Because that's what customers ask for. I like FreeBSD, and if Cisco offered their VPN client software for FreeBSD I would switch my desktop and laptop from Linux tomorrow. But, in reality, that's not what customers ask for.
If a customer asks for Linux, why would Sun want to try to change his mind to FreeBSD? If the salesguy is going to spend hours trying to talk the customer out of Linux, he will be trying to talk him into Solaris.
Not quite. They will be releasing 1 and 2 processor general purpose servers. These are not just Cobalt and not just file and print. They have no intention of selling/supporting Linux on their SPARC machines - just x86. They have supported the sparc/linux team a little bit (giving them hardware, but not money), and that's probably as far as they will go.
This is not IBM's Linux everywhere, and 10 other OSes as well. This is a clean SPARC/Solaris and x86/Linux pairing.
I've got 3/4 of my memory free. Of course the system will let me start another process --we're nowhere near OOM. But the new process proceeds to allocate and allocate and allocate... And now we really are OOM. What now?
Stop allowing the process to allocate before you are out of memory. If you fall below a certain threshold (leaving yourself some headroom for root processes), simply return -1 for brk() calls. At that point, it is up to the application to run with fewer resources, or to exit.
It's not quite as simple for c-o-w faults, but it's not that much harder. If a user process triggers a c-o-w fault and the number of free pages has fallen below a certain threshold, simply let that process hang until free memory increases again.
Allowing processes to hang while waiting for free memory obviously introduces the possibility of deadlock. So, you always have to leave enough free pages available for root to get in there and start killing off non-root processes. You can certainly argue that this is just to OOM killer with a different name, but adding administrative discretion to the process makes the OOM killing approach more reasonable.
Now, if you have root processes that consume excessive memory, you are screwed. But as long as 'root' exists, you can always get screwed by ill-behaving root processes.
Sometimes it's OK, but usually it's not. When it comes to packaging systems, it's downright stupid.
Packaging systems solve two problems: software distribution and dependency tracking.
In order for a packaging system to handle the distribution aspect, both the packager and end user must use the same packaging system. If you package your software with dpkg and I only have RPM on my system, then you have failed to distribute your software to me. That problem is solved easily enough: every user must have every packaging system installed. It's a pointless waste of space, but what the hell; disks are cheap.
The more serious problem is resolving dependencies. You distribute your gnome app using dpkg, but I've installed gnome using RPMs. How do we validate that I have the correct version of gnome (or any version for that matter) in this case? Sure, if I know that I have the right version installed I can tell the installer not to worry about the check, but then I've lost any benefit of the packaging system in the first place.
I know this "it's OK to reimplement the same thing over and over again - that's the beauty of OSS" mantra is widely accepted as gospel on Slashdot, but I'm just not buying it. What's the point of having 100 half-assed projects all failing to do exactly the same thing?
Just as an example: go to sourceforge and look at desktop_environment:window_managers. There are 102 entries! (yes, I know a lot of those aren't really window managers. That list includes themes, menu converters, etc. That's not the point.) Most of them claim to have the same goals: lightweight, flexible, fast, configurable. And most of them are crap. There are hundreds of text editors on sourceforge; 95% of which will never be used by more than 5 people. What a freakin' waste of human effort.
The true benefit of Open Source should be that it frees us from having to solve the exact same problems over and over and over. It should enable us to go out and do new things and solve new problems. If you want to write TextEditor #1342 as a way to learn a new language, then more power to you. But don't try to tell me that the world is a better place because somebody has decided to slap together yet another "powerful programmer's text editor" and put it on a web site.
I guess I still don't understand Slashdot moderation. How can something be both a '4' and a 'troll'?
Honestly, s/he has a very good point. The current Gnome oranization is probably relatively easy for the Gnome developers, since each "project" has its own tarball, but it's a real pain in the ass for the end users.
In theory, you should be able to just download the tarballs that make up the latest 'stable' build, and build that. The last time I tried this (for 1.2, I think), one of the packages needed a newer version of another than was in the 'stable' distribution. The newer version of that package needed a newer version of another one. The whole thing snowballed until I found myself trying to get bonobo and the new GConf stuff shoehorned into gnome 1.2. I gave it up and went back to fvwm2.
