To me, Sun has never recovered from being dragged down by their success with the '.com' bubble.
They floundered around, not making clear whether they thought their SPARC architecture or x86 was their focus, whether Solaris or Linux was their focus. It basically kept shifting.
I will say I think they currently have an idea of the market they should pursue. They aren't chasing the AIX customer set. Sun definitely lost some Solaris business to AIX as they floundered around, yet they aren't fooling themselves thinking they can win that back. In the Unix world right now, your only choice is to hope the current leader screws up. The Unix world is risk-averse, and it would take a miracle to convert a satisfied Unix shop to anything else.
They know they only have any leverage in the server space, and the most likely customer set to be won over would be Linux adopters. It is here that they can find the highest proportion of customers willing to try new technology. As such they have tried to rally around their Solaris technology and reinvent it to look more like Linux.
I think at the end of the day, OpenSolaris is the hail-mary pass they needed to try. It's risky, but they don't have much to lose anymore, and a lot to gain. I would say it would be bad for IBM to do this for AIX, as they would blow the AIX market in doing so by inducing too much perceived risk to their customers, and so for IBM, a two-tiered AIX/Linux strategy makes sense (though I think IBM fails to correctly capitalize directly on their Linux investment. It's clear they contribute much, but they don't get a unique productized offering derived from that large investment).
I think Sun's relative weakness as a company precluded them from being able to become a leader in the Linux environment. They have some great ideas, but not enough once in the community to preserve a competitive edge. Hence they managed to get ZFS out there in a way Linux companies cannot take advantage of. Yes, DTrace is nice, and Zones are useful, but ZFS is the one technology that is relatively peerless outside of proprietary NAS filesystems. So they are guarding their differentiators carefully by tying it to their platform and hoping the community will buy into the cool stuff and flesh out the rest of what they need.
All that said, I don't have confidence in their chances for success, particularly after being forced to rely on a light community so early. They simply don't have the driver support and as btrfs emerges, the technical interest in ZFS could likely wane. I know btrfs still lacks certain features, but I think it will capture most of the critically interesting features of ZFS.
Solaris was relatively stagnant feature-wise. This is not a bad thing for Unix, but the company focus of the late 90s included a lot of people who appreciated the moves that Linux was making. Sure, application compatibility across versions was non-trivial, and behaviors got tweaked constantly, but at a given moment by and large they had interesting ideas relative to Sun. So Sun hardware tended to get Linux thrown on it in some circumstances (the Sun hardware was leaps and bounds better than x86 based hardware of the time, excluding crap like the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10).
I was never a fan of HP-UX, and the Itanium move in particular I think screwed them. It's really hard to sell a Unix customer on a total architecture change, as one of the big values of Unix vendors is longevity of the architecture. They were probably sold on Intel's vision that the architecture would become ubiquitous in the desktop market, which of course did not happen.
Sun managed to successfully ride the tech bubble of the late 90s, but as a consequence, they rode it down fairly closely. Much of their customer base went out of business. Many of the rest cut back on IT and went to x86 Linux. Some others didn't feel the benefit of stagnant featureset of Solaris as a good thing, and went to distributions.
SGI killed Irix, ancient history.
Apple is technically a Unix vendor, but they don't quite fit in business wise with the rest.
IBM I think is current king of the Unix hill. AIX seems to have been slow and steady. As much as I don't particularly feel it, the leadership of Unix shops very much get it.
Now Sun seems the be reinventing their product portfolio. For a while, they seemed to de-emphasive Solaris for their Linux efforts, and then returned. Now they are trying to replicate the success with Linux, but with Solaris. They have successfully gotten things like ZFS and DTrace ingrained in the hearts and minds of the technical community as interesting features. Ian was a fantastic choice for architect, as he really got package repository first, and everything else has been imitating his implementation.
Now the problem they face is whether they can overcome Linux. I think they recognize the AIX owned slice as too difficult as the base is too risk adverse to jump ship readily. Overall, it makes sense to chase Linux, as those customers tend to be more willing to try new things. Howerver, the technical gains they made were only through their direct funding (ZFS in particular has sucessfully been seen as a unique, useful technology outside of OSes run on NAS systems). Laying off 6,000 now to bank on community support is way premature, they just don't have a solution with enough suport behind it to pull that sort of move.
