Next would be I/O to the graphics card, as mentioned in the article. But in general, the bus is the next bottleneck.

Are you actually using crappy licensing as a reason to use alternative hardware? And when the license is open and they only restriction is technical you can use a cheaper solution, and that is a bad thing?

A standard CPU is better, and you are not limited to dedicated (and occasionally had to find) hardware. Look for threads about ZFS or mraid over hardware raid for a lot of discussion on this.

Did you see all the references to debugger plug-ins and the debugger section?

But for that money, more ram or faster drives makes more of a difference...

No, it is the right question. And the answer is, the people that actually understand these things work also know this will not help anything in real world applications. They are also busy optimizing for additional cheap ram, and the new and fast SSD cards that are almost affordable.

Run a big query on your database. Now, while the hard drive light is solid red, look at your CPU load. See how it is not using all the CPU because it is waiting on the hard drive? A GPU will not help that.

Especially when they have already blown the budget on fast SSDs that actually make a real difference in real performance, not just synthetic benchmarks.

For the same reason we have "zero tolerance policies" in schools... We do not trust the people making decisions to make them well. So we set up an arbitrary set of standards that can be gamed, and remove the capability of intervention from the people we do not trust, but decide to give the job anyway...

This might be a question that is good to ask before petri dishes are deployed to hospitals... That and is there a performance difference between humid Houston, and dry as dust Phoenix?

I am still deciding...

So when Boeing and it's suppliers lay thousands of people off, those unemployment benefits came from magic pixie faeries? And the money they no longer spend with your business has no effect on you? Just look to Michigan to see what happens in a state when major factories close. (Or Trenton, for that matter.)

Occasionally, the people in the later group get dragged in mass to the former. The French Revolution is one example. The thing about "the masses" is that we outnumber everyone.

In once sense... But the US people will pay again for the arrogance of the government. It is about time that the people in government start to pay as well.

If pictures of dicks are OK at work, you have the wrong job!

I wish I had points. And I wish web developers did not think everyone has 20meg connections to the net. MANY places outside of big cities are very speed limited.