Option C) Keep selling windows, but partner with a Linux distributor as a back up plan. Canonical would be a good candidate for such a partnership.

As other have said, there isn't one that's "better" than the other in a general sense. However, there are situations in which one is better suited to a task at hand.

This is of course something that applies to many different aspects of application design and architecture.

As an example, I'm developing a high volume, high transaction website application and use both PostgreSQL and MongoDB.

We use SQL where strict relations, type checking, and data integrity are required. The SQL database has the extremely important function of making sure the data given to it by the application is coherent. I realize that MongoDB has functions for checking data integrity, but it is tricker to get right in my opinion and experience (it does allow greater flexibility however). Also, the application has the need for atomic operations and transactions, which MongoDB does not provide.

MongoDB on the other hand, is used where it delivers better performance than PostgreSQL. For example all our logging is sent there, giving near-disk performance while allowing quick and easy searching and archival. Our session is also handled by MongoDB. Finally we make great use of gridFS for all our uploaded content and document storage. We're also looking into MongoDB for data analysis and reporting, fed data from SQL.

So there's no reason to pick one over the other, a mix and match approach will yield better results. Where tasks require greater speed and have loose integrity requirements, go for NoSQL. When the data absolutely needs to be coherent and is by its nature relational, go for SQL.

Also, PostgreSQL will soon support embedding JSON objects directly, so some sort of hybridization is foreseeable in the future. As of now we simply put the Mongo ID in SQL when we need to reference.

Don't know about Germany, but I've driven from Marseille (south of France) to Paris in about 8.5 hours - at night, but not speeding (much) and with food/bathroom breaks.

The TGV, which I've also taken, does it in 3.5 hours, and I can eat and go to the bathroom without stopping.

Cost depends, if you have 4 people in the car and split the fuel and toll costs, it's generally cheaper than 4 train tickets. But for 2 or 3 people, it depends on whether you buy the train tickets in advance or not. For one person, the train will be cheaper, sometimes considerably so.

You're quite right of course, but the same could be said for some European companies.

For example, SNCF sued a food stall lady over her use of the term "Orient Express".

SNCF is wholly-owned by the French governement.

You better believe something will be done about software patents, and IP laws in general, when the Chinese start to heavily sue US companies.

I mean, when it's US companies bashing those in other countries, software patents are awesome. When the inverse occurs, they are obviously a hinderance to progress.

And how will you determine if people didn't get hurt without sending someone to check on them?

At impacts likely to trigger the device, it's entirely possible for someone to be hurt and not even realize till the next day or so. This happens with neck and back injuries, not enough to notice until the person stretches or makes a bad movement, and then *extreme pain*

So, better safe than sorry.

Funny you should mention that right when AMD wins a huge order of graphic chips precisely because they have open source drivers.

And anecdotally, I've never had a problem with AMD hardware, generally by the time the proprietary driver loses support, the open source one matches its performance.

Well it's a good design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Douris_Man_with_wax_tablet.jpg

Ecuador's foreign minister had offered assylum in 2010 but president Rafael Correa later dismised it. It's possible they have succombed to US pressure already, or they could be worried he has something they don't want released.

Should be an interesting turn of events either way. I do hope he finds refuge somewhere, to continue the good fight.

Same here, Mint + Enlightenment is a great combination.

At home, the older laptop that struggles to run Cinnamon (plain Gnome3 is not even an option) is nice and snappy with E17.

At work, it works great on dual or tripple monitors, is super fast even with a bunch of applications and VMs open, and most importantly doesn't slow me down by forcing a workflow I do not want.

I'm running the SVN-fresh version. There's a few bugs sometimes (almost always fixed the next day or so, sometimes within the hour) but by and large it's pretty stable.

https://launchpad.net/~hannes-janetzek/+archive/enlightenment-svn

It's an improvement change in behavior from outright war, yes. But closed sourced drivers are rarely an improvement long term.

Sarkozy is just pandering to the extreme right in an election year.

This law would not be applicable given the French constitution, and in fact would also violate EU law. Any law which limits free expression must have a very specific target, and simply saying "terrorism" or "hate speech" is way too vast.

Child pornography is illegal because it can be easily and precisely defined, but what would define terrorist or hateful speech ? And what is the difference between genuine political speech and hate speech ? It's all very subjective. It would also lead to some interesting consequences, like that Mein Kampf would be legal to sell in print but not viewable on the Internet.

Article (in French)

Oracle is (partly) a Linux company: they sell and support their own distro. After the Sun acquisition, they also own Java, which is used pretty extensively on Linux.

Adobe up until very recently supported Flash on Linux. It may be free, but it was an important part of their business strategy before HTML 5 came along.