I would put more money on it being a matter of them considering it a valuable differentiator for business customers, and keeping it secret mitigates risk of competing vendors popping up to compete on a level playing field.
They aren't still determining the line, they have had this for years and years and know very well their intent and risks.
While I agree with the sentiment, the reality is that all this nonsense does manage to make the vast majority of 'common folk' not know how to circumvent or to even find infringing content. It also makes it more straightforward to identify distributors of infringing content, sending ominous legal threats, and discouraging those that at least know where they could go. As much as we love to point to how quickly people *really* invested in not paying to get things, if you pick out a random folk on the street, they won't know how, but they would have netflix, maybe some DVDs.
It also means that I'm stuck with streaming provider X's crappy app, and having to juggle multiple applications to do the same thing, just with differently licensed content. Oh what a world it would be if I could just explore and enjoy content through Kodi with plugins without being in a DRM fight with the providers I have gone to the trouble to be properly entitled for.
Their closed approach probably stems from them getting a bit burned on IPMI. Intel was chiefly responsible for the spec, but the first real mass market servers that had it were AMD (mainly because of Intel's preoccupation with Itanium at the time). In the server business, Intel has nearl 0% share for service processors (third parties rule that roost, excepting the fact they all must interact with IME too). As they have evolved IME, they've kept it a tight restrictive secret. This means that the functionality is restricted to Intel based systems, but the tools to use it are crap and/or buried inside third party UEFI/BMC firmware.
Basically the industry as a whole had a moment of 'weakness' in the late 90s/early 2000s and had useful interoperable standards come out (not perfect, but serviceable and practical, IPMI and the various IETF SNMP mibs that came out around then). The big players have largely spent the time since trying to bury those standards and re-establish the previous status quo of lock in but 'standards' (looking at CIM/WS-MAN/SMASH/Redfish and Netconf, all of which emphasize vendor 'flexibility' to the point of rendering cross-vendor management with a single codepath impossible). A shame since there are issues in the old protocols that could use some fixing/enhancement.
The instructions to start a new instance of a docker image someone else has shared is one line: docker pull ; docker run The instructions to create a new stock docker image are relatively short, like a simple makefile.
Those short instructions, the existence of dockerhub, and hype combine to have a lot of samples of images to run.
Of course, that image infrastructure is pretty fast and loose, limited ability to verify that the image arrived intact from the uploader, and a sea of mostly anonymous uploaders mean such verification is of limited value anyway. I might pull down a docker image to help clarify documentation or when documentation is not available, but I'd produce my own rather than rely upon 'randomguy45' to correctly maintain their image.
It depends on your perspective. Understanding direct manipulation of cgroups and namespaces is sometimes the simplest thing, depending on what you are doing. Sometimes lxc is. Docker is less about running the containers as it is about building and sharing filesystem snapshots to be used in containers (of course it can manage running of containers, but in that specific respect it doesn't do anything to commend it over directly using lxc). Without dockerhub, I don't think anyone would be paying docker much mind.
If you just want a q&d 'super chroot', then unshare is probably the most straightforward, and lxc just makes things more complex.
I think there's a flawed premise, that there must be outreach to those not particularly inclined to do programming of their own volition.
I think that certain popular offshoring destinations demonstrate the result of such a strategy. There are good developers in those geographies, but the signal to noise ratio makes it tricky for a business person to tell the difference up front. I know in my experience, the 'cheap' flavor of offshore developers have been 5% immediately proficient (those will be gone in a month to get a better paying job, whether they move or not, people who underestimated themselves or had to take a filler job between good jobs), 15% will get to that point over half a year or so (and then get a better paying job, effectively those fresh out of not-much-better-than-high-school education and this is their first real world job). The other 80% of the cheap labor that US companies love so much either just aren't wired for the work or just don't care enough. They approach their job with all of the enthusiasm of a retail store stocker or grocery bagger.
They both want to do an ad network, they both sell music and mobile apps, they both provide mobile operating systems, they both push their platform for laptops. Apple felt compelled to release Apple Maps to reduce reliance on Google maps....
Apple has not yet tried to get into Google's first business (internet search), but it seems only because Google pays them not to try.
The init system is so core to a system, that it's not going to be a system that is easy for others to support if the init can be switched. It puts requirements on every package that may have a service to support all of this stuff.
Choice basically has to be 'I want to use distribution X instead of Y' for things that are so core to a platorm. systemd is so alien compared to SysV that it's a big ask to say 'must support both'.
