Yet you are such a breathtaking, marvelous specimen of humanity that you would grace this undesirable place to enlighten the muck-dwelling Unixites. Truly we are all blessed. Let this day go forth! From this day forward, every February 4th shall be known as -
Oh, wait. You didn't even bother attaching a name to this pathetic holier-than-thou screed. Back to the comforting bosom of Mommy and Windows forums with you, you pathetic bastard.
How bizarre. (Ooh, baby)
I'll, uh, show myself out then, yeah? Yeah. *cough*
Number crunching with MATLAB on big datasets can eat a lot of CPU time - it's better not to wait longer than you have to, and throttling will hold you back. Ditto video transcoding and other kinds of scientific computing (like oil reservoir simulation...), or distributed computing projects like BOINC. But for most use cases you're right: there's just not that much stuff typical users do that needs to grind on a CPU for even minutes at a time, let alone hours or days.
My sympathies on the RAM. That's the most evil kind of corner-cutting to save a couple of bucks.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken