Where did you get the curious notion that Microsoft is a programming company?
Skype, Exchange, SQL Server, MS-DOS, Dynamics, Sharepoint... Good software and bad, Microsoft bought it. It doesn't know how to make mass-market software. The partial exceptions are Word and Excel, and the Windows NT OSes. With NT, Microsoft tried to learn how to make an OS via their JV with IBM on OS/2. History suggests that Microsoft's learning was...less than thorough.
Microsoft is better characterised as an IP licensing company which does some software development (and, under Ballmer, hardware development) as a promotional activity.
I totally agree about their employee review system, though. The flaws in that ought to be obvious to any non-autistic person, sociopath or not.
* in the three quarters before Elop's "Burning Platform" memo, Nokia smartphones was growing volume, profit, and market share. * the memo came out mid-quarter. In that quarter, profit and volume were down. * in every quarter since, Nokia smartphones has made a trading loss, and lost volume, average selling price and market share (although volume seems to have stabilised in the last quarter).
* Nokia started selling Windows phones more than a year after the Burning Platform memo.
Let's go over that last point again. Ahonen says that Nokia's troubles started before Windows phone came out... precisely because Elop committed solely to an OS that didn't exist at the time.
Care to refute any of Ahonen's assertions? With references, mind.
In my opinion, it's far worse than Ahonen says. Here's a thought experiment:-
You are the CEO of a large, profitable and industry-dominating multinational company that built its success on a strategy of massive product differentiation and close relationships with its distribution channels. No matter who a person is--whatever their demographic classification, socio-economic status, country, region, language or religion--you have a product aimed at them. And the company's doing very well: the distributors like your product, and they sell it well. Sales are growing, global market share is growing, profits are growing, despite overheads being a little high.
You see another company starting to make a lot of money selling luxury products (in your industry) in one market (that is large and rich, but which has limited growth potential). This company has an adversarial relationship with its distribution channels. It's more or less the exact opposite of your company.
Do you:-
A) Publicly announce that everything your company has built its success on is totally wrong, and that you must drop everything and all other markets to compete with this new company on their own terms in their own home market--and, moreover, make this announcement a year before you have products to sell in that market?
B) Realise that there is some untapped potential in the luxury end of the market, and add products and services to your portfolio accordingly?
I hope the answer is obvious; this is not even Marketing 101. Unfortunately, the answer Elop chose was A).
How much right does one person have to maim another - cause them pain and cause their teeth to fall out ( withhold fluoride), stunt their intellectual development (withhold iodide), cause them to become paralysed, blind or deaf, or asphyxiated (not protect them from polio, German measles, tetanus)?
I'd argue both that people shouldn't be allowed to harm other people (their children and grand-children) in these ways, and that the rest of us are ethically bound to prevent that harm and risk of harm to future adults, no matter what their parents think.
"The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons" is Old Testament thinking. Are we not civilized, now? Did the children choose their parents?
Actually, it'd be good if the chemtrail/fluoride/anti-vax people did stop using electricity. They'd be too busy doing their laundry to bother rational people.
Wait, your phone can decode video?!? In real time, playing the movies at normal speed? How many kilograms does it weigh, and how long is the power lead? How big is the mortgage on it? (/socraticmethod)
The computer innovation process broadly goes like this: first algorithm sort-of works but is incredibly inefficient - tweaks on this - a rethinking of the whole approach that leads to massive speed-ups - further refinement - implementation of the algorithm in hardware, where it becomes just another specialized processor - everybody profits!.
This article is about the third, or possibly fourth, phase of the process. If it it works out, phase 5 is straightforward. By itself, step 5 typically leads to two orders of magnitude increase in performance, three orders of magnitude decrease in power consumption, and two to four orders of magnitude decrease in cost.
Phases 6 and 7 happen if and when enough people find the provided service useful. (If technologies are no good, that's when only rich people have them. Successful technologies, everyone gets access to eventually.)
It is a potential habitat. It is a gateway to the stars.
...and here you reveal your true colours.
Ceres is not a potential habitat.
