"...if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale."
Funny, at a first guess companies would think twice about becoming like Oracle. You know, you can't disturb unrelated people like you disturb your customers (although, a newby would think it is bad business practice to disturb your customers, the experience contradicts that hypothesis).
But if you think their karma comes from working with open source, well, maybe Larry thinks that too...
To be fair, Windows users were still messing with config.sys and autoexec.bat during all* the 90's, and later also Windows auto-discovery, that hanged the system and didn't work most of the time. Video cards didn't use to be reliable at Windows either.
* Ok, officialy 2000 was at the 90's, so I'm off by a year.
They got nearly all the market on embebbed interpreters on personal computers before DOS, by themselves, they got the word processing and spreadsheet markets by themselves, they created the ASP like servers (an inovation here!!! And then lost most of the market to PHP, but that was later)... That is just from memory, there is probably more.
I'm not saying they were ethical, honest, or that they acted within the law on any of those markets. But they become dominant by their own effort.
Breaking compatibility on XBox is completeley different from breaking compatibility at Windows. That is just the second generation that videogame manufacturers kept compatibility, gamers are used to keep their old machines for playing.
It would be good if, while commenting, clicking the text area simply positionated the cursor at the place you clicked, instead of placing the cursor at the end of the comment, and sending the focus to the first comment on the thread.
"There's a spectrum of Anonymous folks, from the script kiddies who downloaded LOIC, and have it running on their parent's computer, all the way up to the serious folks who actually designed and architected the attacks."
You mean, the serious people that designed a bot that gets links from an IRC channel and does a bandwidth based DoS against it? Yeah, only geniouses could do that, they are irrepleceable.
Will it be able to dissipate 200W and still get a useable battery life?
I guess when my cellphone has a quad-core (my desktops currently have 6 cores each, but forget that) and 8GB of RAM, I'll have quite a bit more at my desktops...
If you define "properly working" as not using the GPU, then you are right. Just keep in mind that on Linux you can (already) increase the responsiveness of your browser and reduce energy consuption at the same time by configuring it to use the GPU.
Well, lots of people are using user agents to index the data they have localy at their hard disks. But nobody calls them user agents anymore.
Also, I can't imagine any other application for them. I can imagine quite a few that would be viable if people were concerned about the safety of their data (including money) and privacy, but they aren't.
"...memory, that can, say, do both fast in order and fast out of order reads... and they might just figure it's a problem technology will pretty easily solve fairly soon."
That problem won't go away that easily. There is a fundamental reason why RAM nowadays is faster for sequential operations, and that reason isn't going away without a major technological reakthrough.
I really think that the Linux Desktop* was needing some bold changes for a lot of time. Maybe that last crop of bold dumb changes may lead to more and more changes until we get something good at random.
That said, except for very few problems, I'm quite ok with KDE4.
* Well, I think the entire desktop idea is ready to change now that computers have so much free resources, but it won't come from any player that is focused on revenue.
To be fair, the 3.x branch had quate a big time to reach such stability. I still don't use KDE 4 at my desktops, because they break nfs server I'm using, and I'm not liking it at my laptop because it keeps accessing the disk and battery life goes away. The problem at the desktops is probably a bug at the server, and at the laptop is probably some configuration setting that I don't know about. Except for those, it seems quite stable.
Seeing how they just didn't get $6 billion in a quarter because of that deal, I'd like to ask how many quarters are they expecting to spend filling their contractual obligations with MS.
Yeah, the difference with Microsoft is that instead of simply making a verticaly integrated product line, they are imposing vertical integration on third parties, with each vertical path composed of several different parties. In short, they are trying to get the worst of vertical integration (that is NIH syndrome, and lack of flexibility) combined with the worst of independent producers (that is lack of economic and planning ingtegration, differing objectives at different levels) with added market failures (olgopsones) problems (inverting the economic power X barrier of entry rule, what makes chip makers extremely vunerable) and some anti-trust problems (governments everywhere will be whatching them).
Or, in a shorter yet version, I don't think it is a good plan.
That assumes that the light speed is a barrier, and that the exponential growth is something not as small, altought 1.0001/millenium would be enough (that's one less zero than your proposed ratio). Ok, there could be a slower civilization out there.
Windows 7 was released by October 2009, so half of the trend duration must be explained another way (and don't forget it is accelerating). Yes, they include mobile, that is relevant, only taking into account the desktop OSes, Linux and Windows are growing at the expense of Macs. I didn't notice it at first. It is also relevant that they are counting Android as Linux.
So, my demisse of Microsoft turned out to be premature:(
The problem is that we'll only be able to measure fl, fi, fc, and L by the time we know the answer (hell, we may be take a long time after we know the anwser just to discover L). By that sense those numbers are unknowable. By the way, at least for our galaxy we kow that the number of alien civilizations with interestelar travel capability that go into exponential growth (as everything alife seems to go) for up to a couple handred years ago is zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, at a first guess companies would think twice about becoming like Oracle. You know, you can't disturb unrelated people like you disturb your customers (although, a newby would think it is bad business practice to disturb your customers, the experience contradicts that hypothesis).