For FS choice, there aren't really downstream effects that every package potentially have to worry about.
Well, for one the kernel is GPLv2, so this may relate to the ecosystem, but not the kernel per se. That said, I don't think GPLv3 has in effect made things that much 'worse' than GPLv2 for the parties that dislike the GPL. What we have seen is an increased involvement of companies and lawyers protecting business interest pushing MIT/BSD style licenses. So it's not that GPLv3 has turned people off of GPL, it's that companies are getting their way more and more (which can be its own problem).
> systemd Note that this is controversial precisely because it's an area that is so core to a system, that it's not really that reasonable to make it an 'optional' thing. Contrast with other controversial things (pulseaudio, networkmanager, dbus) that can be mostly ignored by people turned off by it (though systemd has elevated dbus to a requirement, direct use of dbus by users remains something that can *usually* be avoided.
> GNOME 3 I really wish that 'GNOME 3' would have used a different name. The heritage to Gnome 2 is weak. Use of GNOME name basically is leveraging the familiarity of Gnome 'brand' to de-facto it's way onto the desktop. I would have preferred them to present their 'new concept' as just that, a new concept to be evaluated on it's own merits. Call it a spiritual successor or something, but don't set the expectation that it's the natural evolution of the Gnome 2 experience.
> Wayland I don't fear wayland much, nor am I disappointed with the slow pace of adoption. I don't think it'd be the end of the world if it supports the common desktop, but the improvements it brings are not of urgent practical need.
> Firefox I don't think any browser *isn't* converging on the same experience as Chrome provides (Edge, Opera, Firefox, all resemble Chrome). I am unhappy about this, but don't see this as something that can be escaped on any platform.
> use Windows or OSX Now if any of the above points grate on your sensibilities, Windows takes all of them and makes them worse. If you bemoan the loss of GPLv2, total proprietary isn't going to be better. The browsers are all doing the same stuff. If you don't like systemd or the lack of choice, then Windows services will give you nightmares (added bonus of tendency to lump unrelated services into the same process making it impossible to discern which service is misbehaving performance wise). As of Windows 10, true that Gnome 3 can be avoided, but it can similarly be avoided by going to other desktop environments (MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, KDE, depending), and if you do anything with virtual terminals, Windows will make you cry (mintty as shipped with most recent git is serviceable, but that's as close as it gets). If you don't like Wayland, well Windows display approach looks more like Wayland than X11 (not that it's a bad thing). I don't know about OSX as much (haven't touched it in years).
But that's the whole point, things have rapidly changed and the article feels like this rapid change has led these companies to unstoppable status. History shows that a *lot* of companies have risen, seem stable long enough for people to pronounce them the unambiguous victor for eternity, just to turn around and crash and burn.
Yes, the mid 80s.... It would be sort of amusing to see this same article written about the 'tech' industry written assuming the perspective of the middle of each decade for the last 50 years. It's really amazing how at any give time people feel like 'ok, *now* things are settled and here are the players and the components are known'.
Probably a good rule of thumb is if someone feels like it's interesting enough to actually write an article about, it's probably not settled. Only when pretty much *everyone* considers some facet of the ecosystem to be terribly boring and thankless is it possibly settled (and even then....).
Yes, we can write up a plausible scenario to any of them. AWS, google compute engine, and azure are one catastrophic hypervisor compromise from a mass loss of confidence. Apple and Facebook are one fad away from being rendered history (regardless of the technical strength of their offerings, consumers are really fickle). Like you say, a sudden loss of confidence in internet advertising would crush Google's main stream. Also any company is generally a couple of board members away from being driven into the ground by bad leadership. Similarly tech companies generally have a core of less than a dozen people that the company may not even realize are critical to their core business that could get poached away and collapse their whole ability to compete.
These are 5 companies that right *now* people can't imagine losing their iron grip. Just like over tech industry history we've seen different sets of a few companies that people couldn't imagine losing their grip. The vast majority of those darlings of the industry have folded.
It's not hard to imagine any of those companies fates changing dramatically. It's just that most people won't believe such scenarios plausible. That's the point of my skepticism, the article proclaims them as the unstoppable entrenched 5, but history has shown a lot of unstoppable entrenched companies getting surprisingly upended, at least in the tech field, where the barrier to entry isn't as high as most people believe. It takes surprisingly little for a competitor to start seeing runaway success and very little time and money required to keep up with scale (in relative terms, compared to something like a major energy company or the like).
