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.

Oracle tried to hijack and rebrand RedHat as "unbreakable linux". As far as I know, they're still selling licenses for it. It's basically like CentOS (rebranded, but built from RedHat sources, probably most common linux distro used in corporate environments) except they charge for it. I don't think it sells very well, but it does sell. And since Oracle basically puts no money into developing it, they probably make a decent profit off of it. Which is the problem with Oracle, they are a good at making money for Oracle, and it really doesn't seem like they care about anything else.

I'd like to add to this that one of classic reasons why someone writes an appllication is because they need program to do something, on the other hand, if you always find and use existing solutions, you end up not writing any but short bash scripts. (I speak from personal experience)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but android provides a lot of integration into ALL of Google's most popular web-services, not just search, so it could be that Baidu sees success of Android as being detrimental to Baidu offering competing web-services to things like g-mail, certainly it offers a bunch of apps to do this (I don't know to what extent there's anything actually in the OS that does this) Also they might want to offer a competing "app" marketplace. What probably makes the most sense, would be for Baidu just to take the Android source code, replace the stuff that integrates w/ google web-apps w/ stuff that integrates w/ Baidu web-services, and then publish it w/ their own Marketplace app. I doubt it will be particularly successful, certainly it has no chance at all EXCEPT in China, but who knows...

I'm not reading all of this crap, but there are plenty of methods for storing/restoring data that DON'T involve making backups. Here's a few:

Use dar (search for "dar disk archive" so you don't get daughters of the american revolution)
- dar allows you to get many of the features that snapshots provide by simply backing up files to disk. It supports incremental backups, and supports deleting files on a backups so when you restore from a dar backup it really does restore a given directory to it's state when the backup was made. It's also extremely complex, so you will probably end up writing scripts to automate using it.

Other Options:

-You can also use tar, but it's not as versatile, and only sort-of supports incremental backups, you could probably hack around this by scripting the capabilities yourself, but it's much simpler to use dar instead.

-Use dump/restore (I haven't done this, and this method of backing up is OLD so there may be limitations that make it unusable in this context)

-Use dd to clone partitions/disks to image files, takes a long time and creates huge files, requires harddisks with identical geometry for a restore. (well, not quite, but it makes it alot easier)

There's also some client/server stuff like bacula and amanda, but I don't use them, it seems like much more work than is neccessary. Personally I just do dar backups to an external harddrive (or nfs-mounted share)

I don't know if this has been anybody else's experiance but I've stayed at a couple of hotels ... many had free wifi, but two stand out in my mind as having claimed to have "free wifi" but then when you associated to their access point you couldn't get an IP address. At first I thought "maybe it's because I'm using linux" ... because two friends who were staying with me were able to connect with their iPhones ... but on another trip both my dad and brother were unable to connect with their respectively Windows XP laptop, Macbook. So it seems like there's a whole lot of hotel wifi APs that are setup in a totally screwed up manor. Or maybe I've just had bad luck

In fact, you could argue Microsoft can't, long-term afford NOT to pump massive amounts of money into it's online services because if (and this may or may not be probable but I think anyone will admit it's possible), internet services usurp the vast majority of computing tasks from the desktop computing model, then Windows, Microsoft's core product, become much less relevant than it is today. If Microsoft makes headway in the cloud, at worst they have something to fall back on if the Desktop OS market tanks, and at best they can continue to prop up Windows by offering better integration with their Web-services on Windows then alternate platforms.

spending time on the internet make me feel isolated and lonely ... although spending time around other people also makes me feel isolated and lonely so maybe I shouldn't read too much into that.

It's not at all like DRM, it's a forensics tool. DRM takes your file/software/whatever and asks "is this an authorized copy? should I let the user access/run this file?", this software looks at software that's already been compiled and is being used and determines if it likely came from known source code. Nor is this tool limited to use with open source software, it's just that tool itself is open-source.

And I live in Chicago, but the fastest residential connection option I can get, IN THEORY, is 20 Mb/s down and 6 Mb/s up. In practice I'm stuck w/ AT&T @ 6 Mb/s down + 712 Kb/sec up.

I think if anybody ever bothered to use the default GNOME theme, the one the upstream developers ship, they would appreciate much of an improvement every Ubuntu theme has been over the default.

Ok, you can't actually get seperate virtual desktops on different screens, however, using KDE you may be able to get something that's roughly feature equivalent.

Using your favorite one of xrandr, xorg.conf, or the proprietary Nvidia/ATI tools, you can set up multiple monitors. The default behavior, in the latest Xorg, at least, will let you swap windows between your two displays, the default behavior for "maximize" in KDE will be to fill a single display with one large window, but if you do need a window to span multiple desktops, you can manually resize it.

You can add a seperate KDE panel to each desktop, both can have thier own task managers which can be configure to only show that windows from a given display screen (or not). If you want, you can set things like the desktop background independantly on each display.

Unfortunately, this still isn't quite as functional as actually being able to actually switch virtual desktop independantly on each screen, but it's still pretty nice. (this is my personal setup, when I have two monitors available). In fact, the tiling and tabbed window management features which are allegedly coming in KDE 4.4, may address some of the remain limitations of the current dual head setup in KDE, also, allegedly KDE 4.4 fixes the bug which currently makes the "systemsettings>display>multiple monitors" configuration tool un-usable for many people.

I don't even watch the trailers anymore, I just skip straight to the comments...