I'm a little mixed on the topic. I've had horrible handwriting since I was a kid. But I had an excellent memory. Something I learned in middle school and high school was I had a choice: I could either take notes, to which I could read very little of if I went back later, or I could pay attention to the lecture and retain more of it. The exceptions were math/physics. Those classes I had to take notes as I'd understand the material in class, but if I went to do homework later that night or the next night, I wouldn't remember the finer points.
I had a laptop in college, rarely used it for note taking in class. Once again, for most classes I could take notes (paper or computer) or listen and learn the lecture. Again the exception being classes that were math intensive or subjects like Econ where drawing graphs were kinda hard on a computer.
That changed, however, when I was in Law School. There having a laptop was almost a must and a useful tool. I had hard copies of the texts, but also CD-rom's of the case law and the particular program made it extremely easy to highlight text and leave margin notes on the computer. Extremely useful when you're reading 300 pages a night and then needed to make references the next day in class. I'm not sure if I would have survived 1L with out those notes on the computer.
But I wasn't using it to *take* notes in class as much as search/recall information already stored from the night/day before.
What these type of agreements allow are for companies to get one license to use a number of patents. Generally companies contributing to the pool may get free access or cheaper access, but for companies not in the pool it allows you to buy a single license and continue about your business. It makes innovation and development of new products easier. The only pool I've every used is the H.264 pool from H.264. If we had to go through and license all those patents it would have been nearly impossible for a company our size to do.
But not all of those companies on that list are anti-opensource. Microsoft has been. EMC, I'm not really sure about. Oracle may not develop a lot of opensource stuff, but they certainly use it where it benefits, but Apple? I'd hardly call Apple "anti-opensource". They may not pass the purity test for the True Believers of the Church of Stallman, but let's take a look here...
Apple bought and now maintains CUPS. And I remember the nightmare of *iux printing before CUPS. Apple created Webkit and has kept it opensource. The core is LGPL, the rest is BSD. I'd hardly call that "closed source".
And then look at the vast amount of stuff available under APSL, which is OSI approved:
Our TV died on Xmas eve and we've been out looking. 10 years ago we bought a 65" rear projection HDTV and was way ahead of the curve. We didn't really pay much of a premium USD2,800, but for the first couple years the HD selection was HBO, Showtime, and the HD Preview/Demo channel. It's only been in the last 2 - 3 years we've seen much HD content on our cable provider and we really won't get all the channels we regularly watch in HD until the middle of the year.
We just bought a 60" Plasma TV today for $1,100. The reason why we did was it seemed to have a good and motion was smooth. The 240Hz LED's were $1000 - $2000 more, especially one that was "3D ready". Well by the time with our original HDTV had HD Content we had gone from HD Componet to HDMI and 1080i to 1080p.
We figured we'd much rather save the $1,000 today and see where the technology goes...maybe something better in 5 years that is worth spending the $1,000 on at a later date.
Interestingly enough, the one company I know around here that went thin clients two years ago is back buying their employees laptops. My understanding was the thin client approach was great when it was working, but if something went wrong you could end up with a lot of people not able to do anything and all. And apparently they had a couple instances where that happened. Turned out for them the costs involved in building in redundancy into everything (network switches, routers, servers) ate away at all that projected "cost savings" and may have wound up being more expensive.
Personally I get by with my iPad for all non programming tasks anymore. I can do everything from Email to document creation using iWork. I have a docking station at work and one at the house. I still have a iMac at the office so when I need to fire up XCode or Netbeans I can. But that's once a week. I have a Mac Mini at home hooked up to the TV. But even that has largely been replaced by my Xbox for streaming movies from Netflix. And the TV I just bought now has Netflix built in...
There could be a day when all I have is a couple web enabled appliances around the house and that's it. No "computer" at all.
Correction, because the carriers don't want this. After all, the customers of the handset vendors IS NOT YOU THE END USER, it is the carriers. That is who they are selling to and not the end user. And carriers don't want to sell you a device that lets you do whatever as they've found ways in the past to nickel and dime every feature.