Assume you can develop a shelter with adequate shielding from cosmic rays and solar storms, adequate insulation, pressure containment, etc. (Despite the fact that we don't know what "adequate" is, or exactly what's in "etc".) And assume you can transport inhabitants there, all the while keeeping them healthy. Fine. One teeny little failure in one annoying little subsystem, lasting a mere minute, and every inhabitant is dead. What are the odds of zero operation failures in a lifetime? Never happened in any city here on Earth. Or even any inhabited building.
Another thing. If you could build machines reliable enough to transport people safely around the solar system (and you actually wanted to have people live off Earth), why would you bother with a habitat on an asteroid? Stick with what works: the spaceship. Iain Banks had this right.
Ceres is not a gateway to the stars.
Nothing is. The stars are too far away. You'll never live long enough to learn anything from sending a physical mass to any star with Earth-like, habitable zone planets; your city won't exist long enough. Your civilization likely won't last long enough. (The Fermi paradox is no paradox at all. It's a demonstration of how far apart stars are, and how hostile and unrewarding the intervening space is...and perhaps of the rationality of other intelligent life.)
So what are we left with? Ceres is a potentially useful source of reaction mass/propellant, if anyone ever discovers a valid reason to send physical masses past geosynchronous orbit. (I'll believe mining asteroids could be profitable when I discover a pressing ubiqitous and essential materials problem for which all solutions require one particular element, and the element is both in short supply here on Earth and abundant on an asteroid near Ceres. To date, though, there are substitutes and alternatives for pretty much everything that might start to get short in the next century, so don't hold your breath.)
I can see a point to mini ion drives. They're potentially handy for sending things out to geosynchronous orbit and doing stuff there and in LEO. And I can see a point to operating telescopes with good resolving power out "in space". But I can't see why they'd need to be very far away from Earth. And even for purposes of scientific experimentation, I can't see a point to sending physical mass much past the outer part of the Oort cloud.
If you want to get a semi-knowledgeable public interested in this stuff, don't use words and phrases like 'habitat', 'gateway to the stars' or 'profit' when talking about this stuff. They scream "space cadet".
Yah. Last time I was involved (about 2001), PeopleSoft's payroll system was so crude it couldn't be tweaked, adapted, or otherwise modified to run the payroll for a small-to-middling hospital. If the Pentagon started with Peoplesoft, it was always going to end up here.
While the economy is below full employment, yes. Bastiat's broken windows fallacy only applies when the economy is at capacity.
Of course, it would be better to hire the unemployed to repair and replace failing infrastructure, because it increases future production potential; but if that's politically impossible, digging and filling holes works too.
Everyone immediately leaps to talking about passenger aircraft, but this is going to see large-scale use in air freight first. Passenger craft...perhaps, maybe, one day.
This adds quite a bit to the profitability of freight--or, once the market has done its work, reduced the cost of air freight. Take out the air crew and associated life support systems, and you can add another 300-500 kilos of freight to the manifest.
FedEx, DHL, etc. are going to be all over this, if they can get the idea to fly with regulators.
And when XP arrived almost every customer I had wanted the "Classic Start Menu" from windows 2000. People don't like to learn new things regardless of whether they are better or worse than what they had before.
This is broken on at least two levels.
I was there, and I don't recall any such push-back against the XP menu. There were a few comments about it looking a bit colorful, and feeling slower, but nothing like the reaction to 8's UI. (Of course compared to 98SE or ME, XP was like dawn after a dark night in terms of stability. People loved that.)
Secondly, and more importantly, the first rule of UIs is: don't change it unless it's badly broken.
It's true that most people don't like to learn new things, especially to do with computers. Guess what? Your stupid computer program isn't the most important thing in their lives—or even the fiftieth most important thing. They're not waiting with bated breath for the next "wonderful surprise" you're about to inflict on them. And: you can't change anyone besides yourself. People won't like change, no matter how hard you try to "fix" them. If you want to change the UI, you'd better provide strong, compelling, immediate reasons for that.
There's no evidence that (for anyone outside the executive suites in Microsoft Towers) Windows 8's way of locating and starting applications led to greater productivity and/or better employee morale. There's considerable evidence that the change has caused exactly the opposite.
(The UI mess is sad. Under the covers, 8 is a great improvement over 7. A tight OS.)
1) Now try typing a few letters of what you are searching for. Much better.
