Yes, which is why Android suffers from all kinds of security and stability problems. The very factors that are currently causing Microsoft's market share to decline sharply.

Modelling your business after a failed strategy of the competition doesn't sound a terribly good way to proceed. We need alternatives.

But if M distros are hiring an average of N engineers to do the backporting, they could collaborate, pooling M*N engineers to proactively hunt down and fix regressions and new defects.

Yes, you can't check every possible path, but that kind of surge in bugfixes would massively reduce the risks of newer stable kernels.

The risk game is quite a simple one. The above strategy will reduce the risk of economic damage. It also greatly increases the number of people who are available to fix newly-reported issues by a factor of M, reducing the interval over which catastrophic bugs impact businesses.

Provided the mean economic damage to businesses from new defects, over the duration those defects last, using the above method is less than the mean economic damage due to hackers and pre-existing kernel defects under the current approach, which will remain over a longer period of time due to the more limited resources, then it is more economic for businesses to adopt newer kernels from those vendors.

Economists have equations for quantifying risk in terms of money, and we know how many commercial-grade distros there are.

It would thefore be possible to do the calculation and determine which approach yielded the best returns to businesses.

The cost to the distros is obviously the same, as the same manpower is involved. All the proposal involves is deduplication of effort and moving from mechanical stuff (which AI probably could actually do better) to value-adding stuff that would increase the market value of Linux over the competition.

You are correct, but are overlooking a possible solution.

You have an average of N software engineers hired by M distributions to backport features. This means that the cost of those N*M software engineers is already built in.

If you hire the same N*M software engineers as a consortium to fix the flaws and regressions in more recent stable kernels, then the software won't break, there won't be the new kernel defects, AND you don't get the security holes.

Cooperation upstream would mean less kernel differentiation, sure, but that's not what most enterprises go by anyway.

It solves all the problems you raise (which are all legitimate) whilst eliminating the very real risks that zero-day security holes create.

Instead of hiring lots of developers for each distribution to backport essentially the same set of features to each frozen kernel, get together and collectively hire vastly more high-end dual-role engineers to proactively find and fix the bugs in newer stable kernels, so that there are far fewer new bugs.

This makes the newer kernels safe for enterprise use, whilst eliminating the security risks.

It costs the same amount, but avoids the reputation-scarring effects of security holes and thus also avoids the economic damage done by those holes.

Everyone gains by fixing the faults as far upstream as possible.

Currently many people buy "Enterprise" linux so they have someone to blame.

They could be on bookworm with a -current kernel but then if something goes wrong there's noone paid to apologize.

Perhaps with ransomware insurance going sky-high the incentives will change but right now in EL space being secure is not a top priority - quarterly bonuses are much more important.

You can't be on 18 in ten years, can you?

Plan B is needed. But also if Ubuntu is failing you evaluate that too.

The Past is just another availability zone around here.

Temporal redundancy.

I don't think Econ 101 price/quantity equilibrium is entirely what's going on here. Gigabit service *availability* is about the same in Spain and the US, despite America's per capita purchasing power adjusted GDP being about 60% higher than Spain's.

I think the relevant figure is this: Spain has roughly 2.8x the population density of the US. It's surely a lot more expensive to build the infrastructure to cover roughly the same percent of the population here.

> millions of dollars of fine scientific equipment at work that get's thrown to the curb

yo, hook a brother up.

Like the guys who generated and published every possible melody, somebody should make an algorithm to make every possible variant of simplified letters in every free typeface and publish them.

With SVG the space required is actually petty small.

Just end all the nonsense.

I would call people who actively - violently in some cases - support a LITERAL terror organization that cheerfully murders women and children in their homes (and called their mother to celebrate that fact) are indeed an infection.

As much as those motherfuckers are entitled to freedom of speech to spew their vile filth, others are just as entitled to call them an infection.

Nobody is actually ahead in AI, because they're all solving the wrong problem, as indeed AI researchers have consistently done since the 1960s.

I'm not the least bit worried about the possibility of superintelligence, not until they actually figure out what intelligence is as opposed to what is convenient to solve.

As for Musk, he's busy trying to kill all engineering projects in America.

If there's an issue that needs resolving, it's best to acknowledge it. Hiding away, like Microsoft does with their abysmal records on reliability and security, achieves nothing.

If honesty is a problem, then neither IT nor science seem good professions. Politics and economics might be better.

In neural nets, the network software is not the algorithm that is running. The net software is playing the same role as the CPU in a conventional software system. It is merely the platform on which the code is run.

The topology of the network plus the state of that network (the data) corresponds to an algorithm. That is the actual software that is being run. AI cannot be considered open until this is released.

But I flat-out guarantee no AI vendor is going to do that.

Which means that a household of 10 can all connect to different sites and get full speed.

What is with this assuming only one person in a house can be connected?