When I first started working with this internet thingy, the options to do anything with user data was your choice of C or Perl. Then I moved on to PHP because that was what a lot of projects and people where using. That's what we did our rapid development of our web app in was MySQL and PHP. A lot of that had to do with the initial client and what they had available on their hosting server. Once the proof of concept was signed off on and we had our funding for the final production product we had the great debate. PHP was the early favourite, but then the question became "Which framework to use?" Ruby on Rails was what all the "cutting edge" folks were pushing for and a couple had mentioned Python. Well for every feature we wanted to create there already seemed to be Perl Module written for that. And some of the stuff was new at the time, like Twitter and FaceBook, yet there were Perl Modules already on CPAN. Plus as part of the long term plan was the requirement that eventually we'd likely be on DB2 and using something like Teradata for data warehousing. With Teradata, your choices with the other languages was ODBC or nothing. Perl had not one, but two DBI/DBD modules for working with Teradata.
We ended up writing all our SOAP and REST API's as well as other "backend" code in Perl. We transitioned from MySQL to PostgreSQL with changing a few dozen lines of code and still running on PostgreSQL for both transaction and data warehousing. It's been stable and fairly easy to maintain simply because once we got it finished, there hasn't been any major changes to Perl. As far as I know, those servers are still all Perl 5.8.x and run day in and day out processing thousands of orders for our clients per day.
The frontend client that most of our customers used was written in PHP. It required fairly extensive rewrite during the PHP 4 - 5 transition and then has required further modifications as a few functions were depreciated [Specifically split()] even from PHP earlier version of PHP to PHP version 5.3. Now that has been replaced by HTML5 + Javascript that talks to the Perl powered API.
This is where our state/local governments failed us over the last 25 - 50 years. They should have been the ones investing in copper and later fiber. The city/county provides the wire to your house. You then decide whom they lease the line to for service. The city/county charges each ISP/Teleco the same amount to lease the line for $X per month or $Y per/GB or whatever calculation you want to do. Infrastructure is then supported by those fees + any local taxes the people vote for to improve services.
What's the difference between a spy and a criminal? A government badge. One of the mandates for the existence of organizations like the CIA are to break laws. Granted usually laws in other countries, but to break laws none the less. NSA to a lesser extent as their job is primarily to make and break codes.
When I was in my 20's, we used to head over to a friend's condo every friday night for game night. Usually 10 - 12 of us. There were two Xboxes set up in different rooms for Halo as well a card and board games for those not in to video games and we had a lot of fun. Fast forward 10 years and most are married with kids. Getting out of the house or organizing such events are nearly impossible. Several of us have moved off because of work, but I still get to play Reach with a few of them over Xbox Live on a sunday afternoon.
The problem is that for most of us, the best service in the area is through the cable company. My 3G service through ATT was faster than the DSL we had. They still make their money through the sale of TV Channels into my home. Things like Netflix, youtube, and Hulu directly compete with that service. So while they may start with BitTorrent, how long until they start filtering other kinds of traffic. Want to play on PlayStation or Xbox live, that will be another $4.95 per month not to slow those connections. Want to watch streaming video pay the cable company another $19.99 per month + NetFlix fees for the honor. That's when the cable company can say "or you can watch On Demand Online from us for only $19.95 per month."
Pretty soon Netflix is out of business and the cable companies say, "OnDemand online is now $24.95 per month." And then the next year: "It's now $29.95". And the next year...
Regardless of who actually did the deed, chances are a lot of folks where involved by knowing what was happening and deciding not to say anything to the Iranians about it. Sometimes the most effective spying is when you known, but say nothing.
There are a lot of parties that stand to lose from a nuclear Iran.
If you want to explore that analogy, even the "Wild Wild West" was eventually homesteaded and tamed. So to will be the internet. The genie is being put back in the bottle slowly but steadily. I'm rather convinced now that Net Neutrality will be a thing largely of the past by 2015. There will be a tiered internet that is filtered at the ISP level for most users.
Fifteen years ago the internet was something new, interesting, opening up all kinds of new ideas and technologies. No one was exactly sure what this "internet" thing was so they decided to keep the hands off and see what happens. I remember taking a philosophy class in college in the late 90's that was all about this "cyberrevolution". It was a topic the prof had been looking at for 30 years. (He had a CS in comp sci from Berkley in the 60's, Masters in Math from Stanford, and a PhD in Philosophy.) He had led research projects in the 80's revolving around the idea of "hyperlinks". That one would be reading a piece, text would be linked so you could go find more information on that subject/term. The closest thing there is to that today would be Wikipedia. However, even by the late 90's early 2000's studies had been published that people navigated linearly through webpages.
