Is this how you define signed peace agreements?

Your insurance plan doesn't cover CBT - http://cbtpictures.tumblr.com/ ?

Damn you need to switch provider.

Oh? Please, do share.

I do however need to see public announcements by military leaders that they've shot down a multi-engined aircraft in the vicinity at the time of the incident as evidence.

Russia has been deceitful, aggressive, manipulative and acting illegitimately when it comes to the Ukraine since the start of this crisis. Much like the US and the EU, but it does mean that I refuse to believe anything without some pretty solid evidence. So please, do share..

The whole point of going in-memory inside the main 12c database is that sometimes the alternative to the $23k (list price; negotiate 60-90% off that) is buying a new CPU and licensing the whole database ( + options + OS + etc -> far far more than $23k) on that.

So although normally I bemoan Oracle's exceedingly unfriendly licensing model on this occasion it's not terribly surprising.

A compiler that is as well-designed and useable as Linux and Git? It already exists

The reason that most extensions exist is that there is (or was) no way of implementing things that people want with standard C. Inline assembly is one example. All modern C compilers support it, but GCC and Microsoft's compilers use different syntax (most other compilers implement one or the other, sometimes both). Without it, you require that every time you want to use even a single instruction of platform-specific assembly code, you must write an entire function and call it.

Atomics were another big reason for extensions. Prior to C11, if you wanted atomic operations, you needed either assembly or non-standard compiler intrinsics. Efficient vector support is another one.

While that's technically true, the Ada and Fortran front ends are both using DragonEgg, which is a GCC plugin that converts GIMPLE to LLVM IR. It doesn't work well with GCC 4.7 or newer, produces poor debug info, and is now largely unmaintained. There is a Flang project to produce an LLVM front end for Fortran, but it's very immature. The Ada Labs guys were looking at producing an LLVM front end for Ada, but I don't know that they got anywhere with it.

Clang wasn't. Clang began in 2007, after Chris Lattner had moved to Apple. Before then, if you wanted to compile C code with LLVM, you had to use llvm-gcc, which was a horrible hack that took a forked version of GCC and translated one of the GCC IRs into LLVM IR before code generation.

"I have a copy of phpnuke/moodle/wordpress running in my bedroom" != server.

And yes, active directory is a big reason enterprises are Windows focused.

It's 20-fucking-14 and the Unix world still doesn't have an out of the box working directory service. No, i don't want to create my own LDAP schema and fuck with kerberos and PAM.

No, NIS+ is not a replacement.

No... ISA was a pretty shitty bus even in it's day. Compare to Zorro in the Amiga, which was fully plug and play from the outset.

Yes, technical merit is important, but it is not the most important factor for most software

In every case you mention, I think you'll find the deciding factor was support. DOS won because it ran on any shitty generic PC clone. Windows won because of software support. Office won due to platform support for integration with other MS products. X86 won due to software support. ISA won due to industry support from multiple vendors. DirectX "won" (well, not really OpenGL is still alive and well for non-windows platforms and killing it in mobile with ES) due to MS platform and developer support.

Something to note for those in the Linux community who decide to flame people who are just trying to get their shit to work. Support will make or break your product, especially for business. It can have the shiniest bells and most aurally seductive whistles known to man, but if Bob at Initech can't call on someone when it breaks and actually get help, rather than insults, then it will not fly.

Even worse when the developers are actively hostile to particular classes of user (looking at you, Firefox).

And this kids, is why Linux will never enjoy significant market share on end user devices.

And yes, I'm sure someone will mention Android. Yeah sure, it's Linux. Just keep telling yourself that.

Nothing, unless they want people to actually contribute and spread the word. 1 user who gets screwed by an update = a heap of people told about how linux still isn't ready for prime time, and the support forums are full of assholes.

Does wonders for enticing companies to provide platform support.

Modded troll, but it's pretty true, albeit derogatory towards the second half. In the above time-frame, I've seen nowhere near as much breakage in FreeBSD. FreeBSD even ship compatibility shims in the ports system to enable older applications to work. Microsoft has managed compatibility far better, even apple has done a far better job, and they're probably the most likely vendor to break user-space apps out of the lot.

The above poster also forgot the ipfwadm/ipchains/iptables/nftables debacle - sure, FreeBSD has multiple firewalls but they're all supported and not deprecated from release to release.

The problem is worse on Android than on many other platforms because there are very few native shared libraries exposed to developer and there is no sensible mechanism for updating them all. If there's a vulnerability in a library that a load of developers use, then you need 100% of those developers to update the library and ship new versions of their apps to be secure. For most other systems, core libraries are part of a system update and so can be fixed centrally.