Even corporate dinosaurs that have legacy mainframe operations that go back decades are moving to VM clustering because of the inherent advantages. When I worked for one of these dinosaurs last year, I was walking through the mainframe operations group and someone had a thing printed on the side of her cube extolling that it would take 400 x86 servers to equal their S390. Someone from the VM engineering team had taken a sharpie to it and crossed out the "400 x86 servers" and written on "10 VMware hosts".

It seems that a lot of "big iron" people don't even recognize the existence of the inherent scalability advantages that VMs provide, even though their mainframes have been doing the same thing for decades.

and by "sold" you actually mean "given to with a fat stack of cash". IBM is paying GlobalFoundries to take the semiconductor fab business from IBM.

Yeah, the x86 stack doesn't need that kind of reliability, because of the inexpensiveness of the hardware. If you need that kind of uptime, you buy 3 and put them behind a load balancing scheme. You end up with more capacity, the same reliability, and still less expense. Especially in the world of virtualized server instances.

Thank Jeebus we have those boiling oceans to make clouds then, or we'd never get any precipitation.

Clearly, YOU do not know how evaporation works.

Yeah, because the world has gone to hell in a hand cart from the spontaneous explosions of the wide availability of "bombs" like gasoline cans and propane tanks.

Well, they assemble them. They paid GlobalFoundries $1.5B to take away their chip division last year. The same chip division that advanced the state of the art in semiconductor design to help get the industry to where it is today.

Really though, what "business machines" does IBM make anymore? pSeries? zOS / System390? AS/400? What's the volume on those?

Nobody ever said Elon Musk was a Republican. But you sure knocked the hell out of that straw man.

Yeah, let's not forget the laugher that Obama sent in 2012, which the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected 99-0.

Yes, the GP may have been wrong about not actually submitting a budget in six years. In actuality, submitting budgets that can't even get a single vote from your own party is basically the same thing as not submitting one.

The extinguishing came at the hands of the iPad and Android tablets though. Microsoft didn't get any piece of that, and in fact lost ground.

I thought that was either Symantec or CA?

Parallels really kinda sucks. Of the three major hypervisors available for OS X, it's the worst of them and that's with VirtualBox being stagnant for a year+. No support for OVAs whatsoever. If you virtualize OS X, you can't use keyboard shortcuts without the hypervisor thinking that Cmd+Q was meant for it, rather than an app in the guest OS. And yes, it doesn't do very nice things with thermal management on your hardware.

VMware Fusion works pretty good, but costs $. VirtualBox, for a time, was actually better than VMware Fusion and free. The guys at VMware have fixed that though.

Except that stealing TVs is inherently illegal. If I moved to some fairy-land jurisdiction where stealing TVs was legal and someone stole my TV, then I can't really say that the person who stole my TV is breaking the law, because they aren't.

As I said before, you have a problem with the great State of Nevada; Apple is merely following the laws on the books.

This one has been around since 2000. 15 years, just getting around to auditing the main C library used by EVERYTHING now, I suppose...

It's a horseshit argument, and always has been. Just because someone CAN audit something, doesn't mean they DO. Or that they are competently doing it if they do.

Once the materials that Apple uses are out of the ground and turned into a product, the environmental damage stops except for the electricity required to use it, and it's eventual disposal.

With oil, every step of the process including use does very bad things for the environment.

You could, in theory, use a Mac forever with a solar panel without ever doing anything to the environment.

Okay. That sounds like you've got an issue with the State of Nevada then.