I wish I could remember the specifics, because I know this sounds a bit unlikely, but it was 6 months ago. I expect I'll get a lot of "It worked for me, so you must be a dumbass" responses. By simple/. demographics, most of those will be from Linux users. I tried this on Solaris 8, which probably gets a lot less testing than Linux. (Not that that should be an excuse. If you claim to support a platform, the damn thing should at least build successfully.)
A lot of people don't seem to realize that a small annoyance for them (ads) might be the lifeblood of a struggling internet website. Often, a webmaster will put hundreds of hours into a site and pay hundreds of dollars in hosting and
bandwidth charges. It is too much to ask for him/her to recoup a small amount of that by putting up banner ads?
First of all, the article is about Yahoo (about the only website that isn't "struggling") and about pop-up/under ads - not banner ads.
In any case, how is the webmaster's inability to profit my problem? If the only business model they can come up with relies on irritating the hell out of their audience, then they deserve to go under.
People would rather see their favourite sites go away than put up with a little popup that they can just close. In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site...When you watch TV, you put up with the ads...
Pardon my French, but that's bullshit. If you use a VCR to fastforward through commercials (or TiVo to skip over them), you aren't pirating anything. Preventing a popup add from popping is exactly the same thing.
Same with printed magazines.
I have no problem with ads in magazines. I can easily skip over the first 20 pages to find the table of contents without even looking at the ads.
Now if magazines had spring-mounted ads that popped up in your face evey time you turned a page, that would be a different story. And I assume you wouldn't be complaining about me "pirating" the magazine if I ripped the damn spring out before looking at the first ad.
The real problem is that the key Linux developers go out of their way to make it damn near impossible to deliver a device driver in any way except as part of the mainline kernel. Linus has stated that this is nearly a design goal.
Since they are incapable of and/or unwilling to come up with a device driver API that can stand the test of time, we are stuck with toting around 10s of megabytes of drivers for hardware that we don't have, and with drivers that can become obsolete overnight if they don't have a fulltime maintainer.
Don't you people even read the articles before leaping in here to talk about them? I don't mean to just single out "MattLesko" here, since it seems that at least half of the posters didn't even bother to read the article before shooting their mouths off. Since some other nitwit actually rated this article as "insightful", this is where I finally fell over the edge.
One of the points in the article is that all the sex at the show doesn't do a damn thing to sell the games. All the booths have bimbos, but even the PR people couldn't be convinced to admit that they helped generate sales.
One of the other key points of the article is that the industry would like to move beyond the TeenBoy/FatLoserGeek ghetto and into the larger "mainstream" market. If that is their goal, the article asks, why do they insist on sticking with bimbo marketing that will only appeal to the TeenBoy/FatLoserGeek crowd?
Re:The future of PDA's, and a possible cloud.
on
Cheap Linux PDAs
·
· Score: 1
they will only improve when...better OS's,
especially Linux based ones, arrive on the scene
Why should the OS matter to a PDA? It's a utility that is designed to run one application for one user at a time. If you even know which OS is running - or if you even know that an OS is running - then the OS is just getting in the way.
If you care which OS is running, then you don't want a PDA in the first place. You want a handheld PC.
If you don't value your freedom that much, then I see why you think it is ridiculous.
To put it bluntly, that's just stupid. This is a PDA we're talking about - it's not a freakin' political system!
Do you refuse to shop in any store that has a "proprietary" (oh no! not that!) point-of-sale system running on their cash registers?
Are you boycotting VCRs until you can get a Linux-based TIVO? (so, does anybody have the source code to the "application" that runs on the oh-so-Free TIVO? Are y'all forking out the monthly fee to the Man for the "proprietary" scheduling information?)
Are you refusing to drive until the auto manufacturers start using Embedded Linux to control all the CPUs scattered around the car?
I'm all in favor of Ideals. But you're not working with Ideals - you're just mindlessly bleating the latest KoolRad jingoism.
At the bottom of the column, they make it clear that the "News" is coming from slashdot. If they are trying to fool people, they're going about it in kind of a strange way.
It was also a profound political blunder:
there are more Americans turning 18 than ever
before, and they now know that at least one
presidential candidate is an idiot.
It doesn't matter how many people are turning 18.
Even if they were paying attention to the debate, which they weren't, their opinion doesn't mean a damn thing. They don't vote!
Why does Sun not have the energy to drive
more than one operating system when its
competition does?
Take a look at the changes in marketshare, income, and stock price over the last few years of Sun and the 5 competitors you mentioned. Perhaps all the energy the other companies are putting into their OS collections would be better spent somewhere else, eh?