I noticed this a short time ago, but have yet to see the 'Rmax' performance. They speak to Rpeak, which does beat out the current Rpeak by 23%, though the Rpeak by itself is even more uninformative than Rmax, which is already quite synthetic. Assuming the current #1 hasn't managed tuning or upgrades, this will have to beat 65% efficiency to technically win. 65% is likely an acheiveable goal, though the larger the run, the more difficult to extract a reasonable efficiency number, so it's not certain. I wouldn't expect them to be so loud about it unless they knew the score already though...
I will be interested to see the power consumption figures if offered. For that 25% increase in flops, they are requiring well over twice as many processor packages than RoadRunner (about 18,000 sockets vs 45,000 sockets here).
I do wonder if Cray will be migrating to Intel in the next year given the QPI situation. AMD hasn't kept up compute leadership, and now HT will be lagging performance wise QPI.
These systems are not so tightly integrated as you may imagine. True, many size a full-speed fabric just-right, each little bit costs a ton. However, commonly at scale, you only have full-speed fabric in large subsections anyway, and oversubscribe between the subsections. Jobs tend to be scheduled within subsections as they fit, though the subsection interconnects are no slouch.
This is particularly popular as the authortitative Top500 benchmark is not too badly impacted by such a network topology, and real life workloads tend to not be so large as not to fit in a subsection (just all the subsections would be independently at work).
It's kind of akin to saying you designed a couple of desktops well, because you could 'expand' them to host a lan party by hooking more to switches. Not quite so trivial, but the supercomputers aren't that especially exotic either.
We have an 8.8 TB ext3, no problems. It admittedly takes a while to mkfs, but that is a small small slice of the lifecycle of a filesystem. This FS has been in service for over two years.
I think it shouldn't matter the definition, either way Seagate has no excuse. That out of the way..
But the whole theory of RAID doesn't dictate anything about price nor, in my opinion, even require them to be 'disks'. Maybe 'inexpensive disks' is the term coined by the originator, but I think the originator should recognize the more general applicability of the concept.
For ultimate wrongness with respect to the declared meaning, how about a RAID-0 of high-capacity SSDs. A non-redundant array of expensive non-disk things.
It basically prepares a system for image capture. I suppose that was incomplete.
imagex is what I meant. It's the ms tool to archive up a system and apply, doing whatever magic microsoft blesses for imaging a system. It's akin to a cpio, except it has an xml index to multiple images (which can have inter-image references).
The 'Mixed' share is potentially frightening. I wager mixed reflects Windows success in terms of being on some nodes. It's not all Windows, but it may be an indication of things being entirely bad for MS in this market.
Currently HPC doesn't trend this way either. HPC tends not to be large, single system image designs at this point in time. They tend to be many nodes with independent kernel instances.
The only market that *currently* trends toward this that comes to mind is virtualization. A virtualization server, however, would not be running Windows 7 (if anything MS, it would be a server edition. Even if not for technical reasons, for licensing reasons it pretty much would have to not be a 'desktop/worskstation' edition).
In terms of why, keep in mind it was probably a convenient limit to implement, and not much point from a technical standpoint to do less. In terms of the timeframe they are keeping in mind for desktops, they probably want to be usable on systems 8-10 years after it releases. XP remains a significant product, 7 years after release. XP is afflicted by barriers that seemed out of reach in 2001 for desktops (~3 GB of ram). Many companies are taking a wait-and-see for Windows 7, due to design decisions in Vista they don't agree with. MS more than ever has to prepare for a potential long life for their platform even beyond a new release. If Windows 7 manages to win back a reputation, they hope it will shield them from a potential Windows 8 flop. If Windows 7 flops, they have a significant problem on their hands as those companies that refuse Vista and 7 will be forced to migrate to stay in the current market. If they think 7 will be painful for them, they may think more about a Linux platform, which probably would be more painful a transition, but would be more hypothetically future-proof once done (worst comes to worse, hire an in-house developer to extend your basic platform if you don't like the direction, but generally you can make a brand-new distribution behave pretty much like RH7.3 if you absolutely need to)..
No software should have that problem. If it can't handle it, it should reject/drop the message, not crash (preferably with a substitute message saying message was dropped because sender.
Not confirming the Sametime behavior described, just speaking from experience of many many instances of developers feeding me BS about how they shouldn't have to tolerate some condition or another as it is artificial and stupid, not acknowledging a DoS as a serious problem.
