There was a well documented email debate between Tannenbaum and Torvalds over micro and monolithic kernels. The gist of it was that Tannenbaum thought microkernels were more stable and easier to understand, Torvalds thought microkernels were more complex, less efficient and the stability wasn't worth it. There are successful microkernels, e.g. QNX so perhaps it could have gone the other way but I suspect Torvalds strongly preferred something that worked over something that was "correct" and chose his path.

More importantly, how feature complete it is. The Apple driver might also have to deal with buggy apps, legacy code, crappy code paths and all the rest which slow it down.

Where "right on time" means half-baked nearly 23 years after the project started. The one and only reason to be thankful is that in 1991, a mere year into the project development was already so moribund, mired in politics and perfectionism that a student called Linus Torvalds got pissed off enough to write his own kernel. Thus demonstrating what happens when a project is motivated by pragmatism over one motivated by politics.

Most people recognize that a distribution is the sum of its parts (many of which have nothing to do with GNU or the FSF) and therefore don't elevate any particular group above the others and are quite content to refer to the whole lot as Linux. I suspect that the whole GNU/Linux thing is just some underlying resentment that Linux succeeded precisely for the reasons Hurd failed so miserably - because the FSF is big on ideas, not so big on actually bringing them to fruition in a timely and practical fashion.

IBM have some OpenOffice commercial variant whose name escapes me.

More likely they'll flog the tech on to some niche company to support that market the way they did with OS/2. Doubtless they'll cite all kinds of reasons they couldn't possibly open source it and some of them may even be true.

Probably because they've bought a site licence. Once they do that, all rational thought about switching to something better goes out the window.

Notes is without doubt the worst software I have ever had the misfortune to use. It's slow to start, extremely unintuitive (even 8.5), unforgiving, buggy as hell, baroque, and employs terminology and idioms which are meaningless in the modern world. It really sucks in every way a piece of software can suck. I probably wouldn't care if I had to run it once in a blue moon but this heap of wank is how I'm supposed to communicate with colleagues and organise my calendar. I cannot fathom how it manages to cling on so tenaciously in certain corporations when it is so awful.

The "so what?" is that governments build tax systems that resembles swiss cheese with loopholes and incentives for companies structuring themselves in certain ways and then act all indignant and outraged when its brought to their attention.

While I am certain that it is very hard to build a fair and equitable system of taxation, particularly against multinationals, I am sure there are certain things governments could do to make it very odious to avoid tax and thereby encourage companies to pay their fair dues.

It's not the shortage of teaching material but the fact that it must follow the curriculum. i.e. the state says what students should learn at certain ages and subjects and the course, books and teacher's guide is shaped around it. So typically school books are monopolized by a few publishers which go to the effort to produce suitable books and get them endorsed.

Anyway I have no problem with that. More insidious however are the constant revisions which render them worthless after a year or two, or even worse "work books". Work books are the kind where the child writes answer into the page in thereby making it impossible to reuse.

Here in Ireland almost all the primary school books are like this and the cost of books could be 100 per annum per child. The state could ban the practice in an instant and save parents a lot of money but for some reason they won't.

No it doesn't. Even in the US there are laws that limit "free speech" such as malicious slander. So I can't go around saying you raped a kid when I know you did not.

As for Germany, I expect their limits on particular forms of speech have a little something to do with them underpinning and justifying the systematic slaughter of millions of people. They're probably just a tad sensitive to people perpetuating the same ideas which arguably are malicious slander against an entire culture. Racist attacks and neo-Nazi movements are still a real problem for the country. Even this week a neo-Nazi "kill squad" is on trial for the murdering 10 people.

More likely it's the devices that devs own and reasonably expect the os to work on. It'd be nice to sport CM10 on my HTC desire but if it's even possible I suspect it would be impossibly tight and would still necessitate smearing firmware across an SD partition.

I played Everquest a lot back in the day. Not hardcore amounts of hours but maybe 2 hours in an evening. Like most MMOs the game starts off with easy quests and lots of exploring but as it progressed levelling up really began to drag. By level 20 it might take 2 weeks to level up. I found myself camping more often. I found myself repeating the same damned action over and over - Meditate, Buff, Kill, Retreat to safe area, Meditate, Buff, Kill etc. For variety I might stand in the tunnel attempting to auction jewellery. A good session might see the blue xp bar advance a few pixels. A bad session end with a fraught corpse dragging expedition (or two) and less xp. Hauling ass over the map might take an hour. Boats might take 20 minutes to appear. Spawns might happen once a day and of course were camped out.

And I put up with this bullshit because the transition from fun to grind was so gradual I did not see it happen. So there I was paying subscribing to a game I didn't enjoy. Fortunately for me Verant intervened with their own ineptitude. The Shadows of Luclin expansion was bugged to high fuck which meant the server crashed, the client crashed, the content was bugged out and this went on for weeks. It gave me the time to realise I wasn't enjoying this.

So I let my subscription expire and I quit. It was a wrench to abandon the "investment" I made in the character but it just wasn't fun any more. On the plus side, it trained me to recognize grind and skinner box style gameplay that virtually all MMOs since have used to string people along - long travel distances, infrequent spawns, equipment that degrades, time sinks everywhere. I played other MMOs - Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars Galaxies, A Tale in the Desert and they all suffered from them. Ultimately I quit them all because they were the same damned thing - sucking $15 out of you each month in return for anti-fun.

That said, with the change to free-to-play model has made some MMOs fun again. Lord of the Rings Online for example has been aggressively cutting the grind all over the place - adding fast travel, instant looting, less maintenance, out of combat healing, NPC radar etc. Presumably in the FTP model it pays to get people to progress more quickly rather than have them fuck around looting corpses or recoup lost xp. It's also a very beautiful game with the lore to support it. I've been playing LOTRO for 18 months in the FTP model and must have bought about $50 of points on it, most of that still remaining to be spent. If I don't feel like playing I'm not losing out by not playing so it suits me a lot better. I can play it for 30 minutes during a bout of boredom and feel like I'm getting something from it.

I very much doubt 40% of Android devices in Russia are infected, although I can well believe the rates of infection are much higher in countries which have a culture of piracy over those that don't.

In fairness, there is malware on Android however I expect the risk for most people of catching it is pretty minimal. The Play market is proactively scanned and acts reactively to threats up to and including a remote kill capability. And in many cases those that do get infected have their own lack of sense to thank - installing pirated APKs, or dubious apps from untrusted sources and reaping the rewards.