In that timeframe (10 years ago), Amazon didn't offer an 'platform' for tech. The subject matter is tech companies entrenched by owning a platform. They may have had a lot of tech internally (clearly they did to enable creation of the platform), but they had not yet moved to build a business out of that. If you said 5 years ago, that's different, but 10 years ago they had not even announced anything EC2 like yet.
Yeah, 20 years ago, Microsoft is the only one of those that would have made such a list. AOL, IBM, Yahoo, and Netscape probably would have rounded out a 'top 5' list in that timeline,
10 Years ago, Google is the only one I'd unambiguously considered to have joined the list. . If I had to make a top 5 list for that time frame, Microsoft, Google, Myspace would be firmly in it. Amazon as a retailer was of course a slam dunk, but less so as a 'tech' company, so I'm not sure. Apple is tricky, since as a music player platform they clearly had ascended as a dominant player (and therefore had enough leverage to effect good change for DRM in music), but the real overwhelming Apple presence happened with the iPhone.
At each time, it was difficult to *imagine* how those players could be unseated given how much they dominated that particular time. MS is the only one that really held on to their position. Netscape, Yahoo, AOL, and Myspace being gone and/or essentially defunct is something no one would have believed in their respective heights. Most of those enjoyed a similar 5 year period where no apparent competitor was coming for them, so the metric of 'it's been 5 years and still going strong' isn't very good by itself.
The sad thing is that when the products *do* appear both in store and online, the price delta doesn't strike me as *that* big. Shipping is actually more expensive for online vendor, and as the big players increase their footprint, the sales tax dodge goes away. Yes, there's more real estate, but in terms of manpower, it's actually not that much better for online (they need a bit more individual worker attention for putting together an order, in brick and mortar a lot of that is 'self service).
Of course, this is just guesswork, the final measure is that for products in both places is frequently in the same price area.
Yes, that's a key thing, whether the benefit has outpaced the elevated risk. Considering how much better nutrition, medicine, shelter/climate control, food production, transportation, commucation are, it's pretty good in aggregate.
Global warming is the most likely critical risk. More progress is helping us be able to potentially turn things back, if we are aggressive enough.
For nuclear weapons, it's easy to see how much higher the stakes are, and how terrible the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was. However, that prospect has seemingly had a suppressive effect on warfare. WW1 and WW2 exemplify the darkness of the typical mindset toward warfare mated with post-industrial technology. We have not seen such a wide reaching drag out conflict ever since the advent of nuclear weapons. Of course, it could be fear of how potent weaponry has become, or easier and more thorough documentation bringing the horrors of the battlefield back to the homefront to make non-combatants more keenly aware, or perhaps the powers that be have realized more subtle manipulation of economic circumstances yield better bang for the buck.
Now the virus one seems the furthest fetched concept. If it were deliberate, bad actors have plenty of unfathomable nastiness without bothering to explore this front. If it were accidental, it's difficult to imagine it happening at all, and if it did happen, it almost certainly wouldn't be as bad as any historical natural plague. Meanwhile that same research has saved/extended countless lives.
We should be careful, and it's worth keeping the worries in mind, but anyone who responds with a perspective that advancement has actually been bad would be mistaken.
That has been one thing that has disappointed me in brick and mortar. I rarely can find the good product I want on the shelves, even if I *were* willing to pay a premium to get it rather than online.
So I have to get online because the brick and mortar's just won't carry it. Instead they try to push cheap crap and hope the shoppers aren't doing any research.
Which is of course, nice, but he cites marketing material as an indicator. Now the thing is I know at least some places that still understand from a marketing standpoint what and how to say things to sound 'good'. Down to being able to put on a really good show about materials science and the very nitty gritty about caring and measuring to know what works great.
Then when it comes down to mfg time, that goes out the window and it's sadly apparent that the engineers enabling that understanding are given plenty of room to speak in a marketing situation, but not much actual control over the manufacture of the real product.
For such large enterprise environments, once they've picked something, they will generally be very careful not to have to change their minds that much. Maybe Red Hat could have a shot, but any further from Ubuntu would be a really tough sell.
Also, MS's ambitions are more bread and likely to conflict with AT&T goals. Canonical and SuSE are probably the two remotely viable companies that are the furthest from competing with AT&T in any conceivable way.
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I would put more money on it being a matter of them considering it a valuable differentiator for business customers, and keeping it secret mitigates risk of competing vendors popping up to compete on a level playing field.
They aren't still determining the line, they have had this for years and years and know very well their intent and risks.
