The Microsoft-is-the-computer idea is already well entrenched. You don't buy a computer anymore. You buy Windows or your buy a Mac.

I bought a cheap, pre-built computer sitting in the font of a store to replace one of my (cheaper, older, dead) personal development servers. It had a Microsoft OS on it. I asked for the PC tech running the store to remove the OS and give me the price difference.

His first reply was that PC's don't work without Windows.

I told him I was going to just put Linux on it.

They guy has been building and selling PCs at this place for years. His reply?

"Uh, I don't think Linux runs on PCs."

I just waited for him to crudely zero out the boot block on the HD I was going to trash anyway, bought my 'useless' PC and walked out.

Evercookie is just another salvo in the silly Medieval/Industrial Age Idea of a war of control between producers verses consumer. Remember to be a good sheep, don't open those, you'll void the (useless) warranty! It comes in any color you want, as long as that color is black.

From what I understand, Microsoft also offers "rebates" to hardware computer vendors that are primarily or entirely Windows only. It's the loophole in their consent decree (rebates instead of discounts).

In the music industry, that home to paragons of higher morality like the RIAA*, they call this a payola scam.

But why should you expect different behavior from a monopolist that was convicted by a court then who fully ignored that court?

It's good to be king, regardless if your throne is built on hard work or the heads of the peasants or office and operating system bundling. After all, laws are for other people.

* for new to the Internet or the Irony deficient I suggest you search this very forum for that term.

Why build when you can visit? As any relativistic physicist would note, the largest lens in the Solar system is the sun

It is one thing to release for Linux, a completely different thing to support it.

Surprisingly, a lack of this is the reason CCP dropped their evil-Cedega-non-native-client-under the-covers Linux version of Eve-Online. They claimed the "market wasn't growing fast enough." And here people figured an MMO that requires some thought and skill to play would do well with the Linux community. Queue the 'I play nethack in vt100 at 80x25 just fine' comments.

How long before Valve does this for Steam? How many people have to buy or use Steam on Linux for the CFO not to walk in and pull the plug for a nice 'cost savings bonus'?

Personally this means I get access to a large already-bought back catalog of Source games. I just hope this means the Steam 3rd party and indie developers see this as a chance to rake in a little money. And if any Valve developers are reading, I'd just be happy if a native Steam client could launch Mass Effect under wine. (Bioware -> EA where apparently PC -> Windows.)

how would you like to have 5.58 billion dollars?

In pennies, duh.

The copper alone has to be worth, what, 7 or 8 billion dollars?

As a testimonial to careful color selection, the original graph on the article looks more like a cross between a drain clog and a petri dish seeded by an epileptic robot.

Interesting that the diagrams for Python show a focus on django. Selection bias perhaps? A comparison with say sf.net would be interesting. How many other large python projects have public code repositories available (things like Eve Online would be hidden) for similar data mining?

Showing the segregation of php is curious. It certainly raised a number of questions in my mind. Do any other programming language communities look like this? Over time? What would an animation of the evolution of these projects detail? Does the low cohesiveness imply anything about the nature of php projects?

The flikr page is also interesting. The Perl community looks heavily intertwined. As an old (+3 O'Reilly book) language with many different developers, many who operate in corporate walled gardens, it is surprising to see such massive interconnection in the final graph even with hints of segregation.

Well, if you read the teensy article you see that normal ELF programs are like your normal car, with an ignition, etc.

The really small Linux programs are less like a normal car and more like a Service Car. These Service cars start with a pull cord like a lawn mower, no ignition needed. Both are niche items with practical justifications for their creation that owe their current existence to labors of love (one of parts the other of publishing.)

These cars also use a handlebar instead of a wheel and double as a trailer when being pulled. So, perhaps not unlike the typical Linux application at all.

They are comparing an internet standard that is not yet finalized to what is supposedly a finished product. HTML5 hasn't even settled on a video codec, so how can there even be a real comparison here? Of course HTML5 can't take advantage of GPU acceleration yet, they don't even know what they'll be accelerating yet! The only thing this article does is point out that HTML5 hasn't had the chance to implement GPU acceleration and that maybe they should consider it as part of their criteria in their codec selection process.

I took an IT certification test in 2008 that required me to identify technology sites important to keeping my skills current.

.

