Then how can they know they don't like them?

The thing is you can't necessarily fix a bad gui, unless you're working with something where you have access to the source and can replace the code; with cli, you can alway's script your way around a problem. Your programs doesn't validate input? Write an input validater and pipe it through that. Obviously, cli is great for batch operations and automation, as well. Even if it's a black box, proprietary system. Even if you can change the code, which is easier to do? Spend 15 minutes or less working in your favorite scripting language or source the application source, patch it, re-compile if necessary, test, then apply the operation? (Especially if this is a one-off operation).

Development is not happenning in the open, only google partners like motorola and samsung have access to honeycomb source.

According to the article, blaze customers can get "up to 10mbs" of bandwidth, though they don't specifiy if that's up/down or split symmetrically. This probably reflects an improvement in the technology over the past decade. As long as the latency isn't horrible, this sounds quite competitive vs. aDSL, although aDSL is also much, much cheaper (at least in areas with a reasonably dense population). Of course, the whole point is that there's really no other option besides dial-up.

Not to mention that many CS and IT students, who will encounter Unix/Linux for the first time at their university, might be exposed to Solaris and be convinced that it's the best Unix, simply because it's the one that they are most familiar with. (I'll bet this sort-of reasoning plays a bigger role in people's OS preferences than most would care to admit).

I think you underestimate how much that would hurt Google themselves. If Google stops returning IBM-hosted pages how fast do you think they're going to start losing users who care at all about IBM to Bing? "Search neutrality" advocates will, of course, get up in arms over this, if Google was stupid enough to block a major company's sites, but this shouldn't even make it that far, since screwing up it's search results in a way noticeable by an appreciable number of users is bad enough for Google on it's own, even without a public and/or regulatory body outcry.

In your example though, it's proprietary software vs. proprietary software. What your example really seems to suggest is that "fat clients" aren't always better than "thin clients", and that you should've just renewed the license on your original, proprietary software.

There are two major technical issues obstructing IPv6 adoption for home users:

1. Your ISP doesn't provide you with an IPv6 address.
2. Your network equipment's firmware can't handle IPv6, even though IPv6 has been standardized for over a decade. It's not particularly easy even to buy a new wireless/wired router and/or cable/dsl modem that supports IPv6.

Now you're router is probably physically cable of handling IPv6 routing, a linksys wrt54g from 5 years ago can do it if you flash OpenWRT firmware onto it... so you just need a firmware update to add software support for IPv6 ... but good luck getting revised firmware from your manufacturer.

So, in my opinion, basically no blame rests with network node users, because even if they wanted to enable IPv6 connectivity for their home network, they can't. Some amount of blame rests with your ISP (but I do think Comcast, at least, is exploring the possibility of offering IPv6 connectivity), and alot of blame rests with SOHO networking device manufacturers. Now, if equipment manufacturers and ISPs get their act together and offer IPv6 capable devices and service, then you can start blaming network node users for not getting onboard (and I'm sure, at that point, plenty of people will drag their feet about it).

I don't think there's anyway to reasonalby expect this to work. First off, you'd need to root the device first, second stock android might not even fully support your phone's hardware.

I think if the issue is that, even if there are no royalties paid, h.264 isn't really "free" in that it takes developer time away from other projects that they might work on, nobody at Mozilla is interested enough in h.264 to develop a playback plugin; besides, h.264 plugins sort of defeat the point of , since the idea was to enable video playback WITHOUT plugins. Also, note that Opera, which is a proprietary project doesn't want to support h.264 either. presumably because of malaise regarding royalties (Opera's creators aren't exactly rolling in dough). I think that Microsoft, Opera, and Firefox are all sort-of waiting for the dust to settle in the codec dispute. If it becomes clear that h.264 is the future, Opera and Firefox will have to find some way to support it; if vp8 or, less likely, theora, goes somewhere Microsoft will support it in new versions of IE. Apple, to some degree has a vested interest in opposing anything but h.264, so they might hold out even if it's clear the tide is changing toward another codec.

Firefox doesn't bundle flash, do you mean chrome?

How can an OS level bug cause firmware/BIOS level problems? And or tell me what hardware I can reproduce this bug on.

I'll admit I don't know too much about this but freebsd has managed to provide a stable ABI, I think back to the 4.x releases via compatibility layers (which are not installed by default but are available). I've heard that solaris's abi is stable back to the first official release. Linux devs could provide a stable abi ... but they don't care. They build their kernels from git anyway.

And as McNealy says in the article: going the OEM route to sell x86 Solaris was a HUGE mistake. If Sun had shipped x86 Solaris boxes that they built in shop, they probably could've been "Apple of the enterprise market", selling high quality integrated software and hardware, keep a decent profit margin, but drop prices into a range where they were competitive vs. Linux.

But instead they got mixed up in the whole anti-Microsoft lawsuit because Microsoft rigged the game for them to fail selling through OEMs. Even though Sun would eventually have some success in the courts, they still loss tremendous marketshare to Linux in the meantime. Now I wouldn't agree with McNealy that Solaris is superior in all ways to Linux, but there IS some good stuff in there that Linux doesn't have and it IS probably the most compelling commercial Unix left today. But by the mid-90's and maybe even earlier, there was just no way in hell that SPARC was competitive vs. x86 for anyone who wasn't already locked into the platform in some way, and not being able to enter the x86 market fast enough, in a big enough way, I think is what ultimately killed Sun. Because, like pre-iTunes Apple, they developed software, but mainly made their money off the hardware.

And nothing about "Open Source" or anything they would do after that point mattered, they were just throwing everything they could at the wall, but nothing stuck.