> It's a machine before the TCP/IP and Internet times.

I ran a machine like that with TCP/IP on the Internet. The main problem would be getting an ethernet port working on the thing but the software side of the equation is well covered.

Been there. Did that.

PCMCIA CF card reader, plus fat formatted CF card, plus USB CF card reader.

Or about a thousand other ways.

Find a compromise between predicting too much of the future and just managing a project by the seat of your pants; get into a rhythm where you check how good your estimations and learn to get better at them.

Of course you can't develop every project this way; I've used Agile and it's worked for me. I've used waterfall and it's worked for me too. You have to try to be sensible; you can't completely wall of other people's need to know when you'll accomplish certain things, nor can you build a solid plan based on pure speculation. You have to have an intelligent responsible way of dealing with future uncertainty, a plan to cut it down to size.

I've even had the good fortune at one point of winning a $750,000 grant to build a system for which no firm requirements had been established. It was kind of an uphill-flowing waterfall: we knew how long it would take us and how much it would cost but we had no firm idea of what we were supposed to build. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it was; but my team was *successful* and built a product which was still be used and supported over a decade after the grant finished.

What's missing from many programming estimates is honesty. It's a matter of ethics; you can't take people's money and say maybe someday you'll deliver something useful to them. People don't have unlimited time and money to accomplish all the things that need to be done in the world. It's an honor being entrusted with people's aspirations, and a serious responsibility. It's hard, even nerve-wracking, but you've got to care enough about the impact of your planning on other people to make the effort to do the very best job you can.

And what I've found is that if you do make the effort you can do a surprisingly good job of estimating a project if it's in an area and with technologies you're reasonably familiar with. If you look closely your specific predictions will often be way off, but if you care enough to be brutally honest the pleasant surprises tend to balance out the unpleasant ones.

Meanwhile, there is this PC platform that wiped out all of it's other bespoke competitors probably before you even touched your first computer. PCs are MUCH more diverse than Android phones. But if you started whining about "fragmentation" to PC developers they would look at you like you grew a second head.

What do "desktop users" even want? Do they even have any real desires or do they just mindlessly take whatever is force fed to them by a Microsoft dominated OEM channel?

These are the same "desktop users" that turned their noses up at MacOS in favor of DOS.

The idea that Linux "lost the desktop" is assinine. It was never there to take. It was owned by DOS from day one. Quality of the product accounts for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

By Lemming-centric market metrics, even MacOS is a failure.

Thankfully most other markets are not quite as broken and I am not stuck eating dirt. Only in the computing market is the notion of not wanting to eat dirt seen as extreme or subversive.

...in a VM perhaps.

Go beyond that and Windows is a royal pain to get up and running. It's actually far more problematic to get up and running than Linux is.

It's hard to see this if you've never actually installed a proper copy of Windows on bare metal.

This Linux gaming renaissance is most likely a side effect of how every other gaming platform besides Windows uses "something else". That something else is Linux compatible. That reduces the distance between Linux and what has already been ported to.

Android, MacOS, even the PS4 and Wii's are intermediate steps towards Linux.

It's no great surprise that the most interesting ports for Linux are being done by a MacOS porting house.

Beyond the big titles, Linux is a significant part of the market. The indies were already porting to Linux because of this.

While the NUCs are overkill for HTPC duty, the PIs are also not sufficiently there either. A PI just has problems keeping up with the user interface (XBMC).

Something like a Chromebox is the sweet spot. Decent enough GPU for video decoding and a CPU that's not ridiculously anemic.

You mean that Canadians have a nasty spending cap and get turned down for treatments that Americans take for granted? That kind of cheap?

Don't swim in the kool-aid.

Better yet, if people are re-inventing your work why do you even think you should be granted ownership of it? Chances are that you contributed nothing to the state of the art. You didn't publish anything that's actually useful. Patents are rubbish as documentation. So if that's all you've contributed to the world, then you didn't contribute anything really.

The fact that ANYONE could "re-invent" your stuff means the patent should be tossed.

Patents are evil that way. They allow patent holders to claim ownership of the work of others. It's legalized theft.

I don't have to "imagine" anything. I have seen it firsthand. I have seen the no-talent schmucks from India used as scab labor and I have seen the overqualified and highly talented types from 1st world countries. Both were underpaid and in a vulnerable position.

Talent worth importing is talent worth importing with full status and no strings attached.

No. The H1B debate is about creating an easy to exploit underclass. Even the "talented types" get abused by corporations. Corporations get a free pass to rape pillage and plunder because that's just (Ayn Rand) trendy these days.

Corporations want people that are easy to exploit. People with full legal status are harder to abuse. They also have higher expecations and higher overhead.

I wouldn't even go that far. In all of the locations I looked at where I have some knowledge of the going rates, that data actually showed that the H1-Bs are on the low end of the scale.

This data doesn't appear to be anything to brag about really.

The loss of time and effort to figure out whether this is going to cause a problem and then the time and effort to get rid of it.

That loss is obvious not much on a dollar per user basis, but if you add up all those users it's enough to incent Lenovo to do something so scurrilous. That's precisely the situation which class action lawsuits exist to redress, and according to the article that's the kind of lawsuit that has been filed.

The issue isn't whether EULAs are *potentially* enforceable. The question is whether *this* EULA is enforceable.

In general there is no contract unless their is some kind of exchange of "considerations". Typically the consideration is the privilege of using the copyright holder's software. But, if you can show that users don't want to use this software, and that it is installed for the benefit of a third party, there is no exchange of considerations between the end-user and the copyright holder, and therefore no valid contract.