Sounds like you need this if you want to blow $200 for a real desktop like system. Sure some emedded uses would call for an atom.

For building robots and doing simple things an ARM is fine and most importantly cheap! Folks still use XP machines with 512 megs of ram and cpus not much faster to this day. Postgresql, php, image recognition, and other clients tools ran fine on a pentium III. He'll Debian demoed a 1000 users with apache on a 75 mhz pentium back in the day!

These are not made to run VMware and virtual ized oses and video editing and compiling code. That's what a workstation like my i7 is for.

You know plenty of XP boxes which represent up to % 15 of us Internet users work just fine with 512 megs.

People everyday use word, excel, video editing, and a few tabs in IE 8 just fine with it. I think it's plenty for a hobbyist board. Also Intel makes $200 atom based pie based devices too with USB 3 and hdmi and more ram if you want power. Folks these are $49! That is the appeal for a cheap hacking board. $200 is a little much to goof with in comparison

Alpha doesn't exist anymore. RIP.

In 1999 it was hot and had all sorts of apps that were essential. CS majors loved them. For $3000 they could have their own but couldn't run games. It could do excel, word, visual studio, java, and Unix stuff with FreeBSD or Linux (I was in BSD camp back then). It could trounce a highly priced x86 in it's price range.

But yes it was niche for artists, hackers, and engineers. Carly Fiona killed it. Part of it came back to live with the AMD AthlonXPs and Athlons MPs which creamed the Pentium IVs. Really it was so much DEC you could swap the alpha and Athlon CPUs a decade ago!

Or Carly Fiona wanted Itanium instead.

The market was hot for ALPHA. My community college used them and Slashdot was using them as well in the turn of the century. They ran Windows and IE 6 for internet terminals and classroom labs. $3000 got you a powerful workstation that ran Linux and Windows with Office and Visual Studio and Office. True games were lacking outside Quake 3.

But Compaq bought DEC which HP bought and Carly Fiona pillaged. Rest in peace alpha.

They also purposedly crippled the chip to make it slow to sell more Itaniums.

MS from day 1 with NT was never use x86 as the main CPU.

This was to prevent another crappy DOS or Windows 95 quirky OS optimized and insecure with buffer overflows and optimizations for just x86 instead of portable C libraries.

NT was made for the mips in 1993, not x86 (later backported). This tradition continued and ARM makes sense for the server room.

Most apps are database driven or network specific and are I/O bottlenecked. Not CPU. A java servlet does a query and waits 10 million cpu cycles (exaggeration) waiting for Oracle to get the data from the spinning pile of rust and then process etc.

ARM makes sense in this as it saves money in power and customers are less needy with x86 compatibility there vs the desktop.

The history NT is really a fear of what happened to the crappy DOS based operating systems such as Windows.

NT from day 1 was purposedly not made x86 as the main cpu as people used assembler more in those days and MS management knew it would loose its portability and later security by having x86 hacks and direct memory calls in the kernel etc.

So NT 3.1 was made for the MIPS first on SGI then backported to x86. This continued to PowerPC in 1990s with NT 3.51 and NT 4 and later Alpha with Windows 2000. Itanium was made target which is why Balmer demoed Server 2003 on it first as x86 was not ready.

Today it is ARM. Actually it is very smart engineering wise to do this.

We all hate MS on Slashdot as it is the pro Unix anti MS site since the 1990s so it is a given here. But really portability was never a problem and it iw as not a dumb move.

In the long term ARM and low power cpus make sense for things like Database where I/O and not cpu is the bottleneck. Even in Java servelts and .NET app servers it is waiting for data() from the spinning piles or rust to fill a query more than the CPU.

The only thing is ARM loses its lower power qualities as soon as it does more and you add more things to it like virtualization, FPUS, etc.

IE has for 5 years now. Oh your comparing a 13 year old version when Mozilla and even Opera required quirks and hacks? Yeah real fair comparison. IE 6 was more standards compliant than Netscape and Mozilla 1.0 anyday. Compare a modern browsers

Because Americans don't appreciate telling them which car to buy

I just read this on Facebook which will turn your brain into mush . People really believe that scientists who believe go are radical socialists with funding from Soros. After all the majority are democrats! Problem is this is mainstream as we all know we ascended into communism when Clinton was elected ... rolls eyes. It would not be an issue if just 10% believed this. Not 45% of all Americans

No rite Aid thinks with nfc there are now 0 barriers to entry brick and mortar as a million Internet companies can compete some outside the US where drugs are cheaper. Nfc is another way to make it easier.

What's wrong with Emacs folks?

That was under Sinofsky. He was fired.

He wanted to take advantage of old middle aged users afraid of change to get used to it so they will all stick with Windows Phone after being broken in.

MS is on the right step. The feedback tool and not re leasing isos and instead forcing updates to as many users as possible shows they are listening.

Returning the start menu and un-fullscreening applets shows it is paying attention. Tablet and hybrid users get a metroized big left start menu and screen which you can turn off.

I am waiting for it's return and more sane not all blinding white and borderless pastel colors. Tabs in explorer not implemented yet either.

It is a badass Rockstar technology

That is why hipsters love it as a bad ass Rockstar technology.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b...