The authors used Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) from 3rd parties - they did not do their own. So when they get results like:

But SSDs are significantly more carbon intensive to manufacture. That's because the chip fabrication facilities for SSDs operate at extreme temperatures and pressures that are energy intensive to maintain. And bigger memories require more chips, which increases the footprint accordingly. All this adds up to a significant carbon footprint for SSD manufacture... For example, almost 40 per cent of the carbon footprint of a desktop computer comes from its SSD, compared to just 4 per cent from the CPU and 11 per cent from the GPU.

They should have known they were comparing apples to kumquats. This result is bonkers. There's no way that a single SSD has 4 times the carbon footprint of a GPU. Have the authors ever looked at a GPU? It's on a huge PCB, has an IC with literally hundreds of millions of transistors, surrounded by 4, 8, or 16 DRAM chips with even more hundreds of millions of transistors, and consumes hundreds of watts in operation.

There's nothing unique about the carbon footprint of IC fabrication for SSD flash memory chips compared to DRAM chips, CPUs, or GPUs. A HDD contains chips too - DRAM cache, interface controller, etc. Did they consider those? The CPU consumes dozens or hundreds of watts in operation, with a huge IC die of over 9 billion transistors.

Prime isn't just fast delivery from Amazon. Of the many perks it also includes, I personally use Prime Music, Prime Instant Video, and the free borrowed book on Kindle a month. I would pay $119/yr just for the streaming content alone - it's cheaper than Netflix or HBO Now. The fast free shipping is a nice bonus.

Compare that to Walmart's "potential future" perks - discounts on prescription drugs at their pharmacy, discounts on gas at their gas pump, and ordering by text message? Why on earth would I ever want to order items by text message? Have they heard of smartphones, that amazing invention from 2007? Ordering by text is the worst possible interface for ecommerce that might potentially maybe make sense on a Blackberry or Treo or something.

What you're describing is what Microsoft calls "Shared Source." You want your customers to have access to your source code for their benefit, but you don't want them distributing either source or binary to anyone else.

When you think about it, providing the source code to your customers without the right to share it with others is little different from what you're already doing - providing binaries without the right to share them. You're still asserting your copyright - you would just be providing a bit more copyrighted material.

If you want to create a community around your product's source code, you have to figure out a way for your customers to have the freedom to discuss the code on forums, mailing lists, etc., without your code escaping to the world at large. You could explicitly allow customers to discuss the code on YOUR forum, which they only get access to by being a customer.

If you agree that forums suck, then give your customers access to a private github or gitlab with your source code in it. They could make issues and merge requests, and thereby communicate with each other and with you about the code. Let them make branches, but don't let them touch your branches.

I suggest not providing source to your free (as in beer) users. Make access to the source one of the perks of being a paying customer.

That didn't take long. It's already sold out.

Stories like this make me wonder if anyone in Korea refuses to use a desktop or laptop because they have fans in them.

As someone who sits in a lot of interviews and makes hiring recommendations, I find polished, personal side projects very compelling. If you have a recent tech project that you started on your own, for your own benefit or amusement, that demonstrates multiple technical proficiencies, then I start paying closer attention. When it's just your project, I know that you aren't trying to take credit for someone else's work, and anything cool or impressive in the project proves your initiative and value.

I won't be installing Android on my TouchPad for one simple reason - that would be a downgrade. WebOS is much more pleasant to use than Android; it's better thought through, easier to configure, and easier to manage open apps. If I ever have to install Android on my TouchPad, perhaps because of a glaring security hole in WebOS that won't get fixed, it will be a very, very sad day.

I found myself nodding with agreement to most of these points as well. Linux developers will do much, much better in all markets if they address these complaints. However, some of the the points are false or exaggerated for effect.

For example:

2.1 No good stable standardized API for developing GUI applications (like Win32 API). Both GTK and Qt are very unstable and often break backwards compatibility.

Completely untrue.GTK and Qt are two rare libraries with strict backwards-compatibility rules. It's most of the other libraries on the Linux desktop which break backwards compatibility. The latest versions of GTK+2 and Qt4 will run applications written against GTK+2.0 and Qt4.0 perfectly.

I also wouldn't call the Win32 API "good". Standardized, yes. Good, no. Anyone who's ever tried to write raw Win32 GUI apps knows what I'm talking about. And if you don't use Win32 directly, then you don't have a standard. Which would you prefer? MFC? ATL? Windows.Forms? Avalon?

5.2 No games. Full stop. Cedega and Wine offer very incomplete support.

Completely untrue. Yes, fewer commercial games appear for Linux, but fewer commercial games appear for the Mac, too, and no one says the Mac is not ready for the desktop. For commercial games, there's all of the Unreal Tournament games, all of the Quake games, all of the Doom games, all of the Descent games, as well as community ports of Duke Nukem 3D, the Serious Sam games, and countless others.

Aside from the commercial titles, the games that ship with either KDE or Gnome are as good or better than the games that ship with Windows, and 90% of the PC population only plays those games. (KNetWalk is a great game that would sap millions of hours of productivity from the world if it shipped with Windows.)

You can have a ridiculous amount of fun on Linux with console emulators. There are great clones of other games too, such as FreeCiv and LinCity.

Finally, it's not fair to discount the games that you can play with Wine. I purchased and played Half-Life 2 from start to finish on Linux, and it worked perfectly. I didn't miss Windows one bit.

12. Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard keyloggers and against running malicious software (Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity). sudo is very easy to circumvent (social engineering). sudo still requires CLI (see clause 4.).

And what security model would the complainer prefer? Yes, sudo can be circumvented by social engineering, and Mac OS X basically uses sudo to do admin tasks. On Windows, you don't need to do any social engineering to circumvent the "run-as-admin-by-default" policy.

Redhat-based distros have lots of protection against keyloggers, viruses, and break-ins because SELinux is turned on by default.

I sympathize with the fatigue many people are feeling with the "my console's wang is bigger than your console's wang" flamewars, and I agree that better games often have little to do with graphics horsepower.

However, it's important to realize that most great games take full advantage of the hardware they run on, and therefore they are limited by their hardware. The parent post mentions the SNES generation, so I'll use that as my example.

The SNES had the best sound hardware of its generation, which made the excellent music that accompanied Final Fantasy IV-VI possible. It had excellent sprite rotation and scaling capabilities, which were used as an integral part of gameplay in even the first batch of games, including Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Pilotwings.

Want more proof how much the raw hardware matters? Some of the best games on the SNES required expensive co-processors in the game cartridges. Starfox has a RISC processor on board that's at least as fast as the CPU in the SNES. Similarly, Super Mario Kart was only possible due to the DSP chip it included.

This approach was possible back in the cartridge era, but it's impossible to do in the modern day. You can't put accelerators on a DVD. All of the hardware has to already be in the console.