So, you could build a battle tank or an F1 car with cheaper alternative parts, like.. the engine and wheels off my old Mustang. No matter how much hand waving you do, the scrap metal I bolt on the side is not the same as reactive armor.

If you need the uptime assurance that Xeon, ECC, FireGL whatever provide, then using desktop grade components is not the same thing, and you aren't fooling anybody actually in the market for those things.

Whoa, I thought you were going to say something about the Xeon and ECC memory. What exactly is highly unusual about the video card and number of cores?

This thing is built with server grade equipment, so my wild guess is that means they intended it to have very long uptime, and again, what's highly unusual about that in a high end workstation?

Look, we don't all need to drive tanks to work, but some do. The rest of us don't need to play the "I could build a tank for less, but without the turbine engine, armor, or tracks" game. Well, you can do that, but they are just going to be laughed at by the people that drive tanks, and what else matters...

At some point it IS the fault of the RedHats, the Oracles, the Canonicals, the SUSEs etc. for not attracting ISVs.

Or, if nobody is trying, what's the point of laying blame elsewhere?

Why don't we have command lines... with GUIs?

Like your slideshow example, there are plenty of cases where you have a command line interface to something that's easier to understand visually, or a graphical interface to something that could also be driven quickly via command interface. Yes, even low level system tasks like drilling down into directory structures using the most space, or working with historical performance analysis and statistics is more efficient with visual feedback.

Hey, look at any modern first person shooter game, point and click graphical interface, AND an interactive console. 'nuff said.

I feel bad for people who see this simply as an either/or subject, we should be looking for progress not clinging to old ways, just because.

Dowry is messed up, but I think they'd use cash, household items, and even animals before bitcoin.

"Bitcoin: When you have nothing better to trade."

Why are you attacking this guy, A DELIVERY DRIVER? He wasn't complaining about his job, he's DOING IT. He's just the fucking messenger, moron, please post pics of lazy UPS drivers snacking at Krispy Kreme's if you have em. Fuck you, asshole.

Since when is wishful thinking +Insightful?

And your point would be... what?

If your spouse does it, you what, fire them?

Welcome to the complex world of diplomacy.

I dispute your assertion that a market cannot both be efficient and have people complaining about it.
Further, I believe lots of things can be dumb and efficient, like plants. /goodnight

I didn't read TfA, but from TfS, none of what you said would solve this problem, or a better way to put it is they all could have actually taken place to a reasonable degree.

Is it generally expected or practical to test combinations of versions of the same software in a cluster? Only automated testing could catch a problem like that, and you'd need a simulated production workload.
A "reasonable" development environment would NEVER reach that far. That is a very above average QA environment.

Of course everybody would LOVE to have that, but I doubt that is widely considered a best practice.

At the other end, a monitoring system should have flagged the condition where all nodes are not running the same revision, and discovered new nodes automatically.

Another big "nice to have".

Sure they could have taken measures to prevent this kind of problem, I'm not disputing that, but to generalize the problem as no change management, peer review.... um, no sir.

Well that's one way of looking at it for the "government is out to get us" crowd, another is that the U.S. Congress sometimes intends to protect Unites States assets from those almost mythical "not-the-United-States" places out there that the former crowd seem to be oblivious to.

I'm not for or against protectionist policies in general, but all this "big X and the gub'mint are conspiring against us" blather that paints things as "X got what they wanted therefore it's BAD FOR US", that's just really stupid reasoning.

You are completely deluded, if people had to buy new i-devices every year or two, Apple investors would be happy as clams and packing more money in.

Apple's problem IS that you don't have to buy a new one every year, so they will need to keep making/breaking into new markets.

I have no idea what your idea of obsolescence is, but you can't really grow a business by just making things like hammers... you have to invent screwdriver 2.0 eventually even if it makes hammers look so "yesterday".

You're implying that a distinction between the two is "MOB RULE" while the electoral college process is "MOB RULE". Ask a democrat in Texas if it ain't so! That's also a state where electors have no legal requirements to vote as pledged, they just do.

One distinction is a state _could_ ignore the popular will of its constituents. "NOT MOB RULE" to paraphrase you. They don't, do they? Could you give practical examples of a need to do so?
You can write it in scary caps all you want, it doesn't change the fact that it's what we have today, it follows the principles of democracy.

Another is states are granted electors based on the size of their congressional delegation. Meaning for one thing that regardless of the number of constituents, they get two electors for their two senators. This weights your vote a bit state-by-state, but hardly makes it undemocratic.

FYI to readers - this dreck boils down to state rights issues and silly wordplay to [dis]associate our form of government with the names of political parties. The United States of America is a representative democracy AND a republic. The electoral college is a compromise between the will of the people and the will of the states.

It's probably a good thing, but not for the bat-shit insane reasons like "it protects your liberty."
Be wary of arguments for state power that put you vs. federal government. It's like your cable company running whining ads "blah blah wont reach an agreement with us so in a few weeks so you will lose these channels" trying to pull you into THEIR problem. States have senators to represent them. They are HALF of congress.

Well where do you think new ideas come from?

Do you think they take "regular" people and plant them in the ground, water them with miracle grow or something? So if they didn't grow in Apple soil, it doesn't count?

Really, I'm trying to figure out the logic behind this, like how a company known to boast of its innovation is expected to grow talented employees on trees.
Apple is not THAT good, you are really showing your insecurities.