I'm a consultant as well, however I run Debian linux as my main distribution, and VMWare which has Windows XP installed in it. This way I can make copies of Windows XP at different phases (no patches, full patched no SP2, full patch with SP2).
VMWare is not cheap, but it's well worth the money. What's bizarre is I still have Windows lockup and crash, but my computer is a lot more stable. In fact I've never had linux lock up and crash on me.
Clients are really impressed when they see the "computer" still working (Linux), while Windows is sitting at a blue screen of death. You can have 2 or 3 copies of Windows XP, and setup a samba server on the host as a background server to store your files. No data loss, no worrying about viruses or spyware, no concern about whether to use or not use SP2 (use 'em both).
I thought we were all for the idea of companies supporting Open Source by paying developers for their work? So what if it's a lot of golden handshakes, everything's being done out in the open with the source code available for all to see.
I support Open Source software because it embraces the economic realities of a capitalist society. I respect Free Software and Richard Stallman for the contributions that he's made, but I don't need the guilt trip that I use Linux, GNU & Windows.
Software development is all just a grand experiment. I want to see which method produces the best software. So far, there's no perfect way.
Microsoft rates the flaw "important" for many of its products, but "critical" for Outlook versions 2002 and 2003, Internet Explorer 6 with Service Pack 1, Windows XP and Windows XP with Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2003, and the.Net Framework 1.0 with Service Pack 2 and.Net Framework 1.1, according to the Security Bulletin.
Isn't it interesting that when Microsoft is fighting court cases, Internet Explorer is consider "part of the operating system". But in this case they make the distinction between products, so that this flaw is "important" for one piece and "critical" for another.
It's clear to me that Windows, Office and other related Microsoft products are simply unrepairable. And I don't buy that arguement that it's because they've got the biggest market share that these problems are made known. If that's the case, then how come Apache with over 60% of the market and millions of installations is not fraught with as many defects as Microsoft products?
Solution: Microsoft has to open source their code. It will never happen, but they've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can't fix their own code.
Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time.
In other obscure news about competition that no one cares about, Bob's Fatburger is launching a new ham & swiss sandwich that may prove to be stiff competition against Arby's in the war of the cold cut sandwich arena.
As soon as Apple or major Linux distros start running a WinFS'ish-like file system, Microsoft won't bother to foist their code on the world. Why should they? They drag their feet on every project they can until competition forces them to react.
I find it amusing that Windows requires so much babysitting. OS Patching, anti-virus signature updating, anti-spyware scanning, rinse & repeat. And after awhile when entropy has taken too much of a toll on the machine, it's time to back everything up, erase the computer and reinstall the operating system.
It's a computer for crying out loud! Why can't the process be automated so users can do other things?
More about power and negotiating than technology
on
Apache Rejects Sender ID
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think this is the first time I've seen a situation where Microsoft is unable to dictate to others on "how things are going to be". The question I have now is "what will Microsoft do next?". Are they willing to be directed by an Open Source project, or will they go their own route to stave off the perception that Microsoft isn't as omnipotent as they want everyone to believe?
"It is therefore no surprise that some of our employees, however bright they may, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world"
Yet another reason why Open Source is the only sensible way for technology to grow. Foreign countries can tailor software any way they want to truly meet the needs of a geographical area.
What happens when you put an unprotected Windows 98 box on a broadband connection?
If you went back in time (say 1950's) and were able to peer into the future to 2004 and saw how users had to be "educated" in computer usage (install anti-virus, anti-spyware, OS fixes AND having to keep the whole mess updated), I would think the first thing that people would ask is "Can't the computer do it?"
Patching, fixing, protecting: it's a computer for crying out loud! Why shouldn't users be naive? Why should people be wasting their time learning how to fix something that shouldn't be broken in the first place?
Take a step back, and it seems totally absurd that people need to learn to protect an operating system so bad that it can't protect itself. I call that "sickly".
One wonders why someone that can't afford food would have spent money on a computer on which to play these games.
