TFA is really dumb. It combines two very separate markets - notebooks and smartphones.

It makes the assumption - always wrong - that people don't want more cpu. People ALWAYS want more cpu. I remember back when pundits were writing "there will never be a consumer market for dual-core processors." Now a dual-core notebook is "bottom of the line".

So ARM will take some of the bottom of that market @$20 per cpu. Intel will take the $80 - $200 per cpu market.

Plus, people want software compatibility. Windows on ARM is all well and good, but nobody's going to re-buy a thousand bucks worth of software to save $50 on a laptop.

TFA mentions smartphones and notebooks. Intel is just now venturing into smartphones, so any money from that is "found money." In that market, Intel will be taking more from ARM than ARM can possibly take from Intel.

The notebook market is different, but even there, the numbers don't mean much. If the market doubles in size, and ARM takes the lowest 20% of it, so what? That just means that Intel gets the higher-margin stuff - the formula that Apple's been using for years.

Of course ARM will take more from Intel than Intel will from ARM. But it's stupid math.

Take the desktop market. If ARM has 0% of the desktop market, and Intel has 65%, there's nothing for Intel to take from ARM. If ARM sells just 1 desktop, they've taken more from Intel than Intel took from them. But it's a meaningless stat.

If Quebec were to leave or be booted out, it certainly can default - Newfoundland almost did before it entered confederation in 1949 and Canada agreed to take on most of the debt.

After all, Quebec bonds are guaranteed by Quebec, not Canada. It's the same as the debate over individual US states defaulting. The feds aren't obliged to make good on the debt. It happened in the 1840s http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704835504576060193029215716.html

Of course, the real question is, even if Quebec stays in Canada, how long before it defaults? There's simply no room whatsoever left to raise taxes, not when someone making the minimum wage has a marginal tax rate of close to 30%.

I admit my bias - failbook is a mirage, like all "social media".

As of that blog, well, the last federal election in Kanuckistan, the "journalists", instead of getting out into the street and talking to people, did it the lazy way - following twatter and fartbook, which were basically being spammed by people on all sides.

So they missed the big stories - that the NDP was going to decimate the Liberals and that the BQ was going to lose so many seats that they would no longer have official party status in the House.

This worked out good for the Conservatives, because a lot of Ontario voters had the mistaken idea that the Liberals were going to be the #2 party, and people should vote Liberal if they didn't want the Cons to win - "don't vote NDP and split the vote".

Then again, there's been a few interesting pieces of leakage recently. For those who had to sit through the last Quebec referendum on sovereignty, it turns out that the feds refused to release the poll results from whether the RoC (Rest of Canada) would vote in favour of Quebec separation (as in, "kick them out"), citing "national security." So you KNOW what those polls said.

Of course, the concensus was, and still is, "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out - and btw, the borders go back to what they were at Confederation, so you lose all that northern territory, and btw #2, here's your share of the federal debt. Pay up."

Ultimately, it's going to come to that anyway. Quebec is fast approaching becoming North America's Greece - hugely indebted, no more room for raising taxes (kind of hard when you already have the highest taxes in the world). Two years ago, the OECD ranked Quebec public debt vs GDP (not including the share of the Canadian Federal debt) as the 5th-highest in the world. That's not good. None of the other provinces has even half as much debt vs their internal GDP.

It's only going to get worse, since Quebec policies don't exactly encourage businesses to stay (which is why Montreal went from Canada's financial and head-office center to being a shell over the last 50 years. People who argue about the "inevitable move west" ignore New York, still the US financial capital.)

Looking at things over the last couple of weeks, I've realized that nothing will ever change, no matter what, so the only real solution is, next referendum, Canada hold one as well and basically kick them out. So, since the Quebec situation is intractable (corruption really is too ingrained, unwillingness to change stupid language laws, too much pork-barrelling, lousy demographics), better to look at the next federal election in 3-1/2 years ... and moving to another part of the country well before then.

They have numpads, and bigger screens.

So you'll have to lug an extra pound or so. Big deal.

Look, if you don't like the truth, don't ask for it.

You're the one who picked suse, which was a bad example. What do you think they'd be doing right now if they hadn't gotten the $100 million last year from Microsoft? It's not like Novell hadn't been laying off linux devs before the sale.

But back to zombie slackware - the site still takes 5 minutes to load the home page, a month after this was supposed to be addressed.

Archive.org confirms this has been going on since mid-February. That's 3 months.

So, how about a new meme - "archive.org confirms it - slackware is dead!"

After all, if Mandriva can keep pushing out bug and security fixes and keep their web site running through a near-bankruptcy, why can't slackware?

If Mandriva is dying, how is slackware NOT dying?

If nobody even notices that slackware is off the net for so long, how is it still relevant?

We need consolidation in the linux distro space. The effort that is going to maintain a distro that we have fond memories of but apparently almost nobody is using could be better employed elsewhere, contributing to a more modern distro.