It was really interesting because to him, all the high and noble ideas of what the "internet" was/should be in the end failed to materialize...sort of like the business plans of a lot of dot coms around the same period. It was not going to usher in some new age of enlightenment. People ended up doing pretty much the same things, just with faster/cheaper communications.
IBM does, but IBM tends to use them more defensively these days. There is an unwritten rule there if you don't go after IBM, they won't come after you. And it wouldn't surprise me if these folks already had patent pooling/cross licensing terms with IBM.
High risk or what used to be called "basic research". These are project that may work or provide useful insight for down the road. Chances are they may not lead to some kind of "success" in the commercial world. When companies fund research and development it usually evaluates projects based on the likely hood they'll be able to produce something that is commercially viable and they can break even or profit from the work. We really haven't seen a lot of basic research labs where companies throw money into R&D and see what happens. That's the way it used to work back in the day with places like Bell Labs and even Xerox. Today this is usually done at research universities.
Re:youre on /., a geek or a nerd, and you dont car
on
Today's WikiLeaks News
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Enjoy it while it lasts. We're marching towards Internet 2 where Net Neutrality will be a thing of the past. It's happening in the EU and it's started in the US. 15 years ago the internet caught a lot of people by surprise and they weren't sure what to make of it. I think they have a better idea now and are slowly working towards swinging the pendelum from the wild wild west of information back to something closer to how the "on-line" experience was in the late 80's and early 90's with Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy, etc..
From a software company perspective I get why the "cloud" is so popular. Subscriptions provide a steady stream of operating revenue month in and month out. You have one code base of the software to support. All clients get updates rolled out at the same time and are all on the same page. As someone who owns a software company that has both types of products (subscription and buy and use), the subscription based ones provide enough predictable income each month that we can plan for our expenses accordingly. Our stand alone apps, it just depends. Generally we'll see a lot of revenue in the short term (usually a quarter or two) but then as sales stagnate you may have on going maintenance to pay for. And generally that's where a lot of the cost of those products come into play is after release.
I have my email available on multiple devices through the hosting company I lease a couple managed dedicated servers from using IMAP. They even have a web based interface or I could install any number of web-based IMAP clients if I wanted. For those who have been around computers long enough, the "cloud" is nothing more than timeshare. Same concept, slightly different implementation. You still have a big room (now with a bunch of servers instead of one big one, and everyone then connects via a terminal or in this case a web browser.
I still think the term "cloud" is joke. Or rather, buzzword. What is a cloud? We've run our website and services on dedicated servers and I've been doing it since 1997. So instead of providing clients with a shopping cart I guess I should just call it a "shopping cloud" to be hip.
The problem is this "hacktivism" is doing far more damage than good because it easily allows the politicians to say "We need an internet kill switch". The overwhelming majority of people don't give a damn about wikileaks one way or the other. It's a side show on the 24 hours infotainment channels, that's all. The main reason being that what Wikileaks is doing has little to no effect on people's daily lives. Especially when most are more concerned with the job/family/economy. Instead they see these "attacks" as nothing more than a group of vandals. Nothing more and when authorities want tougher laws to deal with these "vandals", the public shrugs and says...."alright".
And attacking the public facing websites...okay that may work with Amazon or Paypal. But to Mastercard or Visa? So long as I can still use my Visa Debit card or Mastercard at the gas pump or grocery store, it's not like I notice.
That being said, if they did target the processing systems of mastercard/visa, I'm pretty sure that would be the golden goose the politicians have been waiting for to really clamp down on control of the internet because then you are messing with people pocket books.
QoS won't work on the internet. It works well for a local LAN, say an office where you need to priority for VOIP over email, or even access from say your house to the first node, but once your packet leaves your ISP and hits the backbone or another ISP, who can guarantee you QoS then?
It's more that Linux became "good enough" for a lot tasks and was cheaper. Having worked around both, Solaris still has features that if it's needed are worth the money.
Bingo. IT is a service business now. Gerstner saw that in the 1990's. You may have some core products, whether they be software/hardware, and hire people to develop those products, but the money is in services. Sun never stopped being a traditional hardware/business. Interestingly enough it took someone from outside of technology to see that for IBM.
Oracle is not nor has ever been about opensource. It's about making money. Unlike Sun, if it doesn't make money (either directly or indirectly), Oracle will dump it. Oracle knows why it's in business, who its customers are and they are not developers, the community, consumers, or small businesses. They are large companies, the government, and other big institutions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little mixed on the topic. I've had horrible handwriting since I was a kid. But I had an excellent memory. Something I learned in middle school and high school was I had a choice: I could either take notes, to which I could read very little of if I went back later, or I could pay attention to the lecture and retain more of it. The exceptions were math/physics. Those classes I had to take notes as I'd understand the material in class, but if I went to do homework later that night or the next night, I wouldn't remember the finer points.
