https://www.bbc.com/news/scien...

I take you know WINE on Windows was a real thing? Idea was you could run old Windows stuff that only now runs in WINE.

It's not always what the buyer means to do that matters. It's what it's perceived they might do as they now can. Also, sometimes buyers needs from the technology don't stay aligned with those currently down stream and the technology is pulled in a different direction than the original customers needs. To be honest as slow wrecking of ARM is probably what is required as RISC-V doesn't seam quite mature enough to take it over, but phase things and it looks more and more possible. Which would be a good thing I think. Having grown up on Acorn computers, that makes me a bit sad, but the ARM business model is getting in the way now.

Very few towns or cities couldn't be a lot greener than they currently are. Couldn't this be the perfect excuse to make them nicer as well as better for the environment?

> I can only assume it's an internal thing. For the growing number of Linux natives on their company. I think it's exactly this. Linux is eating them from the inside. Plus, for a lot of webby or IoT jobs, you life is just soooooo much easier from a Linux system. At the moment they go native when they can, or have to put up with a VM when they can't. This is all about stemming the bleeding I think. I'm still pretty sure we'll see them swap out the NT kernel completely at some point. Why fight it? They are trying to move to software as a service anyway.

Agreed, it is bribery. But it wouldn't be a problem if we all had the same amount of money to give. If we did, it would be ridiculous to call it bribery. But we don't, so it is a problem. The wealthy can give more than the poor, much more. So much more that the poor, despite their number cease to matter.

This is not how a democracy should work as it utterly breaks it in favour of the wealthy few. I don't understand how ScentCone can possibly think it's ok and get score:5 Insightful!

LOL! You think?
If you don't want graphics, yes sure, chroot Debian like I have now.
If you want graphics it's xvfb and vnc, shudder.
Replace the OS all together? Good luck with that, there is binary blobs drivers to contend with.
There is no reason at all they couldn't have provided at least a skeleton of a normal graphical Unix. A modern smart phone has crazy spec from the future compared with what was around when Unix graphical standards where laid down.
Why the hell should I have to port cross platform stuff to Android?
If they hate X, help with Wayland. If users want normal graphical Unix, we can at least install the Wayland X server.

My brother told me of a story (year or two ago) where he downloaded pirate version of a game he has bought because the DRM failed to allow him to play the game. The pirate version worked fine....

You also missing the point. DRM only need to be broken by one smart person, then everyone just copies the unprotected copy. You don't have to be the one to crack it to get a copy.

chroot Debian on my Android was never satisfactory. I want a standard Linux phone, ideally Debian based. Yes I know, the N900, but it is too old and a dead end. I'm no fan of Unity and modern Ubuntu, but maybe on a phone, it'll win me over. Very interesting. Also, more competition is always good. :-)

The Mhz increase alone would have been good, but it was so much more.
The BBC BASIC interpreter even fitted in the bigger instruction cache. As a kid writing BBC BASIC, this meant a massive speed up.
I clocked it up to 287Mhz (and fitted a 486 heatsink and fan) to make it even faster.

No upgrade I've ever done since then, short of replacing the computer, has made such a big difference.

"Until the engineers get a clue, open source projects will never be more than a closet of hobbyist projects."

What world are you living in? Even if you think everything you run is closed (and it probably isn't), there is a massive sea of things running free software, not just open source, that you will interactive with everyday. It's not unlikely you own a few. There are plenty of big companies and government departments that even the Linux desktop is used. Wake up. It's everywhere already.

I've did a compete namespace and had the same issues. MS only documented at all after being taken to court by the EU. The docs are barely enough and new interfaces have been added since XP, and not all of them documented. Many don't even have a name you can get at, let alone a interface definition, just a GUID. Some, others have worked out, some, no one outside Microsoft knows.
My eyes are now open to this crap way of working. The "magic blackbox" thinkings are naive if they think documenting the surface of the blackboxs are enough. The more complex the thing, the less well documentation is going to be able to cover all the combinations. I'm not saying source instead of docs, I'm saying source as a fall back for when the docs are not enough.

You missed the point. You can have implementations doing exactly what the standard says but unable to work together because of a whole in the docs. Unix systems have the advantage that much of them are open, avoiding problems as implementations can look at what each other do. Also there is almost always multiple implementations so problems show up quickly. In Windows world you have the worse case, one, closed implementation. Any other later implementation has to use that as a reference implementation. When the docs fail, you have to find exactly what that implementation does and do the same, or at least what is compilable. Worse, if the docs say one thing and the closed reference implementation does another, you must do what the closed implementation does. Worse still, Microsoft have a history of deliberately making life for other implementations even harder. It's a nightmare situation. It's why I feel pushing Wine and Mono as things that make Microsoft technology cross platform is stupid. It's a game you can not win or even draw.

Docs aren't perfect. We all know this. To me, if there isn't a open reference implementation I'm not sure it's a open. Only an implementation covers everything required. Yes, in theory, the docs should be an implementation written in English, but that fails as it can't be run and tested, so it's always an incomplete implementation. Also, personally, I often find it easier to dig out exact details for code from other code, rather than from written English.

Yer, only if the specification is perfect. Which it never is. There is always things not documented that projects like Wine, Mono, Samba, etc must work out. Most of the time I don't think it's a deliberate MS policy (though I bet some of the time it is), it's just the nature of software. Really you want not just a published specification but a open reference implementation. MS, intentionally or otherwise, use this in both directions.
http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/296