power consumption, rather than actual speed improvements. Sure, buying a laptop which will run for 8 hours is better than that 3 year old laptop whose battery lasts 2.5 hours, is it *enough* of an upgrade to make it worth buying a new one? For most of us, no. Case in point: I'm using an inverter that I bought 6 years ago, rather than buying a new laptop with a longer-lasting battery right now (cellular data, too... in the back seat of a car that's travelling 100km/h through the countryside). Sure it's one more gadget to carry, it's still a lot cheaper than a new laptop which wouldn't give me any other improvement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattro_(four-wheel-drive_system)

Audi's system delivers drive shaft energy to all 4 wheels... they aren't simply free spinning wheels.

That said, Subaru has been doing All Wheel Drive for 10 years longer than Audi. They started offering it in consumer models in 1972, while Audi didn't even introduce it to their rally cars until 1980, consumer models were a few years after that. You can still buy 2-wheel drive Audis, but all Subaru models come with AWD now, and have for almost 20 years. Both Audi Quattro ans the Subaru AWD system deliver 50:50 power distribution to front/rear (60:40 on cars with automatic), with limited slip differentials to transfer power to wheels that have traction.

They don't have locking diff, which you'd want for getting out of the bog when you're off-road, but they're great for on-road conditions, even with limited traction. I've had a Subaru of some sort for years, currently a 2011 Impreza, and it's great, especially on snow/icy roads.

He wanted to try to match it in form factor as well as performance. And yes, that led to some incredibly stupid choices for his design. If he was willing to go with a grey box form factor, he could have gotten a bigger than mATX motherboard, and found something for less which had all of the functionality he wanted. He could also have found a cheaper (but larger form factor) power supply that also would have met all of his needs. In this case, he's paying extra for the form factor.

When comparing point for point against the Apple, that makes sense, actually. But when you don't really care about the physical size of the beast you're making (such as in a business case), then he could have done it for a lot cheaper. He even pointed out, in his own article, that he bought a pair of $3500 video cards (that's $7000 on video cards alone) because Apple had gone with AMD, even though the NVidia would probably have been a better choice for video editing (and a *lot* cheaper, too).

Don't think it's fair to count Android devices as Linux, given that it's a very closed platform and doesn't have any of the basic functionality that most of us expect from a desktop operating system.

Though given the direction Microsoft and Apple seem to want to go with their desktop systems... maybe in a couple of years it'll be a fair comparison. :)

Because most of the alternatives to Javascript suck more.

So submit it as a wishlist to those vendors.

Personally, it seems redundant, when the guest OS has its own firewall built-in (we're talking about XP, right?), the host OS has its own software firewall, and I have a hardware firewall. You're asking for an application-level firewall in addition to all of these.

Insert picture of that guy from Pimp My Ride....

You're wrong. Every single one you listed has the ability to set up a LAN between VM's without bridging that LAN to the Internet. They're configured out of the box to allow Internet access through NAT, because that's what most people using a VM want with it, but it's trivial to set up a non-bridged LAN between VM's. You can even allow the host to connect to that LAN so it can access shared services while still preventing the VMs themselves from accessing the 'Net.

If you want a VM to access your external LAN without accessing the Internet itself? That's a different story, but that's a firewall configuration thing, not a VM thing. And if you *really* can't figure out how to configure your firewall for that, just install a 2nd NIC in the host system, and bridge the VM to that. Once you've done that, you can take care of the rest at a physical connections level instead of software.

Two questions asked, two answers given --

1st -- Some XP software won't run on Windows 7 because the software was not written to be compliant with Microsoft's published security standards. Stuff that's compliant with the standards runs, stuff that isn't compliant, and which relies on some undocumented feature/bug, may or may not run. Or did you mean ActiveX controls? That's a completely different animal, and can still be made to run on a Windows 7 system with the help of XP Mode. You may also want to ask your web designer why they haven't updated the design/layout in 10 years.

2nd -- People haven't upgraded their XP systems because of opportunity cost. Either you need to worry about updating your ActiveX-based corporate intranet to work on a modern browser, or you have to worry about the cost of purchasing a new set of licenses for a more recent version of Windows. While I could forgive a large corporation which may have to pay tens of millions of dollars to upgrade (though my own company has already upgraded its 85,000 employees' systems to Win7), I have a harder time forgiving a home user whose cost would be effectively nil if they were to purchase a new(er) computer. You don't even have to buy a *new* computer any more to get Windows 7 -- it's been out for long enough that I've seen computers in used computer store or on kijiji for the $50 range which would be an upgrade to anything that was sold with XP, and which come with Windows 7 as well. The savings in electricity alone from such an upgrade would probably pay for that within a year -- remember that while the P4 did boast speeds at 3.4GHz, they did it by using several times the electricity that a modern i3 or i5 uses for the same clock speed.

And the re-buy existing software argument doesn't wash. At the absolute worst case scenario, they can run it in XP Mode, which is a full fledged virtual machine which can run anything that ran on XP.

And Windows XP users can switch to Linux too.... it's been a very long time since I've seen a piece of software that runs on Windows XP that doesn't run on WINE as well... a lot of it runs better on WINE, actually. And for that tiny handful of programs that don't run on WINE? You can run an XP VM, with no network access...

I'm pretty sure you can still find 'em... this one for example is on sale this week, for damn near netbook prices. Yes, it's about $100 more than most netbooks cost, but it's in the price range of a midrange tablet, and it has a keyboard.

If you prefer something cheaper, you could, you know, buy a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard for less.

And failing that, there are always chromebooks. That was my plan for my next ultraportable... buy a 13" chromebook, wipe the drive, and install my Linux of choice....