Hmmm...lessee. I want to reduce the size of this here video, to play it on my phone. What the heck was that app called, again? Maybe something like "transcoder"? (types)... Hmmm..... Nope. Doesn't look right.
Types: <backspace><backspace> (&c).... Ok, how about "video"? (types)... Hmmm, nope, that's not it. I don't think so, anyway.
My wife has Word for Mac. (On a Mac, strangely enough.) Whenever she edits (or, I think, even merely opens and saves) a particular biannual report that I produce, and then I open it again, some paragraphs have lost the spaces between words. Sothereareparagraphsthatrunonlike this.Butothersseemtobefine. And the problem seems to occur with random paragraphs (or sometimesjustphrases) throughout the document.
It's not just my copy of Word (on Win7). At least two other people are involved in the production/review cycle, and they report the same problem.
I don't co-edit many other documents with my wife, so I can't say if this is confined to the one document, and its descendants via copy and/or "save as". However. I'd call that incompatible...anecdotally.
To have Android as a desktop OS only proves Microsoft right about many of Windows 8's design choices.
... Windows 8 gets a lot of flak for Metro, despite having the desktop available, even on crippled RT (which still allows IE and Office, and possibly select third-party software in the future, besides all native OS functions).
Perhaps the interest in Android as a big-screen OS does offer confirmation that Windows 8's UI isn't totally broken. That in turn is confirmation for my thesis that what people hate about the 8 UI is the way it infantilises the user. Fisher-Price colour scheme and a vocabulary including words like "charms" indicate that Microsoft's target user is about 7 years old. The reaction against the 8 UI is a reaction against being patronised and infantilised.
Sure, Android can get a desktop-oriented interface, but why should it?
Surely the answer to that is obvious? From the device manufacturer's point of view, no Microsoft tax, and no Intel tax. Also, a ready-made channel for developers through which customers can buy apps for your hardware.
There are plenty of alternatives (Windows, OS X to a lesser extent, Ubuntu and co., Debian, BSD stuff...)
No, there are not.
OS X is only available on Apple hardware. Apple, to its credit, has showed pretty conclusively that the only way for an OS to succeed in today's world is to have a built-in channel for customers to buy apps. The BSDs and non-Ubuntu Linux are not alternatives for this reason. And Ubuntu is...unfocused, shall we say. Because it's all over the map (servers! no, phones! No, what about the--squirrel!), it's not a viable alternative either, in the end. (Disclosure: I'm writing this on Ubuntu 12.04.)
So, there is one alternative: Windows. And people associate that with work, and its stupid policies and password rules, and its BOFHs, and not being allowed access to Facebook or eBay... they just generally associate Windows with the brokenness of modern life. Android is more or less invisible, except to tech geeks. But lots of people love the chat apps and the silly-things-to-do-to-photos apps. And "zero mindshare for the OS" is another thing that device manufacturers want.
Laffer Curve: somewhat ironically, once people got around to doing some measurements, they found that the optimal top tax rate (for income over the first $1M/year, say) was 73%. Not the result that Laffer wanted, I think.
The modern patent system was introduced in the late 18th century - before telegraphs, before railways, before steam ships. Heck, before paved roads, in most places. The tempo of commerce has increased significantly since then, so it seems likely that reducing the term of patents is appropriate.
I'm sure that some lucky grad students will eventually do the empirical work.
Hmmm.. last used for any length of time: FreeBSD 2.2.2 with FVWM95 (serial mouse!), back in '00 or thereabouts. (At the time, FreeBSD was reliable; Linux was not. Corel Linux--remember that, anyone? Urg. Red Hat? flaky, at the time. Mandrake Linux: slightly less flaky.)
But the culture hasn't changed much, from a recent scout-round. I'd say your impression is correct. Here are some random thoughts:-
*BSDers will say *BSD is more like "real Un*x", but as far as I can tell the OS has been riddled with schisms since the '70s. The "real Un*x" is a nostalgic fantasy (or an artefact of Stockholm syndrome, take your pick).
*BSDers will say *BSD is reliable. That hasn't been a problem for Linux for a decade. (Except for Intel's video drivers...grrr.)
Differences...apart from being behind the times hardware-wise (which you can do with Centos 4, if you want), the main difference is: only one "distro". (Although there are a few derivatives of FreeBSD and NetBSD, only their creators use them, pretty much.) BDSM submissives enjoy OpenBSD; no-one'd dare fork it.
