This speaks volumes about you, and very little about Canonical. I don't even use Ubuntu and my first thought was "Hey, I'll bet they could use this to prioritize patches and focus development". The first step of being responsive to your users is to know what they need, and one way to know what they need is to know what they have/use. No need to waste money on further development or support for a package that only 0.8% of your user base has installed. Likewise, if you're trying to prioritize bug fixing effort, fixing a package that 80% of your installed base uses should probably take precedence over fixing a package that only 50% use, don't you think?

That, and communism. Seriously. Take any bolt on any Apollo spacecraft, and NASA could not only tell you who manufactured it and what lot it came from, but it could tell you which plant manufactured it, who supplied the metal stock, and which parts of which mine the raw ores came from.

In contrast, the Soviets used common, off-the-shelf parts because "every proud Socialist worker produces nothing but the highest-quality work". Which resulted in a general practice of simplifying and over-building everything, since parts quality couldn't be guaranteed. This tended to work well for tanks and rifles, not so much with space ships (although was part of the reason the Mir missions went so well).

Great, now I can get text messages sent directly to my eye! Seems fairly useless for anything more sophisticated than that, though.

The last time I used vSphere, the HTML5 client wasn't anywhere near to parity with the Flash version, and I didn't get the impression that VMware was making it a priority to bring it up to snuff. This was a couple of years ago, sounds like they haven't done much since then either.

Yep. Thanks to family members who just blindly click "OK" whenever a dialog box pops up, we now have Windows 10 on two of our home computers. Worst part was when they didn't have drivers for one motherboard's built-in video hardware, so I had to go out and get a cheap video card just to get the machine back up and running. I've made it clear that the people who installed Windows 10 are now On Their Own as far as OS support goes.

Microsoft bought Skype, they didn't write it. The one they did write (Lync, nee Office Communicator, now Microsoft Teams) is completely different.

Yes. Yes I do.

Well, given that you appear to be about twelve years old, you should have plenty of time to wait.

As I understand it, Intel was forced to come up with a sub-standard design due to AMD's patents in this particular area. I don't think they were primarily motivated by performance.

Workstations used to be machines with performance beyond what was normally achievable with consumer parts. They had (possibly multiple) high-speed displays, (possibly multiple) fast CPUs (possibly with math co-processors) and lots of (usually ECC) memory, and high-speed SCSI disks. They also ran special high-end software packages (CAD, PC board layout, lots of custom crystallography and pipe stress-type programs).

With one CPU architecture now dominant, there are no real "workstation-class" machines anymore. I can't think of a current graphic card or OS that won't support multiple monitors. Multiple cores give almost the same performance as multiple discrete CPUs, you can load up 64G of memory on most mainstream motherboards, and you have multiple 6Gb disk channels talking to SSD drives. There really isn't a whole lot left on the table, performance-wise. Sure, you can get "server-class" hardware that will support 2-4TB of memory, maybe four eight-core CPUs and a half-dozen video cards, but there really isn't any software (other than server applications like VMware or heavy-duty databases) that will give a commensurate increase in performance. Not may people can justify spending 8x the cost of a high-end desktop for a 2.5x (if that) increase in performance.

Spy satellites had optics good enough to read billboards back in the 80s, I wouldn't be surprised if they could read license plates today.

Long-wave AM requires a long antenna to pull in a decent signal. It's a shame, but that's physics for ya.

Just tried it on my phone and it does appear to be using the chip. Either that or they're invested in the radio illusion to the point that they model static and IMD to give you that authentic listening experience.

Oooh, look at Mr. Fancy-Pants here with his IBM 360 and his punched cards! In my day, we did partial differential equations by sticking wires in a plug board and mounting it on our 402 tabulator. By the time we got back from debugging the fire we cooked our dinosaur meat on, we had our answer!

Yeah, no surprise Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and Linda Tripp were found slumped over in the same hot tub.