If I understand it correctly, I would be able to power on, fix or reimage my home desktops/laptops while at work or away on a trip. Or fix my moms crashed computer from half way around the globe. And, since all communication is authenticated with a TLS certificate, there is little danger of other taking over my hardware.

I understand people's right to be paranoid or want 100% open systems, and hope that appropriate choices remain available. But even for most Linux kernel developers a failsafe way to repair an unbootable system from remote is a good thing.

Is install Linux on your "Windows NT" workstation and emulate Ctrl-Alt-Del login screen? Or insert a little keylogger between keyboard and computer's USB port? Or hide a little camera in light fixture of the ceiling to snoop on your password? Or just to a little old fashioned shoulder surfing?

Best realize that your password is vulnerable to a determined attacker and practice defense in depth.

Nothing wrong with that. I bought a new system from nixsys about a month ago so that I can play old Windows 98 games on a system made from mostly new components. Personally, I love Apple trackpad for use on both OSX and Windows. But early mouse systems 3 button mice with a special metal pad also had amazing and reliable precision, unlike modern optical mice where you constantly have to worry about having perfect surface or suffering from little slips when you move them around.

FCC will not stop a moron staying in one of hotel rooms (or say appartments) sending disconnect packets to everyone around them. The only solution is to secure your network from trivial sabotage and applicable standards are readily available. Why waste time policing the hotel itself when every one of it's guests can do the same thing and worse?

Integrated graphics in your CPU will have a modest performance but stable and open source OpenCL driver. If it proves too slow for your particular project, you will be able to compare benchmarks and get the cheapest card that is fast enough to, say, run your animation at 60fps. If you are planning to distribute your code, you will anyway need several GPUs to test with.

However, you can not force other people to keep supporting your preferred alternative. Either contribute patches or pay RedHat or another commercial provider whatever is worth their time to maintain the alternatives for you. You want shell script-based init to tinker with your system, right? Well...

Android enhancements have been merged into Linux kernel, and it had solution to this problem for years. Time to support sandboxing in userland of mainstream Linux distributions. Then Steam can reset its own data all it wants, but can not harm the rest of the system. Nobody is taking away your freedom to give appropriate permissions to system administration tools, but you don't usually want games to administer your system.

In Silicon valley, this is the store to visit if you miss the original spirit of Radio Shark or Fry's. I came to San Mateo when I was ready to make a new gaming rig. The last one I assembled ran Windows 95 and I had no idea about new standards or merits of different components. After many years getting my personal life and career in order I finally had a little time for hobbies once again. The lady who helped me was very knowledgeable of which components would help me stay within in a budget and what exactly will work with given games and operating systems. There was no hurry during the process that took nearly an hour, or aggressive upsell for things I didn't need. Any other big stores did not have this friendliness to hobbyists for ages, if ever.

The only thing is missing is a place that sells more basic components like capacitors and resistors and tables with soldering items and breadboards to assemble electronics. Something like "Color me mine", but for electronics rather than ceramics. At least one store would do great in Bay Area.

Success in pretty much every field depends on brilliance, enthusiasm and perseverance in roughly equal measure. If you have 2 out of 3, you will probably earn a good living. It's unlikely that all 3 are significantly correlated with gender in any field, be it software development or early childhood education. If you live in United States and rule out a career path based on your gender, you likely have to do some work on yourself rather than blaming any external factors.

Of course! A physical 5 processor machine running at 3Ghz would cost peanuts in hardware and power compared to an intentionally crippled 141 processor mainframe. What really happens is you pay (cost - subsidy) for the crippled machine and you or someone else eventually pays (cost + subsidy) for the less crippled machine.

With software, the equation is better. If someone sells you an edition limited to certain number of concurrent transactions, there are no manufacturing costs for your copy that have to be passed to someone else. Furthermore, you have a choice of free software and more basic software from company with smaller development costs. If done right, basic editions can also have lower memory and CPU requirements.

Unless you are saying that IBM is selling $1M systems that cost $50K to manufacture and their marginal costs are also negligible. In this case, you are better off going with a company with lower development costs that addresses just your use case specifically.

To a finances guy, it means you pay for all your hardware and its power use, but have access only to a subset of it most of the time. Inactive hardware costs exactly same as active hardware to develop and manufacture. You are paying for a "discount" on spare capacity with jacked up prices for active capacity.

You are going to serve your Chinese customers from US datacenters? Hehe. Connectivity between world regions is glitchy and high latency. Amazon, for example, provides 9 regions for its compute instances and they don't spend money for these datacenters just for the heck of it.

Even within a region, you are proposing paying for network and other equipment to handle 100% of peak traffic in each datacenter, while one sits idle most of the time. It would be much cheaper, and provide lower latency, to have 3 datacenters capable of handling 50% of peak traffic and all taking traffic at the same time. If one fails or suffers a network partition, the other two maintain a quorum and continue processing requests. In your scheme, a failover will lose at least some recent changes.

As for your "CBU engines", they are regular hardware crippled by DRM. You are paying for your "cheap" backup mainframe by jacked up prices on your primary mainframe. If both were the same, you would have access to more capacity for the same price.

Hence the point that you should not buy those unless you can afford a dozen. If I only need the power of one of those, I would be better off purchasing less powerful/cheaper systems to distribute worldwide.

No matter how reliable and maintainable the box itself is, I wouldn't want my business to lose days or weeks of revenue because the datacenter was swallowed by a sinkhole. Having hundreds of cloud compute instances around the world also helps compensate for network latencies and quickly cut expenses during a business downturn.

I am sure there is a scale at which it makes sense to have dozens of these boxes rather than many thousands of separate instances. Just not sure if volume is enough for IBM to recoup their 1B investment. Good luck!

systemd team has interesting ideas about new features and performance improvements that can be achieved with legacy-free and tightly integrated code base for standard UNIX daemons. Once the benefits are proven, it would be easy to pick and choose between simplicity/modularity and performance and some features can be ported to shell-based init. I don't see systemd developers forcing anyone to use the project.