The FreeBSD man pages were better. Way better, as I recall. That's in part because they tried to avoid all that dubious GNU stuff. Can't say they were wrong about info(1), but I can say they were wrong about make(1).
Filesystems. Linux and *BSD have *FAT*, NTFS, and ZFS in common. That's about it. FreeBSD has had ZFS for a couple of years longer than Linux.
Culture. For a long time the *BSDs' attitude was "compile it from source, and fix the dependencies yourself". Like combining the bad parts of old-time Slackware and Gentoo. Might be better now; I've only tried Live CDs.
Startup: I like the rc.conf startup configuration approach. (Way better than System Five initscripts. "Fragile" hardly begins to describe that approach.) I used Arch Linux for a long time because it had the closest approximation to rc.conf, but it also had drivers for USB and stuff. You know, the hardware I had attached to my PC. Not much, back in the day; but I wanted to use it. Arch was a pretty good compromise.
Now, Arch Linux has moved away from an rc.conf-ish approach to using systemd. I've been getting progressively more annoyed with all the Sieved Poots appearing in linux, so I recently tried PC-BSD, which is supposed to be an end-user friendly porcelain on top of FreeBSD. Unfortunately, it's dire. Bug after glitch after missing object. On both my PCs, the typography is eyewatering. Worse than Windows 3.11.
You're better off with FreeBSD. I might be going back there soon. Probably, though, it won't have support for my USB wifi stick. If you never see me comment again, you'll know what's happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you get the curious notion that Microsoft is a programming company?
Skype, Exchange, SQL Server, MS-DOS, Dynamics, Sharepoint... Good software and bad, Microsoft bought it. It doesn't know how to make mass-market software. The partial exceptions are Word and Excel, and the Windows NT OSes. With NT, Microsoft tried to learn how to make an OS via their JV with IBM on OS/2. History suggests that Microsoft's learning was...less than thorough.
Microsoft is better characterised as an IP licensing company which does some software development (and, under Ballmer, hardware development) as a promotional activity.
I totally agree about their employee review system, though. The flaws in that ought to be obvious to any non-autistic person, sociopath or not.
Slashdot commenters discussing politics always put me in mind of Samuel Johnson's quip about women preaching.
The first two-thirds of it, anyway.
Also: Beowulf cluster, yadda, yadda...; xkcd, yadda, yadda; car analogy.
You mean there are other attack vectors, too?
Enough of the ad hominem, try some facts.
Ahonen says:
* in the three quarters before Elop's "Burning Platform" memo, Nokia smartphones was growing volume, profit, and market share.
* the memo came out mid-quarter. In that quarter, profit and volume were down.
* in every quarter since, Nokia smartphones has made a trading loss, and lost volume, average selling price and market share (although volume seems to have stabilised in the last quarter).
* Nokia started selling Windows phones more than a year after the Burning Platform memo.
Let's go over that last point again. Ahonen says that Nokia's troubles started before Windows phone came out... precisely because Elop committed solely to an OS that didn't exist at the time.
Care to refute any of Ahonen's assertions? With references, mind.
In my opinion, it's far worse than Ahonen says. Here's a thought experiment:-
You are the CEO of a large, profitable and industry-dominating multinational company that built its success on a strategy of massive product differentiation and close relationships with its distribution channels. No matter who a person is--whatever their demographic classification, socio-economic status, country, region, language or religion--you have a product aimed at them. And the company's doing very well: the distributors like your product, and they sell it well. Sales are growing, global market share is growing, profits are growing, despite overheads being a little high.
You see another company starting to make a lot of money selling luxury products (in your industry) in one market (that is large and rich, but which has limited growth potential). This company has an adversarial relationship with its distribution channels. It's more or less the exact opposite of your company.
Do you:-
A) Publicly announce that everything your company has built its success on is totally wrong, and that you must drop everything and all other markets to compete with this new company on their own terms in their own home market--and, moreover, make this announcement a year before you have products to sell in that market?
B) Realise that there is some untapped potential in the luxury end of the market, and add products and services to your portfolio accordingly?
I hope the answer is obvious; this is not even Marketing 101. Unfortunately, the answer Elop chose was A).
