Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel so I doubt this will have much practical influence on his work. It's got to be frustrating though, Linux works on massively huge and complex servers. It works on the smallest mobile and embedded devices. But a regular desktop that from the kernel's side is rather simple, one CPU and usually one GPU and pretty much no exotic devices (from the kernel side all USB devices look the same, for example) and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.

I think the last real significant desktop feature was when they increased interactivity by changing the default time slice from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz and that was in 2004 or so. Heck, I would say it was at least as ready as the BSD kernel was when Apple created OS X in 2001. It's quite telling that the one thing Google did not want to rewrite when they made Android was the kernel. All else they ripped out and replaced with Apache licensed code, but not that. Well that and a bunch of Google proprietary APIs, but that's another flame war. I think I'd feel just the same in his shoes.

They're solidly in the realm of the legal in the US because of USC 17 512(d):

If they don't respond to DMCA notices they fail condition (C) and become liable. This has been established legal history since way back when web pages used to link to illegal MP3 files, perhaps longer. It's not true in the general case, just because you point them to other website that might contain something illegal won't get you into trouble. But pointing directly to infringing content and claiming you aren't liable because you're not the one hosting it doesn't fly.

What drugs are you on really? You make as much sense as saying that because this knife didn't come with an EULA not to behead unbelievers the manufacturer supports what the Islamic State is doing in Iraq/Syria. I've never to my knowledge bought or owned anything that has a political agenda as condition for use and newer will. I do care how they were produced (no child labor, animal testing, destroying the rain forest, social dumping or so on) but I'd never buy a car that had the gall to tell me where I could and couldn't drive in the EULA. So are you nuts, a troll or just trying to kill OSS? Because you make RMS look pragmatic.

Since that's not actually a license, I pick lightsaber. Not as clumsy or random as C++. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

If that is true, why do the wheels need skin in the first place? I doubt anything on that mission is there for decoration...

Overage fees are nothing but pure evil. They did use to offer capped DSL and my cell phone data usage is still capped, I ran into it this summer as I was watching videos at the cabin but it doesn't have overage. What happens is at 80% I got a text that I'm getting close on my cap. At 100% I got a new text saying my quota is now up, I'll now either get very, very slow internet connection the rest of the month like enough to check email and barely browse the web, or I can pay up for additional quotas. Back when they offered capped DSL it was the same there.

The biggest benefit to a flat rate connection is that it's flat rate. And particularly today when you got phones and tablets and laptops and consoles and smart TVs and whatnot that all like to go online keeping track of your aggregate data usage is not easy. Overage fees are like the credit card model offering you 30 days free credit. How to do they make money off giving people free money? Because people slip up, get unplanned or unwanted expenses and then they nail the suckers. It's just begging to exploit the people who think they can save a few bucks a month.

To avoid arguments. If the cops say 11 km/h over an artificially 10 km/h low limit then you weren't speeding just a little, if they said 1 km/h over the limit people go all "waaaaaaa it was only 1 km/h" and "waaaaaaaa your equipment must be off I went 1km/h under". "I wasn't speeding that much" holds a lot less sway than "I wasn't speeding".

Like OCZ which bumped theirs up to 5 years before they imploded? Here's the thing, 2014 was a big year for consoles, both the PS4 and XBone sold many millions of consoles all with AMD semi-custom chips. Yet despite this AMD is barely floating with a small operating income and a tiny loss overall. In 2018, what consoles will be selling? Still the PS4 and XBone but a whole lot less of them.

Two vital quotes from their last earnings call "In the desktop space, demand for our desktop APUs was strong from our OEMs. However, the desktop component channel was softer than we expected." "Inventory was $960 million, up $91 million, primarily driven by increased level of our latest 28-nanometer microprocessor products and lower shipments to channel distributors." Read: APUs go unsold. Either they need to lower production or prices or both.

To be fair, they're hanging on better than I expected but their traditional business still points downwards and breaking new ground is hard. And unless they can turn the trend, it needs to grow a lot and fast to make up for the business that we can see slipping. I wouldn't exactly be sure that AMD will be around to honor that warranty in four years.

Which is the real issue in doing an office migration. That and replicating Outlook, I don't know about the whole kitchen sink but at least the whole mail/calendar/meeting bit. Somehow I'm amazed that in the last decade open source hasn't managed to pull it off, what the average office worker does is not rocket science. I guess it's just nobody's itch.

Well when the First Mayor is making statements like "Linux is limping after Microsoft" and the Second Mayor says the "employees are suffering [under Linux]" then I have a fairly good bet on how the "independent" committee to review their OS policy is going to turn out. And maybe finally we can stop flogging this dead horse, because I'm tired of hearing about Munich as the beacon of light that will usher in a new era of Linux on the desktop. It's been rather obvious to all but zealots that they weren't convincing anyone else to make the switch.

Somehow, I still fail to see the point... I can search for "cat" in Google Images, then if I'm not happy then "siamese cat" and finally "siamese cat jumping" because I'm probably looking for one useful picture, not a blurred mess as I'd expect trying to average what a "jump" looks like. And if you ask what an average face looks like, they mean the average feature size and location not a mathematical average. I'm trying to think of one single purpose where the results of this "average browser" is what I'm looking for and I'm coming up blank.

Someone is, yes. Building overpasses or tunnels for pedestrians on every street is not nearly realistic. If you sprint out a doorway you'll cross the sidewalk and hit traffic in less than 0.5 seconds, even with zero reaction time physics won't let a car stop that fast or they'd have to drive a lot slower than cars today. And while their might be auto-only cars, for most the autopilot will be the new cruise control. It will have an off switch. So yes, somebody here is detached from reality.

I wish that would be equally applied on the lower half of the scale, a poor manager who makes his staff 5% less effective than average kills half a year's worth of productivity. Probably even less since poor management often means you end up doing things that are meaningless or inefficient. It doesn't matter that it was done well, because the deliverables won't ever be used.

I think you're trying very hard to avoid seeing the point though. The point is to enable regular people to mine coins using their ordinary GPUs, either benevolently to have a democratic currency or as the cynic in me suggests get buy-in from many enough people. After all, an altcoin that only a few with specialized equipment can mine effectively is likely to never get off the ground. Bitcoin was different because it was first and everyone pulled together to create a cryptocurrency. It's very easy to create an algorithm that uses 1% of a shader's features and that makes a custom ASIC orders of magnitude faster. The other extreme is to build an algorithm where all the bits and pieces and functionality that goes into a shader is needed, if you tried building a custom ASIC you would essentially end up with your own GPU. That's the meaning of ASIC proof.

I think you're confusing credibility with volatility because their business is making a profit on margins, not playing with currency speculation. Most of the value flows through them as they buy from suppliers and sell to customers, even a relatively small change in value can wipe out their margins. I'm assuming that when I buy something in another country with my VISA then 99.99%+ of the time the store is paid in its local currency, not my currency.