The truth is there is no pure example of a capitalist, communist, or socialist society at large scale. In practice they are all philosophies representing extremes that reality doesn't go to.
Any attempt to implement the pure form of any of them would lead to disaster. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and a carefully controlled mix of all adapted to the circumstances at hand would be productive...
That aside, those with ostensible influence over fuel prices have a significant interest in an administration they have good relations with. As such, a cut in fuel prices could be considered an investment in continuing that relationship. I.e. if they fear tax policies of a new candidate, they would be willing to manipulate consumer confidence to the extent they can so long as the lost revenue wouldn't exceed the lost taxes (balanced against the risk of that manipulation having zero effect). Bonus points if they think the foreign policy of one vs. another leads to a greater supply of raw materials. Not saying this is the case, but "we're capitalist" isn't a valid standalone defense against such a theory.
On one hand, it blames the unreasonably high fuel prices on the administrations leadership. On the other hand, it also gets to bring up the recent market collapse, which the writer also likely attributes in part to the administration's leadership. It's not intended to say his job is to manipulate prices, it's intended to highlight the bad circumstances leading for a need for prices to come down, and the very negative context for it actually coming down.
Of course, it does seem interestingly strange that the gas prices have dropped so rapidly so close to election, moreso than other expenses. I know the market collapse was the last thing the currently in office politicians want, but one wonders if the market had held out, would we have, for some other 'inexplicable' reason, seen gas prices drop before election day?
Linux actually can boot really quick. The kernel takes relatively trivial amount of time to get to 'init'. At that point, the distributions make choices in userspace that may make a distribution slow or fast to boot.
The windows partition step is accurate for retail disks of XP. The steps aren't complex, but they require user to be explicit. In the Ubuntu case, it does indeed default/suggest formatting that you can just accept, for the most common case.
I accept that the poster was describing the retail packaging from microsoft. Comparing OEM 'convenience' roll-ups of software to direct OEM-independent media isn't fair either. As such, Windows XP is not useful in and of itself, and Office and numerous other pieces of software must independently installed to have a useful system. Note, a company in a monopoly admittedly can't win on this count, on one hand they ship a less useful product, go the other way and they abuse their position.
The point of 'installing more files' steps is not that Windows puts in more files (I would wager far more files in aggregate are copied to disk by Ubuntu. Think the point is that Windows installation of XP requires a handful of reboots to navigate. Sometimes these are petty to count, sometimes you have to be careful about controlling the boot device depending on the system/setup.
Windows update, with XP is similar to the partitioning step. You had to seek it out and do it, whereas in Ubuntu, it suggests the update process.
Note that XP was released in 2002. Linux distros of 2002 were no where near this level. It is to be expected that progress would be made. Comparing a distribution packaged in 2008 that can bundle with impunity to a platform that couldn't bundle at the time in 2002 isn't surprising that Ubuntu comes ahead. Vista may be different, I'm unsure. Even today Ubuntu and other distributions can bundle with impunity which will continue to give them a competitive edge in out-of-the-box experience without needing to resort to OEM prepared images.
Have possibly managed to mention the iPhone more? Considering the market penetration, genericizing 'iPhone' to practically mean 'any old cell phone' is a tad premature...
Out-right potentially wrong: no one cares if a customer is made to wait for a server to boot to get served. That's not a generalization to be made lightly... It is true, though, that suspend-to-ram has not received the attention it deserves in the data center. A great deal of server-class systems and options are not designed to cope with suspend-to-ram, and thus you must be careful banking on this. The industry should correct it, but a facility can't bank on it yet (just put pressure on your vendors to make it so...)
Straw-man: A supposed 'myth' that leaving on LCD monitors is fine for energy savings, with the remarkable clarification that being off saves more power... Who would have thought.
Other straw-man: You will unconditionally save money by rapid upgrades to the latest efficient technology. I don't think anyone is foolish enough to think compulsively following any technical treadmill will lead to any overall financial gain..
If they are a single company, then, internally, the two groups almost have to use each other or else seem bizarre. I.e., if the designers contracted out fabrication of a model even though their own fabrication division was not fully utilized, that would seem unhealthy. By the same token, if the fabrication division pre-empted production in-house designs for a third-party, that would similarly look bad.
