1) There are a lot of detractors of Gnome 3. Everyone is not happy with it.

2) What you don't grasp is what I admire about Canonical/Shuttleworth. What kept Linux (or Ubuntu) from dominating the desktop was an inferior GUI experience to Apple/Windows (and unequal driver support). You could chose Gnome or KDE, both too flawed and two unmotivated to compete for the general (dumb) consumer market, give up and go with some form of LXDE(?), or do what Canonical did. Canonical wanted to go after what it saw was the future, and instead of unsuccessfully negotiating with Gnome & KDE designer councils to implement what Canonical wanted, Canonical took its future into its own hands. Computing hardware was moving to tablets, phones & gear, not desktops, and they wanted a GUI that could bridge both worlds. That's why they went to Unity, and given the problems producing a compositor competitive with DirectX, they went to Wayland, then Mir.

3) Every megalomanic in Unixland operates like a bloodthirsty Bolshevik, and thinks Canonical owes them a living for failure or half a loaf.

...I want a pony, Canonical. Pay up!

Its pretty freaking obvious that Canonical's GUI strategy (Unity/Mir) does not involve depending on Gnome. Since neither Shuttleworth is the richest man on earth, or Canonical isn't making a huge profit, why should they be investing salaries into an ancillary GUI, which isn't even that popular within the industry?

I hope Canonical decides to include Gnome into the 14.04 LTS, but only if the company thinks they can afford to invest resources towards it.

The problem wasn't merely that the geeks had no fucking clue how to maintain security. The problem was that the management had no fucking clue how to properly operate a finance establishment. There is no way a competent financial institution does not become immediately aware that someone is stealing from their "vaults". That's because the financial institution should be validating their assets daily, if not hourly.

Here's the question: Do the major exchanges STILL in operation ALL run basic accounting and bank operation practices? Is the Bitcoin Foundation moving the industry towards enabling functioning "arbitrage" for the bitcoin system? What is the Bitcoin Foundation doing to incorporate real world consumer transactions? Until those three aspects come about, you will not have the necessary stability needed for people and businesses to treat bitcoin as "money".

Lion can run on 32bit machines. Its Mountain Lion, OSX 10.8, that can't.

Are you telling me there are still people doing development on L4 kernels???

And don't bring up HURD, I know they've already given up on it.

Ssshhhhh.... Don't get the crazy man started...

Its a flawed poll. Its not setup to discern the amount of first modem users, because the question is when everyone moved off modems. So there's no need for the >20 years users; remove it. "Right this minute" can be merged with dropped carrier. Then they can set better start dates for when broadband rolled out, or change 10-20 years to "more than 10 years".

If you don't care how long your programs take to solve a problem, avoid coding in cuda. If you want to keep your job, and your employer needs to run the app on nvidia cards as fast as possible, you're writing it in cuda.

No, AMD hardware outperforms Nvidia hardware, computational units/$1, for bitcoin mining. That's why bitcoin miners use OpenCL; its about the card. (When one cares about protein folding, programmers that need speed, are going to CUDA and nvidia cards.) Pot, meet Kettle.

You can give up right there. The days of humans getting 100x more efficiency out of a CPU using assembler rather than a higher level language are over. Optimizing compilers are able to devise efficiencies at large scale/detail that a human can at this point. Enterprise level software requiring millions of lines of code are just too large to be optimizable by one human writing in assembler. Speed efficiencies with out of order execution, deep pipelines consumer CPUs will be better utilized by compilers able to make better predictive arrangement of code.

Don't get me wrong. You'll always be able to find ONE "John Henry" that will be able to outcode the "stream compiler". But you can't build a world economy on one programmer. And forget about finding COMPETENT assembler programmers. The people you need to extract these kind of efficiencies are like finding prima ballerinas. Sadly, the world's economy needs more mediocre programmers to generate more working code, and more higher-level, software engineers to implement new solutions for problems addressable by a computer.

Businesses are structured for the quarterly stock profit. For the suggestion your making, the management team would have to be in position to maintain the strategy for years, while taking a killing in profitability. Basically, AMD would have to be taken over by a Japanese company for even a *chance* of a comeback. AMD will have to hope that its pivot to gaming consoles gives it enough oxygen to sustain a radical, new CPU architecture. AMD is a dead man walking.

Marissa Meyer's tumblr purchase strategy isn't nuts, just the price ($1.1 billion?!?!)

Meyer wants to improve Yahoo's current products, and move Yahoo to a focused social media/portal platform. She's counting on Yahoo grabbing a piece of the mobile social media pie, which no big player has right now. (Google would be closest.) This is what will fuel Yahoo's "comeback" into relevance. The problem is that Yahoo has zero product presence in mobile. She's buying tumblr as an infrastructure purchase.

The next issue is pretty cool. Turns out, Facebook will probably not grow anymore. The tweens don't like Facebook. Kids don't like to treat their social media as maintenance work. And Facebook's zeal to grab eyeballs means parents have moved to Facebook, which makes it uncool. Kids want to maintain communication with their peers, so they're gravitating towards low maintenance social media, like twitter, tumblr, and instagram (which Facebook is borging to death). So Meyer buys tumblr to get more presence in social media, and deny another avenue Facebook can acquire to fix their mobile/tween growth. The problem is there's no way tumblr is worth $1.1 billion, unless Meyer is grabbing brains as well, and sees some sort of general social media on mobile framework she can build Yahoo on top of tumblr.

Apple, back in 1998-1999, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Even the early years of Jobs return, Apple was putting out colorful plastic, underpowered computers. It wasn't until the introduction of the Ipod, and Apple's redirection into the consumer device market, did Apple dig itself out of its 1990's stupor.

Did reality prove you wrong? Hasn't the Red Hat stock grown in multiples of its 1990's value? Did she sell it in the early 2000's?

A service pack is a form of configuration management. Think of every binary in the Windows operating system as a program with a version. Microsoft wants to encourage developers to support the latest version of their patched OS. That is, of course, feasibly impossible, especially when some developers are confronted with major behavioral change in one OS program update that their application is dependent upon. So having a "blessed" minimal collection of binary versions makes Microsoft only responsible for those versions. It then becomes incumbent for the developers to make sure their application works to SP1 versions of all those OS programs, and the developers cease to be responsible for making their app work with the original OS binary/daemon that was released with the Windows 7 rollout. (And yes, this is a descriptive simplification of the issue.)

There is more going on with a service pack than just throwing together the latest version of each OS binary. Yes, I wish Microsoft would put out an SP2 already, even if they want to commit corporate suicide by abandoning Windows 7 to get customers to move to Windows 8.

Of course, no one is going to notice, since everyone will be using cloud computing accounts.