I had a laptop in college, rarely used it for note taking in class. Once again, for most classes I could take notes (paper or computer) or listen and learn the lecture. Again the exception being classes that were math intensive or subjects like Econ where drawing graphs were kinda hard on a computer.
That changed, however, when I was in Law School. There having a laptop was almost a must and a useful tool. I had hard copies of the texts, but also CD-rom's of the case law and the particular program made it extremely easy to highlight text and leave margin notes on the computer. Extremely useful when you're reading 300 pages a night and then needed to make references the next day in class. I'm not sure if I would have survived 1L with out those notes on the computer.
But I wasn't using it to *take* notes in class as much as search/recall information already stored from the night/day before.
What these type of agreements allow are for companies to get one license to use a number of patents. Generally companies contributing to the pool may get free access or cheaper access, but for companies not in the pool it allows you to buy a single license and continue about your business. It makes innovation and development of new products easier. The only pool I've every used is the H.264 pool from H.264. If we had to go through and license all those patents it would have been nearly impossible for a company our size to do.
But not all of those companies on that list are anti-opensource. Microsoft has been. EMC, I'm not really sure about. Oracle may not develop a lot of opensource stuff, but they certainly use it where it benefits, but Apple? I'd hardly call Apple "anti-opensource". They may not pass the purity test for the True Believers of the Church of Stallman, but let's take a look here...
Apple bought and now maintains CUPS. And I remember the nightmare of *iux printing before CUPS.
Apple created Webkit and has kept it opensource. The core is LGPL, the rest is BSD. I'd hardly call that "closed source".
And then look at the vast amount of stuff available under APSL, which is OSI approved:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1065/
Our TV died on Xmas eve and we've been out looking. 10 years ago we bought a 65" rear projection HDTV and was way ahead of the curve. We didn't really pay much of a premium USD2,800, but for the first couple years the HD selection was HBO, Showtime, and the HD Preview/Demo channel. It's only been in the last 2 - 3 years we've seen much HD content on our cable provider and we really won't get all the channels we regularly watch in HD until the middle of the year.
We just bought a 60" Plasma TV today for $1,100. The reason why we did was it seemed to have a good and motion was smooth. The 240Hz LED's were $1000 - $2000 more, especially one that was "3D ready". Well by the time with our original HDTV had HD Content we had gone from HD Componet to HDMI and 1080i to 1080p.
We figured we'd much rather save the $1,000 today and see where the technology goes...maybe something better in 5 years that is worth spending the $1,000 on at a later date.
Interestingly enough, the one company I know around here that went thin clients two years ago is back buying their employees laptops. My understanding was the thin client approach was great when it was working, but if something went wrong you could end up with a lot of people not able to do anything and all. And apparently they had a couple instances where that happened. Turned out for them the costs involved in building in redundancy into everything (network switches, routers, servers) ate away at all that projected "cost savings" and may have wound up being more expensive.
Personally I get by with my iPad for all non programming tasks anymore. I can do everything from Email to document creation using iWork. I have a docking station at work and one at the house. I still have a iMac at the office so when I need to fire up XCode or Netbeans I can. But that's once a week. I have a Mac Mini at home hooked up to the TV. But even that has largely been replaced by my Xbox for streaming movies from Netflix. And the TV I just bought now has Netflix built in...
There could be a day when all I have is a couple web enabled appliances around the house and that's it. No "computer" at all.
Correction, because the carriers don't want this. After all, the customers of the handset vendors IS NOT YOU THE END USER, it is the carriers. That is who they are selling to and not the end user. And carriers don't want to sell you a device that lets you do whatever as they've found ways in the past to nickel and dime every feature.