Tricky ethical ground, this.
How much right does one person have to maim another - cause them pain and cause their teeth to fall out ( withhold fluoride), stunt their intellectual development (withhold iodide), cause them to become paralysed, blind or deaf, or asphyxiated (not protect them from polio, German measles, tetanus)?
I'd argue both that people shouldn't be allowed to harm other people (their children and grand-children) in these ways, and that the rest of us are ethically bound to prevent that harm and risk of harm to future adults, no matter what their parents think.
"The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons" is Old Testament thinking. Are we not civilized, now? Did the children choose their parents?
... and using AC electricity (the radiation!!).
Actually, it'd be good if the chemtrail/fluoride/anti-vax people did stop using electricity. They'd be too busy doing their laundry to bother rational people.
flouride
Ah, Muphry's Law. Still all-powerful.
Argh! There is no phase seven. Buffer overflow error.
Wait, your phone can decode video?!? In real time, playing the movies at normal speed? How many kilograms does it weigh, and how long is the power lead? How big is the mortgage on it? (/socraticmethod)
The computer innovation process broadly goes like this: first algorithm sort-of works but is incredibly inefficient - tweaks on this - a rethinking of the whole approach that leads to massive speed-ups - further refinement - implementation of the algorithm in hardware, where it becomes just another specialized processor - everybody profits!.
This article is about the third, or possibly fourth, phase of the process. If it it works out, phase 5 is straightforward. By itself, step 5 typically leads to two orders of magnitude increase in performance, three orders of magnitude decrease in power consumption, and two to four orders of magnitude decrease in cost.
Phases 6 and 7 happen if and when enough people find the provided service useful. (If technologies are no good, that's when only rich people have them. Successful technologies, everyone gets access to eventually.)
It is a potential habitat. It is a gateway to the stars.
...and here you reveal your true colours.
Ceres is not a potential habitat.
Assume you can develop a shelter with adequate shielding from cosmic rays and solar storms, adequate insulation, pressure containment, etc. (Despite the fact that we don't know what "adequate" is, or exactly what's in "etc".) And assume you can transport inhabitants there, all the while keeeping them healthy. Fine. One teeny little failure in one annoying little subsystem, lasting a mere minute, and every inhabitant is dead. What are the odds of zero operation failures in a lifetime? Never happened in any city here on Earth. Or even any inhabited building.
Another thing. If you could build machines reliable enough to transport people safely around the solar system (and you actually wanted to have people live off Earth), why would you bother with a habitat on an asteroid? Stick with what works: the spaceship. Iain Banks had this right.
Ceres is not a gateway to the stars.
Nothing is. The stars are too far away. You'll never live long enough to learn anything from sending a physical mass to any star with Earth-like, habitable zone planets; your city won't exist long enough. Your civilization likely won't last long enough. (The Fermi paradox is no paradox at all. It's a demonstration of how far apart stars are, and how hostile and unrewarding the intervening space is...and perhaps of the rationality of other intelligent life.)
So what are we left with? Ceres is a potentially useful source of reaction mass/propellant, if anyone ever discovers a valid reason to send physical masses past geosynchronous orbit. (I'll believe mining asteroids could be profitable when I discover a pressing ubiqitous and essential materials problem for which all solutions require one particular element, and the element is both in short supply here on Earth and abundant on an asteroid near Ceres. To date, though, there are substitutes and alternatives for pretty much everything that might start to get short in the next century, so don't hold your breath.)
I can see a point to mini ion drives. They're potentially handy for sending things out to geosynchronous orbit and doing stuff there and in LEO. And I can see a point to operating telescopes with good resolving power out "in space". But I can't see why they'd need to be very far away from Earth. And even for purposes of scientific experimentation, I can't see a point to sending physical mass much past the outer part of the Oort cloud.
If you want to get a semi-knowledgeable public interested in this stuff, don't use words and phrases like 'habitat', 'gateway to the stars' or 'profit' when talking about this stuff. They scream "space cadet".
Yah. Last time I was involved (about 2001), PeopleSoft's payroll system was so crude it couldn't be tweaked, adapted, or otherwise modified to run the payroll for a small-to-middling hospital. If the Pentagon started with Peoplesoft, it was always going to end up here.