Thanks - I'll point that out elsewhere. Mind you, I notice that Vector Linux users had a problem yesterday with updates rendering their system unusable ... but at least both websites load quickly, and Vector addressed the problem the same day.

As much as I would love this for my house, I've spent too many hours perfecting my coffee brewing almost down to a science. It would be a waste of the robot's time and mine to do a job I already do great and to have the poor thing gathering dust in a corner.

Roomba to the rescue!

Hey, how well does this coffee robot run Java? And is Oracle going to sue MIT?

Two months with no activity whatsoever, and only sporadic activity prior to that, an often-dead website, and a refusal by you and yours to address the obvious - that only a few people even noticed ... "It's dead, Jim."

Why don't YOU do the audit, if you're so hot and bothered to try to avoid answering the obvious question - which is why should anyone use a distro that can't even keep its own website up, even when there's no load? That reeks of incompetence.

A quick hop to netcraft gives connie.slackware.com as the server.

1337 Error
Your lamp is getting dim, and our server is getting eaten by a grue

Apache/1.3.37 Server at connie.slackware.com Port 80

That's an improvement of the slackware.com, which takes a couple of minutes to even start loading. Are you running it off someone's dialup connection?

Maybe you should switch slackware.com back to bsd like it was in the beginning.

As I pointed out to another slacktroll, suse is also going downhill fast. The quality is just no longer there. The only difference is that Microsoft gave them another $100 million to take them to 2016 - otherwise, they'd be in the same situation as slackware.

Can SUSE recover? I don't know - $100 million takes the pressure off of fixing the underlying problems, making them complacent, and not lean and hungry.

Consolidation in the linux distro world needs to happen, and for that to happen, the least viable distros need to die. Mandriva and Slackware are part of that process.

SUSE is very much a dying distro. The quality of the releases has been going downhill for some time, and the only reason it's still alive is that they got another $100 million from Microsoft last year.

Microsoft Corp. and SUSE, an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group Inc., today announced a four-year extension of the groundbreaking agreement struck nearly five years ago between Microsoft and Novell Inc. for broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support. This relationship will extend through Jan. 1, 2016, with Microsoft committed to invest $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates for customers receiving Linux support from SUSE.

While they tried to spin it as being from "strong customer response", the fact is that those certificate renewals were not happening, even with 75% discounts. So it was worth it to Microsoft to throw in another $100 million over the next 4 years, because Microsoft is the lead company in CPTN Holdings, the group selling the Novell patents. This deal helps compensate Attachmate (otherwise, there'd be yet another nasty court battle wrt Novell).

You're missing a LOT of the main points here.

# 1. I made a direct comparison to Mandriva, another distro that is in financial straits, not a "we have 28,0000 packages on 9 dvds" like debian. Mandriva issues security updates almost daily. Slackware? Months can go by.

The comparison with Mandriva is apt, because both Slackware and Mandriva are dvds, so they're more or less within the ballpark in terms of being comparable. In other words, I made an apples-to-apples comparison, not the apples-to-oranges you tried to make it out to be when you just threw Debian into the mix (BTW, I *never* mentioned Debian).

So, your claim that "Updates to stable happen only if there is a security problem with a packages (sic)." is simply bogus, since even that doesn't happen in a timely fashion.

# 2. Slackware (the site) being dead was barely noticed because nobody is using it. Same with the non-existent package browser. Nobody is using it.

Sure, slackware still has numbers on distrowatch - but those are people who look, not people who download and install. People who did like I did - downloaded the dvd then realized that slack has turned into a zombie distro - aren't users.

You keep on saying that slackware is stable. Dead is also a stable state, so in that sense you may be right.

# 3. Again, wrt "Updates to stable happen only if there is a security problem with a packages (sic)." Funny how you try to claim that slackware is stable, and only needs to keep up with security updates between releases, when not only does it NOT keep up with security updates, but among the few updates, the biggest was updating Moz/FF, not for any particular security bug, but because of their release schedule.

# 4. Who is going to recommend a distro that can't even keep their web site up for days, never mind weeks at a time? When you're of the net, you're dead to the world. To allow this situation to go on for so long is a sign of incompetence, same as having a package browser that for a year now says "in a few days."

How you can turn around and say "So what you see isn't bad at all and largely expected"? It's a disaster. The only thing that mitigated it to some extent is that nobody notices slackware any more except to ask the question "Is slackware dead (again)?"

In a sense, Facebook managed to put *all* the money from the underwriters fees back into their own pocket, since the underwriters are sitting on millions of shares that they had to buy back at the $38 price. However, this is *not* a good thing for Facebook, because now these same underwriters are going to need to get rid of that stock at a profit, or at least not at a loss.

So, Facebook is going to come under a lot of pressure from them to make their business generate Google-sized profits, asap. In other words, Facebook is no longer in control of its destiny. Because if they don't make the underwriters "whole" again, they (Facebook) will never be able to sell the massive amount of stock shares they have left (about 85%).

In a sense, this is about the worst outcome that could have happened for them, long-term.