When I first started working with this internet thingy, the options to do anything with user data was your choice of C or Perl. Then I moved on to PHP because that was what a lot of projects and people where using. That's what we did our rapid development of our web app in was MySQL and PHP. A lot of that had to do with the initial client and what they had available on their hosting server. Once the proof of concept was signed off on and we had our funding for the final production product we had the great debate. PHP was the early favourite, but then the question became "Which framework to use?" Ruby on Rails was what all the "cutting edge" folks were pushing for and a couple had mentioned Python. Well for every feature we wanted to create there already seemed to be Perl Module written for that. And some of the stuff was new at the time, like Twitter and FaceBook, yet there were Perl Modules already on CPAN. Plus as part of the long term plan was the requirement that eventually we'd likely be on DB2 and using something like Teradata for data warehousing. With Teradata, your choices with the other languages was ODBC or nothing. Perl had not one, but two DBI/DBD modules for working with Teradata.
We ended up writing all our SOAP and REST API's as well as other "backend" code in Perl. We transitioned from MySQL to PostgreSQL with changing a few dozen lines of code and still running on PostgreSQL for both transaction and data warehousing. It's been stable and fairly easy to maintain simply because once we got it finished, there hasn't been any major changes to Perl. As far as I know, those servers are still all Perl 5.8.x and run day in and day out processing thousands of orders for our clients per day.
The frontend client that most of our customers used was written in PHP. It required fairly extensive rewrite during the PHP 4 - 5 transition and then has required further modifications as a few functions were depreciated [Specifically split()] even from PHP earlier version of PHP to PHP version 5.3. Now that has been replaced by HTML5 + Javascript that talks to the Perl powered API.
This is where our state/local governments failed us over the last 25 - 50 years. They should have been the ones investing in copper and later fiber. The city/county provides the wire to your house. You then decide whom they lease the line to for service. The city/county charges each ISP/Teleco the same amount to lease the line for $X per month or $Y per/GB or whatever calculation you want to do. Infrastructure is then supported by those fees + any local taxes the people vote for to improve services.
What's the difference between a spy and a criminal? A government badge. One of the mandates for the existence of organizations like the CIA are to break laws. Granted usually laws in other countries, but to break laws none the less. NSA to a lesser extent as their job is primarily to make and break codes.
When I was in my 20's, we used to head over to a friend's condo every friday night for game night. Usually 10 - 12 of us. There were two Xboxes set up in different rooms for Halo as well a card and board games for those not in to video games and we had a lot of fun. Fast forward 10 years and most are married with kids. Getting out of the house or organizing such events are nearly impossible. Several of us have moved off because of work, but I still get to play Reach with a few of them over Xbox Live on a sunday afternoon.
The problem is that for most of us, the best service in the area is through the cable company. My 3G service through ATT was faster than the DSL we had. They still make their money through the sale of TV Channels into my home. Things like Netflix, youtube, and Hulu directly compete with that service. So while they may start with BitTorrent, how long until they start filtering other kinds of traffic. Want to play on PlayStation or Xbox live, that will be another $4.95 per month not to slow those connections. Want to watch streaming video pay the cable company another $19.99 per month + NetFlix fees for the honor. That's when the cable company can say "or you can watch On Demand Online from us for only $19.95 per month."
Pretty soon Netflix is out of business and the cable companies say, "OnDemand online is now $24.95 per month." And then the next year: "It's now $29.95". And the next year...
Regardless of who actually did the deed, chances are a lot of folks where involved by knowing what was happening and deciding not to say anything to the Iranians about it. Sometimes the most effective spying is when you known, but say nothing.
There are a lot of parties that stand to lose from a nuclear Iran.
If you want to explore that analogy, even the "Wild Wild West" was eventually homesteaded and tamed. So to will be the internet. The genie is being put back in the bottle slowly but steadily. I'm rather convinced now that Net Neutrality will be a thing largely of the past by 2015. There will be a tiered internet that is filtered at the ISP level for most users.
Fifteen years ago the internet was something new, interesting, opening up all kinds of new ideas and technologies. No one was exactly sure what this "internet" thing was so they decided to keep the hands off and see what happens. I remember taking a philosophy class in college in the late 90's that was all about this "cyberrevolution". It was a topic the prof had been looking at for 30 years. (He had a CS in comp sci from Berkley in the 60's, Masters in Math from Stanford, and a PhD in Philosophy.) He had led research projects in the 80's revolving around the idea of "hyperlinks". That one would be reading a piece, text would be linked so you could go find more information on that subject/term. The closest thing there is to that today would be Wikipedia. However, even by the late 90's early 2000's studies had been published that people navigated linearly through webpages.
It was really interesting because to him, all the high and noble ideas of what the "internet" was/should be in the end failed to materialize...sort of like the business plans of a lot of dot coms around the same period. It was not going to usher in some new age of enlightenment. People ended up doing pretty much the same things, just with faster/cheaper communications.
