I fundamentally disagree. People want a computer that works. Ever increasing power is a dead end. Average people have no use for the supercomputers we have under our desks NOW

Average people DO have a use for the "supercomputers" under their desks. Otherwise, everyone would still be buying sub-gigahertz semprons. But software continues to get more bloated, and "managed code" imposes even more of an overhead.

Could you run, say, the latest Fedora or Suse on a p266 with 64 megs? That was a hot machine at one time ... but things change.

Dual core processor in the consumer space is because the chip companies couldnt go faster so they went wider,

... which kind of disproves your first statement - since there was a demand for more power, and they couldn't go faster on one core, they went to multiple cores.

It's about what people are willing to pay for. People aren't comparing the $20 ARM against the $100 x86 - they're comparing the whole package. So an x86 that is even 25% more useful is worth the extra bucks, because of what it brings to the whole package. Not to mention that ARM is still struggling to get any significant number of 64-bit chips onto the market, and that's not going to change for several years; with ram being so cheap, plenty of people have 6, 8, 12, 16, even 32 gigs of ram on their desktops. That, plus multi-core goodness, increasingly lets them run VMs.

The article misses an obvious fact - the small market that arm will take is all on the no-profit, low-end, first-time notebook buyer.

Anyone who already has an x86 laptop is going to stick with x86, just to maintain software compatibility. Ditto for anyone with a legacy application. Ditto for anyone who wants to run games (and everyone wants to run the odd game here and there).

So, who's going to buy this? People who used to be called the "netbook" market.

In other words, cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel, almost-no-profit and few needs.

In other words, they'll take sales away from an already dying market, leaving Intel the higher-margin / higher-priced market.

That's the same strategy Apple has used for years.

It really is about the ability to run existing programs, otherwise we'd already have the Year of the Linux Desktop.

ARM won't take anything from the server or desktop market, so the only current Intel market left is laptops.

Nobody's going to junk hundreds or thousands of dollars of software just to save $50 by buying an ARM laptop instead of an x86.

So who's the market? People who don't have any legacy software (so forget business users or anyone who already owns a computer). Even they will mostly stick with Intel, because let's face it, almost everyone who has a computer has at least one application/game/whatever that needs Windows on x86.

It's why we haven't seen the Year of the Linux Desktop, and never will. OTOH, we *might* see a Year of the Android laptop sometime this decade ... which could be interesting.

ARM still has a ways to go before getting any 64-bit cpus into the market. That's not good, not when you consider that most consumers consider 4 gigs as the minimum nowadays for a half-decent laptop.

Ultimately, the incremental cost of going Intel is not going to be enough to offset most people who are buying their first laptop, and most of the rest are already locked in to x86 for the foreseeable future. Just try to take an x86 macbook away from it's owner.

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.

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.

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.