Larry knows exactly how to make money; he is probably the world's best businessman at holding you upside-down and shaking you vigorously until your pockets empty.

I would be stunned if Oracle ever comes out with a credible OpenSolaris strategy -- it's not Oracle's way, nor is it in their best interests to have a vibrant opensolaris community. Unlike Linux, the best parts of Solaris have never come from outside Sun. Dtrace, ZFS, integrated hardware, all this stuff is where Sun's real value lay.

The end game for OpenSolaris began when Sun moved ahead with the merger. From then until the official end is just drama, positioning, etc.

Dear Taco,

Thank you for your commentary. I laughed out loud. That was nice. Then I thought (probably Taco), and checked -- there you were. A part of slashdot will die forever when Darl ends his campaign.

In other news, WW3 started slowly with Google and Dell pulling out of China. Infowars continued to increase when China's root nameserver began to propagate its information out to the developing world, areas that had been increasingly reliant on Chinese funding since the post-cold-War US' international power began to wane..

I laughed outloud, you are so right..

Actually, it's a rental, which is one reason I don't want to go fishing around in the walls.

FreeCiv is buggier, less pretty and focused around Civ1/Civ2 rulesets.

It's also hackable, and super cool, and I like it.

But, you aren't going to enjoy it if your first Civ is Civ4 -- Civ4 has a huge number of 'improvements' (to me, they are improvements) over Civ1/2. Add in the graphics quality, and if you've got it running well, I'd say you should just enjoy yourself. Of course on debian, you could probably sudo apt-get install freeciv, so it wouldn't be too particularly hard to check it out for yourself. : )

I think it unlikely that Google would use on-device ads to help phone costs: their traditional strategy has been to use ads to monetize core offerings, not ancillary ones. Ancillary offerings bring you back to the core offerings, where ads are effectively placed.

There's so much speculation right now on the market, but I think that it's clear that Google could do something really interesting without the use of on-device monetization right now, e.g. the $199 unlocked super-phone that's being discussed in the more rumor-mill-ish blogs right now. If they could be cash-neutral doing that, and simultaneously disintermediate wireless carriers (a side-goal they've had for some time now), AND double Android's market share in the US, the mobile device group will be getting large bonuses, mark my words.

A totally new business model which likely reduces the amount of uptake from consumers: not so likely right now; Google has lots of cash and wants lots of market share. It's not a time to futz around with stuff like this: consumers would generally LOVE an iphone-a-like which costs $30 a month for unlimited calling and only costs $199. If Google can get that out the door, they'll have done plenty already in the last eighteen months.

I haven't read the contract, but I can tell you exactly what happened:

Arrington has good idea, promises to market it, and work on it, plus provide a (modicum) of resources. Engineering Company gets involved. Capitalists get involved and put money in. Guaranteed: Arrington's dollars are all soft-dollars, time, energy, shared office space, PR, marketing, etc.

In the end: it works. Woohoo!

Now, Money guys look at the project, and they think: "OMG, this looks like it will ship and sell. We're all going to make some money, that's good. Let's review the Cap table to see what we'll be making. Hey, WTF? This Arrington guy negotiated like 35-45% of this project for himself, and all he's done is write a few articles about it, and pestered Fusion's engineers.. We could have paid like $20k to some PR firm to do that, how did he end up with 40% of this project?"

They call the engineering guys and say: "Do we need Arrington?"

Engineering guys say "Um, to build this project and ship it, we definitely do not need Arrington. Why?"

Capitalists say: "Because he's worthless, and it would be WRONG to give him the stake he got in the project."

Engineers say: "... um, ?"

Capitalists say: "We're going to execute a clawback, drill Arrington down to 8-10%, and then you and we will get to split the remainder. This isn't being bad, this is being right and moral. He just got too much of the pie up front."

Engineers say: ".. will you talk to him about it?"

Capitalists say: "You're the CEO, you talk to him."

Engineers " .. Okay. "

Guess what, it happens ALL THE TIME. There are a number of possible solutions to a situation like this, but usually you need to plan upfront for it, and be ready. I don't think he was ready, which is too bad.

The fine letter linked to in the above points out the real problems inherent in calculating this out: actually simulating NEURONS, rather than so-called "neural networks" is really hard, and requires a lot of computing power, plus development of techniques that are still cutting edge research. There is no chip array that can do all the (currently not completely specified) simulating of a cat brain at 1 kW.