IBM does, but IBM tends to use them more defensively these days. There is an unwritten rule there if you don't go after IBM, they won't come after you. And it wouldn't surprise me if these folks already had patent pooling/cross licensing terms with IBM.
Are you have you ever been a member of Anonymous?"
Worked well enough in the Mcarthy Era
High risk or what used to be called "basic research". These are project that may work or provide useful insight for down the road. Chances are they may not lead to some kind of "success" in the commercial world. When companies fund research and development it usually evaluates projects based on the likely hood they'll be able to produce something that is commercially viable and they can break even or profit from the work. We really haven't seen a lot of basic research labs where companies throw money into R&D and see what happens. That's the way it used to work back in the day with places like Bell Labs and even Xerox. Today this is usually done at research universities.
Enjoy it while it lasts. We're marching towards Internet 2 where Net Neutrality will be a thing of the past. It's happening in the EU and it's started in the US. 15 years ago the internet caught a lot of people by surprise and they weren't sure what to make of it. I think they have a better idea now and are slowly working towards swinging the pendelum from the wild wild west of information back to something closer to how the "on-line" experience was in the late 80's and early 90's with Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy, etc..
From a software company perspective I get why the "cloud" is so popular. Subscriptions provide a steady stream of operating revenue month in and month out. You have one code base of the software to support. All clients get updates rolled out at the same time and are all on the same page. As someone who owns a software company that has both types of products (subscription and buy and use), the subscription based ones provide enough predictable income each month that we can plan for our expenses accordingly. Our stand alone apps, it just depends. Generally we'll see a lot of revenue in the short term (usually a quarter or two) but then as sales stagnate you may have on going maintenance to pay for. And generally that's where a lot of the cost of those products come into play is after release.
I have my email available on multiple devices through the hosting company I lease a couple managed dedicated servers from using IMAP. They even have a web based interface or I could install any number of web-based IMAP clients if I wanted. For those who have been around computers long enough, the "cloud" is nothing more than timeshare. Same concept, slightly different implementation. You still have a big room (now with a bunch of servers instead of one big one, and everyone then connects via a terminal or in this case a web browser.
I still think the term "cloud" is joke. Or rather, buzzword. What is a cloud? We've run our website and services on dedicated servers and I've been doing it since 1997. So instead of providing clients with a shopping cart I guess I should just call it a "shopping cloud" to be hip.
The problem is this "hacktivism" is doing far more damage than good because it easily allows the politicians to say "We need an internet kill switch". The overwhelming majority of people don't give a damn about wikileaks one way or the other. It's a side show on the 24 hours infotainment channels, that's all. The main reason being that what Wikileaks is doing has little to no effect on people's daily lives. Especially when most are more concerned with the job/family/economy. Instead they see these "attacks" as nothing more than a group of vandals. Nothing more and when authorities want tougher laws to deal with these "vandals", the public shrugs and says...."alright".
And attacking the public facing websites...okay that may work with Amazon or Paypal. But to Mastercard or Visa? So long as I can still use my Visa Debit card or Mastercard at the gas pump or grocery store, it's not like I notice.
That being said, if they did target the processing systems of mastercard/visa, I'm pretty sure that would be the golden goose the politicians have been waiting for to really clamp down on control of the internet because then you are messing with people pocket books.
Yeah, must be noobs. They forgot the ROT13 step...pfffst, bloody amateurs.
QoS won't work on the internet. It works well for a local LAN, say an office where you need to priority for VOIP over email, or even access from say your house to the first node, but once your packet leaves your ISP and hits the backbone or another ISP, who can guarantee you QoS then?
Then just move servers outside the united states where the law doesn't exist.
It's more that Linux became "good enough" for a lot tasks and was cheaper. Having worked around both, Solaris still has features that if it's needed are worth the money.
Bingo. IT is a service business now. Gerstner saw that in the 1990's. You may have some core products, whether they be software/hardware, and hire people to develop those products, but the money is in services. Sun never stopped being a traditional hardware/business. Interestingly enough it took someone from outside of technology to see that for IBM.
Oracle is not nor has ever been about opensource. It's about making money. Unlike Sun, if it doesn't make money (either directly or indirectly), Oracle will dump it. Oracle knows why it's in business, who its customers are and they are not developers, the community, consumers, or small businesses. They are large companies, the government, and other big institutions.