Request, approve, order, receive, install... competition over who has what better stuff... these are signs of a power-obsessed organization that's completely lost its mind. Unfortunately, that's seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Think about it: if it takes $1000 in labor to run an approval process for a $200 item, your authority levels are totally out of balance. Really, just give everyone a reasonable budget to outfit their space in the way that works best for them, and if you want a strict rule, make it a rule against whining and stealing. Besides, if everyone has the same budget, people should be able to appreciate that some will spend it on a nice chair where others want more or larger monitors.

This is Linux, we can have, and need to have, both.

Unfortunately, this endless variety of flavors makes Linux virtually impossible to adopt in the mainstream. There's simply too many options to choose from, so the easiest thing to do is not to choose at all.

Linux needs to collapse into a single desktop/laptop/netbook install, for which 99% of users will customize no greater than to change the wallpaper to a picture of their kids, and it's very doubtful that the various factions will ever agree to standardize on the other's products.

Strange, it seems to me that Google would have some ideas about how to utilize massively parallel processing, as would the supercomputing crowd.

Is the issue here how to scale supercomputing concepts down to desktop applications? Well, for starters, you can dedicate a couple of cores to run all of the background processes (on the order of 70) that my IT department insists must reside on my system, so that I might get at least one which can work on the application(s) at hand.