The problem is relatively rare and it only shows up on 400mhz modules with 4MB or 8MB ecaches. If you're seeing ecache errors on that many CPUs, or if you're seeing them on other USII types, then there is something else wrong.
Assuming you aren't just making this up, it sounds like you have flaky power or the room is _way_ too hot.
Sun is selling E10Ks as fast as they can build them. This machine is several years old now, and demand for them is actually accelerating. If the problems this site reports were widespread - especially considering how much you pay for an E10K - wouldn't you think sales would slip a little?
As for eBay...when experienced their first public outage a year+ ago, they were running everything on one E10K. Apparently, they now have 4 of them. Does that sound like a company that is unhappy with the hardware?
I believe it was a copyright issue. ECMA wanted to own the copyrights on all the documents that Sun submitted - and would then pass ownership of those copyrights to ISO.
Sun had spent years developing those documents (and making them freely available on the web), and didn't want to give them up.
By sheer coincidence, I just read a story in Salon about new records being set in the record industry. Apparently just this last week Britney Spears set a record for the most records sold by a female artist in the first week of an album's release. Eminem's new album comes out this week, and that is expected to open with 1.2-1.4 million first-week sales. That would be the first time ever that two records had consecutive million+ opening weeks.
Why would someone bother to use a NUMA-Q server for any application? Beowulf clustering (which IBM is also pushing) provides a significantly greater price/performance ratio for most applications, and gives you a better interconnect fabric for interprocess communications.
Manageability.
Assuming that they've got this even close to right, managing a 64-CPU NUMA-Q system should be no more complicated than managing a 1 CPU NUMA-Q system. Until the sysadmin tools for Beowulfs get a hell of a lot more sophisticated, managing a 64-CPU Beowulf is going to be much more complicated than a 1-CPU Beowulf.
Programability.
Again, assuming that they've gotten things right, programmers should be able to continue working with a model they know and have experience with. Applications have to be re-written (and frequently re-designed) from scratch to run on a Beowulf, and programmers need to use a totally different mindset. In theory, any application that works on an SMP should "just work" on a NUMA machine - possibly with a recompile. To really get peak performance, applications may well need some tuning, but that's certainly easier than rewriting.
Applications.
I'll bet that when this machine ships, Oracle (just to pick a big example) will already be running on it. When will Oracle ship a Beowulf-aware version?
Between IBM's announcement and SGI's growing support for the LInux platform, it seems that Linux is rapidly carving a place for itself as the *NIX of choice for high-end computing environments.
Well, before we get too excited, keep in mind that both companies support (or flip-flop between if you want to be less charitable) a wide variety of operating systems. This is SGI's third "bet the company" OS strategy in 5 years. IBM's wide support for Linux is far more interesting, but to a certain extent (the 390 comes to mind) it has the feel of a stunt. This is all great news for Linux, but it's still early in the game.
Using a standard platform like Linux that has developed an independent following will give both companies a difinitive advantage over Sun and their Solaris platform.
Until there actually is anything resembling a "standard platform" for Linux, I don't think this is a serious point. There are already plenty of differences between (for example) Debian and Red Hat on the x86 platform alone, so it seems like a huge stretch to suggest that SGI and IBM/Sequent machines will provide a "standard platform" simply because they both have Linux-based kernels available. Again, this is all good for Linux, but don't set your expectations too high.
Good to see that I.B.M. isn't just about legacy systems anymore.
Well, this isn't really an "IBM" system. It's a Sequent system which was far along in the design process when IBM bought them a year or so ago. There seems to have been a tremendous brain drain since the purchase (*), so this machine may be born as a legacy system.
(*) According to one of those drained brains, IBM didn't seem to have a clue what to do with them. Lacking any top-down direction, they tried to launch some bottom-up initiatives, which IBM management squashed.
but this time I cannot stay quiet while the profession and science of marketing is mocked and trivialised in this cruel, insensitive and hurtful way.
Well, you could, you just chose not to.
Calling this "The Most Significant Transaction in Linux History" may be accurate, but it's also pretty silly. I am easily the most significant engineer sitting in my office, but since there is only one chair...
By laughing at the marketers, you demean yourselves, and make yourselves look stupid to the average joe consumer, when it is your JOB to try and impress him with innovative great software.
None of this makes any sense. Where do you get off suggesting that we aren't "Joe Consumer"? I buy stuff all the time. I also see ads on TV, billboards, the web, etc, and I frequently laugh at them.