While the economy is below full employment, yes. Bastiat's broken windows fallacy only applies when the economy is at capacity.
Of course, it would be better to hire the unemployed to repair and replace failing infrastructure, because it increases future production potential; but if that's politically impossible, digging and filling holes works too.
Not just airlines.
Everyone immediately leaps to talking about passenger aircraft, but this is going to see large-scale use in air freight first. Passenger craft...perhaps, maybe, one day.
This adds quite a bit to the profitability of freight--or, once the market has done its work, reduced the cost of air freight. Take out the air crew and associated life support systems, and you can add another 300-500 kilos of freight to the manifest.
FedEx, DHL, etc. are going to be all over this, if they can get the idea to fly with regulators.
And when XP arrived almost every customer I had wanted the "Classic Start Menu" from windows 2000. People don't like to learn new things regardless of whether they are better or worse than what they had before.
This is broken on at least two levels.
I was there, and I don't recall any such push-back against the XP menu. There were a few comments about it looking a bit colorful, and feeling slower, but nothing like the reaction to 8's UI. (Of course compared to 98SE or ME, XP was like dawn after a dark night in terms of stability. People loved that.)
Secondly, and more importantly, the first rule of UIs is: don't change it unless it's badly broken.
It's true that most people don't like to learn new things, especially to do with computers. Guess what? Your stupid computer program isn't the most important thing in their lives—or even the fiftieth most important thing. They're not waiting with bated breath for the next "wonderful surprise" you're about to inflict on them. And: you can't change anyone besides yourself. People won't like change, no matter how hard you try to "fix" them. If you want to change the UI, you'd better provide strong, compelling, immediate reasons for that.
There's no evidence that (for anyone outside the executive suites in Microsoft Towers) Windows 8's way of locating and starting applications led to greater productivity and/or better employee morale. There's considerable evidence that the change has caused exactly the opposite.
(The UI mess is sad. Under the covers, 8 is a great improvement over 7. A tight OS.)
1) Now try typing a few letters of what you are searching for. Much better.
Hmmm...lessee. I want to reduce the size of this here video, to play it on my phone. What the heck was that app called, again? Maybe something like "transcoder"? (types) ... Hmmm..... Nope. Doesn't look right.
Types: <backspace><backspace> (&c) .... Ok, how about "video"? (types) ... Hmmm, nope, that's not it. I don't think so, anyway.
(Types: <backspace><backspace>...<backspace>) Okay, um, "resize"? (types) ...nope.
*clicks around in menu* .... Oh, yeah. Handbrake. Typing transcode did work, but I couldn't tell.
The search interface works really well.
You want an anecdote?
My wife has Word for Mac. (On a Mac, strangely enough.) Whenever she edits (or, I think, even merely opens and saves) a particular biannual report that I produce, and then I open it again, some paragraphs have lost the spaces between words. Sothereareparagraphsthatrunonlike this.Butothersseemtobefine. And the problem seems to occur with random paragraphs (or sometimesjustphrases) throughout the document.
It's not just my copy of Word (on Win7). At least two other people are involved in the production/review cycle, and they report the same problem.
I don't co-edit many other documents with my wife, so I can't say if this is confined to the one document, and its descendants via copy and/or "save as". However. I'd call that incompatible...anecdotally.
Duh! s/has showed/has shown/.
To have Android as a desktop OS only proves Microsoft right about many of Windows 8's design choices.
... Windows 8 gets a lot of flak for Metro, despite having the desktop available, even on crippled RT (which still allows IE and Office, and possibly select third-party software in the future, besides all native OS functions).
Perhaps the interest in Android as a big-screen OS does offer confirmation that Windows 8's UI isn't totally broken. That in turn is confirmation for my thesis that what people hate about the 8 UI is the way it infantilises the user. Fisher-Price colour scheme and a vocabulary including words like "charms" indicate that Microsoft's target user is about 7 years old. The reaction against the 8 UI is a reaction against being patronised and infantilised.
Sure, Android can get a desktop-oriented interface, but why should it?
Surely the answer to that is obvious? From the device manufacturer's point of view, no Microsoft tax, and no Intel tax. Also, a ready-made channel for developers through which customers can buy apps for your hardware.