Of the correct answers required, one was http://slashdot.org./

Make of that what you may, but even on the off days this little 'blog of CowboyNeal's is still considered by many to be less a water cooler for Geeks and more of a IT information resource.

Not everyone can scour the source/binary of every app they get from a 'trusted' site.

At least someone inspected this package. The malware was found, after all. Besides, expecting everyone to scour everything is a Red Herring.

And if you cant trust the 'trusted' sites for the free stuff, then the entire FreeOS movement is dead in its tracks.

At some point you have to trust. Not 'click yes on pop-up warning number 300 for the day' trust but 'these packages are signed by so-and-so who I trust.' Or to put it in words that the corporate world uses: 'signed by so-and-so who I blame.'

A bigger white elephant in the room is Unix-style OSes that do a good job of securing the OS from damage by users, but still let the user completely wipe their own home directory out. I don't really care that this screensaver I download and put in ~/whereever can't mess with anything else in the system. All it has to do is ruin ~/. As they say, that's where I keep my stuff.

Most assume the poll is about Personal Desktop computers. However, I have the following computers on my desk:

A WAP doing the job that used to take a room of equipment.

A cellphone sitting in it's dock, with more MIPS than my first Java development machine and displaying more colors at once on it's smaller-yet-higher-resolution screen.

A dust covered Zune, likewise more well endowed than that space-heating sun box sitting in the office corner.

A camera with more ram than I had hard drive space not to many years ago.

Several external harddirve enclosures with i/o processors each having higher transistor count than all the electronics in a 1980s Radio Shack.

Oh, and two monitors that have more computational power than my desktop from 25 years ago. Each. So, certainly more than two computers. Most even have their own display. Perhaps even the WAP could be considered to have a display, if blinkenlights are your thing.

Give some respect where it is due, please

Okay: respect the engineers. Never the equipment.

'Military grade' just a matter of engineering. Which is highly dependent on the quality of the engineer. Yes, it is the person and their efforts = not some magical unobtanium element only given to the military - that makes military equipment any different than civilian equipment.

The study the history of engineering is very telling to this. First there were Engineers. They worked for the military only. They applied science to solve problems of armies. When someone started needing something more complex then a cow to run a farm, you had Civil Engineering. Literally 'Civilian' engineers. Now you have hundreds of different fields in Engineering. Both the Civil and military use the same physics, same practices and same base materials. Today, with government contracting, they are often the same people.

To take modern weapons systems and try to even think of equating them with your little toy rocket is ignorant at best, and flamebait at worst.

Three words: improvised roadside bombs. If it can kill people, it's a weapon. The only measure of how much respect it should get is how deadly it is. Thinking that some random dude working at home cannot be effective has cost people lives before. And this doesn't even get into the clusterf*ck that is government contracting - in all its lowest bidder glory - that is behind 'modern' weapon systems.

Or a CS undergrad saying they can write an OS from scratch because they have played around with assembly a bit

Yeah. Never happens.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

you chuck it and buy a new one. By then the tech is outdated anyways.

Only one problem with this "disposable IT" model:

'It just works' has been IT job security since before Gates and Moore thought x86 was a good idea.

Outdated is no reason to not continue to pour millions of (otherwise profit) monies into supporting something.

Hands up for those of you who didn't start a new job at a place with a ancient white elephant?

You Novel Netware people with 'end-of-life a decade ago and still can't turn it off' servers can put your hands down too. Same for you Windows admins trying to hide those desktop towers running Windows 95 for some ugly little app by a company that died before google.com even got registered in DNS.

However, I'm betting someone corporate could mention this to their EMC or netapp sales rep and get quite a few free nice lunches out of it.

And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on. (Cue Simpsons jokes).

Local usage? There is a wiring pattern called a traveler circuit used with three-way or four-way switches. It's used to hook one light to two switches among other things. It's very common in America since we have these things called houses that often come with long hallways.

One of the side effects of this is that when you flip one switch to on or off, you invert the meaning of the other switch. So, if one switch was up for on and down for off then flipping the other switch makes it up for off and down for on.

When an electrician installs your light switch, the default is for up to mean ON, and down to mean OFF.

While I've yet to see a house in America with toggle-switch lighting controls facing sideways, it is certainly possible to install them or change them to be so. But as even a quick search on Wikipedia would reveal, the direction has a lot to do with city/state/country zoning ordinances and more than a little cultural inertia.