Let's say for the sake of argument that none of us are "Joe Consumer". That implies that whoever "Joe Consumer" is, he ain't reading this. So, how would he be aware of our mocking, and hence able to think us stupid?
The rest of that paragraph is pure non sequitur.
This IS the most significant transaction in Linux's long and chequered history (which I have been following since the very beginning over 2 years ago.
2 years ago? I've been using Linux for about 7 years now. This is not meant as your typical geekish dick waving; it is meant to illustrate that you're working from a rather different context than many of us.
As a highly respected prectitioner of the science of marketing, I will not be argued with when I say, Without marketing, Linux is nothing.
"Highly respected" by whom? Other marketers?
"Will not be argued with"? Guess again, you pompous twit. Without marketing, those stock prices probably wouldn't be as high as they are (if there were any public Linux companies in the first place), but Linux would still be a stable, widely-used operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's what customers ask for. I like FreeBSD, and if Cisco offered their VPN client software for FreeBSD I would switch my desktop and laptop from Linux tomorrow. But, in reality, that's not what customers ask for.
If a customer asks for Linux, why would Sun want to try to change his mind to FreeBSD? If the salesguy is going to spend hours trying to talk the customer out of Linux, he will be trying to talk him into Solaris.
Not quite. They will be releasing 1 and 2 processor general purpose servers. These are not just Cobalt and not just file and print. They have no intention of selling/supporting Linux on their SPARC machines - just x86. They have supported the sparc/linux team a little bit (giving them hardware, but not money), and that's probably as far as they will go.
This is not IBM's Linux everywhere, and 10 other OSes as well. This is a clean SPARC/Solaris and x86/Linux pairing.
Even more interesting: http://www.sunsource.net.
I've got 3/4 of my memory free. Of course the system will let me start another process --we're nowhere near OOM. But the new process proceeds to allocate and allocate and allocate... And now we really are OOM. What now?
Stop allowing the process to allocate before you are out of memory. If you fall below a certain threshold (leaving yourself some headroom for root processes), simply return -1 for brk() calls. At that point, it is up to the application to run with fewer resources, or to exit.
It's not quite as simple for c-o-w faults, but it's not that much harder. If a user process triggers a c-o-w fault and the number of free pages has fallen below a certain threshold, simply let that process hang until free memory increases again.
Allowing processes to hang while waiting for free memory obviously introduces the possibility of deadlock. So, you always have to leave enough free pages available for root to get in there and start killing off non-root processes. You can certainly argue that this is just to OOM killer with a different name, but adding administrative discretion to the process makes the OOM killing approach more reasonable.
Now, if you have root processes that consume excessive memory, you are screwed. But as long as 'root' exists, you can always get screwed by ill-behaving root processes.
Sometimes it's OK, but usually it's not. When it comes to packaging systems, it's downright stupid.
Packaging systems solve two problems: software distribution and dependency tracking.
In order for a packaging system to handle the distribution aspect, both the packager and end user must use the same packaging system. If you package your software with dpkg and I only have RPM on my system, then you have failed to distribute your software to me. That problem is solved easily enough: every user must have every packaging system installed. It's a pointless waste of space, but what the hell; disks are cheap.
The more serious problem is resolving dependencies. You distribute your gnome app using dpkg, but I've installed gnome using RPMs. How do we validate that I have the correct version of gnome (or any version for that matter) in this case? Sure, if I know that I have the right version installed I can tell the installer not to worry about the check, but then I've lost any benefit of the packaging system in the first place.
I know this "it's OK to reimplement the same thing over and over again - that's the beauty of OSS" mantra is widely accepted as gospel on Slashdot, but I'm just not buying it. What's the point of having 100 half-assed projects all failing to do exactly the same thing?
Just as an example: go to sourceforge and look at desktop_environment:window_managers. There are 102 entries! (yes, I know a lot of those aren't really window managers. That list includes themes, menu converters, etc. That's not the point.) Most of them claim to have the same goals: lightweight, flexible, fast, configurable. And most of them are crap. There are hundreds of text editors on sourceforge; 95% of which will never be used by more than 5 people. What a freakin' waste of human effort.
The true benefit of Open Source should be that it frees us from having to solve the exact same problems over and over and over. It should enable us to go out and do new things and solve new problems. If you want to write TextEditor #1342 as a way to learn a new language, then more power to you. But don't try to tell me that the world is a better place because somebody has decided to slap together yet another "powerful programmer's text editor" and put it on a web site.