You would be surprised. Although many households who are poor are doing the best they can, many more are run by foolish people. People who spend thousands every year on cigarettes, alcohol and porn off the internet. I live in a semi-rural area, but we have two downtown areas. One is surrounded mostly by young families, and the other by mostly welfare recipients. The poorer downtown area has trouble sustaining businesses, but there are a lot of pawn shops, and a lot of those shops are filled with cheap computers.
The fact is, there are a lot of people in poverty who do own computers. The old saying still holds true today "a fool and his money are soon parted"/
The bleeding hearts among you can now feel free to mod me down or rip me apart.
Worst movie I've seen? Easy: Mulholland Drive. David Lynch must have been falling over himself laughing that he was able to get critics to love his movie. Like the idiot philosopher who states "God is one hand clapping" which gets blank stares and nodding heads as if to say "wow, he's so deep". Nonsense. And so is Mulholland Drive - nonsense.
Not everyone will agree with this, but games are what will make Linux succeed as the #1 desktop in the world. When you can buy the same games for Linux that you can for Windows and anyone can install them, there will be a massive push behind Linux as an operating system.
Games push hardware, which sell more computers, which spur the development of faster machines. Microsoft used to do a good job of releasing bloatware that forced companies to upgrade their work PC to keep doing the same jobs (word processing, spreadsheets, databasing & communication apps).
If your a Linux fan like me, having a Linux-based arcade machine is a very, very good thing. Linux will definitely succeed in the desktop arena - we have games coming.
Now, I Don't know Python, so educate me? IF you can fit it all in your head, how do you access a database with Python? Write a GUI? CReate an HTTP server? Read and parse a JPEG?
Python's beauty can probably be best summed up in the easter egg planted in the interpreter itself. Just go to any Python interpreter and type "import this"
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
I'm a Python programmer. I never learned Java because I heard so many people complain about how many books and reference materials they need just to get things done.
What I don't understand is why I even need Java? Jython let's me do pretty much everything Java can do, in a language that is a lot simpler that "fits in my head", not fits in a huge bookshelf. Sure I still need to know a bit about Java classes and such, but it's a lot less work than my friends who program in Java have to do. I feel sometimes like I'm watching people hike up to the top of a mountain every day, while I just take a 4x4 and get to the same place, but get there faster and with a lot less sweat and effort.
Can anyone who codes both in Python and Java educate me?
Pry it away through the Second PC
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Over the last three years, the fraction of home and office PCs powered by Linux has roughly doubled, to almost 3 percent, and it's set to double again before the end of 2005, according to market research firm IDC.
I don't think Linux can compete directly with Microsoft. Their mindshare and marketing is too powerful. Where I see the opportunity to win is through the second PC.
Many households are starting to buy more than one computer. If Linux came pre-installed and configured with Samba (to share and store files for the entire house) and streaming software to stream audio and video, then Joe Consumer could start relying on Linux to hold what's most important - their data.
Maybe consumers won't see Linux as a front-line PC for awhile, but the super-reliable machine in the background storing all their save game data, their music collections and their work files will sneak its way into homes just like Linux snuck in to the datacenter. When Jane Doe is pulling her hair out because Windows needs 14 hours of download time to get it OS updates, anti-virus and anti-Spam signatures after being rendered unusable from the latest virus, the realization that reliability is ultimately more important than compatibility will finally dawn. "Hey, this Linux computer is still working. I'll get my report done on that machine"
Of course once that happens, then more people will buy Linux machines. Then there will be a growing demand for native software. Linux compatibility will finally be addressed, because there will now be a market to sell games, applications and other stuff for Linux.
Hopefully Billy Gates and his cohorts have a good supply of Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride. They're going to be losing a lot of sleep in the next few years.
It brings up an interesting tactic Microsoft can use to *really* kill Linux. Just support a whole tonne of Open Source projects for about 2 years, paying all sorts of bounties to programmers. At the same time, slip in lots of proprietary code and then sue everyone, or let their minions over at SCO perform more barratry. Then Bill can sit back and say "well we tried to help Open Source, but it obviously doesn't work".
