High-end Xeon, ~900 times as many transistors. Quad-core i7, only ~300. What makes you so certain that the instruction decode has not grown significantly in size since that first very minimal implementation on the Pentium Pro?

The load is not demanding, but RAID-1 (at least) on the boot device is required, because it's remotely managed, so the "warm standby" approach is not acceptable for the boot disk.

Yeah, but ZFS with 2-disk parity does me no good for the system disk, since OS X will not boot from it. (And proprietary hardware "RAID-in-a-box" is something that I will not accept anymore.)

Memory, yes. But changing the hard disk was not a task for ordinary mortals. (Been there, done that.)

What concerns me is the lack of any mention of dual-drive configurations. If I can't mirror the boot drive, then it just became much less useful as a small server.

That's true, and it's also worth noting that all the complex addressing modes of CISC limit how many registers you can have. (Because you use bits for the addressing modes which could otherwise be used for register numbers.) So limited numbers of registers is not just a historical accident of CISC which can be easily fixed; for a given instruction size, a CISC design can address fewer registers than a RISC design.

But it's not even the whole story. Once you go superscalar and start dispatching multiple instructions per clock, it becomes really import to have fixed-length instructions, so that's another big problem with CISC.

And yet, they still have to deal with variable-length instructions, which means they still have to decode multiple possible instructions in parallel and throw some out, which still imposes a significant overhead in terms of transistor count. Intel won the CPU wars in spite of the x86 architecture, not because of it--they outdid everybody else on process.

Yes, there most certainly is a reason to do so--to affect the balance of power between the parties.

Prior to 2012, I always evaluated candidates individually. The last two elections, no. The last two elections, I felt it was more important to try to send a message to the Republican party about continuing to nominate idiots obsessed with irrelevant outdated right-wing religious beliefs.

No, smartypants, a couple of hours west of there...

Wow. It is still early in my time zone, but wow. Did I really just post that???

I'm 51 years old. I "matured" into a fiscal conservative a long ago. I registered to vote when I turned 18, and have voted in every election since.

In 2012, and now again in 2010, I am voting a straight Democratic ticket. What the Republican party has become, makes me sick.

Certainly. Located near already-existing high-kW/mW power sources, as in near malls or office parks...

Not beyond the realm of possibility, no. But requiring not just new wiring into your house, but probably new wiring of an entirely new kind, at higher voltage, with specificallly-designed safety measures in terms of conduit, how it's routed, protection against touching contacts, and so on.

I did read it, and disagreed with it. $800 is not a "fairly modest" hobby. It's not a hobby at all ;-)

Nope. Anyone who won't spend $800 does not even have a hobby...

Sure, now with a century's worth of time passed, and significant advances in DC power electronics over the past couple of decades...