I guess I still don't understand Slashdot moderation. How can something be both a '4' and a 'troll'?
/. demographics, most of those will be from Linux users. I tried this on Solaris 8, which probably gets a lot less testing than Linux. (Not that that should be an excuse. If you claim to support a platform, the damn thing should at least build successfully.)
Honestly, s/he has a very good point. The current Gnome oranization is probably relatively easy for the Gnome developers, since each "project" has its own tarball, but it's a real pain in the ass for the end users.
In theory, you should be able to just download the tarballs that make up the latest 'stable' build, and build that. The last time I tried this (for 1.2, I think), one of the packages needed a newer version of another than was in the 'stable' distribution. The newer version of that package needed a newer version of another one. The whole thing snowballed until I found myself trying to get bonobo and the new GConf stuff shoehorned into gnome 1.2. I gave it up and went back to fvwm2.
I wish I could remember the specifics, because I know this sounds a bit unlikely, but it was 6 months ago. I expect I'll get a lot of "It worked for me, so you must be a dumbass" responses. By simple
It's "Allez cuisine!"
French, ya know.
First of all, the article is about Yahoo (about the only website that isn't "struggling") and about pop-up/under ads - not banner ads.
In any case, how is the webmaster's inability to profit my problem? If the only business model they can come up with relies on irritating the hell out of their audience, then they deserve to go under.
People would rather see their favourite sites go away than put up with a little popup that they can just close. In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site...When you watch TV, you put up with the ads...
Pardon my French, but that's bullshit. If you use a VCR to fastforward through commercials (or TiVo to skip over them), you aren't pirating anything. Preventing a popup add from popping is exactly the same thing.
Same with printed magazines.
I have no problem with ads in magazines. I can easily skip over the first 20 pages to find the table of contents without even looking at the ads. Now if magazines had spring-mounted ads that popped up in your face evey time you turned a page, that would be a different story. And I assume you wouldn't be complaining about me "pirating" the magazine if I ripped the damn spring out before looking at the first ad.
Since they are incapable of and/or unwilling to come up with a device driver API that can stand the test of time, we are stuck with toting around 10s of megabytes of drivers for hardware that we don't have, and with drivers that can become obsolete overnight if they don't have a fulltime maintainer.
One of the points in the article is that all the sex at the show doesn't do a damn thing to sell the games. All the booths have bimbos, but even the PR people couldn't be convinced to admit that they helped generate sales.
One of the other key points of the article is that the industry would like to move beyond the TeenBoy/FatLoserGeek ghetto and into the larger "mainstream" market. If that is their goal, the article asks, why do they insist on sticking with bimbo marketing that will only appeal to the TeenBoy/FatLoserGeek crowd?
Why should the OS matter to a PDA? It's a utility that is designed to run one application for one user at a time. If you even know which OS is running - or if you even know that an OS is running - then the OS is just getting in the way.
If you care which OS is running, then you don't want a PDA in the first place. You want a handheld PC.
To put it bluntly, that's just stupid. This is a PDA we're talking about - it's not a freakin' political system!
Do you refuse to shop in any store that has a "proprietary" (oh no! not that!) point-of-sale system running on their cash registers?
Are you boycotting VCRs until you can get a Linux-based TIVO? (so, does anybody have the source code to the "application" that runs on the oh-so-Free TIVO? Are y'all forking out the monthly fee to the Man for the "proprietary" scheduling information?)
Are you refusing to drive until the auto manufacturers start using Embedded Linux to control all the CPUs scattered around the car?
I'm all in favor of Ideals. But you're not working with Ideals - you're just mindlessly bleating the latest KoolRad jingoism.
When is Sun going to get off their asses and allow Solaris to be downloaded, as they've been promising for months now?
Is now soon enough for you?
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/source/
At the bottom of the column, they make it clear that the "News" is coming from slashdot. If they are trying to fool people, they're going about it in kind of a strange way.
It was also a profound political blunder: there are more Americans turning 18 than ever before, and they now know that at least one presidential candidate is an idiot.
It doesn't matter how many people are turning 18. Even if they were paying attention to the debate, which they weren't, their opinion doesn't mean a damn thing. They don't vote!
Why does Sun not have the energy to drive more than one operating system when its competition does?