But if you think their karma comes from working with open source, well, maybe Larry thinks that too...
Yeah, but the hackers know that it is a case of an evil corporation against evil hackers. Again, why would the hackers belive on such a promisse?
Yeah, ok, I'm from a third world country...
Ok, Android isn't a failure, but I don't know where you want that list to go.
To be fair, Windows users were still messing with config.sys and autoexec.bat during all* the 90's, and later also Windows auto-discovery, that hanged the system and didn't work most of the time. Video cards didn't use to be reliable at Windows either.
* Ok, officialy 2000 was at the 90's, so I'm off by a year.
Just because autoconfiguration worked for you doesn't mean it was reliable. By that time, it wasn't. And the config wizards were lacking.
Wrong, by that time I was already looking ahead into buying a computer with 2 astonishing MB of RAM!
You can't steal credit card numbers with a DDoS attack.
They got nearly all the market on embebbed interpreters on personal computers before DOS, by themselves, they got the word processing and spreadsheet markets by themselves, they created the ASP like servers (an inovation here!!! And then lost most of the market to PHP, but that was later)... That is just from memory, there is probably more.
I'm not saying they were ethical, honest, or that they acted within the law on any of those markets. But they become dominant by their own effort.
Breaking compatibility on XBox is completeley different from breaking compatibility at Windows. That is just the second generation that videogame manufacturers kept compatibility, gamers are used to keep their old machines for playing.
It would be good if, while commenting, clicking the text area simply positionated the cursor at the place you clicked, instead of placing the cursor at the end of the comment, and sending the focus to the first comment on the thread.
That could lead to some interesting dancing movements.
Except that Anonymous does DDoS, they don't steal credit card numbers.
You mean, the serious people that designed a bot that gets links from an IRC channel and does a bandwidth based DoS against it? Yeah, only geniouses could do that, they are irrepleceable.
Will it be able to dissipate 200W and still get a useable battery life?
I guess when my cellphone has a quad-core (my desktops currently have 6 cores each, but forget that) and 8GB of RAM, I'll have quite a bit more at my desktops...
If you define "properly working" as not using the GPU, then you are right. Just keep in mind that on Linux you can (already) increase the responsiveness of your browser and reduce energy consuption at the same time by configuring it to use the GPU.
Well, lots of people are using user agents to index the data they have localy at their hard disks. But nobody calls them user agents anymore.
Also, I can't imagine any other application for them. I can imagine quite a few that would be viable if people were concerned about the safety of their data (including money) and privacy, but they aren't.
That problem won't go away that easily. There is a fundamental reason why RAM nowadays is faster for sequential operations, and that reason isn't going away without a major technological reakthrough.
I really think that the Linux Desktop* was needing some bold changes for a lot of time. Maybe that last crop of bold dumb changes may lead to more and more changes until we get something good at random.
That said, except for very few problems, I'm quite ok with KDE4.
* Well, I think the entire desktop idea is ready to change now that computers have so much free resources, but it won't come from any player that is focused on revenue.
To be fair, the 3.x branch had quate a big time to reach such stability. I still don't use KDE 4 at my desktops, because they break nfs server I'm using, and I'm not liking it at my laptop because it keeps accessing the disk and battery life goes away. The problem at the desktops is probably a bug at the server, and at the laptop is probably some configuration setting that I don't know about. Except for those, it seems quite stable.
Seeing how they just didn't get $6 billion in a quarter because of that deal, I'd like to ask how many quarters are they expecting to spend filling their contractual obligations with MS.
Yeah, the difference with Microsoft is that instead of simply making a verticaly integrated product line, they are imposing vertical integration on third parties, with each vertical path composed of several different parties. In short, they are trying to get the worst of vertical integration (that is NIH syndrome, and lack of flexibility) combined with the worst of independent producers (that is lack of economic and planning ingtegration, differing objectives at different levels) with added market failures (olgopsones) problems (inverting the economic power X barrier of entry rule, what makes chip makers extremely vunerable) and some anti-trust problems (governments everywhere will be whatching them).
Or, in a shorter yet version, I don't think it is a good plan.
That assumes that the light speed is a barrier, and that the exponential growth is something not as small, altought 1.0001/millenium would be enough (that's one less zero than your proposed ratio). Ok, there could be a slower civilization out there.
Windows 7 was released by October 2009, so half of the trend duration must be explained another way (and don't forget it is accelerating). Yes, they include mobile, that is relevant, only taking into account the desktop OSes, Linux and Windows are growing at the expense of Macs. I didn't notice it at first. It is also relevant that they are counting Android as Linux.
So, my demisse of Microsoft turned out to be premature :(
The problem is that we'll only be able to measure fl, fi, fc, and L by the time we know the answer (hell, we may be take a long time after we know the anwser just to discover L). By that sense those numbers are unknowable. By the way, at least for our galaxy we kow that the number of alien civilizations with interestelar travel capability that go into exponential growth (as everything alife seems to go) for up to a couple handred years ago is zero.