With that view, it would be a tad harder for the fabrication portion of the business to attract design companies, with prospective companies knowing they are putting their manufacturing capabilities in the hands of a company that would be both partner and competitor. The conflict of interest is far from appealing.
Few large corporations under typical circumstances preserve in-house at-scale manufacturing. I.e., most x86 system vendors now at most design the system and then feed to another company for fulfillment, potentially even a company spun off from themselves when they reached a similar conclusion.
As consumers, we don't stand to lose, only to gain. For example, if nVidia has been held back in any quality/performance way by inferior fabrication companies, they may now approach AMD fabrication. Same goes for AMD v. Intel, if another fab company can deliver more aggressive process size/yield improvements, then AMD design can go to that company and produce a valid competitor to Intel.
Or it shows that both halves of the company were completely average nowadays even in only the context of their similar competitors, and still doesn't do well, but that isn't different from today.
However, the community shouldn't look down upon you for accepting the offer. The community chose the BSD license and this is a consequence. When contributing to/developing a BSD licensed project, the only reasonable expectation is that your work will be credited moving forward. I've seen working on BSD licensed projects as inherently resume-padding. You kinda hope it will be picked up in prominent commercial endeavors that you can point to as evidence of your competence without coming off as unwilling in a theological front from conflicting with business. You want the main project to be solid and good, but why explicitly shrug off GPL for BSD if not for explicitly embracing closed redistribution/forks?
If others care so much about your contribution, they need to pick up the banner if you go and follow your path.
I'm not saying BSD is better than GPL or vice-versa, but there are inherently different expectations set by each. If the community is disgusted by such a prospect, GPL would have been the choice. If they heartily support it in the hopes they can take credit for significant work on a commercial product, then they picked the correct license. Fairly simple.
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I can buy that growth of non-x86 markets are relatively stagnant, but it seems to me that Linux is still quite healthy.
To me, Sun has never recovered from being dragged down by their success with the '.com' bubble.
They floundered around, not making clear whether they thought their SPARC architecture or x86 was their focus, whether Solaris or Linux was their focus. It basically kept shifting.
I will say I think they currently have an idea of the market they should pursue. They aren't chasing the AIX customer set. Sun definitely lost some Solaris business to AIX as they floundered around, yet they aren't fooling themselves thinking they can win that back. In the Unix world right now, your only choice is to hope the current leader screws up. The Unix world is risk-averse, and it would take a miracle to convert a satisfied Unix shop to anything else.
They know they only have any leverage in the server space, and the most likely customer set to be won over would be Linux adopters. It is here that they can find the highest proportion of customers willing to try new technology. As such they have tried to rally around their Solaris technology and reinvent it to look more like Linux.
I think at the end of the day, OpenSolaris is the hail-mary pass they needed to try. It's risky, but they don't have much to lose anymore, and a lot to gain. I would say it would be bad for IBM to do this for AIX, as they would blow the AIX market in doing so by inducing too much perceived risk to their customers, and so for IBM, a two-tiered AIX/Linux strategy makes sense (though I think IBM fails to correctly capitalize directly on their Linux investment. It's clear they contribute much, but they don't get a unique productized offering derived from that large investment).
I think Sun's relative weakness as a company precluded them from being able to become a leader in the Linux environment. They have some great ideas, but not enough once in the community to preserve a competitive edge. Hence they managed to get ZFS out there in a way Linux companies cannot take advantage of. Yes, DTrace is nice, and Zones are useful, but ZFS is the one technology that is relatively peerless outside of proprietary NAS filesystems. So they are guarding their differentiators carefully by tying it to their platform and hoping the community will buy into the cool stuff and flesh out the rest of what they need.
All that said, I don't have confidence in their chances for success, particularly after being forced to rely on a light community so early. They simply don't have the driver support and as btrfs emerges, the technical interest in ZFS could likely wane. I know btrfs still lacks certain features, but I think it will capture most of the critically interesting features of ZFS.
Solaris was relatively stagnant feature-wise. This is not a bad thing for Unix, but the company focus of the late 90s included a lot of people who appreciated the moves that Linux was making. Sure, application compatibility across versions was non-trivial, and behaviors got tweaked constantly, but at a given moment by and large they had interesting ideas relative to Sun. So Sun hardware tended to get Linux thrown on it in some circumstances (the Sun hardware was leaps and bounds better than x86 based hardware of the time, excluding crap like the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10).
I was never a fan of HP-UX, and the Itanium move in particular I think screwed them. It's really hard to sell a Unix customer on a total architecture change, as one of the big values of Unix vendors is longevity of the architecture. They were probably sold on Intel's vision that the architecture would become ubiquitous in the desktop market, which of course did not happen.
Sun managed to successfully ride the tech bubble of the late 90s, but as a consequence, they rode it down fairly closely. Much of their customer base went out of business. Many of the rest cut back on IT and went to x86 Linux. Some others didn't feel the benefit of stagnant featureset of Solaris as a good thing, and went to distributions.
SGI killed Irix, ancient history.
Apple is technically a Unix vendor, but they don't quite fit in business wise with the rest.
IBM I think is current king of the Unix hill. AIX seems to have been slow and steady. As much as I don't particularly feel it, the leadership of Unix shops very much get it.
Now Sun seems the be reinventing their product portfolio. For a while, they seemed to de-emphasive Solaris for their Linux efforts, and then returned. Now they are trying to replicate the success with Linux, but with Solaris. They have successfully gotten things like ZFS and DTrace ingrained in the hearts and minds of the technical community as interesting features. Ian was a fantastic choice for architect, as he really got package repository first, and everything else has been imitating his implementation.
Now the problem they face is whether they can overcome Linux. I think they recognize the AIX owned slice as too difficult as the base is too risk adverse to jump ship readily. Overall, it makes sense to chase Linux, as those customers tend to be more willing to try new things. Howerver, the technical gains they made were only through their direct funding (ZFS in particular has sucessfully been seen as a unique, useful technology outside of OSes run on NAS systems). Laying off 6,000 now to bank on community support is way premature, they just don't have a solution with enough suport behind it to pull that sort of move.
I noticed this a short time ago, but have yet to see the 'Rmax' performance. They speak to Rpeak, which does beat out the current Rpeak by 23%, though the Rpeak by itself is even more uninformative than Rmax, which is already quite synthetic. Assuming the current #1 hasn't managed tuning or upgrades, this will have to beat 65% efficiency to technically win. 65% is likely an acheiveable goal, though the larger the run, the more difficult to extract a reasonable efficiency number, so it's not certain. I wouldn't expect them to be so loud about it unless they knew the score already though...
I will be interested to see the power consumption figures if offered. For that 25% increase in flops, they are requiring well over twice as many processor packages than RoadRunner (about 18,000 sockets vs 45,000 sockets here).
I do wonder if Cray will be migrating to Intel in the next year given the QPI situation. AMD hasn't kept up compute leadership, and now HT will be lagging performance wise QPI.
These systems are not so tightly integrated as you may imagine. True, many size a full-speed fabric just-right, each little bit costs a ton. However, commonly at scale, you only have full-speed fabric in large subsections anyway, and oversubscribe between the subsections. Jobs tend to be scheduled within subsections as they fit, though the subsection interconnects are no slouch.
This is particularly popular as the authortitative Top500 benchmark is not too badly impacted by such a network topology, and real life workloads tend to not be so large as not to fit in a subsection (just all the subsections would be independently at work).
It's kind of akin to saying you designed a couple of desktops well, because you could 'expand' them to host a lan party by hooking more to switches. Not quite so trivial, but the supercomputers aren't that especially exotic either.
I might not have said much if you said you had a P4 desktop, but...
The power envelope of a non-netburst processor makes laptops much much better. Heat and battery life on my P4 laptop were quite unbearable.
We have an 8.8 TB ext3, no problems. It admittedly takes a while to mkfs, but that is a small small slice of the lifecycle of a filesystem. This FS has been in service for over two years.
I think it shouldn't matter the definition, either way Seagate has no excuse. That out of the way..
But the whole theory of RAID doesn't dictate anything about price nor, in my opinion, even require them to be 'disks'. Maybe 'inexpensive disks' is the term coined by the originator, but I think the originator should recognize the more general applicability of the concept.
For ultimate wrongness with respect to the declared meaning, how about a RAID-0 of high-capacity SSDs. A non-redundant array of expensive non-disk things.
c:\windows=system32\sysprep.exe
It basically prepares a system for image capture. I suppose that was incomplete.
imagex is what I meant. It's the ms tool to archive up a system and apply, doing whatever magic microsoft blesses for imaging a system. It's akin to a cpio, except it has an xml index to multiple images (which can have inter-image references).
Is there a reason why sysprep wouldn't work? It's already on your system I would wager.
Compared to avi it adds usefulness, though that's not saying much. I think it adds over wmv, but that again wouldn't be saying much.
I do agree that mkv currently has richer featureset implemented.
The 'Mixed' share is potentially frightening. I wager mixed reflects Windows success in terms of being on some nodes. It's not all Windows, but it may be an indication of things being entirely bad for MS in this market.
Currently HPC doesn't trend this way either. HPC tends not to be large, single system image designs at this point in time. They tend to be many nodes with independent kernel instances.
The only market that *currently* trends toward this that comes to mind is virtualization. A virtualization server, however, would not be running Windows 7 (if anything MS, it would be a server edition. Even if not for technical reasons, for licensing reasons it pretty much would have to not be a 'desktop/worskstation' edition).
In terms of why, keep in mind it was probably a convenient limit to implement, and not much point from a technical standpoint to do less. In terms of the timeframe they are keeping in mind for desktops, they probably want to be usable on systems 8-10 years after it releases. XP remains a significant product, 7 years after release. XP is afflicted by barriers that seemed out of reach in 2001 for desktops (~3 GB of ram). Many companies are taking a wait-and-see for Windows 7, due to design decisions in Vista they don't agree with. MS more than ever has to prepare for a potential long life for their platform even beyond a new release. If Windows 7 manages to win back a reputation, they hope it will shield them from a potential Windows 8 flop. If Windows 7 flops, they have a significant problem on their hands as those companies that refuse Vista and 7 will be forced to migrate to stay in the current market. If they think 7 will be painful for them, they may think more about a Linux platform, which probably would be more painful a transition, but would be more hypothetically future-proof once done (worst comes to worse, hire an in-house developer to extend your basic platform if you don't like the direction, but generally you can make a brand-new distribution behave pretty much like RH7.3 if you absolutely need to)..
No software should have that problem. If it can't handle it, it should reject/drop the message, not crash (preferably with a substitute message saying message was dropped because sender.
Not confirming the Sametime behavior described, just speaking from experience of many many instances of developers feeding me BS about how they shouldn't have to tolerate some condition or another as it is artificial and stupid, not acknowledging a DoS as a serious problem.
It takes an eternity and a half to start. Bash is instantaneous.
Writing something in powershell automatically makes it an incredible resource hog. Shell scripts should not be that way.
The truth is there is no pure example of a capitalist, communist, or socialist society at large scale. In practice they are all philosophies representing extremes that reality doesn't go to.
Any attempt to implement the pure form of any of them would lead to disaster. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and a carefully controlled mix of all adapted to the circumstances at hand would be productive...
That aside, those with ostensible influence over fuel prices have a significant interest in an administration they have good relations with. As such, a cut in fuel prices could be considered an investment in continuing that relationship. I.e. if they fear tax policies of a new candidate, they would be willing to manipulate consumer confidence to the extent they can so long as the lost revenue wouldn't exceed the lost taxes (balanced against the risk of that manipulation having zero effect). Bonus points if they think the foreign policy of one vs. another leads to a greater supply of raw materials. Not saying this is the case, but "we're capitalist" isn't a valid standalone defense against such a theory.
On one hand, it blames the unreasonably high fuel prices on the administrations leadership. On the other hand, it also gets to bring up the recent market collapse, which the writer also likely attributes in part to the administration's leadership. It's not intended to say his job is to manipulate prices, it's intended to highlight the bad circumstances leading for a need for prices to come down, and the very negative context for it actually coming down.
Of course, it does seem interestingly strange that the gas prices have dropped so rapidly so close to election, moreso than other expenses. I know the market collapse was the last thing the currently in office politicians want, but one wonders if the market had held out, would we have, for some other 'inexplicable' reason, seen gas prices drop before election day?
Linux actually can boot really quick. The kernel takes relatively trivial amount of time to get to 'init'. At that point, the distributions make choices in userspace that may make a distribution slow or fast to boot.
The windows partition step is accurate for retail disks of XP. The steps aren't complex, but they require user to be explicit. In the Ubuntu case, it does indeed default/suggest formatting that you can just accept, for the most common case.