Take a look at the changes in marketshare, income, and stock price over the last few years of Sun and the 5 competitors you mentioned. Perhaps all the energy the other companies are putting into their OS collections would be better spent somewhere else, eh?
The problem is relatively rare and it only shows up on 400mhz modules with 4MB or 8MB ecaches. If you're seeing ecache errors on that many CPUs, or if you're seeing them on other USII types, then there is something else wrong.
Assuming you aren't just making this up, it sounds like you have flaky power or the room is _way_ too hot.
Sun is selling E10Ks as fast as they can build them. This machine is several years old now, and demand for them is actually accelerating. If the problems this site reports were widespread - especially considering how much you pay for an E10K - wouldn't you think sales would slip a little?
As for eBay...when experienced their first public outage a year+ ago, they were running everything on one E10K. Apparently, they now have 4 of them. Does that sound like a company that is unhappy with the hardware?
Sun had spent years developing those documents (and making them freely available on the web), and didn't want to give them up.
Assuming that they've got this even close to right, managing a 64-CPU NUMA-Q system should be no more complicated than managing a 1 CPU NUMA-Q system. Until the sysadmin tools for Beowulfs get a hell of a lot more sophisticated, managing a 64-CPU Beowulf is going to be much more complicated than a 1-CPU Beowulf.
Again, assuming that they've gotten things right, programmers should be able to continue working with a model they know and have experience with. Applications have to be re-written (and frequently re-designed) from scratch to run on a Beowulf, and programmers need to use a totally different mindset. In theory, any application that works on an SMP should "just work" on a NUMA machine - possibly with a recompile. To really get peak performance, applications may well need some tuning, but that's certainly easier than rewriting.
I'll bet that when this machine ships, Oracle (just to pick a big example) will already be running on it. When will Oracle ship a Beowulf-aware version?
Well, before we get too excited, keep in mind that both companies support (or flip-flop between if you want to be less charitable) a wide variety of operating systems. This is SGI's third "bet the company" OS strategy in 5 years. IBM's wide support for Linux is far more interesting, but to a certain extent (the 390 comes to mind) it has the feel of a stunt. This is all great news for Linux, but it's still early in the game.
Using a standard platform like Linux that has developed an independent following will give both companies a difinitive advantage over Sun and their Solaris platform.
Until there actually is anything resembling a "standard platform" for Linux, I don't think this is a serious point. There are already plenty of differences between (for example) Debian and Red Hat on the x86 platform alone, so it seems like a huge stretch to suggest that SGI and IBM/Sequent machines will provide a "standard platform" simply because they both have Linux-based kernels available. Again, this is all good for Linux, but don't set your expectations too high.
Well, this isn't really an "IBM" system. It's a Sequent system which was far along in the design process when IBM bought them a year or so ago. There seems to have been a tremendous brain drain since the purchase (*), so this machine may be born as a legacy system.
(*) According to one of those drained brains, IBM didn't seem to have a clue what to do with them. Lacking any top-down direction, they tried to launch some bottom-up initiatives, which IBM management squashed.
Well, you could, you just chose not to.
Calling this "The Most Significant Transaction in Linux History" may be accurate, but it's also pretty silly. I am easily the most significant engineer sitting in my office, but since there is only one chair...
By laughing at the marketers, you demean yourselves, and make yourselves look stupid to the average joe consumer, when it is your JOB to try and impress him with innovative great software.
None of this makes any sense. Where do you get off suggesting that we aren't "Joe Consumer"? I buy stuff all the time. I also see ads on TV, billboards, the web, etc, and I frequently laugh at them.
Let's say for the sake of argument that none of us are "Joe Consumer". That implies that whoever "Joe Consumer" is, he ain't reading this. So, how would he be aware of our mocking, and hence able to think us stupid?
The rest of that paragraph is pure non sequitur.
This IS the most significant transaction in Linux's long and chequered history (which I have been following since the very beginning over 2 years ago.
2 years ago? I've been using Linux for about 7 years now. This is not meant as your typical geekish dick waving; it is meant to illustrate that you're working from a rather different context than many of us.
As a highly respected prectitioner of the science of marketing, I will not be argued with when I say, Without marketing, Linux is nothing.
"Highly respected" by whom? Other marketers?
"Will not be argued with"? Guess again, you pompous twit. Without marketing, those stock prices probably wouldn't be as high as they are (if there were any public Linux companies in the first place), but Linux would still be a stable, widely-used operating system.