There is one small edge case where fast boot up time is particularly awesome: Notebooks. Considering the issues most OSes have had with suspending, being able to fully shut down and then reboot in less time than resuming from suspend would be pretty handy.

Of course, you do have to close your programs, but I'm sure it would be trivial to write a shutdown script that starts up all the running processes with the same documents again...

Oh, I thought of another one: Media/DVD playing machines...

Well, youtube with its 640x480 video might not tax your machine, but try checking the recommended specs for MythTV. Remember that 'simple' things like watching a movie and recording Greys anatomy is something that the average citizen has been taking for granted for a few decades now.

Then add multiple camera-angle sporting matches in full HD (hey, a guy can dream!), and you see that having a few powerful cores can be quite useful in the home.

Your general point does stand though, outside a (simulation, file, web, media) server environment, anything more than a couple GHz is probably wasted.

Does allow botnets to send even more spam per second though!

Very frustrating is probably the understatement of the year (lucky its only Feb!). But I should warn you not to buy guitar hero world tour - it is even more broken in the sense that in order to continue a song (that is, get through the whole thing) *everyone* has to be able to play the whole thing. There is no 'get drunk and rock out mode' like the battle mode in GHIII - where the song will go to the end no matter how hard you suck.

I spent about three hours with four friends 'playing' this game, and at the end of it not only did we not complete a single track, none of them ever wanted to play again. Stark contrast to GH3 which had the same group coming back for more!

This reason was enough for me to put that on the 'when I have way too much free time' list of games to try out. Likely if you and your friends aren't serious about their games, your group will feel the same.

P.S. Dear Slashdot, Don't insult my intelligence by talking about 'beginner mode' that mode is not only boring, its also pretty easy to fail it if you are a first-timer.

Heh. I spent so much time making Aeris the best char in my party. I rejected Tifa so hard for her, and then she freakin died. I think the neighbours ears are still ringing from the cry of pain...

But more generally, I don't know about the games you are playing, but doesn't a game have to have a plot to have plot twists?

I jest. But still, good stories are pretty few and far between. Which is pretty strange, considering I would guess the story to be the cheapest part of a game to make (Just one or two writers vs. dozens of artists or programmers). And it covers so many flaws too - how many games are revered in the 'great story, shame about the graphics category'. Contrast the 'great graphics, shame about the story' games that are almost universally reviled...

The problem of this is the 'tyranny of the masses'. As any slashdotter will gleefully explain, most people are stupid. Ergo, the majority will be stupid, thereby always frustrating the efforts of the smart to implement intelligent policies. The idea of a democracy (as a friend of mine once put it) is to 'Represent the Majority, Respect the Minority'. Unfortunately, in most places it seems to be 'Represent the Minority, Respect?' I do agree that there should be simpler and more readily available means of assessing public opinion though. I mean, how many people vote in a Big Brother episode? Surely in this day we can get some kind of 'online straw poll' system going...