So are you supporting the Windows Phone platform?

I disagree. Particularly w/ the decision to prevent Netflix from paying to establish faster lanes. I'm fine w/ banning ISPs from slowing down traffic.

What I would have liked, though, would have been the FCC ruling that content can't be blocked just b'cos it's available on TV. In other words, if you bought internet but not TV service from say, TWC, then when you hit a site that has either live feeds or a recording of an event, they shouldn't be able to prevent you from watching just b'cos you didn't buy the TV service w/ it.

Not just that, it's a lot easier to have tens or hundreds or thousands of books in a Kindle or an iPad. Particularly during moving. You don't have to worry about pages getting yellow, or particular books getting lost - once something is in your online library, it's there for good - unless and until you delete it.

Well, when Obama came to power, global warming was pretty big on the agenda. Now, w/ the freezing temparatures even in the south, doesn't look like it's an issue anymore. With all the snow, he's really scaled global warming back to the point where we're now freezing. So Mr Obama, can you accept that you've done this job very successfully, and stop trying to stop global warming by vetoing this pipeline deal? Too much of a good thing....

Silicon is only reaching its limits in the commercial space, where cost reductions are required, no matter how irrational. But in the military or aerospace sectors, stability is a lot more important, which is why those sectors are slow to move, if ever, and are willing to pay premium prices for yesterday's technology to be kept alive. For them, 500nm would be a lot more stable than even 50nm, let alone 10nm. They'd rather go w/ that, rather than go to an unstable yet expensive technology like GaAs, or even a shrink of silicon to the point where it gets unstable.

Also, Moore's law only made sense when it was extrapolated to mean that the number of transistors would keep doubling implies that the cost per transistor would keep getting halved. But now, the one no longer implies the other: while one can still get twice the silicon, the much more sophisticated processes and tooling required has actually increased the cost, and one of the few solutions to that has been to increase wafer diameters. The ISSCC would do well to recognize that a certain node - say 10nm - is the best that can happen, and then try and help get as much of the volume manufacturing to that point. However, older nodes from 500nm on down would still be needed for the foreseeable future.

You could have TTL or ECL, but they won't be anywhere near as scalable, given the relative sizes that are required of collector, gate & emitter

But nowhere nearly as long as silicon. The real successor to Silicon may be either Graphene or Silicene

Silicene may be a more likely substitute than silicone

Wasn't that called Xenix?

I quite agree. That 'window' of opportunity (in a manner of speaking) existed during the entire Windows 8.x fiasco, but neither Linux nor the BSDs seized the initiative. Now, Microsoft is in a comeback mode w/ Windows 10, and it's unlikely that that opportunity will come again anytime soon. Unless another Ballmer replaces Nadella anytime soon.

There are a few derivative distros of FreeBSD, but none of PC-BSD. All those distros are generally either exclusively for servers, or have some special features (DragonFly's SMP, NAS for network storage and pFsense for Firewalls/Routing). So if the BSDs want a single OS to target laptops, PC-BSD it is. They now support a variety of DEs, and have done an excellent job in making most applications behave well under most DEs (exceptions being the GTK3 apps running under anything other than GNOME3)

Lumina is just ONE of the available desktop environments for PC-BSD, and that too, not the default. The default is still KDE. I've used Lumina - had some rough edges previously, but is currently much improved.

It almost is. Consider all those applications that would previously be prefaced by K - KMail, Kontacts, Krita, KOffice, et al. In fact, KOffice has become Calligra, which is reasonably good, but could be better. And they've dealt w/ the multiple platform issue a lot better than Microsoft did: they have KDE Plasma Desktop for desktops, Plasma Netbooks for laptops & netbooks, and Plasma Active for tablets, phones & phablets.

In fact, for a while, PC-BSD, and previously, another BSD called DesktopBSD, was KDE only. It was only in version 9 that they added support for some 8 different window managers.