See? The truly cynical among us can take any thread and twist it as a slam against Microsoft. Booyakasha!
now don't get me wrong, i'm not bashing php. i use php all the time and it is a pretty straightforward tool and quite easy to pick up. the inevitable problem with trying to reform a language is that you need to "break" it in order to fix it
In the movie "City Slickers" Jack Palance's character quips that the secret to life is just one thing, and once you know what that one thing is, everything else makes sense. I'm beginning to think that programming languages are the same way. The "one thing" about Visual Basic was introducing components. Perl's one best thing is powerful reporting capabilities. Python's contribution is namespace (just type 'import this' into the interpreter for an easter egg's explanation).
PHP's "one great thing" seems to be initial ease of use. It's dead simple to install, the php website's documentation is second-to-none, and it's relatively painless to cut-and-paste code inside HTML to make stuff work. My problem, however, is the same complaint I have with the Windows operating system: PHP is impossible to master, because it's becoming too broad with too many functions and too many special cases.
According to http://tnx.nl/php there are 3079 core functions in PHP4 (as of november 2003), compared to 206 in perl.
Well, I guess I came to the party late. I didn't even realize that code used to be formatted to 80 columns!
I guess that's why most of my old code is impossible to maintain. In search of something better, I switched to Python because of ESR recommendation and I really, really like it. The forced syntax makes my code a lot more readable. Although I've been struggling to switch my LAMP coding from Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP to Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python, I'm hoping it will be easier to maintain.
I think I'll begin to adopt fixed-width as well and see if I can continue to make code maintenance improvements. To me, computing speed is no longer an issue. Development and maintenance speed is king now.
What drives me crazy about PHP is it just keeps growing. Need another function? Ah let's just add it! The problem is the language grows from something quite simple to something that's impossible to master.
I like the approach Python has taken. Everything is kept clean and simple, and the complexity is added through importing modules. Need another function? Import it! I guess that's why Python is said to "fit in your head".
I'd better stop before I start a flame-war. The point I wanted to make is PHP and Java will both probably collapse under their own weight, and another simpler language will take their place. If the plan is the grow PHP into Java, then there will be tonnes of books needed to reference everything, which is good if you want to sell books, but bad if you want to write programs without having to constantly look something up.
It seems to me that a programming language needs to plan for growth before it starts, otherwise it grows and gobbles up the mental resources of the programmers using it. Once it's too big, people will just fall back on simpler tools.
If a company's *really* that concerned about people gaining access to their network through tapping, then they should be moving away from wireless altogether and towards fiber optics. Fiber is completely impervious to electromagnetic tapping, because it's optical, not electrical.
WiFi will never be secure. So decide if you want security or convenience.
OpenOffice.org is just the beginning. A wide variety of desktop applications, including Web browsing and office productivity software, are available at low cost or no cost. Many of these apps not only run on Linux, but also offer versions for Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX and others. What's more, several big-name software providers, from Novell to Oracle, are making their robust and well-tested enterprise applications available on Linux as well.
Good. And they will no doubt run into interoperability problems that other ambitious migration projects have. Of course the big difference is Novell is a position to do something about it. They can commission groups of paid and volunteer programmers to fix what doesn't work, so that we can all benefit.
Maybe there's some ex-Microsoft employees out there that can pitch in. Computing may become fun again after all for the masses.
Great! Hopefully other companies will use Linux to leverage Microsoft into deeply discounting their overpriced software.
I don't like monopolies because they lead to unimaginative products with high price tags. Competition clears the stagnant air and fires the imagination of those who seek to build and compete.
Linux will never go away. Nor will Microsoft in all probability. It's an ecosystem that's not pretty, but it gives me lots of cheap hardware that's useless to bloated MScode. I like that. And I'm glad people will use Linux anyway they see fit, even if it's to negotiate a better deal.
Seems to me this will lead to lazy production practices, not better-built chips. Maybe it's needed in order to keep pushing the Moore's Law marketing vision.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd recommend printing off Microsoft product descriptions from their website. They have a huge collection of fairy tales.
I'm a consultant as well, however I run Debian linux as my main distribution, and VMWare which has Windows XP installed in it. This way I can make copies of Windows XP at different phases (no patches, full patched no SP2, full patch with SP2).
VMWare is not cheap, but it's well worth the money. What's bizarre is I still have Windows lockup and crash, but my computer is a lot more stable. In fact I've never had linux lock up and crash on me.
Clients are really impressed when they see the "computer" still working (Linux), while Windows is sitting at a blue screen of death. You can have 2 or 3 copies of Windows XP, and setup a samba server on the host as a background server to store your files. No data loss, no worrying about viruses or spyware, no concern about whether to use or not use SP2 (use 'em both).
I thought we were all for the idea of companies supporting Open Source by paying developers for their work? So what if it's a lot of golden handshakes, everything's being done out in the open with the source code available for all to see.
I support Open Source software because it embraces the economic realities of a capitalist society. I respect Free Software and Richard Stallman for the contributions that he's made, but I don't need the guilt trip that I use Linux, GNU & Windows.
Software development is all just a grand experiment. I want to see which method produces the best software. So far, there's no perfect way.
Microsoft rates the flaw "important" for many of its products, but "critical" for Outlook versions 2002 and 2003, Internet Explorer 6 with Service Pack 1, Windows XP and Windows XP with Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2003, and the .Net Framework 1.0 with Service Pack 2 and .Net Framework 1.1, according to the Security Bulletin.
Isn't it interesting that when Microsoft is fighting court cases, Internet Explorer is consider "part of the operating system". But in this case they make the distinction between products, so that this flaw is "important" for one piece and "critical" for another.
It's clear to me that Windows, Office and other related Microsoft products are simply unrepairable. And I don't buy that arguement that it's because they've got the biggest market share that these problems are made known. If that's the case, then how come Apache with over 60% of the market and millions of installations is not fraught with as many defects as Microsoft products?
Solution: Microsoft has to open source their code. It will never happen, but they've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can't fix their own code.
Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time.
In other obscure news about competition that no one cares about, Bob's Fatburger is launching a new ham & swiss sandwich that may prove to be stiff competition against Arby's in the war of the cold cut sandwich arena.
I'd hire Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson to greet you unwelcome guests.
As soon as Apple or major Linux distros start running a WinFS'ish-like file system, Microsoft won't bother to foist their code on the world. Why should they? They drag their feet on every project they can until competition forces them to react.
[Microsoft | Bill Gates] != innovator
I find it amusing that Windows requires so much babysitting. OS Patching, anti-virus signature updating, anti-spyware scanning, rinse & repeat. And after awhile when entropy has taken too much of a toll on the machine, it's time to back everything up, erase the computer and reinstall the operating system.
It's a computer for crying out loud! Why can't the process be automated so users can do other things?
I think this is the first time I've seen a situation where Microsoft is unable to dictate to others on "how things are going to be". The question I have now is "what will Microsoft do next?". Are they willing to be directed by an Open Source project, or will they go their own route to stave off the perception that Microsoft isn't as omnipotent as they want everyone to believe?
Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.
"It is therefore no surprise that some of our employees, however bright they may, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world"
Yet another reason why Open Source is the only sensible way for technology to grow. Foreign countries can tailor software any way they want to truly meet the needs of a geographical area.
What happens when you put an unprotected Windows 98 box on a broadband connection?
If you went back in time (say 1950's) and were able to peer into the future to 2004 and saw how users had to be "educated" in computer usage (install anti-virus, anti-spyware, OS fixes AND having to keep the whole mess updated), I would think the first thing that people would ask is "Can't the computer do it?"
Patching, fixing, protecting: it's a computer for crying out loud! Why shouldn't users be naive? Why should people be wasting their time learning how to fix something that shouldn't be broken in the first place?
Take a step back, and it seems totally absurd that people need to learn to protect an operating system so bad that it can't protect itself. I call that "sickly".
One wonders why someone that can't afford food would have spent money on a computer on which to play these games.
You would be surprised. Although many households who are poor are doing the best they can, many more are run by foolish people. People who spend thousands every year on cigarettes, alcohol and porn off the internet. I live in a semi-rural area, but we have two downtown areas. One is surrounded mostly by young families, and the other by mostly welfare recipients. The poorer downtown area has trouble sustaining businesses, but there are a lot of pawn shops, and a lot of those shops are filled with cheap computers.
The fact is, there are a lot of people in poverty who do own computers. The old saying still holds true today "a fool and his money are soon parted"/
The bleeding hearts among you can now feel free to mod me down or rip me apart.
Worst movie I've seen? Easy: Mulholland Drive. David Lynch must have been falling over himself laughing that he was able to get critics to love his movie. Like the idiot philosopher who states "God is one hand clapping" which gets blank stares and nodding heads as if to say "wow, he's so deep". Nonsense. And so is Mulholland Drive - nonsense.
Not everyone will agree with this, but games are what will make Linux succeed as the #1 desktop in the world. When you can buy the same games for Linux that you can for Windows and anyone can install them, there will be a massive push behind Linux as an operating system.
Games push hardware, which sell more computers, which spur the development of faster machines. Microsoft used to do a good job of releasing bloatware that forced companies to upgrade their work PC to keep doing the same jobs (word processing, spreadsheets, databasing & communication apps).
If your a Linux fan like me, having a Linux-based arcade machine is a very, very good thing. Linux will definitely succeed in the desktop arena - we have games coming.
Now, I Don't know Python, so educate me? IF you can fit it all in your head, how do you access a database with Python? Write a GUI? CReate an HTTP server? Read and parse a JPEG?
Python's beauty can probably be best summed up in the easter egg planted in the interpreter itself. Just go to any Python interpreter and type "import this"
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
I'm a Python programmer. I never learned Java because I heard so many people complain about how many books and reference materials they need just to get things done.
What I don't understand is why I even need Java? Jython let's me do pretty much everything Java can do, in a language that is a lot simpler that "fits in my head", not fits in a huge bookshelf. Sure I still need to know a bit about Java classes and such, but it's a lot less work than my friends who program in Java have to do. I feel sometimes like I'm watching people hike up to the top of a mountain every day, while I just take a 4x4 and get to the same place, but get there faster and with a lot less sweat and effort.
Can anyone who codes both in Python and Java educate me?
Over the last three years, the fraction of home and office PCs powered by Linux has roughly doubled, to almost 3 percent, and it's set to double again before the end of 2005, according to market research firm IDC.
I don't think Linux can compete directly with Microsoft. Their mindshare and marketing is too powerful. Where I see the opportunity to win is through the second PC.
Many households are starting to buy more than one computer. If Linux came pre-installed and configured with Samba (to share and store files for the entire house) and streaming software to stream audio and video, then Joe Consumer could start relying on Linux to hold what's most important - their data.
Maybe consumers won't see Linux as a front-line PC for awhile, but the super-reliable machine in the background storing all their save game data, their music collections and their work files will sneak its way into homes just like Linux snuck in to the datacenter. When Jane Doe is pulling her hair out because Windows needs 14 hours of download time to get it OS updates, anti-virus and anti-Spam signatures after being rendered unusable from the latest virus, the realization that reliability is ultimately more important than compatibility will finally dawn. "Hey, this Linux computer is still working. I'll get my report done on that machine"
Of course once that happens, then more people will buy Linux machines. Then there will be a growing demand for native software. Linux compatibility will finally be addressed, because there will now be a market to sell games, applications and other stuff for Linux.
Hopefully Billy Gates and his cohorts have a good supply of Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride. They're going to be losing a lot of sleep in the next few years.
It brings up an interesting tactic Microsoft can use to *really* kill Linux. Just support a whole tonne of Open Source projects for about 2 years, paying all sorts of bounties to programmers. At the same time, slip in lots of proprietary code and then sue everyone, or let their minions over at SCO perform more barratry. Then Bill can sit back and say "well we tried to help Open Source, but it obviously doesn't work".
See? The truly cynical among us can take any thread and twist it as a slam against Microsoft. Booyakasha!
now don't get me wrong, i'm not bashing php. i use php all the time and it is a pretty straightforward tool and quite easy to pick up. the inevitable problem with trying to reform a language is that you need to "break" it in order to fix it
In the movie "City Slickers" Jack Palance's character quips that the secret to life is just one thing, and once you know what that one thing is, everything else makes sense. I'm beginning to think that programming languages are the same way. The "one thing" about Visual Basic was introducing components. Perl's one best thing is powerful reporting capabilities. Python's contribution is namespace (just type 'import this' into the interpreter for an easter egg's explanation).
PHP's "one great thing" seems to be initial ease of use. It's dead simple to install, the php website's documentation is second-to-none, and it's relatively painless to cut-and-paste code inside HTML to make stuff work. My problem, however, is the same complaint I have with the Windows operating system: PHP is impossible to master, because it's becoming too broad with too many functions and too many special cases.
According to http://tnx.nl/php there are 3079 core functions in PHP4 (as of november 2003), compared to 206 in perl.
3079? That's just seems insane to me.
Well, I guess I came to the party late. I didn't even realize that code used to be formatted to 80 columns!
I guess that's why most of my old code is impossible to maintain. In search of something better, I switched to Python because of ESR recommendation and I really, really like it. The forced syntax makes my code a lot more readable. Although I've been struggling to switch my LAMP coding from Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP to Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python, I'm hoping it will be easier to maintain.
I think I'll begin to adopt fixed-width as well and see if I can continue to make code maintenance improvements. To me, computing speed is no longer an issue. Development and maintenance speed is king now.
What drives me crazy about PHP is it just keeps growing. Need another function? Ah let's just add it! The problem is the language grows from something quite simple to something that's impossible to master.
I like the approach Python has taken. Everything is kept clean and simple, and the complexity is added through importing modules. Need another function? Import it! I guess that's why Python is said to "fit in your head".
I'd better stop before I start a flame-war. The point I wanted to make is PHP and Java will both probably collapse under their own weight, and another simpler language will take their place. If the plan is the grow PHP into Java, then there will be tonnes of books needed to reference everything, which is good if you want to sell books, but bad if you want to write programs without having to constantly look something up.
It seems to me that a programming language needs to plan for growth before it starts, otherwise it grows and gobbles up the mental resources of the programmers using it. Once it's too big, people will just fall back on simpler tools.
If a company's *really* that concerned about people gaining access to their network through tapping, then they should be moving away from wireless altogether and towards fiber optics. Fiber is completely impervious to electromagnetic tapping, because it's optical, not electrical.
WiFi will never be secure. So decide if you want security or convenience.
OpenOffice.org is just the beginning. A wide variety of desktop applications, including Web browsing and office productivity software, are available at low cost or no cost. Many of these apps not only run on Linux, but also offer versions for Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX and others. What's more, several big-name software providers, from Novell to Oracle, are making their robust and well-tested enterprise applications available on Linux as well.
Good. And they will no doubt run into interoperability problems that other ambitious migration projects have. Of course the big difference is Novell is a position to do something about it. They can commission groups of paid and volunteer programmers to fix what doesn't work, so that we can all benefit.
Maybe there's some ex-Microsoft employees out there that can pitch in. Computing may become fun again after all for the masses.
Great! Hopefully other companies will use Linux to leverage Microsoft into deeply discounting their overpriced software.
I don't like monopolies because they lead to unimaginative products with high price tags. Competition clears the stagnant air and fires the imagination of those who seek to build and compete.
Linux will never go away. Nor will Microsoft in all probability. It's an ecosystem that's not pretty, but it gives me lots of cheap hardware that's useless to bloated MScode. I like that. And I'm glad people will use Linux anyway they see fit, even if it's to negotiate a better deal.
Seems to me this will lead to lazy production practices, not better-built chips. Maybe it's needed in order to keep pushing the Moore's Law marketing vision.