Larry knows exactly how to make money; he is probably the world's best businessman at holding you upside-down and shaking you vigorously until your pockets empty.

I would be stunned if Oracle ever comes out with a credible OpenSolaris strategy -- it's not Oracle's way, nor is it in their best interests to have a vibrant opensolaris community. Unlike Linux, the best parts of Solaris have never come from outside Sun. Dtrace, ZFS, integrated hardware, all this stuff is where Sun's real value lay.

The end game for OpenSolaris began when Sun moved ahead with the merger. From then until the official end is just drama, positioning, etc.

Dear Taco,

Thank you for your commentary. I laughed out loud. That was nice. Then I thought (probably Taco), and checked -- there you were. A part of slashdot will die forever when Darl ends his campaign.

In other news, WW3 started slowly with Google and Dell pulling out of China. Infowars continued to increase when China's root nameserver began to propagate its information out to the developing world, areas that had been increasingly reliant on Chinese funding since the post-cold-War US' international power began to wane..

I laughed outloud, you are so right..

Actually, it's a rental, which is one reason I don't want to go fishing around in the walls.

FreeCiv is buggier, less pretty and focused around Civ1/Civ2 rulesets.

It's also hackable, and super cool, and I like it.

But, you aren't going to enjoy it if your first Civ is Civ4 -- Civ4 has a huge number of 'improvements' (to me, they are improvements) over Civ1/2. Add in the graphics quality, and if you've got it running well, I'd say you should just enjoy yourself. Of course on debian, you could probably sudo apt-get install freeciv, so it wouldn't be too particularly hard to check it out for yourself. : )

I think it unlikely that Google would use on-device ads to help phone costs: their traditional strategy has been to use ads to monetize core offerings, not ancillary ones. Ancillary offerings bring you back to the core offerings, where ads are effectively placed.

There's so much speculation right now on the market, but I think that it's clear that Google could do something really interesting without the use of on-device monetization right now, e.g. the $199 unlocked super-phone that's being discussed in the more rumor-mill-ish blogs right now. If they could be cash-neutral doing that, and simultaneously disintermediate wireless carriers (a side-goal they've had for some time now), AND double Android's market share in the US, the mobile device group will be getting large bonuses, mark my words.

A totally new business model which likely reduces the amount of uptake from consumers: not so likely right now; Google has lots of cash and wants lots of market share. It's not a time to futz around with stuff like this: consumers would generally LOVE an iphone-a-like which costs $30 a month for unlimited calling and only costs $199. If Google can get that out the door, they'll have done plenty already in the last eighteen months.

I haven't read the contract, but I can tell you exactly what happened:

Arrington has good idea, promises to market it, and work on it, plus provide a (modicum) of resources. Engineering Company gets involved. Capitalists get involved and put money in. Guaranteed: Arrington's dollars are all soft-dollars, time, energy, shared office space, PR, marketing, etc.

In the end: it works. Woohoo!

Now, Money guys look at the project, and they think: "OMG, this looks like it will ship and sell. We're all going to make some money, that's good. Let's review the Cap table to see what we'll be making. Hey, WTF? This Arrington guy negotiated like 35-45% of this project for himself, and all he's done is write a few articles about it, and pestered Fusion's engineers.. We could have paid like $20k to some PR firm to do that, how did he end up with 40% of this project?"

They call the engineering guys and say: "Do we need Arrington?"

Engineering guys say "Um, to build this project and ship it, we definitely do not need Arrington. Why?"

Capitalists say: "Because he's worthless, and it would be WRONG to give him the stake he got in the project."

Engineers say: "... um, ?"

Capitalists say: "We're going to execute a clawback, drill Arrington down to 8-10%, and then you and we will get to split the remainder. This isn't being bad, this is being right and moral. He just got too much of the pie up front."

Engineers say: ".. will you talk to him about it?"

Capitalists say: "You're the CEO, you talk to him."

Engineers " .. Okay. "

Guess what, it happens ALL THE TIME. There are a number of possible solutions to a situation like this, but usually you need to plan upfront for it, and be ready. I don't think he was ready, which is too bad.

The fine letter linked to in the above points out the real problems inherent in calculating this out: actually simulating NEURONS, rather than so-called "neural networks" is really hard, and requires a lot of computing power, plus development of techniques that are still cutting edge research. There is no chip array that can do all the (currently not completely specified) simulating of a cat brain at 1 kW.

Sci-Fi, the act of writing out speculations on our future, or an alternate one, isn't dead. The Spec-Fiction portion of it isn't dead, at least. The extrapolating current life into the future portion is having trouble, though. Vernor Vinge explains this nicely in his Singularity essays. He claims that sci fi writers have been dealing with the difficulties of making quality predictions for at least a decade, maybe two decades now.

In short, rate of change is speeding up, ergo change is going to be geometric, maybe exponential, ergo there will be some period of time, reasonably short, after which we (as current humans living on earth) will not understand very much about the world.

Vinge (and Ray Kurzweil) call this the Singularity. It's a nice, compelling idea if you're a math guy or gal (and I am a math guy).

Corollary to all this: Either you can write near-term extrapolative fiction or you can write post-singularity fiction, but there's no mid-range future. The mid-range future will happen in like an afternoon one day, and nobody will notice it due to what happens shortly after. This lack of mid-range predictability is what's bugging some people. But, functionally, I don't understand why. Scientists don't need Arthur C. Clarke to dream impossible dreams right now -- IBM neuroscientists are physically simulating a cat brain ALREADY for goodness sake! They don't need to think 'out of the box' about what the future could hold. The world has moved on, and into a space where finance guys will PAY people to IMPLEMENT their crazy sci-fi ideas.

We call the finance guys venture capitalists. They are helping build hotels in space, yadda,yadda,yadda. The future is already here at some level, and the mid-range future is being obsessively considered by inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs and VCs,

The stross quote backs this idea, change is already happening rapidly, and speeding up in a way that surprises a hard-SF writer.

This is why I like the tack Vinge has recently taken: think about INTERFACE to a new world. Think about ethics right around the time of the singularity. These are good places for sci-fi authors, traditionally a pretty thoughtful bunch.