At the rate they're going? They'll outpace Final Fantasy before Windows 8 is released.

Protip: Almost every search engine out there will let you use quotation marks to mark a phrase that should be kept together. '"Windows 7" problem' (Who searches for "Problem"?) yields many excellent results.

I'm of two minds on this one.

On one hand, my experience with corporate IT has been very poor. Usually, they're the ones preventing you from having the tools you need to do your job, or making poor use of resources, or sneaking in and doing something to break a previously working situation. One good example, my department is responsible for maintaining a number of industrial PCs and servers, and not only are we blocked from the Microsoft download site (so we have to download patches on our own time at home), but there have been times in the past where IT has sneaked in and made changes to working machines that make them non-working machines. These machines control and monitor life or death situations, so we're working on getting IT off our machines out out of our systems.

On the other hand, It *is* their network right up to your server. You have to understand that their mandate is to operate and protect that network.

If it's Sony, and it's universal, then yes. Blame Sony if you don't like it. They're the ones who poisioned the discourse.

I frankly don't trust the submitters in this thread much further than I can throw them. The universal support for Sony smacks of paid astroturfers. Fake grassroots is part of their modus operandi, so I'm inclined to believe all of you are actors.

This may be a silly question, but who still buys Sony anyway?

They're constantly trying to shove their expensive, non-standard shit down everyone's throat, leaving you with devices whose removable memory costs several times more than the standards everyone else uses.

I understand that the Playstation 3 has some great games, but why support a company that's consistently more interested in building an empire than working with its customers?

History shows us that "we can emulate it" is not an acceptable alternative most of the time.

Apple managed to get away with it, but they managed to get away with a lot of dramatic platform shifts because they have dictatorial control over their product. They could switch their entire product line over to ARM tomorrow and apple fans would have no choice but to switch.

X86 and the PC architecture are different than that. They're more democratic, which often means innovation must maintain the status quo or risk losing the base. That's why x86-64 worked so well where Itanium and countless other 64-bit processors (including many with Windows support) failed completely.

Lamenting silicon use is a little silly, from where I'm standing.

If you look at a modern processor, the entire decision-making part of a chip is absolutely miniscule. The biggest hog of silicon is cache.

x86 and the PC standard is a boon to everyone. If you want to see what computers would look like without the benefit of the open architecture, look at smart phones -- even Android, fully open source, has people begging for updates to their phones OS because everything is too locked down and proprietary (and non-standard) to let things like linux thrive.

Seems unlikely to me. Intel would have moved away from x86 if it could. Thinking about it, the whole architecture is something they don't have very tight control over, as the very existence of AMD and other competitiors show. If Intel had been able to lock the world into something like the i960, I'm sure they'd be happier than a pig in shit.

Intel may have tried to push Itanium, but it wouldn't have worked. They were hardly able to push it as a server solution.

This story is about the further decay of Intel's once flagship product, the Merced. If anything, this story shows that x86 and extensions of it DO have a very important place in the market. Despite having existed forever before x86-64, it wasn't until the Opteron and Athlon 64 that 64-bit architecture became commonplace. It wasn't Merced, it wasn't DEC Alpha, it wasn't a Motorola processor.

Ignoring the practical reasons why x86 continues to survive may make sense in a vacuum of academic computer science, but even academic engineers should be looking at the realities of the situation.

I think you've got a false dichotomy here.

It's highly HIGHLY unlikely that x86 is going to be usurped by anything any time soon. Part of the reason is, despite apparently every person here's hatred of it, the legacy of x86.

There's always going to be that one application that you just can't find a replacement for. Even among FOSS software, there's a good chunk that is non-trivial to port to a non-x86 architecture. This is fine in sectors like smart phones, where the segment isn't so bogged down in legacy applications that you can just drop everything and start with a brand new OS and a brand new CPU every couple years, but in the PC market, and even in the Server market, that's just not going to fly. Give the smart phone market 5 years, and we'll see a lot of the same legacy there, if any of the current platforms stabilize that long.

The other reason is political: x86 is a once in a million event of an open-ended architecture actually took over the market. Existing non-x86 markets show us what we can look forward to if the platform were to ever die. Want to install linux? Get ready to either hack your computer(If you're lucky and find a hole in the security) or to beg the manufacturer to give you the option. Peripherals for a proprietary solution will always cost more because there will be less competition because of higher barriers for entry. The actual machines themselves will cost more for the same reason. Most industries aren't about to lose that flexibility for an appliance controlled by another company. The whole PC platform may seem like the wild west, but even Android can seem like North Korea at times(Watching people praying for a new version of Android to come to their phones despite the ability to compile from source is a great example of this).

What we're seeing instead is the opposite. Rather than seeing ARM et. al. taking over the ultra low end PC market(despite plenty of attempts to over the years), it was the Intel Atom that effectively created the segment for the first time.

That said, there's no reason why ARM et. al. can't exist in the completely different segment of highly locked down appliances like phones.

There's an obvious hole in your argument.

When you're at home, you certainly CAN escape from the situation. If someone on your personal facebook or MSN or ICQ is bothering you, it's easy to block them.

If you run into a bully at the arcade, or at the park, or in the mall, you can totally walk away, and there's nothing keeping you there. If something criminal happens then you can press charges, but you're basically giving a great argument why teachers shouldn't be keeping tabs on people's personal lives outside of school.

Regardless of your debate, there is a huge body of study dedicated to how unimaginably awesome I am. I'd post a reference, but I'm far too awesome to waste my time on such things -- Studies confirm it!

You're pretty much bang on.

I just bought an Android after a year as an Apple guy, and I don't really care how quick it is, I care about the fact that my favourite websites work(lots of flash). An extra tenth of a second isn't going to make or break it.

I think we can all agree, once we've gotten video games out of the way, we should ban literature.

-"Brave New World" By A. Huxley contains an entire society addicted to drugs, and we shouldn't be promoting drug use.
-The novel "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk has created underground fighting clubs around the world!
-"A modest proposal" by Jonathan Swift advocates eating poor people!!
-Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf" helped create a genocide of 12 million people!!!
-Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" created a political ideology that is responsible for at least 100 million deaths!!!!

Obviously, we need to ban books. Unlike simply violent video games which are bound within pixels and polygons, books can utilise a person's entire imagination to picture violence, drug use, cannibalism, or any one of a million terrible things!