I understand and respect that point of view. But I'm not sure there are enough of us Sony and MS haters to sustain the business model - any more than there are enough of us Sony and MS haters to make DRM-free films the norm or Linux the dominant desktop operating system.

I think it may be a tough sell:
1. The Xbox One and PS4 are established gaming consoles with known names. This is new.
2. The Xbox One and PS4 have a big array of well known and popular titles available on it with interfaces designed specifically for use with a console remote. This game has very few, and lots of Android games not designed to work with a console remote. You need an internet connection to set up a game and to play, but you don't need a high speed connection during play to stream most of the content.
3. The Xbox One and PS4 have 500GB of storage - which is pathetic, considering how cheap a 2TB hard drive is these days. But 500GB sure beats 16GB.
4. The Xbox One and PS4 can play DVDs and Blu Rays. This can't. It can stream them, but the number of potential buyers with home media centers and their entire movie collection ripped for streaming is almost certainly much smaller than the number of potential buyers with DVDs and Blu Ray disks.

On the other hand:
1. This thing is cheaper.
2. If their game streaming service doesn't suck and the pricing is good, the game selection becomes way more attractive. It's still, so far, not as good as on one of the lead consoles. But I have to admit that spending, say, $10 or $15 per month to access to 30+ games looks more appealing than spending $50 or $60 per game even though the latter can be cheaper if you don't buy that many games over the life of the console.
3. Eventually I think most people - especially kids just entering the workforce now or in the next few years - may get out of the habit of buying DVDs and Blu Rays entirely and keep their entire movie collection in Vudu/Amazon Prime/Google Play/iTunes/whatever, in which case the lack of a drive is irrelevant. I have 300-odd DVDs (most purchased used), but I'm an old bastard.

That document is from 2010. So are the other web links about this. What evidence do we have the current published CPU benchmarks still unfairly give an advantage to Intel?

Seconded. I'm a near rabid AMD fan, so I'd like to see this. But I'm not finding any results to substantiate it.

I think for very cheap machines, if you take the cost difference between an AMD CPU + motherboard vs. Intel CPU + motherboard and put that cost difference into an SSD while the Intel box still has a traditional hard drive, then AMD is a good value.

And in fact, that's what I did with my wife's most recent computer. AMD A8-7600 + 12GB of RAM + 120GB SSD. Extremely cheap and it can still play Minecraft and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 for my sons.

But if you were going to get an SSD anyway, plus 6+GB of RAM (more for a power user or developer or someone doing video editing or virtualization), then I agree with you. Paying the extra $100 to go from an $80 AMD "APU" to a $120 Intel i3-4160 and compatible motherboard will pay off in spades. Even the $70 Pentium dual core 50 watt G3258 kills any AMD processor this side of the overclocked 220 watt FX series chips for single-threaded performance.

It's also real life imitating art, because the protagonist of Charles Stross' novel Accelerando ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) uses this technique and becomes persona non-grata in the US. The book came out in 2005.

Good point. I did mean to include that under the inferior and inadequate solutions options, but of course it does complicate things because finding a technical solution that works that also has your preferred combination of license and contributor license agreement is much harder than just creating a technical solution that works.

I have a 1055T (not trying to one-up you) and a Radeon 5770. It worked fine for Windows 7 when I had it, but I had bought Win7 retail so when my wife's Windows XP install croaked I bought an SSD for her machine and put the Win7 install on that, and since then I've run Linux full time.

Try mosh, if you haven't already. :)

No mods, openjdk. Someone else pointed out elsewhere that the problem may be the open source AMD drivers.

The Anonymous Coward a few posts back pointed that out to me already. I forgot the third possibility - that my fourteenth standard is at best no better than the best of the thirteen others and I have just made the situation worse. You and he or she are correct about that, and I'm sorry I didn't include it in my list of options.

Good luck. If you're familiar with Red Hat and CentOS, then Fedora may work too. I have Ubuntu on one machine and Fedora on another. I like a lot of Linux distributions, but I try to use the most mainstream ones so that if a casual Linux user among my friends or family has a question, I have up to date experience with something close to their setup.

You can also do that with the systemd journal. Where's the problem?

Systemd is more work for you, someone with a broad depth of expertise in SysV init and shell scripts. For someone new to both, systemd is less work and provides all of the same features and advantages. Lennart Poettering is not a Red Hat executive or a Fedora guidance committee chairman - he and his team got systemd adapted by Fedora, then OpenSUSE, then Arch, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then CentOS based only on its technical merits.

I have encountered all of that information too. However, the situation has been improving. I can't say how much of that improvement is due to AMD and how much is due to open source developers that are good at reverse engineering. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... Also, I had those Minecraft crashes on Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10, and 15.04 alpha - that article I linked has kernel 3.18 (same as Ubuntu 15.04 alpha), Mesa 10.5-devel (15.04 alpha has 10.4.something), and open source radeon driver 7.4.99 (15.04 has 7.4.0). Maybe if I compiled my own driver and mesa I would get better stability, but I can't be sure.

I'm an AMD fan from way back because of the monopoly tricks Intel pulled in the late 1990s early 2000s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... ) - I figure Intel has the money and resources to put towards open source today because of the advantage they unfairly gained due to tricks then.