When I bought a new laptop last year, it came w/ Windows 8.1, which was unusable, due to the hot corners and all that. I had visited a Linux Expo and met the FreeBSD guys, and got a PC-BSD DVD from them. Initially, the laptop had trouble recognizing it, but once I went into BIOS and changed the bootup settings, that got fixed. This was during 10.0, before the current version that includes UEFI support (and which needs to be installed from scratch - that part can't be an upgrade). I made a conscious decision to wipe out Windows 8.1 and not look back (which I couldn't have anyway, since the laptop didn't come w/ a Windows 8.1 DVD - another brilliant decision by MS)

My setup has worked well, w/ a few exceptions. It doesn't recognize the Intel WiFi, so I have to run an Ethernet cable from the router to the laptop, making it effectively a desktop. Last week, somebody needed to have a GoToMeeting session w/ me, and since the webcam is not recognized, that didn't happen. I also have a Brother P-touch label maker that has its own driver internally, and so obviously, that only works w/ Windows and nothing else. But other than this, I have had no issues, since all my usage is either in browsers (I use both Chromium and FireFox) or Thunderbird. For the Office application, I tend to use Calligra, but I guess others will prefer Libre-Office. I've created multiple users in the system for different roles that I play - one account for my office, one for my personal things like banking and other services, one for the various blogs including /., one for games and so on. For each of them, I use different DEs to experiment w/ them and get used to them. I use Lumina (primarily), KDE, LXDE and both GNOME3 classic shell and GNOME3.

One thing that happened a couple of months ago to my surprise. I had to change my router from a Belkin to a Linksys, which changes the gateway address from 192.168.2.1 to 192.168.1.1. I tried going into various text terminals and changing it, but wouldn't work. Ultimately, I found out, by trial & error, that I was supposed to go into the Control Panel and change it from there. Once I did, it worked like a charm. The PC-BSD handbook does a good job in telling you how to do things, but falls flat on its face if something doesn't work as it should.

While it could be a lot better, my PC-BSD experience has been satisfactory.

While iXsystems does own both OSs, I think PC-BSD has a number of things that should be quite independent of what's happening on the FreeBSD side. For starters, device drivers. I've written here in the past about shoddy support for WiFi - INTEL'S. The other day, I tried doing a GoToMeeting session, and it didn't work, despite having both Chromium & FireFox on the box. FreeBSD has no reason to support WiFi or webcams, but my usage was one of the rare but critical instances that causes people to have a second Windows laptop/tablet for precisely that.

If PC-BSD waits for FreeBSD, it'll wait forever, since FreeBSD does NOT have the same priorities that PC-BSD should have. FreeBSD does well as a server OS already deployed by many companies, such as Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, as well as a router OS for companies like Juniper. On top of that, it's the basis of free Router/Networking OSs such as pFsense, and have a good backing from Apple. So FreeBSD is already a success in its own realm. PC-BSD so far has not managed to go beyond that: it's currently little more than FreeBSD w/ an X11 installer (incidentally, if the BSDs add Wayland support, that too should be a PC-BSD, rather than a FreeBSD project), smooth and admirable package managers (PBI w/ portsng) and a stripped down version of PC-BSD w/o the X11 called TrueOS. This won't do! PC-BSD needs to define its own goals, like being an acceptable alternative to both Windows & Linux on laptops and tablets not made by Apple.

A good list of projects for PC-BSD to have would be

1. 1. Driver support: No, I'm not talking about supporting the greatest cards from NVIDIA or AMD. I'm talking about supporting off the shelf consumer items, in addition to things already found on a laptop. In addition to WiFi, they could support the webcams that come built in. Also, in the consumer marketplace, there are a lot of things, like label makers, which the project could add support for. The best thing about it is that since PC-BSD has already gone fully 64-bit and ZFS, they are unlikely to find themselves in a situation in the future where their added support for newer devices gets lost in an upgrade
2. 2. OS-X compatibility: PC-BSD already has jails for both Debian and Gentoo. Since a lot of the OS-X and iOS underpinnings are FreeBSD, and since LLVM/Clang is official for both Apple and PC-BSD, the project could have a jails system for OS-X. It could also either work w/ Apple directly on allowing the Apple store to be available on PC-BSD (maybe for a price paid by the end users) or w/ developers on making their OS-X applications available on PC-BSD as well
3. 3. Since OS-X is native to the Core series and iOS to the A-series, PC-BSD could port it to ARM and develop a version for tablets that runs iOS apps, using the same approach above. It can then even consider having its own tablet to be a low end alternative to iPads, and raise a bit of cash that way, like Mint does w/ its own box.
4. 4. At some point, consider supporting Wayland, and make it a PC-BSD project: FreeBSD has no reason to add Wayland any more than they work on Lumina

So far, PC-BSD has done an impressive job in making most applications behave the same way, whether run under KDE, Lumina or LXDE. An exception is GTK3 apps, which run fine under GNOME, but misbehave under other DEs, often going fullscreen (not maximized).