While I agree with the sentiment, the reality is that all this nonsense does manage to make the vast majority of 'common folk' not know how to circumvent or to even find infringing content. It also makes it more straightforward to identify distributors of infringing content, sending ominous legal threats, and discouraging those that at least know where they could go. As much as we love to point to how quickly people *really* invested in not paying to get things, if you pick out a random folk on the street, they won't know how, but they would have netflix, maybe some DVDs.
It also means that I'm stuck with streaming provider X's crappy app, and having to juggle multiple applications to do the same thing, just with differently licensed content. Oh what a world it would be if I could just explore and enjoy content through Kodi with plugins without being in a DRM fight with the providers I have gone to the trouble to be properly entitled for.
Yes, I have witnessed a lot of 'ok, the IME thinks SOMETHING is wrong, but damned if we know what'
Their closed approach probably stems from them getting a bit burned on IPMI. Intel was chiefly responsible for the spec, but the first real mass market servers that had it were AMD (mainly because of Intel's preoccupation with Itanium at the time). In the server business, Intel has nearl 0% share for service processors (third parties rule that roost, excepting the fact they all must interact with IME too). As they have evolved IME, they've kept it a tight restrictive secret. This means that the functionality is restricted to Intel based systems, but the tools to use it are crap and/or buried inside third party UEFI/BMC firmware.
Basically the industry as a whole had a moment of 'weakness' in the late 90s/early 2000s and had useful interoperable standards come out (not perfect, but serviceable and practical, IPMI and the various IETF SNMP mibs that came out around then). The big players have largely spent the time since trying to bury those standards and re-establish the previous status quo of lock in but 'standards' (looking at CIM/WS-MAN/SMASH/Redfish and Netconf, all of which emphasize vendor 'flexibility' to the point of rendering cross-vendor management with a single codepath impossible). A shame since there are issues in the old protocols that could use some fixing/enhancement.
And the specifications are locked up and restricted, preventing quality third party tools to step in for Intel's lackluster implementation.
That would be all well and good, but the rhetoric frequently invokes 'be competitive with india/china/etc'
Mainly convenience and networking effects.
The instructions to start a new instance of a docker image someone else has shared is one line: docker pull ; docker run
The instructions to create a new stock docker image are relatively short, like a simple makefile.
Those short instructions, the existence of dockerhub, and hype combine to have a lot of samples of images to run.
Of course, that image infrastructure is pretty fast and loose, limited ability to verify that the image arrived intact from the uploader, and a sea of mostly anonymous uploaders mean such verification is of limited value anyway. I might pull down a docker image to help clarify documentation or when documentation is not available, but I'd produce my own rather than rely upon 'randomguy45' to correctly maintain their image.
It depends on your perspective. Understanding direct manipulation of cgroups and namespaces is sometimes the simplest thing, depending on what you are doing. Sometimes lxc is. Docker is less about running the containers as it is about building and sharing filesystem snapshots to be used in containers (of course it can manage running of containers, but in that specific respect it doesn't do anything to commend it over directly using lxc). Without dockerhub, I don't think anyone would be paying docker much mind.
If you just want a q&d 'super chroot', then unshare is probably the most straightforward, and lxc just makes things more complex.
I think there's a flawed premise, that there must be outreach to those not particularly inclined to do programming of their own volition.
I think that certain popular offshoring destinations demonstrate the result of such a strategy. There are good developers in those geographies, but the signal to noise ratio makes it tricky for a business person to tell the difference up front. I know in my experience, the 'cheap' flavor of offshore developers have been 5% immediately proficient (those will be gone in a month to get a better paying job, whether they move or not, people who underestimated themselves or had to take a filler job between good jobs), 15% will get to that point over half a year or so (and then get a better paying job, effectively those fresh out of not-much-better-than-high-school education and this is their first real world job). The other 80% of the cheap labor that US companies love so much either just aren't wired for the work or just don't care enough. They approach their job with all of the enthusiasm of a retail store stocker or grocery bagger.
They both want to do an ad network, they both sell music and mobile apps, they both provide mobile operating systems, they both push their platform for laptops. Apple felt compelled to release Apple Maps to reduce reliance on Google maps....
Apple has not yet tried to get into Google's first business (internet search), but it seems only because Google pays them not to try.
The init system is so core to a system, that it's not going to be a system that is easy for others to support if the init can be switched. It puts requirements on every package that may have a service to support all of this stuff.
Choice basically has to be 'I want to use distribution X instead of Y' for things that are so core to a platorm. systemd is so alien compared to SysV that it's a big ask to say 'must support both'.
For FS choice, there aren't really downstream effects that every package potentially have to worry about.
I think in aggregate the behavior on laptops has improved out of the box.
What has gotten worse is the ability for someone to figure out and apply a reasonable workaround for an issue they run into.
> GPLv3
Well, for one the kernel is GPLv2, so this may relate to the ecosystem, but not the kernel per se. That said, I don't think GPLv3 has in effect made things that much 'worse' than GPLv2 for the parties that dislike the GPL. What we have seen is an increased involvement of companies and lawyers protecting business interest pushing MIT/BSD style licenses. So it's not that GPLv3 has turned people off of GPL, it's that companies are getting their way more and more (which can be its own problem).
> systemd
Note that this is controversial precisely because it's an area that is so core to a system, that it's not really that reasonable to make it an 'optional' thing. Contrast with other controversial things (pulseaudio, networkmanager, dbus) that can be mostly ignored by people turned off by it (though systemd has elevated dbus to a requirement, direct use of dbus by users remains something that can *usually* be avoided.
> GNOME 3
I really wish that 'GNOME 3' would have used a different name. The heritage to Gnome 2 is weak. Use of GNOME name basically is leveraging the familiarity of Gnome 'brand' to de-facto it's way onto the desktop. I would have preferred them to present their 'new concept' as just that, a new concept to be evaluated on it's own merits. Call it a spiritual successor or something, but don't set the expectation that it's the natural evolution of the Gnome 2 experience.
> Wayland
I don't fear wayland much, nor am I disappointed with the slow pace of adoption. I don't think it'd be the end of the world if it supports the common desktop, but the improvements it brings are not of urgent practical need.
> Firefox
I don't think any browser *isn't* converging on the same experience as Chrome provides (Edge, Opera, Firefox, all resemble Chrome). I am unhappy about this, but don't see this as something that can be escaped on any platform.
> use Windows or OSX
Now if any of the above points grate on your sensibilities, Windows takes all of them and makes them worse. If you bemoan the loss of GPLv2, total proprietary isn't going to be better. The browsers are all doing the same stuff. If you don't like systemd or the lack of choice, then Windows services will give you nightmares (added bonus of tendency to lump unrelated services into the same process making it impossible to discern which service is misbehaving performance wise). As of Windows 10, true that Gnome 3 can be avoided, but it can similarly be avoided by going to other desktop environments (MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, KDE, depending), and if you do anything with virtual terminals, Windows will make you cry (mintty as shipped with most recent git is serviceable, but that's as close as it gets). If you don't like Wayland, well Windows display approach looks more like Wayland than X11 (not that it's a bad thing). I don't know about OSX as much (haven't touched it in years).
But that's the whole point, things have rapidly changed and the article feels like this rapid change has led these companies to unstoppable status. History shows that a *lot* of companies have risen, seem stable long enough for people to pronounce them the unambiguous victor for eternity, just to turn around and crash and burn.
Yes, the mid 80s.... It would be sort of amusing to see this same article written about the 'tech' industry written assuming the perspective of the middle of each decade for the last 50 years. It's really amazing how at any give time people feel like 'ok, *now* things are settled and here are the players and the components are known'.
Probably a good rule of thumb is if someone feels like it's interesting enough to actually write an article about, it's probably not settled. Only when pretty much *everyone* considers some facet of the ecosystem to be terribly boring and thankless is it possibly settled (and even then....).
Yes, we can write up a plausible scenario to any of them. AWS, google compute engine, and azure are one catastrophic hypervisor compromise from a mass loss of confidence. Apple and Facebook are one fad away from being rendered history (regardless of the technical strength of their offerings, consumers are really fickle). Like you say, a sudden loss of confidence in internet advertising would crush Google's main stream. Also any company is generally a couple of board members away from being driven into the ground by bad leadership. Similarly tech companies generally have a core of less than a dozen people that the company may not even realize are critical to their core business that could get poached away and collapse their whole ability to compete.
These are 5 companies that right *now* people can't imagine losing their iron grip. Just like over tech industry history we've seen different sets of a few companies that people couldn't imagine losing their grip. The vast majority of those darlings of the industry have folded.
It's not hard to imagine any of those companies fates changing dramatically. It's just that most people won't believe such scenarios plausible. That's the point of my skepticism, the article proclaims them as the unstoppable entrenched 5, but history has shown a lot of unstoppable entrenched companies getting surprisingly upended, at least in the tech field, where the barrier to entry isn't as high as most people believe. It takes surprisingly little for a competitor to start seeing runaway success and very little time and money required to keep up with scale (in relative terms, compared to something like a major energy company or the like).
In that timeframe (10 years ago), Amazon didn't offer an 'platform' for tech. The subject matter is tech companies entrenched by owning a platform. They may have had a lot of tech internally (clearly they did to enable creation of the platform), but they had not yet moved to build a business out of that. If you said 5 years ago, that's different, but 10 years ago they had not even announced anything EC2 like yet.
Yeah, 20 years ago, Microsoft is the only one of those that would have made such a list. AOL, IBM, Yahoo, and Netscape probably would have rounded out a 'top 5' list in that timeline,
10 Years ago, Google is the only one I'd unambiguously considered to have joined the list. . If I had to make a top 5 list for that time frame, Microsoft, Google, Myspace would be firmly in it. Amazon as a retailer was of course a slam dunk, but less so as a 'tech' company, so I'm not sure. Apple is tricky, since as a music player platform they clearly had ascended as a dominant player (and therefore had enough leverage to effect good change for DRM in music), but the real overwhelming Apple presence happened with the iPhone.
At each time, it was difficult to *imagine* how those players could be unseated given how much they dominated that particular time. MS is the only one that really held on to their position. Netscape, Yahoo, AOL, and Myspace being gone and/or essentially defunct is something no one would have believed in their respective heights. Most of those enjoyed a similar 5 year period where no apparent competitor was coming for them, so the metric of 'it's been 5 years and still going strong' isn't very good by itself.
The sad thing is that when the products *do* appear both in store and online, the price delta doesn't strike me as *that* big. Shipping is actually more expensive for online vendor, and as the big players increase their footprint, the sales tax dodge goes away. Yes, there's more real estate, but in terms of manpower, it's actually not that much better for online (they need a bit more individual worker attention for putting together an order, in brick and mortar a lot of that is 'self service).
Of course, this is just guesswork, the final measure is that for products in both places is frequently in the same price area.
Yes, that's a key thing, whether the benefit has outpaced the elevated risk. Considering how much better nutrition, medicine, shelter/climate control, food production, transportation, commucation are, it's pretty good in aggregate.
Global warming is the most likely critical risk. More progress is helping us be able to potentially turn things back, if we are aggressive enough.
For nuclear weapons, it's easy to see how much higher the stakes are, and how terrible the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was. However, that prospect has seemingly had a suppressive effect on warfare. WW1 and WW2 exemplify the darkness of the typical mindset toward warfare mated with post-industrial technology. We have not seen such a wide reaching drag out conflict ever since the advent of nuclear weapons. Of course, it could be fear of how potent weaponry has become, or easier and more thorough documentation bringing the horrors of the battlefield back to the homefront to make non-combatants more keenly aware, or perhaps the powers that be have realized more subtle manipulation of economic circumstances yield better bang for the buck.
Now the virus one seems the furthest fetched concept. If it were deliberate, bad actors have plenty of unfathomable nastiness without bothering to explore this front. If it were accidental, it's difficult to imagine it happening at all, and if it did happen, it almost certainly wouldn't be as bad as any historical natural plague. Meanwhile that same research has saved/extended countless lives.
We should be careful, and it's worth keeping the worries in mind, but anyone who responds with a perspective that advancement has actually been bad would be mistaken.
That has been one thing that has disappointed me in brick and mortar. I rarely can find the good product I want on the shelves, even if I *were* willing to pay a premium to get it rather than online.
So I have to get online because the brick and mortar's just won't carry it. Instead they try to push cheap crap and hope the shoppers aren't doing any research.
Which is of course, nice, but he cites marketing material as an indicator. Now the thing is I know at least some places that still understand from a marketing standpoint what and how to say things to sound 'good'. Down to being able to put on a really good show about materials science and the very nitty gritty about caring and measuring to know what works great.
Then when it comes down to mfg time, that goes out the window and it's sadly apparent that the engineers enabling that understanding are given plenty of room to speak in a marketing situation, but not much actual control over the manufacture of the real product.
For such large enterprise environments, once they've picked something, they will generally be very careful not to have to change their minds that much. Maybe Red Hat could have a shot, but any further from Ubuntu would be a really tough sell.
Also, MS's ambitions are more bread and likely to conflict with AT&T goals. Canonical and SuSE are probably the two remotely viable companies that are the furthest from competing with AT&T in any conceivable way.
Actually not. Bitcoin's losing perceived legitimacy just brings down the whole concept with it.