I accept that the poster was describing the retail packaging from microsoft. Comparing OEM 'convenience' roll-ups of software to direct OEM-independent media isn't fair either. As such, Windows XP is not useful in and of itself, and Office and numerous other pieces of software must independently installed to have a useful system. Note, a company in a monopoly admittedly can't win on this count, on one hand they ship a less useful product, go the other way and they abuse their position.
The point of 'installing more files' steps is not that Windows puts in more files (I would wager far more files in aggregate are copied to disk by Ubuntu. Think the point is that Windows installation of XP requires a handful of reboots to navigate. Sometimes these are petty to count, sometimes you have to be careful about controlling the boot device depending on the system/setup.
Windows update, with XP is similar to the partitioning step. You had to seek it out and do it, whereas in Ubuntu, it suggests the update process.
Note that XP was released in 2002. Linux distros of 2002 were no where near this level. It is to be expected that progress would be made. Comparing a distribution packaged in 2008 that can bundle with impunity to a platform that couldn't bundle at the time in 2002 isn't surprising that Ubuntu comes ahead. Vista may be different, I'm unsure. Even today Ubuntu and other distributions can bundle with impunity which will continue to give them a competitive edge in out-of-the-box experience without needing to resort to OEM prepared images.
Thanks to DRM, your dreams will all be downscaled from that.
Have possibly managed to mention the iPhone more? Considering the market penetration, genericizing 'iPhone' to practically mean 'any old cell phone' is a tad premature...
What I was saying...
Out-right potentially wrong: no one cares if a customer is made to wait for a server to boot to get served. That's not a generalization to be made lightly... It is true, though, that suspend-to-ram has not received the attention it deserves in the data center. A great deal of server-class systems and options are not designed to cope with suspend-to-ram, and thus you must be careful banking on this. The industry should correct it, but a facility can't bank on it yet (just put pressure on your vendors to make it so...)
Straw-man: A supposed 'myth' that leaving on LCD monitors is fine for energy savings, with the remarkable clarification that being off saves more power... Who would have thought.
Other straw-man: You will unconditionally save money by rapid upgrades to the latest efficient technology. I don't think anyone is foolish enough to think compulsively following any technical treadmill will lead to any overall financial gain..
If they are a single company, then, internally, the two groups almost have to use each other or else seem bizarre. I.e., if the designers contracted out fabrication of a model even though their own fabrication division was not fully utilized, that would seem unhealthy. By the same token, if the fabrication division pre-empted production in-house designs for a third-party, that would similarly look bad.
With that view, it would be a tad harder for the fabrication portion of the business to attract design companies, with prospective companies knowing they are putting their manufacturing capabilities in the hands of a company that would be both partner and competitor. The conflict of interest is far from appealing.
Few large corporations under typical circumstances preserve in-house at-scale manufacturing. I.e., most x86 system vendors now at most design the system and then feed to another company for fulfillment, potentially even a company spun off from themselves when they reached a similar conclusion.
As consumers, we don't stand to lose, only to gain. For example, if nVidia has been held back in any quality/performance way by inferior fabrication companies, they may now approach AMD fabrication. Same goes for AMD v. Intel, if another fab company can deliver more aggressive process size/yield improvements, then AMD design can go to that company and produce a valid competitor to Intel.
Or it shows that both halves of the company were completely average nowadays even in only the context of their similar competitors, and still doesn't do well, but that isn't different from today.
However, the community shouldn't look down upon you for accepting the offer. The community chose the BSD license and this is a consequence. When contributing to/developing a BSD licensed project, the only reasonable expectation is that your work will be credited moving forward. I've seen working on BSD licensed projects as inherently resume-padding. You kinda hope it will be picked up in prominent commercial endeavors that you can point to as evidence of your competence without coming off as unwilling in a theological front from conflicting with business. You want the main project to be solid and good, but why explicitly shrug off GPL for BSD if not for explicitly embracing closed redistribution/forks?
If others care so much about your contribution, they need to pick up the banner if you go and follow your path.
I'm not saying BSD is better than GPL or vice-versa, but there are inherently different expectations set by each. If the community is disgusted by such a prospect, GPL would have been the choice. If they heartily support it in the hopes they can take credit for significant work on a commercial product, then they picked the correct license. Fairly simple.