...not even the ones who got on by accident,
thinking it is just a normal coaster.

Yes, a lot of business users are forced to use a Microsoft OS...

That's what I meant by business reasons. Their apps only run on Windows, or are bespoke, inefficiently written apps that require multiple cores just to run acceptably, and due to office politics, they insist on using them, and other things that happen in business which don't enable progress but yet occur in the "real" world.

Also, sorry, I more meant to say Blu-ray ripping and transcoding to h.264/mp4 and stuff, but then, you know, I got lazy.

you are both right.

Flash ( which runs within firefox) can cause this behaviour, and it can make Celerons and such unresponsive. Single cores with hperthreading and AMD based machines seem less affected. Must be a flash/windows quirk.

Even ctrl-alt-del may fail to cause a response in a timely manner, if a process "explodes".

However, mutiple cores are really more useful for transcoding and other "geeky" stuff. As more people rip their DVDs to save them from teh scratches of their kids or the clumsiness of their friends , or just common wear and tear, those cores will keep being more important.

Of course, they are business reasons for using them, too....

bicycle , dumb phone = cheap , old tech
car, smart phone = more expensive, newer tech

That's the basis of my analogy.

And sarcasm.

I understood that from the time I saw C# syntax, and more when I had to deal with the modern version of "dllhell" at work much more recently.

Somehow, people who want to create more work in the general case tend to win out... verbosity seems to rule over pragmatism... and C++, as a superset of C, gives you the option to be terse.

That being said, they are political reasons why .NET was doomed to fail, but just like politicians, it continues to get support by the masses.

Yea,

and I secure my car by having a bicycle, instead.

Sure, I get wet when it rains, but I'm a so much safer.

140. XKCD can explain everything. explain it or it goes.

http://rulesoftheinternet.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

You might be able to do the job, but you lack confidence...

We might be able to do the job, but we lack details and motivation.

So, hire a more experienced consultant to help you out.

Or just think some more about it, and enjoy learning by doing.

I concur; if anything, Trademarks can be used to enforce branding/quality. A company trademark is like a personal signature.

What I still don't understand is why people are talking only about openness in software, and ignoring how closed hardware is becoming... try writing an alternative to the Award-Phoenix BIOS and you're see what I mean (yes, I know they're some projects to do just that, but look at how hard it is an how many NDAs would be involved if you wanted to support most hardware)....