Red Hat has value in their commercialized platform. They have things like RHN. Besides this, they're specifically an open source consulting firm. They don't make money by giving things away. Also, they're focused on the parts of their platform that make money... while Sun wasted money on things like OpenOffice, which is basically a scourge to any organization that wastes cash on it.

What other organization has managed to squeeze money out of the free software specific community? The most profitable linux-oriented ventures are not presenting it as an open platform, but as an embedded system well hidden from the user.

Red Hat is just a completely inapplicable example of this. Their marketing is just not freetard centric like anything GNU or the FSF puts their name on. Red Hat is a company that offers enterprise services.

This netgear product is a freetard-centric router. It's marketed specifically towards people who buy things because they're "open". Red Hat's platform has value outside of being open. Netgear's product does not.

Sun blew their load and open sourced everything, even valuable things. They left almost no value in their platform. Red Hat made sure there was no supported free version of RHEL- CentOS being outside of their organization. Sun even started to give away Solaris 10. I believe their documentation was openly available, also. Red Hat makes sure to keep their documentation only usable by subscribers.

Red Hat simply has a better monetized business model. Sun died the death of a company that "truly believed" in open source while Red Hat kept it real.

Red Hat markets to enterprises, not freetards. Freetards do not purchase RHEL.

Ha! Oh netgear, you just don't market to freetards. They'll aggressively attack any company that attempts to cater to them or their platform. They will not be happy until you have given everything away and are completely unprofitable, like Sun. So Broadcom won't let you gpl their drivers? That's too bad, now the FSF is going to hang you from the highest tree and make an example out of you for making those drivers available to be used by the community. Instead of reaching a difficult to market to segment, you're instead going to be attacked by the very people you sought to please.

You just don't cater to people who are looking to undermine and exploit your product, it's not worth it. Save yourself some development time and just give them an unsupported breadboard with no firmware on any chips, some rough documentation, and tell them to have fun "hacking".

What a hilarious waste of marketing money. Selling to an anti-commercial market segment...

It seems fair that something paid for by public money should be openly available to all Americans, but what about foreigners? What happens if they commies get a hold of our U.S. History textbooks? Then they will know that Christopher Columbus discovered North America while proving that the Earth was round.

Furthermore, they might also discover that America won World War I single-handedly. This is dangerous information that I am certain few other nations possess.

Symantec doesn't like that Microsoft is releasing a high quality anti-virus for free? I wonder why. How... how so very odd.

It seems like the virus protection racket on the Microsoft platform for home users might be over. That must be really scary for Symantec, not having everyone by the balls.

Every western company has to step carefully around the Chinese market. If you're working on a proprietary product, you NEVER license source over there. If a Chinese company decides to rip you off, you've got no recourse.

When you sell software in China, no matter what type, you can only sell a single seat license-- they will break your protection and run it on a hundred.

China's government protects its companies from fair business practices, anyway. Many of the malicious hacks that come from the Chinese government are purely economical- just stealing plans, prototypes, and source code from prominent western businesses.

So, good luck, guys. If these big powerful multinational companies can't get China to pay for what they do to our IP market, I'm not sure what you GPL folks can do. They will say anything they need to say to avoid respecting your license.

But which do you like?

I think I'll just go back to riding around town on my goat. He's much faster.

You're talking IBM Mainframe operating systems, then? Yes, they had very advanced architectures-- intelligent concepts like capabilties-based kernels and such. I think you're really oversimplifying this history. If anything, Unix killed off systems like this. Microsoft came in from a completely different angle-- I'm not even sure if you could consider them a driving force in the server world until very recently. Their systems are built from a simplistic base and moved towards complexity, making many architectural sacrifices to cut the cost of hardware.

I am generally talking about PC's, here- and I can't think of what these IBM systems would offer that market.

If anything, Unix eliminated these systems and stagnated internally, leaving a VMS-based system like NT in a competitive position. Systems like NT and Unix are cognitive, they interface well with people. They won in a human market, not a technical market.

Actually, it sounds like I am talking about small computers and you're talking MULTICS.

I don't think Microsoft really hurt these systems as much as the concept of personal computing in general. It wasn't a dark ages so much as servers and clusters leaving the limelight. The Microsoft brand is so weak right now that people are actually pretending that desktop Linux is usable, so I think the excuses are gone. Microsoft dominated for about a decade by providing cheap and accessible systems and commanding the PC show, but technology-cleansing and losing the server market was all Unix.

And you'd be wrong. You sound like a cranky mainframe guy.

I was hoping to just hear people talk about their favorite titles in general. No major preference.

I am not being snarky. I am literally curious to see if they ever got around to releasing good games for this console.

Microsoft is talking about the security framework of IE 8 and they're absolutely correct. Bringing up IE 5 and IE 6 and IE's of times yore is completely irrelevant.

This isn't about characterizing the Microsoft enterprise as some sort of individual and IE as some sort of character in a dramatic play. This sort of analysis is irrational when talking about security.

We are talking about the current IE 8... and IE 8 is extremely secure as it is. I brought up this exact issue the other day because it is a relevant point-- how much can you safely strip from Google Chrome before its security model is irrelevant to the IE plugin model and you've created a new entry point?

If you want Google Chrome, it would be more secure to simply run Google Chrome.

Putting these two browsers together creates awkward new security situation that completely defeats features like antimalware and anti-XSS protecton where IE 8 excels.

Take your fanboy hats for a moment and try to grasp that Microsoft is bringing up a valid point: if Google doesn't maintain this frame with the same level of resources they throw at Chrome, it will simply become an attack vector that neither Microsoft nor Google will be able to cover.

And that's why Red Hat is the largest company in the technology world.

er... maybe all the Linux co's combined?

No?

Oh, nevermind.

Obviously, your nonexistent fantasy operating system will come by and change everything once Linux pads the way and people start loving impractical academic systems again. Until then, I think what matters is organization and architecture, something that I've never seen come out of the academic or open source world. Platforms are more than just their system architecture, they're also platform architecture.

Talking to you is a waste of time. I am talking about a real market and you are talking about a fantasy market full of nonexistent products.

That's completely and utterly unrealistic. If those techniques and languages produced workable products, some would exist.

The fact that you mention kernels as being millions of lines suggests that you've never seen a microkernel and have little comprehension of the NT architecture.

I hate to break it to you, tux, but academic kernels are actually behind commercial kernels in technology... and they most certainly don't beat them in practicality or performance. If they did, I'm sure someone would use them. Companies are very good at grabbing academic kernels and dropping them in, like NeXT and XNU, for instance.

I'll just leave you to your little "modern kernel" fantasy.

I would say the Java platform is rather separate from its host architecture.

Haha... and because the system is so limited that you have to literally customize and hack it to work properly towards any server task, so one machine could never realistically do any task in production. Oh sure, it can "multi-role", it just isn't feasible. Virtualization simply exposes it as a limited architecture.

There's nothing archaic about making a multi-role capable system, realistically systems are getting largely and some people need more work out a single machine. Virtualization is extremely inefficient in comparison, just manageable to UNIX people.

Where are all these brilliant "true" computer scientists who write "modern" kernels? Every now and then, some PhD's system gets swallowed into a commercial distribution of some sort. If this weren't just some sort of utterly retarded academic systems fanfic on your part, someone would have made something that somehow outperforms or outshines commercial systems.

Besides this, commercial systems are defined by their organization. You know nothing about the actual NT kernel architecture, and that's fine. It sounds like you have a very absurdly ivory tower perspective anyway.