No, I don't think this at all, but I would expect the level of effort to be similar to something like CentOS. Probably more so, since if I understand correctly, one of their goals was to not be tied too tightly to their upstream distro, so they'll be faced with having to replace libblahblah.so.4 and all of its dependencies when they want to update packages foo, bar,and blee that upstream decided can't change for stability purposes.

I will say that your point about the work involved with maintaining a golden Windows image is a good one, though given that DLL hell is mostly a thing of the past (I won't comment on the shitty way that MS dealt with that, but it is more or less fixed) it's probably a lot less work than the above. Still, it is a point I hadn't considered.

Their claimed cost savings is something like $20M, so that pays for a LOT of overhead. But does it pay for enough?

That's also my question. I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around a decade long engineering effort, plus the ongoing costs of maintaining their own distro(!!) is going to lead to a net cost savings. Best of luck to them, and I do hope they succeeded here, but I too would love to see specifics (and not marketing drivel provided by MS, Gartner, etc).

Bullshit. The constitution is an enumeration of powers possessed by the government. The list of rights embodied in the amendments are only examples, and the founding fathers thoughtfully included the ninth AND tenth amendments as a reminder of that. There was an argument over having a bill of rights at all, and those opposed based their objection on the idea that, over time, an enumeration of rights would come to be seen as an inclusive, limited list and undermine freedoms instead of enabling them. And here we are today, where most people believe the part in bold above.

Please excuse the formatting above. I really, really, hate that slashdot can't seem to handle lists anymore.

Some thoughts on this:

• It my be fantasy for you and I, but Google actually lives in this world. When you can dabble in setting up gigabit city-wide networks as a freaking "experiment" it's reasonable to assume that bandwidth for remote connectivity isn't really an issue for you.
• 100kbit is more than enough to buy you a reasonably quick remote desktop session. If all your real work is being done in the datacenter across multiple redundant 10gbit links, then who the hell cares what the WAN connectivity is, as long as it's enough to get the session to the user?

FTFY. Label contracts pass the cost of basically everything on to the artist, so other than providing an advance and access to some slimy contacts, the label isn't really doing much for the artist (and in the end, the label owns the copyright on what the artist paid for... it's like a reverse work for hire).

[citation needed]
According to The Navy Department Library, the second world war cost about $300 billion in 1945 dollars, or $4.1 trillion in today's dollars. If you include the costs of the Marshall Plan, etc, I'm sure that changes things quite a bit, but probably not almost two orders of magnitude.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not out to take anything away from Google here (if I could have a nexus phone on Verizon, believe me, I'd be rolling a couple of dozen out tomorrow). I'm not comparing price/performance here, I'm just pointing out how silly it is to make a big deal out of the fact that someone's unreleased flagship device is faster than everyone else's existing devices.

According to Rightware's Power Board, the Nexus 5 delivered the second-highest Benchmark X gaming score among smartphones, behind only the iPhone 5S, making it the most powerful Android-based handset in the land.

Latest generation flagship smartphone faster than previous models. Film at 11.

I have a better punishment: no visas of any kind for three years. No h1b, no b1, your CEO can't have a visa for his quarterly visit, nothing. The punishment should fit the crime.

Why, exactly, is this not science? Science is a method, not a tucking religion! Our understanding of the universe is imperfect at best and it's certainly POSSIBLE that there is another explanation. Not at ALL likely, but possible.

If everyone had your hostility toward retesting what we already know, we'd still think the earth was flat and that it was the center of the universe.

The post he responded to referenced Elon Musk and Bell Labs. Going a bit further afield the old xerox PARC and IBM of of did plenty of research. Microsoft spends a bunch on pie in the sky stuff. John Carmack plowed plenty of money into building rockets.

Has government funded research produced absolutely incredible results that we're all better off for? Abso-freaking-lutely! Is the government the ONLY one that spends on basic research with no immediate application? Absolutely NOT!

I was referring to the animated type, unless you can come up with an ascii emoticon that is rolling its eyes?

Also an excellent example

To be fair, Obama didn't show up for work in 2007-2008, he was too busy running for higher office to do the job he was elected to do. I wish /. had emoticons so I could do the "rolling eyes" smiley right now.

Once upon a time, politicians would resign from their current office in order to run for a different one, but the last one I can remember doing that was Bob Dole in 1996. The worst example I can think of was Joe Lieberman, who simultaneously ran for reelection to the Senate and for Vice President just four years later.