While you might have missed that Intel already is the largest GPU vendor in the world for years (gaming is small compared to B2B sales), you are right, anyway. When offering intel CPUs implies having to buy their GPU, the air will become thin for excellent integrated chipset offerings as Nvidia's. Instead of pushing customers through secret, anti-competitive contracts, they have just changed their product lineup. Want a CPU? Fine, but you can't have it without a GPU.

It will be interesting to see, wether Apple will get special treatment. The have already semi-officially let a word slip out, that they are not interested in the Arrandale GPU and won't use it. It's just not powerful enough for their GPU-laden OS and application lineup compared to Nvidia's chipset offerings.

The BSD license was written 1982, long before Stallman's GPL, and the people behind it were no fundamentalists. A lot of very successful projects use BSD or derived licenses until today. There can be strong motivation for a company to contribute its own progress upstream without being forced by a license like the GPL. See this post from above for a nice summary. The is no evidence that it was the GPL that made GNU/Linux so successful. It might just have been the better product than the BSD's or just accomplished to build stronger momentum.

I strongly disagree. Open Source has mainly been brought forward by pragmatists as Linus with a sense to attract high level software industry supporters. The fundamentalists were, the last time I checked, still working on GNU/Hurd. ;)

That's really insightful.

Apple does not just exploit open source, they also contribute bleeding-edge, high-quality code for GCC (LLVM), although they would legally not be required to do so by the BSD license.

I'm sick of those fundamentalists. What could be healthier than an open source platform without vendor lock-in, that anybody can use to generate some income. I love what has been produced in the spirit of open source and nobody won't take this away. But the everything must be free mentality is a bigger threat than people making money by selling software in binary form for a living. Good software means months of work and pizza and coffee need to be paid for. And experience has shown that at max 0.5% of people pay for something that they can get for free easily and legally.

Recursive lookup from by asking the root servers is pretty slow compared to a prefetching resolver, like in the order of at least times 5 to 10. If you never browse new pages it won't make a difference (you'll hit your home server's cache). At least 30% of my daily browsing are new sites found via Google. For those a fast prefetching resolver can really make a difference. And you very probably don't have a prefetching resolver at home, both RAM and bandwidth needed are usually out of reach for home use.

Actually, I was pretty surprised how good Google's offering sounds. I stopped using about every service except their search due to privacy concerns, but this really sounds quite appealing to me this time:

In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.

Yes, old, unpatched browser versions can be exploited. Is this a joke?

The fans inside computers shovel several cubic meters of air every day through a very tight space. It could certainly be possible, that this leads to amounts of poisonous residue far above your usual passive smoking hazards. And thus this might not be another piece of green hysteria, but consistent and reasonable action even despite the public outcry, that this may cause.

I would have expected Slashdot to note the fact, that Google does not mention anywhere wether the presented data is even nearly complete. Without that it is just a sham, giving you the feeling of control, but possibly only touching the tip of the iceberg.

In my opinion thin clients with kiosk mode browsers, video served as h264 Flash over cheap gigabit ethernet is really the most economic, thus flexible, way to go. Your future interfaces (floor sensors, etc.) can be made to interact with Flash by just mapping them to simple KeyEvents over a simple PS/2-USB adapter, just like you get from a keyboard.
I would dump the DVD changer though and just import all content onto a big NAS array.

Excuse me, why do I get the impression this this is sounding a little Microsofty. Why? It somehow bears the taste of a "campaigning perspective". So you intended to have consumer use discussed here. Well sorry, that this is Slashdot!

However, kudos for the campaign as a whole. The "Yes, Vista sucked, but have you heard, Windows 7 rules"-spin really took off. You also made sure, that all exclusive early reviewers compared it to Vista and not XP (which made Vista look so bad). W7 is again considerably slower than XP, even with all eye candy and UAC shut off. But somehow you managed it, to make almost nobody ask, because "it's so much better than Vista".

The reviews are out for months. Anybody who really cared has it already anyway. Students could have it for weeks for free via MSDN AA. Not that I would say that there might still be some people waiting for this, but is this really worth a Slashdot story??

What has this got to do with the "cloud"? If your data is critical enough, do it in house or mirror/slave/backup across two or more vendors. The probability of chain failure at one vendor's site alone is much higher than when you use several. The required isolation and separation of your components will also benefit your overall architecture.

About two years ago I tested wether my Gentoo kernel was really faster. Disabling 3/4 of the options really just improved boot time and memory footprint, but not overall performance that much, at least far from 12%. Compared to a modularized kernel with just the stuff loaded, that was needed, the difference was negligible. I'm not sure if Torvalds is telling the truth about the reasons. To me it seems that the central, overall kernel architecture has degraded over time with regard to performance.