There are plenty of alternatives (Windows, OS X to a lesser extent, Ubuntu and co., Debian, BSD stuff...)
No, there are not.
OS X is only available on Apple hardware. Apple, to its credit, has showed pretty conclusively that the only way for an OS to succeed in today's world is to have a built-in channel for customers to buy apps. The BSDs and non-Ubuntu Linux are not alternatives for this reason. And Ubuntu is...unfocused, shall we say. Because it's all over the map (servers! no, phones! No, what about the--squirrel!), it's not a viable alternative either, in the end. (Disclosure: I'm writing this on Ubuntu 12.04.)
So, there is one alternative: Windows. And people associate that with work, and its stupid policies and password rules, and its BOFHs, and not being allowed access to Facebook or eBay... they just generally associate Windows with the brokenness of modern life. Android is more or less invisible, except to tech geeks. But lots of people love the chat apps and the silly-things-to-do-to-photos apps. And "zero mindshare for the OS" is another thing that device manufacturers want.
This story normally ends with "... and that's why I bought a Mac".
Microsoft isn't the only company that employs "reputation managers", it seems.
Laffer Curve: somewhat ironically, once people got around to doing some measurements, they found that the optimal top tax rate (for income over the first $1M/year, say) was 73%. Not the result that Laffer wanted, I think.
The modern patent system was introduced in the late 18th century - before telegraphs, before railways, before steam ships. Heck, before paved roads, in most places. The tempo of commerce has increased significantly since then, so it seems likely that reducing the term of patents is appropriate.
I'm sure that some lucky grad students will eventually do the empirical work.
Are you planning to patent the process of making laws?? Clever!
Correction: That was FreeBSD 2.2.26.
Hmmm.. last used for any length of time: FreeBSD 2.2.2 with FVWM95 (serial mouse!), back in '00 or thereabouts. (At the time, FreeBSD was reliable; Linux was not. Corel Linux--remember that, anyone? Urg. Red Hat? flaky, at the time. Mandrake Linux: slightly less flaky.)
But the culture hasn't changed much, from a recent scout-round. I'd say your impression is correct. Here are some random thoughts:-
*BSDers will say *BSD is more like "real Un*x", but as far as I can tell the OS has been riddled with schisms since the '70s. The "real Un*x" is a nostalgic fantasy (or an artefact of Stockholm syndrome, take your pick).
*BSDers will say *BSD is reliable. That hasn't been a problem for Linux for a decade. (Except for Intel's video drivers...grrr.)
Differences...apart from being behind the times hardware-wise (which you can do with Centos 4, if you want), the main difference is: only one "distro". (Although there are a few derivatives of FreeBSD and NetBSD, only their creators use them, pretty much.) BDSM submissives enjoy OpenBSD; no-one'd dare fork it.
The FreeBSD man pages were better. Way better, as I recall. That's in part because they tried to avoid all that dubious GNU stuff. Can't say they were wrong about info(1), but I can say they were wrong about make(1).
Filesystems. Linux and *BSD have *FAT*, NTFS, and ZFS in common. That's about it. FreeBSD has had ZFS for a couple of years longer than Linux.
Culture. For a long time the *BSDs' attitude was "compile it from source, and fix the dependencies yourself". Like combining the bad parts of old-time Slackware and Gentoo. Might be better now; I've only tried Live CDs.
Startup: I like the rc.conf startup configuration approach. (Way better than System Five initscripts. "Fragile" hardly begins to describe that approach.) I used Arch Linux for a long time because it had the closest approximation to rc.conf, but it also had drivers for USB and stuff. You know, the hardware I had attached to my PC. Not much, back in the day; but I wanted to use it. Arch was a pretty good compromise.
Now, Arch Linux has moved away from an rc.conf-ish approach to using systemd. I've been getting progressively more annoyed with all the Sieved Poots appearing in linux, so I recently tried PC-BSD, which is supposed to be an end-user friendly porcelain on top of FreeBSD. Unfortunately, it's dire. Bug after glitch after missing object. On both my PCs, the typography is eyewatering. Worse than Windows 3.11.
You're better off with FreeBSD. I might be going back there soon. Probably, though, it won't have support for my USB wifi stick. If you never see me comment again, you'll know what's happened.